When Madeline Was Young Read online

  The doctor right away felt Madeline's lymph glands, smoothing his fingers down her neck. She had just enough energy when he did that to lift her chin and slowly close her glassy eyes. She was going to die. Right there in front of us, slumped against my mother, she was going to take one last little breath. And then what would we do? Would my mother cry out, suddenly insane like one of the tragic Greek heroines? Would she shriek at anyone who threatened to take the body away? I looked hard at Dr. Riley: Say she'll five, say she'll live. If she died we wouldn't believe it; and so it was up to the doctor to make the story true. For a minute, as I stared, I forgot the patient and the death and the panicked mother. It was as if I were in the room alone with the doctor, as if he were speaking to me while he attended to Madeline, as if he were telling me to step into my future. He had glanced at me just once, but in that look he had seemed to say, Watch. And I thought if you were going to pass on, it wouldn't be so terrifying with his hands moving gently over your face and throat, and if you were going to live, suddenly because of that cupped hand on your cheek, you'd be glad you were staying. He touched Madeline 's forehead, he made her take a sip of ginger ale, and then he listened to her heart; he stared dreamily at the floor, tuned into the intricacies of her particular glub-glub, the whisper that seemed to tell him her history. As he removed the earpieces of his stethoscope, he said to Madeline, "The flu always seems worse in summer, doesn't it, young lady?" I recall noting that he would call her "young lady"

  because he was feeble and old. Anyone, compared with him, was young. He patted her leg. "You're just about over the hump, even if it doesn't quite feel like it." To my mother he said, "I don't see signs of scarlet fever, nothing dangerous here. She should feel better in a day or two."

  Soon after he left, I went into the woods to sit on a stump in the near darkness. I was often crying in those days, and it always embarrassed me even in private, even as I couldn't help it, the girlishness of it. The shame made me cry harder, stuffing my fist in my mouth to keep from making noise. The doctor had said that Madeline was going to get well, that the worst was over, and so there was that relief. I thought I was for the most part grieving for Madeline, for her brush with death. Although she would survive, I was sorry for my neglect of her through the years, and sorry, too, for the wretched games I'd played, pretending she was the dog and I the master, she the servant and I the king, she the wife and I the commanding husband--

  Madeline, always the one who barked and fetched and scrubbed. I sobbed with useless contrition. Without knowing I was probably also crying because never again would I feel awe for Buddy in the thoughtless way a younger boy idolizes someone else. It seemed terrible that he had spoken about her to me--the big secret, pal--and then she had almost died, perhaps a cause and effect, his words somehow infecting her. And it seemed especially harsh to be miserable in a place that had always held the greatest of happinesses. I would have thought it worth weeping, I'm sure, if I'd understood that those summers would not come again, that Buddy and I would never be together at Moose Lake as we'd been all those years before.

  Much later, when my sister, Louise, and I were both at Oberlin College in Ohio, I told her about that night at the lake, when Buddy informed me that I could, with impunity, have my way with Madeline. I explained that I'd figured out the pieces by talking to our aunt Figgy and also the cleaning lady, Russia. Louise said, "But Mad You knew about Madeline. We've always known. I remember looking at the photo album with Mom when I was little, how she pointed at each person and explained." Louise repeated, "We've always known."

  I understood again that it was Buddy who had made the story seem like a sensational deceit, a tabloid headline. When, in fact, our parents had absorbed Madeline's tragedy into everyday life so seamlessly it was unimportant to dwell on the circumstances. They had the balanced sense of both the absurdity of existence and the importance of using our gifts, of finding the work we were meant to do. Hardly the stuff of soap opera. It had taken me years to see that Buddy had told me about Madeline for no other reason than to impress his kid cousin in the moment: Buddy Eastman knew what it was to feel up a girl.

  That was all he'd wanted to tell. I stood like a dolt in Louise's dorm room at Oberlin, having revealed the great lie, the substantial weirdness I'd trumped up at the center of the Maciver clan. Only to find there was no secret and no pathology.

  "Maybe," Louise suggested kindly, "you were way too young when Mom told you and couldn't make sense of it."

  Somewhere along the line, Buddy, in his superior wisdom, might have spelled it out, might have explained that my father, Aaron Maciver, had married Madeline Schiller on March 27, 1943. Did Buddy spare me that information because he knew I would not have wanted to hear such a thing out loud? Did he know that I was the type of boy who found it hard to believe that my parents hadn't always lived under the same roof? Even as I held the knowledge in a far fold, a neural nook and cranny, that Madeline had once been my father's wife, I was also sure that, despite the evidence about my parents' separate upbringings, they had actually been born married and loving each other. Buddy's news, if he'd carried on with it, would have been full of complications, but most probably I would have entertained none of them. I had no wish to think about how my father had extracted himself from one union in order to make another. Ridiculous! No doubt I had rejected my mother's account, told to me as one tells a three-year-old a strange fact of his life so that it is reduced to normalcy. At some point, however, I must have been scared to death and therefore rejected the story, relegated it to the world of make-believe. Because, if Madeline had been my father's bride when she was only a girl, or seemed so, that meant that I might already have gone to war or left home or not been my parents' child, and all without realizing it.

  So--the facts, what stands as truth. In 1943, my mother, Julia Beeson, was a junior at Radcliffe College, not yet having borne either Louise or me in any other dimension or lifetime. She was invited to Aaron Maciver's wedding in Chicago, never having met him, because she was the roommate and good friend of my father's sister, Figgy, nee Fiona, the maid of honor.

  Figgy would have demanded my mother come to her brother's wedding to meet a rich cousin, a poor relation, a handsome brute, a homely sailor--anyone at that late date would do to put a little romance into Julia Beeson's schoolmarmish life. The event had been scheduled to coincide with Radcliffe's spring vacation, the bride, so said Figgy, having gone to great lengths to accommodate the scholars. Figgy understood that it was essential to find an important man in order to become important herself; she wished that her closest friends would ultimately land boyfriends from the same echelon, so that years away they would find themselves seated next to each other at a State Department dinner. But first, for Julia Beeson, a man, any man.

  According to my aunt Figgy, Aaron Maciver's bride wore a silk sheath that so conformed to her long, slim body that you imagined the silk was her skin, her skin the silk. At the altar, before my father and Madeline said their vows, the minister, standing a step up from them, put his hands on the shoulder of the bride and groom, and made the unfortunate remark clergymen sometimes can't help making in the heat of the moment. "If you two," he said, "could see twenty-five years into the future, you would not have the courage to make this commitment." He said the line tenderly, and many of the couples in the congregation laughed knowingly. Madeline and Aaron smiled quickly, privately--how little the minister understood the depths of their love! My mother, in the back pew, may have smiled, too, thinking herself adult enough to realize the hazards of matrimony.

  My father, overtaken by emotion during the vows, could hardly bleat out the required "I do." He did cry easily, a habit I knew I came by honestly. Figgy maintained that when he married Madeline, tears slipping down his cheeks, the women in the congregation, single and otherwise, were sorry not to have nabbed him for themselves.

  I've learned most of my parents' history from Figgy and the cleaning lady, Russia, both women who don't check their hyperbolic
tendencies. Nonetheless, it's probably fair to report that Madeline was the kind of woman who steps into the room and at once is the center of attention, the kind of woman who knows she has that effect and pretends it's nothing. "Miss Madeline," Russia intoned in her husky Mississippi accent, shaking her head, her lips pursed,

  "Miss Madeline in those days, in a sundress! Just like a queen, and she always, she always get what she want." Russia spoke admiringly, as if the work of realizing that sort of feminine potential took a great deal of strength. It's not hard to imagine that Madeline, the only child, the woman with allure, was compellingly haughty. She was probably not easy to please, and so for her suitors there was the continuous enticement, one challenge after another, one more offering to make, another promise to deliver. Before the marriage, my poor father wrote to tell her that she was all light and grace and goodness, confusing her beauty, perhaps, with her character.

  It was after the ceremony, in the receiving line, that my parents first met. My father, fair and freckled, was wearing a light-gray suit with a white rose at the lapel. My mother was as ever herself, a person who made no attempt to be fashionable, who didn't strain to highlight her assets. She never wore makeup, she never spoke about reducing, and she had no interest in clothes beyond keeping herself warm in winter and cool in summer. It's possible she was vain about her hands, her long fingers and perfectly oval nails, but I say so only because she had the right to think them elegant. She had blue eyes, small but penetrating, a perfect short nose, a generous mouth that allowed for her brilliant smile and what I loved best about her, her wide-open laugh. My father once said she was the most irreverent serious person he'd known. But in the first encounter she was no doubt straightforward and earnest. In her plain blue suit, her sensible pumps, with her short frizzy hair around her face, she probably gave a solid handshake and told him she was pleased to meet him, and also that she wished him the best happiness in marriage.

  Madeline would have been next in line. "Julia Beeson," my father might have said, passing her on, "this is my wife." My mother was as vulnerable to beauty as the rest of us, and she may well suddenly have felt shy. As if she were a dowager aunt, someone far older rather than a few years younger than her new acquaintance, she took both of Madeline's hands in hers.

  "Figgy's friend?" Madeline turned to her new husband to make sure she'd heard correctly. "It's very nice to meet you. And what a pretty brooch." Before she greeted the next guest she'd forgotten the plain woman, forgotten her name and the great-grandmother's garnet brooch, an ornament years later she was often urging my mother to wear.

  Julia knew only what Figgy had told her, that Madeline had gone to a dreary little college in Chicago and studied home economics with an emphasis on fashion design. Figgy's biography of Madeline was on the whole the story of Figgy's dissatisfaction with her future sister-in-law and her disappointment in her own brother for marrying down. The Maciver family had once been a significant Chicago dynasty, going back to the fur traders; they had their place still on the Social Register.

  Who was Madeline Schiller? There was the no-name college, not to mention the groveling parents who were denied membership at the country club, who had had to prostrate themselves to get Madeline into the Junior League so she could go to the cotillion. They'd had the gall to discourage Madeline from marrying Aaron Maciver, suggesting she could do better.

  My father was legally blind without his glasses and during the war had been sent to work in a munitions factory in Wisconsin. After he tripped over a wire in the parking lot and broke his foot in several places, he was discharged. That is to say, the Schillers may have had their own reasons for worrying about their daughter's choice. By trade he was an ornithologist, and for most of his professional life he was the curator of birds at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He wore binoculars around his neck the way librarians wear their glasses. At least once a year he went away for months to collect specimens in mountains and forests marked with red dots on our globe in the living room. He always returned with suitcases of birds neatly packed in foreign newspaper, laid in crosshatching rows. I like to think Madeline's love for him was a sign of her native intelligence.

  Despite the relatives' concerns, the photographic record bears proof that Mr. and Mrs. Maciver were happy, the two of them generally shoulder to shoulder, clear-eyed, and grinning into the sunlight. Right before the wedding, Madeline had quit her job at the dress shop in order to learn to be a wife. Every morning, Mrs. Maciver sat at the kitchen table reading the Joy of Cooking, that primer of Jell-O rings; scalding, simmering, and poaching; stuffings, dressings, and forcemeat; oyster souffles; and the elusive milk-fed veal. She had been stricken by the fever of domesticity, something else that repulsed Piggy. Her fantasy was not modest in scale: eight children she wanted, four girls, four boys. On the curator's salary, they'd move to a large house on the lake, the little ones circling their mother in the nursery, Mother never losing her figure or her steady temperament, always unstained and unflappable in the center of the cheerful fracas.

  It was peculiar, Buddy perhaps wanted to tell me, what lay at the heart of our middle-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant life. There is a picture of my father and his bride heading out together from their apartment on the North Side, in Rogers Park, for a Sunday-morning ride on their upright bicycles with wicker baskets. It's possible the photo was taken on the day of the accident, an hour or so before my father decided for some reason to mrn back ahead of Madeline. She wanted to go farther along the road by the lake, to visit her parents, and they separated, he promising to pick her up in the car to spare her the six-mile ride home.

  The calamity and its aftermath have never been a story in the family, no recounting of those formless days in the hospital waiting for Madeline to wake, the first months of small and great hopes, the guarding against the clarity of future despair. No one had seen her lose control of the deep-blue Raleigh; there is no accounting for how she found herself on the pavement, the wheels crashed against the stone fence, the frame obscenely bent. The person who discovered her, who called for help and probably even resuscitated her, apparently was forgotten in the rush to the hospital. Madeline may have fractured a few ribs, losing blood into her chest occultly, low blood volume stopping her heart. There may in addition have been a blow to the skull, acute subdural hematoma, the compression affecting her judgment and abilities. I can only guess in crude terms what happened, as was true for the doctors of that time, too. If we are in the dark ages now in the history of our understanding of the brain, the 1940s was a geologic age, somewhere in the middle of the Paleozoic, the quiet years before dinosaurs thundered over the earth. There were as yet no assessment scales for the stages of coma and recovery, no brain scans to identify the areas of damage; there were as yet no comprehensive rehabilitation facilities for the impaired. "She was out long enough to return quite less than herself," is how Figgy explained the consequences of the smash-up. Madeline had suffered traumatic brain injury, resulting in memory loss, cognitive deficits, personality change, mood disorders-quite less than herself. There has always been privacy around the subject of her accident, something, I maintain, that is altogether different from secrecy. I have the habit of explaining to my wife, again and then again, that that kind of privacy goes hand in hand with dignity. Figgy herself was unsure of the details when she was telling me about the disaster, the summer before I went to college.

  My father went out for a bike ride with his wife and sometime later brought home from the hospital a twenty-five-year-old woman who would forever have the intellectual powers of a seven-year-old. A fine tale with gothic possibilities, a good story for Buddy to consider telling in the dark night to his cousin. What, I wonder, did my father's colleagues say to him about this piece of bad luck, or call it carelessness on the part of the husband? He'd abandoned his wife on the trail, turning back for what important business? What studying or house project would have been so critical that he couldn't ride on to say hello to his in-la
ws?

  My grandmother rushed in to be of service, hiring a nurse so that my father's work and graduate studies would not be disturbed. It was she and also my mother in those years who made it possible for him to get his Ph. D. and thereafter secure the curator job he'd always wanted at the Field Museum. Madeline's parents, curiously, astonishingly, moved to Florida, to Naples, as far from the disaster as they could get. Mr. Schiller, who had doted on her, behaved as if his only child had died, as if by relocating they could erase her memory.

  I am a doctor now in a small town in Wisconsin, and I see ordinary tragedy often enough. When someone I hadn't known well passes away on my watch, I go through the paces of giving comfort and I make myself in the moment imagine the suffering. It never fails to be affecting: coming upon a group gathered by the bed, all of them freed from the hold of night and day in the hospital's eternal light, all of them suddenly having to take a part in the great drama of their family. Still, my sympathy is admittedly frequently an exercise, one I can take up at will and usually set down.

  My father's sadness comes to me unbidden and at odd hours. His future was shattered, and yet day after day the ghost of that future sat stolidly across from him at the breakfast table. I knew Madeline as a woman who had moved into her injury, who seemed to inhabit her limitations, a woman who was fixed in her self. But what of those months and years after the accident, what of that long period of becoming? It's notable that neither Figgy nor Russia felt free to rhapsodize upon the Macivers'