Joyce Oates - We Were the Mulvaneys

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thEstate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2001 by 4th Estate

Copyright © The Ontario Review, Inc. 1996

Cover design by Jo Walker

The quoted passage here is taken from Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Problems of Life: An Evaluation of Modern Biological and Scientific Thought (Pitman Publishing, Ltd., London, 1952), p. 103

Joyce Carol Oates asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9781841156996

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007502134

Version: 2020-01-31

From the reviews of We Were the Mulvaneys:

‘Oates’s finest … a major achievement’

Chicago Tribune

‘We Were the Mulvaneys works not simply because of its meticulous details and gestures … What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is something stronger and spookier: her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something on the other side that we’d swear was life itself’

DAVID GATES, New York Times

‘This is a book that will break your heart, heal it, then break it again every time you think about it’

Los Angeles Times

‘Novelists such as Updike, Roth, Wolfe and Mailer slug it out for the title of the Great American Novelist. But maybe they’re wrong. Maybe, just maybe, the Great American Novelist is a woman’

Herald

‘A brilliantly detailed and varied picture of family life and a succession of dramatic set pieces … These are people we recognise, and she makes us care deeply about them’

Kirkus

for my “Mulvaneys” …

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged.Missing me one place search another,I stop some where waiting for you.

from Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

I. FAMILY PICTURES

Storybook House

The Doe

St. Valentine’s 1976

Ringing the Cowbell

Family Code

Dirty Girl

Providence

Strawberries & Cream

Secrets

The Revelation

Babies

Damaged Girl

The Lovers

Imminent Mortality

Every Heartbeat!

The Assault

The Penitent

Ask Dad

Boys Will Be Boys!

Phase

Gone

II. “THE HUNTSMAN”

One By One

Valedictory Speech

Snow After Easter

“The Huntsman”

Plastica

Dignity

Reverse Prayer

The Accomplice

Brothers

Crossing Over

The Handshake

The Bog

III. “THE PILGRIM”

Tears

Green Isle

The Pilgrim

The Proposal

Rag-Quilt Life

IV. HARD RECKONING

Hard Reckoning

On My Own

The White Horse

Stump Creek Hill

Intensive Care

Gone

EPILOGUE REUNION: FOURTH OF JULY 1993

KEEP READING

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

We were the Mulvaneys, remember us?

You may have thought our family was larger, often I’d meet people who believed we Mulvaneys were a virtual clan, but in fact there were only six of us: my dad who was Michael John Mulvaney, Sr., my mom Corinne, my brothers Mike Jr. and Patrick and my sister Marianne, and me—Judd.

From summer 1955 to spring 1980 when my dad and mom were forced to sell the property there were Mulvaneys at High Point Farm, on the High Point Road seven miles north and east of the small city of Mt. Ephraim in upstate New York, in the Chautauqua Valley approximately seventy miles south of Lake Ontario.

High Point Farm was a well-known property in the Valley, in time to be designated a historical landmark, and “Mulvaney” was a well-known name.

For a long time you envied us, then you pitied us.

For a long time you admired us, then you thought Good! — that’s what they deserve .

“Too direct, Judd!”—my mother would say, wringing her hands in discomfort. But I believe in uttering the truth, even if it hurts. Particularly if it hurts.

For all of my childhood as a Mulvaney I was the baby of the family. To be the baby of such a family is to know you’re the last little caboose of a long roaring train. They loved me so, when they paid any attention to me at all, I was like a creature dazed and blinded by intense, searing light that might suddenly switch off and leave me in darkness. I couldn’t seem to figure out who I was, if I had an actual name or many names, all of them affectionate and many of them teasing, like “Dimple,” “Pretty Boy” or, alternately, “Sourpuss,” or “Ranger”—my favorite. I was “Baby” or “Babyface” much of the time while growing up. “Judd” was a name associated with a certain measure of sternness, sobriety, though in fact we Mulvaney children were rarely scolded and even more rarely punished; “Judson Andrew” which is my baptismal name was a name of such dignity and aspiration I never came to feel it could be mine, only something borrowed like a Hallowe’en mask.

You’d get the impression, at least I did, that “Judd” who was “Baby” almost didn’t make it. Getting born, I mean. The train had pulled out, the caboose was being rushed to the track. Not that Corinne Mulvaney was so very old when I was born—she was only thirty-three. Which certainly isn’t “old” by today’s standards. I was born in 1963, that year Dad used to say, with a grim shake of his head, a sick-at-heart look in his eyes, “tore history in two” for Americans. What worried me was I’d come along so belatedly, everyone else was here except me! A complete Mulvaney family without Judd .

Always it seemed, hard as I tried I could never hope to catch up with all their good times, secrets, jokes—their memories. What is a family, after all, except memories?—haphazard and precious as the contents of a catchall drawer in the kitchen (called the “junk drawer” in our household, for good reason). My handicap, I gradually realized, was that by the time I got around to being born, my brother Mike was already ten years old and for children that’s equivalent to another generation. Where’s Baby? — who’s got Baby? the cry would commence, and whoever was nearest would scoop me up and off we’d go. A scramble of dogs barking, their eagerness to be taken along to wherever a mimicry of my own, exaggerated as animals are often exaggerations of human beings, emotions so rawly exposed. Who’s got Baby? Don’t forget Baby!