When Madeline Was Young (27 page)

"Thank you," I said.

"The last time your father saw Buddy was the summer of 1975, in Washington, D
. C
.," Diana began.

Tessa raised what serve as her brows, those tiny pencil lines above her eyes. "True?"

I put my head down, nose to the tomato sauce that Diana had made with her own jeweled hands.

"I love that Mom knows this stuff and you hardly remember! That's so symbiotic. Did you have a major argument about the Vietnam War with Buddy? Since you wimped out and didn't serve--right?"

"Right," I said.

"What I mean, Dad, is that no matter how justified you were in avoiding a ridiculous war, the fact that he went and you didn't had to be this thing between you, the elephant in the room, the--"

"Do you want some cheese, Tessie?" Diana said, passing the cutting board.

Tessa grated the mail-order parmigiano over her pasta, grimacing with her effort. When she finished she said, "What did Buddy do over there, anyway?"

"As I understand it," I said, "he was in support organizations, first as a guard, and when he re-enlisted he went through another training program for a unit that manned the supply lines."

"There's that picture of him being decorated by President Nixon on the Moose Lake mantel, so that must have been a big deal." She was speaking at her plate, as if she were working the details out to herself. "Even if the president was an asshole, still, it's the president, and there were probably people in the family who thought it was exciting." She looked up at me. "When you met in 1975, the war was over and you were finally hashing it out? If I'm going to meet my cousins, I want to know about your brawl."

"Diana," I murmured. That very afternoon, she had put up a bushel of the San Marzano paste tomatoes, nine sparkling pint jars on the counter. She was still wearing her charming smock, spattered with juice and pulp, and further, her curly hair, the gray dyed to brown, was covered with a blue bandana. She was in that moment my Antonia, the love of my life. Surely it has never been more dangerous to love than in our time; the feminazis would undoubtedly lynch me for warming so to Diana in her farm-wife costume, the ensemble--such a vision--that made me want to jump up and polka with her out to the hayloft. "Diana," I said again. "This is the most delicious thing I have ever tasted." I had to close my eyes, to hold the trace of basil, the rumor of garlic in my mouth. "I feel like I'm back in my native Italy."

"Seriously, Dad! What happened?"

I opened up to look at Tessa. "Happened?"

"You're being obtuse on purpose! Don't be stupid."

"Usually nothing much actually happens." I was still in the trance of the pasta and also the Bryant Family Cabernet, 1996. "I'm not sure you're aware of that. It sounds unexciting, but as you get older you're grateful every time nothing at all occurs." I can count on one hand the incidents through my years that have spurred concrete change, starting with Madeline's bicycle accident, an essential marker in my life, as important as conception. To my daughter, in a vain attempt to make a joke, I said, "We put on diapers, Buddy and I, and we wrestled."

Diana exhaled theatrically, as if to say to Tessa, See? See how impossible my life is?

Tessa spoke quietly. "I'd really like to know. I'd like to kno
w y
our history." In her voice there was disappointment--You are letting me down, Father--and also tones of determination: I will get the story from you.

"You want to know," Diana said to Tessa with exquisite patience. "You want to know how it was between your father and Buddy. They were like brothers, that's what Louise says. Inseparable. When the families split it was like . . . what's-their-names, in Romeo and Juliet--"

"The Montagues and the Capulets."

"Those boys on either side of the fence."

"Except no double suicide," I said, my mouth full of noodles. " `She's dead, deceas'd, she's dead; alack the day!' "

"Your father had a summer job at the VA hospital in D
. C
. I stayed behind in Madison, working at a day camp, such wonderful, sweet girls, ages eight to ten, lots of fun. Buddy was just home from Vietnam. There was a dinner at Aunt Figgy's house, and that's when some of the animosities about the war came out. The family, like I was saying, was always arguing about it."

"There wasn't any animosity between Buddy and me over the war," I said, clearly, having swallowed.

"Excuse me?" Diana said. "I beg your pardon?"

The dog came up and put her nose between my legs, looking at me dolefully, as if there were nothing to say about my predicament, nothing to be done about my women, whose great subject is the emotional landscape, their own and the hazy terrain of their loved ones'. It is a tottery position for them, trying to acquire self-knowledge without going overboard, without becoming stridently self-indulgent.

"And there wasn't a dinner at Figgy's," I said.

I do, however, remember meeting Buddy for a drink at a hotel near Union Station in Washington, and no doubt Diana is correct, that the year was 1975. It's also probably true that there was a story to tell, one that could well satisfy the women. My cousin was passing through the city, on his way to Maine to visit his parents. From the window where I was sitting in the bar, I could see him coming along the street
,
walking swiftly, chin up, eyes straight ahead, as he must have had to do in training, and in drills overseas. He was tan as always, with that particular Buddy sheen, as if he'd been lightly washed in gold. His skin tone was an ornament, an essential accessory to the man, the sun-studded soldier.

I came outside and we shook hands heartily, and then, in that way veterans have, he threw his arms around me and hugged me hard, swaying back and forth. He was twenty-nine. There were faint lines under his eyes, his face was leaner, the angles were pronounced: he was fit, and also he'd suffered. I knew very little about Buddy's time in Vietnam, but we'd all learned about the Silver Star he'd received for showing uncommon bravery through the Tet Offensive. He had been a guard, and so he hadn't at first been in combat, standing sentry at his base somewhere, I think, near Nha Trang. His mother had thought he'd have a desk job, but Buddy had decided to be as close to the infantry as he could without actually fighting. During Tet, he'd come under fire and, using his old general's authority, that gift he'd honed at Moose Lake, he'd repelled the enemy and also protected most of those he'd been working with. Although Cousin Nick once said that Arthur Fuller pulled strings, that no one who had fought in a little skirmish like that would have earned such an honor, I had liked to think Buddy deserved the decoration.

Once we were inside the bar and sitting he said, "How is everyone? Your mom, your dad, Madeline?"

"Madeline?" After all those years, after having been away, he found it important to ask after her, to make sure that she was fine, that the neighbor boys weren't abusing her. The thought of Buddy probably still made Jerry Pindel's blood run cold. "She's doing all right," I said. She was fifty-six, her blond hair in her updated coif streaked with white, the shine gone. The thin fall of her hair to her shoulders and the bangs made her actually look younger than she had with her ribbons and rubber bands. Five years had passed since Mikey O'Day had moved to Lantana, Florida. She still refused to go to the movie the-

ater, and my mother always drove out of her way to avoid the DariDip. Julia had managed to get Madeline a job at a beauty salon uptown, gainful employment, what Figgy had envisioned from the start. A few afternoons a week, she did shampoos and swept the clippings from the floor. She was proud of her work and excited to have her own money. The first thing she had shown me on my last visit was her passbook from the bank.

We figured, Buddy and I, that it had been ten years since we'd last seen each other. During much of that time he'd been out of the country. He'd found his place in the army, he'd gotten engaged to Joelle, a woman who'd been in the Miss America Pageant. Before her state title she'd been Miss Alamogordo, an accomplishment that sounded even more exotic than Miss New Mexico. Buddy hadn't been to Washington since he'd been decorated by Nixon in 1969. "An amazing moment." He shook his head as if he still couldn't believe it.

I had read accounts of soldiers who had not felt the same way, who had not attended their ceremonies, but Buddy was in earnest about his awe. "Watergate blew everything," he said. "It blew the Peace Accords, it blew our ability to stand behind the treaty, to protect Vietnam. It blew Congress's will to finish off the war honorably."

I agreed with him that the break-in had been unfortunate.

"There's always foul play in elections," he said. "The country acts like Nixon's the first guy to tamper with the process!"

"And to tape himself at the same time," I noted.

"When I got off the plane at Dulles, after my first tour, people spat on me. You folks out there"--he waved his hand to indicate the Midwest--"don't believe it, but it's true. I was spat on in our capital because I'd served my country." He frowned into the polish of the bar. "What could they know?" he muttered.

That kind of ingratitude, I said, was unforgivable, and I was sorry he'd had to endure it.

"Especially for enlistees, the guys who signed up because we believe in our country."

"Do you remember," I said, "how startled everyone was when you joined?" I suppose what I meant was how frightened I'd been for him.

"Are you kidding, Brains? There was no big secret there. It was a hell of a lot easier to go into the army than not get into college and not win the girl of my dreams. Don't get me wrong, I was prepared to do the job. But I did practically flunk out of the academy, something my mom probably kept to herself. I'm not just saying I almost flunked out a little. Arthur, I'm sure, had to talk sweet or pay up so I could graduate."

It was the first time we were talking as fully fledged adults, the first occasion when we could look back on our youth with some kind of perspective. I was suddenly very glad that he'd made the effort to meet. It had been common knowledge that he'd had to stay back a grade in high school, but Figgy had always made it sound as if they had opted to have Buddy experience certain subjects again so that he would be strong academically, as if they'd had a choice, as if repeating was like taking megavitamins. I could imagine that, rather than doing his homework, he'd been teaching his friends indispensable lessons for their real lives.

"I'm wired for the army anyway--my dad, my grandfather," he was saying. "I come from a long line of warriors." He stretched his arms their full span, as if to tell me there had been legions before him, all the way back to Achilles. "How else was I supposed to figure out manhood?"

"Manhood." The image of Jerry Pindel rose before me, blood streaming from his nose. "I was always impressed by your courage," I said, "well before you joined the army." "Courage," I thought, wasn't exactly the word. How much of Buddy's force was actually bravado? "There was that night--you might not recall it--the night in the neighbor's garage the summer you visited us, the year before you enlisted." That small scuffle, that violence would be nothing compared with the tedium and heroics of years at war.

"That fucking made me crazy!" he cried. "Yeah, I remember. The scumbag operator--what was his name? The bunwad, trying to make Madeline blow that idiot on the sofa! I wanted to blast that asshole's brains to smithereens."

I couldn't help laughing at his indignation. "It was a fashion show at first," I reminded him. "I'm not sure Jerry planned for anything beyond dressing Madeline in the Goodwill clothes and having some hilarity at her expense."

"You're out of your mind, Brains! He had the retard on the sofa so Madeline could dickie-lick him. You are still out to lunch, aren't you, pal? Head in the clouds. I did want to kill that kid for mixing Madeline up with the half-breed."

"Her boyfriend," I said. "Mikey, that 'half-breed,' was her boyfriend. She was engaged to him."

He squinted to think. "Yeah, oh yeah, I knew that, that's right. What are you saying, though? You saying it was okay for the butt-wipe to--"

"Of course not. I'm only saying that Mikey wasn't a stranger to Madeline, and also I wouldn't call him a half-breed." I probably sounded not only sanctimonious but dramatic when I said, "He was the best thing that ever happened to her."

"Sure, sure, I can see that. She was a very pretty lady, and she was dying for it. I was a babe in the woods, and I knew that much. My mom said she was like a bitch in heat, always rubbing up against the back fence, mooning around the yard. You did want the poor girl to have some relief." He felt it necessary to add, "But not up in that attic with all those dumb-ass kids watching."

He trolled in the communal snack-mix bowl for the peanuts, and I drank my beer. I remembered that hot afternoon when Mikey and Madeline for the first time disappeared alone into her bedroom. I'd been reading an enormous Hermann Hesse novel that I took for the last word on the meaning, among other things, of rivers, the profound flow, the taking, the giving, the changing, the sameness. It was with
a w
eighty seriousness that I rolled off my sticky bed to go to the bathroom. As I was at the toilet, I realized that the two of them were upstairs, in Madeline 's room, together in her room. I could hear her light laughter and his guffaws, which were unusually throaty. Back in the hall I listened some more, the voices behind the closed door as changeable as the river, but also ever the same. Mikey was making noises the way he did if my mother presented him with a dish of ice cream or a juicy hamburger, yum-yum sounds. I went straight downstairs to see if Julia was home, and so she was, in the kitchen chopping carrots, without a care in the world. I stood staring at her.