We Were the Mulvaneys. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ at the feel of a horse’s tongue. She loved the humid snuffling breath, the powerful, unimaginable life coursing through the immense body. A horse is so big, a horse is so solid. Always, you respect your horse for her size.

      She loved the rich horsey smell that was a smell of earliest childhood when visits to the horse barn were overseen scrupulously by adults and it was forbidden to wander in here alone—oh, forbidden! Brought in here for the first time in Dad’s arms, then set down cautiously on the ground strewn with straw and walking, or trying to—the almost unbearable excitement of seeing the horses in their stalls, poking their strangely long heads out, blinking their enormous bulging eyes to look at her. Always she’d loved the sweetish-rancid smell of straw, manure, animal feed and animal heat. That look of recognition in a horse’s eyes: I know you, I love you. Feed me!

      So easy to make an animal happy. So easy to do the right thing by an animal.

      Molly-O was nine years old, and no longer young. She’d had respiratory infections, knee trouble. Like every horse the Mulvaneys had ever owned. (“A horse is the most delicate animal known to man,” Dad said, “—but they don’t tell you till it’s too late and he’s yours.”) She wasn’t a beautiful horse even by Chautauqua Valley standards but she was sweet-tempered and docile; with a narrow chest, legs that appeared foreshortened, knobby knees. Her coat was a rich burnishedred with a flaglike patch of white on her nose and four irregular white socks—Button’s horse, her twelfth birthday present. There is no love like the love you have for your first horse but that love is so easy to forget, or misplace—it’s like love for yourself, the self you outgrow.

      Marianne hid her face in Molly-O’s mane whispering how sorry she was, oh how sorry!—since school had started she’d been neglecting Molly-O, and hadn’t ridden her more than a dozen times last summer. Her horse-mania of several years ago had long since subsided.

      It had been a mild horse-mania, compared to that of other girls of Marianne’s acquaintance who took equestrian classes and boarded their expensive Thoroughbreds at a riding academy near Yewville. Flaring up most passionately when she’d been between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, then subsiding as other interests competed for her attention; as Marianne Mulvaney’s “popularity”—the complex, mesmerizing life of outwardness—became a defining factor of her life. Competing in horse shows wasn’t for her, nor for any of the Mulvaneys. (At the height of his interest, at fifteen, Patrick had been a deft, promising rider.) Dad said that the “great happiness” in horses, as in all of High Point Farm, was in keeping it all amateur—“And I mean real amateur.”

      It was more than enough, Dad said, for a man to be competing in business with other men. Maybe an occasional golf game, squash, tennis, poker—but not seriously, only for friendship’s sake, and sport. A man’s heart is lacerated enough, being just an ordinary American businessman.

      Of course, Dad admired certain friends of his, business associates and fellow members of the Mt. Ephraim Country Club who were “horsey” people (the Boswells, the Mercers, the Spohrs), but the thought of his daughter taking equestrian lessons, competing in those ludicrously formal horse shows, was distasteful to him. It was rank exhibitionism; it led to fanaticism, obsession. You don’t want animals you love to perform any more than you want people you love to perform. Also, it was too damned expensive.

      The Mulvaneys were in fact “well-to-do.” At least, that was their local reputation. (Despite the way Corinne dressed, and her custom of shopping at discount stores.) High Point Farm was spoken of in admiring terms, and Michael Mulvaney Sr. cut a certain swath in the county, drove new cars and dressed in stylish sporty clothes (no discount stores for him); he was generous with charitable donations, and each July Fourth he opened his front pasture to the Chautauqua County Volunteer Firemen’s annual picnic. But in private he fretted over money, the expense of keeping up a farm like High Point, leasing as much land as he could, supporting a family as “spendthrift” as theirs. (Though Michael Sr. was the most spendthrift of all.) From time to time he threatened to sell off a horse or two—or three—now the older children’s interest in riding had declined, but of course everyone protested, even Mike Jr., who rarely poked his head into the horse barn any longer. And Mom became practically hysterical. That would be like an execution! That would be like selling one of us!

      Well, yes.

      In. the next stall Patrick’s gelding Prince was knocking about, whinnying and snorting for Marianne’s attention. And so Clover and Red were stirred to demonstrate, as well. Here we are, too! Hungry! And a gang of six barn cats was gathering around Marianne, mewing and suggestively kneading the ground. Love us! Feed us! All these creatures had been fed twice that day, by Patrick and Judd, but Marianne’s appearance threw their routine off kilter, or so they wished it to seem; and Marianne was far too softhearted to disappoint. As a little girl she’d made rules for herself: if she petted or fed one animal in the presence of others, she must pet and feed them all. It was what Jesus would have done had He lived intimately with animals.

      What would Jesus do?—that’s what I ask myself. I try, and I try, but my good intentions break down when I’m with other people. Like with the guys, you know?—it’s like there’s the real me, that being with somebody like you brings out, Marianne, and there’s the other me that—well, that’s an asshole, a real jerk. That makes me ashamed.

      His eyes lifted shyly to hers. The heavy lids, the narrow bridge of the nose, the lank hair fallen onto his forehead. His skin looked grainy, as in an old photograph. He was stretched on the step below her, his shoulders rounded, so she’d wanted to poke at him as she might have poked at Patrick to urge him to straighten his backbone, lift his shoulders. Music pounded and pulsed through the walls. It was loud enough to influence the beat of your heart, to make you sweat. He’d been drinking but wasn’t drunk—was he?—and seemed instead to be speaking frankly, sincerely, as she’d never heard him speak before. Oh hadn’t he meant it, any of it? Had it solely been to deceive, to manipulate?

      She could not believe that, could she?

      Not Marianne Mulvaney in whose heart Jesus Christ had dwelled for the past seventeen years, or more.

      

      As she left the barn, the thought touched her light and fleeting as a snowflake. Am I saying good-bye?

      Now the sky was cracked and cobbled and glowed in the west with a mysterious bruised flame on the very brink of extinction. In the front windows of the antique barn lights winked, and Marianne thought for an uneasy moment that Corinne was inside; but it was only reflected light.

      Marianne unlatched the door of the antique barn with cold-stiffened fingers and let herself inside. Switched on the overhead light, hoping no one in the house would notice. Hoping Corinne wouldn’t grab a jacket and run out to join her.

      She’d had a thought of—what was it?—not a dream exactly but a vivid memory of a framed reproduction, a wall hanging?—one of Corinne’s “bargain treasures.” Suddenly it seemed urgent to find it.

      But where, amid this clutter?

      Marianne hadn’t been in her mother’s shop for a while. There must have been new acquisitions, it looked as if Corinne was stripping down and refinishing a weird armchair of twisted, gnarled tree limbs, like a torture machine, and there was a Shaker-style rocking chair positioned on a worktable, but Marianne couldn’t be sure.

      A smell of paint solvent, varnish, furniture polish, oil-based paint (Corinne had been painting the interior of the barn a bright robin’segg blue but hadn’t quite finished the task), mouse droppings, dust. That comforting smell of old things, of the past. So happy here, things are so calm and sane СКАЧАТЬ