When Madeline Was Young

by Jane Hamilton

  "It's two short weeks," my mother said serenely. She was putting dishes away, moving around me while I stood in the center of the kitchen. "This is the one chance some children have to be exposed to culture and to the idea of possibility. It can be life-changing. Take them to the Field Museum and let them help you with your job. It's a privilege to go behind the scenes, and I'm sure they'll be fascinated by the specimens and your cataloguing tasks. It's not that difficult to extend yourself." She looked me in the eye on her path to the dining-room silverware box. "They might be interesting people." She did not avert her gaze. "It's possible they'll have something to teach you."

  For a good part of our Project Share weeks, Louise lugged her cello over to Stephen Lovrek's house, the two of them disappearing into their music. The work of the artist, apparently, was more important than giving alms to the poor. With her usual diplomatic sarcasm, Louise said, "You've got great brainstorms, Mom, no doubt about it. When I get older I hope I'm not still completely close-minded, but for now I don't have the energy to participate in your scheme."

  My mother, as was her habit with Louise at that stage, wisely said very little. "Do what you can to help," she murmured.

  Up in my room Louise said to me, "Isn't it great how Mom can have a slave and at the same time be full of concern for all peoples?"

  "Slave?"

  "Russia, Mac, Russia? The woman who comes to clean our toilets, who we say is family, our relative who lives in her shack on the South Side."

  "It's more complicated than that," I said. "Do you think Russia would be happier if we let her go, if Mom told her the setup was rotten? I'm not sure she'd have such a good time working at Marshall Fields. I'm not sure she knows how to read."

  "Don't tell me the bullshit lines--you don't have to repeat Grandmother's standard sales pitch about how there is mutual care and dependency between slave and owner, how lovely, really lovely it is that everyone knows his place." Louise all at once grew tired of the conversation. "Never mind," she said before her last word. "I hope both you and Mom feel absolved for the white man's sins." She went downstairs, picked up her cello case by the leather strap, and, carrying it like a pocketbook, walked out the door.

  There was the trip to the tenement to fetch Malzena and Cleveland, the green paint flaking in the long dim hall, most of the light-bulbs smashed, bits of jagged glass still screwed into the sockets, the frightening smell from the one bathroom that six families shared. Madeline didn't seem to notice the gloom or the stench. She walked slowly, trailing behind, her eyes open just enough to see her feet. It would have been easy to forget her, the woman who was fading away, who was so listless she was hardly alive. In the car on the way home, she curled up against the window and stared at the door handle. Mikey O'Day was at Disneyland with his parents and one of the sisters. He was an uncle many times over, and every summer there was at least one trip to visit the grandchildren at a historic site. Two whole weeks without him, two weeks without song, without dance.

  As my mother drove, she exhausted her store of questions for the guests, so that when we came up our street even she couldn't think of another thing to ask. After she had shown Malzena and Cleveland to their rooms--that is, my room and Lu's--

  she suggested, all cheery-

  like, that I take them to the pool. I already knew that they had muteness as their defense, that we could adequately blot each other out with silence.

  "Madeline would probably like to go, too," Mrs. Maciver said.

  Maybe you should take them--everyone, the black, the white, the lame, the old, the young. I did not, of course, say this out loud.

  I didn't know who was lower in the Simonsons' estimation, the first Mrs. Maciver or me. It was clever of my mother, as always, to mask the order to take Madeline along by saying how much she would enjoy the entertainment. Still, since the advent of Mikey there'd been fewer demands on all of us. Louise and I took wens walking to the Dari-Dip at nine-thirty at night to pick the perfect couple up and to shadow them, making sure Mikey got home safely. That was the extent of our summer duties. At the beginning of their friendship, Mrs. O'Day had prescribed a routine to their week, a schedule that they took for granted. Soon after the romance got off the ground, Mikey began working on weekends at the uptown movie theater for a few hours, taking tickets. He wore a cheap black suit and a red bow tie. Madeline, in silk and jewels, spent her Saturday and Sunday afternoons watching a double feature. It was one of Mikey's perks that she got in free of charge. "The boss, the boss knows Madeline, knows Madeline is my girl." On the appointed summer evenings, there was the Dari-Dip. Wednesday mornings, they went to Little's Music Shop. My mother took them in hand for cookie making and apple peeling, and she paid Mikey small change to help her wash windows or dig holes for shrubs or carry boxes up from the basement for Goodwill. On their own, the couple went to the pool, and they lay around necking, and they sat out on the front steps watching the little girls play, those children who finally were beneath Madeline since she'd gotten herself a boyfriend. They were inseparable except during the sacred dinner hour, when Mikey was called home to eat with his parents. None of us looked forward to his vacations, those weeks when she walked around the house as if she were newly blind, as if she didn't know where anything was, as if nothing would ever interest her again.

  Mikey was gone now as we struggled to the pool in formation, I leading the way, Malzena and Cleveland behind me on the pavement, and Madeline dragging along on the grass. I thought about the water, how the Simonsons would jump in and how then I wouldn't want to follow after them. I felt that way when Jerry Pindel in his red briefs stood at the side about to do his cannonballs, and when the sweaty Van Normans, who never showered, did their sloppy dives; even Mikey O'Day, clean and soapy-smelling, his hairy gut hanging over his suit, made me squeamish. You thought you were swimming in water that was automatically disinfected by the chlorine, but actually you were pawing your way through the neighbors' snot and spit and specks of shit they hadn't taken care to wipe away. The small white sun bore down on us as we walked along, as I said to myself, I'm not going in that pool. The only people I wanted to swim with were the Maciver cousins, and only in the glittering water of Moose Lake.

  I suppose I had to talk to Cleveland in order to point out the lockers and give him the towel I'd been carrying for him, but whatever we said to each other didn't feel much like speech. We changed our clothes and went through the spray of the shower and out into the glare of the light-aqua water, which looked refreshing even though I knew it was a thick, greasy brine.

  My guest, a muscular six feet three inches, in very small briefs that were as black as his skin, met his little sister coming out of the girls' changing room, she in her pink two-piece, the bottom with a ruffled skirt, and matching pink plastic barrettes in her bouquet of braids. Together they--or that is, we--walked toward the diving boards. Madeline went her own way, to the shallow end, where she'd inch by inch lower herself down the steps until she was standing, the water up to her waist. Without Mikey to carry her around, she'd probably stay in one place, watching. The lifeguards in their towers, their whistles to their lips, turned to stare at the Simonsons. The pool was of Olympic dimensions, and around it there was a wide apron where the members baked in their slatted chairs or on the hot cement. The women looked up from their books and, without meaning to, squinted at the glossy blackness of my brother and my sister. But we were a progressive people in our town, and next they made a fuss of not looking. They rearranged their towels, they fiddled with the locker keys that were pinned to their suit straps, they flipped through their books to see how much longer. The neighbors who knew us were pugnacious in their enthusiasm. "Hello, Mac!"

  Mrs. Lombardo called. She waved both hands at the Simonsons. "Hello there! Hello, hello! Great day to be at the pool!"

  Mrs. Lemberger shouted, "You'll love the water! Absolutely love it!"

  Mrs. Gregory was up on the observation deck, fully dressed in skirt and blouse, heels and nylons, a
n alien in our midst. She waved, too, her smile, the dark lipstick, taking up her face.

  Without his clothes on and after the speedy shower, there was still a cigarette smell mixed with hair tonic, that odor both clinging to Cleveland and radiating from him, as strong as his color. He managed to stroll down to the deep end without glancing left or right, his gaze narrow and sure, that self-containment also drawing us to him. Had my mother considered how the Simonsons would feel in the presence of the neighborhood women who wanted to think well of themselves? I matched Cleveland's stride, trying by that effort to let him know that, though the other pool members were show-offs in their nonchalance, their enlightened acceptance of ghetto youths, really I was so color blind I hadn't even considered that race or class divided us. I'd been raised by Madame Civil Rights, after all, our household heroes Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, Ella Fitzgerald, Scott Joplin, Sidney Poitier, Langston Hughes, Percy Julian, not to mention Porgy, not to mention Bess. You couldn't find a white boy who was blacker than Mac Maciver. We fair Anglo-Saxons, and the even more freakish Irish Catholics with their freckles and the blue veins pulsing under their translucent skin, were burning up and would someday succumb to hideous cancers. But not so the Simonsons, the both of them evolu-tionary success stories, the melanin in their skin serving as a nifty biological shield against ultraviolet radiation. The sickle-cell-anemia gene aside, Cleveland and Malzena had the upper hand, and maybe, if I mentioned that, maybe he'd pound me on the shoulder good-naturedly, something that I wouldn't like much but that would mean I was all right in his book.

  The pool was noisy with children bobbing up and down and chasing each other, their arms outstretched as they bounced along. The Simonsons, one after the next, climbed the stairs of the lower board and took their dives, Malzena's yellowish soles together and pointed. They weren't so poor they hadn't learned to swim. Cleveland's long, shadowy form moved near the bottom, and when he burst into the air he whipped his head to one side, a shower from his modest Afro. They made their way through the crush of swimmers and the spray of their splashing to the shallow end. The children were children, staring if the pair came close, looking over their shoulders, and then paddling on. I guess I stood at the edge for quite a while, watching the members warm to their own friendliness. They had passed the phase of fiddling with their possessions and were trying to be welcoming, smiling hard, with their hands at their brows out in the general direction of the guests. I knew I was going to jump in the water although I didn't want to, and also I was sure that I was never going to take the plunge into that warm, mucousy slurry.

  When I was pushed I did feel the hand, the nudge that tipped me over. I didn't at first know it was Jerry Pindel I was on top of, both of us tangled in each other, both sinking to the black line. When we blasted up, Jerry's arm was around my neck. "You fuck!" he spat.

  The lifeguard was standing on his platform, blowing his whistle as if he were screaming into it. For an instant I was as startled by Jerry, by his face, as I was by being in the water. His hair was slicked back, so for once he was visible, a kid with enormous dark eyes, wide-set, his skin brown and clear, his mouth, two peaks at the upper lip, the slight downturn of the full lower lip, the feature that probably drove the girls crazy.

  "Sorry," I said to Jerry. "Someone pushed me."

  "Nigger." He splashed me with both palms, the bitter wave going down my throat.

  It was after I got out and lay on the cement that I began to feel the heat of the broad hand that had been on my back. Had it been an ordinary shove? It wasn't that it had been unusually forceful but that there had been keen feeling behind it, a reason beyond playfulness or even regular old retribution. I had been dunked and launched against my will into the water hundreds of times, but I came to know slowly that the push had been different. There had been malice in it, I was sure; the hand had burned.

  When the Simonsons climbed out, they settled several yards from me, lying on their stomachs, shivering, their arms tucked under themselves. If I closed my eyes halfway, my wet lashes served as a curtain, veiling the guests in my field of vision even as I looked at them. Cleveland had known what I'd been thinking as I'd hesitated at the water's edge, and what better way to serve me right than to make me drink his bath, to choke on it. While we were still wet, the lifeguards blew their whistles for rest period. The mothers put on their white rubber caps, buckled the straps by their ears, and began their languid crawls down the placid lanes, fifteen minutes for their exercise. Cleveland sat up and cocked his head slightly, once, twice, so that at first I thought he had a nervous tic. When he did it again with irritation, I understood it was time to go. He was annoyed that I had to take a moment to talk to Madeline, to tell her we were leaving, to remind her to look both ways crossing the two streets between the park and home. It wasn't often that she went past our block by herself, but she was capable of it, at the curb turning this way, that way, checking again, the hard gaze along the empty street. When she was sure there were no cars in sight, she ran as fast as she could.

  The Simonsons and I had been quiet before, but after we left the pool our silence thickened. We moved around each other as if none of us were there, as if we believed that if we could shut our mouths a little tighter and stare harder straight ahead we would gratefully find ourselves alone. My mother expected me to show them the town, and we began an aimless walk. She must have thought I'd suddenly become like a middle-aged docent, explaining the salient features of the Prairie Style architecture: the leaded windows, the low roofs--isn't it interesting, and they all leak!

  Remember the great Frank Lloyd Wright's idea of organic architecture, you know the concept, boys and girls, integrating the site and the structure, just as the fellow surely did who built your cold-water firetrap in the city.

  The Simonsons did not glance up on the block where there were several famous examples, including Wright's home and studio--heads to the pavement, all of us walking as if we were shackled together but five feet apart. We went on to the monkeys in their sawdusty cages at the department store, and because the air was still and heavy upon us we drifted into the library, down the cool dim hall to the drinking fountain. And out again into the scorching sun. That was as much fun as I could provide for the underprivileged. In a moment of willful charity I supposed that they had as much interest in staying with the Macivers as I had in being their host; I was sorry for the three of us. When we got back to the house, Uncle Harv, the mailman, was stuffing our letters into the slot on the porch. He reacted just as the women at the pool had, turning, gaping, and then, when he'd gathered himself, becoming hearty in his tolerance--nay, his affection, his abiding love--for the Negro. "Greetings!"

  he cried, a stiff grin on his face.

  "Uhh," one of them said.

  Cleveland went up to my room and shut the door, and I went down the basement to sit on the beige-and-brown-speckled linoleum behind the bar. Why had my mother sicced the Simonsons on us, on the neighborhood, on Uncle Harv? Why? If she so dearly wanted to do grandiose deeds, why hadn't she been swimming in the piss water with the poor children? Why hadn't she taken the burn of that push? She was the worst of the suburban do-gooders--Louise was right about her hypocrisy. When she called me for dinner I didn't come, not until they were all finished, and I didn't go along with them to the park to hear the Kiwanis playing patriotic music in the gazebo. I didn't feel well, I said, unable to look at her, unable to look at any of them.

  Cleveland and I were supposed to share my room and the sleeping porch, but I chose instead to lie awake on the basement floor wrapped in an old army blanket. My mother had demanded I move my snakes downstairs, so why not sleep with the bedfellows to which I was accustomed? Let the Africans and the Anglos alike roast in their sheets upstairs, let them dream of their cultural experiences, let my mother stew in her own virtue, let the flame of her purity turn her black.

  In her own way there was probably no one more racist than Russia. She was leery of the project and kept her distance from the gu
ests. Even though there were a handful of middle-class minority families in town, Russia didn't like to see the coloreds on our streets, in a place she felt they didn't belong. I remember more than once walking with her to the grocery store and her saying under her breath, "What's that spook doing here? Where's he think he's going?"

  On the third day of Project Share, Buddy arrived. My cousin strolled through the door, took one look at Cleveland slumped on the sofa staring at nothing, and said, "Hey." There was the short flurry of hellos for the rest of us, and then Buddy, harking to the sound of the dribbling ball, suggested they go out into the alley. So obvious, so simple. He had been on a bus for ten hours, and had no wish to sit in the living room answering my mother's questions. The neighborhood boys with their St.

  Christopher medals around their hot necks opened out and drew Buddy and his friend into their heat. "Great to see you,"

  Buddy said, as if he'd known them all for a long time. He peeled off his shirt and threw it on the trash can, his summer skin the color of a glazed ham. The game began.

  That was the year my parents were trying to remodel the kitchen. As if it weren't enough trouble having visitors, the downstairs was torn apart, the laths and studs exposed, the sink standing alone without countertops, the stove and refrigerator on the back porch. I never had the sense that money was tight; in fact, I never thought very much about how my parents managed. It wasn't something they talked about in front of us, but they were careful, I later realized, planning for the things we needed, saving for our college, and they had a stash for Madeline, too, if the time came when they couldn't care for her. There was starter money from the Schillers, but my father was dutiful about adding to it. As part of their remodeling economy, he brought home a discarded countertop from the museum with cabinets that had been used in a hands-on exhibit about Turkey. No one had bothered to clean any of it out, and so you'd open the cupboards or a drawer to find a replica of a pitcher, a stone shovel, or a jar of beans, what the Hittites might have had for supper, a slab of dried fish from the Bosporus, a vessel filled with fossilized lamb meat. A shame to waste the perfectly good pine cupboards and the long red Formica, the dream kitchen of the ancients.