When Madeline Was Young

by Jane Hamilton

  In the heat of anger once, Diana said to me that my parents could not be as happy as I thought they were. I had invented their happiness--as always, I had blinders on, blinders, and couldn't see what my mother and father were.

  "What are they?" I said, thinking of myself as a tired old horse plodding down the street with patches close up to my drooping eyelids.

  "They are--they are--"

  "I know it sounds unlikely, their contentment," I tried to say without whinnying. "I know it sounds impossible to you."

  The handful of Macivers sat up front on the groom's side of the church, as custom dictates: my parents, Russia, Madeline, Louise and her husband, Dale, and their two daughters. Three of the cousins came with their wives, but no Figgy, no Arthur, no Buddy. As Diana came floating down the aisle, blue-eyed and pink, her ringlets on top of her head, I knew there was little to regret. Still, for a minute I was certain I was in cardiac arrest. Just as Buddy had said might happen to him when he married.

  How good it would be to look out and see him there, the drill sergeant reassuring me that my heart would continue to beat. The mass of Hartleys on Diana's side, all of them having given their approval, smiled upon us in our hour of fulfillment. I had learned their rituals, enough of them to know what teams to root for, what meat, what cuts to grill for the gatherings, what kind of jokes would play. I had done my studying, and I might just as well have made a dive into them, mosh pit style, so they could carry me to their home.

  Chapter Fourteen

  IT WAS JUNE 1993, JUNE I t, WHEN MY FATHER CALLED TO tell me my mother had died in her sleep. I thought that he must be mistaken, that he had misread the event he was about to narrate. "I don't believe what I'm saying to you," he began

  "but it appears that Mom died sometime in the night." He spoke as if he were relating an everyday occurrence, as if he were telling me about old Mrs. Lombardo walking her schipperke dog past the house.

  "Sometime in the night? What--where is she?" "In her sleep."

  He's gone mad, I thought. Or else she was having a dream so deep, lying so still in the hush of her fantasy, that the attentive husband was crying, Wolf, wolf! We'd all laugh about his overzealous care later. My mother couldn't be in any mood to die, and in her sleep, too, a squandering of an experience, one she'd like to have while awake.

  "Where is she?" I asked again.

  "Right here in bed. I haven't moved her."

  She was seventy-one, her outrage and interest as sharp as ever, her hair a salt-and-peppery rumble, her face a little rounder than it used to be, her laugh a little looser. She had enough padding to keep that future old-lady osteoporotic hunch at bay, and she was in fine shape, walking two or three miles a morning. It was not possible for her to be dead. All the same, I barked my orders. "I'm going to hang up. I want you to call 911. When you've done that, Father, call me back." She might have suffered a stroke, a cerebral embolism that had paralyzed her, that had rendered her unconscious.

  "Mac," my father said gently, "she was cool when I woke. I've felt for her pulse, I've listened for her heart. There is no life in her."

  When he'd gone through the motions of checking her vital signs for my benefit, he said, "If you can come now, soon, I'll wait to make the call. So you can see her as she is."

  Louise got on the next flight, and I drove down, both of us going home without our families. Diana was already riding a bus to the children's museum with Katie's class and would be away for most of the day. According to the calendar, she had her usual breakneck schedule, dentist appointments for all the girls after school, Lyddie's piano lesson, and the regular Friday-night dinner for her parents. Followed by cribbage club with the sisters and the in-laws. I was grateful not to have to face her: she would absorb the fact immediately, her empathy forcing me to the quick. I put myself in the car, squarely in the seat, in the void of no time, of not yet knowing, not yet, not yet. I would drive on. Although I have no memory of taking care of any work detail, I must have called the office before I left. A death in the family, I might have said, without elaborating.

  I had always imagined her going with a short illness at an advanced age--aging for Julia that would take place without the side effects of senescence. She'd wake one morning with a wildly disseminated cancer, an invasion that had occurred without her notice, with no pain. It was the way to go--diagnosed on Tuesday, dead by Friday. There she'd be, set up in a bank of pillows, her hair spun to an airy white, giving last-minute instructions, and also making a pronouncement that would elevate the past to legend and illuminate our futures. Everything that one wants from the dying.

  Although I didn't yet understand that she was gone, I did know that once the medics came she would be taken from the house.

  That was the evil I could think to prevent. If I had my way, if we could buck the law, I'd insist she be laid out in the parlor for a week, so we could begin to adjust to the idea of her leaving. How I missed the days long before my birth! At the hospital morgue or a funeral-home viewing, she could not very well be herself. For a second I imagined standing with Russia next to the casket, hand in hand, talking quietly about Miz Julia. But that was absurd, too, just as ridiculous as my mother being laid out anywhere or being cremated, cooked down to a paltry heap of dust. According to her wishes, that fistful would be buried in front of the headstone that was already in place at the Moose Lake cemetery.

  To see the body in her own bed was the best I could want in my state of not knowing, the intimacy of her things around her, Julia at the center in her nightgown with the rips in the armpits and the tattered sleeves. If she had to be dead, I reasoned, then she should stay in her room. I could also at least hope for a sense of the ineffable close by. Even those who are not afflicted with religious conviction so often plan in the last moment of their loved one's life, at the last gasp, to see the glimmering of the spirit as it rises up and passes out the window or through the ductwork. I had never felt that breeze or seen the vapor, as some have reported, but I was sure that with Julia, even hours past her death, there had to be--there would be something of her remaining in the air. That is to say, I had the optimism of a person in shock.

  Along the interstate I thought almost nothing of her. It was 1993, after all, the year the Chicago Bulls were playing the Phoenix Suns in the NBA Finals, unarguably the most dazzling games of the century. There happened to be a call-in show on that subject for most of the eighty-mile trip, and yet even at the closing there seemed to be a great deal more to say about the players, their spectacular baskets--so lavishly remembered--the brilliance and stupidity of the coaches through the ages, the salaries, the trades, the tussles on the court. I was sure that Jerry Pindel and the old alley gang, in whatever states they lived, were following the games blow by blow, eager for the inevitable victory.

  Jerry had turned out well by the world's standards, running a high-class resort in Tucson, a job that probably required him to be a showman on occasion. When I drove up the street, I didn't more than glance at the Lemburgers' house, the Rockards', the Van Normans', nor did I look at ours, the new coat of gray paint with the white trim, the evergreens in front gone tall and bushy.

  There was no need to look, when it was so clearly in mind. My father was at the door, in a crisp blue shirt and chinos, his summer work uniform. His hair was wet from the shower, his wrinkled face rosy from his scrub. How peculiar that he had bathed while his wife lay in bed, that he'd taken even ten minutes away from her when there was so little time left.

  "Madeline 's upstairs," he said, embracing me lightly, as if my sister would be my first concern.

  "All right," I said.

  In their room, the spindle bed, the counterpane, the geraniums in their pots, old as trees, the library books stacked on the floor, the white curtains luffing against the screen--everything was in its place. Madeline was lying next to my mother, petting her shoulder. I went to her side and kissed her damp cheek, but she hardly noticed. My mother was on her back, the quilt up to her breasts, her ey
es closed, her mouth slack, Julia Maciver with the still, smooth face of death. An arrhythmia, an embolism, phlebitis? "You can't," I murmured, peeling back the sheet to touch her stiff hand. The blood had begun to pool there, the skin darkening, no stopping, no turning back that lividity. She must have been gone for six or seven hours. "You can't," I said again.

  My father pulled up another chair for me, and we sat watching her, in that watching waiting for our own understanding to come.

  Madeline was making a low drone, a continuous hum, what sounded like a machine in the far distance, an ominous hulk on its way. The noise was a comfort, someone among us knowing what to do. I'm sure my father and I talked about the cause of death and what needed to be done, but I only remember trying to converse with Julia. I admonished her, asking within myself, Why have you done this thing? What are you thinking, to leave us when we're not ready, when we haven't had enough?

  I had been planning on there being entire decades before us when I'd agitate with my mother for her heart's desire. Decades when I wasn't in the thick of child-rearing responsibilities, when I wasn't working long hours seeing patients, decades when the dictates of the Hartleys' holiday regime would somehow have relaxed. Then--oh, then--my mother and I would march on the Capitol for whatever she said, for gay marriage, the family farm, medical marijuana, and, why not, universal health care. When all the battles had been waged, after my father and Madeline were in the grave, she'd come to live with us, spending her remaining strength trying to convert the Hartleys to her party. How the sisters-in-law would look back to their petty rivalries with fondness!

  Louise arrived at the house, pale and dry-eyed, and we continued to sit watching the bed. She was another female who in adulthood had chopped off her long hair, who looked more girlish with a pixie cut. In middle age Louise still had a serious, determined air, no sign yet of mellowing. We talked again about what had killed Julia, a topic that distracted us from her death.

  My father recalled that the week before she'd had palpitations during her morning exercise, but she hadn't mentioned any distress on the following days. I gave an oration on arrhythmias--the prime suspect as far as I could tell--waxing upon tachycardias, bradycardias, flutters, fibrillations, conduction disorders.

  "I wonder," Louise said, before I was quite finished, "if she chose to make her exit without interference from the medical profession."

  I still had my hand in a fist, the crude model of the heart, about to explain what happens when the myocardium fails to contract as a whole. "What?" I said.

  "She might have been fully aware that palpitations are a sign of heart disease, or whatever it is, and decided not to go to the doctor."

  My father nodded twice, considering. "That seems unlikely," I said, as dispassionately as I could. "There's a large family of drugs on the market that suppress ventricular tachycardias. Mom would have known that it was unnecessary to die because she had an irregularity. Implanting a pacemaker, even, is relatively simple. It takes about an hour and is routine--"

  "But maybe she had some deeper knowledge."

  Louise and I had turned to each other, away from Julia. "I don't think Mom was ready to go," I said, "if that's what you mean. I don't think someone as vital as Mom would all of a sudden, because of a few palpitations, decide to give up the ghost. The problem with arrhythmia in our case is that it might not show up in postmortem, but, whatever the cause, we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that Mom was negligent about her health, or that she had an awareness of her own mortality."

  "I'm not saying she was negligent. I'm saying she might have felt there was something wrong with her--maybe palpitations were just the tip of the iceberg--and she believed that her illness should take its course without anyone fiddling. There's great dignity in that approach--"

  "Fiddling? An exam at an office, a prescription? Lu, that's hardly--"

  "Children!" my father called out gaily, as if our squabble brought back the days of our youth, as if nothing could make him happier than our regression. "She may not have been ready," he said, "but how many times through the years has she wished for a swift departure?" Lu and I shifted in our chairs, looking at her again, as if that time she might answer. "Probably," he went on, "she would have returned her library books if she thought she was about to go west. She would have left a casserole or two. But you know as well as I that she didn't want to be strapped to a high chair outfitted with a drool bucket. She was often reminding me that I was to pull the plug without a moment's hesitation. I don't think there's anyone more enthusiastic about euthanasia than your mother."

  Though that might be true, it had nothing to do with the matter at hand. When I looked at her, I could do little to keep my bewilderment at bay. How could she, of all people, have such a sudden lack of consideration? Why hadn't she called me?

  What good was having gone to medical school if I couldn't be of use to her? This death was avoidable, and Louise and my father were wrong to comfort themselves with the idea of a secret wish on Julia's part. That we should be happy for her was absurd; to imagine that her premature passing was a blessing against imaginary illnesses down the road was to disregard wantonly her relish for life. I began to mutter. "I'm sorry for us," I said. "Maybe someday, Father, I can be glad for her, but not now. Not now. She's seventy-one. She's young! None of us are ready for her to go."

  He put his hands to his face. Madeline 's hum grew louder. Louise knelt by him, softly saying, "Father. Father."

  When you looked at her, at Julia Beeson Maciver, really studied her, you could see that she'd never been more at peace.

  Although the body was already at work breaking down, lactic acid flooding the muscles, the wrinkles were gone from her brow, and she did look serene. The skin on her arms seemed paper-thin, a covering that might flutter away with the slightest breeze, as if it couldn't have stood much more wear. Tessa had seen an Indian saint in a Sheraton Hotel in Illinois, and she'd reported that the woman's skin was giving way from hugging hundreds of people, day after day. And that seemed to have happened to Julia, too, all those years holding Madeline, sleeping against her, tucking her in, smoothing her hair, rocking her through a tantrum. Nevertheless, it couldn't be true that she'd grown tired of this world, that she wanted out.

  When the medics came to take the body away, we thought ourselves ready. We'd gotten hungry and had stopped looking at her. It was not as difficult as we anticipated, to pry Madeline from the bed. Her yellow T-shirt was moist, and she was sweetly warm when she buried her face in my neck, that rumbling still going in her throat. When the men were set to move the bag that held Julia through the front door, I found myself gripping the gurney at her feet. They paused as if they had their own reasons for stopping, the need to shift the weight, and one of them scratched his cheek. After a minute. they lifted their load a little higher over the threshold, the signal that they were about to take her from us. When they were gone, I went down the basement and, like the child I'd reverted to, I sank to my old knees behind the bar, that place of refuge. Mother. Beloved. Don't go.

  IT DIDN'T TAKE LONG for word to get out, and by evening we wanted for nothing in the Maciver kitchen. We sat at the table keeping up our strength with butternut-squash risotto, grilled vegetable pinwheels, orecchiete with broccoli rabe, tofu dengaku, slivers of Kobe beef raised in the foothills of Mount Haleakala, and twice-baked potatoes as long as my shoes. There was chocolate cake draped with a ganache that could put out our lights with a mere thimbleful. This was not the standard lasagna and banana bread that circulated in my part of the world in time of trouble. Most of the old neighbors had moved on, and the new couples seemed to have taken up cooking, or at least shopping at high-class delicatessens, rather than rearing squadrons of children. Gardening was the other activity that had replaced wholesale procreation, and they brought flowers from the raised beds in their yards. There was a strange festivity as we ate and the neighbors came and we oohed and aahed over their offerings; and when they left, we reviewed the visit, and t
hrough the conversation and the food the telephone kept ringing, and one of us leapt up, taking the phone to the dining room, trailing the ten-foot cord to tell the particulars again to another shocked relative.

  It might have made sense to ask my father about the early days of his marriage to Julia, but he was so intent on his meal, moving slowly from beef to potato, chewing carefully, as if eating might now take up all of his time. For years I had wanted to hear the family history from him, but I realized, watching his knobby fingers work his knife and fork, and as he made his affectionate comments about the Grove Avenue families of our time, that the story had always been visible, that my parents had lived it fully in our presence, no need to hear him frame it in words. I believe that I have never idealized the marriage, that what I saw was its truth. Her voluble yang to his steady, quiet yin; her calm, knowing yin to his abstracted yang. There was no person he wanted to talk to more than my mother, no greater pleasure than his homecoming to her, night after night. That was what Louise and I had understood through our childhood, that they'd celebrated each other in everyday life, and that their love was the sort that radiated outward. For a while in the 1980s, we'd tried to get our parents to find a group home for Madeline, but to no avail. "This is her group home," my mother had said. My father asked, "Move Madeline so we can do what? Go on a cruise, maybe get to sit at the captain's table? Drive cross-country in an RV? Smoke pot freely now that the children are gone?"

  At some point in the far-off future, they planned to sign up for a retirement community, the three of them, or, if they didn't manage to clean out the house before they fell apart, a nursing facility. When Mikey O'Day left town, my mother had made it a point to keep Madeline busy. Miss Madeline still went to a morning program for the handicapped, and many afternoons she worked for Shelly, the neighbor who ran the beauty salon. Shelly had a cadre of senior citizens who were used to Madeline, who favored her gentle fingers moving through their wet hair before they got their weekly permanents. My mother had reminded us that there were more services for the disabled than there had been when we were growing up. Although none of us said so, I'm certain we'd all thought how Mikey O'Day had been the greatest service, occupying Madeline with his music and his ticket-taking for hours at a time. In her old age, Madeline was a favorite member of the Sunshine Club, an organization that went on trips to the zoo and sponsored holiday parties and dances. It was an ecumenical group-young, elderly, physically handicapped, mentally challenged. Through the years there'd been a few suitors, quiet, odd men who called Madeline on the phone. She seemed to tolerate their entreaties, and she might deign to sit next to this one or another on a trip. That was the extent of the liberties she allowed.