"Oates, Joyce Carol - We Were the Mulvaneys" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)
No one knew who'd drawn LE COCK. (Of course, someone knew.) The girls were embarrassed, unsmiling; would not look toward the offensive desk, nor at certain of the boys who were exchanging glances with one another, grinning, wriggling their shoulders, embarrassed, too, but more than that, excited. What a cruel thins to do, for God's sake. That isn't funny, you guys. But who could erase the drawing, at such short notice? And with Madame Lederer already in the room, writing the next day's assignment on the blackboard? And who wanted to get involved, anyway? That's disgusting. U/hat an asshole. But maybe she wouldn't notice. Maybe Madame Lederer wouldn't notice.
Boys will be boys!
A second after the bell, when nearly everyone was in the classroom, settling into their seats, Marianne Mulvaney entered, in the new, measured way of hers; not, as in the past, gliding into the room with friends, smiling and calling out hello, but alone, and shyly; uncertainly, like a convalescent on her feet just a little too soon, disoricnted in the world of the healthy and trying not to show it.
The girl was Marianne Mulvaney of course, and yet-was she?
Except for Madame Lederer at the blackboard, back turned to the classroom, everyone was watching covertly, avidly. Poor Marianne! So sad. How can yol.1 guys he so nasty. It was noted that Marianne's face was oddly triangular, sallow-skinned and witchy; her downcast eyes were overlarge in their sockets; her directionless smile was strained, lips pulled tight across her teeth. Look: she asked for it. Come on.! Making her way to her desk in the third row, almost dead center of the room, Marianne stumbled over Ike Rodman's size-thirteen sneakered feet in the aisle, rnumrnred what sounded like "Excuse me," and Ike said quickly, his face reddening, "Yeah, sure." Everyone watched as Marianne approached her desk, and lowered her bookbag to the top; slipped into the seat without seeing LE COCK, in that way of hers she'd had since returning to school a few days before, vague-eyed, almost in slow motion, but always with that smile that pathetic smile! like a permanent grimace.
Sighs of general relief, a few scattered titters. Madame Lederer, a chesty, overdressed woman in her late thirties who imagined herself chic, turned to welcome her first-year class with her customary grandiloquent gestures and sweetly-glamorous big smile. "Bon jour, mademoiselles et monsieurs!"
Almost too loudly, with mock eagerness, caine the response:
"Bon-jour, Madame Lederer!"
At her desk in the third row, center of the room, Marianne Mulvaney fumbled to open her French text, opened a spiral notebook, took out her pen and squinted at the smiling, gesticulating woman at the front of the room. There was nothing more to look at, no more interest in Marianne, the morning's meager drama had fizzled out.
PHASE
How apprehensive she'd grown of the telephone ringing. Especially at night if Michael Sr. wasn't home.
As so often, since February, unaccountably he was not home.
So often, these weeks. As winter yielded by slow, resistant degrees to spring. The harsh windy snow-pelleted spring of upstate New York, daffodils' bright-yellow shocked faces coated in ice, their stems broken, fallen. So Corinne thought: Nothing progresses in a straight line, it's more-well, imbricated. The way a roofer lays tiles, shingles, overlapping one another, for strength.
Where did he go, under the spell of his obsession?-Corinne could ask, of course, and he'd answer. Always, there was a ready answet Dropping by some old friends. Just driving around, clearing my head. With a hint of his old bad-boy jocularity, Hey, who wants to know? Or, winking, Come with me, sweetheart, and you wouldn't have to ask. (As if he'd want her with him! As ifCormne his wife, his children and High Point Fann, weren't part of what he needed to escape from.) But the ready answers were never the right answer, where their eyes niight lock, Corinne's and Michael's, and she'd know he was speaking the truth.
Welcoming her into his heart.
Even the pain, the hurt, the rage of his heart-why couldn't he let her in any longer?
She wanted to cry to him: i'm her mother! I've been violated, too.
He was letting Mulvaney Roofmg slide, that much Corinne knew.
What Michael Mulvaney had so tirelessly, so single-mindedly and with such hope built up for the past twenty years, what, apart from his family, he'd lived for ("To be respected as the best goddamned roofer in the Chautauqua Valley") he was letting slip like sand between his fingers.
Worried calls from his foreman Alex Flood-8 A.M. and a crew was at the work site and where was Mr. Mulvaney; worried calls from his secretary Leah, midmorning and supplies were being delivered, important calls coming in-where was Mr. Mulvaney?
Bright as a blue jay Corinne heard herself quip (even as her fists were clenched so tightly, her nails dug deep into her palms), "Why ask me?-I've only known the guy twenty-three years."
Laughing her breathless neighirig laugh, in the face of startled silence.
During one of these unsettling calls (in fact, at 4:40 P.M. and the call was from a customer with a complaint), Patrick entered the kitchen, and overheard Corinne on the phone. When she hung up, he touched her arm gently. "Hey, Mom. Hey."
Was she crying? She hadn't even noticed-
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