When Madeline Was Young

by Jane Hamilton

  "You know my sister? No, no, not Lu, but Madeline, she's not really my sister, she was married to my father, but then, one day, she hit a stone wall, bam, on her bike, no one saw it, it ruined her, oxygen deprivation, brain damage--and then my mother cared for her, she was a nurse, she wasn't my mother yet, not yet, and later she married my father, there was an annulment or a divorce, nothing sneaky, it was legal . . ." It sounded so nutty, so melodramatic, I started to laugh.

  "Not that it's funny"--I was only laughing harder--"it's not at all, as a matter of fact, Lu and I, we were talking . . ." And, as if to make it worse, a stream of snot coming from my nose, I began to cry again. "They're taking Mikey O'Day to Florida." I looked through my tears at Sophia. "They can't do that! She'll die." I started to cough. "Of loneliness." I repeated, choking, "Of loneliness."

  Sophia was staring at me in amazement. "What," she said at last, "in the fuck are you talking about?" When I couldn't begin anew, or take up in the middle, or even end the story, she said, "I don't know why you never told me whatever you're trying to explain before. But that's just you, I guess. Strong and silent, the current running too deep for me. Way too deep."

  It was no doubt just the scene she needed to be able to go off with a clear conscience, to pursue her career as the second violinist in a quartet that did achieve some fame. Because there were no more classes, she left the campus the next day and didn't come back until graduation. I saw her after the ceremony, in the distance. She was looking over at us, at my parents and Madeline. I waved through the crowd, the only chance I got to say goodbye to her.

  Chapter Twelve

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE BUDDY'S SON'S FUNERAL, TESSA GRACED US with her presence at the supper table. She was working as an intern at the local newspaper, the lone daughter at home for the entire summer. Diana stood at the sink, running water into a kettle, speaking to me in her voice that was high and clear over the tap. "Your inability to extend yourself is more than plain bad manners, really Mac, but it's that, too. It's rude. How would you like it--" She stopped, realizing perhaps that it was tempting fate to consider the deaths of your own children, even for educational purposes.

  As she ran the water, and with dinner on the way, I had enough hope to think almost cheerfully of marriage as a mortification not of the flesh but of the soul. Just the soul, that's all. I'd had a trying day in my kingdom, the fortress with peaked skylights, the bright veneer of germlessness, the homey touches of flowered wallpaper borders, and at regular intervals large framed still-lifes of ribboned hats among plates of fruit. There were TV monitors, too, in every corner, attractive men and women dispensing information about menopause, sexual dysfunction, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, and the benefits of the dread colonoscopy. To devote oneself to wellness at the clinic is to sprint from exam room to exam room, trying both to fulfill and to ignore the dictates from the new corporate headquarters, the efficiency guidelines, ten minutes per patient.

  It's the American way, and although we old fogies are not resigned, although we subvert as best we can, we know that without revolution from all quarters we are powerless in the face of the business gurus at the central office and, beyond, at the insurance companies. The big joke, how stressed and bitter the doctors are as they try to promote health in others.

  That afternoon my nurse, Gretchen, had twisted her ankle, leaving me in the trembling hands of a shy student on the second day of her internship. I have tried through the years to become a better listener, something the women doctors tend to do well, tilting their heads and appearing to give the patients time to tell their stories. I had made a point to be attentive to Mrs. Ozanick, an eighty-two-year-old widow who has had chronic migrating pain for the twenty years I've known her. For fourteen minutes, I had followed her solid wall of talk concerning her cell-phone plan, her nephew's phone arrangement, and the paucity of calls she received, on land or otherwise, from her children. I have not been able to find a real remedy for her discomfort, aside from the solace she seems to take from my interest. Since she pays out of pocket, she can visit me as often as Gretchen will schedule her. When she left the office, her stomach pain was in fact gone, I was edified about the merits of her carrier, and the miracle of medicine had proved itself once more to be a vapory thing. I was twenty-five minutes behind, and in the next appointment had to tell a thirty-sevenyear-old mother of four, a woman who had come in with fever and anemia, that there had been primitive leukemia cells in her blood leukocyte count, an indication of acute granulocytic leukemia. Remissions, I did not tell her, saving that piece for the oncologist, are usually partial or brief. After that, now fifty-four minutes behind, there was a case of poison ivy, a man who, incidentally, had a tattoo on his back of Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande fatte--his wife's favorite painting. It had been done over a five-year period, spreading out the torment and expense.

  The rash, much to his relief, was on his legs, and did not interfere with the artwork. As I was walking out of the clinic, around the corner from the hospital, an ambulance was just pulling in at Emergency. A twenty-year-old boy had been struck by a train on a back road and was dead on arrival.

  "Comfort me with apples," I said in Diana's direction at the sink, "for I am sick of love." There was too much genuine suffering in the world to be anything but filled with happiness on the home front, an idea, when I've voiced it, that makes Diana go fearsomely hard and cold. Diana is a model of decorum--her anger, which of course is rightfully hers, clean and bright, blossom of snow. But I was not going to Kyle Eastman's funeral merely as a corrective to my character.

  "Do you need therapy, Dad?" Tessa wondered softly. "Would that help? Sometimes it seems like you married--well--not your own mother, not Grandma Julia, but someone's mother. The mother-brides were switched at the wedding. It's a mistake of karma!"

  Where, from what realm, do our monstrous children come? And when did children blithely start to analyze their parents at the dinner table? What television show taught them this?

  "Mom obviously can't stop gnawing on the old bone of your reconnecting with Cousin Buddy. So--what's the deal?"

  "What did you say, Tessie?" Diana at last turned off the water. "I didn't hear."

  "I was telling Dad that it would be interesting to meet the cousins. Buddy has five kids, right?"

  "Four now," Diana said. "Living, I mean. They'll always have five, always. Kyle--bless his soul--Robert, Mallory, Vanessa, Brittany."

  Tessa reached across the table to grasp my hand. "Why don't you take me to the funeral? I'll be the ice-breaker."

  An apt role for Tessa in any situation. When she looks at you, it is best to clear your mind of insincerity. She does not listen with womanly sympathy, no cocking of the head, no steady warmth, no encouraging nods. Tessa is a predator when she listens, the girl taking your full measure.

  "Buddy's family has great faith," I muttered. "He doesn't need any of us to witness his grief." My cousin, as far as I knew, had not gotten religion, but perhaps a little of his wife's zeal had rubbed off on him.

  Just then one of the newer sisters-in-law entered, Nan from across the road, the pediatrician among us. Diana's younger brother had taken her to be his second wife a few years before, after the first one ran off from the family compound. I was pleased when Jim married Nan, because she reads, she is curious about any subject, she votes as I do, she has never said a single word about her emotional state, and also she seems to understand how the family operates and still she appears to like us.

  "Mac won't go to his cousin's son's funeral," Diana said, by way of greeting Nan. "The boy died in Iraq." She brought a wide bowl of greens in all the salad hues to the table, from purple lettuces to the glowing jade of chard to the blue of young kale.

  She had managed to grow lettuce through the heat, her garden a weedless wonder of verdure and nourishment.

  "How beautiful!" Nan said, with genuine awe. Her Nordic good looks, towering height, and straight blond hair make her seem chronically wh
olesome and vigorous. "I'm sorry to hear about your cousin," she said to me. "That's awful." After she'd inquired about Kyle's age and the circumstances of his death--questions that Diana answered--she again turned to me, to praise and to say thank you. I had seen a patient of hers that morning, a boy with a rash, swollen glands, fever, peeling skin. It's quite difficult to diagnose an illness if you haven't encountered it at least once. I'd been able to tell her that Stevie Tolbert-son had Kawasaki disease, something that isn't very common in Anglo-Saxons, and in addition is apt to show up in winter and spring. Stevie was Nordic himself, and it was fully summer. "I'm so grateful," she was saying. "I think you should give a talk to the staff about Kawasaki, the way you did about tetanus last year." To Diana she said, "He told you about that, didn't he?"

  "My husband, speak?"

  "It's just that he's modest," Nan explained. "A reluctant hero. But let me tell you. He was walking through the ER, there was a woman with muscle spasms, Dr. Prentiss didn't have any idea what was wrong with her, Mac took one look and said, 'Tetanus.'

  The fact that Mac just happened to be walking past saved the woman's life."

  Her story was not true to the letter: it had taken me more than one look to make the diagnosis. Again, I was able to do so only because I'd had the privilege of seeing tetanus, in D. C. it was, a man half dead from a puncture wound.

  "Anyway," Nan said, "I'm sorry to barge in here, but I wanted to thank you."

  While she'd been talking, Diana had come behind my chair and put her hands on my shoulders, as she often does when she is feeling sorry or left out. It had done me no harm to have Nan say in her presence that she was indebted to me. Nan paused, looking at Diana and looking at me. She said, "We might be able to spare you for a day or two, Mac, for your funeral. We probably could get along."

  Diana pressed closer and said in my ear, "I understand you're busy, I do."

  Nan thanked me again as she got up from the table, and I thanked her--for what she did not know, for her kindness, her diplomacy, her excessive compliments. A reluctant hero! I was always much improved after seeing her. The minute she was out the back door, Tessa leaned forward in her so-called shirt, an orange scrap with one string each side, and the secondary purple straps of her brassiere. "Tell me," she said, "about the last time you saw Buddy." She was a sophomore at her eco-friendly, vegetarian, composting-toilet college in North Carolina, a student of history and journalism. She was practicing her trade, just as a dental student pulls the wisdom teeth of all her family members. The small rectangular emerald-green frames of her new glasses added to the serious and yet hip investigative-reporter effect. I had no doubt that she would go far, not only because of her intelligence and wit but because of her other, equally important attributes: the wardrobe, the velvety skin--so much of it to see--and her persistence.

  "The discussion of human relations is overrated," I said to her. "When I was a boy we talked politics. We discussed the world around us, science, art, music. We didn't spend our lives picking apart--what do you call them?--relationships."

  "You didn't have to pick yours apart," Diana said wearily. "Your family tore itself to pieces over current events. You all argued and argued until you didn't speak anymore." Despite her fatigue, she made that most generous of motions, sweeping up the linguine from the bowl with two wooden forks, swinging the mass of it onto my plate.

  "Thank you," I said.

  "The last time your father saw Buddy was the summer of 1975, in Washington, D. C.," Diana began.

  Tessa raised what serve as her brows, those tiny pencil lines above her eyes. "True?"

  I put my head down, nose to the tomato sauce that Diana had made with her own jeweled hands.

  "I love that Mom knows this stuff and you hardly remember! That's so symbiotic. Did you have a major argument about the Vietnam War with Buddy? Since you wimped out and didn't serve--right?"

  "Right," I said.

  "What I mean, Dad, is that no matter how justified you were in avoiding a ridiculous war, the fact that he went and you didn't had to be this thing between you, the elephant in the room, the--"

  "Do you want some cheese, Tessie?" Diana said, passing the cutting board.

  Tessa grated the mail-order parmigiano over her pasta, grimacing with her effort. When she finished she said, "What did Buddy do over there, anyway?"

  "As I understand it," I said, "he was in support organizations, first as a guard, and when he re-enlisted he went through another training program for a unit that manned the supply lines."

  "There's that picture of him being decorated by President Nixon on the Moose Lake mantel, so that must have been a big deal."

  She was speaking at her plate, as if she were working the details out to herself. "Even if the president was an asshole, still, it's the president, and there were probably people in the family who thought it was exciting." She looked up at me. "When you met in 1975, the war was over and you were finally hashing it out? If I'm going to meet my cousins, I want to know about your brawl."

  "Diana," I murmured. That very afternoon, she had put up a bushel of the San Marzano paste tomatoes, nine sparkling pint jars on the counter. She was still wearing her charming smock, spattered with juice and pulp, and further, her curly hair, the gray dyed to brown, was covered with a blue bandana. She was in that moment my Antonia, the love of my life. Surely it has never been more dangerous to love than in our time; the feminazis would undoubtedly lynch me for warming so to Diana in her farm-wife costume, the ensemble--such a vision--that made me want to jump up and polka with her out to the hayloft. "Diana," I said again. "This is the most delicious thing I have ever tasted." I had to close my eyes, to hold the trace of basil, the rumor of garlic in my mouth. "I feel like I'm back in my native Italy."

  "Seriously, Dad! What happened?"

  I opened up to look at Tessa. "Happened?"

  "You're being obtuse on purpose! Don't be stupid."

  "Usually nothing much actually happens." I was still in the trance of the pasta and also the Bryant Family Cabernet, 1996. "I'm not sure you're aware of that. It sounds unexciting, but as you get older you're grateful every time nothing at all occurs." I can count on one hand the incidents through my years that have spurred concrete change, starting with Madeline's bicycle accident, an essential marker in my life, as important as conception. To my daughter, in a vain attempt to make a joke, I said,

  "We put on diapers, Buddy and I, and we wrestled."

  Diana exhaled theatrically, as if to say to Tessa, See? See how impossible my life is?

  Tessa spoke quietly. "I'd really like to know. I'd like to know your history." In her voice there was disappointment--You are letting me down, Father--and also tones of determination: I will get the story from you.

  "You want to know," Diana said to Tessa with exquisite patience. "You want to know how it was between your father and Buddy. They were like brothers, that's what Louise says. Inseparable. When the families split it was like . . . what's-their-names, in Romeo and Juliet--"

  "The Montagues and the Capulets."

  "Those boys on either side of the fence."

  "Except no double suicide," I said, my mouth full of noodles. " `She's dead, deceas'd, she's dead; alack the day!' "

  "Your father had a summer job at the VA hospital in D. C. I stayed behind in Madison, working at a day camp, such wonderful, sweet girls, ages eight to ten, lots of fun. Buddy was just home from Vietnam. There was a dinner at Aunt Figgy's house, and that's when some of the animosities about the war came out. The family, like I was saying, was always arguing about it."

  "There wasn't any animosity between Buddy and me over the war," I said, clearly, having swallowed.

  "Excuse me?" Diana said. "I beg your pardon?"

  The dog came up and put her nose between my legs, looking at me dolefully, as if there were nothing to say about my predicament, nothing to be done about my women, whose great subject is the emotional landscape, their own and the hazy terrain of their loved ones'. It
is a tottery position for them, trying to acquire self-knowledge without going overboard, without becoming stridently self-indulgent.

  "And there wasn't a dinner at Figgy's," I said.

  I do, however, remember meeting Buddy for a drink at a hotel near Union Station in Washington, and no doubt Diana is correct, that the year was 1975. It's also probably true that there was a story to tell, one that could well satisfy the women. My cousin was passing through the city, on his way to Maine to visit his parents. From the window where I was sitting in the bar, I could see him coming along the street, walking swiftly, chin up, eyes straight ahead, as he must have had to do in training, and in drills overseas. He was tan as always, with that particular Buddy sheen, as if he'd been lightly washed in gold. His skin tone was an ornament, an essential accessory to the man, the sun-studded soldier.

  I came outside and we shook hands heartily, and then, in that way veterans have, he threw his arms around me and hugged me hard, swaying back and forth. He was twenty-nine. There were faint lines under his eyes, his face was leaner, the angles were pronounced: he was fit, and also he'd suffered. I knew very little about Buddy's time in Vietnam, but we'd all learned about the Silver Star he'd received for showing uncommon bravery through the Tet Offensive. He had been a guard, and so he hadn't at first been in combat, standing sentry at his base somewhere, I think, near Nha Trang. His mother had thought he'd have a desk job, but Buddy had decided to be as close to the infantry as he could without actually fighting. During Tet, he'd come under fire and, using his old general's authority, that gift he'd honed at Moose Lake, he'd repelled the enemy and also protected most of those he'd been working with. Although Cousin Nick once said that Arthur Fuller pulled strings, that no one who had fought in a little skirmish like that would have earned such an honor, I had liked to think Buddy deserved the decoration.