When Madeline Was Young (26 page)

"They won't take him to Florida," I assured Louise again. "They can't." I'm afraid that set us off once more, another teary bout for those two people who had enough sense to know they weren't normal, who had had the astonishing luck to find each other. It was when Lu was locked in my arms, groaning, that Sophia pushed open the door. She'd knocked, I guess, but we hadn't heard. It probably took us a minute to realize that she was there, but finally we did notice, an
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lowly we lifted our heads. I felt as if I were trying to see through a heavy rain, as if I were driving through a storm.

"Sophia?" I rooted around on the bed for my miserable soaked piece of linen.

Louise had a more finely tuned sense of disaster, and after the initial hesitation she popped out of bed. "Mac and I," she explained, "are in the middle of a nervous breakdown." When Sophia didn't move, didn't come in or back away, Louise tried again. "It's not what it looks like--although I'm not sure what it looks like. I don't know, we were talking about old times, about family problems."

Sophia blinked rapidly. "You're talking about family, your family? When the entire world is burning?"

"One thing," I said, "led to the next."

"Ah," Sophia said. "I see. Like it always does."

I was up and going to her. "We were talking about the killings and--"

"I would never want to interrupt family togetherness," she said before she bolted.

Although she had a head start, I was able to catch her by bounding, a half-flight in one leap. On the second-floor landing I managed to pin her to the railing. "Get your hands off me!" she cried.

"Sophia, don't be crazy. Don't be insane! We--"

"I am not insane!" She was off again, down the next flight. When I'd leapt once more and barred the door to the lobby, I tried to tell her in a rush about Madeline, the real story, as fully detailed as I could make it in a few sentences.

"You know my sister? No, no, not Lu, but Madeline, she's not really my sister, she was married to my father, but then, one day, she hit a stone wall, bam, on her bike, no one saw it, it ruined her, oxygen deprivation, brain damage--and then my mother cared for her, she was a nurse, she wasn't my mother yet, not yet, and later she married my father, there was an annulment or a divorce, nothing sneaky, it was legal . . ." It sounded so nutty, so melodramatic, I started to laugh.

"Not that it's funny"--I was only laughing harder--"it's not at all, as a matter of fact, Lu and I, we were talking . . ." And, as if to make it worse, a stream of snot coming from my nose, I began to cry again. "They're taking Mikey O'Day to Florida." I looked through my tears at Sophia. "They can't do that! She'll die." I started to cough. "Of loneliness." I repeated, choking, "Of loneliness."

Sophia was staring at me in amazement. "What," she said at last, "in the fuck are you talking about?" When I couldn't begin anew, or take up in the middle, or even end the story, she said, "I don't know why you never told me whatever you're trying to explain before. But that's just you, I guess. Strong and silent, the current running too deep for me. Way too deep."

It was no doubt just the scene she needed to be able to go off with a clear conscience, to pursue her career as the second violinist in a quartet that did achieve some fame. Because there were no more classes, she left the campus the next day and didn't come back until graduation. I saw her after the ceremony, in the distance. She was looking over at us, at my parents and Madeline. I waved through the crowd, the only chance I got to say goodbye to her.

Chapter
Twelve

A FEW DAYS BEFORE BUDDY'S SON'S FUNERAL, TESSA GRACED
US with her presence at the supper table. She was working as an intern at the local newspaper, the lone daughter at home for the entire summer. Diana stood at the sink, running water into a kettle, speaking to me in her voice that was high and clear over the tap. "Your inability to extend yourself is more than plain bad manners, really Mac, but it's that, too. It's rude. How would you like it--" She stopped, realizing perhaps that it was tempting fate to consider the deaths of your own children, even for educational purposes.

As she ran the water, and with dinner on the way, I had enough hope to think almost cheerfully of marriage as a mortification not of the flesh but of the soul. Just the soul, that's all. I'd had a trying day in my kingdom, the fortress with peaked skylights, the bright veneer of germlessness, the homey touches of flowered wallpaper borders, and at regular intervals large framed still-lifes of ribboned hats among plates of fruit. There were TV monitors, too, in every corner, attractive men and women dispensing information about menopause, sexua
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ysfunction, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, and the benefits of the dread colonoscopy. To devote oneself to wellness at the clinic is to sprint from exam room to exam room, trying bot
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o fulfill and to ignore the dictates from the new corporate headquarters, the efficiency guidelines, ten minutes per patient.

It's the American way, and although we old fogies are not resigned, although we subvert as best we can, we know that without revolution from all quarters we are powerless in the face of the business gurus at the central office and, beyond, at the insurance companies. The big joke, how stressed and bitter the doctors are as they try to promote health in others.

That afternoon my nurse, Gretchen, had twisted her ankle, leaving me in the trembling hands of a shy student on the second day of her internship. I have tried through the years to become a better listener, something the women doctors tend to do well, tilting their heads and appearing to give the patients time to tell their stories. I had made a point to be attentive to Mrs. Ozanick, an eighty-two-year-old widow who has had chronic migrating pain for the twenty years I've known her. For fourteen minutes, I had followed her solid wall of talk concerning her cell-phone plan, her nephew's phone arrangement, and the paucity of calls she received, on land or otherwise, from her children. I have not been able to find a real remedy for her discomfort, aside from the solace she seems to take from my interest. Since she pays out of pocket, she can visit me as often as Gretchen will schedule her. When she left the office, her stomach pain was in fact gone, I was edified about the merits of her carrier, and the miracle of medicine had proved itself once more to be a vapory thing. I was twenty-five minutes behind, and in the next appointment had to tell a thirty-sevenyear-old mother of four, a woman who had come in with fever and anemia, that there had been primitive leukemia cells in her blood leukocyte count, an indication of acute granulocytic leukemia. Remissions, I did not tell her, saving that piece for the oncologist, are usually partial or brief. After that, now fifty-four minutes behind, there was a case of poison ivy, a man who, incidentally, had a tattoo on his back of
Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande fatte--his wife's favorite painting. It had been done over a five-year period, spreading out the torment and expense. The rash, much to his relief, was on his legs, and did not interfere with the artwork. As I wa
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alking out of the clinic, around the corner from the hospital, an ambulance was just pulling in at Emergency. A twenty-year-old boy had been struck by a train on a back road and was dead on arrival.

"Comfort me with apples," I said in Diana's direction at the sink, "for I am sick of love." There was too much genuine suffering in the world to be anything but filled with happiness on the home front, an idea, when I've voiced it, that makes Diana go fearsomely hard and cold. Diana is a model of decorum--her anger, which of course is rightfully hers, clean and bright, blossom of snow. But I was not going to Kyle Eastman's funeral merely as a corrective to my character.

"Do you need therapy, Dad?" Tessa wondered softly. "Would that help? Sometimes it seems like you married--well--not your own mother, not Grandma Julia, but someone's mother. The mother-brides were switched at the wedding. It's a mistake of karma!"

Where, from what realm, do our monstrous children come? And when did children blithely start to analyze their parents at the dinner table? What television show taught them this?

"Mom obviously can't stop gnawing on the old bone of your reconnecting with Cousin Buddy. So--what's the deal?"

"What did you say, Tessie?" Diana at last turned off the water. "I didn't hear."

"I was telling Dad that it would be interesting to meet the cousins. Buddy has five kids, right?"

"Four now," Diana said. "Living, I mean. They'll always have five, always. Kyle--bless his soul--Robert, Mallory, Vanessa, Brittany."

Tessa reached across the table to grasp my hand. "Why don't you take me to the funeral? I'll be the ice-breaker."

An apt role for Tessa in any situation. When she looks at you, it is best to clear your mind of insincerity. She does not listen with womanly sympathy, no cocking of the head, no steady warmth, no encouraging nods. Tessa is a predator when she listens, the girl taking your full measure.

"Buddy's family has great faith," I muttered. "He doesn't nee
d a
ny of us to witness his grief." My cousin, as far as I knew, had not gotten religion, but perhaps a little of his wife's zeal had rubbed off on him.

Just then one of the newer sisters-in-law entered, Nan from across the road, the pediatrician among us. Diana's younger brother had taken her to be his second wife a few years before, after the first one ran off from the family compound. I was pleased when Jim married Nan, because she reads, she is curious about any subject, she votes as I do, she has never said a single word about her emotional state, and also she seems to understand how the family operates and still she appears to like us.

"Mac won't go to his cousin's son's funeral," Diana said, by way of greeting Nan. "The boy died in Iraq." She brought a wide bowl of greens in all the salad hues to the table, from purple lettuces to the glowing jade of chard to the blue of young kale. She had managed to grow lettuce through the heat, her garden a weedless wonder of verdure and nourishment.

"How beautiful!" Nan said, with genuine awe. Her Nordic good looks, towering height, and straight blond hair make her seem chronically wholesome and vigorous. "I'm sorry to hear about your cousin," she said to me. "That's awful." After she'd inquired about Kyle's age and the circumstances of his death--questions that Diana answered--she again turned to me, to praise and to say thank you. I had seen a patient of hers that morning, a boy with a rash, swollen glands, fever, peeling skin. It's quite difficult to diagnose an illness if you haven't encountered it at least once. I'd been able to tell her that Stevie Tolbert-son had Kawasaki disease, something that isn't very common in Anglo-Saxons, and in addition is apt to show up in winter and spring. Stevie was Nordic himself, and it was fully summer. "I'm so grateful," she was saying. "I think you should give a talk to the staff about Kawasaki, the way you did about tetanus last year." To Diana she said, "He told you about that, didn't he?"

"My husband, speak?"

"It's just that he's modest," Nan explained. "A reluctant hero. But let me tell you. He was walking through the ER, there was a woman with muscle spasms, Dr. Prentiss didn't have any idea what was wrong with her, Mac took one look and said, 'Tetanus.' The fact that Mac just happened to be walking past saved the woman's life."

Her story was not true to the letter: it had taken me more than one look to make the diagnosis. Again, I was able to do so only because I'd had the privilege of seeing tetanus, in D
. C
. it was, a man half dead from a puncture wound.

"Anyway," Nan said, "I'm sorry to barge in here, but I wanted to thank you."

While she'd been talking, Diana had come behind my chair and put her hands on my shoulders, as she often does when she is feeling sorry or left out. It had done me no harm to have Nan say in her presence that she was indebted to me. Nan paused, looking at Diana and looking at me. She said, "We might be able to spare you for a day or two, Mac, for your funeral. We probably could get along."

Diana pressed closer and said in my ear, "I understand you're busy, I do."

Nan thanked me again as she got up from the table, and I thanked her--for what she did not know, for her kindness, her diplomacy, her excessive compliments. A reluctant hero! I was always much improved after seeing her. The minute she was out the back door, Tessa leaned forward in her so-called shirt, an orange scrap with one string each side, and the secondary purple straps of her brassiere. "Tell me," she said, "about the last time you saw Buddy." She was a sophomore at her eco-friendly, vegetarian, composting-toilet college in North Carolina, a student of history and journalism. She was practicing her trade, just as a dental student pulls the wisdom teeth of all her family members. The small rectangular emerald-green frames of her new glasses added to the serious and yet hip investigative-reporter effect. I had no doubt that she would go far, not only because of her intelligence and wit but because of her other, equally important attributes:

the wardrobe, the velvety skin--so much of it to see--and her persistence.

"The discussion of human relations is overrated," I said to her. "When I was a boy we talked politics. We discussed the world around us, science, art, music. We didn't spend our lives picking apart--what do you call them?--relationships."

"You didn't have to pick yours apart," Diana said wearily. "Your family tore itself to pieces over current events. You all argued and argued until you didn't speak anymore." Despite her fatigue, she made that most generous of motions, sweeping up the linguine from the bowl with two wooden forks, swinging the mass of it onto my plate.