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

Within minutes the verdict was: a stink bomb.

Prankish seniors must have set off a stink bomb, to rout their own commencement. Was such a thing possible?

Close by, only a few blocks away, the siren at the Mt. Ephrairn Firehouse began to wail, as the first fire truck careened out of the garage to speed westward along Fifth Street.

Luckily, no one of the more than five hundred persons in the auditorium, which included very young children and numerous senior citizens, was injured in the stampede to escape. Edt doors were quickly flung open, rows of coughing, choking people filed out Onto pavement or grass to recover within minutes. The most extreme symptoms were vomiting and hysteria Most victims were merely nauseated, not incapable of breathing but revulsed by the foul air they had no choice but to breathe. The greatest concentration of the chemical bomb (hydrogen sulfide: ingeniously implanted in the building's basement ventilating system) was at the front of the auditorium where the eighty-nine graduating seniors, their teachers and school district administrators were seated By the time the Patriot-Ledger printed its front-page article on the mysterious event, two days later, declaring in broad headlines STINK BOMB DISRUPTS MT. EPURAIM H.S. COMMENCEMENT, the prevailing theory was that the prank had not been committed by Mt. Ephraim seniors, not even the rowdy, sometimes nialicious boys who might have wished to pull off such a brilliant stunt (their teachers swore they simply weren't capable of concocting such a chemical bomb, let alone shrewdly timing it to detonate well into the ceremony and not at once) but by senior boys from one or another of their sports rivals in the valley-Yewville High, for instance.

There'd been bad blood between Mt. Ephraim and Yewville since the smaller school, Mt. Ephraim, had won the Valley basketball championship that spring; obscene graffiti had been scrawled on both school buildings, and there had been several fights, and numerous threats- the more Mt. Ephraim considered it, the more it seemed obvious the stink bomb had to have been set off by Yewville, for-who else?

Though no one had seen strangers lurking about the high school before the ceremony. And no mocking acknowledgment of the prank had come from any Yewville source.

There were other, less convincing theories, all of them investigated by Mt. Ephrairn police and school administrators. An individual malcontent, for instance? A senior embittered by low exam grades, a romantic disappointment, fliilure to get admitted to the right college? Dislike of his teachers, his classmates? Over the weeks, months, even years, numerous theories, speculations would be discussed, for the stink bomb ofJune 19, 1976, at the Mt. Ephraim High commencement, was one of the most famous events of local history. But nothing was ever proven. There was no incriminating evidence, there were no informers. No one ever stepped forward to take credit.

"Oh my goodness, Judd!-are you all right? Oh where is Patrick?"

Mom was blinking dazed in sunshine, groping for my hand. I told her sure, I was O.K., I'd recovered almost immediately, whatever the gas in the auditorium was hadn't been any poison just a terrible stink. And firnny-wasn't it? A joke! People were streaming out onto the grass beside us, coughing, choking, some of them trying not to vomit, wiping their faces on their sleeves; a few were cursing; some of the seniors were laughing, recognizing it as a prank-"Wow! Wild! Far Out!" Ike Rodman marveled. Along the periphery of the gathering crowd came my brother Patrick loping like a track runner, though unhurried, in starched white shirt and chinos, and bareheaded-already he'd derobed, leaving his cap and gown on a sidewalk near a rear entrance of the school. He sighted us, Mom and me, ignored all others, frowning as if perturbed. His Pinch-frown, more a meditative glower than strong emotion. Or was he frowning in order not to smile? I stared at him in awe but he refused to meet my gaze. Mom rushed to embrace him and he let her hug him, stiff and embarrassed, looking over her shoulder; his left eye squinted nearly shut. Clever Patrick Mulvaney! He must have escaped from the stage as soon as the virulent odor began to waft from the vents, he'd even happened to have a handkerchief to press over his mouth and nose, a wetted handkerchief in flict, and he'd run immediately backstage, through a fire exit and outside, just possibly the first person to escape.

Mom exclaimed, "Oh, Patrick! Thank goodness, you're safe." She laughed breathlessly, twining her arms around him as if, in fact, he might have been in danger. "What a catastrophe! You never got to give your speech. Oh but it is funny, isn't it? Who would ever think of such a trick!"

Patrick said indifferently, "Some moronic classmates of mine, obviously.''

On our way to the parking lot to meet up with Dad, I sidled close to Patrick to nudge him surreptitiously. My eyelids were pufly and my lips swollen and bruised as if I'd been pummelled. Coils of nausea stirred in my guts. Yet it was unqualified admiration, it was awe I felt for him. I whispered, "Jesus, P.J., did you-? Was it-you?" but Patrick merely glanced at me coolly. "Who wants to know? You?"

As if the idea amused him, merely.

It would be the most P.J. ever confided in me of the stink bomb episode.

There, in the station wagon, was our father waiting for us, or in any case waiting, sitting, behind the driver's wheel but facing outward, the door open. Legs crossed, his left calf showing a raw hairy dead-white stretch of flesh between sock and pants-leg. The glauy bronze necktie was unloosened and his blue serge coat was unbuttoned. Dad was smoking, brooding; tallying up figures on a pocket calculator and jotting them down on a notepad. More than Mom's hair, his was threaded with gray like mica. It did not appear that he had been drinking-at least, no bottle was in sight-but mriuch of the strain was gone from his face and his cheeks were splotched, jowly. When he saw us, the remains of his family, Morn trotting in the lead in high-heeled white pumps, bursting with news, and Patrick in casual clothes again, and me, skinny Ranger, tagging behind, Dad blinked several times like a man who has misplaced his glasses.

"Back so soon?"

SNOW AFTER EASTER

God damn!-despite his best intentions, he was late.

He'd explained politely to Dr. Herring's assistant that he would have to leave the lab promptly at 5 P.M., which was the time at which, under the tel-ms of his employment, he should have left in any case, but the young professor, new from Harvard, kept finding more and more work for him to do; always there was more work for Patrick Mulvaney to do, sterilizing lab equipment, carefully incubating cultures, wiping up spillage and even (this afternoon!) sponge-mopping a section of the floor. And helping to record data of such exacting minuteness, Patrick felt, as he often felt in the midst of such experiments, which were essentially the counting of microbe cells with a high-tech hemocytometer, as if he were an intruder in a world that, if he descended into it for a split second, would devour him rapaciously, reducing him to mnere chemicals and a throbbing current called "life." Gazing through the powerful microscope he had to look up frequently, to break the spell; to escape a vertiginous sensation that was part dread, and part longing.

There, the not-human.

Marianne's bus was due at 5:05 P.M., in downtown Ithaca. Patrick had told her he'd be a few minutes late, unavoidably. But now he was very late, unable to get away from the university building until after 5:30 P.M., and it was another eight minutes running to the lot where his Jeep was parked, and another fifteen minutes getting downtown, on traffic-clogged one-way streets. He could have wept, he was so angry! Angiy at himself, mainly, for not being more assertive with Herring's assistant, who, he guessed, disliked him anyway, as a twenty-year-old undergraduate he couldn't quite intimidate.

Don't make enemies! Patrick counseled himself uneasily. You will need all the help you can get.

Since high school biology, Patrick's sophomore year, he'd known what he wanted to be: a research biologist. Not a teacher- he couldn't see himself in such a role, he hadn't the patience, or the sympathy and identification with others, younger versions of himself. God, no!-the vision filled himn with dread. (If he didn't get a Ph.D., if he had to fall back upon, for instance, high school teaching.) Pursuing truth of an unemotional, essentially unhuman nature, in the silence and isolation of the laboratory, suited him; or would suit him once he was independent enough to oversee his own ambitious experiments. He would not be inconsiderate of his young assistants, especially hapless undergraduates, though he would not get to know them personally. He would evoke no emotion in them at all.

What plans Patrick had! Sometimes he could not sleep, for speculating. He wanted to study the evolutionary history of a single species in its natural habitat, over a period of millennia-the development of a simple animal. Or, he wanted to study the relations between selected species and their ecology, the process of Darwinian evolution. (As the son of a devout Christian, he was fascinated by the theory of "natural selection" in which all serious scientists seemed to believe, with a very nearly religious conviction. A nundless, purposeless, mechanical process, devoid of meaning, theological or otherwise!) Or, he wanted to study cellular life, the relations between types of microbes. (Dr. Herring's work, funded by the federal government and the National Science Foundation, was a massive project in the development of new antibiotics.) Or, he wanted to study a single body organ, for instance the eye, the remarkable design of the eye, in diverse species.

Well, more than Patrick Mulvaney could name, he wanted!