authority on kittens.”
And we’d all laugh, including Mom. Yet the fact she was our mother remained.
Of us kids it was always Patrick who was most skeptical about the blizzard-fireflies story. (Maybe because Patrick, the smartest of us, wanted so badly to believe?) There was a way he had of leaning his elbows on the table (the kitchen table: where we’d likely be) and shoving out his lower lip, his warrior-stance in Debate Club at school, and saying, “Oh, Mom! Come on! Let’s examine this rationally. It could not have been ‘fireflies’ in a blizzard in December. Ple-ease.”
And Mom would retort, her cheeks reddening, “What were they, then, Mr. Socrates? I was there, and I saw. I know a firefly when I see one.”
“How would I know what they were?” Patrick protested. “It might’ve been a hallucination.”
“Two of us? Momma and me? An identical ‘hallucination’ at the identical moment?”—Mom was incensed, leaning across the table toward Patrick.
“There’s such a phenomenon as mass hysteria,” Patrick said importantly. “The power of suggestion and wishful thinking. The human mind is—well, real weird.”
“Speak for your own ‘human mind’! Mine happens to be normal.”
Mom was laughing, but you could see by the glisten in her eyes she was getting miffed.
Yet Patrick persisted. Mike might kick his ankle under the table, Marianne might poke him in the ribs and tease “Pinch!”, but Patrick couldn’t stop. There was something wonderful in the hot harried look in his eyes, especially the bad one. “O.K., Mom, but consider: why would God send a blizzard to almost kill you and Grandma, then rescue you by sending ‘fireflies’? Does that make sense?” Patrick’s glasses winked with adolescent urgency. His voice cracked like a radio beset by static. Here was an American teenager who just wanted things to make sense. “And what about the other people who died that day, in the blizzard? Why did God favor you and Grandma over them? What was so special about you?”
That was Patrick’s trump card, he’d toss down onto the table in gloating triumph.
By this time Mom had gone dangerously red in the face, that mottled look you sometimes get without being aware of it, working in the barns on a stifling hot day, even if you’ve avoided the sun. Her hands fluttered like hurt birds, her words came stammering. All of us, even Dad, watched closely, wondering how Mom would answer these challenging words of Patrick’s, to silence his doubts, and ours, forever. Damn old Pinch!—I wanted to punch his smug mouth, making us all anxious, after Sunday supper (Sunday nights were always “super-casserole” occasions, meaning Mom and Marianne would concoct delicious refrigerator-leftovers unique and not-repeatable), and the dogs and cats gobbling away at plate scrapings, in their separate corners, anxious too, with that twitchy animal anxiety that shows as rapacious appetite, muzzles lowered to the bowl. And by this time Feathers would have woken from his earlyevening drowse to scold, chatter, chirp in sounds sharp as the twining of a fork on a glass. Patrick took no notice of such upset as he’d himself caused but leaned farther forward, his bony vertebrae showing through his shirt, and he’d shove his prissy John Lennon glasses against the bridge of his nose, and beetle his brow so he’d be staring at Mom like she was some kind of specimen, one of those poor sad dead “nocturnal” moths pinned to a Styrofoam board in his room.
Corinne drew her shoulders up, and threw back her head. However she was dressed, however flyaway her hair, she spoke calmly, with dignity. Always, you maintain your dignity: that was Captain Mulvaney’s charge to his troops. “I believe what God requires me to believe, Patrick. I would not ask of Him that He explain His motives any more than I would wish that any of you might ask of me why I love you.” Mom paused, wiping at her eyes. Our hearts beat like metronomes. “It was providence, and it is, that I was spared from death in 1938 so that—” and here Mom paused again, drawing in her breath sharply, her eyes suffused with a special lustre, gazing upon her family one by one, with what crazy unbounded love she gazed upon us, and at such a moment my heart would contract as if this woman who was my mother had slipped her fingers inside my rib cage to contain it, as you might hold a wild, thrashing bird to comfort it, “—so that you children—Mikey, Patrick, Marianne, and Judd—could be born.”
And we sighed, and we basked in that knowledge. Even Pinch, who bit his lip and frowned more deeply. Yes it made sense, yes it was our truth, Dad grinned and nodded to signal his agreement.
Hell, yes: providence.
That Sunday afternoon, upstairs in her bedroom, Marianne methodically emptied her garment bag of everything except the satin prom dress, her fingers moving numbly and blindly, yet efficiently. She then zipped the bag shut again and hung it in the farthest corner of her closet beneath the sharp-slanting eaves.
Always, you maintain your dignity.
At High Point Farm in the big old house she’d lived in all her life. What began to beat against her nerves was the familiar sound of clocks ticking.
Clocks measuring Time, was what you’d think. That there was a single Time and these clocks (and the watches the Mulvaneys wore on their wrists) were busily tick-tick-ticking it. So that in any room you needed only to glance at a wall, or a mantel, or a table, and trust that the time you’d see measured there was accurate.
Except of course that wasn’t how it was. Not at High Point Farm where Corinne Mulvaney collected “antique” American clocks.
Not even that she collected them—“More like the damn things accumulate,” Michael Mulvaney Sr. complained.
So it was not Time at High Point Farm but times. As many times as there were clocks, distinct and confusing and combative. When the hand-painted 1850s “banjo” clock in the front hall was musically striking the hour of six, the 1889 “Reformed Gothic” grandfather clock on the first-floor landing of the stairs was clearing its throat preparing to strike the quarter hour after one. On the parlor mantel were a Chautauqua Valley “steeple” pendulum clock of the 1890s and a Dutch-style painted walnut pendulum clock of the 1850s, one about to strike the hour of nine and the other importantly chiming the hour of eleven-thirty. In the family room was a crudely fashioned 1850s eight-day clock with a tarnished brass eagle at its top, that clanged the hour, half hour, and quarter hour with a jazzy beat; in the dining room, a mantel clock of golden pine with a river scene hand-painted (and now badly faded) on its glass case, of the 1870s, and a delicately carved mahogany Chautauqua Valley grandmother clock of the turn of the century, with ethereal chimes. Scattered through the house were numerous other antique clocks of Corinne’s, each a treasure, a bargain, a particular triumph. If there wasn’t an excess of competing noise from radio, TV, tapes, records, raised voices or barking dogs you could move through the house in a trance of tick-tick-ticking.
Of course there were a number of clocks, including the most beautiful, that had long ago ceased ticking completely. Their pendulums had not moved for years; their slender black hands, pointing at black numerals, were forever arrested at mysterious fatal moments.
You would think that Time “stands still.” But you’d be wrong.
Always, Marianne had loved the clocks at High Point Farm. She’d thought that all households were like theirs. So many clocks ticking their separate times. Striking the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour whenever they wished. Friends who came to visit asked, “How do you know what the real time is?” and Marianne said, laughing, “Oh, the real time is in the kitchen: Dad’s electric clock.” She would lead her friends into the big country kitchen where, above the fireplace, was a moonfaced General Electric clock in the design of a sunburst, with fat black hands and bulgy black numerals and a maddening little hum like something grinding its teeth. The clock had been a gift to Dad on the occasion of his forty-fifth birthday from his poker-playing circle. The men of the circle were