When Madeline Was Young (30 page)

lation of the urban landscape. We were leaving it behind as we'd done before, but this time was different; this time the entire scrim had been pulled away from the home front, and we could see the outer world that all along had been part of us. I would have liked to return to our cozy, selfish ignorance, but that seemed no longer possible; from now on we'd walk hand in hand with our entitlements, nursing them along, feeding them up. In the brief years of childhood, I had cried more than a boy should, shaken with sorrow if I saw a person in a wheelchair or a blind woman trying to cross the street. The deaf son of the grocer nearly killed me. My mother had identified our distinctive gifts--my sensitivity, she called it, and Louise 's music. Maybe the sound of the cello had been the only important, the only productive thing that had happened in our house. I wished for a minute that the older Lu weren't sitting next to me, that the Louise of Oberlin College could take herself back to our living room and sit herself down to her threequarter-sized cello.

Before we landed, just to irritate her, I said in my best Russia voice, "Timothy is my favorite, but Mr. Buddy, he's flying right into the storm to save us."

MY MOTHER COULDN'T STOP POOR BOYS, minority boys, or foolis
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oys from fighting the war, but she was not going to let the government have me for fodder. For her, in the matter of the Vietnam War, all young men were not equal. The summer after college, when I was living at home and working again at the museum, in Fishes, my number for the draft came up, just as we'd feared. The antiwar movement had by then seized the country, and it's hard to imagine even the most freedom-loving person thinking that Southeast Asia would be a worthwhile place to die. Nixon had been pulling out troops for some time, and I had no interest in being the last to be killed for any reason, not least for a cause the administration appeared to think futile. There was one terrible dinner at Moose Lake with Figgy and Arthur, righ
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efore I pleaded my case as a conscientious objector at the county courthouse, citing my Quaker heritage and my upbringing as a pacifist. After that night, my aunt and my mother never really spoke again. Buddy had enlisted for a second tour and was back in Vietnam, part of the First Logistical Command, the organization that supervised a number of depots, support groups, ammunition supplies, and mortuaries. For a while the word went around that he was driving trucks to the front lines, but as I said there were different reports through the years. Cousin Petie, who seemed to have his own reason for disliking Buddy, maintained that Sergeant Eastman was well behind the scenes and in no real danger. After Nixon's election, Arthur was going back and forth to Princeton to teach, and Figgy was staying in D
. C
. for her work at the Phillips Collection.

I remember that the Fullers left Moose Lake before their scheduled departure, and that Figgy took me aside as the car was idling, saying she would hold me in her prayers.

You pray? I wanted to ask.

She said I must always know that she admired me even if she didn't agree with my family's politics.

They had argued while they ate sliced turkey and boiled new potatoes. Arthur had become owlish in his delivery, staring at his adversary longer than was comfortable for any of us and then blinking slowly as he spoke. With severe forbearance he explained to my mother that the North Vietnamese were gaining power because of the American peace movement. The antiwar protesters had created a schism so deep in the country, he said, that it had destroyed the war effort; they had made it impossible for the military to call up the men that were needed and for Congress to allocate the moneys for victory. It must have required courage on Arthur's part, to have been one of the last holdouts on Johnson's staff to insist it was within reach to beat the enemy. In the election of 1968, Figgy and Arthur went Republican, voting for Nixon because they felt he would proceed with the conflict until it was finished honorably. It was unclear to some of us what pre-

cisely that meant, if it required all-out winning or somehow gaining enough leverage to broker a settlement. My mother was fond of saying that Figgy was the vocal part of Nixon's Silent Majority.

Because Julia couldn't forgive the Fullers for defecting to the GOP, she did her best to avoid seeing them. Whether the meeting at Moose Lake in 197
0
was planned or accidental, I don't know. Since she was forced to eat dinner with them that night, she as always threw her own research in Arthur's face: 8
0
percent of the armed services addicted to drugs, and privates attacking their superiors, wounding or killing their captains. If Arthur hadn't raised his voice to speak over her, you might have thought, looking at him, that he was unruffled. His lids slowly closed over the bulge of his eyes; his lids slowly lifted. He said again that the antiwar propaganda had demoralized the troops, had turned the army upside down.

"They are demoralized, Arthur, because all along they've been lied to! They are demoralized because they're being slaughtered senselessly!"

"It is difficult to keep the large picture in mind, certainly," he said. There was, I noticed then, a steady tic in his lower jaw. "Without American intervention, communist hegemony will likely spread through South Asia, East Asia, Thailand, India. Without our intervention, the Soviet Union might well take it upon themselves to secure oil-producing nations in the Middle East."

Arthur's relative calm was more than my mother could abide. "Forty thousand troops have been killed," she cried. "The South Vietnamese have been denied elections, they have been murdered, they have been polluted by our chemicals and all of our garbage they can get on the black market. Corruption is running--"

It was at that moment, I believe, when the argument fell to pieces, when Figgy entered the fray, shouting, "Don't tell us what it's like. Buddy has served for four years. Arthur has been there several times. You--you've not ever been to Southeast Asia!"

"That has nothing to do with what we're talking about, Figgy
,
and you know it. I have not been to Vietnam, I have not been to Timbuktu, but there have been reports from trustworthy writers--" "Trustworthy writers!"

"Mac will not be killed because Johnson's men and now Nixon's men have made the most tragic mistakes of this century!"

It was the same argument they'd been having for years, only just then I realized that all along what they'd actually been fighting about was their sons. Each of them as a parent had committed his child to a certain path, and each needed to insist time and again that his way, and the boy's willingness to follow, was right. Whereas, in the early days, their volleys had had the feel of sport, now their dislike was bitter and personal, the stakes high because we were both draft age.

"Mac," my mother was close to screeching, "will not die because you, people like you, refuse to face the terrible truth. The policies you have supported have killed thousands of men in a war that was not winnable from the start. You, you are responsible! You have made all of us in this country murderers. Murderers."

She left the room, and did not come downstairs in the early morning when her old friends left.

FOR TWO YEARS AS A CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR, I ran blood sample
s i
n a lab in Trenton, New Jersey. I spent the twenty-four months working, and also mourning Sophia Cooper. In the evenings I reread Miss Cooper's books, those weighty assignments, in my studio apartment, as if that application might one day help me win her back. It was a lonely period, and although I suspected it would end, I did not really believe that the slow time would ever pass. I did remember now and then to think of Madeline, to remember that without Mikey O'Day she might well be as wretched as I. The summer before my stint as a CO, when I'd been at home, I was so distracted by my own troubles that I paid her no attention. My mother had gotten her a job, there was that. She probably so accurately mirrored my misery I didn't want to look at her.

In New Jersey I sometimes thought I should send her a postcard or a package, a little thing to cheer her up, but I don't know that I ever did. On the weekends I took the train to New York and wandered the streets and museums, wondering if I'd bump into my former vegetarian--co-op housemate. And planning my moves if I happened to see her. So casually I might say, "I never dreamed I'd run into you here." I'd explain that, instead of being gunned down in a rice paddy, I was available to have a cup of coffee. The alumni magazine had said she was in the city studying with a violin guru who only took students bound for glory. I understood that a person who has been spared his death in the jungle, who has been spared from killing, should not admit to suffering from a loneliness so keen it seemed a physical affliction. I knew I should be grateful to have a heart and stomach, arms and legs, and empty hands with which to register that loneliness. Later, in my married days, when I closed the door to my study, I was after that old ache. I'd grown nostalgic for it. I'd listen to symphonies and read, drowning in the wisdom of Beethoven and the virtue of Lincoln. But if I fell asleep on my study sofa, and if I woke as dawn was coming on, I was sure for a horrifying moment that I was back in Trenton, that the rest of my life was only a dream, and that I'd remained in New Jersey. I'd throw off the thin blanket and hurry up to the bedroom, where Diana would instantly wake to scold me. What a relief to climb in next to her while she listed all the reasons it was thoughtless and also unhealthy to sleep on my sagging old couch.

In my conscientious-objector years, every now and then, I'd meet Figgy in New York. She'd take me to the Metropolitan, or we'd walk through the East Village so she could point out where she'd lived with Bill Eastman, where they had gathered in bars and cafes with those hard-drinking, womanizing painters who were on their way to inventing Abstract Expressionism. She talked about herself in that period with some vagueness, as politicians now do about their druggy days in college. She was kind enough to speak to me about the artists and their work, to avoid the subjects that had separated the families. She neve
r a
sked about my conscientious-objector status, and she didn't have much curiosity about my life in New Jersey. We were always glad to see each other, and I think we both felt the pleasure of doing something slightly illicit. The Capulet and Montague cousins having a drink outside of Verona.

When at last I did leave New Jersey for medical school in Madison, Wisconsin, I couldn't believe my fortune, to have classmates again, to have my cadaver, to study the body down to the molecular level so as to come someday to that simple act, both hands to a sufferer's throat, a cool touch to the hot forehead. Although I imagined myself in a clean, well-lit office with state-of-the-art equipment at my disposal, a fleet perhaps of nurses, beyond those trappings I still hoped to end up like old Doc Riley at Moose Lake, the dignified hoary man for whom the little children had parted the way. In my third week at school I met Diana, the girl down the hall. On our first date she spread out her napkin, drew small squares to represent each apartment in our building, and not only wrote the names of the inhabitants but described their persons, their problems, their liaisons with other residents, and also she told me their pets' names. She had done her research thoroughly, but she seemed to enjoy the fact that I found her work so amusing. "I'm serious!" she protested when I doubted there was a woman one floor up who actually weighed four hundred pounds, kept seven cats illegally, and had reported a UFO landing on Lake Mendota the winter before. She was charmingly petulant. She didn't need anyone to jump-start her for talking, and when I was with her I entered a state of deep relaxation. Her energetic generosity, her sparkly happiness were pacifying to me, but I could see how her zest could be inspiring, too. I had no doubt that she was going to be a fine grade-school teacher. It's usual, I suppose, to believe that our beloved is more of a certain something than anyone else, that she has more beauty or wit or enthusiasm or determination. Sophia had had an enlightened musical sensibility, great powers of concentration, and unusual physical ease. Diana, for all her distinguishing virtues and joys
,
seemed a standout because she loved me more than I deserved. We were both eager for the future and soon were sure of our choices.

I remember my panic when I'd counted out the money for the ring, and, even so, how her eyes welled up in the moment of presentation. How could I have known that she wanted the one with the two small stones either side of the diamond? "No, I like it, I do, I really do!" she cried into my chest. "I'm just all emotional, I've waited for this for about a million years, for you to come into my life."

I was sorry that I'd guessed wrong in the jewelry store, and as we walked downtown the next morning--she huddled against me, still weepy--I very much wanted to make the scene right for her. The ring was exchanged, an upgrade made possible by another loan from my father. She wept again, from delight and gratitude, and thus the anecdote of our engagement, of my ineptitude as a shopper, was sealed.

We have never been unfaithful, not I, and Diana--no, I feel sure that she has not. About fifteen years ago, when I was at a meeting in New York, I went to a concert of an up-and-coming string quartet at Avery Fisher Hall. I don't know what I hoped for, or what I supposed would happen. They were playing some of the early Beethoven quartets. Did Sophia Cooper steal the show because she was the only woman onstage, or because in her black strapless gown she'd come into the kind of beauty everyone would recognize? Gone was the long hair, gone were the glasses falling down her nose, gone her college pudginess. Her overbite, her gorgeous malocclusion, was accentuated in her lean face. Even if she'd had a shaved head, and if her vertical overlap had been surgically corrected, I would have known her as she began to play, as she sat on the edge of her chair waiting for the music to take her to the surprise destination. That was the Sophia Cooper I remembered. Afterward, I waited like a schoolboy outside the stage door with a small spray of roses.