When Madeline Was Young

by Jane Hamilton

  Once we were inside the bar and sitting he said, "How is everyone? Your mom, your dad, Madeline?"

  "Madeline?" After all those years, after having been away, he found it important to ask after her, to make sure that she was fine, that the neighbor boys weren't abusing her. The thought of Buddy probably still made Jerry Pindel's blood run cold. "She's doing all right," I said. She was fifty-six, her blond hair in her updated coif streaked with white, the shine gone. The thin fall of her hair to her shoulders and the bangs made her actually look younger than she had with her ribbons and rubber bands. Five years had passed since Mikey O'Day had moved to Lantana, Florida. She still refused to go to the movie theater, and my mother always drove out of her way to avoid the DariDip. Julia had managed to get Madeline a job at a beauty salon uptown, gainful employment, what Figgy had envisioned from the start. A few afternoons a week, she did shampoos and swept the clippings from the floor. She was proud of her work and excited to have her own money. The first thing she had shown me on my last visit was her passbook from the bank.

  We figured, Buddy and I, that it had been ten years since we'd last seen each other. During much of that time he'd been out of the country. He'd found his place in the army, he'd gotten engaged to Joelle, a woman who'd been in the Miss America Pageant. Before her state title she'd been Miss Alamogordo, an accomplishment that sounded even more exotic than Miss New Mexico. Buddy hadn't been to Washington since he'd been decorated by Nixon in 1969. "An amazing moment." He shook his head as if he still couldn't believe it.

  I had read accounts of soldiers who had not felt the same way, who had not attended their ceremonies, but Buddy was in earnest about his awe. "Watergate blew everything," he said. "It blew the Peace Accords, it blew our ability to stand behind the treaty, to protect Vietnam. It blew Congress's will to finish off the war honorably."

  I agreed with him that the break-in had been unfortunate.

  "There's always foul play in elections," he said. "The country acts like Nixon's the first guy to tamper with the process!"

  "And to tape himself at the same time," I noted.

  "When I got off the plane at Dulles, after my first tour, people spat on me. You folks out there"--he waved his hand to indicate the Midwest--"don't believe it, but it's true. I was spat on in our capital because I'd served my country." He frowned into the polish of the bar. "What could they know?" he muttered.

  That kind of ingratitude, I said, was unforgivable, and I was sorry he'd had to endure it.

  "Especially for enlistees, the guys who signed up because we believe in our country."

  "Do you remember," I said, "how startled everyone was when you joined?" I suppose what I meant was how frightened I'd been for him.

  "Are you kidding, Brains? There was no big secret there. It was a hell of a lot easier to go into the army than not get into college and not win the girl of my dreams. Don't get me wrong, I was prepared to do the job. But I did practically flunk out of the academy, something my mom probably kept to herself. I'm not just saying I almost flunked out a little. Arthur, I'm sure, had to talk sweet or pay up so I could graduate."

  It was the first time we were talking as fully fledged adults, the first occasion when we could look back on our youth with some kind of perspective. I was suddenly very glad that he'd made the effort to meet. It had been common knowledge that he'd had to stay back a grade in high school, but Figgy had always made it sound as if they had opted to have Buddy experience certain subjects again so that he would be strong academically, as if they'd had a choice, as if repeating was like taking megavitamins.

  I could imagine that, rather than doing his homework, he'd been teaching his friends indispensable lessons for their real lives.

  "I'm wired for the army anyway--my dad, my grandfather," he was saying. "I come from a long line of warriors." He stretched his arms their full span, as if to tell me there had been legions before him, all the way back to Achilles. "How else was I supposed to figure out manhood?"

  "Manhood." The image of Jerry Pindel rose before me, blood streaming from his nose. "I was always impressed by your courage," I said, "well before you joined the army." "Courage," I thought, wasn't exactly the word. How much of Buddy's force was actually bravado? "There was that night--you might not recall it--the night in the neighbor's garage the summer you visited us, the year before you enlisted." That small scuffle, that violence would be nothing compared with the tedium and heroics of years at war.

  "That fucking made me crazy!" he cried. "Yeah, I remember. The scumbag operator--what was his name? The bunwad, trying to make Madeline blow that idiot on the sofa! I wanted to blast that asshole's brains to smithereens."

  I couldn't help laughing at his indignation. "It was a fashion show at first," I reminded him. "I'm not sure Jerry planned for anything beyond dressing Madeline in the Goodwill clothes and having some hilarity at her expense."

  "You're out of your mind, Brains! He had the retard on the sofa so Madeline could dickie-lick him. You are still out to lunch, aren't you, pal? Head in the clouds. I did want to kill that kid for mixing Madeline up with the half-breed."

  "Her boyfriend," I said. "Mikey, that 'half-breed,' was her boyfriend. She was engaged to him."

  He squinted to think. "Yeah, oh yeah, I knew that, that's right. What are you saying, though? You saying it was okay for the butt-wipe to--"

  "Of course not. I'm only saying that Mikey wasn't a stranger to Madeline, and also I wouldn't call him a half-breed." I probably sounded not only sanctimonious but dramatic when I said, "He was the best thing that ever happened to her."

  "Sure, sure, I can see that. She was a very pretty lady, and she was dying for it. I was a babe in the woods, and I knew that much. My mom said she was like a bitch in heat, always rubbing up against the back fence, mooning around the yard. You did want the poor girl to have some relief." He felt it necessary to add, "But not up in that attic with all those dumb-ass kids watching."

  He trolled in the communal snack-mix bowl for the peanuts, and I drank my beer. I remembered that hot afternoon when Mikey and Madeline for the first time disappeared alone into her bedroom. I'd been reading an enormous Hermann Hesse novel that I took for the last word on the meaning, among other things, of rivers, the profound flow, the taking, the giving, the changing, the sameness. It was with a weighty seriousness that I rolled off my sticky bed to go to the bathroom. As I was at the toilet, I realized that the two of them were upstairs, in Madeline 's room, together in her room. I could hear her light laughter and his guffaws, which were unusually throaty. Back in the hall I listened some more, the voices behind the closed door as changeable as the river, but also ever the same. Mikey was making noises the way he did if my mother presented him with a dish of ice cream or a juicy hamburger, yum-yum sounds. I went straight downstairs to see if Julia was home, and so she was, in the kitchen chopping carrots, without a care in the world. I stood staring at her.

  "Hello," she said.

  "What do you mean, 'Hello'?"

  She continued chopping. "Everyone," she said, "deserves their privacy."

  "Their privacy."

  I had not yet learned that Madeline had had a hysterectomy, and I wondered if I should give my mother a lecture, edify her about the consequences of irresponsible sexual behavior. Or was she advocating free love for each member of the family?

  Were there going to be bundles of retarded joy at nine-month intervals from here on out? I supposed genetically they'd have normal children, but who would care for the pint-sized geniuses when the parents had trouble figuring out how to set an alarm clock? I was going to seize my book from my own bed and leave for the farthest reaches of town. Only to see, on my way back upstairs, that their door had popped open, a two-or-soinch aperture. There was Mikey standing stark naked in profile, there his tight little butt, his Buddha belly, his magnificent--and long!--glistening, ready, and willing tumescence. If I called it that to myself, it was because I'd been reading great literature. And Madeline, or anyway her
legs on the bed, Madeline, herself waiting and ready. I walked down the stairs, out of the house, thinking of the few couples who, it was rumored at school, were having sexual intercourse. I'd invite them over so they could fuck on the dining-room table as my mother was trying to serve dinner; they could fuck on the kitchen floor, in the tub, on the piano while Louise practiced; they could fuck in my parents' bed, on top of them while they slept.

  So Madeline, to use Buddy's phrase, had gotten some relief. "It's funny," I said to him, "but it seemed to me that you were beating up Jerry for the wrong reason. Not that it matters, but the fashion show was the greater cruelty, far more ugly, meaner, than the generalized humiliation of the sexual favor. The evil tease of the runway was perfectly tuned to Madeline's vulnerability." I'd wanted to tell him that for a long time. "Your outrage at Mikey's being a moron--"

  "You know, Brains?" He shook his head, the slow back-and-forth of amazement. "Isn't Brains a fucking cute little scientist, dissecting a monkey in the basement!" He managed to say that with almost no rancor. "Here comes Brains with a bucket of dead fish, the scholar"--he let out a cackle--"with his head up his ass."

  I had once wanted to set him on fire, almost sure in the moment that I was capable of it. We were again coming close to the tender, murderous point at the center of our fraternal affection. "It was good of you," I went on, "to prevent the neighborhood from erupting, to go door to door and absolve Cleveland of guilt in the beating. It turned out there was racial hatred on the block. Although not everyone believed you--some of those women held it against us for a long time, that we'd sheltered the Negroes. I don't think Mrs. Pindel ever spoke to my mother again.

  "That asswipe," Buddy spat, still referring, I guessed, to Jerry. "The little faggot."

  A clarifying moment, in the smoky bar, the glass to my lips. Buddy perhaps had clocked Jerry most of all because of the whiff in the loft of our neighbor's homosexuality. Maybe the thrashing had had nothing to do with Madeline: Brains, at last understanding the deeper impulse of his strong and courageous cousin, the hero, and champion of certain minorities.

  "So," I said after a decent interval, "you're going to make a life of it. A career military man."

  Buddy was signed up for the Drill Sergeant Program, a future that had amused the cousins with its rightness. He explained at some length what was required of him, how he'd gone through security clearance before and passed various tests, and also proved that he had no speech impediment, an important detail in the drill-sergeant profession. He was hopeful that with his experience he'd advance quickly. He'd been in the army long enough to assume that I knew what he was talking about, that I was familiar with the chain of command and the military acronyms, that they were all household terms. Even if I didn't understand the finer points, I could see that his service in Vietnam had somehow not diminished his enthusiasm for being a soldier, that if anything his commitment had intensified through the years. When I wondered out loud if that was true he said,

  "Someone has to do this job. It's up to those of us left to rebuild the reputation of the military, to keep our great country strong. I ask myself, if I don't do it, who will?"

  When I didn't say anything he repeated, "Who will?"

  The aim was admirable, I said.

  "You think so, Brains?" He turned his body on the stool so that he faced me, so that he could look at me squarely.

  "Sure," I said, "yes. Absolutely."

  "Yeah, well, I'd like to pass down some of what I've learned in the field and contribute to our nation being strong. You better believe it. I'd like to combat all the shit that's been heaped on the good men who fought hard."

  I had the unfamiliar sensation then that although he was staring, it wasn't for the purpose of seeing me. For a minute he went still. He was no longer present, just like that, gone. It was as if he'd been cut away from himself. Even though I couldn't have imagined what hell he'd been through, I thought I understood how going to war would separate you not only from your old friends but from the civilian you'd once been, how you might not be able to reclaim much of your old character. That such a thing would happen to Buddy, that he'd lose his essential Buddyness--I'd rather have had him insulting me or being furious for a wrongheaded reason than going so quiet. "Aren't you," he said, finally blinking, taking a handful of the pretzels, "aren't you going to ask if I believed in the war, since your mother isn't here to grill me?"

  At the ready to be obedient, I said, "Did you believe in the war?"

  He threw the snack mix in his mouth, chewing, chewing and reflecting, as if he hadn't solicited the question, as if he didn't know the answer. After a while he said, "I hate to say this in present company, but whether you believe in it or not is beside the point.

  Tell that to Aunt Julia. You've over there, you have a job to do, it's a job. You're bored off your ass half the time, you hope nobody in the detachment goes too nuts, you hope you don't go nuts, you hope your superiors aren't sadists, you hope no one gets so drunk they start shooting you, you hope the guy who got blown up screwing a fourteen-year-old gook--you hope his mother doesn't write to you to ask about his noble death in battle." He put his hand back in the feed bowl. "It's a job, like I said."

  I was relieved when he changed the subject, when he said, "So--you're going to be a doc. Make the big bucks."

  "I'll be working in a small-town hospital, I hope." The fucking cute little scientist tells his dream to the drill sergeant. "Internal medicine."

  "You always were a whore for guts, weren't you, pal?"

  "A real whore," I agreed.

  "That's great, Brains. I'll make sure to get to your doorstep before I have my heart attack. Which might happen soon, since I'm about to be a married man." He did liven up then, telling me about Joelle, the beauty queen, a kindergarten teacher, the sister of an academy friend. I assumed he'd been careful not to catch anything overseas, or, if he had, to get it treated. Surely everything unsavory that happened stayed within the group, the exploits collectively blacked out when the troops touched down on American soil.

  Soon after, when we were parting, he said, "I forgive you--you know that, right? Don't you?"

  "What?"

  He gripped my hand. "For not serving." He held on to me, unwilling to let go. It seemed, it did seem that he meant what he'd said. He was chewing gum, his mouth the only part of him in motion. If Tessa had been born and grown and present, she would have whipped up a story about our meeting in no time. She might have noted his urgency, his nervousness. She might have said he wanted me to forgive him, but for what exactly I didn't know.

  Chapter Thirteen

  WHEN RUSSIA'S HUSBAND WAS SHOT DEAD OUTSIDE OF THE pharmacy on the South Side, it was Buddy, out of all the absent Macivers, whom the widow missed the most. That killing in the spring of 1968 was sandwiched between Martin Luther King's and Bobby Kennedy's assassinations, but, then, everyone in that year seemed to have personal claims of violence that went along with the public tragedies. Elroy was ours. My mother phoned Louise and me at college, saying that we must come back for the funeral, that, no matter Louise's part in her friend's senior recital or an exam I had to study for in genetics, Russia was family. Our presence at the service was required.

  "Family?" Louise said to me. "I hate it when she says that. I've never even met Elroy Crockerby."

  "Never met Elroy?" I didn't say that I had seen him only once, although the ten-minute sighting had made an impression and I had not forgotten him. For the first time it occurred to me that Russia had always had to work on Christmas Eve. Where was Elroy while his wife was baking rolls at the Macivers'? Maybe Russia would rather have stayed home, gone to church, and cooked exclusively for her man. My father always drove down to pick her up before breakfast and took her back after the last dish was washed, around midnight. I wondered if Elroy had routinely worked on the holiday, at the Michigan Avenue Hotel, where he was a doorman.

  To Louise I said, "Why didn't Elroy ever come to Christmas Eve?"

  "Be
cause slaves leave their families when the master says. They have to abandon their husbands to serve dinner up at the plantation house."

  Louise's trombonist had recently jilted her, running off with a dippy flutist--a modifier she used, she explained, even though it was redundant. She'd had a disappointing audition for a summer program she was desperate to attend, and she was on edge about that outcome. There was no point arguing with her when she was already scrappy. "I'm not going to the funeral to satisfy Mom's idea of our racially balanced family," she said. "I'm sorry, but I'm not going."

  We both did fly to Chicago for the morning service, and were back in Ohio with an hour to spare for Louise's recital. The tickets cost my parents a fortune, but they insisted it was money well spent. Lu and I had never been to Russia's neighborhood, let alone her church or her house. Over the phone my mother said she was thankful a white person hadn't killed Elroy. "If there is anything to be thankful for in this situation," she amended. The murderer had been caught five minutes after the shooting, with Elroy's wallet in his pocket, including the kingly sum of $12.42.

  I remembered my mother's words as I took my place in the front pew of the Pathway to Victory Baptist Church. Russia had gathered my aunts, uncles, first cousins, second cousins, and great-aunt around her in the vestibule. This was well before the O'Days moved to Florida, and Mikey and Madeline were there, too. Since Russia had always been fond of Mikey, Mrs. O'Day, after hemming and hawing, gave permission for her son to go to the dangerous South Side, with the stipulation that he be home before dark. Russia had drawn me to her chest, her long spidery arms flapping at my back. "Timothy," she cried, "my boy, my own child." Her voice had gone thin and wavery. We processed up the aisle, all of us in a clump behind the casket, all of us ahead of the Crockerby retinue, the sixty or so family members who were shedding their tears. My mother was right: how much more terrible it would have been to be on display and in the prized seats if one of us had killed Elroy.