We Were the Mulvaneys. Joyce Carol Oates

       STORYBOOK HOUSE

      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