We Were the Mulvaneys. Joyce Carol Oates

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 here Corinne would exclaim, brushing away cobwebs, dodging a drip from the ceiling, gamely clearing space for visitors to walk through the clutter, her eyes glistening like a child’s. All the Mulvaney children were involved in Corinne’s obsession from time to time, particularly Marianne, eager to be Mom’s helper, though lacking her mother’s unquestioning passion for old things, the mere look and feel and smell and heft of them; the fact, to Corinne endlessly fascinating, they were old. And abandoned by their former owners.

      Michael Sr. took a characteristic humorous view of High Point Antiques: to him, Corinne’s stock was basically junk. Some of it “O.K. junk” and some of it “not-bad junk” but most of it “just plain junk” of the kind you can find in anybody’s attic or cellar if not the town dump. The mystique of old and abandoned was lost on him. “In my business,” he said, “you provide the customer with state-of-theart goods and labor or you’re out on your ass.”

      Marianne guessed that the antique barn was Corinne’s haven from the continuous intensity, the carnival atmosphere, of family life. Especially when Marianne and her brothers had been small children. There was cram and clutter and a look of a tornado having blown through in both the house and in the antique barn but in the antique barn it was quiet, at least.

      Heavy rusted wrought-iron garden furniture, a “gothic revival” settee, a “rococo revival” chair of exquisite cast-iron filigree, willow ware settees and headboards, that twisty furniture made of gnarled tree limbs with bark still intact—“naturalistic style,” of the turn of the century; native willow and imported rattan and much-varnished aged wood that looked as if it would disintegrate into its molecules if anyone’s weight was lowered upon it. There were dining-room sets, battered drop-leaf maplewood tables and matching chairs with split rush seats; there were stacks of dust-limp lampshades, lamps of yellowed carved ivory, free-standing gilt-stenciled “Doric columns,” even a broken-stringed harpsichord with keys the color of English breakfast tea. There were lacquered surfaces, grimy-fabric surfaces, splotched-mirror surfaces, porcelain and marble and stone and concrete (urns, dogs, horses, a ghastly white-painted “darky” holding out a fingerless hand for an invisible horse’s rein). There was a counter of shoe boxes stuffed with aged postcards dated 1905, 1911, 1923, handwritten, in the scrawled and faded and frequently indecipherable hands of strangers; penny postcards bearing vista-views of the Chautauqua Valley, photographs painted over to resemble watercolors in romantic pastel hues, selling for as little as one dollar a dozen. (If Corinne could sell them at all.) Marianne couldn’t resist, pulled out a card at random, a sunset scene of canal barge, yoked mules and mule driver titled Erie Barge Canal at Yewville, N.Y., 1915. On the reverse was a message in near-invisible blue ink, in a woman’s flowery hand: Hello Rose! Suppose you think I am dead. But I am not, very much alive instead. How are you all? & are you still in the same house? Let me hear from you. All O.K. here except for Ross & grandma, no change. Love to all & the baby too. Yr. sis. Edna. It was dated Fri. P.M., July 16. Hastily Marianne put the card back in the shoe box and moved on. If she began reading through these old cards she’d lose herself for an hour.

      Some of them she’d stolen away to keep in her room. They sold so cheaply, it seemed a shame. Such tragically real and unique and irreplaceable documents. Corinne agreed they were precious but then everything in her antique barn was precious wasn’t it?—that was the point of antiques wasn’t it?

      Behind stacks of water-stained and -warped old books—James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pathfinder, Winston Churchill’s A Modern Chronicle, Hamlin Garland’s A Son of the Middle Border, A Children’s Garden of Poesy and several volumes of Reader’s Digest Books, Information Please Almanac 1949—partly covered by a kerosene-smelling ratty old quilt, Marianne found what she was searching for. A framed reproduction of an antiquated painting by an unknown artist, titled The Pilgrim: a romantically twilit vista of mountains, a woodland lake, light radiating from a likeness of Jesus’ face in the sky falling upon a robed figure kneeling in a meadow of grazing sheep and lambs beside the glistening water. The figure was barefoot and seemed to have made her way across a rocky terrain; her profile was partly obscured by a plait of faded gold hair and a shawl modestly covering her head. Beneath the title was the caption, which Marianne found thrilling: He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.

      Corinne had brought The Pilgrim home years ago from a flea market and hadn’t sold it though the price had been lowered several times, rather conspicuously—$25, $19.98, now $12.50. (How did Corinne determine these prices, anyhow? She seemed to have, as Michael Sr. observed, an unfailing instinct for keeping them just high enough to discourage potential buyers.) Marianne recalled Patrick saying of the reproduction, What cornball stuff, Mom! and she supposed she had to agree,