Loving boys was just more of a challenge, somehow. Like keeping an even course in a canoe on a wild rushing river. Boys didn’t let you rest!
A long time ago when they were young married lovers with only the one baby, Mikey-Junior they’d adored, Corinne and Michael made a pact. If they had more babies—which they dearly wanted—they must vow never to favor one over the others; never to love one of their children the most, or another the least. Michael said, reasonably, “We’ve got more than enough love for all of them, whoever they are. Right?”
Corinne hugged and kissed him in silence, of course he was right.
What a feverish, devoted, you might say obsessed young mother she’d been! Her blue eyes shone like neon. Her heart beat steady and determined. She knew she could love inexhaustibly because she was herself nourished by God’s inexhaustible love.
But Michael had more to say. In fact, Michael was argumentative, impassioned as Corinne rarely saw him. He’d come from a large Irish Catholic family of six boys and three girls in Pittsburgh; his father, a steelworker and a heavy drinker, had bullied his mother into submission young and slyly cultivated a game of pitting Michael and his brothers against one another. All the while Michael was growing up he’d had to compete with his brothers for their father’s approval—his “love.” At the age of eighteen he’d had enough. He quarreled with the old man, told him off, left home. So his father retaliated by cutting Michael out of his life permanently: he never spoke 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.”
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