Finally Mike was allowed to speak, pleading, “But I wasn’t with those guys, Dad! I d-didn’t know anything about it until afterward.” Dad asked skeptically, “Oh yes? How long afterward?” and Mike said, “I—don’t know, exactly.” “An hour? Five minutes?” “Gosh no, Dad—the next day, I guess.” Mike’s voice was weak and scared and I’d guess he might be lying. Or maybe Dad just scared him so, he was breaking down. It was fascinating to me to hear my big brother Mule speaking to our father like a small child—like me, aged ten. The thought came to me Don’t we ever grow up? For some weird reason this was consoling.
They talked a while longer, Dad and Mike, and finally Dad relented, saying, “All right, Mikey. But if I ever learn you were involved, even just that you knew, at the time, I’ll break your ass. Got it?” Mike murmured, “Yes sir,” like he was grateful! All the while P.J. must have been sitting there, stricken with alarm and embarrassment, only fifteen at the time and not what you’d call “socially mature” for his age—Dad must have figured he was old enough to learn certain facts of life, even if they didn’t immediately apply to him.
Dad said, winding things up, “O.K., guys! Enough for one day. Any questions?” Mike and P.J. murmured no. “Just so you know your old man loves you, eh? Just so you know.”
I hurried out of Dad’s way, hiding around a corner, and after he’d left I tiptoed back to the doorway, and there were my brothers standing with a shared look as of witnesses to an accident. They didn’t see me but I didn’t hide from them, exactly. Mike was wiping at his eyes, kind of solemn but excited, shaking his head, “—You can’t lie to Dad, it’s the weirdest thing. I mean, you can try, but it doesn’t work. It’s like he knows. It’s like he can hear what you’re thinking. He always understands more than I tell him, and more than I know.”
P.J. had removed his glasses and was polishing the lens on a shirttail. He said petulantly, “I don’t know anything about it! Why am I being blamed?”
Mike said, “You’re not being blamed. Blamed for what? I’m not being blamed, am I?—not that I deserve to be, I don’t.”
P.J. said, “Those guys are your friends, not mine. I don’t even know what they did.”
“Well—I don’t, either.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
“I don’t.” Mike was pacing around, running both hands through his hair. He looked a little like Dad, from the back. He said in a rueful voice, “It’s a funny thing, how you always know more than you say. I mean—a person does. What you say is always less than you know.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what I said! Like if I say, ‘I went out with the guys, we went from point X to point Y, from point Y to point Z’—well, I’m telling the truth, but I’m saying less than I know.”
P.J. looked confused. As if Mike was saying things of the sort P.J. was known for, and P.J., thrown in the position of listener, was at a disadvantage. “But—why?”
Mike said excitedly, “Because to say a thing is just to state a fact. If I say, ‘My name is Mike Mulvaney’ I’m saying a whole lot less than I know about myself, right? It’s impossible to say who I am, where’d I begin?—and where’d I end? So I wind up saying my name.”
P.J. said, “That’s true about any statement we make, isn’t it? We never tell as much as we know.”
“Right! So we’re lying. So almost every statement is a lie, we can’t help it.”
“Yeah. But some statements are more lies than others.”
This, Mike didn’t seem to hear. He’d stopped his pacing and was looking toward the doorway, not seeing me; his face glistened with sweat but he smiled suddenly, as if something had just become clear. “It’s weird, man—it’s like a discovery to me. It means I’m not going to be telling much of the truth through my life, or even know what the truth is. And, for sure, I’m not going to be able to tell Dad anything he doesn’t already know.”
P.J. snorted with laughter.
Later I found Mom out in the antique barn and asked her what was going on, what had Dad been talking about with my brothers, and Mom said she had no idea, none at all—“Why don’t you ask Dad, Ranger?”
I asked Marianne instead. She didn’t know, she told me quickly.
Not a thing.
“Cor-rinne! Hello.”
Wednesday morning, a harried errand-morning, and there was Mrs. Bethune the doctor’s wife approaching Corinne, with a smile and a wave of greeting, in the Mt. Ephraim Post Office. Not one of Corinne’s women friends.
Keep in motion, don’t slacken and you’ll escape Corinne instructed herself, smiling vaguely at Mrs. Bethune even as she lifted a hand in an ambiguous gesture—hello, or hasty good-bye?
Lydia Bethune was one of the inner circle of the Mt. Ephraim Country Club, to which the Mulvaneys had belonged for the past three years; always perfectly dressed and groomed, one of that species of attractive, capable women whose very being seemed a reproach to Corinne. For an ordinary weekday morning in Mt. Ephraim, Lydia was wearing, not wool slacks and a soiled parka, like Corinne, but a lovely soft russet-dyed rabbit-fur jacket, one of those unspeakable “fun” furs, and expensive-looking leather boots that shone as if they’d been polished only minutes before. Her hair was beauty-salon frosted-blond, cut stylishly short; her makeup was impeccable; thin smile-lines radiated outward from her pink-lipsticked mouth like Muffin’s whiskers, that seemed to quiver with emotion when he looked up at you. Lydia was a familiar Mt. Ephraim presence, active in charities including of course the hospital women’s auxiliary of which Corinne was a member; her daughter Priscilla was in Patrick’s class at the high school, a flashy girl with a sullen smile—pretty enough, Corinne granted, but thank God not hers.
The inward-swinging door of the post office kept opening, customers kept coming in, Corinne’s escape was blocked. No choice but to stand and chat with Lydia Bethune who was a nice woman, a well-intentioned woman, but who carried with her an aura of perfumed complacency that set Corinne’s teeth on edge.
“Corinne, how are you?”
“Oh, well—you know, busy.”
“Bart says he sees Michael at the club often, on the squash court especially, and I have lunch there sometimes, about once a week. But we never see you there.”
Corinne murmured a vague apology. True, she rarely went to the Mt. Ephraim Country Club, despite the ridiculous six-hundred-dollar yearly dues Michael paid. She wasn’t a woman who golfed, in warmer weather; she had no use for the tennis courts, or the indoor or outdoor pools; if she wanted exercise, she had plenty of house-and farmwork to do. Above all, she wasn’t a woman who “lunched”; the thought made her smile. Dressing up to have expensive lunches, with drinks, with women like Lydia Bethune and her friends!—not quite Corinne Mulvaney’s style. Every few weeks, Michael insisted that they have dinner on a Saturday evening with one or two other couples, or maybe Sunday brunch, with the children, but that was about the extent of Corinne’s involvement. And even then she went reluctantly, like one of her own adolescent children dragooned into something against his will, complaining that she hadn’t the right clothes to wear, or her hair wasn’t right, or she had nothing to say to those people.
Don’t be ridiculous, Michael chided, we’re those people ourselves.
Lydia Bethune was chattering, smiling—a smile that made Corinne uneasy, it looked so forced. “Priscilla says Marianne was so pretty at