When Madeline Was Young (5 page)

"People," I replied into my coffee, "do all kinds of things." I had only the morning before seen a man who had managed to insert, or more probably have inserted, a hardball the size of a grapefruit into his rectum. Not a detail I would have brought up at the breakfast table, or at any time of day for that matter, but an argument, nonetheless.

"Why are you so stubborn?"

"Stubborn?"

She groaned softly--or, rather, she growled. When she does that she shakes her head, setting her dark curls atremble. She is the prettiest of her sisters, their features thick where hers are delicate, their eyes blue with light lashes, hers black, and one of them on a perpetual and ineffectual diet. Diana's springy tresses are her bane and my pride. She has never had any interest, none, in knowing that the wonder of her hair depends on the number of disulfide bonds between hair proteins in their shafts.

"He's not stubborn, Mom," Lyddie, the firstborn, said. "He just doesn't have pods of well-developed friendship the way we do."

"He's like the silent guy at the end of the block," Katie said, "the one you'd never suspect would go shoot all the kids in the library. Not that Dad would, but if he did you'd be totally surprised--and then sort of like, 'Oh! I get it.' "

They had the habit of speaking about me as if I were not present. Tessa, having entered quietly, stared at her sister. "Sometimes, Katie, I swear to God, you say the most imbecilic things."

"Kate's got a point," Lyddie said, she who was planning to study the law. She then launched into the story the girls seem never to tire of about the time I was watching a video of a new surgical procedure. It was a heart surgery, as I recall, angioplasty perhaps, and while I was watching I guess I was eating a stack of blueberry pancakes. They like to tell how the deep reddish-purple of the berries stained the plate and napkin and my teeth, as on the screen blood spattered the surgeon's gown.

Lyddie has my aunt Figgy's freckled skin, wavy hair, and the noteworthy bosom. Like Figgy, she is full of fun, capable and shrewd, dead serious when it comes to her goals. She intends to be a criminal lawyer and then a district attorney and eventually a judge. Katie is the youngest, plush and blond, enough bulk to be a good softball player, the Maciver among her sisters who has no enthusiasm for academics. She is a brave girl to have come in her brother's place. Tessa is straight and thin, small-boned like her mother, with a sharp chin and nose, the moodiest of the lot. She reads books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page. Historically, until the older girls' college years, Lyddie mothered Katie. Tessa and Katie fought with their claws. And Lyddie and Tessa slew each other with words.

At one point, when Diana was still exhorting me to go to the funeral, Tessa leaned over the upstairs railing into our almost entirely open first floor, the great room a drafty three stories, and called, theatrically, "Don't make him go, Mom! Buddy's what, a corporal or a major? How embarrassing for Dad."

Tessa has the gift--or foolishness--of finding clues where there may be none, of believing, as she noses around in her quarry's psyche, that even if she can't quite pinpoint the mystery, there is indeed something. Buddy's son, not so much older than Tessa, was going to arrive in the U
. S. A
. in the customary coffin draped with Old Glory. He would be on the tarmac, one of the boxes in one of the rows. Had my mother been alive, I feel sure she would have had a momentary startle, grim satisfaction her involuntary response to this saddest of outcomes.

"You are president of the Youth Symphony Board," my wife reminded me, "a library trustee, a founder of the homeless shelter, and, let's not forget, at the top of your profession. I'm sure you can face your cousin, honey, and be of comfort to him. You were so close!"

"Yeah, Dad," Lyddie said. "Get over yourself."

They all laughed. Tessa had gone beyond hearing range and wa
s n
ot there to defend me. It is a chronic amusement, to be surrounded on your own grounds by no one but women, including the dog, Nancy, the Rhodesian ridgeback, and at one time a girl hamster named Sammy. The holding is twelve acres, much of it landscaped, with a six-thousand-square-foot post-and-beam house, moderately efficient, and a three-car garage. The kitchen, which Diana calls Contemporary Country, reflects her rural upbringing and also her modern tastes. There is a gingham wallpaper design, tile inserts of farmyard animals here and there on the countertops, dried flowers hanging from the always freshly polished copper pots, but amid that rustication--boo!an eight-burner Viking stove, a pantry with a thousand-bottle wine cellar, and a stainless-steel refrigerator the size of a tanker. Her cookbooks suggest that she has eaten at the restaurants of the great American chefs and that she believes in the slow-food movement. At the dinner hour there is no luckier man than I.

At the time the house was built, it was Diana's dream come true, along with the grape arbor, the apple orchard, and the bower of lilacs. Her latest wish to perfect that dream is a lap pool in a solarium. I have brought on the accounts and shown her our debt load, and I've reminded her how many times the house has already been in the Annual Hospital Tour of Homes, the doctors showing off their goods but of course for charity. Diana reads optimistic fiction in which, as far as I can tell, the heroine discovers her inner strength and lives out her life feeding off that rich core. In the end, both she and I know, she will get her way.

Nothing for the lone male to do but retreat into the paterfamilias silence, far away and yet close enough to hear, when they are home, the rushing murmur of the girls' endless chatter and internecine squabbles. To contain my love for them, I have a room far from the hub--"the cell," they call it--where I have amassed my books. It is there that I close my door and take up the histories of the ancient world, from 1999 backward.

IN CHILDHOOD, when a matter of a few months separated the men from the youths, Buddy was nearly two years my senior; I was the second oldest, and there were four boy cousins under me. There was, in addition, a much younger bunch we paid no attention to. The five of us, the elders, could not count ourselves in the same stratum as the master, and we gladly submitted to Buddy's command. It was we, I later thought, who trained him to be an officer, serving courageously in Vietnam, the recipient of ribbons and medals, including a Silver Star. After his initial tour as a guard, he re-enlisted, the second time with the First Logistical Command, working the supply lines from Da Nang. Through the years he made his way up the echelons, a career military man, until, as Tessa suggested, he was some kind of chieftain--a sergeant first class, last I'd heard.

How well he'd turned out, and against all the early predictions. In his school days he was no scholar, much to his mother's mortification. There was naturally talk in the family about the fluke, the genetic near impossibility, that Harvard and Radcliffe graduates, Figgy and Bill Eastman, had produced a boy who not only had average intelligence but was almost held back in the third grade. Had he been dropped on his head as an infant, or deprived of oxygen for a minute at birth? The relatives seemed not to consider that he didn't care enough about his studies to apply himself, that he had no academic interests, that he filled in the circles at random on standardized tests. There was fresh incredulity and some glee among the aunts when they'd managed to learn that he'd scored in the 20th percentile on his Iowa Basic Test of Skills in the eighth grade.

He made slightly above-average trouble as a teenager, before he was shipped off to a military academy, but on the whole it was trouble for its own sake. He wasn't angry or sullen, didn't hold a grudge against any particular person. His intentions, that is, were pure. Why not set a cornfield on fire at the lake--not just a corner flaring up, but the windy night sweeping the flames, one end to the other, five acres ravaged? That the barn and farmhouse hadn't been lost was a testament to the volunteer fire department. Even Buddy admitted it ha
d g
otten out of hand. There were other pyrotechnics no less exhilarating, tying M-8
0
s to bricks and throwing them in the water to blow up the overgrown greasy carp. The fatsos of the fish world, he maintained, deserved to be obliterated. His need to rid the lake of aquatic ugliness seemed connected to our grandfather's wish to preserve the loveliness of the butterflies, and my father's trapping birds to immortalize their plumage. Buddy always managed to get hold of illegal fireworks, and up in the west pasture we were at least once a summer in the paradise of explosives. It probably goes without saying that there was nothing funnier in all the world than Buddy igniting his farts with a Bic lighter.

He went to jail only once, for taking an ambulance on a joy ride. That was something we only heard about. I was glad also to miss the shaving of the cat down to its whiskers, the animal staggering around the yard as if it had been blinded. Perhaps his most whimsical stunt took place after they moved to Washington, D
. C
., when he sneaked backstage in a high-school auditorium and inserted himself into the second act of Bngadoon, hamming it up in the dance line to amaze the leading lady. He'd had the foresight, the genius, to rent a kilt. Figgy had never been more embarrassed by her son, but only because the ingenue was the daughter of a member of President Kennedy's Cabinet, either Transportation or Agriculture. Shortly after that episode, Buddy was sent to the academy in West Virginia.

There was no end of Buddy stories, including the one about the girl who got pregnant, who had to go all the way to Tokyo to have her abortion and get over him. There were the stories, and there were the snapshots of his feats, water-skiing with theatricality and daring, playing tennis with panache, grace notes in his serve before the slam. His lips had that turned-inside-out puffiness, and yet the pillow of the upper lip was finely sculpted, the refinements people pay great sums of money for nowadays. The big joker mugged for the camera, that mouth puckered up, ready to kiss. Although I'd learned to expect it, he always managed to tackle me when I wasn't ready, even if I thought I
was on guard. I'd find myself suddenly on the floor of the forest, Buddy yelling at me to fight him. "Stop being puny, Brains! Take me down, take me down!" I don't think he really meant me to, because he usually jumped me when the others were watching, to prove, I guess, that he was the stronger and also that there were limits to his ability to force my or anyone else's success. "How're you going to get out of this hold, huh? Huh? Stick your ass up, your wimpy little ass, come on, use your legs, use your legs, what are you made of?" And so forth.

At night, as I said, he gave us indispensable advice. His verbal skills were not exceptional, but he was a good mimic, and he was also an exhibitionist--and why not, since he was lean and muscular and immoderately well hung? We took it for granted that he was right to show off. Without his clothes on, and bouncing as best he could on the thin cot, he made sexual intercourse seem like an activity that was best performed on a trampoline, something that added to my anxiety about girls. Even in the guttering light his prowess was plain to see, and so we understood that any slight he received in school or on the playing field was an error, an injustice, a violation of the truth. He used to organize the five of us for pranks, and he was able to do this with great efficiency because he made it clear that he, and only he, knew our characters. He'd stand on the dock with his arms crossed over his bare chest, surveying the group, taking stock again of our strengths and weaknesses, our basic selves, which were so difficult to hide from him.

My grandmother owned the lake compound near Antigo, and she stayed all summer, making sure, she thought, that her grandchildren followed the rules. Boys past the age of six used the outhouse or the bushes, no matter the weather. Boys were never under any circumstances to come into the house to bathe, and only if they were near death could they sleep in the closet-sized room off the parlor. Boy creatures washed in lake water with lumps of scratchy white soap, did their business in the wild, and remained healthy. The girls, the young misses, were not allowed in our domain, in the upper boathouse, on pain of a punishment that would surely humiliate all of us. I imagine
d o
ur having to line up in the living room, my grandmother's demanding we speak about our misdeeds, her calling on us, displeased and indeed violated by every word we said. When I thought of the interrogation, of her disappointment and disgust--which we had brought upon ourselves--I felt near to vomiting. Buddy always reassured us, telling us that if we followed his directions we wouldn't get caught. Thus was our path charted for us; thus was it our duty to cross the unyielding line.

There were two or three plots we used to gain entrance to the girls' quarters, in the long hours of the afternoon or the darkest night, so that we could execute the time-honored violations, short-sheeting the beds, tucking salamanders into neatly folded clothes, plunking turtles in the toilets, and once, we stood sentry for Buddy while he spent an hour with Cousin Mona. That evening we were sick with excitement and wonder, and never again could we look Mona in the eye.

It must be said that the four girls our age retaliated more or less in kind. They TP-ed the inside of the boathouse every year, a trick that always gratified them, rolls of toilet paper crisscrossing the open room so densely it was impossible to move from one end to the other. They managed to do half the job the year I was fourteen, while we slept. Buddy was visiting for a weekend, the extent of his time with us that summer, and it was he who woke and captured two of them. He told Pammy to stay, and then he heaved Mona, the most comely, over his shoulder, and walked with her down the stairs and out to the dock. No doubt being thrown in the lake by Buddy was what she'd hoped for, what she'd planned. He didn't push her but lowered her lovingly into the glassy water, slipping in after her, moving quietly out to the raft. They probably only took off some of their clothes at the ladder. The rest of us, including the other hostage, sat around on the beds, rubbing our eyes, unable to think what to do that might somehow match Buddy's fun, or anyway the story he would tell when he was finished.