When Madeline Was Young

by Jane Hamilton

  As far as I could figure from Figgy's sketchy anecdotes, Madeline had had post-traumatic amnesia after the accident, her short-term memory, as usually happens to the brain-injured, coming back slowly, within a month or two. If she had merely repressed her early years, then perhaps being in the piazza, in the church would trigger the moment with the Italian, just as the famous madeleines had given Proust his flood of recollections. All that had been lacking in Madeline's life up to this point was a simple trip to Italy! It wasn't a moment too soon for an old lady who might be suffering from standard forgetfulness. If there was magic to be had in all the world, wouldn't it take place in a country where saints still performed miracles from the grave, where St.

  Januarius' blood, for example, dried and preserved, turned into a liquid when it was brought near a certain holy statue? Not only did it liquefy, not only did it froth, it bubbled. Therefore, I said, "I've changed my mind. I think I'll wish that you, Miss Madeline, that you remember something that once brought you joy. Long ago, so long ago you might not ordinarily remember.

  How about that?"

  Did I feel foolish saying so? Not at all, not then. I handed her the taper, and she touched it to her wick. Perhaps now, midway through the first decade of the new century, we have to be too alert to entertain mystical experiences, but in Santa Croce, before the millennium, I very much wanted one. She had a faraway look I thought might possibly mean something. "I wish," she pronounced with great seriousness, and also, it must be said, genuine altruism, "that the bride looks like an angel. Forever and ever."

  "Angel?" I whispered. What was it that the Italian had said to her when he'd nearly run over her on his bike? "At this moment-I see in the piazza the angel." Was it a coincidence that Madeline was speaking of angels, or did she in fact remember? Her saying so couldn't have been prompted by the angels everywhere in Florence, the cherubim and seraphim in the churches, the museums, on postcards, on the walls of the restaurants, on packets of tissue, on the wrappers of chocolate. How many hundreds of annunciations had we seen? She was surrounded by lovely winged women of great purity, but I was certain in the moment that none of those images had superficially affected her. She remembered. I knew she remembered.

  I lit my candle, restating my desire. "I wish that Madeline remembers something forgotten, something that once brought her a great happiness." Let her basal forebrain bloom with acetylcholine-producing neurons, those that are essential for memory.

  And then what? Let her remember, and let that happiness remain within her, neither fading nor becoming sour; let there be that miracle, too, that the joy remain fresh.

  We both stared at the slender white flame for a minute, both of us, maybe, expecting a scene to appear out of the small bit of fire. When that didn't happen I said, "Let's go out and sit on the steps a minute. Let's go see what we see."

  "See what we see," she echoed.

  Once we were on the shady end of the stone steps, when we were sitting, looking out into the square, I asked, "Have you ever been here before?"

  "Yeah." She said so dully, the way she often did when she didn't know the answer.

  I wondered if the man, let us call him Giorgio, was still alive. He would also have been in his eighties, and perhaps he still lived in Florence, above the leather shop that his sons now managed. Maybe he was one of the elegant elderly gentlemen sitting outside in front of a cafe, having his coffee, his cane resting against the table. If he looked up at Madeline, would he have a jolt? Would he see that essential divinity in her still? In order to help her get back to 1937 I had to try to find out where her memory easily started. She had access to Mikey O'Day and the horse-jumping era, and so maybe I could nudge her backward.

  "Do you remember when Lu and I were little, when you chased us around the circle downstairs?"

  "Russia made me take a nap!" She pouted. "I was too old for a nap."

  "Of course you were. But you had to, because everyone did what Russia said."

  "She was mean to me."

  "She was bossy, that's true. But she always said you were the prettiest girl. Do you remember that?"

  "Prettiest girl," she repeated, brightening.

  "Do you remember a long time ago, a very long time ago, when you were in high school, when you went to Evanston Township High School?"

  "Yeah," she said again.

  What question could I ask for the miracle? Did you use to like to ride a bicycle? Did you ever meet a man who was riding a bike? Do you remember the severe woman who wore the ostrich plume in her hat? Not the person you called Mother who died five years ago, but that other mother, Mrs. Schiller? When, incidentally, did you begin to call Julia Maciver Mother? I put my arm around her and kissed the cheek that was covered with fine down, and then I drew away and said it right out. I said, "At this moment-I see in the piazza the angel."

  She sat idly scratching her leg, squinting up at the sun as it started to come across us.

  "Tessa caught Isabel's bouquet," she said. "I wanted to, but Tessa got it before me."

  "And then Tessa divided the flowers so you could have some of them. Lyddie, Katie, and you all got roses." It had been wonderful of Tessa to realize that Madeline was hoping for the bouquet.

  She wrinkled her nose as if a bad smell had come her way. "But I wanted to catch it."

  "I did, too," I said.

  She bent over her lap. It took me a minute to realize she was laughing. "They-they don't-don't let . . . boys catch the bouquet!"

  She lifted her head to stare at me, and then she laughed again, the sound starting down in her throat and hitching upward.

  "That's funny! B-boys don't catch the bouquet."

  I stretched out my legs and let the sun shine full on my face. Perhaps there were going to be no miracles for Miss Madeline, at least not today. The magic of winter to spring was no doubt less intricate than Madeline's finding one small memory from her youth. Maybe it was in an effort to redeem myself that I began to talk, or maybe even before I started I knew that it was up to me to give her what she couldn't make on her own. "Long ago," I said, "there was a girl walking in the hot afternoon, by herself, across this piazza. Coming from over there-do you see?-from the Borgo dei Greci, a boy was running an errand for his father, on his bike. The piazza was empty because most of the people in Florence were taking their siesta. But he came riding across and he saw the girl. They were the only two people awake in the city." It was important to outfit the heroine, and I said with absolute confidence, "She was wearing a white dress with a full skirt, and a straw hat with a blue ribbon that went down her back. It was fluttering a little, in the breeze. She had left her mother in the hotel and was glad to be by herself, just this once, to walk along the streets looking at everything without someone explaining the details, this dead saint, that dead saint, such-and-such who was a famous artist, what's-his-name who was burned at the stake. She was tired of history. When the boy saw her, he stopped his bike. He had to put his feet down on the pavement so he could stare at her without falling over."

  "Why?" Madeline said.

  "Because"-I looked at her; I gazed upon her-"because she was beautiful. She was more beautiful than anyone he'd ever seen.

  The beauty," I added for moral purposes, "came from deep within her. But she was walking, walking, and if he didn't ride to her she'd be across the piazza and down a side street and he'd never see her again. He rode as fast as he could, faster than he needed. He was so worried he'd lose her he couldn't stop, he had to leap off his bike and catch her--otherwise he would have slammed right into her. 'Signorina! Signorina!' He didn't know much English, and it sounded strange to her, funny, the way he talked as he helped her up. 'Sorry! Oh, sorry--I feel more sorry, I--you, tell it to me that you are are all smooth--that you are no hurt. Tell it to me that you are joy.' She studied his face for a minute, the dark brown of his eyes, his mouth, as finely cut as the sculptures she'd seen. She found she couldn't speak. She was looking at him and she couldn't--not right away--tell him, 'I am j
oy.' "

  Madeline was staring out into the center of the piazza. "Did they get married?"

  "Yes. Her mother could see that they were in love, and so she gave her permission. They had their wedding--"

  "Was her dress like Isabel's?"

  "Exactly like it."

  "Oh," she said, scratching her leg again. "That's good." She nodded. "That's good."

  After a while we made our way toward the Piazza della Signoria. For the first time I understood why Figgy had considered Madeline 's Italian episode fit for an adult listener, and also why she delighted in telling it. "You can live other lives in stories," I tried to explain to Madeline as we walked. "For a minute you can go back to a beginning. You can . . ." What I meant beyond that dribble, what Figgy had shown me through the years, was the pleasure of lingering in a single moment of possibility.

  Instead of bringing up that idea to Madeline, or introducing her to the theory that all time is happening in every moment, I said,

  "There are always so many what-ifs. If the girl hadn't escaped from her mother. If the girl had decided to walk up to San Miniato instead of across the piazza. If the girl hadn't been wearing that white dress. If the boy on the bike hadn't had to run an errand at that moment for his father."

  "The boy on the bike," she repeated. And then, in a remarkable, a stunning flash of insight, she said, "Was the mother mad?"

  I stumbled and had to clutch her. Madeline, oh, Madeline, yes, yes!

  The mother was furious, she was enraged. "Was she angry?" I asked, slowly, slowly. "Maybe at first. Probably. It might have taken her a while to come around. In the end she was sorry to give her daughter up but she was thrilled for her, too. She knew she had to let her go, let her go off into her own life."

  When we came from the narrow street into the open, I spotted Lyddie, Tessa, and Katie, the three of them in their summer dresses standing by the Fountain of Neptune. Three long-haired blond girls, flushed from the heat, with change in their purses.

  I grabbed Made-line's hand again. It was involuntary, my crying, "Look! There they are!"

  At that moment I would have been so glad for each of my girls to meet her own Florentine young man, each in his turn the most handsome. Lyddie, Tessa, and Katie swept up by Guido, Fabrizio, and Carlo right before us at the fountain. I would go back to the hotel and tell Diana that the marriages had taken place, that the girls were set, that before them lay years of golden sunshine and olive harvests and dark-eyed babies.

  Chapter Sixteen

  BUDDY'S SON KYLE WAS BORN IN 1982 AND DIED IN 2003, SO mused Tessa one night at the kitchen island before we went south. "He lived from the Apple Ile to the iPod. Isn't that incroyable?"

  Chef Maciver was serving a cheap but not terrible South African Sauvignon Blanc, a wine that had a rich, bouncy finish. Since my underage daughter weighed 105 pounds, she'd gotten tipsy in no time.

  "He lived from AIDS to Ebola! From indie rock to hip-hop and teen pop. From Dynasty to Six Feet Un- Oh, my God!" She clapped her hand to her mouth. "Six Feet Under!" The fountain of cultural history remained plugged for a moment.

  Kyle had been twenty-one years old for a few months, glad at last to be legal.

  Tessa took another swallow and then rattled on happily. "It would be interesting to meet someone who's part of the army. I don't have any idea what that's about. Not to mention seeing my gene stock. Are all the Eastmans going to join the military, every single one of Buddy's kids? Do you think? What if they all get blown up? There were families in the Civil War that lost all their sons, entire towns that were-"

  "Tessa," I said firmly, about to remind her that a slightly drunk girl should be able to show respect.

  "Something else you don't realize," Diana called, coming through the swinging doors of the pantry, the one feature of our kitchen that makes me feel as if I'm in a Western, as if Diana might draw her pistols out of her holsters. "Don't you understand?

  Buddy would be honored for you to be there."

  "Fort Bragg is the base where four men killed their wives during a six-month period," my daughter went on in her instruction.

  "Did you hear about it? I wonder what your cousin has to say about that scandal?"

  "Were they convicted?" I asked.

  "Now you get intrigued by Fort Bragg," Diana said, as if murder, as if uxoricide, had always been my primary interest.

  And so, another funeral. Though it's true that in adulthood there has been little reason for Buddy and me to stay in touch, and that, further, in middle age a person begins to scale back, conserving energy for pastimes that matter most, I admit that seeing him in North Carolina, the mere sight of him, and in his dress uniform, too, gave me a shock. It was a pleasure I would never have anticipated. He was standing in the parking lot at the back of the church when we drove in, next to the hearse. The sergeant first class was wearing his navy-blue coat with gold buttons and roping, his insignias and decorations on the lapels and at the breast. His cap had a gold emblem that even from a distance stirred a person to think of lionhearted conquerors and the ceremony of their homecoming.

  From the comfort of our cool, clean rental car, it was Diana who said, "There's Buddy!" She who had never met him.

  "Which one?" Tessa loomed between the front seats. She might *have been about to go to a cocktail party in her sleeveless short black dress and the heels that would surely make her a long-term patient of a podiatrist. Her vanilla-flavored perfume had required me to crack the window.

  The pallbearers were gathered around, and he had his hands on two of them, on their shoulders, as he dispensed directions or consolation or thanks. "Buddy's the one in charge," I said, gesturing in his direction. My own kind, despite the fact that we had no interests, no aesthetic, no values in common. My littermate, a member of the tribe. I might have liked to stand next to him, stand, that's all, breathing in, breathing out. How unexpected affinity is! From twenty yards away, his compact athletic form brought on that old frisson of both danger and safety. Because hadn't he always protected us? Even as he led us toward peril, we always knew that Buddy would shield us from trouble.

  The church was one of those modern white barnlike structures with cushioned pews, enough space to seat two thousand.

  Figgy had once told me that it was Joelle who was the Holy Roller in the family. Buddy went along with her for the holidays but apparently was independent enough not to have become born again. I am still unclear of the denomination; I don't know what warehouse-proportion generic evangelical is called, and with a touch possibly of Pentecostalism, a tolerance for but not wholesale encouragement of glossolalia. Inside the building there was no gloom, no hush, and no sense of an age-old story.

  The few stained-glass windows were abstract, decorative rather than instructional. There was so much light and space, all an emptiness, that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a drive-through window for the quick-fix, for a gobble of pastoral intimacy.

  I tried to imagine what Buddy would think about on his forced marches to church, if he ever reflected in that arena upon his sins or the grace of salvation. Was he, I wondered, ever tempted?

  We were early and able to watch the place fill from the spot I chose, I insisted upon, in the back. As is my habit, I counted the crowd, eight hundred or so mourners by the start of the service, a staggering number of people to know. Joelle's prayer circle, Moms in Touch, were up front, in a space reserved for them; they had networked with other chapters of Moms in Touch across the country to pray for Kyle and the Eastmans. Buddy, Joelle, and the four children appeared in the foyer, readying themselves to walk behind the casket. Joelle looked just as she had for years on the Christmas cards, stately enough to do a swimsuit competition but also sweetly pretty, a blond puff framing her face, her diamond earrings twinkling through, all as befits a kindergarten teacher. Any self-respecting fiveyear-old would fall in love with her at first sight. She had her arms around the two younger daughters while Buddy, from behind, whispered into her hair. The oldest da
ughter rested her head on her brother's shoulder. That private family moment shut out those of us who were looking on, made us turn back in our seats to face the pulpit. I assumed that, the formal rules for a military funeral notwithstanding, Buddy could have elected to be a pallbearer, and that he had opted to walk instead with his family, to be one of them, to offer them his comfort.

  Or perhaps it was he who needed them. When I happened to glance around once more, he was looking at me. My cousin, I now saw, was no longer bronzed. He had let himself go pale like the rest of us, his face flat without the old color. Of course his hair was thinner, of course, and what was left was faded.

  Buddy!

  He was staring at me, motionless, his eyes glazed. And then he put his cap back on and smiled, one corner of his mouth spreading upward, such a rueful expression I wondered if I'd been mistaken, if that man was actually my childhood playfellow.

  I raised my hand, and although he couldn't hear I did say his name. He nodded as if he'd understood my meaning before he turned back to his group. He had kept us safe in the time of our quaint dereliction at Moose Lake, but he had failed his son: Buddy, it came full upon me, had lost his boy.

  At the appointed hour, the soldiers carried the coffin down the aisle-no wheels for those warriors. They also wore navy-blue dress uniforms, with white gloves and dark caps. They must all have only that morning had the same barber shave them to exact specifications, so that in their line from the rear you saw the square of those nearly bald heads and their clean ears and the caps sitting high on their crowns. Tessa's mouth fell open, in awe of that precision. That their solemnity seemed permanent was probably meant to be a solace.

  Figgy was alive but no longer herself, in a nursing home in Washington, D. C., a place, Buddy would tell me, providing the finest care money could buy. A few years before, she'd suffered a stroke, losing both speech and motor control. She no longer seemed to recognize Buddy when he visited. Arthur had gone quickly, of pancreatic cancer, in 1999. During the funeral, I imagined that my mother had returned. As Diana did, she, too, would feel the pressure to be present at the family event, no matter the obstacles or the length of the journey. Especially in view of the fact that after all the talk none of the other cousins had made the trip, and because she had always had a soft spot for Buddy. Diana, I knew-as I suppose I had from the start-had been right to urge me to come, to be part of the ritual that renews our dedication to the past.