When Madeline Was Young

by Jane Hamilton

  My mother had come to the sink with the empty bottles. "If he wins," she said, "it will be because his poppa buys the office for him, just as he bought the Senate seats for his boys."

  Figgy flicked the lights. "It's late, love. It's later than it's ever been up here. It's bedtime. Kennedy for president! Good night."

  My aunt's womanly intuition told her that her husband was going to Washington, that he was going to be important, and that she, Mrs. Arthur Fuller, would be invited to have tea with Mrs. Kennedy on several occasions. Also, they'd enroll Buddy in a private school along with other White House staff children. Finally, he'd start to make something of himself.

  Chapter Four

  THERE WERE A FEW STORIES MY AUNT LIKED TO TELL ABOUT Madeline, but none gave her so much pleasure as

  "the Italian episode," as she called it. Through the years, the Moose Lake house, the broad front porch gave Figgy and me the opportunity to talk about the family, to cloak those conversations, that gossip, in the mantle of history. Because I was the closest of the cousins in age to Buddy, because he and I were nearly brothers for a time, she felt an affinity for me that she did not have with the other boys. Although I've heard the Italian episode on several occasions, I didn't understand her relish in it until fairly recently. I thought she enjoyed it primarily because it was the single complete story from Madeline's life before she was ours. The big event, Figgy would say, in Miss Schiller's record as herself.

  "Did I ever tell you about the Italian episode?" she'd say. "Remind me," I always said.

  We might be in the dark on the Moose Lake porch, or in a cafe in New York City. "Miss Schiller," she'd muse, as if she could conjure the woman she'd known briefly. "Miss Schiller." Wherever we were, the Italian episode began with Madeline's high-school graduation, Mother Schiller watching the boys parade across the stage as if they were auditioning for the role of her daughter's husband. The day after the ceremony, Mrs. Schiller took Madeline to Italy to shop for clothes, to look at the famous paintings, and, most important, to send picture postcards to the neighbors: We stood in a swoon in the Bargello. One afternoon in Florence, Madeline managed to escape the hotel, to take a walk across the Piazza Santa Croce alone. She had grown tired of being forced to feel in front of the broken statues, all those lost arms and blank eyes, and the unconvincing marble swirls of pubic hair. In that free quarter-hour, Madeline at last was at liberty to develop her own sensations. The Italian who provoked her had dark curls and, let's say, the famous Florentine smile and the liquid eyes. Although Madeline needed no special effects, it would be tempting to report that she seemed to be lit from within, that the piazza around her, the pale gold of the early-afternoon sun framing her, had made her seem otherworldly. He came steaming to her from the other side on his bike, riding it scooter-style, pushing off, both feet on the same pedal. When he got close he was unnerved and lost his balance.

  Dio mio! The only person in all of the piazza and he comes at her as if he meant to run her over. He had to drop the handlebar, falling into her, the two of them clutching each other, trying to remain upright. As he got hold of himself he managed to say, "At this moment--I see in the piazza the angel." He reached out with just the right amount of hesitation, Buddy might have said, and touched her cheek. "Are you--true?"

  "So much of Madeline's fate involved the bicycle," Figgy always said at that point.

  Two days later, when Mrs. Schiller came into Madeline's room at the pension in the morning and found the girl missing, she recalled the handsome stranger in the lobby the night before, the same man--wasn't he?--they'd seen behind the counter at the leather store. Before she phoned the police, she demanded that the desk clerk arrange for two tickets on the earliest departing train to anywhere else. The mother apparently had had previous experience combating her daughter's passions. When Madeline stole into her room before breakfast, she found her bags packed. Mrs. Schiller, dressed in her gray traveling suit and her hat with the plume, came briskly through the door to announce the waiting taxi.

  There was no use protesting that the night had passed in chaste getting-to-know-you activities, the walk in the dark up to San Miniato, the church door magically open, the two of them sitting together, huddling, if the mother must know, in the chill, teaching each other to speak. An Italian lesson, that was all. Wasn't really the shopping, the Fendi handbag and the pink silk dress, for the purpose of becoming acquainted with just such a man--a man with a solid family business? There'd been the stroll in the dawn to his house, the parents' apartment, where they made hot chocolate. After that consoling drink he took her downstairs to knock on the window of the baker, begging him to let the signorina have a sweet pastry fritter. The mother would have none of it, and away they went, Madeline in that tragic pose, turned to look longingly through her tears out the back window of the taxi all the way to the train station.

  For some time afterward, she had a secret correspondence with the Italian. She understood that he'd gotten married or killed when the letters came back to her unopened via the friend who'd served as the accomplice. She was inconsolable for months, so the story went, until my father rescued her from her grief. I like to believe that Madeline had gotten over Italy, that in the first year of her marriage the doe-eyed man careening across the piazza never intruded upon her fantasy of the future Maciver infants asleep in their cribs.

  Although the Schillers had nothing to recommend themselves, Figgy couldn't help approving the story of the Italian. If there was anything she might love Miss Schiller for, let it be her pluck, for that single night shivering with the ghouls and the handsome leather salesman up in San Miniato. When I once asked Figgy why she liked that story, which was after all a fairly ordinary schoolgirl story, she looked at me with pity, as if she'd just realized I'd been too young to hear such a tale. And she was right, I was too young--but that was something it would take me years to know.

  Chapter Five

  THREE YEARS AFTER MADELINE'S ACCIDENT, MY PARENTS married in a chapel up near Moose Lake. It was a brief ceremony, and except for Figgy and Bill Eastman, none of the 170 people from the first Maciver wedding were invited. Figgy and Bill in fact were the only witnesses. My mother's parents were dead, and the one brother in California did not make the trip.

  There was no mention in the Chicago paper of one Julia Beeson marrying Aaron Maciver, no cascade of wedding gifts, no rehearsal dinner or reception. You could say that they practically eloped, or that they wanted their marriage to be a secret, but I think, more reasonably, my father, unlike his sister and his first wife, was glad for any ritual to be a quiet affair. In the single photo of the day, my mother, overtaken in a silver box of a suit that belonged to Figgy, has her mouth wide open in a madcap grin. Figgy has used that picture against her, making predictable comments to me about how Julia had gone cuckoo in the moment of her conquest. My father is holding steady, looking straight at the camera. I imagine he's just made a wry comment, the trials of his previous marriage having cultivated in him a darker humor. He is probably wondering in disinterested tones if his sister should be smoothing the collar of the Reverend Monder's robe, and in such a casual manner.

  They were, I'm certain, as straightforward as they could be with Madeline, and yet during the engagement how could they not have betrayed some nervousness? It was an unusual situation, to be sure, no books to guide them through a potentially difficult transition, and it's doubtful that Reverend Monder was of much use. They were going on a short trip, they explained, and when they came back, when they returned to Chicago, they'd live together in the new house. My parents spoke into the silence, Madeline all the while looking slantwise at the floor. They talked about it bit by bit several months in advance, about the time when they'd be married. There were several visits to the house, to stake out Madeline 's bedroom, to show her the place in the backyard for the flower beds, to discuss where they'd put the furniture and how they might eventually buy a piano.

  It's possible, however, that they were vague about the
hour and day of the wedding; as I heard the story, it was when Madeline went down to the lake with Grandmother that they took their leave to the chapel.

  I often wonder what slivers of memory Madeline allowed herself. My wife now and again tells me I'm unusually romantic for a doctor of internal medicine. And so poetic. "Deep down," she adds. She will say so in company, putting her arms around me from behind and kissing the top of my head, Diana taking pity on me or chiding me or having a wistful thought. What poetry is to her I do not know. I like to think she means I'm still open to the notion of mystery. For the most part, I hope that Madeline had successfully and permanently repressed her other life, her girlhood, her marriage erased. In the early days of my practice, I had considered talking to my parents about having her evaluated. We could easily have consulted together with a neurosurgeon, and somewhat easily have comforted Madeline through the noise and confinement of an MRI. We might have begun to understand what areas of her brain were still active, what centers had developed in the absence of those that were damaged.

  It was peculiar, how difficult it was to broach the subject. When I asked--for it was something that never came up--the accident always seemed a thing that had happened so long before, the circumstances of little consequence past the great and unalterable consequence. They did not perhaps want to remember the length of time in the hospital, the day-to-day hopes and crushing disappointments, and their fatigue when the patient was discharged into her new life. That they never asked me to consider her records or solicited advice in relation to her injury is, I suppose, a result of logical thinking on their part, of believing that she was always going to be as she was, something really we all accepted as a matter of faith.

  She was emotionally unstable, she had trouble with games and puzzles that were past a second-grade level, she spoke loudly, she showed on some occasions signs of disinhibition, the pathological lack of inhibition, although she was also capable of restraint. At first, as is common in the brain-injured, she had short-term-memory disorder, paranoia, and depression; she perseverated, she lashed out, she was probably dysarthric, her slurred speech something my mother may have helped her overcome. As I remember her in my childhood, she often looked blank. If I now and then considered her injury, I imagined it as a blow that had dulled her thinking, that hadn't so much severed the connections, synapse to synapse, as it made the circuits weak, the electrical flash, if we could see it, a stuttering yellow, a reluctant flare.

  Through our growing up, my mother so often explained to Madeline that she'd had an accident, using the line if Madeline had a headache, a frustration, an upset. She did enjoy looking at magazines, and dressing dolls and herself, her interest in fashion undisturbed. I still hope that her forebrain is capable of synthesizing good dream material from the bombardment of impulses sent up from the brain stem, that her night life is full of silks and glitter, feather boas and high-heeled shoes, the glamorous strut down the runway. When I was a teenager, my secret maudlin streak was far more pronounced, and even though I knew Madeline could not recover, I half believed that Louise's music could captivate her beyond the usual power of song, that the aching beauty of Bach's Cello Suites could repair--for a split second and in exact proportion, beauty to area--the scar tissue in the white matter.

  Louise was a serious girl with thin brown hair to her waist, a girl who always won the stare-down contests. She had my father's build, the long torso, the skinny legs, but my mother's large quick hands. So, when it came time to sign up for a string instrument in the fourth grade, it was the cello for Lu. She had the predictable burst of enthusiasm at the start, practicing ostentatiously, first very carefully putting the parts of the stand together, extending the trunk, another inch, easy does it, back a touch, until it was the exact height for her proportions. She opened her book to the lesson, arranged the chair, this way, that way, and set out the metal circle on the carpet that would hold the cello's stem. From the crushed green velvet of her case she removed her bow, and from the handy compartment up by the scroll, the bar of rosin. The sumptuous velvet and mysterious scarlet insignia embossed on the rosin box lent the whole enterprise an air of mysticism. She tightened the screw of the bow, again making subtle adjustments to the tension, and then she nursed the rosin along the horsehair with such thoroughness she became cloudy with dust.

  Whether it was the music itself or her teacher, the dashing Mr. Blau, Louise's enthusiasm extended beyond the initial rental period. She became obsessed with her cello, worshipping Mr. Blau and Johann Sebastian Bach, always referring to the master with his three-part name. A few years later, she also gave her heart to the ill-fated Jacqueline du Pre. My mother believed that music was the most spiritual of the arts, and she was all for my sister's devotion. But even she on occasion worried. That Lu would rather spend three hours practicing scales than playing kick-the-can on a summer night, that she couldn't break for five minutes for a Black Cow, seemed a sign of monomania rather than of a disciplined nature. My mother feared she'd make herself sick, that she'd shrivel without sunlight and exercise, or, worse, she once joked, that with her tendency for rapture she'd grow into the kind of fanatical teen who'd give herself up to a cult leader. Louise's lank hair fell down around her cello, and so it appeared that she and it were joined, were outgrowths of each other, that it would take nothing short of a treacherous surgery to separate the two.

  In her high-school days, her friend Stephen Lovrek came over several times a week to accompany her on the piano. As far as I could tell they were not romantic--or not in the usual sense. The two of them were concordantly under the spell of certain passages, having their spasms at the same crescendo, throwing themselves over their instruments, their eyes closed, both of them grimacing, their heads rolling forward, shaking slowly, and then the sudden lift, the gaze heavenward. If you didn't know better, you might have thought the beauty they were making was measure by measure killing them. Stephen also had a dramatic head of hair, a dense hedge that loosened when he sweat, curls breaking out from that dark mass. He was very pale, as if he, too, spent little time in natural light, both he and Louise candidates for rickets. They hardly spoke--no need, it seemed, for words. He'd come through the front door at the appointed hour without knocking, walk into the living room; she'd indicate the page of music on the stand with her bow, that ancillary finger; he'd nod, taking his part from his briefcase. He'd twirl the round piano stool in search for the acceptable height, up and down on its screw until it was right where it had been when he'd begun. They'd rune, their bodies alert to the wave of the perfect A.

  I used to sit at my desk upstairs and listen to them. The music made me sadder than just about any mournful thing I'd yet encountered, but all the same it was a sadness a person welcomed. I was of the age and had enough privilege to entertain a general sorrow about life. There was in addition the matter of my musical ability, a deficiency I couldn't seem to overcome.

  When I was fifteen, the choral teacher at school, desperate for boys, asked me to try out for one of her singing groups. After my rendition of "White Coral Bells," after an amazed silence, Mrs. Yarmell said they wouldn't be needing me that time around. She thanked me for my interest. Louise, trying as she occasionally did to be comforting, said that my singing had the unfocused sound of an air-raid siren, but a soft one, a lulling one. That is to say, I loved music the way a person who has his mouth sewn shut longs for food. In the darkness of my room, it seemed to me that everyone in the family was swept up by the piano and the cello, the long line of a phrase carrying us inside our own selves, as close to our selves as we could get. It sometimes seemed possible in the moment to hold the turmoil of the Romantics, or the straight, clean order of Bach, on the verge of that single tender point. There was a weird forgetting that occasionally happened, too, arriving somewhere past the self, I'd guess, held in time by nothing but the music.

  My mother often took her spot in the old wing chair opposite the piano, and if she sat down, Madeline, two inches taller, was sure to follow,
first perching on her lap and after a while stretching along the length of my mother's body. "Great big girl,"

  my mother would say, shifting her weight, trying to get comfortable. Madeline, in her blue shorts, blond fluff down her legs, a finger in her mouth, listened to the Francoeur sonata, played perhaps here more plaintively, there more ecstatically than the Baroque composer had dared to dream. The way Madeline rested her head on my mother's shoulder, staring at the far wall, might well have made Julia wonder if the original Mrs. Maciver was thinking sad thoughts that had brought her to a point of stillness, or if she had the blankness of peace. My mother might also have asked herself what curse was on my father, that they'd produced a child who could play the cello so soulfully--of all the heart-wrenching instruments. He'd sit at the dining-room table pretending to read, his hands cupped at his ears.

  We lived in the house that Figgy and Bill Eastman had helped my parents buy just after their wedding. It was a fresh start in a new place, a village to the west of Chicago, away from the more conservative North Side, our town the Parnassus of suburbia, leafy, enlightened, and dry, dry! Not a drop of likker to be bought or sold. It was an oasis of taste without excessive wealth, where even the Mob was considerate, doing its business out of earshot, out of sight. Somehow or other, without a tavern, spirits still ran high in the parishes. There were racial quotas to spur integration in the 1970s and, later, an ordinance to welcome gays and lesbians to the community. At some charmed point it became a nuclear-free zone, a fact that Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea will surely be sensitive to when they are launching their missiles. My mother, I think, played a part in that whimsical piece of legislation.

  To help out with the housekeeping in the new neighborhood, and as a wedding gift, Grandmother Maciver gave her old cook and cleaning lady, Russia, to my mother, to have all day once a week. It was in addition to the great-grandmother's silver tea service and the English china that had in the first round been given to Madeline. The dishes were whisked away, wrapped up, and presented again. Russia and her husband, Elroy, had lived with my grandmother in the old days, in the era when even ordinary middle-class whites had live-in colored help.