When Madeline Was Young (18 page)

EXCEPT FOR MY EXCESSIVE HOUSE and the tropical vacations and
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porty car I once succumbed to--and it did drive like butter and it did purr like a kitten and it did make me feel a man--I labor under the impression that I am my mother's legitimate heir. My father would have been satisfied, suspending judgment, interested in our business no matter what profession Louise and I had chosen. My mother, despite her party line of live-and-let-live, would have been devastated if we'd become the usual bad guys, strip-mall developers, self-servingly born-again, lobbyists for the NRA. The best way, I've found, is to do good works behind the scenes, and if your beneficence is discovered, then there you are, exposed in your generosity. Nowhere, for example, on the plaques at the homeless shelter in my town, or in the new wing of the hospital, does my name appear. My mother would call that reti-

cence humility; she would approve. But as for the secret life, the dream life, would she forgive me my indulgences? I've been taking piano lessons for a few years, my teacher a young woman who tells me I'm doing a Good Job! It has been my lifelong goal to play "Fiir Elise." Although I've plateaued at two-handed "Jingle Bells," I still hold out hope. If I allow myself a non-medicine-related fantasy when I'm on the treadmill, or in the seconds before I'm snoring, what I see is Timothy Maciver just about to step onstage for his debut--never in Carnegie Hall's history will there be as affecting a rendition of Beethoven's love song, not to mention as hearty a "Dashing through the snow." On alternate days, Chef Maciver is preparing peekytoe crabs in a puff pastry for his television audience. Chef Maciver has a glass of Romanee-Conti (
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985) with his staff after the taping, and although few know it he grew the grapes himself in an undisclosed location. Off to sleep I go, into that life of many talents.

Buddy ended up making Figgy prouder than she might have imagined in that time when she was fighting tooth and nail to get him past the third grade. In the revised history of Buddy, the story goes that it was his F's in penmanship that tripped him up, a skill that by today's standards was absurdly overvalued. His handwriting still looks as if it's come from the clutch of a palsied schoolteacher.

It was the summer of 1965, the July before the notable Christmas party, when I began to believe again, in spite of myself, that Buddy was a person of real valor, that he was imbued with something like a high moral purpose. He'd come to Moose Lake on his own, and for a few days after seeing our grandmother he'd stayed with us in Illinois. His trip coincided with the visit of two teenagers from the slums, a boy and girl who were experiencing suburban life in our home as part of a program called Project Share.

Before we went to collect our Project Share brother and sister from their tenement on the West Side, I'd argued lightly with my mother, informing her that the concept was not only cockeyed but unconscionable. I didn't say that I hated the idea of strangers in our house fo
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wo weeks, but she probably understood the real thrust of my protest. Project Share, I said, was brilliant, very smart, giving a tour of middle-class wealth to the poverty-stricken. What good people we were to open our doors to the needy! Further, if they wounded us, stabbing us in the night, we would have the pleasure of martyrdom. Most probably Malzena and Cleveland Simonson, fifteen and sixteen, would go back to the ghetto and either fall into a profound depression or begin to hold up women on the El train, ladies in white gloves and spring coats who were going to the symphony. As for our heavenly reward, the big payoff, we'd already absorbed Mikey O'Day into our lives. Wasn't that enough? Having to watch the eternally young go steady until the end of time?

"It's two short weeks," my mother said serenely. She was putting dishes away, moving around me while I stood in the center of the kitchen. "This is the one chance some children have to be exposed to culture and to the idea of possibility. It can be life-changing. Take them to the Field Museum and let them help you with your job. It's a privilege to go behind the scenes, and I'm sure they'll be fascinated by the specimens and your cataloguing tasks. It's not that difficult to extend yourself." She looked me in the eye on her path to the dining-room silverware box. "They might be interesting people." She did not avert her gaze. "It's possible they'll have something to teach you."

For a good part of our Project Share weeks, Louise lugged her cello over to Stephen Lovrek's house, the two of them disappearing into their music. The work of the artist, apparently, was more important than giving alms to the poor. With her usual diplomatic sarcasm, Louise said, "You've got great brainstorms, Mom, no doubt about it. When I get older I hope I'm not still completely close-minded, but for now I don't have the energy to participate in your scheme."

My mother, as was her habit with Louise at that stage, wisely said very little. "Do what you can to help," she murmured.

Up in my room Louise said to me, "Isn't it great how Mom can have a slave and at the same time be full of concern for all peoples?"

"Slave?"

"Russia, Mac, Russia? The woman who comes to clean our toilets, who we say is family, our relative who lives in her shack on the South Side."

"It's more complicated than that," I said. "Do you think Russia would be happier if we let her go, if Mom told her the setup was rotten? I'm not sure she'd have such a good time working at Marshall Fields. I'm not sure she knows how to read."

"Don't tell me the bullshit lines--you don't have to repeat Grandmother's standard sales pitch about how there is mutual care and dependency between slave and owner, how lovely, really lovely it is that everyone knows his place." Louise all at once grew tired of the conversation. "Never mind," she said before her last word. "I hope both you and Mom feel absolved for the white man's sins." She went downstairs, picked up her cello case by the leather strap, and, carrying it like a pocketbook, walked out the door.

There was the trip to the tenement to fetch Malzena and Cleveland, the green paint flaking in the long dim hall, most of the light-bulbs smashed, bits of jagged glass still screwed into the sockets, the frightening smell from the one bathroom that six families shared. Madeline didn't seem to notice the gloom or the stench. She walked slowly, trailing behind, her eyes open just enough to see her feet. It would have been easy to forget her, the woman who was fading away, who was so listless she was hardly alive. In the car on the way home, she curled up against the window and stared at the door handle. Mikey O'Day was at Disneyland with his parents and one of the sisters. He was an uncle many times over, and every summer there was at least one trip to visit the grandchildren at a historic site. Two whole weeks without him, two weeks without song, without dance.

As my mother drove, she exhausted her store of questions for the guests, so that when we came up our street even she couldn't think of another thing to ask. After she had shown Malzena and Cleveland to their rooms--that is, my room and Lu's--she suggested, all cheery-

like, that I take them to the pool. I already knew that they had muteness as their defense, that we could adequately blot each other out with silence.

"Madeline would probably like to go, too," Mrs. Maciver said.

Maybe you should take them--everyone, the black, the white, the lame, the old, the young. I did not, of course, say this out loud.

I didn't know who was lower in the Simonsons' estimation, the first Mrs. Maciver or me. It was clever of my mother, as always, to mask the order to take Madeline along by saying how much she would enjoy the entertainment. Still, since the advent of Mikey there'd been fewer demands on all of us. Louise and I took wens walking to the Dari-Dip at nine-thirty at night to pick the perfect couple up and to shadow them, making sure Mikey got home safely. That was the extent of our summer duties. At the beginning of their friendship, Mrs. O'Day had prescribed a routine to their week, a schedule that they took for granted. Soon after the romance got off the ground, Mikey began working on weekends at the uptown movie theater for a few hours, taking tickets. He wore a cheap black suit and a red bow tie. Madeline, in silk and jewels, spent her Saturday and Sunday afternoons watching a double feature. It was one of Mikey's perks that she got in free of charge. "The boss, the boss knows Madeline, knows Madeline is my girl." On the appointed summer evenings, there was the Dari-Dip. Wednesday mornings, they went to Little's Music Shop. My mother took them in hand for cookie making and apple peeling, and she paid Mikey small change to help her wash windows or dig holes for shrubs or carry boxes up from the basement for Goodwill. On their own, the couple went to the pool, and they lay around necking, and they sat out on the front steps watching the little girls play, those children who finally were beneath Madeline since she'd gotten herself a boyfriend. They were inseparable except during the sacred dinner hour, when Mikey was called home to eat with his parents. None of us looked forward to his vacations, those weeks when she walked around the house as if she were newly blind, a
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f she didn't know where anything was, as if nothing would ever interest her again.

Mikey was gone now as we struggled to the pool in formation, I leading the way, Malzena and Cleveland behind me on the pavement, and Madeline dragging along on the grass. I thought about the water, how the Simonsons would jump in and how then I wouldn't want to follow after them. I felt that way when Jerry Pindel in his red briefs stood at the side about to do his cannonballs, and when the sweaty Van Normans, who never showered, did their sloppy dives; even Mikey O'Day, clean and soapy-smelling, his hairy gut hanging over his suit, made me squeamish. You thought you were swimming in water that was automatically disinfected by the chlorine, but actually you were pawing your way through the neighbors' snot and spit and specks of shit they hadn't taken care to wipe away. The small white sun bore down on us as we walked along, as I said to myself, I'm not going in that pool. The only people I wanted to swim with were the Maciver cousins, and only in the glittering water of Moose Lake.

I suppose I had to talk to Cleveland in order to point out the lockers and give him the towel I'd been carrying for him, but whatever we said to each other didn't feel much like speech. We changed our clothes and went through the spray of the shower and out into the glare of the light-aqua water, which looked refreshing even though I knew it was a thick, greasy brine. My guest, a muscular six feet three inches, in very small briefs that were as black as his skin, met his little sister coming out of the girls' changing room, she in her pink two-piece, the bottom with a ruffled skirt, and matching pink plastic barrettes in her bouquet of braids. Together they--or that is, we--walked toward the diving boards. Madeline went her own way, to the shallow end, where she'd inch by inch lower herself down the steps until she was standing, the water up to her waist. Without Mikey to carry her around, she'd probably stay in one place, watching. The lifeguards in their towers, their whistles to their lips, turned to stare at the Simonsons. The pool was of Olympic dimensions, and around it there was a wide apron where th
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embers baked in their slatted chairs or on the hot cement. The women looked up from their books and, without meaning to, squinted at the glossy blackness of my brother and my sister. But we were a progressive people in our town, and next they made a fuss of not looking. They rearranged their towels, they fiddled with the locker keys that were pinned to their suit straps, they flipped through their books to see how much longer. The neighbors who knew us were pugnacious in their enthusiasm. "Hello, Mac!" Mrs. Lombardo called. She waved both hands at the Simonsons. "Hello there! Hello, hello! Great day to be at the pool!"

Mrs. Lemberger shouted, "You'll love the water! Absolutely love it!"

Mrs. Gregory was up on the observation deck, fully dressed in skirt and blouse, heels and nylons, an alien in our midst. She waved, too, her smile, the dark lipstick, taking up her face.

Without his clothes on and after the speedy shower, there was still a cigarette smell mixed with hair tonic, that odor both clinging to Cleveland and radiating from him, as strong as his color. He managed to stroll down to the deep end without glancing left or right, his gaze narrow and sure, that self-containment also drawing us to him. Had my mother considered how the Simonsons would feel in the presence of the neighborhood women who wanted to think well of themselves? I matched Cleveland's stride, trying by that effort to let him know that, though the other pool members were show-offs in their nonchalance, their enlightened acceptance of ghetto youths, really I was so color blind I hadn't even considered that race or class divided us. I'd been raised by Madame Civil Rights, after all, our household heroes Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, Ella Fitzgerald, Scott Joplin, Sidney Poitier, Langston Hughes, Percy Julian, not to mention Porgy, not to mention Bess. You couldn't find a white boy who was blacker than Mac Maciver. We fair Anglo-Saxons, and the even more freakish Irish Catholics with their freckles and the blue veins pulsing under their translucent skin, were burning up and would someday succumb to hideous cancers. But not so the Simonsons, the both of them evolu-

tionary success stories, the melanin in their skin serving as a nifty biological shield against ultraviolet radiation. The sickle-cell-anemia gene aside, Cleveland and Malzena had the upper hand, and maybe, if I mentioned that, maybe he'd pound me on the shoulder good-naturedly, something that I wouldn't like much but that would mean I was all right in his book.

The pool was noisy with children bobbing up and down and chasing each other, their arms outstretched as they bounced along. The Simonsons, one after the next, climbed the stairs of the lower board and took their dives, Malzena's yellowish soles together and pointed. They weren't so poor they hadn't learned to swim. Cleveland's long, shadowy form moved near the bottom, and when he burst into the air he whipped his head to one side, a shower from his modest Afro. They made their way through the crush of swimmers and the spray of their splashing to the shallow end. The children were children, staring if the pair came close, looking over their shoulders, and then paddling on. I guess I stood at the edge for quite a while, watching the members warm to their own friendliness. They had passed the phase of fiddling with their possessions and were trying to be welcoming, smiling hard, with their hands at their brows out in the general direction of the guests. I knew I was going to jump in the water although I didn't want to, and also I was sure that I was never going to take the plunge into that warm, mucousy slurry.