When Madeline Was Young

by Jane Hamilton

  "Now, why would anyone be mad at you?" my mother said to Buddy. "Great big girl--you'll have to excuse her. She'll be fine in a few minutes. Actually, she'll be right as rain by noon tomorrow, when Mikey gets back. She doesn't know what to do with herself when her sweetheart is away."

  I was slow to come to it, but I suddenly realized that Buddy hadn't figured out who Mikey was; he thought the man on the sofa was a nobody, a generic neighborhood misfit. And why would he have known Mikey was the sweetheart when Madeline had degraded him so? "You, you big fat dodo!" Not to mention the fact that we were geared for Mikey's arrival home the next day, all of us unprepared to see him early. "The one you called the moron?" I murmured to Buddy. "That's him, the boyfriend."

  I went down the basement as my cousin had directed, to be in the company of the baboon. I didn't know which shock to consider first. How could Madeline be so fickle? How could she lose her senses over Jerry when she loved Mikey? Happy Mikey, hurrying to see her! Joyful Mikey, caught in Jerry's snare. Because this was long ago, before teenagers knew so much--

  because this was years and years ago--I thought, How could . . . ? How could a woman put her mouth--there?

  Overhead came the rushing sound, all those feet steaming to the kitchen, the sign that Mrs. Maciver was serving ice cream. It was no surprise to me that Buddy had done the job in Jerry's loft that should have been mine to do; how could it have been otherwise? I understood that I'd been watching Madeline for a few years without knowing what to look for, a gap Buddy would not have tolerated in himself. Of all the things to grieve for, though, of all the things that made it impossible to go upstairs for a sundae, was the humiliation Madeline had suffered in Mrs. Pindel's hideous dress--

  what she would have been crying about if she'd known better.

  Chapter Eleven

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN A WHILE AFTER THE CHRISTMAS PARTY, after we learned that Buddy was going to enlist, that my mother came knocking at my door. I was half asleep when I heard the timid tap-tap, what sounded like a nervous girl at the headmaster's study. The last time she had tucked me in had been--when? Between her tap and my response, I woke completely. How could I have no memory of that important ritual's ending or even petering out? I couldn't think why I had let the vespers go, or if, in fact, it had been she who had stopped reading to me.

  "Come in?" I said.

  "Good," she said in the light of the hall, "you're not on the porch tonight. It's twenty below." She went straight to the end of the bed, and as she had in the old days, she kicked off her Hush Puppies and pushed herself to the back of the wall, her legs stretched out in front of her. She wore a skirt and a blouse always, with stockings and a girdle. I had on occasion caught a glimpse of her dressing and had seen the contortions she had to make in order to get herself into that foundation. She hoisted the contraption up to her thighs and then gyrated as she pulled it over her hips and buttocks, stuffing the last bit of the rum into those panels that were advertised to hold you tight for eighteen hours. This, for a woman who was not fashion-conscious; this, without question, from her who rabble-roused for half a dozen radical causes. Her eyes bulged, her whole head distended on her pulsing neck. When I was small, that moment in her bedroom was the only time I felt afraid of her or maybe for her: what might happen if she accidentally left the girdle on into the nineteenth hour, if it all of a sudden failed? I don't think Madeline, with her natural slimness, the grace of her long limbs, had ever thought to wear a girdle. She watched my mother's daily exercise with interest, and often she'd open the top drawer and pull out a string of pearls, an accessory to gussy up Julia's skirt and sweater, a trinket to make all that effort somehow worthwhile. "Not this morning, lamb," my mother usually said. "Let's save those for an important event."

  Most of the mothers on the block dressed for homemaking, many of them probably squeezing into their girdles just as Julia did, and some of them surely in later life enduring back pain or even prolapsed uteruses as a result of weakened abdominal muscles.

  "How we suffered," Figgy would say.

  In my room, my mother was settling on the bed, in no apparent danger of bursting from her threads. I had the vestigial sensation that because she was there I could turn over and sleep without fear of robbers or the commies. We had, months before, more or less recovered from the Simonsons' visit. I had pretty much put it aside, and maybe even forgiven her for inflicting the guests on us, for trying to educate us. She and I had once talked, without going into the details, about how some of the neighbors had blamed Cleveland for Jerry Pindel's broken nose. She admitted that the racists in our midst had shocked her, and that he had been in a difficult situation. Louise had probably told her in vague terms what had happened in the Pindels' garage, enough of the story anyway to make my mother keep a stricter hold on Madeline and Mikey.

  "Are you still awake?" she whispered as an afterthought. I already knew she hadn't come in to see if I was warm enough.

  Along the wall closest to her, my new acquisition, a demure orange corn snake, lay coiled in its terrarium. The magnificent and vain python and the retiring king snake were in their tanks, too. Farther down the shelf were the four cages of white mice to feed them. I don't know that my mother had been in my room for months, and I silently gave her credit for not mentioning the fragrance. Or the climate I had made equatorial with the aid of a space heater. I had started keeping snakes when I was twelve, and it did occur to me as I watched her in the dark that the air quality of my room might have something to do with her staying away.

  She asked me right off, without any more pleasantries, how I'd been thinking about the Vietnam conflict, and what Buddy had said about wanting to join the army.

  "Not much," I said, answering both questions. I didn't want to dwell on Vietnam in the night. Also, I was surrounded every day not only by my mother's talk but by the impermeable membrane of her convictions; I knew about the situation without even knowing that I knew. If I'd been held at gunpoint I could have recited facts and figures, could have told my assailant that Henry Cabot Lodge had succeeded Maxwell Taylor as ambassador to South Vietnam, that something like 180,000 military personnel were in the country, and that four million civilians had fled to the cities. Further, I understood that my mother's asking me what I thought was bound to lead to her own disquisition.

  She said that she wanted to give me a little background, that of course I was free to make up my own mind about world events, but that she didn't wish me to end up like Buddy, outfitted in a uniform, filled with the passions of his military-school demagogues, with no real idea what he was getting into.

  "Why would I end up like Buddy?" I'm sure I sounded as peevish as I felt. Stephen Lovrek's question still thrummed in my ear from months before: Stephen coming down the basement stairs on that hot July night, seeing me at the bar, knowing Madeline was being toyed with out in the alley, and saying, "Where's Buddy?" Stephen hadn't known Buddy for more than two hours, but it was clear to him whom he should call for help.

  Still, my mother swept through the thousand years of the Chinese, Japanese, and French occupations of Vietnam. She lingered at the Geneva Convention, 1954, and a 1950 speech of Eisenhower's in which he made a commitment to maintain South Vietnam as a separate country. There was a sidebar about Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the scare that had made her finally embrace her president. Even as she spoke to me on that night in 1966 it was clear that she was losing her heart to Bobby Kennedy. She veered farther from Vietnam to talk about Bobby's trip to the Mississippi Delta, and how he, much more than his brother, had taken on civil rights as a moral issue. She forgave him his various sins, including all the photo ops, parading around with the multitudes of little Kennedys, a nation unto themselves. Back to the war, she feared that Johnson was only going to get us deeper into the quagmire from which we would not be able to withdraw, not until thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people were killed. The Vietnamese, she said, were fighting against us with a ferocity we weren't prepared
for.

  "Got it," I said, clutching my pillow.

  "And there's Arthur," she went on, "with his charts, his incredible memory for the tonnage of bombs dropped, the numbers, the casualties from each battle--the abstraction of the conflict. Well, you know the kind of man Arthur is."

  "Yep," I said. Actually, I didn't know anyone else like Arthur. I knew only Arthur. As far as I could see, he was the single person who was most likely to understand the situation--how could he not, when his job afforded him access to the president, the generals, and to classified documents?

  "There is evidence," she was saying, "in an interview Kennedy gave just before he was shot, that he was going to withdraw the advisers from Vietnam, that he was going to leave the country to determine its own fate. I do think he knew that we had to pull away, that the hour had come, that he would have taken our nation in another direction." She paused before she said, "I hate to think of Buddy going over there."

  All at once I thought of the images I'd seen in magazines and on TV, the villages in flames, the children burned and running, the bandaged soldiers, the bloodied water of the rice paddies. The North Vietnamese, the pitiless and cunning enemy, would have no trouble finding soldiers to butcher who weren't necessarily on the front lines. I sat up and almost said out loud that I didn't want Buddy to go. My mother was right on that score; they shouldn't let him. He could find a job, or be stupid and get into trouble, the police hauling him to prison, to safety. So what if it was a worthy cause, as Arthur believed. Worthy enough to give Buddy to it? In order not to embarrass myself, I slid back under the covers and put the pillow over my head.

  "Good night, Mac," my mother said, thinking she'd been dismissed. She patted the form of my leg under the blanket. "One of these days it would be good to let Russia in here to clean. She's itching to get her hands on the place." She patted my leg again. "I'll find her a surgical mask so she's not asphyxiated." I think she kissed the pillow, for want of my hair. "Darling Mac,"

  she murmured.

  She had no idea that her talk of war would prevent me from sleeping, not just on that occasion but for weeks after. If she had tucked me in routinely, it most certainly would have killed me. She couldn't know that her history lesson had imparted nothing to me but anguish. Or, rather, at first I thought that she was innocent, that she had no notion of her effect. Later, I wondered if she understood full well what she was doing. It's possible, it's likely that she meant to lead me to sorrow in order to distract me from my admiration of Private Eastman.

  IN THE YEARS THAT HAVE PASSED, I've read quite a bit about the war.

  I've watched the documentaries, not only out of interest, and out of dismay at my own willful ignorance at the time, but also out of a sense of obligation to Buddy. Whenever I see anything about the period or read about it, I can't keep from inserting Buddy into the scene. It's Buddy rounding up a group of Vietcong, holding an M--16 to their backs; Buddy smoking a reefer in camp; Buddy giving directions to his men over a shortwave radio; Buddy going into a madam's hooch with a slim Vietnamese teenager. It's the best I can do for him, to have tried to imagine his life. Including his being decorated by President Nixon and returning home to people who spat on him and finding himself a good wife. Those are among the forces that compelled him to remain in the military, to train young men in the armed forces for future conflicts.

  "Where's Buddy?" So said Stephen Lovrek in the crisis moment.

  Right after Buddy's son was killed in Iraq, Diana threw herself into the task of persuading me to go to the funeral. As I said, she was skillful, restating her arguments in each round but also throwing a surprise punch now and again. First she usually talked about how sad it was that we'd never visited Buddy, that she'd never met the man who had meant so much to me as a boy.

  Next, she'd speak about family responsibility, about the importance of my representing the Aaron Maciver branch of the clan.

  She'd bring up the idea--which proved to be fanciful--that all the cousins were going to the funeral: I would be the only one missing. "Your absence will serve, as usual," she'd say, "to draw attention to yourself."

  This is something she has said to me before in other appeals. I'm not sure if she is being ironical--my husband, the show-off--if in that one complaint she is proving herself capable of irony. It is true, however, that I had not gone to Buddy's wedding, not gone to any of the family reunions that have been thrown over the years, and I'd avoided Moose Lake on the few occasions he'd visited. He had never had ownership in the property, because Figgy had sold her shares to my father in 1970, going for a killing. She didn't need the Wisconsin place when Arthur had the island in Maine. In order to buy out his sister at full market value, my father dipped into Madeline's retirement fund and spent his inheritance from his mother.

  I have found it difficult under any circumstances to leave my office on short notice, inconveniencing my patients and colleagues. "Mac, sweetheart," Diana said in round four or five, "I know you have an old score to settle with your cousin, I know you do, but it's--"

  "Diana." How she enjoyed stirring up drama, something you'd think she'd tire of with so much family around her, the sisters-in-law always either building toward a tizzy or in the whirlwind of one.

  "You know you're holding a grudge, you know you are!"

  "Men don't hold grudges," I pointed out. "It said so in the paper recently." Women, according to the study, nurture along their hurt feelings for years, backstab, gossip, don't forgive. Men are more likely to blow up or beat the shit out of each other and move on. "At my stage of life," I explained, "there is no reason to be acquainted with Buddy except for a sentimental notion we may have had about each other. There is no tragedy when time and distance have easily done their work."

  "Mac," my wife said sorrowfully, her hands to my shoulders, "I just can't understand you. I try, and I cannot."

  In fact, Diana understands plenty. She knows I mean to protect my dignity by being quiet, a tactic she does not approve of.

  Risk being a fool, she has instructed through the years. If I drink too much and, a rare occurrence, end up dancing in my socks in Mikey O'Day fashion, or singing a tone-deaf selection, she becomes very excited, as if she has found herself a new man.

  When she demands I pipe up, she often goes at it strenuously, a beagle baying to my fox in the hole. Nonetheless, if I were fond of aggravating her, I would say so. She is in many ways on the opposite end of the scale in temperament and personality from Sophia Cooper, the girl I earnestly loved in college, and yet she is a far better wife than Sophia would have made. Not that I am to speak or think, not ever, about wives in terms of good, better, best, or for that matter conjure the valiant beagle in the same breath as a woman, on pain of death from my daughters. But there is no doubt that Diana in her role of wife has allowed me my life's work as well as the joys of a family. I try to honor her for that feat, not only with thanks in every day but with a shower of gifts which she has circled in the catalogues before the major and minor holidays. Let me never forget Sweetest Day, which falls somewhere between Mother's Day and Valentine's Day, a tricky, no-man's-land observance.

  Before Diana, when I was at Oberlin College, I fell in love with Sophia, a long-brown-haired violinist. She was not a beauty by conventional standards, something my roommate pointed out. The first time I saw her, she was onstage in rehearsal, bow poised on the strings, waiting to make her entrance in a Schumann quintet. From the beginning, she was set apart from the usual zealots, those students who called themselves musicians, who read their scores in the dining hall over their veal Parmesan. Sophia had a narrow jaw and an overbite that made her mouth jut forward--please let me say with impunity--in a weaselish way, but a nice weasel, a soft, bright-eyed weasel, a rare Mustela you'd want to trust. Her overbite was one of her features that drove me wild with love. I suppose it was in part the temporomandibular dysfunction that made her look so eager and focused. I didn't expect her, then, to play as if the music was revealing itself to her, as i
f she was continuously surprised at the turns it was taking. It wasn't so much that she was playing her violin, she said, but that the music came through her. She was able to argue for hours about intonation and phrasing, as all her peers did, but also to lapse into a learned forgetting, so that the music could spin itself into the requisite gold. There were probably others on campus who had that Zen approach to their art, but she was the one, I thought, who really lived it. Other appealing features: her hair went past her waist, her enormous glasses came down nearly to the maxilla, so much of her oversized on her small self or askew or a little bit bestial.

  Louise ended up going to Oberlin, too, because of the conservatory that was part of the college, and for a few years we were there together. Stephen Lovrek, incidentally, came along also, a person I studiously avoided whenever I saw him in the library or the cafeteria. He dropped into the jazz warp, and Louise hardly ever saw him at school. On vacations at home, they resumed their classical music as if nothing as large as an aesthetic had separated them. For a while, Louise and Sophia and a trombonist friend of Lu's and I were a foursome. There was competition between my sister and my girlfriend: claims of possession on Sophia's part, and superior knowledge of my habits on Louise 's.

  "I think it's interesting," Sophia would say, "that Mac always listens to everyone else's opinion before he'll comment. You don't know if he's looking upon you with benevolence, or if he thinks you're an idiot."

  "Benevolence!" I'd insist.

  She'd turn to look me up and down. "Or he'll say one quiet thing that you realize after a minute is funny."

  "The only person Mac has ever strenuously argued with is my mother," Louise would counter loftily. "Which is perverse of him, since my mother is probably the only person he agrees with wholeheartedly on just about any subject. If he was married to her he'd be--what's the word?--uxorious. And of course," she'd add, "of course he's funny."