We Were the Mulvaneys. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ road forking off to the right: High Point Road.

      Now you’re in the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains and those are the mountains in the distance ahead: wooded slopes that look carved, floating. Mt. Cataract is the highest at 2,300 feet above sea level, chalky at its peak, visible on clear days though it’s thirty miles away. It looks like a hand doesn’t it? Marianne used to say like someone waving to us. In winter this is a region of snow vast and deep and drifting as the tundra. In my mind’s eye I not only see but cringe at the blinding dazzling white hills stretching for miles, tufted and puckered with broken cornstalks. Sparrow hawks circling overhead in lazy-looking spirals, wide-winged hawks so sharp of eye they can spot tiny rodents scurrying from one cornstalk to another and drop in a sudden swooping descent like a rocket to seize their prey in their talons and rise with it again. In warm weather most of the fields are tilled, planted. Hilly pastureland broken by brooks and narrow meandering creeks. Herds of Holsteins grazing; sometimes horses, sheep. You’re in the deep country now, and still ascending. Past the crossroads town of Eagleton Corners—post office and general store in the same squat little building, farm supply store, gas station, white clapboard Methodist church. Now the character of High Point Road changes: the blacktop becomes gravel and dirt, hardly more than a single lane, virtually no shoulders and a deep ditch on the right. The road rides the edge of an ancient glacier ridge, one of a number of bizarre raised striations in the earth in this part of New York State, like giant claws many miles long. And now there’s a creek rushing beside the road, Alder Creek that’s deep, fast-moving, treacherous as a river. Still you’re ascending, there’s a steep hill as the road curves, it’s a good idea to shift into second gear. When the road levels, you pass the Pfenning farm on the right, which borders the Mulvaney property—at last! The Pfennings’ house is a typical farmhouse of the region, economical asphalt siding, a shingled roof exuding slow rot. The barn is in better repair, which is typical too. Lloyd Pfenning is Dad’s major renter, leasing twelve acres from him most years to plant in oats and corn. A half mile farther and you pass the run-down, converted schoolhouse, Chautauqua County District #9, where a succession of families have lived; in this year 1976, the family is called Zimmerman.

      Another half mile and you see, on the left, a large handsome black mailbox with the silver figure of a rearing horse on its side and the name M U L V A N E Y in lipstick-red reflector letters. Across from the mailbox there’s a driveway nearly obscured from view by trees and shrubs, and the sign Mom painted herself, so proudly—

      HIGH POINT FARM

      1849

      The gravel drive is lined with tall aging spruces. Around the house are five enormous oaks and I mean enormous—the tallest is easily three times the height of the house and the house is three storeys. In summer everything is overgrown, you have to stare up the drive to see the house—what a house! In winter, the lavender house seems to float in midair, buoyant and magical as a house in a child’s storybook. And that antique sleigh in the front yard, looking as if the horse had just trotted away to leave the lone passenger behind—a human figure, a tenderly comical scarecrow wearing old clothes of Dad’s.

      A storybook house, you’re thinking, yes? Must be, storybook people live there.

      

      High Point Farm had been a local landmark long before my parents bought and partly restored it, of course. Most recently it had been the secluded homestead of an eccentric German-born gentleman farmer who’d died in 1951 and left it to young, distant relatives living in cities far away with little interest in the property except as an occasional summer place or weekend hunting retreat. By 1976, when I was thirteen, High Point Farm was looking almost prosperous and it wasn’t unusual for photographers from as far away as Rochester and Buffalo to come out to photograph it, “historic” house and outbuildings, horses grazing in pastures, antique sleigh and “quaint” little brook winding through the front yard. Each year, High Point Farm was featured on calendars printed by local merchants, the Mt. Ephraim Patriot-Ledger, the Western New York Historical Society.

      On the wall of my office at the newspaper there’s a Historical Society calendar for 1975, opened permanently to October—“Pumpkin Time at High Point Farm!” A glossy picture of the scarecrow figure in the sleigh in Dad’s old red-plaid jacket, earflap cap, bunchy khaki trousers, surrounded by Day-Glo orange pumpkins of varying sizes including, on the ground, an enormous misshapen pumpkin that must have weighed more than one hundred pounds. Beyond the figure in the sleigh is the lavender-and-fieldstone farmhouse with its numerous windows and steep-pitched roofs.

      I’ve had the page laminated, otherwise it would long be faded and tattered.

      Our house was a rambling old farmhouse of seven bedrooms, verandas and porches and odd little turrets and towers and three tall fieldstone chimneys. Dad said of the house that it had no style, it was styles, a quick history of American architecture. Evidence showed that as many as six builders had worked on it, renovating, expanding, removing, just since 1930. Dad kept the exterior in Al condition, of course—especially the roofs that were covered in prime-quality slate of a beautiful plum hue, and drained with seamless aluminum gutters and downspouts. The old, central part of the house was fieldstone and stucco; later sections were made of wood. When I was very little, in the mid-Sixties it must have been, Dad and two of his Mulvaney Roofing men and Mike Jr. and Patrick repainted the wood sections, transforming them from gunmetal gray to lavender with shutters the rich dark purple of fresh eggplant. The big front door was painted cream. (Eighteen gallons of oil-base paint for old, dry wood had been required, and weeks of work. What a team effort! I’d wished I was big enough to use a brush, to climb up onto the scaffolding and help. And maybe in my imagination I’ve come to believe I had been part of the team.)

      Part of the house’s historic interest lay in the fact that it had been a “safe house” in the Underground Railroad, which came into operation after the passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Act, one of the most shameful legislative measures in American history. My mother was thrilled to discover documents in the Chautauqua County Historical Society archive pertaining to these activities, and wrote a series of pieces for the Mt. Ephraim Patriot-Ledger on the subject. How innocently vain she was! How captivated, as she said, by “living in a place of history”! She’d been born on a small farm about fifteen miles to the south where farm life was work, work, work and the seasons simply repeated themselves forever, never adding up to what you’d call “history.”

      It was after I started school that Mom became seriously interested in antiques. She’d furnished much of the house with authentic period items, those she could afford, and it became her notion to buy and sell. She acquired some merchandise, set up shop in a small converted barn just behind the house, advertised in one or another local antique publications and painted a sign to prop up beside the scarecrow in the sleigh—

      HIGH POINT ANTIQUES

      BARGAINS & BEAUTY!

      Not that many customers ever came. High Point Farm was too far from town, too difficult to locate. Sunday drivers might drop by, enthralled by the sight of the lavender-and-stone house atop the hill, but most of Mom’s visitors were fellow dealers like herself. If in fact someone wanted to buy an item of which she’d grown especially fond, Mom would seem to panic, and murmur some feeble apology—“Oh, I’m so sorry! I forgot—that item has been requisitioned by a previous customer.” Blushing and wringing her hands in the very gesture of guilt.

      Dad observed, “Your mother’s weakness as a businesswoman is pretty simple: she’s a hopeless amateur.”

      Scouring auctions, flea markets, garage and rummage sales in the Chautauqua Valley, not above browsing through landfill dumps and outright trash, about which Dad teased her mercilessly, Mom only brought home things she fell in love with; and, naturally, things she’d fallen in love with she couldn’t bear to sell to strangers.

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