didn’t blur you wouldn’t have the fool’s courage to do things again, again, again that tear you apart.
Labor was the right word for it. You surely do labor. Like pushing a wagon loaded with cement blocks uphill, three wheels stuck. Grunting, sweating, straining like a sow to give birth as it’s called. There came a high-pitched roaring, and a muscular contortion not to be believed like pulling yourself inside out, like you’re a glove. And then suddenly, after how many hours it would always seem suddenly, a rushing out of the tunnel into blazing, blinding light.
Here I come, here I come, oh! here! I! COME!
Michael Mulvaney her husband grinning and gritting his big teeth, droplets of sweat gleaming on his face like shiny transparent beetles. Oh his bloodshot eyes! No sleep for eighteen hours! Push! push! push! uuuuhhh! he and the nurse were urging like demented cheerleaders. Veins stood out on the young husband’s forehead, close to bursting. Corinne I love you, love love love you, that’s my girl thatagirl! that-a-girl! PUSH!
Then suddenly it was out of her, and in others’ rubber-gloved hands. The baby!—she’d almost forgotten, that was the point of this ordeal wasn’t it, so much fuss—the baby, squirming and red-slippery as a sea creature, incongruously lifted into raw air. Where did so much lung power, so much volume, come from? What if the baby had begun to wail like that, that loud, inside the womb? Corinne laughed at the thought, drunk and dazed. Jammed her scraped knuckles against her teeth and laughed, wept behind her hand. Oh God, am I worthy? Are You sure You didn’t make a mistake?
Four times Corinne would give birth. And never grow wiser. In fact each time it would seem more preposterous—she’d done so little, and reaped so much. Were she and Michael Mulvaney really good enough, strong enough, smart enough, deep enough to be entrusted with babies?
That first time, in the Rochester hospital, March 1954, euphoria swept over her like a drug. Red-slippery baby in her arms: a boy. A boy! Michael Jr.! (In fact, was Corinne drugged? What was it—Demerol? She’d been brave and brash asking the doctor please not to sedate her, please no thanks but maybe with her anxious husband’s complicity he’d dosed her anyway on the sly? guessing it would be a protracted labor he’d hoped to maintain her screams at a respectable decibel level, was that it?) And there was her husband, her Michael Mulvaney she’d married after only a few months of knowing him, loving him more than her life, her life she’d have tossed into the air confident he’d catch it, yes and she’d given birth to this astonishing kicking-crying boy-baby for his sake.
Joking amid the sticky bedclothes, lifting the tiny baby in her arms, for always they were great kidders, a comic duo to crack up the nurses—“See what you made me do, Michael Mulvaney!”
They were married, it was quite legal. But Corinne had removed her plain, worn-gold, pawnshop-purchased wedding band months before, worried she’d never get it off her swelling fingers. The only mother in the maternity ward with no ring, just—fingers. So Michael couldn’t resist quipping, loud enough to be heard through the room, “Well. Guess I’ll have to marry you now, kid, eh?”
The looks on those strangers’ faces.
So Corinne was a new mother: slightly touched by new-mother craziness. She hoped to dignify herself by commenting sagely to the doctor (always, you want to impress them: men of authority) about “the sucking reflex”—“the bonding instinct”—and similar clinical-anthropological phenomena. She wanted to impress this man she hardly knew, she’d been a college student after all, even if it was only at Fredonia State, and she’d dropped out between her junior and senior years to get married. She wasn’t some immature girl like others in the maternity ward with her—seventeen, eighteen years old, just kids. She, Corinne Mulvaney, was a mature young wife of almost twenty-three.
Plucking at the doctor’s sleeve as he was about to move on, “Oh! doctor, wait!—one thing!” and he’d smiled at her breathlessness, “Yes, Corinne?” and she’d said in a rush, stammering, “Y—You don’t think God made a mistake, do you? That He might change His mind, and take our baby back?”
Marianne, the third-born, the sole daughter, was to be the miracle baby.
You only get one of them, once. If you’re lucky. But most people aren’t lucky. (So you mustn’t gloat, of course.) Corinne and Michael Mulvaney seemed to understand, though they were still young parents when their daughter was born, in their twenties. This was in June 1959.
Already, they had two boys. Two boys! But where Michael Jr. and Patrick Joseph had been screamers and thrashers virtually from birth, strong-willed, stubborn, crying through the night in a contest of wills (“Pick me up! Nurse me! I know you’re there!”), their intransigent male selves assertive as their tiny, floppy penises, Marianne was sweet and amiable, an angel-baby, a friendly baby. A baby, as Michael Sr. observed, who actually seemed to be on our side. Within two weeks of coming to live with them at High Point Farm, this baby slept seven hours through a night, allowing her exhausted mother and father to sleep seven hours, too. Corinne and Michael grinned at each other. “Why didn’t we try one of these, right away?”
Not that they weren’t crazy about their sons, too. They were, but in a different way.
Boy-babies: unpredictable surges of animal-energy, even in the crib. Mauling and bruising Corinne’s milk-heavy breasts. With sly goo-goo eyes Love me all the same! When they slept, they did sleep hard. Especially Patrick, in his first six months. But more often there were thumps, crashes, the sound of breaking glass. Earsplitting heartrending baby-shrieks. Kicking and splashing bathwater, refusing food, refusing to be diapered, flush-faced, flailing like beached little sharks.
Mikey-Junior, the firstborn, the biggest baby (nine pounds, two ounces) would come to seem in time the most distant: he’d been born, not in Mt. Ephraim, but in Rochester; in a “big-city” hospital; brought back to a rented duplex in an almost-slummy neighborhood near downtown, not to High Point Farm like the other babies. This seemed to cast him, in retrospect, in a kind of gritty urban light; amid traffic noises, frequent sirens, the isolated and mysterious shouts of unknown men in the middle of the night. Sometimes it almost seemed that Mikey had been born to strangers—young, clumsy, frightened parents who hadn’t yet decided exactly whether they wanted to have children; whether all this they’d set into motion by their passion for each other was serious.
Michael Jr., Mikey-Junior, Big Guy, one day to be called “Mule” and “Number Four”: all boy as a certain kind of sausage might be said to be all sausage. Uncanny how he’d resembled his young (twenty-six, and scared) father, already in the delivery room: the puggish nose, the squarish jaw, the close-set warm-chocolatey-brown eyes, the dark-red curls like wood shavings. The belligerent mouth that turned, when kissed, to sugar. Within his first year alone Mikey got his head so stuck between stair railings (in the rented duplex) his terrified father had had to remove one, to free him. He’d snatched at and trapped in his hand a bumblebee (yes, he was stung); tackled a young cat and was scratched above his right eye; hung on his mother so much she’d begun to be lopsided, with a chronic aching neck. His first words, in comical imitation of his parents’ admonitions, were Mikey! Baby! and Noooo! As soon as he grew teeth he used them: gnawing at newspapers like a hungry rodent, gnawing at his crib railings, biting through a toaster cord—fortunately, the toaster hadn’t been plugged in at the time. Very quickly, being mechanically-minded like his father, he learned to switch on the radio, the TV, the washing machine; to unplug the refrigerator and start it defrosting; to pick his father’s jacket pockets for loose change, which with gleeful squeals he’d toss rolling and bouncing across the floor. More dangerously, he learned to turn on stove burners and the oven, to strike matches into flame. He was comically aggressive in “protecting” his Mommy when visitors dropped by. Once the Mulvaneys moved to the country (what a wonderland for an active child, the many rooms in the old house, the outbuildings, fields and woods) he cultivated a habit of escaping parental vigilance, climbing out of his playpen and wandering off, sniffing like a dog, inexhaustibly curious. Always, Corinne was calling, “Mikey! Mikey where are you!” and trotting after