When Madeline Was Young (2 page)

Cousin Nick pointed out that Buddy's father, Bill Eastman, had been a boozer and a womanizer, the divorce with advice to give. Buddy, often fresh from a visit with the old man, was probably parroting him. It struck us both how relatively decorous Buddy's language had been: a boy with his swagger might have cursed like a sailor. That was the thing about our cousin, how he sometimes surprised you with what could nearly be called class.

That summer before I turned thirteen, I was, as always, at Buddy's side through the strict schedule wherein we fished in the tin boat and sailed in the sea boat and felled tall trees and swam across the green lake and played tennis in the old grass court in the upper pasture. As was my habit, I filled buckets with amphibians and rodents
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jars with spiders and moths, boxes with jawbones and rib cages--those collections something Buddy would much later remember with contempt. At night, surrounded by my pails of scratching creamers in the boathouse, we had our den of sin with the boys. What were the adults thinking, that they entrusted the younger children to Buddy and even to me, a hundred yards away from the main house, in a tinderbox structure that we kept stocked with candles, some of us smoking until we fell asleep? He and I always excused ourselves for our midnight ritual just as the crew was drifting off, the two of us sitting on the dock under the shooting stars, talking in our way, man to man. If he'd been a reader, if he'd been literary, he might have said about Madeline that the mad wife in our family had come down out of the attic and taken up residence in the playroom.

When I look back, it seems surprising that it took Buddy to make me think I should somehow protect Madeline at the lake and at home from people who might prey upon her. Where had my brotherly chivalry been before that? Madeline seemed happy enough on the periphery of the little girls' gang, but I felt that if I were actively good I should build Lincoln Logs on the porch with her, or organize a Ping-Pong tournament for her group, none of whom could hit the ball twice in a row, the single return usually a fluke. Still, they would have been filled with self-importance and excitement. At the least I should have inserted myself into "Mother, May I?" during the adults' happy hour, staying next to Madeline as we took our no-risk baby steps. Even if Buddy leered and poked me in the ribs at dinner, I should have both shielded myself from him and shown him his suggestions meant nothing to me. I told myself, I insisted it didn't matter how or why my parents had adopted Madeline; she was my sister, a girl I hadn't paid half enough attention to over the years, a girl who was so pure of heart and silly she worshipped me. There was nothing Buddy could say, no matter how he talked, no matter how he jeered or winked, nothing at all that could make me ashamed to have someone like Madeline in my family.

It was shortly after Buddy's little talk on the dock that Madeline became ill. Although it turned out to be a harmless flu, my mother was so concerned that I became sure my sister was near death. She had a high fever, hot flashes that drenched her sheets, chills that made her teeth chatter. My mother was a nurse, but there were limits to her knowledge and confidence. Near dusk one night, she phoned Dr. Riley, a small-town physician of an era long past, a professional who could be counted on to treat large animals if the veterinarian was overbooked. When he got out of his car and came across the lawn, using his cane, and with his battered leather bag in hand, the children silently parted the way. My mother called down to me from the window of the south bedroom to show him up, and also, while I was at it, to bring her ice.

"Timothy," she cried, using my Christian name, something that happened so seldom I hardly recognized it. She must have realized her error because she began again. "Mac! Mac, get me a dish of ice, will you please?"

When I came into the room, she was propping the invalid in a sitting position on the bed with herself as the leaning post. She kissed Madeline's hair as she made the adjustments. There had been plenty of times when she had been alarmed over events--it was as if the end of the world were nigh when the Russians shot down one of our reconnaissance planes, and when President Eisenhower had to send troops to Little Rock she wept--but I had never seen her frightened for one person. She didn't say anything, saving her mouth, I guessed, for those prayerful kisses, and she didn't look at me, either. She made no comment about how I was upstairs, in a place the boys were forbidden, and she didn't ask after all for the ice. I remember knowing I was there because I could see in the long mirror my knobby knees, the awful brown fawnishness of my young self, my wide brown eyes, my brown hair in need of a cut, my uncertainty.

The doctor right away felt Madeline's lymph glands, smoothing his fingers down her neck. She had just enough energy when he di
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hat to lift her chin and slowly close her glassy eyes. She was going to die. Right there in front of us, slumped against my mother, she was going to take one last little breath. And then what would we do? Would my mother cry out, suddenly insane like one of the tragic Greek heroines? Would she shriek at anyone who threatened to take the body away? I looked hard at Dr. Riley: Say she'll five, say she'll live. If she died we wouldn't believe it; and so it was up to the doctor to make the story true. For a minute, as I stared, I forgot the patient and the death and the panicked mother. It was as if I were in the room alone with the doctor, as if he were speaking to me while he attended to Madeline, as if he were telling me to step into my future. He had glanced at me just once, but in that look he had seemed to say, Watch. And I thought if you were going to pass on, it wouldn't be so terrifying with his hands moving gently over your face and throat, and if you were going to live, suddenly because of that cupped hand on your cheek, you'd be glad you were staying. He touched Madeline 's forehead, he made her take a sip of ginger ale, and then he listened to her heart; he stared dreamily at the floor, tuned into the intricacies of her particular glub-glub, the whisper that seemed to tell him her history. As he removed the earpieces of his stethoscope, he said to Madeline, "The flu always seems worse in summer, doesn't it, young lady?" I recall noting that he would call her "young lady" because he was feeble and old. Anyone, compared with him, was young. He patted her leg. "You're just about over the hump, even if it doesn't quite feel like it." To my mother he said, "I don't see signs of scarlet fever, nothing dangerous here. She should feel better in a day or two."

Soon after he left, I went into the woods to sit on a stump in the near darkness. I was often crying in those days, and it always embarrassed me even in private, even as I couldn't help it, the girlishness of it. The shame made me cry harder, stuffing my fist in my mouth to keep from making noise. The doctor had said that Madeline was going to get well, that the worst was over, and so there was that relief. I thought I was for the most part grieving for Madeline, for her brus
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ith death. Although she would survive, I was sorry for my neglect of her through the years, and sorry, too, for the wretched games I'd played, pretending she was the dog and I the master, she the servant and I the king, she the wife and I the commanding husband--Madeline, always the one who barked and fetched and scrubbed. I sobbed with useless contrition. Without knowing I was probably also crying because never again would I feel awe for Buddy in the thoughtless way a younger boy idolizes someone else. It seemed terrible that he had spoken about her to me--the big secret, pal--and then she had almost died, perhaps a cause and effect, his words somehow infecting her. And it seemed especially harsh to be miserable in a place that had always held the greatest of happinesses. I would have thought it worth weeping, I'm sure, if I'd understood that those summers would not come again, that Buddy and I would never be together at Moose Lake as we'd been all those years before.

Much later, when my sister, Louise, and I were both at Oberlin College in Ohio, I told her about that night at the lake, when Buddy informed me that I could, with impunity, have my way with Madeline. I explained that I'd figured out the pieces by talking to our aunt Figgy and also the cleaning lady, Russia. Louise said, "But Mad You knew about Madeline. We've always known. I remember looking at the photo album with Mom when I was little, how she pointed at each person and explained." Louise repeated, "We've always known."

I understood again that it was Buddy who had made the story seem like a sensational deceit, a tabloid headline. When, in fact, our parents had absorbed Madeline's tragedy into everyday life so seamlessly it was unimportant to dwell on the circumstances. They had the balanced sense of both the absurdity of existence and the importance of using our gifts, of finding the work we were meant to do. Hardly the stuff of soap opera. It had taken me years to see that Buddy had told me about Madeline for no other reason than to impress his kid cousin in the moment: Buddy Eastman knew what it was to feel up a girl. That was all he'd wanted to tell. I stood like a dolt in Louise'
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orm room at Oberlin, having revealed the great lie, the substantial weirdness I'd trumped up at the center of the Maciver clan. Only to find there was no secret and no pathology. "Maybe," Louise suggested kindly, "you were way too young when Mom told you and couldn't make sense of it."

Somewhere along the line, Buddy, in his superior wisdom, might have spelled it out, might have explained that my father, Aaron Maciver, had married Madeline Schiller on March 27, 1943. Did Buddy spare me that information because he knew I would not have wanted to hear such a thing out loud? Did he know that I was the type of boy who found it hard to believe that my parents hadn't always lived under the same roof? Even as I held the knowledge in a far fold, a neural nook and cranny, that Madeline had once been my father's wife, I was also sure that, despite the evidence about my parents' separate upbringings, they had actually been born married and loving each other. Buddy's news, if he'd carried on with it, would have been full of complications, but most probably I would have entertained none of them. I had no wish to think about how my father had extracted himself from one union in order to make another. Ridiculous! No doubt I had rejected my mother's account, told to me as one tells a three-year-old a strange fact of his life so that it is reduced to normalcy. At some point, however, I must have been scared to death and therefore rejected the story, relegated it to the world of make-believe. Because, if Madeline had been my father's bride when she was only a girl, or seemed so, that meant that I might already have gone to war or left home or not been my parents' child, and all without realizing it.

So--the facts, what stands as truth. In 1943, my mother, Julia Beeson, was a junior at Radcliffe College, not yet having borne either Louise or me in any other dimension or lifetime. She was invited to Aaron Maciver's wedding in Chicago, never having met him, because she was the roommate and good friend of my father's sister, Figgy, nee Fiona, the maid of honor. Figgy would have demanded my mother come to her brother's wedding to meet a rich cousin, a poor relation,
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andsome brute, a homely sailor--anyone at that late date would do to put a little romance into Julia Beeson's schoolmarmish life. The event had been scheduled to coincide with Radcliffe's spring vacation, the bride, so said Figgy, having gone to great lengths to accommodate the scholars. Figgy understood that it was essential to find an important man in order to become important herself; she wished that her closest friends would ultimately land boyfriends from the same echelon, so that years away they would find themselves seated next to each other at a State Department dinner. But first, for Julia Beeson, a man, any man.

According to my aunt Figgy, Aaron Maciver's bride wore a silk sheath that so conformed to her long, slim body that you imagined the silk was her skin, her skin the silk. At the altar, before my father and Madeline said their vows, the minister, standing a step up from them, put his hands on the shoulder of the bride and groom, and made the unfortunate remark clergymen sometimes can't help making in the heat of the moment. "If you two," he said, "could see twenty-five years into the future, you would not have the courage to make this commitment." He said the line tenderly, and many of the couples in the congregation laughed knowingly. Madeline and Aaron smiled quickly, privately--how little the minister understood the depths of their love! My mother, in the back pew, may have smiled, too, thinking herself adult enough to realize the hazards of matrimony. My father, overtaken by emotion during the vows, could hardly bleat out the required "I do." He did cry easily, a habit I knew I came by honestly. Figgy maintained that when he married Madeline, tears slipping down his cheeks, the women in the congregation, single and otherwise, were sorry not to have nabbed him for themselves.

I've learned most of my parents' history from Figgy and the cleaning lady, Russia, both women who don't check their hyperbolic tendencies. Nonetheless, it's probably fair to report that Madeline was the kind of woman who steps into the room and at once is the center of attention, the kind of woman who knows she has that effect and pre-

tends it's nothing. "Miss Madeline," Russia intoned in her husky Mississippi accent, shaking her head, her lips pursed, "Miss Madeline in those days, in a sundress! Just like a queen, and she always, she always get what she want." Russia spoke admiringly, as if the work of realizing that sort of feminine potential took a great deal of strength. It's not hard to imagine that Madeline, the only child, the woman with allure, was compellingly haughty. She was probably not easy to please, and so for her suitors there was the continuous enticement, one challenge after another, one more offering to make, another promise to deliver. Before the marriage, my poor father wrote to tell her that she was all light and grace and goodness, confusing her beauty, perhaps, with her character.