When Madeline Was Young

by Jane Hamilton

  "The army will be good for him," Figgy was saying over the noise of the carolers to my mother. "He's done just fine at Fork Union. Buddy's a boy who needs a firm hand, you know that. It's taken him a while to reform, but he's shaping up nicely." She'd tied one apron around her neck and another around her waist, more of her covered than usual. If Mrs. Kennedy--or dead Jack-

  -could see her now, wiping the dishes.

  "You can't let him enlist," my mother said. She was at the sink, doing the washing.

  "He's a long shot for Harvard, sweetheart. The conflict may be over before he's finished his training, and if it's not he'll be able to pick a job far from combat. I'm not sending him over there to be killed."

  "Support positions can be dangerous, too. And there are other colleges besides Harvard." Arthur came into the kitchen carrying the last basket of rolls, and my mother right away went after him. "You can keep Buddy from enlisting, Art. You of all people know how desperate the fighting is, how savage. And how long it's going to go on." She had taken off her rubber gloves and was appealing to him with her outstretched hands.

  I had a fleeting thought that Arthur might not have been willing to send his flesh-and-blood son, if he'd had one, to war. He set the basket on the counter and shot Figgy a look: I don't know why I put up with your relations. He must never have seen dishpan hands before, because he looked as if he might be ill at the sight of my mother's saturated skin, the puckery whiteness of her fingers.

  "Buddy has been brought up to understand the responsibility of those of us who live in freedom." He paused to allow that idea to sink in, to let my mother reflect that some persons didn't raise their children to the highest standards. "And, as Dr. Johnson remarked, 'Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.' This would be particularly true of Buddy if he didn't serve."

  "I know you served," my mother said, "but you were neither soldier nor sailor. And yet you aren't someone who thinks meanly of himself. We always come back to this notion, don't we? Those of you who didn't go to war will freely bring others to peril. What did Brutus say? 'The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.' "

  Figgy just then cried out, "Nel megdeg del cammin di nostra vita / Mi throvai per una selva oscura, / Che la diritta via era smarrita." She stamped her foot. "There. I win. You dopes only quote in English." Despite Arthur's fatigue, he was a gentleman, and he meant always to acquit himself well. He took my mother's ugly hands in his, a gesture that must have been a real effort, although he shook them more firmly perhaps than he should. "Thank you for the evening, and we will go now." Before he shot down the hall, he bowed to Russia. "You always win my heart anew with your rolls. Thank you, ma'am, and Merry Christmas."

  "Mr. Fuller," Russia murmured, closing her eyes, her palm to her heart.

  He was out of the room, pushing past the carolers, going fast into the cold to sit in the car. It was a long time before Figgy and Buddy could claim their wraps from the pile on the bed upstairs and say their goodbyes to all of us.

  "Merry Christmas, goddamn you, Julia," Figgy said. "I think I'll probably get over it, but at the moment let me say I'm never coming to this house again. My husband will be frozen out there."

  "I wanted to hear what he had to say." My mother kissed Figgy on the cheek.

  "No, you didn't. You wanted to talk. You wanted to hear your own self-righteous voice." With Arthur's coat to her chest and her fur over her shoulders, she sailed out the door.

  Buddy shook my hand and wished me luck in the rest of the school year. Russia had always spoken in the privacy of our kitchen as if she believed Buddy would never amount to anything. That night she put her arms around him. "You take care of yourself, you hear? I'm so proud of our boy. You tell your mother make sure and send me a picture of you in your uniform."

  Even stranger was the sight of Buddy chucking Madeline under the chin, avuncular again in the parting, saying, "You be good, now."

  Chapter Nine

  THERE WAS A PERIOD IN MY GIRLS' EARLY-TEEN YEARS WHEN they could not stand the sound of their mother's voice.

  The pitch of her nagging, her laughter on the telephone, the way she loved up the dog. "Do you have to breathe?" Tessa once snapped at her while they were watching TV. The sight of Diana's flesh also disturbed them. If they happened to catch her wrapped in a towel, the ends tucked into her cleavage, their eyes widened, their nostrils quivered, and they turned tail. Diana took their revulsion personally and once wept about it in her closet, her face pressed to a chiffon gown she'd worn to the breast-cancer ball. "They make me feel like the scene of an accident," she said through her sniffles.

  "Aw," I said, trying to draw her to me.

  "And after all the years of the aerobics classes, the yoga videos. And Jeffery!"

  "Jeffery?"

  "You know," she managed to whimper, "at the gym. The trainer."

  I'd forgotten that phase of her body management. "You're in very good shape," I said. She'd always been slight, and although she might have gained ten pounds since I'd met her, that amount is like keeping up with inflation and in middle age signifies nothing. She still had her youthful prettiness, the thick black lashes against her blue eyes, the dash of freckles across her nose.

  "And for what?" she cried. "For what?" She glared at me before she sank into her bank of dresses.

  "Come on now, lamb," I found myself saying, "you're beautiful." She clutched the bar then and opened her mouth wide, a thin rattle coming from the back of her throat. I'd seen a patient that day with ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, a brave man coping with the loss of speech, of movement, no longer able to swallow easily, and along with him his upbeat but realistic wife--and yet Diana's boundless misery in the moment seemed the greater tragedy. "Diana," I said, "Diana," but she would not be soothed.

  She had told me when we first married that a career was really only a fancy name for a job, that she wanted to spend her life, the decades before her, educating our future children, five of them she wanted, and also making me fat. She has kept her word, driving the girls to the end of the county and back for ballet lessons, ceramics lessons, soccer teams, drama workshops, and she's done more than her share of good works, too, serving on the school board, hosting AFS students, running the local garden club, working at the literacy center, chaperoning proms and field trips, including one to France with Tessa. We were all proud of her when she was voted Woman of the Year woo by the local women's business association. As for her early goals, I have not grown fat only by virtue of the treadmill up in our bedroom alcove. There were some years that I regret, the undercurrent of acrimony running through the household, the era when I was working very long hours and Diana was frustrated by my absence. I sometimes thought she was deliberately subverting the girls' affection for me. If I promised to get home to put them to bed, she'd do it herself earlier than she should, so that when I arrived ready to roughhouse they were sound asleep.

  Once when I planned an afternoon off she, a model of organization, got the date wrong and had arranged an outing with her sisters and their children, an irresistible trip to a water park. My idea to take them fishing on the muddy Fox River did not win the hour. I now and then wonder if Diana would have been happier with a career, both of us flying in opposite directions in an ordained frenzy. I sometimes wonder, if she'd had a paying job that had absorbed her, whether she might have been more open to my ideas of real service, spending a year in Africa or other desperate continents, treating AIDS and malaria patients. As it was, I knew better than to bring up that fantasy.

  "Your family, Mac! Your family!"

  During the daughters' eye-rolling phase at their mother, they seemed to want more than anything to please me. When I came into their adolescent favor, when they turned their backs on Diana, I assumed in my closely held smugness that I'd always, from then on, be in their good graces. Even at that stage, however, I would never have had the nerve to ask which of them did love me most.

  There w
as a bittersweet night a few years past when I realized that their allegiances had shifted yet again. Lyddie had just come home for Thanksgiving after her first stint away at the University of Michigan, and Diana was asking her about a boy we had met on campus. Trance, he was called. A name whose origin I didn't want to know. Diana has the habit of thinking that each girl's beau is going to be the one, and, if he is especially suitable, falling in love with him herself. I suspect that Lyddie behaves like a proper post-postmodern girl, that she believes in Mr. Right--or, rather, Mr. Perfect--but while she's waiting for him to materialize, for his brain to descend from the ether into his hunky body, she'll strap on her little high-heeled shoes, and come what may. Tessa is probably more discriminating, full of doubt that a mortal male will meet her requirements, even if for an evening. Katie, the sturdy catcher for the softball team back in her high-school days, has always had a pack of studly athletes around her, the lot of them in front of the TV like puppies on a blanket. In all their futures, I see children and houses and mountains of things, electronics, kitchen appliances, educational toys in handcrafted baskets, hills of shoes, forests of earring trees, cashmere sweaters by the acre, along with the requisite storage units in room-sized closets. I am hopeful that one of the sons-in-law will be a computer whiz, that he'll install my software and make complaints on my behalf to the cable company.

  It was the night before Thanksgiving, the five of us glad to be together before the crowd appeared the next day. For a few months, Lyddie, like many students her age, had been flirting with filmmaking. Diana was still bustling by the stove while the rest of us were at the table, listening to Lyddie's freshman-year adventures. "We were setting up a shoot on the railroad tracks? Oh, my God, it was ridiculously cold, and the tech guy was running back and forth for--"

  "That reminds me, Lyddie," Diana said, coming to us with a platter of marinated lamb tidbits, an appetizer off the grill, a recipe that the cookbook author had appropriated from Italian shepherds. Diana, as often happens, had no idea that she was interrupting a conversation.

  "Ahhhhh," I said, my face to the plate. "You've done it again." The marjoram and garlic, the earthy meat smell, always makes me want to grab a blanket and head outside to my flock.

  "What are Trance's plans for Easter vacation?"

  "Trance?" Lyddie said to her mother.

  "Would he like to come to Vail with us? Does he ski?"

  Lyddie blinked several times in my direction. It seemed she was appealing to me. A rare moment, the oldest Miss Maciver losing her self-possession. It took me a minute to realize that she was trying to remember who Trance was, that he was probably one of many boys she'd dated, or whatever it is young women call what they do. She'd introduced him to us at the Homecoming Weekend maybe because he was presentable, or perhaps because he happened to be standing nearby. He did in fact have an impressive vitae, and we'd met his mother, a dentist, and heard tell of his father, the attorney. It was possible that Lyddie had had one encounter with Trance, the night before at a frat party, or he was only called Trance on that occasion, or after the introductions all around she never saw him again. Diana had approved the boy's rough-hewn good looks and his strong white teeth, no doubt already picturing her hardy meat-eating grandsons. She had literally jumped up and down once we'd turned the corner and were out of sight of our daughter and her prospective mother-in-law.

  It was Tessa who did the rescue at dinner, Tessa who said, "Wasn't Trance--wasn't he going to do Habitat for Humanity over spring break?"

  I had never been aware of her coming to her sister's aid before. It was gratifying to see that the separation, the salve of distance, in that semester had for the first time in their lives made them allies.

  "Great memory, Tess," Lyddie said, flashing her a smile. "Also, Mom, Trance is a total klutz. He'd probably kill himself on the slopes."

  Katie, who was fourteen then, and not quite up to speed, said, "I like the other guy you were with when I visited, not the first time, not the blondie. The one with the dreads."

  "Who's that?" Diana shrilled.

  "The Dave person?" Tessa surmised. "Your Sherpa? The one who always carries your equipment?"

  "Oh God, Dave! He's ridiculously smart." Lyddie leaned over until her head was at the edge of Diana's place mat and said liltingly, "He's just a friend, Mom."

  That exaggerated gesture made the sisters laugh but was nonetheless a comfort to Diana; she could believe that Trance was still in the picture. I was struck by how careful the older girls had become of their mother, how they understood her aspirations for them, how they didn't want to disappoint her. And how they didn't need me in any of their machinations. They were going to go off into their lives, to have it their way, but for as long as possible they'd do their best to shield Diana, and me as well, from their unsavory interests and appetites.

  One of my favorite of the many, many ridiculously clever mechanisms of the body, one with the thrill of a sporting event, occurs when an egg is being fertilized, when the most ambitious sperm penetrates the ovum shell. A chemical signal shoots off from the ovum's inner membrane to the wall, shutting the place down, keeping out all other seekers. Those gates slamming shut are the very beginning of the singular person, the I-am. No one can tell the younger generation how harrowing parenthood is in the face of that bam, although the signs are everywhere for the attentive child. But who wants to face the pain of the mother, the matron, no matter how buff, sitting at the head of the table, who is wishing the age-old wish even at this late date, praying, with a heady brew of self-interest and selflessness, for her daughter to marry a good boy from a nice family.

  Madeline Schiller had married a Ph. D. candidate, the future owner of a historic lake home, the scion of the Maciver glue dynasty. Figgy once told me that Madeline's parents, Nadine and Christopher Schiller, came to see their daughter now and again in the first few years after the tragedy. They stopped dropping in not long after my mother became the second Mrs.

  Aaron Maciver. There was an awkward visit, Madeline refusing to acknowledge the guests, hiding her face in my mother's lap.

  For some reason, whenever Diana starts talking about our daughters' marriages, I can only picture Madeline starting out on her bike with her new husband on a soft Sunday morning.

  EXCEPT FOR MY EXCESSIVE HOUSE and the tropical vacations and a sporty car I once succumbed to--and it did drive like butter and it did purr like a kitten and it did make me feel a man--I labor under the impression that I am my mother's legitimate heir. My father would have been satisfied, suspending judgment, interested in our business no matter what profession Louise and I had chosen. My mother, despite her party line of live-and-let-live, would have been devastated if we'd become the usual bad guys, strip-mall developers, self-servingly born-again, lobbyists for the NRA. The best way, I've found, is to do good works behind the scenes, and if your beneficence is discovered, then there you are, exposed in your generosity. Nowhere, for example, on the plaques at the homeless shelter in my town, or in the new wing of the hospital, does my name appear. My mother would call that reticence humility; she would approve. But as for the secret life, the dream life, would she forgive me my indulgences? I've been taking piano lessons for a few years, my teacher a young woman who tells me I'm doing a Good Job! It has been my lifelong goal to play "Fiir Elise." Although I've plateaued at two-handed "Jingle Bells," I still hold out hope. If I allow myself a non-medicine-related fantasy when I'm on the treadmill, or in the seconds before I'm snoring, what I see is Timothy Maciver just about to step onstage for his debut--never in Carnegie Hall's history will there be as affecting a rendition of Beethoven's love song, not to mention as hearty a "Dashing through the snow." On alternate days, Chef Maciver is preparing peekytoe crabs in a puff pastry for his television audience. Chef Maciver has a glass of Romanee-Conti (1985) with his staff after the taping, and although few know it he grew the grapes himself in an undisclosed location. Off to sleep I go, into that life of many talents.

  Buddy en
ded up making Figgy prouder than she might have imagined in that time when she was fighting tooth and nail to get him past the third grade. In the revised history of Buddy, the story goes that it was his F's in penmanship that tripped him up, a skill that by today's standards was absurdly overvalued. His handwriting still looks as if it's come from the clutch of a palsied schoolteacher.

  It was the summer of 1965, the July before the notable Christmas party, when I began to believe again, in spite of myself, that Buddy was a person of real valor, that he was imbued with something like a high moral purpose. He'd come to Moose Lake on his own, and for a few days after seeing our grandmother he'd stayed with us in Illinois. His trip coincided with the visit of two teenagers from the slums, a boy and girl who were experiencing suburban life in our home as part of a program called Project Share.

  Before we went to collect our Project Share brother and sister from their tenement on the West Side, I'd argued lightly with my mother, informing her that the concept was not only cockeyed but unconscionable. I didn't say that I hated the idea of strangers in our house for two weeks, but she probably understood the real thrust of my protest. Project Share, I said, was brilliant, very smart, giving a tour of middle-class wealth to the poverty-stricken. What good people we were to open our doors to the needy!

  Further, if they wounded us, stabbing us in the night, we would have the pleasure of martyrdom. Most probably Malzena and Cleveland Simonson, fifteen and sixteen, would go back to the ghetto and either fall into a profound depression or begin to hold up women on the El train, ladies in white gloves and spring coats who were going to the symphony. As for our heavenly reward, the big payoff, we'd already absorbed Mikey O'Day into our lives. Wasn't that enough? Having to watch the eternally young go steady until the end of time?