When Madeline Was Young Read online

  private affairs--Russia, the cleaning woman who observed us for generations, who could make a story out of very little material.

  Not even Russia would trespass, never volunteering a word about that in-between phase, Madeline wife but not wife.

  My sentimental father might lie staring up at the ceiling at night, too stricken for tears. He might have gotten carried away by the old joy, let himself be hopeful when there could not be hope. Stupid! Maybe even brutish. He'd been fooled by the holy silence in which she'd always given herself, which was in some ways just as it had been before the accident. He'd never slept with anyone but Madeline, so how could he know the difference, if there was any, between their own religion, this art of theirs, and what was the natural response of the average female? What had seemed spiritual about sex when she'd been right had probably not required her mind or even much of a self. Did she still have a self? Of course, of course she did. But maybe, after all, there had been no profound understanding between them in their year of marriage, open eye to open eye as they'd moved together, she clasping his hips, she--the first time, what a shock!--turning around on hands and knees, his Madeline, now sweet, now surprisingly fierce. He had not imagined, for example, that they would share, and so ecstatically, their animal shame.

  Very occasionally I let myself think of that kind of thing. I suspect that not long after the accident my father knew he couldn't continue the old communion. There was the canopy bed, excessive in lace and ribbon, that he and my grandmother bought to entice Madeline away from him, a garish little-girl delight to seduce her to her own room. It is an embarrassment to recount that detail, my grandmother in those early days setting the tone for the household, shopping for the changed Madeline, doing what she could to ease the strain. Figgy through the years pestered me with the idea that they were wrongheaded, re-creating Madeline 's childhood, forcing upon her a young girl's tastes and enthusiasms. We used to argue about it, she saying that Madeline deserved the respect of an adult, that, even if she was incapacitated, she didn't have to play with dollies and puppets and finger paints. I contended that Madeline gravitated to comforts she could grasp. And, furthermore, she used brushes and tube paints and a palette. I see now that it is a fair question, to ask how much of Made-line's disability was imposed upon her.

  In fairness, too, it is a question that should be answered in terms of intention. Although the particulars are gruesome--the pink wallpaper, the vanity table with gold trim, the shelf of toys--my father, my grandmother, my mother meant to care for their charge the best they knew how; they meant to help her hold still in her new self.

  IT WAS A FEW MONTHS after my father's marriage to Madeline that my mother had quit Radcliffe and come back to her native Chicago to get a degree in nursing. Figgy tended to highlight the farcical, but my mother also wasn't a reliable narrator, she who thought her own life unremarkable. It is either fantastical, then, or an ordinary coincidence that my mother was the nurse's aide who bathed Madeline and changed her sheets in the hospital after the accident. During those weeks at the Evanston Hospital, Julia Beeson and Aaron Maciver ate dinner together--the closest Julia had ever come to having a date, Figgy said. In the cafeteria they ate tough roast beef coated with a thick, dull gravy. "Imagine it's caramel," my mother advised. I suppose they spoke about Madeline's prognosis, they spoke about her strength, her endurance. It's also likely that they discussed the invasion of Normandy. There may have been talk about the difficulty Julia had had at Radcliffe, the intense snobbery there, all those Winslows, Cottings, and Cabot Lodges. The wealthy Quakers and Unitarians had been so cool in their generalized liberal kindness, and she couldn't escape the feeling that she was a charity case, the match girl on a scholarship in her ragged stockings. When she had to leave Radcliffe to care for her ailing father, it was something of a relief, an excuse for escape. She confessed that to Aaron, confessed that her father's illness and death had saved her from the oppression of her classmates and the family expectation that she be a colossus of knowledge. What a deliverance, she said, to do honest work, to pay for her own college education toward a useful degree. Aside from that intimacy and the balm of sympathy as the crisis went on, surely what sealed my parents' bond was their mutual affection and veiled scorn for Figgy. My father, but softly, imitated his sister's capacity to work through a room of men until she'd lassoed the most eligible bachelor, and my mother, with such fondness, impersonated Figgy cozying up to the professor and at cocktail parties becoming chums with the president of the board.

  After the patient was safely home, Aaron invited Julia to the museum to show off the collection to her, drawer by drawer.

  He was not yet curator, but he had a position in the bird division, making skins and assisting with the cataloguing. Because of Julia's genuine concern, she had soon, inevitably, become one of Madeline's constellation of caretakers. Why not, as a kind of thanks to her, extend the invitation to see the remarkable collection, the behind-the-scenes splendor? Over those birds that were presumed to be extinct--the great auk, the ivory-billed woodpecker--Julia nearly wept, and over many of the others--the indigo bunting, the chickadee, the hooded merganser, the common junco--she bent low and held her throat. He had thought she would enjoy them, but her reaction was beyond his expectation. Her appreciation for the dead was so great he couldn't resist asking her into the woods to show her the variety of the living in her own city. She was a quick study, and when she went to the nearby state park with him the following spring, to see the migrating warblers, she had done her lessons well, spotting without his help the chestnut-sided, the magnolia, the black-and-white, the Wilson's, the bay-breasted and golden-winged.

  Eventually, with the aid of a tape-recorded tutorial, she came to know the songs almost as well as he did. Although he'd been taught that comparison is odious, how could he not remark to himself that Madeline had never been interested in his work, that, for all her decorating sense, her artistry when it came to arranging flowers and furniture and putting suit with tie and shoes, she had not been seized by the magnificence of the birds? In the woods she had always grown cold, or she was dying of heat, or she was eaten alive by mosquitoes, frailties he had done his best to love. My father was impressed by Julia's quiet appreciation of beauty, by her stoicism when she was uncomfortable, by her intellect, and by her empathy for those who suffered, by her plans to become a nurse, to work in Appalachia or with Negroes in the city, a place where the need was acute.

  All that in addition to my mother's sly ridicule of his loudmouthed sister.

  In the years before their marriage, my mother came to the apartment to cook a meal, to read to Madeline, to play Go Fish, to look at fashion magazines, to dress paper dolls. Julia would hold Madeline's face and speak to her, making a loving tableau.

  She told her stories, she tried to stretch her memory, gently, gently, so that Madeline, her head to her shoulder, as if in contemplation, didn't always become enraged by the challenge. My mother understood that a woman who had once been athletic, who had shot archery and enjoyed swimming, more than anything needed to be worn out, that it was important to keep the body moving. Julia may have known, before research began to bear the evidence, that exercise is important to cognition.

  Madeline had come out of the accident with a hitch in her walk, with an ungainly stride. It was, if I had to guess, a result not of the brain trauma but of a wrenching of her limb in the wrecked wheel. You had to look three times at her--once as a matter of course, and then at that odd lope, and again to see that it really was a lovely young woman. In summer my mother took her to the beach, and together they'd sink down out of the July heat into the cool water, Julia moving Madeline 's arms to remind her of the strokes she'd used in synchronized swimming. She was with Madeline through her hysterectomy, a surgery the doctor had suggested in order to make Mrs. Maciver's life easier. As Figgy told it, my mother's attorney cousin arranged for my father to be legally separated from his wife. It was my mother, then, according to the lore, who orches
trated the divorce.

  "ONLY A DESPERATE MAN would have taken your mother seriously,"

  Figgy told me not long ago, when we were up at Moose Lake. "How else," she said, "could Julia have landed herself a husband?"

  "Figgy," I said wearily. It wasn't the first time she'd spoken to me about my mother in disparaging tones.

  "Mac! Sweetheart, come on!" My aunt leaned forward on the porch, after all those years still showing off her cleavage in her low-cut blouse, the withered bosom and her pearls at last giving her a patrician elegance. She said, "Your mother saw her chance and went after Aaron. Good for her, is what I say. I'm all for that kind of capture. But on a level playing field there would have been no competing with Madeline. The glamour-puss made her own slips, her own camisoles, her own winter coat--she was that particular. So what if she was no intellectual giant? What hot-blooded man cares about that? Madeline had powers beyond the standard dumb blonde--genuine star quality, that calculating femme-fatale lustiness beneath the cool platinum purity. I'm telling you in her own way she was a deep thinker. But had she ever read anything more difficult than a fashion magazine?" Figgy rubbed her hands together with the thrill of this part of the story. "Say there hadn't been an accident. Your father would have died a slow death, a cruel death, if he'd stayed married to that gorgeous twit, absolutely. He would never have gotten a divorce, never!" She threw her head back and laughed. "He'd have taken to drink!"

  Because I made no comment, she seemed to think she had to elaborate. "Look-it. Your father, even with those thick glasses, has always appealed to women. He's one of those killingly thoughtful men--nothing showy, but if you happen to take a fourth glance you're smitten. Madeline was your father's real love, the passion of his life. He knew he'd never find someone to fire his jets the way she had--and let me tell you, as quiet and dignified as your father is, he couldn't keep his hands off her.

  She had this way of acting as if she tolerated his devotion, a total come-on, don't you think?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "Once she was out of the picture--so to speak--your father figured he might as well take a wife with broad hips." Figgy held her hands three feet apart, as if that distance had been my mother's girth. "And those sagging breasts! Those ill-fitting brassieres! She was a dead ringer for a Salvation Army matron. There was a hardy girl for you, someone who wouldn't slip off a bike and smash her head to pieces. A woman who was so hopeless she'd care for another man's wife. Wife Number One, Wife Number Two under the same roof--so Oriental!"

  I had only to raise my eyebrows.

  "You don't think so? Oh well, when we were roommates in college I always thought I could save Julia from frumpiness, bring her up in the world. Her big fat spanky pants drying in the bathtub gave me the giggles every morning. Don't mistake me, I loved the woman, you know that. Her secret playful streak, her intelligence--she was a walking reference for things historical, and she could recite poems stanza after stanza. I loved her like a sister."

  Julia had been dead for a few years when that conversation with Figgy, one of our last, took place on the Moose Lake porch. As had become usual in my talks with her, I'd been filled with the outrage of a good son. As always, I'd remained the well-brought-up nephew. In the early 1970s, the two of them had had an argument from which they never recovered. I did try to remember that Figgy was probably still trying to justify herself, still trying, as she ranted at me, to make Julia see the light. I regretted, as I had often done, that I'd never gotten my mother to speak about the early days of her marriage to my father. She always brushed my questions off, as if taking on a burden like Madeline was something anyone would have done. I would have liked to tell my aunt that her friend Julia had become more beautiful as she'd aged, radiant in a way Figgy would never have understood. Julia grew rounder and rosier, and even frumpier than she'd been, if that was possible in Figgy's book, as the era of the girdle gave way to the salubrious days of the sack dress and sweat suits. Like a child, I wanted to shout at Figgy that my mother was better! Wiser! Smarter! Deeper than Figgy could fathom. Although Julia wanted to do good works on a large scale, organizing and assisting in an Eleanor Roosevelt fashion, it's not hard to imagine how she could easily have been drawn into my father's life, how she, with her store of sympathy and grace, might have thought that in the Maciver household there was in fact a need equal to her love. If I'd said so to Figgy, she would have laughed me off the porch, repeating my sentence as if it were a punch line.

  Chapter Three

  IT'S A CURIOUS THING ABOUT WOMEN, THE WAY THEY EXTEND themselves to each other for no particular reason.

  This is a behavior Buddy neglected to tell me about when we were boys. My wife, Diana, and Buddy's wife, years before they met, faithfully exchanged Christmas cards. Every December there came in the mail the studio photo of Buddy, Joelle, and the five children, not any of them looking the least bit sullen or inconvenienced in their church clothes, and all of them, according to the accompanying letter, noble citizens. The picture Diana sent of us was also studied, but we were outside, squinting into the camera, the missus and the doctor and the three daughters on a ski slope or a beach, somewhere far away, in expensive sunlight.

  My wife has a dynasty of her own to occupy her, eight siblings, two parents, two sets of grandparents, all of whom live near us, as well as seventeen nieces and nephews and, farther afield, thirty-two first cousins. Over dinner one night a few years ago, when I was mulling over the phenomenon of the holiday communications, and especially those to strangers, Tessa, our middle child, explained that Christmas cards are the goods of the braggart. She had come home from college for winter break a day or two before, and still had her initial enthusiasm for us after the months of separation.

  "The goods of the braggart," I repeated with fatherly pride.

  "And also a way to mark territory, the single-spaced two-page letter exactly like a dog pissing on a hydrant."

  There is not very often a wounded silence from Diana. It is even unusual for her to pause, as she did just then, for a fortifying breath, which is after all necessary for sustained speech. "You go," she said to Tessa, "and spend November at the printer. You take a picture that's good of everyone--Katie doesn't have her mouth open, Lyddie 's not blinking, your head's not in a book, your father fora moment is not staring out at the Andromeda who-knows-what. I don't think you understand how demanding family is and how important. You have no idea."

  Since we live on one long country road, every driveway for three-quarters of a mile an entry into property owned by one of Diana's brothers and their wives, I'd wager that Tessa does know a thing or two about the diplomacy required to keep the close family in a loving circle. Although the girls were at first astonished, it was no mystery to them why Diana once cut up the evil sister-in-law's cast-off Oriental rugs. She shredded the jewel-colored wool into strips with a box cutter and laid them down to make paths between the flower beds. As I heard tell, the rugs had been given to her in a great show of generosity, a blaze Diana interpreted as hostility. I'm quite sure that the Queen of England does not have such expensive mulch. Because there is no end of excitement in our neighborhood, when it came time for college Tessa chose a scruffy liberal-arts school in North Carolina, hundreds of miles from Wisconsin.

  "Oh gosh, Mom!" Tessa said, hands to her head, the pads of her fingers hard into her skull. "Those Christmas cards must be so much work!" She had the right tone and pace, rushing in to comfort with a sincere mix of reverence, and exhaustion, too, at the very idea of letter writing. "It's fabulous you keep in touch with everyone, even people you don't really know. Someday it would be fantastic to have a huge reunion and meet all of Dad's relatives. I'd love that. And it would be easy, because you've connected with them, because you know so many of the addresses."

  Tessa flashed a look across the table at me, eyes widening, lips firm together, an instant you can miss if you're not waiting.

  I don't admit to being gratified by that spark between us, but in truth lit
tle else that is so small makes me so glad. If I have had a long day listening to my patients' worries and my colleagues' complaints, and if at the end Tessa will reward me, then all is well in my speck of the world. I had missed her more than I'd imagined when she'd left for college in September. I almost never speak about my patients, but I was tempted to tell her about Mrs. Kosiba, a woman suffering from ulcerative colitis. She had been plagued that morning by the difficulty she was going to have juggling her first and second husbands in the hereafter.

  She'd liked the first mister far better than his replacement, but the second had left her with money. How to express gratitude to Number Two at the pearly gates without implying she wanted to spend time with him in heavenly recreation? I didn't mention to Tessa or Diana that for some persons the problems in the old bye-and-bye might actually be compounded, that it might do to save some energy for the tumult beyond the grave. My women went on to discuss their Christmas shopping, speaking in code, I gathered, about their secrets and surprises.

  THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, on July 24, 2003, Buddy's son was killed in Baghdad. Nearly three months had passed since the war with Iraq had been declared over. We first found out about Sergeant Kyle Eastman from the list of the dead in the New York Times, a feature I always scan. As soon as I read the name out loud at the breakfast table Diana told me I must call my cousin or write a letter. Thirty-eight years had passed since I'd last seen him or spoken to him. His boy, a sergeant for the First Battalion, Thirty-fourth Regiment, had been struck by an improvised explosive device. What sounded like the kind of thing Buddy had tried to make on any number of occasions in his basement through the formative years. Before the idea of the boy's death had sunk in, the phone calls began to come from the Macivers scattered around the country, the network of cousins broadcasting the news. When I told Diana later in the day that I wasn't going to write the letter at the moment, thinking that anything I might say would sound fatuous, what did she do but sit herself down and toss off a note to Joelle, a woman she'd never met, expressing all of our condolences. My wife has stacks of thick beige card stock in the desk cubbyhole, DR. AND