When Madeline Was Young

by Jane Hamilton

  Over the weeks she helped her refine her egg-poaching techniques and made her mistress of the coffeemaker. In short order Madeline mastered the art of heating Lean Cuisine to perfection in the microwave, and she learned to sort colors and measure out soap for the laundry. She took wifely pride in her decorations-a pitcher of marigolds on the table, an arrangement of seashell soaps in the powder room. But it was on that first morning that the ground rules were put in place. "Charles, come here," Russia snapped, just after she'd ordered him away. She dictated a schedule to him, leaning over to see that his careful printing was neat enough, and then she affixed the list of seven theses to the refrigerator. "Monday: Dust. Tuesday: Change Sheets. Wednesday: Make Russia Breakfast. Thursday: Wash Clothes. Friday: Clean Sinks. Saturday: Buy Fruit. Sunday: Praise."

  This list, which surely includes all things, which my father read out every morning for his own amusement, seemed to bring the day into focus for Madeline. It made it possible for her to rise in the morning with purpose. She combed her short hair, put on the clothes that she'd laid neatly on the floor the night before, and descended to the kitchen to start the coffee. On Saturdays they went early to the farmers' market in the high-school parking lot, smelling the tips of the melons before they purchased them, and carefully picking out apples from the bins, for Madeline did not like marks or bruises. On Sundays they went to Reverend Hollister's church for praise, and also to feel closer to my mother, as if she might linger there, as if they could be alert to her presence more naturally in that sanctuary. On the weekdays they sat at the breakfast table, Madeline watching the Today Show on the little TV my father had bought, and he reading the paper. It was what retired couples did the world over.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THERE WERE NO CRUISES OR ELDER HOSTELS FOR THE reinstated Mr. and Mrs. Maciver, although they sometimes came to Moose Lake in the summer, when we were all there. They had a routine. A short walk in the morning, breakfast, and sitting on the porch, my father reading, Madeline looking at magazines. They often both had a nap in the afternoon. Madeline stayed in the south bedroom, in the iron bed where, long before, she had been so sick. Diana did what she could to try to fill in for my mother, inviting Madeline to the store, giving her tasks in the kitchen, and they gardened together, the two of them in straw hats out in the overgrown flower beds. In brief spurts Madeline seemed to enjoy digging holes for the flats of annuals and pulling weeds. She had a white cushion she knelt on, and she patted the earth around her plants with real conviction.

  For several years we'd owned Moose Lake with three other Maciver families, running it as a time-share proposition, each of us with two weeks in the summer, and months on end, if anyone wanted, in the winter. Although we could have used the place with Louise, her children were quite a bit older than ours, and they were usually busy with their instruments or at camp. Without cousins for the girls, and without the rule of my grandmother, the estate, even when it was all ours for a stretch, was diminished. I had wanted to carry on the Victorian rules, but somehow that ironclad tradition didn't take. I suppose it was no fun to have rules to break if there was not a band of girls and boys to scheme with. Copulation, I'm sure, did take place in the boathouse, my daughters with their high-school and college beaux. They didn't know what they were missing, didn't know that their pleasure was hardly worth the trouble without the threat of punishment.

  I wondered if for Madeline there was the lingering sense of the romantic days when there had been twenty children, when at dinner there were two long tables on the porch, and the lineup of babies in their high chairs, always someone for her to mother.

  When my daughters were teenagers, they didn't love the lake and couldn't be persuaded to come without their friends. They complained that there was nothing to do. One of my younger cousins had for a time lobbied for a TV on the premises, including a satellite dish and a gaming apparatus, but we elders won the day, much to the girls' disappointment. Tessa was the only child who knew to take up a book. In our weeks, they put on their little suits and tanned on the dock, waiting for me to take them water-skiing. Madeline, in her sleeveless blue cover-up dress that came to her knees, holding her hat to her head, was always the watcher, calling to me from the back of the boat when a girl went down. My daughters were polite with her and formal.

  Madeline was after all a lady in her seventies, the innocence or impassivity in her wrinkled face a strangeness to them. She'd sit on the end of the dock watching them wrestle each other on the raft, those small, muscly, near-naked Amazons. They were part boy, part woman, part beast--hard to say what Madeline thought as she looked on. In the new era, the trunk of Lincoln Logs was dusty in the corner of the living room, and the sheet over the dollhouse never came off.

  There was a bright afternoon when I came upon her at the fire pit. She was squatting, bending over her long haunches, marking in the ashes with a stick. "Miss Madeline," I said, "what are you making?"

  "Don't know." She put her chin to her knee and kept scratching. Nothing to do but make an occasion of it, setting fire to the paper trash already assembled--the two of us, poking at the glowing embers.

  I'VE HAD A FEW real lapses in my adulthood, at least that I can identify. One was the blankness on the day that started with my father's phone call at breakfast, when he announced that my mother had died sometime in the night. I had registered very little through those hours, until suddenly I found myself on my knees behind the bar in the basement. There was another incident like that in Italy, an hour or so when I refused to see the world as it was, stubborn in my unwillingness to take into account what I knew. That time was not a blank, however. If anything, the afternoon was too full of emotion--rich, you might say, with operatic feeling.

  It was 1998, five years past Julia's death. Louise 's daughter Isabel was marrying a boy she'd met during a college program in Rome. Marty Raffin was a solid citizen of the Northwest, a boy who had climbed Mount Rainier several times, pickax in hand up the broad glacier. Not someone you'd immediately think to insert as bridegroom into the cobbled piazza of a dinky medieval town in Tuscany. The couple was going to be married outside of Fiesole, in the garden of a professor they'd befriended in their charmed semester a few years before. It was a small gathering--Louise 's family and ours, the groom's parents, and the three friends who had been able to afford the trip. I'd been surprised when my father, nearly eighty, had said that he and Madeline would come along. In all his collecting expeditions, he'd never been to any of the European cities except to pass through the airports. Before he died, he said, he'd like to add an Italian bird or two to his list--an orchetto, a garletta, a mignattaio--and also to see if the sparrows and wrens, those species that had been brought to the New World, sang differently in the presence of the pervasive smell of garlic. "Not to mention the pleasure of seeing my granddaughter get married," he said. He noted that he still had his own teeth and he could walk and he was not yet incontinent. "Real readiness," he declared, "for travel of any kind."

  We were sitting at a long table in a low-ceilinged peasant cottage of a restaurant in Fiesole, on the night before the wedding, having eaten a meal of such tenderness and simplicity that everyone's present seemed sublime and the future destined to be happy. There had been fettuccine with cream-and-butter sauce, delicately garnished with shaved white truffles, and veal chops cooked with sage and white wine, and asparagus from a northern spring, neither too fat nor too thin, bundled up with prosciutto that had been aged a year and a half, the fine balance of savory and sweet, moist and firm. A bowl of fruit, each glossy strawberry more perfectly ripe than the last. While everyone else had drifted out to the street, into the evening, my father and I sat, two men submitting to Italian-style digestion, grappa as our aid. As we lingered there, I wondered out loud if Madeline had any memory of her European trip, over sixty years earlier, when she'd met the suitor, when her mother had swept her away from Florence. The question was theoretical at that point, something to consider lazily, whimsically, on a full stom
ach. It was poignant, I said to my father, wasn't it, that Madeline had returned here at this stage of her life?

  He untucked his napkin from his shirt and dabbed at his mouth, one side and then the other. "What's this, now?"

  I reminded him that Mrs. Schiller, the first mother-in-law, had taken Madeline to Italy before the marriage.

  "What marriage?"

  "She must have been in high school. Before you and she got married. Your wedding was in 1943, so probably their Italy trip was 'y or so. Before the war."

  I'd never seen him looking confused as an old person will, the brow sharply furrowing, the eyes going vacant even as they narrowed. He was still usually so quick that his befuddlement startled me. "Nineteen thirty-seven?" It took me a minute to realize that his difficulty didn't stem from memory loss, not really. Time had done its work to absorb Madeline fully into our family; it was as if for him she had always been a Maciver, as if there had never been any Schillers.

  "I don't recall that," he said, giving up the search, the frown for the most part easing from his face. "It beats me."

  Madeline was outside, standing by the fountain with the bride.

  They must have been talking about the wedding dress. Isabel appeared to be conjuring it with her fingers, first floating them over her breasts and then her arms widening in the promise of a full skirt. Madeline put her hands to her mouth and laughed, out of sheer delight at how beautiful it was going to be.

  AFTER THE WEDDING, after the sun-drenched day as advertised, and the dark-haired bride sealing her vows in her ivory lace, and another meal that filled our hearts with gladness, after that we spent three days in Florence. My girls--twelve, fourteen, and sixteen--shared a long white room with a close-up view of one small section of the Duomo's intricate marble walls, the jewel box of gargantuan proportions. Every morning they threw open the shutters to the ringing of the bells, and although they'd been woken early they were awestruck instead of annoyed. I liked to think of the three of them and Madeline lying in the starched sheets of their dormitory, waiting for the bells to peal across the city, as close as they'd ever come to being novitiates. They knew better than to ask Madeline to braid their hair, because if it didn't go well, if Madeline got frustrated, it would spoil her morning. But she did some of their preening, one after the next waiting for the in-house beautician to brush and comb and make their ponytails. You could see that she was nervous and excited, taking on the responsibility of hairdresser to the princesses.

  It didn't take long for the girls to figure out the lay of the land, and then they were off, charging across the Ponce Vecchio, to the Boboli Gardens, ducking in here and there to a church or, at the least, a gift shop. Tessa would come back to the hotel with stacks of postcards, Katie with medals of the saints, and Lyddie once with a gutted bird tied at the feet for my father. She'd picked it out from a line of them hanging on a string at a butcher's, and with her head turned away and her arm outstretched she'd handed it to him. He was so pleased, and keen to find a stove and a frying pan, to see how a Florentine sparrow tasted.

  The adults took turns with Madeline, morning and afternoon shifts. She was spry, and for short periods she enjoyed walking, looking at the shopwindows, the tourists, the paintings and sculptures. Over the years she had developed real stoicism, or perhaps it was resignation, an animal patience, waiting, waiting for time to pass. She could sit peaceably at the dinner table while the others talked, for many minutes turning a salt shaker around and around, or rocking, her upper body moving in slow back-and-forths. In our forays into museums and churches, she was drawn to the Baby Jesuses and the Madonnas, if the Virgin didn't look too somber, and she stared unabashedly, her mouth open at the sometimes larger-than-life penises of the statuary. In the Uffizi, she was as transfixed as I by the Botticellis. She couldn't believe how long Venus' hair was, and I think it amazed her the way the tresses so conveniently covered the genitals. She stepped as close as she could to look at the golden locks obscuring the place. When she'd gotten over that part of the painting, she pointed at the feet, at how well Venus was balancing on the lip of the seashell. We'd spend forty-five minutes or so walking slowly through a few of the galleries, sitting for a while to watch the crowds, and then we'd take a break in a cafe so she could have a gelato and I a coffee spiked with Benedictine.

  At one point I found myself walking with her across the Piazza Santa Croce. It was the spot, if I remembered correctly, where, according to Figgy, Madeline had met her swain on his bicycle. That is, one afternoon, after drinking a bottle of Chianti at lunch, I deliberately strolled in that direction with Madeline, arm in arm, just as a mother and son might do on a fine summer day. How Figgy knew about the location of the love moment is hard to say. I can only assume that, once upon a, time Madeline had confided in her, that they had a luncheon, sister-in-law to sister-in-law. Because I had read my Baedeker thoroughly, I knew that geniuses such as Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Galileo, and Rossini had graced the Franciscan church with their bones, that there were splendid tabernacles and sepulchers for their glorious dust. I talked to Madeline about St. Francis as we walked, about his love for animals and the poor. She was the only one in the family who was willing to listen to my lectures.

  Standing at the edge of the piazza, I explained how the people had lived huddled on top of each other in their crammed quarters in the Middle Ages. It was the monks who came up with the idea of the large squares, space for people to gather, for games and conversation. "Just like the alley," I said, "the way it used to be, the boys playing basketball, the mothers discussing their children."

  "Room to play horses," she observed.

  As far as I knew, she hadn't had a horse friend in years, the younger generation on the block no longer building jumps in mud-packed backyards. In the present-day era, there were preassembled play structures pounded into the thick grassy ground, and no one ever in sight. "You remember that, do you?" I said. "Cantering around with the Van Norman girls, whinnying and clicking your tongue?" It was unusual now to hear a basketball thumping in the alley, that noise as constant as a clock ticking the seconds when I was a boy.

  The pigeons were bullying and bobbing for crumbs, and the tourists with their baseball caps and fanny packs jostling us made it difficult to feel much of any kind of past. And yet my heart was racing, to be crossing the piazza with her. She was wearing a light pink dress, sleeveless and straight, feminine and even flattering on her eightyyear-old frame. There was that stillness in her face, her mouth open slightly, the eyes cast down as she dutifully waited for the minutes to pass, waiting for nothing much to happen. Alcohol destroys brain cells in the left hemisphere especially, the seat of language, of logic. Perhaps I was drunk; perhaps the nerve membrane in my frontal lobe had become structurally unstable from years of drinking through dinner. How to account for the suddenness of my feeling, my wish for Madeline to have happiness, to have a jolt of life. I gripped her shoulder as if somehow I could prod her to it. "Madeline," I said. In a time when my brain was probably failing me, I had hope for hers. I can offer little explanation for that hope, that she have access to a scene that had once thrilled her, except to say that after my lunch I was overcome in the shadow of Santa Croce. For just a minute, darling Madeline, become yourself "Madeline," I said once more.

  "I'm okay," she said reflexively.

  I wondered if she'd gone into the church on that day, when she was a teenager, or if the imposing building had served only as a backdrop to the Italian as he rushed to her on his bike. I suggested we go inside, thinking that the nave might somehow be familiar to her. After the conflagration, bike and man and girl, maybe they had gone together into the church and stood looking up at the terrible height of the ceiling, an architectural impossibility. I had often thought about how Madeline's recovery would have been significantly different if she'd been a young bride in the year 2000, if her frontal-lobe syndrome could have been partially treated with neuropharmacology, neuropsychiatrists, and continued rehabilitation. It is c
onceivable that she might have overcome some of her deficits.

  In the enormous cavern of the basilica, we both did grow solemn. Our footsteps echoed, and although the other tourists were trying to be quiet and respectful, even their whispers seemed to ring out into the gloom. I could see that Madeline was spooked, that she didn't want to hear her sandals on the stone, didn't want to move for fear of making noise. It wasn't going to be worth trying to see the Giottos in the side chapels, or the Donatello Crucifix, or the tombs of the great men, and in any case just then I didn't care about the masterpieces. "Should we light a votive candle before we go," I said, "and make a wish?"

  Yes, she would like that. With a mission, with her goal the tiers of guttering candles in their glasses on the far side, she didn't so much care about clacking across the floor. As I dug in my pockets for coins, to make our plea legitimate, she asked the age-old question: "Does it have to be a secret when you wish?"

  "No!" I said. "Absolutely not. I'll tell you what I'm going to wish. Let's see-I might wish that the bride and groom have a long future." My heart quickened again. "Is that too dull?"

  She bit her lip as she thought. "No," she pronounced.

  It had always been impossible to know if the scar tissue had disrupted the network between her hippocampus, the temporal lobes, and their connection to other midline structures, those memory components that must be linked together as a whole for a person to retrieve comprehensible chunks of the past. Still, I had grown certain that Madeline's long-term memory must be intact, that she had gaps in her history only because neither she nor anyone in her household told the stories of her girlhood.