When Madeline Was Young (35 page)

It didn't take long for the girls to figure out the lay of the land, and then they were off, charging across the Ponce Vecchio, to the Boboli Gardens, ducking in here and there to a church or, at the least, a gift shop. Tessa would come back to the hotel with stacks of postcards, Katie with medals of the saints, and Lyddie once with a gutted bird tied at the feet for my father. She'd picked it out from a line of them hanging on a string at a butcher's, and with her head turned away and her arm outstretched she'd handed it to him. He was so pleased, and keen to find a stove and a frying pan, to see how a Florentine sparrow tasted.

The adults took turns with Madeline, morning and afternoon shifts. She was spry, and for short periods she enjoyed walking, looking at the shopwindows, the tourists, the paintings and sculptures. Over the years she had developed real stoicism, or perhaps it was resignation, an animal patience, waiting, waiting for time to pass. She could sit peaceably at the dinner table while the others talked, for many minutes turning a salt shaker around and around, or rocking, her upper body moving in slow back-and-forths. In our forays into museums and churches, she was drawn to the Baby Jesuses and the Madonnas, if the Virgin didn't look too somber, and she stared unabashedly, her mouth open at the sometimes larger-than-life penises of the statuary. In the Uffizi, she was as transfixed as I by the Botticellis. She couldn't believe how long Venus' hair was, and I think it amazed her the way the tresses so conveniently covered the genitals. She stepped as close as she could to look at the golden locks obscuring the place. When she'd gotten over that part of the painting, she pointed at the feet, at how well Venus was balancing on the lip of the seashell. We'd spend forty-five minutes or so walking slowly through a few of the galleries, sitting for a while to watch the crowds, and then we'd take a break in a cafe so she could have a gelato and I a coffee spiked with Benedictine.

At one point I found myself walking with her across the Piazza Santa Croce. It was the spot, if I remembered correctly, where, according to Figgy, Madeline had met her swain on his bicycle. That is, one afternoon, after drinking a bottle of Chianti at lunch, I deliberately strolled in that direction with Madeline, arm in arm, just as a mother and son might do on a fine summer day. How Figgy knew about the location of the love moment is hard to say. I can only assume that, once upon a
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time Madeline had confided in her, that they had a luncheon, sister-in-law to sister-in-law. Because I had read my Baedeker thoroughly, I knew that geniuses such as Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Galileo, and Rossini had graced the Franciscan church with their bones, that there were splendid tabernacles and sepulchers for thei
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lorious dust. I talked to Madeline about St. Francis as we walked, about his love for animals and the poor. She was the only one in the family who was willing to listen to my lectures. Standing at the edge of the piazza, I explained how the people had lived huddled on top of each other in their crammed quarters in the Middle Ages. It was the monks who came up with the idea of the large squares, space for people to gather, for games and conversation. "Just like the alley," I said, "the way it used to be, the boys playing basketball, the mothers discussing their children."

"Room to play horses," she observed.

As far as I knew, she hadn't had a horse friend in years, the younger generation on the block no longer building jumps in mud-packed backyards. In the present-day era, there were preassembled play structures pounded into the thick grassy ground, and no one ever in sight. "You remember that, do you?" I said. "Cantering around with the Van Norman girls, whinnying and clicking your tongue?" It was unusual now to hear a basketball thumping in the alley, that noise as constant as a clock ticking the seconds when I was a boy.

The pigeons were bullying and bobbing for crumbs, and the tourists with their baseball caps and fanny packs jostling us made it difficult to feel much of any kind of past. And yet my heart was racing, to be crossing the piazza with her. She was wearing a light pink dress, sleeveless and straight, feminine and even flattering on her eightyyear-old frame. There was that stillness in her face, her mouth open slightly, the eyes cast down as she dutifully waited for the minutes to pass, waiting for nothing much to happen. Alcohol destroys brain cells in the left hemisphere especially, the seat of language, of logic. Perhaps I was drunk; perhaps the nerve membrane in my frontal lobe had become structurally unstable from years of drinking through dinner. How to account for the suddenness of my feeling, my wish for Madeline to have happiness, to have a jolt of life. I gripped her shoulder as if somehow I could prod her to it. "Madeline," I said. In a time when my brain was probably failing me, I had hope for hers. I can offer little ex-

planation for that hope, that she have access to a scene that had once thrilled her, except to say that after my lunch I was overcome in the shadow of Santa Croce. For just a minute, darling Madeline, become yourself "Madeline," I said once more.

"I'm okay," she said reflexively.

I wondered if she'd gone into the church on that day, when she was a teenager, or if the imposing building had served only as a backdrop to the Italian as he rushed to her on his bike. I suggested we go inside, thinking that the nave might somehow be familiar to her. After the conflagration, bike and man and girl, maybe they had gone together into the church and stood looking up at the terrible height of the ceiling, an architectural impossibility. I had often thought about how Madeline's recovery would have been significantly different if she'd been a young bride in the year 2000, if her frontal-lobe syndrome could have been partially treated with neuropharmacology, neuropsychiatrists, and continued rehabilitation. It is conceivable that she might have overcome some of her deficits.

In the enormous cavern of the basilica, we both did grow solemn. Our footsteps echoed, and although the other tourists were trying to be quiet and respectful, even their whispers seemed to ring out into the gloom. I could see that Madeline was spooked, that she didn't want to hear her sandals on the stone, didn't want to move for fear of making noise. It wasn't going to be worth trying to see the Giottos in the side chapels, or the Donatello Crucifix, or the tombs of the great men, and in any case just then I didn't care about the masterpieces. "Should we light a votive candle before we go," I said, "and make a wish?"

Yes, she would like that. With a mission, with her goal the tiers of guttering candles in their glasses on the far side, she didn't so much care about clacking across the floor. As I dug in my pockets for coins, to make our plea legitimate, she asked the age-old question: "Does it have to be a secret when you wish?"

"No!" I said. "Absolutely not. I'll tell you what I'm going to wish. Let's see-I might wish that the bride and groom have a long future." My heart quickened again. "Is that too dull?"

She bit her lip as she thought. "No," she pronounced.

It had always been impossible to know if the scar tissue had disrupted the network between her hippocampus, the temporal lobes, and their connection to other midline structures, those memory components that must be linked together as a whole for a person to retrieve comprehensible chunks of the past. Still, I had grown certain that Madeline's long-term memory must be intact, that she had gaps in her history only because neither she nor anyone in her household told the stories of her girlhood. As far as I could figure from Figgy's sketchy anecdotes, Madeline had had post-traumatic amnesia after the accident, her short-term memory, as usually happens to the brain-injured, coming back slowly, within a month or two. If she had merely repressed her early years, then perhaps being in the piazza, in the church would trigger the moment with the Italian, just as the famous madeleines had given Proust his flood of recollections. All that had been lacking in Madeline's life up to this point was a simple trip to Italy! It wasn't a moment too soon for an old lady who might be suffering from standard forgetfulness. If there was magic to be had in all the world, wouldn't it take place in a country where saints still performed miracles from the grave, where St. Januarius' blood, for example, dried and preserved, turned into a liquid when it was brought near a certain holy statue? Not only did it liquefy, not only did it froth, it bubbled. Therefore, I said, "I've changed my mind. I think I'll wish that you, Miss Madeline, that you remember something that once brought you joy. Long ago, so long ago you might not ordinarily remember. How about that?"

Did I feel foolish saying so? Not at all, not then. I handed her the taper, and she touched it to her wick. Perhaps now, midway through the first decade of the new century, we have to be too alert to entertain mystical experiences, but in Santa Croce, before the millennium, I very much wanted one. She had a faraway look I thought might possibly mean something. "I wish," she pronounced with great seriousness, and also, it must be said, genuine altruism, "that the bride looks like an angel. Forever and ever."

"Angel?" I whispered. What was it that the Italian had said to her when he'd nearly run over her on his bike? "At this moment-I see in the piazza the angel." Was it a coincidence that Madeline was speaking of angels, or did she in fact remember? Her saying so couldn't have been prompted by the angels everywhere in Florence, the cherubim and seraphim in the churches, the museums, on postcards, on the walls of the restaurants, on packets of tissue, on the wrappers of chocolate. How many hundreds of annunciations had we seen? She was surrounded by lovely winged women of great purity, but I was certain in the moment that none of those images had superficially affected her. She remembered. I knew she remembered.

I lit my candle, restating my desire. "I wish that Madeline remembers something forgotten, something that once brought her a great happiness." Let her basal forebrain bloom with acetylcholine-producing neurons, those that are essential for memory. And then what? Let her remember, and let that happiness remain within her, neither fading nor becoming sour; let there be that miracle, too, that the joy remain fresh.

We both stared at the slender white flame for a minute, both of us, maybe, expecting a scene to appear out of the small bit of fire. When that didn't happen I said, "Let's go out and sit on the steps a minute. Let's go see what we see."

"See what we see," she echoed.

Once we were on the shady end of the stone steps, when we were sitting, looking out into the square, I asked, "Have you ever been here before?"

"Yeah." She said so dully, the way she often did when she didn't know the answer.

I wondered if the man, let us call him Giorgio, was still alive. He would also have been in his eighties, and perhaps he still lived in Florence, above the leather shop that his sons now managed. Maybe he was one of the elegant elderly gentlemen sitting outside in front of a cafe, having his coffee, his cane resting against the table. If he looked up at Madeline, would he have a jolt? Would he see that essential divinity in her still? In order to help her get back to 1937 I had to try t
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ind out where her memory easily started. She had access to Mikey O'Day and the horse-jumping era, and so maybe I could nudge her backward. "Do you remember when Lu and I were little, when you chased us around the circle downstairs?"

"Russia made me take a nap!" She pouted. "I was too old for a nap."

"Of course you were. But you had to, because everyone did what Russia said."

"She was mean to me."

"She was bossy, that's true. But she always said you were the prettiest girl. Do you remember that?"

"Prettiest girl," she repeated, brightening.

"Do you remember a long time ago, a very long time ago, when you were in high school, when you went to Evanston Township High School?"

"Yeah," she said again.

What question could I ask for the miracle? Did you use to like to ride a bicycle? Did you ever meet a man who was riding a bike? Do you remember the severe woman who wore the ostrich plume in her hat? Not the person you called Mother who died five years ago, but that other mother, Mrs. Schiller? When, incidentally, did you begin to call Julia Maciver Mother? I put my arm around her and kissed the cheek that was covered with fine down, and then I drew away and said it right out. I said, "At this moment-I see in the piazza the angel."

She sat idly scratching her leg, squinting up at the sun as it started to come across us.

"Tessa caught Isabel's bouquet," she said. "I wanted to, but Tessa got it before me."

"And then Tessa divided the flowers so you could have some of them. Lyddie, Katie, and you all got roses." It had been wonderful of Tessa to realize that Madeline was hoping for the bouquet.

She wrinkled her nose as if a bad smell had come her way. "But I wanted to catch it."

"I did, too," I said.

She bent over her lap. It took me a minute to realize she was laughing. "They-they don't-don't let . . . boys catch the bouquet!" She lifted her head to stare at me, and then she laughed again, the sound starting down in her throat and hitching upward. "That's funny! B-boys don't catch the bouquet."

I stretched out my legs and let the sun shine full on my face. Perhaps there were going to be no miracles for Miss Madeline, at least not today. The magic of winter to spring was no doubt less intricate than Madeline's finding one small memory from her youth. Maybe it was in an effort to redeem myself that I began to talk, or maybe even before I started I knew that it was up to me to give her what she couldn't make on her own. "Long ago," I said, "there was a girl walking in the hot afternoon, by herself, across this piazza. Coming from over there-do you see?-from the Borgo dei Greci, a boy was running an errand for his father, on his bike. The piazza was empty because most of the people in Florence were taking their siesta. But he came riding across and he saw the girl. They were the only two people awake in the city." It was important to outfit the heroine, and I said with absolute confidence, "She was wearing a white dress with a full skirt, and a straw hat with a blue ribbon that went down her back. It was fluttering a little, in the breeze. She had left her mother in the hotel and was glad to be by herself, just this once, to walk along the streets looking at everything without someone explaining the details, this dead saint, that dead saint, such-and-such who was a famous artist, what's-his-name who was burned at the stake. She was tired of history. When the boy saw her, he stopped his bike. He had to put his feet down on the pavement so he could stare at her without falling over."