"Oates, Joyce Carol - We Were the Mulvaneys" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

I was drinking, I was to blame. If I could relive that night but I can't. How can 1 hear false witness against him?

One day Mom removed the soiled, torn prom dress from the hack of Marianne's closet where it was hidden. She hadn't needed to ask Marianne where the dress was. Found it, unerring, without wishing to examine it; wadded it into a ball and stuffed it in a paper bag with other household trash. Mom's eyes gleaming with tears but she wasn't crying nor was Marianne. Not a word uttered.

Bright-glaring snowdrifted winter mornings at High Point Farm! It would be Marianne's last winter here, she seemed to know. Two mornings in succession, the last week of February, the school bus couldn't get through, so Patrick and Judd stayed home. That air of excitcd childish expectation, listening to WYEW-FM radio as they'd done for years, years, years on blizzard mornings, waiting to hear of county school cancellations. Though Mananne was upstairs when the Mt. Ephraim district was announced and P.J. and Ranger cheered in unison.

Not that P.J. much liked to stay home-"quarantined" as he called it-amid so much snow, silence.

Winter silence. His eyes avoiding hers, young face ravaged in shock, pity, distaste.

(How much did Patrick and Judd know? Presumably, their parents had told them something. And Mike, an adult, knew. He'd known from the first, the evening of the day Corinne had taken Marianne to Dr. Oakley.)

Mananne had agreed to see Dr. Oakley another time, at Morn's urging. On the examination table steeled herself against pain shutting her eyes Jesus! Jesus!Jesus! as beads of sweat formed at her hairline but there was no pain. Jesus had helped her banish pain. Afterward dressing herself, articles of clothing slipping from her fingers numbed and without sensation like strangers' fingers weirdly annexed to her hands. She'd overheard a man's voice in the room next door. "-made the right decision, under the circumstances. An ugly, messy prospect-" but she'd stopped listening.

There was Michael Mulvaney Sr.: Dad. Tried not to think about Dad.

After that first night when he'd gripped her hand, so hard. And cried. The shock of seeing Dad cry! She was temfied, her heart was breaking. So she vowed not to think of it afterward, with Jesus' help. For there was nothing to be done. She could not testify against Zachary Lundt for she could not recall, with any degree of accuracy, the sequence of events of the early hours of Sunday February 14 nor even herself during that time. It was like a movie where something has gone wrong with the film, images continue to flutter past, but dim, confused, out of focus. Nor could she accompany her father as he wished (where? to the Chautauqua County district attorney's office, in Chautauqua Falls?)-sirnply, she refused.

Could not, could not. God forgive her, she could not.

And so it became a household of silence. As if in the afterniath of a violent detonation. No wonder Mom played the radio so loudly in the kitchen, her brothers turned the TV up, even the dogs barked at the slightest provocation-a flock of noisy crows in the pear orchard, a helicopter with propellors chop! chop! chopping! the air on a mysterious early-evening flight through the Valley.

There was the discovery she'd never actually looked at, never seen, Michael John Mulvaney, Sr., until this time. For always he'd been Dad. Or Captain, or Curly. (Though not "Curly" for years- one of the names he'd outgrown.) Seeing him now, Dad, yet Michael John Mulvaney, Sr., when she could not look at him directly, at all. For his eyes shifted uneasily in his sockets when she appeared. If she entered a room in which he stood or sat, he would shortly leave. Forehead creased, eyes shifting so he need not see her.

He'd aged a decade in ten days. Heavy-footed on the stairs, turn a corner and there he was-who? A bearish man, shoulders slumped, rubbing a fist into an eye and panting like a winded horse trying to catch its breath. His face like uncooked, flaccid dough.

Daddy I'm so sorry.

Daddy what can I say.

Can't remember, can't testify. Daddy I'm so ashamed.

She did not wish to hear but sometimes (by chance, in the bathroom adjacent to their bedroom) she heard. And there was Dad's voice lifting in anger, incredulity and Mom's voice quieter, pleading. The quarrel subsided, you would think it had been extinguished, but like a smouldering swamp fire it had simply gone underground and would soon erupt again, another night. The quarrel was as much a matter of silence, withheld speech, as it was speech itself And suddenly Michael Sr. who was Dad, her Dad, stalked from the room not giving a damn who heard, Marianne, Patrick, or Judd, down the shuddering Stairs and out the back door, a dog or two scrambling across the kitchen floor in his furious wake, toenails clicking on the linoleum. A few seconds later came the sound of the Ford pickup revving into life, the engine turning over, catching, tires spinning in the packed snow, catching too, and Dad would be halF-vay down the drive before switching on. the headlights.

Those red taillights: Marianne would watch from her bedroom window. If she'd risen from bed, to stand and see. Smaller and smaller the lights like rapidly receding red suns (dwarf stars, Patrick called them) in her vision blurred with moisture until they disappeared.

Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.

Those days when the phone rang a number of times in succession (for Dad-he took the calls in his study, door shut) and other, more frequent days when Dad was in town and the telephone never rang. Or if it did Morn might call out, in her cheery general-bulletin yodel, for anyone to hear who was interested: "Wrong-nurn-ber!"

There were few calls, these days, for Corinne Mulvaney, as for her daughter. What had happened, so swiftly, to their popularity? She could count her friends on the thumbs of both hands, Momjoked.

Though Mom didn't joke much, these days.

Rarely whistled, even to call the household brood to be fed.

Sometimes in an open-eyed frowning trance she'd pass by Foxy, or Little Boots, or Troy, or tremulous Silky gazing up at her with widened hopeful doggy eyes and tails beginning to thump in happy anticipation, sometimes she'd collide with one of the cats, in particular Big Torn whose aggressive habit it was to block her way in the kitchen in order to shunt her in the direction of the bowls in the cats' corner. Just didn't seem to see these creatures, not at eye level. "Oh, you! Hungry so soon? Didn't I just feed you?" Automatically pouring dry kibble into a bowl taking no heed of the Cat or dog staring up at her in mute animal perplexity.

Yes and Feathers might burst explosively into song, aroused by the whistling teakettle, or wild birds tittering at the feeder outside the window, but he'd sing alone. His marvelous trilling rising-andfalling soprano, but he'd sing alone