We Were the Mulvaneys. Joyce Carol Oates

to him again, not even on the phone; nor did he allow anyone else in the family to see Michael, speak with him, answer any of his letters.

      “Of all of them, only two of my brothers kept in contact with me,” Michael said bitterly. “My mother, my sisters—even my sister Marian I was always so close with—acted as if I’d died.”

      “Oh, Michael.” He shrugged, screwed up his face in an expression of brave boyish indifference, but Corinne saw the deep indelible hurt. “You must miss them …” Her voice trailing off weakly, for it was so weak a remark.

      Of course she’d understood that relations were cool between Michael and his family—not one Mulvaney had come to their wedding! But she’d never heard the full story. She’d never heard so sad a story.

      Michael said quietly, “No more, and no less, than the old bastard misses me.”

       RINGING THE COWBELL

      There was Patrick, shrewd-suspicious Pinch, falling for one of Mom’s tricks!

      Ringing the cowbell on the back veranda, the gourd-shaped coppery “antique”—as Mom called it—to summon him back to the house and inveigle him into volunteering—“volunteering”—to drive into town to fetch Marianne home.

      Like a fool, Patrick had come running. The sound of the cowbell at High Point Farm was understood to be code for Who’s in the mood for an outing? a nice surprise? Years ago when the family had been younger, Dad or Mom frequently rang the cowbell on summer evenings to announce an impromptu trip for all within earshot—to the Dairy Queen on Route 119, to Wolf’s Head Lake for a swim and picnic supper. When the drive-in on Route 119 had still been operating, the clanging cowbell might even mean a movie—a double feature. In any case, it was supposed to signal an outing! a nice surprise! Not an errand.

      Patrick should have known better. Eighteen years old, no longer a kid dependent upon his parents’ whims and moods, he, not one of his parents, was likely to be the one driving somewhere on a Sunday afternoon. In mid-February, it wouldn’t be to any Dairy Queen or to Wolf’s Head Lake. But the sound of the cowbell in the distance, as he was walking along the frozen creek, one of the dogs, Silky, trotting and sniffing at his side, had quickened his pulse with the promise of childhood adventure.

      Of the family, Patrick was the one to wander off by himself. He was content to be alone. At least, with only an animal companion or two. He’d done his barn chores for the day, cleaning out the horses’ stalls, grooming, feeding, watering—seven pails of water a day per horse, minimum! Then he’d gone hiking along Alder Creek for miles up into the hills above High Point Farm. He might have been entranced by the snow-swept windswept distances but in fact his mind was tormented with ideas. Ideas buzzing and blazing like miniature comets. In one of his science magazines he’d read an essay, “Why Are the Laws of Nature Mathematical?” that had upset him. How could the laws of nature be mathematical?—only mathematical? He’d read, too, about certain recent evolutionary discoveries and new theories of the origin of Homo sapiens in northern Africa—what had these to do with mathematics? He said aloud, aggrieved, “I don’t get it.”

      Innocently vain at eighteen, Patrick Mulvaney thought of himself as an experimental scientist, a biologist. He’d been awarded quite a prestigious scholarship from Cornell University to study “life sciences” there. His dad, who hadn’t gone to college, boasted that Cornell was “one of the great American universities”—embarrassing to Patrick, though surely true. Patrick intended to push on for a Ph.D. and devote himself to original research in molecular biology. His grades in science at the high school were always high A’s; his grades in solid geometry and calculus were high A’s too, but Patrick sensed his limits, knew he hadn’t natural aptitude for higher math. It filled him with dismay and panic to think that the laws of nature might be mathematical in essence and not a matter of indefatigable observation, data, experimentation. It was unfair! Unjust! Yet—was it correct? Science is a continuous text ceaselessly being written, revised, redacted, expanded and edited, while mathematics is pure and ahistorical. Much of today’s science will be refuted, but not mathematics. Was this so? How could it be so? What could mathematics say of life? the simplest unicellular life? What could mathematics say of the mysterious evolutionary branchings of life through the millions of years of earth’s existence? Patrick murmured aloud, “They don’t know everything.”

      A fine powdery snow was blown against his face, from the ground. Above, the sky was clear—a hard wintry blue like ceramic.

      Patrick hiked on, and began to smile. Recalling the “exquisitely beautiful watercolors”—Mom’s words—he’d slyly tacked up on the kitchen bulletin board, aged fourteen. Mysterious prints of what appeared to be brilliantly adorned suns, moons, comets—whatever? After keeping the family guessing for a few days Patrick revealed what the prints were: magnified slides of the dogs’ saliva.

      The looks on their faces.

      How Patrick had laughed, laughed. All of them, even Mike, staring at him in disbelief and revulsion. As if he’d betrayed them, or some sacred trust. As if he’d betrayed the dogs! Patrick demanded to know why the dogs’ saliva, teeming with microbes (not so very different from their own) had seemed “exquisitely beautiful” to them one day, but not the next. Never mind, Patrick, Mom had said huffily, just take those things down at once, please.

      Now Patrick laughed aloud, remembering. The memory had quite vanquished his anxiety of a few minutes before. “They don’t know anything!”—he heard his bemused voice, aloud.

      He meant not just the Mulvaneys, but most of mankind.

      Hearing the cowbell, a summons from his mom, Patrick cut his hike short and trotted the mile or so back to the house, Silky panting excitedly beside him, but the trick was on him this time—“I’m sorry to bother you, P.J., but Button needs a ride home from the LaPortes. Can you drive in?” Mom was apologetic, smiling, in that shamelessly exploitive way of hers none of her children could resist, Corinne Mulvaney playing at and perhaps even imagining herself as flustered, helpless—so contrary to her true nature, which was all efficiency. She was in the midst of refinishing a piece of furniture and couldn’t stop, she hoped he’d understand, she was sorry to be intruding on his time to himself after he’d done his chores and did them so well and—anyway—it was a favor for Button, wasn’t it? “Take the Buick, hon. Dad’s out with the pickup. Here, catch—” fishing the keys to the station wagon out of a deep pocket of her stained coveralls and tossing them with inappropriate gaiety to Patrick, who glared at her with all that he could muster of adolescent irony. “Gee thanks, Mom,” he said, shoving his glasses against the bridge of his nose, “—a Sunday drive to Mt. Ephraim and back. Just what I need.”

      Fourteen miles, round-trip. No, closer to fifteen since the La-Portes lived on the far side of town. It was a trip he took five days a week, back and forth, usually on the school bus.

      So he’d driven into Mt. Ephraim, and picked up his sister, and yes he’d possibly noticed that something was wrong, Marianne’s smile less convincing than usual, an evasiveness in her eyes, and certainly she wasn’t her usual chattery-brimming self, a purely and profoundly and to Patrick’s superior mind often exasperatingly girl-self; but frankly he’d been relieved not to hear about the prom and the party and her “date” and her familiar litany of girlfriends Trisha, Suzi, Bonnie, Merissa—how “fantastic” the decorations in the gym, how “terrific” the local band, what a “wonderful, unforgettable” time everyone had had. And how “honored” she’d been, in the Valentine Queen’s court. Patrick, a senior, hadn’t the slightest interest, not even an anthropological interest, in the frantic febrile continually shifting social lives of any of his classmates. Corinne was disappointed in him perhaps, he’d scarcely known the Valentine’s Day prom was the previous night until the commotion and fuss over Marianne and her new dress, Dad taking Polaroids as usual, and the “date” showing up—Austin Weidman in a dark suit that made him look like a funeral director, poor adenoidal Austin who