When Madeline Was Young

by Jane Hamilton

  "Chicken shit?"

  "You're probably going to tell me that I served, that I'm still serving, I shouldn't have any cause for psycho-bullshit. Sure, I'll buy that. The army then, the army now, it's as fucked up as any organization. It was a screwy time, all those guys at the base, some of them losing their marbles. That energy, the waiting around, it just about kills you." He crossed the street without looking to see if a car was coming, as if we were on a continuous path that wouldn't have any obstructions. "The thing is, you're decked out as a soldier, but you're the one guarding a collection of shitty hooches pretty much out of earshot of the fighting. You're the one sending the grunts canned beans for what could be their last meal. It seemed the least I could do, turn around and sign up again, pay my pound of flesh in time."

  "You were decorated," I pointed out.

  "Yeah, I had a moment. During Tet. We almost got our heads blown off, a bunch of us. No one expected it-on a holiday, for Christ's sake, the lunar fucking new year. It was the kind of thing, it happens, you don't even remember much of it. You're going on instinct, working blind. I figured I was going to die, so I'd better make my mother proud."

  "You knew what to do and you had courage." I had told him that kind of platitude before, and usually with the hope that it didn't sound patronizing. I didn't mean it to now, in any case.

  "Tet gave me a good taste of combat. I fucking proved myself. So-fine. Bully for me. Stuff happens, the wailing of a woman, of a kid-I'm not going into it. Because you can't really tell someone about it, know what I mean? Don't worry, I'm not about to be all sensitive on you, I'm not going to have a movie-quality Vietnam-vet breakdown. You probably kill people every other day, right, Brains? A few too many aspirin in the IV drip?"

  We haw-hawed.

  "The thing is," he said again, "you've got everybody's idea of yourself as a soldier to uphold. That Silver Star made my mother wet her pants. Why come back Stateside to be a fuckup?"

  "You weren't a f-"

  "But Kyle, see, Kyle was different. He had real guts, my boy did. He put himself in situations-" We'd turned a corner, and without looking he said, "Nice houses, huh? Nice place to live."

  "Very nice," I said.

  "That kid was committed, that kid. Never seen anything like it. After the Twin Towers, he says to me, he says, 'Dad, I'm going to fight for what I know is right. I love this country.' My kid says that to me, how are you going to argue? There's nothing you can tell him. I'm trying to talk him out of enlisting, I'm thinking, What the fuck can I say? I felt like your mother, felt like Aunt Julia.

  'Don't sign up, Kyle, don't go through officer training, don't love your fucking country, wait a few years, go to college, get yourself an education, then go in as a medic, a doctor, a nurse, who the fuck cares?' And he says to me, 'We gotta fight this war now, Dad. We gotta get the terrorists now.' "

  When I didn't speak he said, "Yeah, I know, what's there to say?" He was brave as hell, my kid.

  I would have liked to know Kyle. I wondered what, beyond the thin just-in-case letter, would show me the real boy. Were there other letters, or a drunken friend who might say more than the bromides, a girl who'd listened to Kyle's doubts? Buddy's sadness was in his tread, it was in the way his arms fell to his sides, the slope of his shoulders, the way he looked down at the pavement; it was in the squelch of his soaked shoes.

  I could imagine talking and not talking, walking together through Fayetteville, maybe hooking into Sherman's trek, going all the way to Savannah and to the sea. I felt that long-ago pride to be with him, and possibly to be of some use as we walked. Maybe he understood that, because he said, "Thanks again, Brains, for coming. It's been too many years, way too many years." We'd reached another corner, a large dark house on a double lot. I remember thinking the place looked like a fortress, and noting the single green light up on the second floor, a computer terminal's watchful eye. "Let's cut across," Buddy said, veering into the wet grass.

  I wondered, Cut across to where?

  In the middle of the yard-and why should I have been surprised?-he hooked his arm around my neck, pausing behind me to enjoy the capture.

  "Uhh," from my mouth.

  He collapsed my knees, falling along with me.

  "Oof!"

  He pushed my face into the grass. How you going to get out of this hold, huh? Stick your ass up, your wimpy little ass, come on, use your legs, use your legs, what are you made of? He wrenched my arm across my spine. We boys of summer! I heard myself laugh. My cousin expertly torqued my shoulder, the acromioclavicular joint-"Christ!"-separating from the scapula.

  "What's that?"

  "Bastard!" Even as he pulled harder, the familiarity of the routine was a happiness. Tears smarted in my eyes, and I believe I said, to quote Jerry Pindel, "Fuck!"

  "That's right."

  It was like the repetition in a piece of music, the reprise that brings with it a deeper understanding of a thing you can't begin to name. I was suffocating from his weight and the grass up my nose. If I had been able to breathe, I would have laughed some more. If I wasn't about to suffer from either an AC separation or an anterior dislocation--I couldn't quite tell which one would come to pass--I would have laughed yet again at his ability to unravel the years, at the kindness of his gift. He held me for as long as he knew I could stand it, of that I am sure, his old instinct for precision serving him. When he let go it was slow, first releasing my arm bit by bit, and then rolling off me. He must have lain on his back for a minute, looking up at the few stars shining beyond the watery sky. It must have been a little while, my acromion settling back into position, the green computer light twinkling. As if nothing had occurred, we managed to get ourselves standing and dusted off. My glasses were bent and would need some adjusting back in real time. Without any more conversation, we walked the few miles to the Eastman yard where the Japanese lights, the colored globes, swiveled in the breeze.

  IOELLE WAS AT THE PATIO TABLE, clearing the chicken bones and the bottles, when we appeared. The enormous dogs barked their throaty wuf-wufs and leapt to their favorite. Once Buddy was in his chair, he started to laugh. In short order he became convulsed. I took myself to the far reaches of the yard, gathering plates and glasses from the few guests who remained. Joelle glanced at her husband, shook her head, and said, "Don't tell me. I don't want to know."

  "Mac?" Diana cried, coming from the house. "Where have you been? Why-why are there grass stains on your shirt? Your face is all-"

  "Go clean up in the basement," Joelle said to her husband. "Calm down. Calm down! Get hold of yourself."

  "That's, that's," Buddy heaved, tears running down his face, "where we, where we, wash the, the dogs."

  Not too long after we'd recovered ourselves, doing the best we could to wipe the dirt from our clothes, after I'd bent my glasses to their original shape, we began the round of farewells, including the promise of many future meetings, vacations together, Club Med! Hilton Head! Orlando! A reunion of all the cousins, perhaps, at Moose Lake. Years ahead of communion, the men disappearing into their bacchanalian rites, thrown back into their adolescence, the women tidying and commiserating. It was past midnight when Tessa and Diana and I finally drove away from that house, where violence and salvation met so companionably.

  "What, may I ask," Diana said on the way to the hotel, "were you doing with Buddy?"

  Were there any words from literature that I could use to explain? In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost. No, it wasn't that. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Diana had never warmed to The Great Gatsby, the book ruined by her high-school English teacher.

  Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. I wasn't as far gone as Lear, not yet. Without God and with fractured love through the years, without much insight, I had relied on poetry and what I thought was kindness as my guide. Now, however, I could not come up with a line that would satisfy both my wife and me.

&
nbsp; She said, "I was so embarrassed, you with your grass stains and dirty face."

  Maybe I'd had a real mystical experience, a genuine revelation of eternity there with Buddy, nearly suffocated by his own hand on a stranger's ChemLawn. A person didn't have certainty and happiness on that order just every day. "Lamb?" I said.

  "What."

  "It was good we made this trip. Especially since Russia and my parents and Louise couldn't. Thank you for pestering me."

  It must have been the praise, the acknowledgment that I'd been stubborn, that made my wife burst into tears, showing more emotion in the car than she had for Kyle in the church. She opened her purse and retrieved one, two, three, four, five fresh tissues.

  "It's too bad," I went on, ignoring her display, "that Russia couldn't have been here. The funeral would have been the high point of her life. She would have had such pride in Kyle's sacrifice."

  Russia had died in 1997 in a nursing home near her youngest brother, in Mississippi. She fought him every day during the years of his faithful visits, she was miserable to all her guests, she drove the staff to distraction. The last time I saw her there, she beseeched me to take her away. "I'll come and live with you, Timothy, won't give you a minute of bother, not one single minute."

  "Of course you wouldn't."

  "I'm not making my crossing from this place, you hear me? You tell Mr. Buddy to help me, you tell him Russia needs him to get to the Promised Land."

  "I'll tell him."

  Without either my or Buddy's assistance, she made her transition after a short bout with pneumonia.

  WHEN WE ARRIVED at O'Hare from North Carolina, the day after the service, it was late afternoon, and at my request we drove to my father's house, not far away, to tell him about the relatives. He would appreciate the news, and also he would understand, in a way no other person could, the confusion of the ritual. We found him sitting out on the new deck with Madeline, the two of them having happy hour, he with his bottle of Schloss Saarstein Riesling and she with a glass of something fizzy. There was a dish of salty peanuts, a plate of Wheat Thins, and, with a nod to urban sophistication, one tomato bruschetta each. Although Russia had not included happy hour in the daily catechism, my father had become religious about this habit after Julia's death.

  He had made a small garden plot in the backyard so he could grow tomatoes and basil for that happy hour, as well as flowers for the woman of the house. Because he no longer went to the museum, there were four bird-feeders, two on poles and two hanging from the pear tree: the Grove Avenue oasis for the lesser birds, grackles and starlings, and whatever high-class songbirds might stop by. The Merry Maids had been for their biweekly appointment that day, sweeping through the house in thirty minutes, four of them in checked uniforms fanning out to clean; even on the deck there was still the whiff of the air freshener they sprayed inside as their last act.

  Once we got talking about the trip, Diana was good enough to marshal Tessa and Madeline into the kitchen, to assemble the dinner we'd brought. I was glad to have a chance to describe the visit with no others adding or correcting. "All that talk of valor and service and the Kingdom of Heaven," I said. "It was wonderfully primitive and persuasive."

  "Your mother would have croaked."

  "Tessa, I'm sorry to say, did her grandmother proud, reducing an old friend of Kyle's to tears with her antiwar screed."

  "Did she?" He perked up.

  "What's remarkable, though, is that Buddy told me he'd tried to talk Kyle out of enlisting. He said he'd felt Mom's presence when he was making his arguments."

  My father lifted his eyes to the heights of the pear tree. "There's nobody left in the family for your mother to spar with. She only picks on the ignorant people with advanced degrees, those who theoretically should know better." He, too, considered her in the present. He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt, and when they were back on his face he pressed close to examine me. "You don't look so great."

  "Can't hold my liquor," I said. "I temporarily forgot that I'm old." I was moving my arm only by virtue of the Percadan I'd found in my bag.

  "Old," my father repeated.

  "Buddy's old now, too."

  "Devastated, I'd expect."

  "I almost didn't recognize him."

  "I assume the military does something to prepare the boys for death. Maybe there's no better training in this life than that."

  Was my aged father properly trained? I wondered. Was he ready? "I got sad news a few days ago," he said, "news that Mikey O'Day died."

  "Mikey!"

  "His sister called, the younger sister, the one in Georgia he'd gone to live with when the mother passed away. Congestive heart failure, pretty quick, I guess. The sister seemed to think he knew he was going."

  That was something people often mentioned. He knew, he recognized me in the end, he wasn't afraid, and so forth. To my father I said, "Did you tell her?"

  "I don't think I will. I've been pondering, but I don't see any reason."

  We were quiet for a while. And then I told him about Robert playing Battlefield Vietnam. We talked in our usual and not altogether uncheerful way about how the world was going to hell. When Diana and the girls came out with a tray of sandwiches, my father said to Madeline, "There you are."

  "I'm always here," she said, smoothing her short hair as she sat next to him.

  He put his hand between her shoulder blades and drew circles for a minute. She hardly noticed, and I realized it was probably a gesture he made several times a day, without thinking. When he was done he rested his fingers at the nape of her neck.

  "This spread is beautiful, isn't it, Maddy?" He gave her a quick pat before he helped himself to an indeterminate kind of sandwich, turkey or ham or egg salad, whatever was most oozing mayonnaise.

  "Diana." I reached for her sleeve. How did a person keep the devotion running pure? With or without God's grace. Devotion that at a certain point was for its own sake. "Diana," I said again, clutching her upper arm, which had grown strong with her morning yoga guru.

  "Okay, okay!" She was trying to shake me away. "I know you want to get going. I know your head is killing you, but it's your own fault. Just let me eat."

  Nonetheless, for a little bit, I kept my hand, but softly, on her arm.

  When we finished our sandwiches, we turned for the north, leaving the two of them at their places on the deck. The sun was moving beyond the trees and houses, no place in my old town to see it finally slip over the filmy city horizon. Madeline and my father would sit there together until the fireflies appeared and the street lights came on, waiting for the ghostly mothers to ring their bells and sing out the names of their children from the back porches-time, at long last, to come inside.

  Table of Contents

  Start

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen