Following that night, I moved out. I would live by myself in Ma.r.s.ena, I said. Yes I"d take Little Boots with me, I"d care for him in his old age. Yes I was strong enough, I could do it.
Never again under the same roof with Michael Mulvaney Sr. In -ct it seemed to me that Michael Mulvaney Sr. had died, and another man had taken his place, not even resembling him that much, and maybe that"s a good thing.
I had my job at Miracle Mart, and later on I"d get a better-paying job at the Milk Jug, and still later (though I could not have guessed such good luck, beforehand) a part-time job with the Ma.r.s.ena Weekly Packet whose editor was a brother of the English teacher at the high school I came to be friends with, my senior year-actual writing, reporting, my bylineJudd Mulvaney there in print, and even being paid for it.
Beyond that, I"d graduate with honors from Ma.r.s.ena High School and go away to college, and be gone.
On my ourn at the age of not_even_eighteen.
Morn cried, cried. It wasn"t as easy parting the way I"m making it sound. Because nothing between human beings isn"t uncomplicated and there"s no way to speak of human beings without simnplifying and misrepresenting them. Momn cried but she helped me pack my things. Begged me to kneel with her and pray together to ask of G.o.d whether this was the right thing and quietly I said no.
"We"re past prayer," I said. "We pa.s.sed prayer a long time ago."
I thought she would protest but instead she sat heavily on the edge of the bed, and tried to smile at me. In a hoa.r.s.e voice she said, "Yes, maybe it"s better. Until he"s himself again. You know one day he"ll be himself again, you know that don"t you?"
I stared at the toes of my sneakers. V/hat did I know?-I was an arrogant scared kid.
"Your father loves you, honey. He loves you all, you know that don"t you?"
"I don"t know what I know."
They say the youngest kid of a family doesn"t remember himself very clearly because he has learned to rely on the memories of others, who are older and thus possess authority. Where his memory conflicts with theirs, it"s discarded as of little worth. V/hat he believes to be his memory is more accurately described as a rag-bin of others" memories, their overlapping testimonies of things that happened before he was born, mixed in with things that happened after his birth, including him. So it wasn"t a smart-a.s.s remark, I don"t know what I know. It was just the truth.
"It"s just that he loses control sometimes. As soon as he gets the business established again, and gets back to work, you know how he loves to work, he"ll be fine. The drinking is only temporary-it"s like medicine for him, like he has a terrible headache and needs to anesthetize himself, you can sympathize with that, Judd, can"t you? We might be the same way in his place. He"s a good, decent man who only wants to provide for his f-mily. He"s told me how sorry he is, and he"d tell you except-well, you know how he is, how men are. Re loves you no matter what he says or does, you know that don"t you? He"s been under so much pressure it"s like his head, his skull, is being squeezed. Once, a long tune ago, I read a story about an Italian worker who has a terrible, tragic accident on a construction site, a load of wet concrete overturns on hirn-"Christ in Concrete" was the t.i.tle, I think-oh, I never forgot that stoIy--it was so real, so terrifying how the poor man was trapped-in hardening concrete that squeezed him to death, broke his bones and his skull and there was nothing anyone could do-" Mom spoke more and more rapidly, more breathlessly until I wanted to take hold of her hands and quiet her.
Thinking Christ is anybody and n.o.body.
Thinking Love wears out, maybe. Maybe that"s a good thing.
I guess I started crying, too. But I wasn"t going to change niy mind.
I made Mom promise she"d call nie, or come to where I was staying next time Dad got drunk or crazy, or if he threatened her. Don"t wait for him to hit you, I said. She promised she would do this. She believed there would not be a next time because he"d been so sorry when he came back, and so scared of what he"d done, but yes she promised. And finally I did kneel with Morn, one last time, and we prayed together each of us in silence in the cramped little room at the rear of the "split-level ranch" on Post Road which was our last shared home even if it was never a home. Both Foxy and Little Boots crowded eagerly against us, nudged their damp anxious noses against us begging Us, too! Us, too! Don"t forget us, too!
But Mom never called me. On June 21, first day of summer, Dad filed papers in the district civil court in Yewville applying for the privilege of bankruptcy. He"d had to hire a new lawyer-couldn"t avoid it. Immediately the Mulvaneys" a.s.sets were "frozen"-the new house put on the market for resale-what humiliation my parents had to endure I would not learn until years later.
Their marriage, too, began to unravel-in ways I would not know, and did not wish to know.
For suddenly I was on my own! I"d thought I would be lonely, hut in my new life I had no time for loneliness.
Living in a single furnished room (with lavatory, shower) on the top, third floor of a big old clapboard apartment house in the noman"s-land south side of Ma.r.s.ena. Near the railroad yard, about a mile from the high school. The building had once been a hotel, the Ma.r.s.ena Inn, a long time ago. Mostly it was welfare families who lived there, in the larger apartments on the ground f{oor. The siding was weatherwom brown the color of bleached winter gra.s.s, transparent strips of duct tape from the previous winter still flapped at sonic of the windows. A sagging veranda across the width of the building, the roof and posts overgrown with vivid orange bug-ridden trumpet vine. The building"s custodian and his wife and children lived on the ground floor-the wife had set out geraniums in pots on the veranda, and a scattering of battered old wicker furniture, a carpet. There were clotheslines everywhere and except on rainy days laundry hanging up to dry. One of the elderly tenants tended a coop of scruffy chickens in the backyard. These chickens were all
Rhode Island Reds but diseased.-looklng, like old feather_dusters, bald on their heads and backs. There were two reigning, squawky roosters for about two dozen hens and both looked the worst for wear, with inflamed combs, scaly legs. On wet days, and it was a wet summer, a terrible stink wafted upward from the muddy floor of their coop at which they pecked, pecked, pecked chickenfashjon through the daylight hours-but I didn"t mind, I was a farm boyused to such smells.
And quickly I would come to be friends with the old man who owned the chickens He"d come to like me, too. And Little Boots he"d keep company with when I was away. He called me "Juddy_ boy"-sonie-j-1-5 "Sonny" if he didn"t exactly remember my name.
THE WHITE HORSE.
He"d married young, that was his story. You don"t know what your story is going to be until looking back.
Because he"d fallen in love with a girl strong enough to keep him faithful. And he"d wanted children with her as ballast, to keep his rocky little boat from careening off course, carried away by the first big swell. A son, another son, a daughter, and a third son. Their small limbs, warm and pulsing, unbelievable soft skin, faces eager with love for Daddy, for now he was Daddy that was who he was, holding him tight, holding him safe.
G.o.d, he"d loved them! Those kids. The first baby, named for him, had scared him a little, the love came so strong, and the love for the woman, so strong, he"d felt panic touch the base of his spine light as a stranger"s fingertips You did this, Mulvaney? that"s your son? your responsibility for life? But then it was all right. It was just life. It was American life. Look around, everybody"s marrying young, it"s an economic boom too, all the world"s watching in awe, post-World War II United States of America mushrooming up, up, up like the A-bomb cloud-Sky"s the limit! Forty million American babies predicted for the Fifties. It was just life, normal life, and it was good.
Like G.o.d said gazing upon His creation in the Garden of Eden, it was good.
And then-they were gone.
The Mulvaneys who bore his name, not just the kids but the woman, too. (In fact, he"d been the one to move away. Just took
off, threw a few things in the car, moved to Yewville. There gets a point, a man can"t take it any longer.) Life started going fast, and faster, and he"d been taken by surprise. And not old, d.a.m.n it, cither-in his early fifties. Suddenly his little boat was in rough, un-- friendly waters. Storm winds, heaving waves spinning him out of control. And there, above, on a bridge he"d have to pa.s.s under, there stood his father-his father he hadn"t seen for a lifetime! The bridge was one of the old Pittsburgh bridges over the Allegheny River, he recognized the knotty black shape of it, the looming silhouette, and he recognized his father astonished that the man wasn"t elderly but a man Michael"s own age, his father was shouting at him, his voice forlorn yet angry, over these many years still angry, and the jaws thickset in the stubborn inviolable rect.i.tude of the danined, and there was the upraised fist-Go to h.e.l.l, then! No son of mine.
A father"s curse! Michael Mulvaney Sr. had lived his entire adult life in the wake of his father"s curse.
So too he"d sent his own daughter away, not with a curse but in the name of love. He believed, he would swear to his very death-it had been love.
And how strange time was. Once you veered away from sh.o.r.e, and flew along, borne by the river"s current beneath the bridge and Out to what looked like sea, as if it hadn"t been the Allegheny after all but the mouth of a vast dark thundercloud_sea_somewhere you can"t recognize. What the h.e.l.l is this? H/ho"s making these decisions?
After thirty years living a bachelor"s life again. But the world wasn"t a bachelor"s world now. Not the world of Michael Mul- vaney"s young adulthood when he"d thumbed his nose at the old man, Go to h.e.l.l yourse-fl and left Pittsburgh forever.
Now there was a confusion of times, places. It was like switching TV channels-you never knew where exactly you were, or how long you"d be there.
How Corinne had cried, cried. It wasn"t like her, and it scared him. That first full day the three of them were in the new house in Ma.r.s.ena when Corinne hadn"t the manic excitement of preparing to move, the great effort ahead. She"d cried like a helpless child 11"here are our trees? Oh IWichael, where are our trees? As if she hadn"t actually noticed until then, hadn"t allowed herself to look, to know what the new property was: a plot of land less than an acre.
So he"d gotten good and drunk, left her there bawling. What good would it do, the two of them bawling together like sick calves?
Thinking A man dese?ves some freedom for Christ"s sake. A furlough. If he wanted to drink, he"d drink. Fed up with being made to feel guilty every time he popped a can of ale, or stayed away missing a meal, or took the name of the Lord "in vain" making his Christian wife flinch. She wasn"t his mother for Christ"s sake.
The first place he lived was a good-sized furnished apartment overlooking Out.w.a.ter Park, in Yewville. The second was a smaller apartment on Market Street, New Canaan. The third was a room and a half on East Street, Port Oriskany. He"d never again return to the Chautauqua Valley, that was a dead region to him now.
Working where he could. As often as he could. Nonunion, hourly wages. Sure he"d had serious problems of att.i.tude, adjustment, at first. Michael Mulvaney"s new status being not employer as he"d been for nearly thirty years but employee. A sensation like stepping into an elevator but there"s no elevator there, just the shaft.
At first, he"d tried to get managerial jobs, salesman positions. But there were none of these jobs available, at least not for him. That look of belligerence in his face, the tight, taut mouth. He"d caught sight of himself once in a window, looked like a pike. Slamming along. Impatient, furious. Forcing a smile. A pike"s smile. How quickly he was recognized: one glance at this job applicant entering an office not entirely clean-shaven, clothes just slightly rumpled, the hurt puckered furious pike-look in his eyes.
Sorry Mr. Mulvaney, that position has been taken.
Once, in Port Oriskany, a young bespectacled man smirked uttering these words Sorry Mr. Mulvaney, that position has been taken but Michael Mulvaney didn"t slink away like a kicked dog, instead he leaned over the man"s desk trembling with indignation shoving his fine-stubbled jaw and bared teeth into the b.a.s.t.a.r.d"s face. Yes? Taken by a.s.sholes like you?
That story-how many times he"d tell it, for the remainder of his life. In how many bars and always it would get laughs. True belly laughs. Even the women, they"d laugh-he was a man who loved making a woman laugh
It had done him good to see that prissy b.a.s.t.a.r.d cower, the quick fear in the b.a.s.t.a.r.d"s eyes. One of the enemy. His comeback hadn"t gotten him a job in that office nor any job ever again in which he would wear a fresh-laundered shirt, a tie and coat and gleaming leather shoes, and be called "Mr. Mulvaney." He, who"d once had capital and a.s.sets approaching two million dollars. But still it had done his soul good.
Two years, three years, five years-he would lose count. Ronald Reagan was President of the United States now and poor sad Jimmy Carter was not only gone but forgotten. Supplanted as if he"d never been.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Working where he could, where they"d hire him on. Scanning the HELP WANTED-MALE columns of the papers. Some employers knew him-which was good sometimes, bad others. He was a d.a.m.ned good worker but he did have a short fuse. He was good at giving orders but not so good at taking them. Where he couldn"t be foreman, things didn"t always work out. Crews of mostly younger men. Somedays, he wasn"t in top physical condition. Hacking cough from those d.a.m.ned cigarettes he couldn"t seem to kick, puffy boiled-looking face, the bleary no-color of eyes determined not to give away the beat beat beat of a hangover"s pain. Also, his joints were giving him trouble-fingers, shoulders, knees. Also, he needed gla.s.ses but never got around to getting them.
Working where he could, and when. He let his employers know he"d had plenty of experience with roofing, siding, construction but he never went into details. Last thing you want the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to know is who you are. Your true ident.i.ty. No one wants to hire a man who, -f there was justice in the world, deserves to be the one behind the desk hiring.