When Madeline Was Young

by Jane Hamilton

  If Julia had been with us, it's possible she might have gotten the idea, a flash for a second or two, sitting through "Sheep May Safely Graze," and then an electrifying rendition of "Amazing Grace" by a mere girl, and from the minister's eulogy, that Kyle Eastman had made a substantial contribution, a valuable contribution to the Republic. Even if you didn't believe in war on general principle, even if you didn't believe in the war at hand-even if you had little use for nation-states. You were nonetheless in the presence of a tradition, the pomp, those somber soldiers parading up the aisle carrying the draped box, we wretches assembled, the ceremony, yes, tugging at your heart, making you feel something that lay hidden within yourself. There it was beating in your blood, a sense of nobility in service, and a love for your imperfect country. We were as the Trojans gathering Hector's white bones from the funeral pyre, the warm tears streaming down our cheeks as we put the remains in a golden chest and shrouded it round and round in soft purple cloths. We were burying the beautiful warrior, the brave hero, who had been sent to war by the machinations of the gods. Why not call it that? If you closed your eyes, if you let yourself fall into the collective sadness, you might start to believe that Kyle had not died in vain, that his sacrifice had meant a great deal; you might think it possible that he was meeting his Maker. You might, if you hadn't slept much and were feeling dizzy, you might imagine the streets of Baghdad, the pavement glittering, the mosques rising up white and holy, the American servicemen and -women flowing into the city in their armored Humvees to liberate-Diana poked my leg. "What are you doing?"

  I opened my eyes, astonished for a second by the light. "You were swaying," she whispered.

  "Is he okay?" Tessa asked.

  There was the reading by the energetic young pastor of the last letter, Kyle's just-in-case letter. Kyle had written that he would always be with his family and they with him. He'd addressed each sibling. Little Squirt. Tippy. Gongo. Pep. "Little Squirt, keep your eye on the ball. You're going to get past eighth grade, and believe me life is going to look up. Tippy, dance like no one's looking. You know the drill. Love like you've never been hurt. Gongo, mess up your room sometimes, it won't kill you. I hear you playing the piano in my dreams. Pep, Pepper, don't ever lose your spice. Remember, there's no basement in the Alamo!" To Joelle, "You're the kindest, most beautiful, the greatest mother in the world. Where do I start? From the smallest things like doing the coloring on my school projects to the bigger ones, sticking up for me in Principal Borg's office. You are my angel, looking down on me." For Buddy there was this: "Dad, you've always been there for me, always shown me the way, always got me to do my best. You've never let me down, something I know now is pretty impossible to pull off. Whether I live or die I can never thank you enough."

  In the front pew, Buddy must have had his head in his hands, feet apart, elbows on his thighs. The only visible part of him was the hunch of his upper back. The minister waited a decent interval before he went on. "How many young men," he then cried out, "how many young men are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, as our Kyle was? A young man who knew the price of liberty, who believed that others should know the glory of freedom, the goodness of great love-and this work, this work, my friends, when it is done, when it is finally done, will be a magnificent thing, a creation of freedom and Godliness, a mosaic that will have as its part the bright, shining colors of Kyle Eastman."

  When he was finished, Buddy's seventeen-year-old daughter, Vanessa, aka Gongo, marched to the grand piano at the side of the altar, sat herself down, and played Schumann's "Arabesque." She reminded me of a young Louise at her cello. How had Buddy produced a girl with Louise 's focus when two of my daughters had complained bitterly up through "Hot Cross Buns" on their tonettes? Lyddie, the most advanced, used to play tinkly Disney songs on the piano, the kind of music that adheres to the skin, that causes moles to change.

  Before the benediction, the long notes of "Taps" filled the white space of the sanctuary. The bugler stood near us in the back, his horn tilted upward, his eyes fixed yonder. There was again the sense that we were part of no ordinary tragedy but one infused with majesty. It is not often that a person encounters majesty outside of scenic views-the mountain peaks in the distance or enormous animals in the wild. On that day those simple intervals, the bugler holding the notes longer than seemed humanly possible, made all of us sit straighter even as tears welled in our eyes.

  When the service was over, just after the casket came back up the aisle, Diana took me in hand. Without waiting for all the other rows to process out of the sanctuary, front to back, she followed behind the Eastmans so that we might be among the first to greet our relations.

  "We have virtually cut in line," I remarked.

  "We've come from far away and we're family," she explained. "We should have been sitting up there with them instead of being stuck a million miles from the pulpit." Down a ramp we went, into a spacious parlor that could have been a motel lobby or a clinic waiting room. Home away from home with the ficus plants, the blond wood, the paintings of fruit, the muted colors of the upholstery, hues for quiet suffering. The cross hanging above the bank of windows was the only ecclesiastical touch. Against the stretch of glass and light, the Eastmans were waiting for the assault. "Joelle," Diana said, moving toward Mrs. Eastman with open arms. "I'm Diana Maciver, and this is Mac."

  "Diana!" Joelle cried. "Where were you? My gosh, I didn't know you were here! You should have been sitting with us!"

  "We're just so glad to be with you," Diana murmured, sure to catch my eye before she embraced the grieving mother. The way the women looked long at one another, and embraced again, made me wonder if they'd been having reunions on the sly, get-togethers through the years without the stick-in-the-mud husband. Familial adultery, sneaking off to be with your in-laws, the cousins you profess not to know.

  "I'd recognize you anywhere, Mac," Joelle said, smiling with radiant sincerity. "It is a blessing to see you."

  We had to greet Joelle's parents and her sisters before we reached Buddy. "Put her there," he called out, plowing into me.

  "Put her there!" I echoed. We had never said such a thing to each other before. "Put her there" had been an expression our fathers used. No matter; I knew he was Buddy because he still smelled of Old Spice, a loyal servant to his brand, a fragrance possibly worth fighting for. How sweet the air.

  "Thanks a million, Brains," he said, when we'd separated. "I can't tell you how good it is to see you. It means so much, your coming down-whoa! Who's here? Which Maciver is this beautiful, beautiful girl?"

  "I'm Tessa." She offered her hand to him. "I'm extremely sorry for your loss. I'm also very pleased to meet you."

  "Thank you, honey." He bent to kiss her cheek. "You are gorgeous. I can see that, inside and out."

  There were raucous introductions all around of the second cousins, Vanessa rushing at Tessa as if they, too, had participated in the clandestine reunions. Because Diana had been talking to one of Joelle's sisters, she was late to our love-in. "And here's Mrs. Maciver!" Buddy said to Diana. "The woman Mac has kept me from all these years." Hug, hug, hug. "We meet at last."

  "At last," she breathed.

  Surely after that was done, after we had performed our parts so well, we could be excused, we could shuffle out the door and go home. "Come," my wife said to me, "have a brownie." There were bite-sized cakes with white frosting and yellow crosses, and also larger chocolate squares with meticulously frosted American flags, each one requiring a baker's dexterity and patience. I didn't feel that I should eat either a religious dessert or a patriotic one, and I could see that Tessa was faced with the same dilemma. Diana had sped to the coffee urn and was unavailable for guidance. "How hungry are you?" I asked my daughter.

  "This seems worse than eating the head off the chocolate bunny at Easter," she whispered. "But I'm starving! We have to have enough nourishment to make it through the burial, right? This whole thing is the weirdest experience I've ever had. It's so unbelievab
ly sad and also it's--"

  "You'd better eat."

  She bent low to inspect the offerings. "I wouldn't want to offend Jesus in case he actually is the deity, but, on the other hand, maybe this place has cameras on us, and the administration is watching to see who will commit a crime against our flag. There will be shock and awe right here in Fort Bragg."

  I decided to play it safe, taking a teaspoon of cashews and a teaspoon of mints on my saucer. She was still deliberating, asking, "Am I more frightened of God or my country? God or country?"

  "Not so loud," I muttered.

  She reached for a white cake with a cross. "My country," she said out loud. "Far more scared of my country."

  rr HAD RAINED the night before, a downpour in a season of heavy rains, and the earth was still soggy, the air steamy; the puddles shone on the pavement between the rows of graves. There had been drought for a few years, but even so to some the mess seemed an insult, a heartless additional trouble. The procession to the cemetery had been slow, the line of cars extending for well over a mile. There were .5 people in a deep circle around the hole that had been readied for Kyle. When it came time to fold the flag, Joelle began to sob, the final moment, the last keepsake in its intricate turning, this way, that way, the handing over of what remained. Buddy, with the flag pressed to his chest, took his wife's hand and placed it over his own at the center of the bundle. There was then the ear-shattering and heart-stopping twenty-one-gun salute. It was a tradition, I later learned, that had begun as the signal to halt the fighting in order that the dead could be shoveled from the battlefield. Three volleys indicated that all was clear underfoot so the fighting could resume. From his formal army portrait on the easel in the church, in cap and uniform, Kyle looked to have been a youth with a clear face and a thick neck. I hadn't been able to glean much more than that from the photo. He had had his mother's jaw and mouth, his father's green eyes. The coffin was lowered into the ground, inside it whatever parts of him his unit had been able to retrieve from the blast. The torso, connected to the partial skull by a thread of muscle, perhaps, a shattered leg, the humerus that had been found a block away. That night, Buddy would say that serving in the army had been Kyle's dream from the time he was two years old.

  They lived in a large house off the base, in an old neighborhood of Fayetteville. Diana admired the walnut trim and the fireplaces, the mail-order Persian rugs, the many tiered prisms of the dining-room chandelier, the generous pantry with the glassed-in cupboards, and a long counter for the juicer, the espresso machine, the six-slot toaster, ditto that number of spaces in the egg poacher, and down the line the waffle iron and panini press. By the looks of the equipment, the Eastman family was fed well and variously. The dark wood and red cast of the fireplace bricks were reminiscent of the Moose Lake house. I had never talked with Buddy about the lake, never asked if he had minded being cut out of the property when Figgy sold her shares. The Maine island had been sold, too, nothing left for him but cold cash, nothing to do but rent a cottage year after year on the Outer Banks, a place that would not feature our grandfather's butterfly collection, the motheaten buffalo skin in the parlor, the photographs of the Macivers from the present back to the 1880s.

  Joelle excused herself from the gathering to give us a tour of the house, including the refinished attic where Robert, the thirteen-year-old, was playing a computer game called Battlefield Vietnam. He hadn't lost his baby fat, or maybe his soft round face, his pudginess, was the result of inactivity. With an exercise regiment he would come to look like his father, complete with the matinee-idol lips. Although I am sometimes still incredulous, I know I was of sound mind in the room with leather couches and a white ropy carpet, a large-screen TV, and a blue exercise ball: I was not hallucinating. I asked what the game was called, and one of the friends sitting nearby told me. I asked him a second time, to be sure. The women went on with the tour, and I stayed to watch Robert maneuver a swift boat through enemy waters, ducking the fire coming at him from a team in cyberspace.

  "Well done," I said.

  He did glance away, did look up at me to accept the praise. "Thank you."

  "Your dad was in Vietnam."

  "First Logistical Command," Robert said, turning back to the screen. When he hit his target he cried, "Sweet!" As if he had anticipated my next question, he said, "Dad gets a kick out of this game."

  It was out of long habit that I continued to remember things to tell my mother, and I noted that detail for her as I went down the narrow stairway. Maybe Robert was in shock from his brother's death, and the computer a place to hide, to rest. That is, I was trying to think of ways to justify the game to Julia. Was a computer war game any different from our old evening ritual in the neighborhood, running around with cap guns in our holsters shooting at each other? Those of us who were not allowed toy guns made do with sticks. Like Robert, we got what may have been an important thrill from the terror of capture and our capacity for killing; maybe we were learning to connect with the story of humankind. To love, Julia, to love means we must kill!

  On the second floor, in the master suite, Diana was again holding Joelle in her arms, both of them teary. I wondered if Joelle felt unequivocal about Kyle's sacrifice, if she was as sure as her pastor of its worth. When I came back from the bathroom, the women were wiping their eyes, so glad to find that they owned some of the same brands of clothing, in one room had the same valances, and did the same yoga video in the morning, their guru an Oriental man, shirtless on TV, with enviable pectorals and a black braid to his waist. I had never known, until that day, what a valance was, that we had several on our windows, and that Diana followed a guru. Was it Buddy's wisdom and advice from years past that had made me marry a woman who was similar to my cousin's wife? He himself later said, "We married clones, Brains, how do you like that? Look how they're jabbering at each other." They did seem to be furiously trying to make up for lost time. "Don't you," Buddy said heartily, "don't you just love

  'em?"

  He and I sat in the backyard as night fell, drinking my gift of Leinenkugel, the Wisconsin beer he had started me on so long ago. He had changed from his uniform into civilian clothes, into a new sports coat that was slightly less stiff than his army jacket. Kyle's old friends moved in and out of our conversation, many of them giving testimonials to their classmate, telling us how Kyle never lost his courage, never failed in his resolve to serve his country, never lost his idealism. One of his oldest playmates, a boy who'd flown in from Texas, spoke about how Kyle understood the responsibility of freedom. "He felt it here,"

  he said, striking his palm to his heart. "He knew there had to be those who are willing to fight. He knew there are so many who won't make the ultimate sacrifice."

  I was surprised by how little Buddy said. The standard lines seemed to hold no interest for him. He was eating a pile of barbecued chicken wings and drinking his beer, nodding on occasion. I'm not sure he was really listening. Out of habit, it seemed, the friends tore into Bill Clinton, bandying around the details as if they were still fresh, the cigar, the girl, the stain on the dress, as if their hatred was an important part of our history. At one point Buddy did hold forth, giving a short oration about how difficult it was going to be to bring democracy to the Muslim nations, and how those people yearned for freedom. For an instant he spoke with an evangelist's fervor, breathing into the word "yearn," drawing it out. He talked about freedom as if it were a material thing, an item to own, an object that, if you could just put your hands on it, you'd have. "Once they get it," he said, shaking his head, "once they get it, they'll see."

  He seemed to have spent what energy he'd had left after the service on that brief speech. He finished his seventh or eighth beer, and, nudging me, he said, "Let's get out of here, Brains." He tipped the bottle back to get the last drop. "Excuse us, boys.

  Help yourself to the Leinenkugel, all the way from Wisconsin, in the cooler there. It's a very special brew, very special." As we were going out the gate he said to me,
"Quick, before the dogs see." The two St. Bernards, Saint and Sinner, did not like their master to stray far.

  Through the neighborhood we went, past the solid stucco and clapboard three-story houses, houses that graced old suburbs the country over, houses that surely always must shelter children who play musical instruments, and parents who read books.

  There were halos around the street lights, the air was thick with the smell of the wet August vegetation, the heavy balls of hydrangeas drooped over the lawns, the phloxes and conefiowers and lilies were dashed by the rain. I stepped carefully around the puddles while Buddy sloshed through without seeming to notice. He asked desultory questions about the cousins, the condition of the Moose Lake house, and my work. He was neither nervous nor engaged, but he listened well enough to comment. "Corporate America. It's going down. Down the tubes."

  "Seems like it," I said.

  When I remarked that he had interesting, talented, and caring children, he muttered absently, "Yep, yep, aren't they great?

  They're great." Out of relation to anything we'd been talking about, he said, "You know why I re-enlisted, don't you?"

  "Re-enlisted?"

  "Why I re-enlisted."

  "No, not really. That always seemed something of a mystery. I do remember my father saying you were well suited to the job."

  "Well suited. That's a good one."

  "Why did you?" I asked.

  "I was lucky to be in support positions, basically a desk job the second time around. I'm not saying I didn't work hard. I'm not saying I wasn't important to the effort. You do end up having some guilt about being in safe spots, though. You can end up thinking you're chicken shit."