When Madeline Was Young

by Jane Hamilton

  "Persons of color, Dad!" my daughter Lyddie would correct.

  "Let him talk in the language of his ignorant and unfeeling time." So would say Tessa, my champion.

  By the 1940s, my grandmother had raised her children, lost her husband, and moved to an apartment; therefore she didn't need Russia more than once a week herself. Russia always said that Miz Maciver had been her best friend, that Miz Maciver made the promise that Russia would never be without the care of our family. My grandmother was able to keep the vow by making Russia indispensable to us. Russia Crockerby was laced into our everyday life for much of my childhood, and yet I didn't know much about her beyond the fact that she'd come from Mississippi when she was seventeen, with Elroy. At breakfast once, Louise set down her spoon and stared at Russia. "When," Louise said solemnly, "is your birthday?"

  "Can't tell you, honey." Russia stirred her muddy coffee and raised the cup to her lips.

  "What?" we said. "Why not?"

  "They was too busy to notice the day."

  "Not know your birthday!" we asked, again and again.

  "Don't know the year, either."

  "Not know how old you are?"

  We couldn't get our minds around that blank in your own history, how formless the years would be without the one day around which all the others spun. It didn't occur to us that nobody in her house, not the seven siblings or the parents, could read or write, that documenting the names and dates in the Bible might have been impossible. We were less impressed with the idea that her grandmother had been a slave, so far back, in that time too far away to have been true. It was curious that Russia's family would have been "darkies," because Russia was hardly black, so light, faintly yellow if anything; if all her people were like that, it would have been hard, I thought, to discriminate on the plantation between the master's family and her relatives.

  My grandmother, for her part in the friendship, would say that Russia understood her place. There was grace in such an arrangement, she declared, real value in knowing where you fit. A girl who'd come up from hardscrabble Mississippi had found her life in a family of means. Grandmother didn't have to explain that within that abiding Maciver structure Russia grew to understand how to exercise her will. Certainly no one in the Maciver clan, no one, underestimated Russia's power.

  Every Wednesday for nearly fifty years, and also many other days in between, Russia drove from the South Side, where she lived first with her husband and later with her sister, to clean for my mother. On the back porch she removed her plastic boots rimmed with fur, then tiptoed through the kitchen in her stocking feet, looking strange and large in her driving clothes, in her plaid wool skirt, a cashmere sweater, a string of pearls around her neck, all hand-me-downs from my grandmother. She had a wide, flat face with dark spots on her light skin, and soft black hair. In the bathroom she'd change into her white uniform and cushioned shoes. She wasn't really Russia to us until she put on that uniform. While my mother fixed breakfast, Russia went downstairs to throw a load in the wash and set the iron to heating. For forty years, until my mother's death, she served Russia two boiled eggs in the blue egg cups, two pieces of doughy white bread toasted just enough to firm them up, two strips of bacon dewy with grease, and coffee brewed to sludge. There was nothing difficult about the menu, and yet if there was any meal my mother fussed over as a housewife it was Russia's toast and coffee. If there was any morning when my mother felt ashamed of herself it was Wednesday, when she had not cleared off her dresser to Russia's specifications. It became a joke between them, my mother's squalor, her books and papers and powders, and Russia's stagy bright-eyed hope and disappointment, followed by hope-for-tomorrow.

  Madeline always came in the kitchen and leaned against my mother at the table while they ate. "You look so pretty today, Miz Madeline," Russia would say. "Prettiest girl in the house, yes, ma'am. Ain't that right, Miz Julia?"

  "Prettiest girl," my mother would agree.

  I thought it funny then, that Russia called my sister Miss Madeline. She had a hard-and-fast system for the family: she addressed white people in my grandmother's generation with the ultimate respect--Miz Maciver--and those of my parents' age as Miss and Mr. with their first names--Miz Julia--but she had no titles for the children, even when we were grown. Later I realized that Russia had known Madeline before the accident, when she'd been a married woman. Russia was the only person who used my given name, who called me Timothy. It was Figgy who christened me Mac, a match, she probably thought, for her Buddy. Mac Maciver, a ridiculous stuttery name, and yet I have not been able to shake it.

  In our block, all the houses had the same blueprint, all of them with long, narrow living rooms and built-in bookcases, leaded windows in the Prairie Style, and low radiators to sit on in the winter. The dining room had a chandelier dripping with prisms, and another set of built-in shelves to display the china. I suppose they were the tract houses of the 1920s, perhaps in their time a blight, the dream of an unctuous developer, the old clapboard houses giving way to what may have been considered the charmless new. Even if time and affection had not had their effect, they would surely now be to the dispassionate observer graceful and solid and deserving of historical preservation. There were four bedrooms upstairs and a porch, where I slept year-round, in winter with hat and mittens, insulated camping clothes, wool socks, and a heavy stack of old comforters. "Timothy," Russia would cackle, "he sleep like an Eskimo, he sleep like a whale in his blubber, he sleep like a poor old man who can't get a dog to be his friend." I was immobile but warm and safe in the midst of the swirling vacuum of the cosmos. In that era before yard lights, a boy could learn the constellations in the suburbs, and through the storm windows I watched the winter sky slowly glide to summer. The house seems small now, by our overwrought standards, the bedrooms confining, the one full bath inadequate. To us the dusty rooms with hissing radiators and dark trim were generous, large enough for escape and yet intimate enough to contain the air that seemed solely ours, rich with music and the promise of rump roast for supper.

  We had the distinction of having a finished basement with a wet bar--something the fathers in the neighborhood admired, a feature that was wasted on my parents, since they didn't drink much and rarely entertained. The ground floor was laid out in a circle, so that the children must tear from the kitchen, through the dining room, the living room, the front hall, and back again--

  around and around we went, as the architects intended. When I was young, Madeline chased me on that route. She always pitched forward, from the waist up leaning hard into the race, her slow leg dragging behind. When I was older, she still loved that game, although it was I who pursued her. Russia didn't approve of roughhouse, especially when we were all larger, when our footfall shook the foundation. "Timothy!" she'd bark. "Miz Madeline! You stop that, now. No more of that monkeyshines!"

  When my parents moved in after their marriage, my mother probably did not fully disclose the situation, did not go door to door announcing that she was caring for, or raising, her husband's first wife, that the separation had proceeded without incident, and that Madeline was so brain-damaged she had little idea just how she'd been displaced. Although, it must be said, the girl had strong feelings. But the new Mrs. Maciver did visit the neighbors to introduce herself and Madeline, perhaps the first woman to use the word "special" in just that way about the girl people supposed was a sister. Those neighbors who became so familiar, and yet were always unknown to us, came bearing their geraniums and casseroles. Mrs. Van Norman, Mrs. Kloskey, Mrs. Pindel, Mrs. Lemberger, Mrs. Rockard, Mrs. Stonewerth, Mrs. Pilska, Mrs. Gregory, they who soldiered forth from their back doors, the solid phalanx of them coming over the crest of a hill, blotting out the rising sun. That, anyway, that horror-movie scene, the mothers like enormous prehistoric insects, is how I once dreamed of them, waking on the icy upstairs porch in a sweat and with a racing heart. You'd stand before one of their front doors and ring the bell because you were selling candy bars or asking for a cup of s
ugar; you'd see into the hall, into the living room shaped just as yours was except it didn't look anything like yours, hazy with cigarette smoke and dog fur, or so bright and empty with plastic slipcovers and the glare of the polished coffee table. It was unsettling, that so much strangeness could be so near.

  Because Russia later worked for the Pindels, the family across the alley, I have no doubt that in due course word spread about Madeline. It's possible that the neighborhood children understood the Maciver relationships long before Buddy told me at Moose Lake. My mother had come gradually into my father's daily life, and yet after the wedding there was nonetheless a period of adjustment for the Macivers. Madeline smelled a rat, she did, being left with my grandmother up at the lake while my parents spent thirty-six hours at a nearby resort, the only time I know of when they were alone. From the beginning of the marriage, Madeline regularly came into their room at night and stood by their bed. Miss Madeline, in her pink-rosebud nightie, blond hair falling loose around her shoulders, her two fists at her side, her feet planted. Surely, just then, she apprehended the whole chain of events. My mother opened the covers and told her to get in. My father's side of the bed was flush to the wall and made soliciting him cumbersome, or perhaps they situated themselves that way to protect him. I know they had this arrangement, because it went on for years, the bedroom door ajar in the mornings, my father holding my mother around the waist, his mouth against her shoulder, and my mother's arm hanging off Madeline 's rib cage, the three of them fast asleep on the family Sealy Posturepedic. Not even the frilly canopy could keep Madeline in her own room, not with a new wife on deck. I suppose my mother's letting her in was the path of nonviolence, or at the least of nonresistance. Louise and I never slept with our parents, because there wasn't enough room with the trio cradled together. If there was a storm, we ran to each other's room and hid under the blankets.

  Once, when Diana and I were up at Moose Lake, when we were first getting to know each other, prematurely in love, I happened to describe my father and my mother and Madeline, all in a row under the quilt. She and I were lying in the boathouse on the narrowest of cots, just the two of us on the property. We couldn't imagine that a bed could be too narrow for our delight, the closer we had to press together the better. There'd been romance right away, by candlelight pulling slivers out of her slender feet, shards that she'd gotten from walking on the crudely planed old floor. That made her, I said, an honorary Maciver cousin, if she'd like. She laughed and ardently said, "Yes!" Even though my grandmother had been dead for years, I was still nervous, afraid she might return to punish us. With the thrill of disobeying that most fundamental rule--a female in the boathouse--and feeling that at last I was catching up to Buddy in the women department--but, more important, with our intimacy growing in the chill of the dank room, I found myself telling Diana more of the Madeline story than I'd ever told anyone before.

  When I got to the sleeping part, Diana's lovely eyes grew round and she drew herself up, leaning on her elbow.

  "What are you saying, Mac? I mean, do they--?" Her eyes somehow widened further. "Is it--?"

  "Nothing like that! No, no," I quickly assured her.

  "But . . . but . . . it's bizarre. It's kinky. You grew up with that? Wasn't it . . . ? How did you . . . ? It's--"

  Even as I regretted telling her, I couldn't help laughing at her speechlessness. "They were just sleeping, Diana," I said, kissing her wonderful hair. She'd lived all her life in a Midwestern town of eight thousand, a place where the cheerleaders from junior high in short order become the society women, convention enforced from the seventh grade on, generation after generation. Her father was the big grocer, the wheeler-dealer; her mother dogged in her determination that each of the nine children make them proud. It wasn't that Diana had a cheap little provincial mind--those words came to me, and so I kissed her hair with greater fervor. I didn't want to think how a stranger would see my parents' marriage, didn't want to run the statistics, to find what number of freakish combinations you could spin from a threesome.

  (Mother + Father) > Madeline

  (Madeline + Father) > Mother

  (Mother + Madeline) > Father

  Madeline + Mother + Father = Three Bedfellows

  (Madeline) + (Mother) + (Father) = Solitary Family Members

  Maybe my mother in actuality had wedded my father's first wife, with him as their beard, standing by to protect the Boston marriage. Maybe they were swingers; maybe they invited the mailman in for lunchtime fun. And don't forget Russia! Imagine Buddy and Diana together, wolf to wolf, both of them gnawing on any bones they could dig up.

  I wanted to tell Diana that I owed my life to Madeline 's lack of skill in steering her Raleigh bicycle; I owed my sensibility, my own faith in goodness, to the texture of our family life, the warmth that my parents radiated to all of us and each other. I sat up on the rickety cot, confused by how much I loved her. "Is something the matter?" she said, tickling my back with her fingernails.

  How to try again to explain the twist of the story, how my father and mother were much better suited for the long years together than Madeline and my father were, the irony of their lives, the bitter part of my parents' happiness. It was I who was speechless then. How to make her see that my mother's tenderness for Madeline was a pure thing?

  "Is something the matter?" my future wife had to ask once more. Her face in the candlelight and her concern distracted me from my equations. I lay back down, no more talking about my parents or Madeline or the old days.

  Chapter Six

  FIGGY FELT FREE TO BE ESPECIALLY FRANK WITH ME WHEN she'd had plenty to drink. And so she made a point to tank up if she was sure to say something unseemly. "Did I mention anything I shouldn't have?" she'd ask the morning after, all innocence. "Was I consistent, at the least?" In the last few years before she had a stroke, she couldn't seem to help bullying me with her idea of my mother's character. "The thing is," she'd say, "the thing is, it was subtle, the way Julia pulled off the martyr role." It's not always clear if a drunk is speaking her favorite truths or wallowing in melodrama; that is, I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, hoping she was only being theatrical. When I remembered how much scotch she'd put away, I could for the most part forgive her.

  Because I had once or twice asked her to tell me the story of my parents' early life together, she seemed to think that every rime we had a chance she should repeat the parts wherein my mother's goodness irritated her. The more annoyed she became, the greater her pleasure seemed to be. "In the beginning," she'd declare roundly, "Madeline went berserk. The change in the patient was something the newlyweds weren't prepared for--all of a sudden the invalid alive and kicking. What a little brat she was! Your mother had the theory that Mrs. Maciver the First had been drugged in those years after the accident, to make caring for her easier. As if medication were a crime. Of course she was sedated! Who wouldn't sedate a woman who was in a fury? Later, when Madeline calmed down, when she started following Julia around like a goddamn puppy, that was worse. Julia encouraged the slavishness--she loved it, couldn't get enough. It was the most revolting thing you ever saw."

  "Really," I always said. I was sure back then that Figgy's enthusiasm would keep her alive well into her hundreds.

  "Along come you and Louise. It probably wasn't so terrific anymore, two real children plus the girl giant. Then wasn't Julia sorry she'd infantilized Madeline? Not that Madeline had ever had the capacity to be a brain surgeon, but they might have treated her like an adult instead of insisting she play the part of the child. What was she, nearly six feet at her tallest?"

  "No," I tried, "not that--"

  "There was no graceful way out for poor, poor Julia, no comfort but to be holier-than-thou, hauling that hulk around with her everywhere she went."

  After my mother died, I thought that Figgy might become softer, perhaps even a little reverent. "There's nothing more tedious than a righteous woman," she blazed on. "I'm sure your father wanted to paddle their big
tyke now and then. I'm sure he kept going on his expeditions for as long as he could to escape the--situation."

  I'd refill her glass, wondering if she'd soon tire.

  "To get as far away," she'd explain, "from the saint as he could."

  In all the time since, most every imagining and remembrance I've had of my parents has been a remonstrance to Figgy.

  She is helpless now, having suffered a progressive stroke, multiple cerebral infarction. I find myself arguing with her still, although I haven't seen her in years. It is to her I owe a debt for the details, the small scenes she described that have made it possible to see some distance into the Macivers' marriage. But if I can on occasion muffle Figgy's rhetoric, I find that my parents after all are capable of moving around in their past without her.

  It was, I think, on the whole true, what she told me about the first year: Madeline did howl and kick and throw things, staggering from upset to upset, her anger directed at Julia. This in an era when families were not as pharmaceutically girded for trouble, no reliable antidepressants for mother, no liquid nortriptyline administered in a glass of apple juice for daughter. It's likely, too, that Julia had disposed of the crude sedatives Grandmother had passed on to her for the patient. Though it sometimes seemed apparent what Madeline understood, it was impossible to predict what might provoke her, when she might fly into a rage. She would wake next to my mother, and she might scratch Julia through her nightgown or dig her nails into her cheek. "Good morning, lamb," my mother would say, carefully pulling away, climbing to the end of the bed to get out. On a better day, the enfant terrible whimpered and hid her head in the pillow. There was the long coaxing to the kitchen table.