When Madeline Was Young

by Jane Hamilton

  I remember that the Fullers left Moose Lake before their scheduled departure, and that Figgy took me aside as the car was idling, saying she would hold me in her prayers.

  You pray? I wanted to ask.

  She said I must always know that she admired me even if she didn't agree with my family's politics.

  They had argued while they ate sliced turkey and boiled new potatoes. Arthur had become owlish in his delivery, staring at his adversary longer than was comfortable for any of us and then blinking slowly as he spoke. With severe forbearance he explained to my mother that the North Vietnamese were gaining power because of the American peace movement. The antiwar protesters had created a schism so deep in the country, he said, that it had destroyed the war effort; they had made it impossible for the military to call up the men that were needed and for Congress to allocate the moneys for victory. It must have required courage on Arthur's part, to have been one of the last holdouts on Johnson's staff to insist it was within reach to beat the enemy. In the election of 1968, Figgy and Arthur went Republican, voting for Nixon because they felt he would proceed with the conflict until it was finished honorably. It was unclear to some of us what pre-cisely that meant, if it required all-out winning or somehow gaining enough leverage to broker a settlement. My mother was fond of saying that Figgy was the vocal part of Nixon's Silent Majority.

  Because Julia couldn't forgive the Fullers for defecting to the GOP, she did her best to avoid seeing them. Whether the meeting at Moose Lake in 1970 was planned or accidental, I don't know. Since she was forced to eat dinner with them that night, she as always threw her own research in Arthur's face: 80 percent of the armed services addicted to drugs, and privates attacking their superiors, wounding or killing their captains. If Arthur hadn't raised his voice to speak over her, you might have thought, looking at him, that he was unruffled. His lids slowly closed over the bulge of his eyes; his lids slowly lifted. He said again that the antiwar propaganda had demoralized the troops, had turned the army upside down.

  "They are demoralized, Arthur, because all along they've been lied to! They are demoralized because they're being slaughtered senselessly!"

  "It is difficult to keep the large picture in mind, certainly," he said. There was, I noticed then, a steady tic in his lower jaw.

  "Without American intervention, communist hegemony will likely spread through South Asia, East Asia, Thailand, India. Without our intervention, the Soviet Union might well take it upon themselves to secure oil-producing nations in the Middle East."

  Arthur's relative calm was more than my mother could abide. "Forty thousand troops have been killed," she cried. "The South Vietnamese have been denied elections, they have been murdered, they have been polluted by our chemicals and all of our garbage they can get on the black market. Corruption is running--"

  It was at that moment, I believe, when the argument fell to pieces, when Figgy entered the fray, shouting, "Don't tell us what it's like. Buddy has served for four years. Arthur has been there several times. You--you've not ever been to Southeast Asia!"

  "That has nothing to do with what we're talking about, Figgy, and you know it. I have not been to Vietnam, I have not been to Timbuktu, but there have been reports from trustworthy writers--" "Trustworthy writers!"

  "Mac will not be killed because Johnson's men and now Nixon's men have made the most tragic mistakes of this century!"

  It was the same argument they'd been having for years, only just then I realized that all along what they'd actually been fighting about was their sons. Each of them as a parent had committed his child to a certain path, and each needed to insist time and again that his way, and the boy's willingness to follow, was right. Whereas, in the early days, their volleys had had the feel of sport, now their dislike was bitter and personal, the stakes high because we were both draft age.

  "Mac," my mother was close to screeching, "will not die because you, people like you, refuse to face the terrible truth. The policies you have supported have killed thousands of men in a war that was not winnable from the start. You, you are responsible! You have made all of us in this country murderers. Murderers."

  She left the room, and did not come downstairs in the early morning when her old friends left.

  FOR TWO YEARS AS A CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR, I ran blood samples in a lab in Trenton, New Jersey. I spent the twenty-four months working, and also mourning Sophia Cooper. In the evenings I reread Miss Cooper's books, those weighty assignments, in my studio apartment, as if that application might one day help me win her back. It was a lonely period, and although I suspected it would end, I did not really believe that the slow time would ever pass. I did remember now and then to think of Madeline, to remember that without Mikey O'Day she might well be as wretched as I. The summer before my stint as a CO, when I'd been at home, I was so distracted by my own troubles that I paid her no attention. My mother had gotten her a job, there was that. She probably so accurately mirrored my misery I didn't want to look at her.

  In New Jersey I sometimes thought I should send her a postcard or a package, a little thing to cheer her up, but I don't know that I ever did. On the weekends I took the train to New York and wandered the streets and museums, wondering if I'd bump into my former vegetarian--co-op housemate. And planning my moves if I happened to see her. So casually I might say, "I never dreamed I'd run into you here." I'd explain that, instead of being gunned down in a rice paddy, I was available to have a cup of coffee. The alumni magazine had said she was in the city studying with a violin guru who only took students bound for glory. I understood that a person who has been spared his death in the jungle, who has been spared from killing, should not admit to suffering from a loneliness so keen it seemed a physical affliction. I knew I should be grateful to have a heart and stomach, arms and legs, and empty hands with which to register that loneliness. Later, in my married days, when I closed the door to my study, I was after that old ache. I'd grown nostalgic for it. I'd listen to symphonies and read, drowning in the wisdom of Beethoven and the virtue of Lincoln. But if I fell asleep on my study sofa, and if I woke as dawn was coming on, I was sure for a horrifying moment that I was back in Trenton, that the rest of my life was only a dream, and that I'd remained in New Jersey. I'd throw off the thin blanket and hurry up to the bedroom, where Diana would instantly wake to scold me. What a relief to climb in next to her while she listed all the reasons it was thoughtless and also unhealthy to sleep on my sagging old couch.

  In my conscientious-objector years, every now and then, I'd meet Figgy in New York. She'd take me to the Metropolitan, or we'd walk through the East Village so she could point out where she'd lived with Bill Eastman, where they had gathered in bars and cafes with those hard-drinking, womanizing painters who were on their way to inventing Abstract Expressionism. She talked about herself in that period with some vagueness, as politicians now do about their druggy days in college. She was kind enough to speak to me about the artists and their work, to avoid the subjects that had separated the families. She never asked about my conscientious-objector status, and she didn't have much curiosity about my life in New Jersey. We were always glad to see each other, and I think we both felt the pleasure of doing something slightly illicit. The Capulet and Montague cousins having a drink outside of Verona.

  When at last I did leave New Jersey for medical school in Madison, Wisconsin, I couldn't believe my fortune, to have classmates again, to have my cadaver, to study the body down to the molecular level so as to come someday to that simple act, both hands to a sufferer's throat, a cool touch to the hot forehead. Although I imagined myself in a clean, well-lit office with state-of-the-art equipment at my disposal, a fleet perhaps of nurses, beyond those trappings I still hoped to end up like old Doc Riley at Moose Lake, the dignified hoary man for whom the little children had parted the way. In my third week at school I met Diana, the girl down the hall. On our first date she spread out her napkin, drew small squares to represent each apartment in our building, and not only
wrote the names of the inhabitants but described their persons, their problems, their liaisons with other residents, and also she told me their pets' names. She had done her research thoroughly, but she seemed to enjoy the fact that I found her work so amusing. "I'm serious!" she protested when I doubted there was a woman one floor up who actually weighed four hundred pounds, kept seven cats illegally, and had reported a UFO landing on Lake Mendota the winter before. She was charmingly petulant. She didn't need anyone to jump-start her for talking, and when I was with her I entered a state of deep relaxation. Her energetic generosity, her sparkly happiness were pacifying to me, but I could see how her zest could be inspiring, too. I had no doubt that she was going to be a fine grade-school teacher. It's usual, I suppose, to believe that our beloved is more of a certain something than anyone else, that she has more beauty or wit or enthusiasm or determination. Sophia had had an enlightened musical sensibility, great powers of concentration, and unusual physical ease.

  Diana, for all her distinguishing virtues and joys, seemed a standout because she loved me more than I deserved. We were both eager for the future and soon were sure of our choices.

  I remember my panic when I'd counted out the money for the ring, and, even so, how her eyes welled up in the moment of presentation. How could I have known that she wanted the one with the two small stones either side of the diamond? "No, I like it, I do, I really do!" she cried into my chest. "I'm just all emotional, I've waited for this for about a million years, for you to come into my life."

  I was sorry that I'd guessed wrong in the jewelry store, and as we walked downtown the next morning--she huddled against me, still weepy--I very much wanted to make the scene right for her. The ring was exchanged, an upgrade made possible by another loan from my father. She wept again, from delight and gratitude, and thus the anecdote of our engagement, of my ineptitude as a shopper, was sealed.

  We have never been unfaithful, not I, and Diana--no, I feel sure that she has not. About fifteen years ago, when I was at a meeting in New York, I went to a concert of an up-and-coming string quartet at Avery Fisher Hall. I don't know what I hoped for, or what I supposed would happen. They were playing some of the early Beethoven quartets. Did Sophia Cooper steal the show because she was the only woman onstage, or because in her black strapless gown she'd come into the kind of beauty everyone would recognize? Gone was the long hair, gone were the glasses falling down her nose, gone her college pudginess.

  Her overbite, her gorgeous malocclusion, was accentuated in her lean face. Even if she'd had a shaved head, and if her vertical overlap had been surgically corrected, I would have known her as she began to play, as she sat on the edge of her chair waiting for the music to take her to the surprise destination. That was the Sophia Cooper I remembered. Afterward, I waited like a schoolboy outside the stage door with a small spray of roses.

  She saw me as the door opened. "Mac?" She came two steps toward me. "Mac Maciver? Is that you?" She set her violin down-

  -her halfmillion-dollar instrument, right there on the pavement--and threw her arms around me. She no longer smelled of the co-op, no longer drenched in the odors of dark sesame oil and boiled kale. She was a woman who wore expensive perfume, who ate not only meat but brains, who used makeup that had been tested on animals. "Mac--oh, Mac!"

  I would have been glad to leave her after that embrace, satisfied with the outcome. But she had time for a drink--plenty of time, in fact, for dinner. Her husband would have gone to bed hours before, falling asleep with the baby.

  The baby!

  "Gabrielle," she said, returning to her violin. "Five months old yesterday. Oh, but you're here! This is wonderful, this is perfect, this is glorious."

  "Glorious," I repeated. The music, I remembered to say, had been transcendent, her playing bewitching.

  "We four were in accord tonight," she said, slipping her arm through mine. "More or less."

  I recall little about the walk to the restaurant, or the food, outside of the cervelle that she ate. It was almost as if we were back in New Hampshire, as if all the years had fallen away and we were again those two young people strolling through the woods down the path to the pond. We'd believed then that we'd been sprung from our families into our own lives. Although the evening is a gleamy blur, I know we did not explicitly discuss the terminal night our senior year, when Louise and I had been rolling around in the dorm bed, squalling like infants. She did ask after my sister, and was pleased to learn that she had a place in the Cleveland Orchestra. It was the mention of Louise that led gracefully into her apology for leaving me abruptly before graduation. She said that she'd always wanted to write to me, to search me out, to conclude respectfully what had been so important to her.

  Those years in New Jersey rose before me, day after day, night after night, the miasma of that time, the mute suffering as I'd tried to heal from her. When I couldn't speak, when I only nodded, she said, "You were such an odd mix, Mac Maciver, of seriousness and exuberance. You were the only uptight hedonist I think I've ever known." With her long fingers she dipped whatever we were eating--oysters, for starters, maybe--into the spicy sauce, and then put the fleshy mass into her mouth.

  "You were serious, too," I managed.

  "I was only serious about my playing, but you--you were quiet and intense about everything, about each of your classes, about baking bread, about buying a pair of shoes, about being learned, about . . . making love. But then you'd sometimes bust out of yourself . . ."

  In the interest of moving the conversation along, I told her that I had been rereading some of her assigned books--not The Ambassadors, no, but Middlemarch again. And she asked did I relate to the character Lydgate, the young ambitious doctor? I wondered if she was actually asking if I, like Lydgate, was trapped by marriage in a backwater with small-minded people. I replied that some of Lydgate's challenges in a provincial hospital were similar to those I encountered, and that the book had much more meaning to me than it had in college. She had set me on my path, and since then, without once communicating, we had read many of the same books. It is well known that there is no greater aphrodisiac, none, than the realization that you and your acquaintance have been reading the same treasured lines at roughly the same time.

  Out on the pavement, she asked me where I was staying. I drew her to me, and in that firm hold, that minute, another, and a little longer, she somehow understood that I couldn't invite her back. "You are beautifully old-fashioned," she said to me as I opened the cab door for her. She kissed me in that unrestrained way I remembered so well. "I do love you still," she murmured, and then the door slammed and she was off.

  It was one o'clock in the morning, and I was walking along Columbus Circle. Madeline appeared before me, Madeline in her mourning over Mikey O'Day. When Mikey had left for Florida, the two of them had understood that they would be able to visit each other. But Mikey was far more a creature of the moment than Madeline. They couldn't very well carry on much of a friendship by phone, so little to say without the actual presence of the other and their old routines. The communication trailed off, and before Mikey could come back the next summer, he'd found another place to sing and, according to Mrs. O'Day, another girl. No matter that girl. In my slightly sad but still exhilarated drunkenness, I would have traded that evening to Mikey and Madeline if such a thing were possible. I would have given them the chance to walk ahead of me to the hotel, where they could, just once, have renewed their old bond.

  WHEN LOUISE AND I WERE BOTH IN COLLEGE, those late summer days when we were packing, my mother would always say to Madeline, "You're going to be my only girl left at home." She said it again before Louise 's wedding, and again, nonsensically, when I married Diana. Buddy was up in Alaska then, and could not get to the ceremony. It was in 1978, during the Carter years, the president my mother rejoiced in and Figgy and Arthur loathed. They abhorred what they called the president's phony homespun graciousness, the undermining of our sense of national identity, the hoax of the energy crisis,
and the pussyfoot approach to rescuing the hostages. We all knew the arguments they would have had if they'd been in each other's company. Diana thought my mother intelligent and fascinating. She liked to tell her relatives about that, how smart Mrs.

  Maciver was. Julia had enjoyed Sophia Cooper the two times she had visited me at college, but I think, despite her progressive thinking, she had the good-wife approach: she knew that in many ways Diana would make a better home for me. She saw how much we were in love, how smitten I was, and trusted that I knew best. If she worried, she didn't let on. She didn't change her tune in our company, continuing to talk as if we all had the same interests, as if we'd listened to the State of the Union Address and were concerned about gas consumption and had run to the library to check out the Pulitzer Prize--winning novel. She and Diana discussed the new math, ability grouping, and children's literature, even though my fiancee was going to quit teaching second grade when we moved back to her hometown. The future Mrs. Maciver was going to try to get pregnant directly after the wedding. She had been told by the family doctor that she might have trouble conceiving because of her irregular periods and her tipped uterus, and she was anxious to get to work on our project.

  "Be good to each other," Julia said to us when we announced our engagement.

  How could we do otherwise? I had studied--so I thought--my parents' marriage. I believed that marital felicity came from lively conversation over a well-prepared dinner, children, reading at night, bed, and, in the morning, work. Marriage should contain those things, and if a person had his health none of it should be too difficult. And what did Diana think? She was thrilled by the idea of being Dr. and Mrs. Maciver, excited by our plans to move to her hometown so we could surround ourselves, on all sides and beyond the sides, by her large and close-knit family, the five brothers and their broods, the three sisters and their children, the parents and grandparents.