When Madeline Was Young (3 page)

It was after the ceremony, in the receiving line, that my parents first met. My father, fair and freckled, was wearing a light-gray suit with a white rose at the lapel. My mother was as ever herself, a person who made no attempt to be fashionable, who didn't strain to highlight her assets. She never wore makeup, she never spoke about reducing, and she had no interest in clothes beyond keeping herself warm in winter and cool in summer. It's possible she was vain about her hands, her long fingers and perfectly oval nails, but I say so only because she had the right to think them elegant. She had blue eyes, small but penetrating, a perfect short nose, a generous mouth that allowed for her brilliant smile and what I loved best about her, her wide-open laugh. My father once said she was the most irreverent serious person he'd known. But in the first encounter she was no doubt straightforward and earnest. In her plain blue suit, her sensible pumps, with her short frizzy hair around her face, she probably gave a solid handshake and told him she was pleased to meet him, and also that she wished him the best happiness in marriage.

Madeline would have been next in line. "Julia Beeson," my father might have said, passing her on, "this is my wife." My mother was as vulnerable to beauty as the rest of us, and she may well suddenly have felt shy. As if she were a dowager aunt, someone far older rather tha
n a
few years younger than her new acquaintance, she took both of Madeline's hands in hers.

"Figgy's friend?" Madeline turned to her new husband to make sure she'd heard correctly. "It's very nice to meet you. And what a pretty brooch." Before she greeted the next guest she'd forgotten the plain woman, forgotten her name and the great-grandmother's garnet brooch, an ornament years later she was often urging my mother to wear.

Julia knew only what Figgy had told her, that Madeline had gone to a dreary little college in Chicago and studied home economics with an emphasis on fashion design. Figgy's biography of Madeline was on the whole the story of Figgy's dissatisfaction with her future sister-in-law and her disappointment in her own brother for marrying down. The Maciver family had once been a significant Chicago dynasty, going back to the fur traders; they had their place still on the Social Register. Who was Madeline Schiller? There was the no-name college, not to mention the groveling parents who were denied membership at the country club, who had had to prostrate themselves to get Madeline into the Junior League so she could go to the cotillion. They'd had the gall to discourage Madeline from marrying Aaron Maciver, suggesting she could do better.

My father was legally blind without his glasses and during the war had been sent to work in a munitions factory in Wisconsin. After he tripped over a wire in the parking lot and broke his foot in several places, he was discharged. That is to say, the Schillers may have had their own reasons for worrying about their daughter's choice. By trade he was an ornithologist, and for most of his professional life he was the curator of birds at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He wore binoculars around his neck the way librarians wear their glasses. At least once a year he went away for months to collect specimens in mountains and forests marked with red dots on our globe in the living room. He always returned with suitcases of birds neatly packed in foreign newspaper, laid in crosshatching rows. I like to think Madeline's love for him was a sign of her native intelligence.

Despite the relatives' concerns, the photographic record bears proof that Mr. and Mrs. Maciver were happy, the two of them generally shoulder to shoulder, clear-eyed, and grinning into the sunlight. Right before the wedding, Madeline had quit her job at the dress shop in order to learn to be a wife. Every morning, Mrs. Maciver sat at the kitchen table reading the Joy of Cooking, that primer of Jell-O rings; scalding, simmering, and poaching; stuffings, dressings, and forcemeat; oyster souffles; and the elusive milk-fed veal. She had been stricken by the fever of domesticity, something else that repulsed Piggy. Her fantasy was not modest in scale: eight children she wanted, four girls, four boys. On the curator's salary, they'd move to a large house on the lake, the little ones circling their mother in the nursery, Mother never losing her figure or her steady temperament, always unstained and unflappable in the center of the cheerful fracas.

It was peculiar, Buddy perhaps wanted to tell me, what lay at the heart of our middle-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant life. There is a picture of my father and his bride heading out together from their apartment on the North Side, in Rogers Park, for a Sunday-morning ride on their upright bicycles with wicker baskets. It's possible the photo was taken on the day of the accident, an hour or so before my father decided for some reason to mrn back ahead of Madeline. She wanted to go farther along the road by the lake, to visit her parents, and they separated, he promising to pick her up in the car to spare her the six-mile ride home.

The calamity and its aftermath have never been a story in the family, no recounting of those formless days in the hospital waiting for Madeline to wake, the first months of small and great hopes, the guarding against the clarity of future despair. No one had seen her lose control of the deep-blue Raleigh; there is no accounting for how she found herself on the pavement, the wheels crashed against the stone fence, the frame obscenely bent. The person who discovered her, who called for help and probably even resuscitated her, apparently was forgotten in the rush to the hospital. Madeline may have fractured a few ribs, losing blood into her chest occultly, low bloo
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olume stopping her heart. There may in addition have been a blow to the skull, acute subdural hematoma, the compression affecting her judgment and abilities. I can only guess in crude terms what happened, as was true for the doctors of that time, too. If we are in the dark ages now in the history of our understanding of the brain, the 194
0
s was a geologic age, somewhere in the middle of the Paleozoic, the quiet years before dinosaurs thundered over the earth. There were as yet no assessment scales for the stages of coma and recovery, no brain scans to identify the areas of damage; there were as yet no comprehensive rehabilitation facilities for the impaired. "She was out long enough to return quite less than herself," is how Figgy explained the consequences of the smash-up. Madeline had suffered traumatic brain injury, resulting in memory loss, cognitive deficits, personality change, mood disorders-quite less than herself. There has always been privacy around the subject of her accident, something, I maintain, that is altogether different from secrecy. I have the habit of explaining to my wife, again and then again, that that kind of privacy goes hand in hand with dignity. Figgy herself was unsure of the details when she was telling me about the disaster, the summer before I went to college.

My father went out for a bike ride with his wife and sometime later brought home from the hospital a twenty-five-year-old woman who would forever have the intellectual powers of a seven-year-old. A fine tale with gothic possibilities, a good story for Buddy to consider telling in the dark night to his cousin. What, I wonder, did my father's colleagues say to him about this piece of bad luck, or call it carelessness on the part of the husband? He'd abandoned his wife on the trail, turning back for what important business? What studying or house project would have been so critical that he couldn't ride on to say hello to his in-laws?

My grandmother rushed in to be of service, hiring a nurse so that my father's work and graduate studies would not be disturbed. It was she and also my mother in those years who made it possible for him t
o g
et his Ph
. D
. and thereafter secure the curator job he'd always wanted at the Field Museum. Madeline's parents, curiously, astonishingly, moved to Florida, to Naples, as far from the disaster as they could get. Mr. Schiller, who had doted on her, behaved as if his only child had died, as if by relocating they could erase her memory.

I am a doctor now in a small town in Wisconsin, and I see ordinary tragedy often enough. When someone I hadn't known well passes away on my watch, I go through the paces of giving comfort and I make myself in the moment imagine the suffering. It never fails to be affecting: coming upon a group gathered by the bed, all of them freed from the hold of night and day in the hospital's eternal light, all of them suddenly having to take a part in the great drama of their family. Still, my sympathy is admittedly frequently an exercise, one I can take up at will and usually set down.

My father's sadness comes to me unbidden and at odd hours. His future was shattered, and yet day after day the ghost of that future sat stolidly across from him at the breakfast table. I knew Madeline as a woman who had moved into her injury, who seemed to inhabit her limitations, a woman who was fixed in her self. But what of those months and years after the accident, what of that long period of becoming? It's notable that neither Figgy nor Russia felt free to rhapsodize upon the Macivers' private affairs--Russia, the cleaning woman who observed us for generations, who could make a story out of very little material. Not even Russia would trespass, never volunteering a word about that in-between phase, Madeline wife but not wife.

My sentimental father might lie staring up at the ceiling at night, too stricken for tears. He might have gotten carried away by the old joy, let himself be hopeful when there could not be hope. Stupid! Maybe even brutish. He'd been fooled by the holy silence in which she'd always given herself, which was in some ways just as it had been before the accident. He'd never slept with anyone but Madeline, so how could he know the difference, if there was any, between their ow
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eligion, this art of theirs, and what was the natural response of the average female? What had seemed spiritual about sex when she'd been right had probably not required her mind or even much of a self. Did she still have a self? Of course, of course she did. But maybe, after all, there had been no profound understanding between them in their year of marriage, open eye to open eye as they'd moved together, she clasping his hips, she--the first time, what a shock!--turning around on hands and knees, his Madeline, now sweet, now surprisingly fierce. He had not imagined, for example, that they would share, and so ecstatically, their animal shame.

Very occasionally I let myself think of that kind of thing. I suspect that not long after the accident my father knew he couldn't continue the old communion. There was the canopy bed, excessive in lace and ribbon, that he and my grandmother bought to entice Madeline away from him, a garish little-girl delight to seduce her to her own room. It is an embarrassment to recount that detail, my grandmother in those early days setting the tone for the household, shopping for the changed Madeline, doing what she could to ease the strain. Figgy through the years pestered me with the idea that they were wrongheaded, re-creating Madeline 's childhood, forcing upon her a young girl's tastes and enthusiasms. We used to argue about it, she saying that Madeline deserved the respect of an adult, that, even if she was incapacitated, she didn't have to play with dollies and puppets and finger paints. I contended that Madeline gravitated to comforts she could grasp. And, furthermore, she used brushes and tube paints and a palette. I see now that it is a fair question, to ask how much of Made-line's disability was imposed upon her. In fairness, too, it is a question that should be answered in terms of intention. Although the particulars are gruesome--the pink wallpaper, the vanity table with gold trim, the shelf of toys--my father, my grandmother, my mother meant to care for their charge the best they knew how; they meant to help her hold still in her new self.

IT WAS A FEW MONTHS after my father's marriage to Madeline that my mother had quit Radcliffe and come back to her native Chicago to get a degree in nursing. Figgy tended to highlight the farcical, but my mother also wasn't a reliable narrator, she who thought her own life unremarkable. It is either fantastical, then, or an ordinary coincidence that my mother was the nurse's aide who bathed Madeline and changed her sheets in the hospital after the accident. During those weeks at the Evanston Hospital, Julia Beeson and Aaron Maciver ate dinner together--the closest Julia had ever come to having a date, Figgy said. In the cafeteria they ate tough roast beef coated with a thick, dull gravy. "Imagine it's caramel," my mother advised. I suppose they spoke about Madeline's prognosis, they spoke about her strength, her endurance. It's also likely that they discussed the invasion of Normandy. There may have been talk about the difficulty Julia had had at Radcliffe, the intense snobbery there, all those Winslows, Cottings, and Cabot Lodges. The wealthy Quakers and Unitarians had been so cool in their generalized liberal kindness, and she couldn't escape the feeling that she was a charity case, the match girl on a scholarship in her ragged stockings. When she had to leave Radcliffe to care for her ailing father, it was something of a relief, an excuse for escape. She confessed that to Aaron, confessed that her father's illness and death had saved her from the oppression of her classmates and the family expectation that she be a colossus of knowledge. What a deliverance, she said, to do honest work, to pay for her own college education toward a useful degree. Aside from that intimacy and the balm of sympathy as the crisis went on, surely what sealed my parents' bond was their mutual affection and veiled scorn for Figgy. My father, but softly, imitated his sister's capacity to work through a room of men until she'd lassoed the most eligible bachelor, and my mother, with such fondness, impersonated Figgy cozying up to the professor and at cocktail parties becoming chums with the president of the board.

After the patient was safely home, Aaron invited Julia to the museum to show off the collection to her, drawer by drawer. He was not yet curator, but he had a position in the bird division, making skin
s a
nd assisting with the cataloguing. Because of Julia's genuine concern, she had soon, inevitably, become one of Madeline's constellation of caretakers. Why not, as a kind of thanks to her, extend the invitation to see the remarkable collection, the behind-the-scenes splendor? Over those birds that were presumed to be extinct--the great auk, the ivory-billed woodpecker--Julia nearly wept, and over many of the others--the indigo bunting, the chickadee, the hooded merganser, the common junco--she bent low and held her throat. He had thought she would enjoy them, but her reaction was beyond his expectation. Her appreciation for the dead was so great he couldn't resist asking her into the woods to show her the variety of the living in her own city. She was a quick study, and when she went to the nearby state park with him the following spring, to see the migrating warblers, she had done her lessons well, spotting without his help the chestnut-sided, the magnolia, the black-and-white, the Wilson's, the bay-breasted and golden-winged. Eventually, with the aid of a tape-recorded tutorial, she came to know the songs almost as well as he did. Although he'd been taught that comparison is odious, how could he not remark to himself that Madeline had never been interested in his work, that, for all her decorating sense, her artistry when it came to arranging flowers and furniture and putting suit with tie and shoes, she had not been seized by the magnificence of the birds? In the woods she had always grown cold, or she was dying of heat, or she was eaten alive by mosquitoes, frailties he had done his best to love. My father was impressed by Julia's quiet appreciation of beauty, by her stoicism when she was uncomfortable, by her intellect, and by her empathy for those who suffered, by her plans to become a nurse, to work in Appalachia or with Negroes in the city, a place where the need was acute. All that in addition to my mother's sly ridicule of his loudmouthed sister.