In the long run, Dad said, you get exactly what you pay for.
Quality costs.
Marianne’s heart was pumping after her close escape, in the kitchen. There would be no avoiding Mom when they prepared supper. No avoiding any of them, at the table.
Yet how lucky she was, to have a mother like Corinne. All the girls marveled at Mrs. Mulvaney, and at Mr. Mulvaney who was so much fun. Your parents are actually kind of your friends, aren’t they? Amazing. Trisha’s mother would have poked her way into Marianne’s room by now asking how was the dance? how was your date? how was the party? or was it more than one party? did you get much sleep last night?—you look like you didn’t. Another mother would perhaps have wanted to see Marianne’s dress again. That so-special dress. Even the satiny pumps. Just to see, to reminisce. To examine.
One of the rangy barn cats, an orange tiger with a stumpy tail, leapt out of a woodpile to trot beside Marianne as she crossed the snow-swept yard to the horse barn. He made a hopeful mewing sound, pushing against her legs. “Hi there, Freckles!” Marianne said. She stooped to pet the cat’s bony head but for some reason, even as he clearly wanted to be petted, he shrank from her, his tail rapidly switching. He’d come close to clawing or biting her. “All right then, go away,” Marianne said.
How good, how clear the cold air. Pure, and scentless. In midwinter, in such cold, the fecund smells of High Point Farm were extinguished.
No games. No games with me.
Just remember!
At the LaPortes’ she’d bathed twice. The first time at about 4:30 A.M. which she couldn’t remember very clearly and the second time at 9:30 A.M. and Trisha had still been asleep in her bed, or pretending to be asleep. The gentle tick-ticking of a bedside clock. Hours of that clock, hours unmoving beneath the covers of a bed not her own, in a house not her own. Toward dawn, a sound of plumbing somewhere in the house, then again silence, and after a long time the first church bells ringing, hollow-sounding chimes Marianne guessed came from St. Ann’s the Roman Catholic church on Mercer Avenue. Then Mrs. LaPorte knocking softly at Trisha’s bedroom door at about 9 A.M. asking, in a lowered voice, “Girls? Anyone interested in going to church with me?” Trisha groaned without stirring from her bed and Marianne lay very still, still as death, and made no reply at all.
Later, Trisha asked Marianne what had happened after the party at the Paxtons’, where had Marianne gone, and who’d brought her back, and Marianne saw the worry, the dread in her friend’s eyes Don’t tell me! Please, no! so she smiled her brightest Button-smile and shook her head as if it was all too complicated, too confused to remember.
And so it was, in fact: Marianne did not remember.
Unless a giddy blur, a girl not herself and not anyone she knew. Coughing and choking dribbling vomit hot as acid across her chin, in a torn dress of cream-colored satin and strawberry-colored chiffon, legs running! running! clumsy as snipping shears plied by a child.
Out in Molly-O’s stall, at this hour? But why?
This safe, known place. The silence and stillness of the barn, except for the horses’ quizzical snuffling, whinnying.
Marianne wondered if, back in the house, Corinne was consulting with Patrick. Is something wrong with—?
Judd, too, had looked at her—strangely.
He was only thirteen, but—strangely.
Marianne took up a brush and swiftly, rhythmically stroked Molly-O’s sides, her coarse crackling mane. Then lifted grain and molasses to the wet, eager mouth. She clucked and crooned to Molly-O who had roused herself from a doze to quiver with pleasure, snort and stamp and twitch her tail, snuffling greedily as she ate from Marianne’s hand. That shivery, exquisite sensation, feeding a horse from your hand! As a small child Marianne had screamed with delight at the feel of a horse’s tongue. She loved the humid snuffling breath, the powerful, unimaginable life coursing through the immense body. A horse is so big, a horse is so solid. Always, you respect your horse for her size.
She loved the rich horsey smell that was a smell of earliest childhood when visits to the horse barn were overseen scrupulously by adults and it was forbidden to wander in here alone—oh, forbidden! Brought in here for the first time in Dad’s arms, then set down cautiously on the ground strewn with straw and walking, or trying to—the almost unbearable excitement of seeing the horses in their stalls, poking their strangely long heads out, blinking their enormous bulging eyes to look at her. Always she’d loved the sweetish-rancid smell of straw, manure, animal feed and animal heat. That look of recognition in a horse’s eyes: I know you, I love you. Feed me!
So easy to make an animal happy. So easy to do the right thing by an animal.
Molly-O was nine years old, and no longer young. She’d had respiratory infections, knee trouble. Like every horse the Mulvaneys had ever owned. (“A horse is the most delicate animal known to man,” Dad said, “—but they don’t tell you till it’s too late and he’s yours.”) She wasn’t a beautiful horse even by Chautauqua Valley standards but she was sweet-tempered and docile; with a narrow chest, legs that appeared foreshortened, knobby knees. Her coat was a rich burnishedred with a flaglike patch of white on her nose and four irregular white socks—Button’s horse, her twelfth birthday present. There is no love like the love you have for your first horse but that love is so easy to forget, or misplace—it’s like love for yourself, the self you outgrow.
Marianne hid her face in Molly-O’s mane whispering how sorry she was, oh how sorry!—since school had started she’d been neglecting Molly-O, and hadn’t ridden her more than a dozen times last summer. Her horse-mania of several years ago had long since subsided.
It had been a mild horse-mania, compared to that of other girls of Marianne’s acquaintance who took equestrian classes and boarded their expensive Thoroughbreds at a riding academy near Yewville. Flaring up most passionately when she’d been between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, then subsiding as other interests competed for her attention; as Marianne Mulvaney’s “popularity”—the complex, mesmerizing life of outwardness—became a defining factor of her life. Competing in horse shows wasn’t for her, nor for any of the Mulvaneys. (At the height of his interest, at fifteen, Patrick had been a deft, promising rider.) Dad said that the “great happiness” in horses, as in all of High Point Farm, was in keeping it all amateur—“And I mean real amateur.”
It was more than enough, Dad said, for a man to be competing in business with other men. Maybe an occasional golf game, squash, tennis, poker—but not seriously, only for friendship’s sake, and sport. A man’s heart is lacerated enough, being just an ordinary American businessman.
Of course, Dad admired certain friends of his, business associates and fellow members of the Mt. Ephraim Country Club who were “horsey” people (the Boswells, the Mercers, the Spohrs), but the thought of his daughter taking equestrian lessons, competing in those ludicrously formal horse shows, was distasteful to him. It was rank exhibitionism; it led to fanaticism, obsession. You don’t want animals you love to perform any more than you want people you love to perform. Also, it was too damned expensive.
The Mulvaneys were in fact “well-to-do.” At least, that was their local reputation. (Despite the way Corinne dressed, and her custom of shopping at discount stores.) High Point Farm was spoken of in admiring terms, and Michael Mulvaney Sr. cut a certain swath in the county, drove new cars and dressed in stylish sporty clothes (no discount stores for him); he was generous with charitable donations, and each July Fourth he opened his front pasture to the Chautauqua County Volunteer Firemen’s annual picnic. But in private he fretted over money, the expense of keeping up a farm like High Point, leasing as much land as he could, supporting a family as “spendthrift” as theirs. (Though Michael Sr. was the most spendthrift of all.) From time to time he threatened to sell off a horse or two—or three—now the older children’s interest in riding had declined, but of course