It was a good memory. It came out of nowhere, a child climbing through a window, trembling with excitement and suspense, and it ended in a blaze of summer sunshine. She’d ignored the boys calling to her and stood shading her eyes like an Indian scout, seeing the mountains in the northeast, the wooded hills where strips of sunshine and shadow so rapidly alternated you would think the mountains were something living and restless.
And Mt. Cataract like a beckoning hand, for just Button to see.
Here. Look here. Raise your eyes, look here.
In the warmly lit kitchen rich with the smell of baking bread there stood Corinne leaning against a counter, chatting with a woman friend on the phone. Her blue eyes lifting to Marianne’s face, her quick smile. The radio was playing a mournful country-rock song and Feathers, incensed as by a rival male canary, was singing loudly in rebuttal, but Corinne didn’t seem to mind the racket. Seeing Marianne grab her parka from a peg in the hall she cupped her hand over the receiver and asked, surprised, “Sweetie? Where are you going?”
“Out to see Molly-O.”
“Molly-O? Now?”
That startled plea in Corinne’s voice: Don’t we prepare Sunday supper together, super-casserole? Isn’t this one of the things Button and her Mom do?
Outside it was very cold. Twenty degrees colder than that afternoon. And the wind, bringing moisture to her eyes. It was that slatecolored hour neither daylight nor dark. The sky resembled shattered oyster shells ribboned with flame in the west, but at ground level you could almost see (sometimes Marianne had stared out the window of her bedroom, observing) how shadows lifted from the snowy contours of the land, like living things. Exactly the bluish-purple color of the beautiful slate roof Michael Sr. had installed on the house.
In the long run, Dad said, you get exactly what you pay for.
Quality costs.
Marianne’s heart was pumping after her close escape, in the kitchen. There would be no avoiding Mom when they prepared supper. No avoiding any of them, at the table.
Yet how lucky she was, to have a mother like Corinne. All the girls marveled at Mrs. Mulvaney, and at Mr. Mulvaney who was so much fun. Your parents are actually kind of your friends, aren’t they? Amazing. Trisha’s mother would have poked her way into Marianne’s room by now asking how was the dance? how was your date? how was the party? or was it more than one party? did you get much sleep last night?—you look like you didn’t. Another mother would perhaps have wanted to see Marianne’s dress again. That so-special dress. Even the satiny pumps. Just to see, to reminisce. To examine.
One of the rangy barn cats, an orange tiger with a stumpy tail, leapt out of a woodpile to trot beside Marianne as she crossed the snow-swept yard to the horse barn. He made a hopeful mewing sound, pushing against her legs. “Hi there, Freckles!” Marianne said. She stooped to pet the cat’s bony head but for some reason, even as he clearly wanted to be petted, he shrank from her, his tail rapidly switching. He’d come close to clawing or biting her. “All right then, go away,” Marianne said.
How good, how clear the cold air. Pure, and scentless. In midwinter, in such cold, the fecund smells of High Point Farm were extinguished.
No games. No games with me.
Just remember!
At the LaPortes’ she’d bathed twice. The first time at about 4:30 A.M. which she couldn’t remember very clearly and the second time at 9:30 A.M. and Trisha had still been asleep in her bed, or pretending to be asleep. The gentle tick-ticking of a bedside clock. Hours of that clock, hours unmoving beneath the covers of a bed not her own, in a house not her own. Toward dawn, a sound of plumbing somewhere in the house, then again silence, and after a long time the first church bells ringing, hollow-sounding chimes Marianne guessed came from St. Ann’s the Roman Catholic church on Mercer Avenue. Then Mrs. LaPorte knocking softly at Trisha’s bedroom door at about 9 A.M. asking, in a lowered voice, “Girls? Anyone interested in going to church with me?” Trisha groaned without stirring from her bed and Marianne lay very still, still as death, and made no reply at all.
Later, Trisha asked Marianne what had happened after the party at the Paxtons’, where had Marianne gone, and who’d brought her back, and Marianne saw the worry, the dread in her friend’s eyes Don’t tell me! Please, no! so she smiled her brightest Button-smile and shook her head as if it was all too complicated, too confused to remember.
And so it was, in fact: Marianne did not remember.
Unless a giddy blur, a girl not herself and not anyone she knew. Coughing and choking dribbling vomit hot as acid across her chin, in a torn dress of cream-colored satin and strawberry-colored chiffon, legs running! running! clumsy as snipping shears plied by a child.
Out in Molly-O’s stall, at this hour? But why?
This safe, known place. The silence and stillness of the barn, except for the horses’ quizzical snuffling, whinnying.
Marianne wondered if, back in the house, Corinne was consulting with Patrick. Is something wrong with—?
Judd, too, had looked at her—strangely.
He was only thirteen, but—strangely.
Marianne took up a brush and swiftly, rhythmically stroked Molly-O’s sides, her coarse crackling mane. Then lifted grain and molasses to the wet, eager mouth. She clucked and crooned to Molly-O who had roused herself from a doze to quiver with pleasure, snort and stamp and twitch her tail, snuffling greedily as she ate from Marianne’s hand. That shivery, exquisite sensation, feeding a horse from your hand! As a small child Marianne had screamed with delight 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