When Madeline Was Young (22 page)

"That," I managed, pointing at the jar, "is the precursor to the shish kabob." Jerry Pindel, my first patient!

Buddy seemed to think I was breathless because of the artifact. "What the hell kind of place is this anyway?" He spoke with real contempt.

"Freaky sons of bitches," Cleveland muttered.

Our liege started to laugh, pulling open drawer after drawer, yanking out the pottery tablets, the pebbles, the postcards of Istanbul, the archeologists' tools, the plastic magnifying glasses, the sand-sifters and scrapers--each item funnier than the last.

"All of it is from a museum exhibit," I began. "It was supposed to show how the Hittites--"

"Sure, Brains," Buddy said, through his chuckles. "Yep. And upstairs it's the Pharaoh's can, built to hold a great big golden turd." "No, really--"

"It's okay, pal." He nodded to himself. "Go down the basement. Get back to your important experiment cutting up our furry friends. Something to do while Madeline sucks the dick of the neighborhood moron. Let the village idiots line up for a knobber. Go on, go down there. The men in the white coats understand." I guess I was standing still, staring at him. "Brains!" he shouted, clapping his hands. "You're going to start drooling if you don't blink."

My parents walked in just then. Buddy turned to close the drawer, and at the same time said with what sounded like real interest, "How was your walk?"

No one mentioned the incident. I later learned that Stephen Lovrek had been in the bathroom, that he'd happened to look out the window, that it was he who had seen Jerry taking Madeline from the Pilskas' yard into the Pindel garage. Whether Jerry had meant to involve Mikey, or if Mikey had just happened along the alley to see Madeline after his trip, I don't know.

"It's a beautiful night," my mother said to Buddy. To me she said, "Why aren't you wearing your smock? You're covered in blood!"

Louise and Stephen were in the living room, taking another stab at Chopin. Cleveland and Malzena were out on the front porch, eating the candy they'd bought with money the church had given them for their educational experience. Louise had probably told Mikey t
o g
o home, or maybe he had needed no prompting, running off down the alley. Madeline was in her room bawling. The dress! Where was that dress? Had she taken it off, and would she hide it?

My mother listened up the back stairs. "What's wrong with her?"

I had never lied to Julia, or not much anyway, and I did not on that occasion begin. "She's mad at Buddy," I said. Poor Madeline, ripped from Jerry's arms, deprived of his manly attention.

"Now, why would anyone be mad at you?" my mother said to Buddy. "Great big girl--you'll have to excuse her. She'll be fine in a few minutes. Actually, she'll be right as rain by noon tomorrow, when Mikey gets back. She doesn't know what to do with herself when her sweetheart is away."

I was slow to come to it, but I suddenly realized that Buddy hadn't figured out who Mikey was; he thought the man on the sofa was a nobody, a generic neighborhood misfit. And why would he have known Mikey was the sweetheart when Madeline had degraded him so? "You, you big fat dodo!" Not to mention the fact that we were geared for Mikey's arrival home the next day, all of us unprepared to see him early. "The one you called the moron?" I murmured to Buddy. "That's him, the boyfriend."

I went down the basement as my cousin had directed, to be in the company of the baboon. I didn't know which shock to consider first. How could Madeline be so fickle? How could she lose her senses over Jerry when she loved Mikey? Happy Mikey, hurrying to see her! Joyful Mikey, caught in Jerry's snare. Because this was long ago, before teenagers knew so much--because this was years and years ago--I thought, How could . . . ? How could a woman put her mouth--there?

Overhead came the rushing sound, all those feet steaming to the kitchen, the sign that Mrs. Maciver was serving ice cream. It was no surprise to me that Buddy had done the job in Jerry's loft that should have been mine to do; how could it have been otherwise? I understood that I'd been watching Madeline for a few years without know-

ing what to look for, a gap Buddy would not have tolerated in himself. Of all the things to grieve for, though, of all the things that made it impossible to go upstairs for a sundae, was the humiliation Madeline had suffered in Mrs. Pindel's hideous dress--what she would have been crying about if she'd known better.

Chapter
Eleven

IT MUST HAVE BEEN A WHILE AFTER THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
,
after we learned that Buddy was going to enlist, that my mother came knocking at my door. I was half asleep when I heard the timid tap-tap, what sounded like a nervous girl at the headmaster's study. The last time she had tucked me in had been--when? Between her tap and my response, I woke completely. How could I have no memory of that important ritual's ending or even petering out? I couldn't think why I had let the vespers go, or if, in fact, it had been she who had stopped reading to me.

"Come in?" I said.

"Good," she said in the light of the hall, "you're not on the porch tonight. It's twenty below." She went straight to the end of the bed, and as she had in the old days, she kicked off her Hush Puppies and pushed herself to the back of the wall, her legs stretched out in front of her. She wore a skirt and a blouse always, with stockings and a girdle. I had on occasion caught a glimpse of her dressing and had seen the contortions she had to make in order to get herself into that foundation. She hoisted the contraption up to her thighs and then gyrated as she pulled it over her hips and buttocks, stuffing the last bit of the rum into those panels that were advertised to hold you tight for eighteen hours. This, for a woman who was not fashion-conscious; this, without question, from her wh
o r
abble-roused for half a dozen radical causes. Her eyes bulged, her whole head distended on her pulsing neck. When I was small, that moment in her bedroom was the only time I felt afraid of her or maybe for her: what might happen if she accidentally left the girdle on into the nineteenth hour, if it all of a sudden failed? I don't think Madeline, with her natural slimness, the grace of her long limbs, had ever thought to wear a girdle. She watched my mother's daily exercise with interest, and often she'd open the top drawer and pull out a string of pearls, an accessory to gussy up Julia's skirt and sweater, a trinket to make all that effort somehow worthwhile. "Not this morning, lamb," my mother usually said. "Let's save those for an important event."

Most of the mothers on the block dressed for homemaking, many of them probably squeezing into their girdles just as Julia did, and some of them surely in later life enduring back pain or even prolapsed uteruses as a result of weakened abdominal muscles.

"How we suffered," Figgy would say.

In my room, my mother was settling on the bed, in no apparent danger of bursting from her threads. I had the vestigial sensation that because she was there I could turn over and sleep without fear of robbers or the commies. We had, months before, more or less recovered from the Simonsons' visit. I had pretty much put it aside, and maybe even forgiven her for inflicting the guests on us, for trying to educate us. She and I had once talked, without going into the details, about how some of the neighbors had blamed Cleveland for Jerry Pindel's broken nose. She admitted that the racists in our midst had shocked her, and that he had been in a difficult situation. Louise had probably told her in vague terms what had happened in the Pindels' garage, enough of the story anyway to make my mother keep a stricter hold on Madeline and Mikey.

"Are you still awake?" she whispered as an afterthought. I already knew she hadn't come in to see if I was warm enough.

Along the wall closest to her, my new acquisition, a demure orange corn snake, lay coiled in its terrarium. The magnificent and vai
n p
ython and the retiring king snake were in their tanks, too. Farther down the shelf were the four cages of white mice to feed them. I don't know that my mother had been in my room for months, and I silently gave her credit for not mentioning the fragrance. Or the climate I had made equatorial with the aid of a space heater. I had started keeping snakes when I was twelve, and it did occur to me as I watched her in the dark that the air quality of my room might have something to do with her staying away.

She asked me right off, without any more pleasantries, how I'd been thinking about the Vietnam conflict, and what Buddy had said about wanting to join the army.

"Not much," I said, answering both questions. I didn't want to dwell on Vietnam in the night. Also, I was surrounded every day not only by my mother's talk but by the impermeable membrane of her convictions; I knew about the situation without even knowing that I knew. If I'd been held at gunpoint I could have recited facts and figures, could have told my assailant that Henry Cabot Lodge had succeeded Maxwell Taylor as ambassador to South Vietnam, that something like
1
8
0
,000 military personnel were in the country, and that four million civilians had fled to the cities. Further, I understood that my mother's asking me what I thought was bound to lead to her own disquisition.

She said that she wanted to give me a little background, that of course I was free to make up my own mind about world events, but that she didn't wish me to end up like Buddy, outfitted in a uniform, filled with the passions of his military-school demagogues, with no real idea what he was getting into.

"Why would I end up like Buddy?" I'm sure I sounded as peevish as I felt. Stephen Lovrek's question still thrummed in my ear from months before: Stephen coming down the basement stairs on that hot July night, seeing me at the bar, knowing Madeline was being toyed with out in the alley, and saying, "Where's Buddy?" Stephen hadn't known Buddy for more than two hours, but it was clear to him whom he should call for help.

Still, my mother swept through the thousand years of the Chinese, Japanese, and French occupations of Vietnam. She lingered at the Geneva Convention, 1954, and a 1950 speech of Eisenhower's in which he made a commitment to maintain South Vietnam as a separate country. There was a sidebar about Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the scare that had made her finally embrace her president. Even as she spoke to me on that night in 1966 it was clear that she was losing her heart to Bobby Kennedy. She veered farther from Vietnam to talk about Bobby's trip to the Mississippi Delta, and how he, much more than his brother, had taken on civil rights as a moral issue. She forgave him his various sins, including all the photo ops, parading around with the multitudes of little Kennedys, a nation unto themselves. Back to the war, she feared that Johnson was only going to get us deeper into the quagmire from which we would not be able to withdraw, not until thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people were killed. The Vietnamese, she said, were fighting against us with a ferocity we weren't prepared for.

"Got it," I said, clutching my pillow.

"And there's Arthur," she went on, "with his charts, his incredible memory for the tonnage of bombs dropped, the numbers, the casualties from each battle--the abstraction of the conflict. Well, you know the kind of man Arthur is."

"Yep," I said. Actually, I didn't know anyone else like Arthur. I knew only Arthur. As far as I could see, he was the single person who was most likely to understand the situation--how could he not, when his job afforded him access to the president, the generals, and to classified documents?

"There is evidence," she was saying, "in an interview Kennedy gave just before he was shot, that he was going to withdraw the advisers from Vietnam, that he was going to leave the country to determine its own fate. I do think he knew that we had to pull away, that the hour had come, that he would have taken our nation in another direction." She paused before she said, "I hate to think of Buddy going over there."

All at once I thought of the images I'd seen in magazines and on TV, the villages in flames, the children burned and running, the bandaged soldiers, the bloodied water of the rice paddies. The North Vietnamese, the pitiless and cunning enemy, would have no trouble finding soldiers to butcher who weren't necessarily on the front lines. I sat up and almost said out loud that I didn't want Buddy to go. My mother was right on that score; they shouldn't let him. He could find a job, or be stupid and get into trouble, the police hauling him to prison, to safety. So what if it was a worthy cause, as Arthur believed. Worthy enough to give Buddy to it? In order not to embarrass myself, I slid back under the covers and put the pillow over my head.

"Good night, Mac," my mother said, thinking she'd been dismissed. She patted the form of my leg under the blanket. "One of these days it would be good to let Russia in here to clean. She's itching to get her hands on the place." She patted my leg again. "I'll find her a surgical mask so she's not asphyxiated." I think she kissed the pillow, for want of my hair. "Darling Mac," she murmured.

She had no idea that her talk of war would prevent me from sleeping, not just on that occasion but for weeks after. If she had tucked me in routinely, it most certainly would have killed me. She couldn't know that her history lesson had imparted nothing to me but anguish. Or, rather, at first I thought that she was innocent, that she had no notion of her effect. Later, I wondered if she understood full well what she was doing. It's possible, it's likely that she meant to lead me to sorrow in order to distract me from my admiration of Private Eastman.