When Madeline Was Young (4 page)

In the years before their marriage, my mother came to the apartment to cook a meal, to read to Madeline, to play Go Fish, to look at fashion magazines, to dress paper dolls. Julia would hold Madeline's face and speak to her, making a loving tableau. She told her stories
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she tried to stretch her memory, gently, gently, so that Madeline, her head to her shoulder, as if in contemplation, didn't always become enraged by the challenge. My mother understood that a woman who had once been athletic, who had shot archery and enjoyed swimming, more than anything needed to be worn out, that it was important to keep the body moving. Julia may have known, before research began to bear the evidence, that exercise is important to cognition. Madeline had come out of the accident with a hitch in her walk, with an ungainly stride. It was, if I had to guess, a result not of the brain trauma but of a wrenching of her limb in the wrecked wheel. You had to look three times at her--once as a matter of course, and then at that odd lope, and again to see that it really was a lovely young woman. In summer my mother took her to the beach, and together they'd sink down out of the July heat into the cool water, Julia moving Madeline 's arms to remind her of the strokes she'd used in synchronized swimming. She was with Madeline through her hysterectomy, a surgery the doctor had suggested in order to make Mrs. Maciver's life easier. As Figgy told it, my mother's attorney cousin arranged for my father to be legally separated from his wife. It was my mother, then, according to the lore, who orchestrated the divorce.

"ONLY A DESPERATE MAN would have taken your mother seriously,"

Figgy told me not long ago, when we were up at Moose Lake. "How else," she said, "could Julia have landed herself a husband?"

"Figgy," I said wearily. It wasn't the first time she'd spoken to me about my mother in disparaging tones.

"Mac! Sweetheart, come on!" My aunt leaned forward on the porch, after all those years still showing off her cleavage in her low-cut blouse, the withered bosom and her pearls at last giving her a patrician elegance. She said, "Your mother saw her chance and went after Aaron. Good for her, is what I say. I'm all for that kind of capture. But on a level playing field there would have been no competin
g w
ith Madeline. The glamour-puss made her own slips, her own camisoles, her own winter coat--she was that particular. So what if she was no intellectual giant? What hot-blooded man cares about that? Madeline had powers beyond the standard dumb blonde--genuine star quality, that calculating femme-fatale lustiness beneath the cool platinum purity. I'm telling you in her own way she was a deep thinker. But had she ever read anything more difficult than a fashion magazine?" Figgy rubbed her hands together with the thrill of this part of the story. "Say there hadn't been an accident. Your father would have died a slow death, a cruel death, if he'd stayed married to that gorgeous twit, absolutely. He would never have gotten a divorce, never!" She threw her head back and laughed. "He'd have taken to drink!"

Because I made no comment, she seemed to think she had to elaborate. "Look-it. Your father, even with those thick glasses, has always appealed to women. He's one of those killingly thoughtful men--nothing showy, but if you happen to take a fourth glance you're smitten. Madeline was your father's real love, the passion of his life. He knew he'd never find someone to fire his jets the way she had--and let me tell you, as quiet and dignified as your father is, he couldn't keep his hands off her. She had this way of acting as if she tolerated his devotion, a total come-on, don't you think?"

"Yes," I said.

"Once she was out of the picture--so to speak--your father figured he might as well take a wife with broad hips." Figgy held her hands three feet apart, as if that distance had been my mother's girth. "And those sagging breasts! Those ill-fitting brassieres! She was a dead ringer for a Salvation Army matron. There was a hardy girl for you, someone who wouldn't slip off a bike and smash her head to pieces. A woman who was so hopeless she'd care for another man's wife. Wife Number One, Wife Number Two under the same roof--so Oriental!"

I had only to raise my eyebrows.

"You don't think so? Oh well, when we were roommates in college I always thought I could save Julia from frumpiness, bring her up in the world. Her big fat spanky pants drying in the bathtub gave me the giggles every morning. Don't mistake me, I loved the woman, you know that. Her secret playful streak, her intelligence--she was a walking reference for things historical, and she could recite poems stanza after stanza. I loved her like a sister."

Julia had been dead for a few years when that conversation with Figgy, one of our last, took place on the Moose Lake porch. As had become usual in my talks with her, I'd been filled with the outrage of a good son. As always, I'd remained the well-brought-up nephew. In the early 197
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s, the two of them had had an argument from which they never recovered. I did try to remember that Figgy was probably still trying to justify herself, still trying, as she ranted at me, to make Julia see the light. I regretted, as I had often done, that I'd never gotten my mother to speak about the early days of her marriage to my father. She always brushed my questions off, as if taking on a burden like Madeline was something anyone would have done. I would have liked to tell my aunt that her friend Julia had become more beautiful as she'd aged, radiant in a way Figgy would never have understood. Julia grew rounder and rosier, and even frumpier than she'd been, if that was possible in Figgy's book, as the era of the girdle gave way to the salubrious days of the sack dress and sweat suits. Like a child, I wanted to shout at Figgy that my mother was better! Wiser! Smarter! Deeper than Figgy could fathom. Although Julia wanted to do good works on a large scale, organizing and assisting in an Eleanor Roosevelt fashion, it's not hard to imagine how she could easily have been drawn into my father's life, how she, with her store of sympathy and grace, might have thought that in the Maciver household there was in fact a need equal to her love. If I'd said so to Figgy, she would have laughed me off the porch, repeating my sentence as if it were a punch line.

Chapter
Three

IT'S A CURIOUS THING ABOUT WOMEN, THE WAY THEY EXTEND
themselves to each other for no particular reason. This is a behavior Buddy neglected to tell me about when we were boys. My wife, Diana, and Buddy's wife, years before they met, faithfully exchanged Christmas cards. Every December there came in the mail the studio photo of Buddy, Joelle, and the five children, not any of them looking the least bit sullen or inconvenienced in their church clothes, and all of them, according to the accompanying letter, noble citizens. The picture Diana sent of us was also studied, but we were outside, squinting into the camera, the missus and the doctor and the three daughters on a ski slope or a beach, somewhere far away, in expensive sunlight.

My wife has a dynasty of her own to occupy her, eight siblings, two parents, two sets of grandparents, all of whom live near us, as well as seventeen nieces and nephews and, farther afield, thirty-two first cousins. Over dinner one night a few years ago, when I was mulling over the phenomenon of the holiday communications, and especially those to strangers, Tessa, our middle child, explained that Christmas cards are the goods of the braggart. She had come home from college for winter break a day or two before, and still had her initial enthusiasm for us after the months of separation.

"The goods of the braggart," I repeated with fatherly pride.

"And also a way to mark territory, the single-spaced two-page letter exactly like a dog pissing on a hydrant."

There is not very often a wounded silence from Diana. It is even unusual for her to pause, as she did just then, for a fortifying breath, which is after all necessary for sustained speech. "You go," she said to Tessa, "and spend November at the printer. You take a picture that's good of everyone--Katie doesn't have her mouth open, Lyddie 's not blinking, your head's not in a book, your father fora moment is not staring out at the Andromeda who-knows-what. I don't think you understand how demanding family is and how important. You have no idea."

Since we live on one long country road, every driveway for three-quarters of a mile an entry into property owned by one of Diana's brothers and their wives, I'd wager that Tessa does know a thing or two about the diplomacy required to keep the close family in a loving circle. Although the girls were at first astonished, it was no mystery to them why Diana once cut up the evil sister-in-law's cast-off Oriental rugs. She shredded the jewel-colored wool into strips with a box cutter and laid them down to make paths between the flower beds. As I heard tell, the rugs had been given to her in a great show of generosity, a blaze Diana interpreted as hostility. I'm quite sure that the Queen of England does not have such expensive mulch. Because there is no end of excitement in our neighborhood, when it came time for college Tessa chose a scruffy liberal-arts school in North Carolina, hundreds of miles from Wisconsin.

"Oh gosh, Mom!" Tessa said, hands to her head, the pads of her fingers hard into her skull. "Those Christmas cards must be so much work!" She had the right tone and pace, rushing in to comfort with a sincere mix of reverence, and exhaustion, too, at the very idea of letter writing. "It's fabulous you keep in touch with everyone, even people you don't really know. Someday it would be fantastic to have a huge reunion and meet all of Dad's relatives. I'd love that. And it would be easy, because you've connected with them, because you know so many of the addresses."

Tessa flashed a look across the table at me, eyes widening, lips firm together, an instant you can miss if you're not waiting. I don't admit to being gratified by that spark between us, but in truth little else that is so small makes me so glad. If I have had a long day listening to my patients' worries and my colleagues' complaints, and if at the end Tessa will reward me, then all is well in my speck of the world. I had missed her more than I'd imagined when she'd left for college in September. I almost never speak about my patients, but I was tempted to tell her about Mrs. Kosiba, a woman suffering from ulcerative colitis. She had been plagued that morning by the difficulty she was going to have juggling her first and second husbands in the hereafter. She'd liked the first mister far better than his replacement, but the second had left her with money. How to express gratitude to Number Two at the pearly gates without implying she wanted to spend time with him in heavenly recreation? I didn't mention to Tessa or Diana that for some persons the problems in the old bye-and-bye might actually be compounded, that it might do to save some energy for the tumult beyond the grave. My women went on to discuss their Christmas shopping, speaking in code, I gathered, about their secrets and surprises.

THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, on July 24, 2003, Buddy's son was killed in
Baghdad. Nearly three months had passed since the war with Iraq had been declared over. We first found out about Sergeant Kyle Eastman from the list of the dead in the New York Times, a feature I always scan. As soon as I read the name out loud at the breakfast table Diana told me I must call my cousin or write a letter. Thirty-eight years had passed since I'd last seen him or spoken to him. His boy, a sergeant for the First Battalion, Thirty-fourth Regiment, had been struck by an improvised explosive device. What sounded like the kind of thing Buddy had tried to make on any number of occasions in his basement through the formative years. Before the idea of the boy's death had sunk in, the phone calls began to come from the Macivers scattere
d a
round the country, the network of cousins broadcasting the news. When I told Diana later in the day that I wasn't going to write the letter at the moment, thinking that anything I might say would sound fatuous, what did she do but sit herself down and toss off a note to Joelle, a woman she'd never met, expressing all of our condolences. My wife has stacks of thick beige card stock in the desk cubbyhole
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DR. AND MRS. TIMOTHY MACIVER embossed in burgundy on the top
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stationery that Tessa might say is also the goods of the braggart.

Shortly after the note incident, Diana began her work to try to get me to go to the funeral, which was being held near Fort Bragg. She started in slowly, saying how sad it was that we'd never taken the time to visit Buddy on our trips down to North Carolina. "Don't you think it's sad, Mac? I just think it's so sad!" I knew exactly what she was up to, my dainty Machiavelli, she whose narrative froth belies a stern taskmaster. One of the conversations on the funeral subject took place midmorning on a muggy Sunday, when our other daughters, Lyddie and Katie, had just shuffled in, their eyes not yet fully open, the two of them unable to move without bumping into the island stools as they toasted their strawberry Pop-Tarts. Next, what did my culinary philistines do but brew their coffee in the French press. Lyddie was wearing a T-shirt with a photograph of a western lowland gorilla on the front, and on the back a Virginia Woolf quote: "Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." Where exactly did the savage in my daughters end and the sophisticate begin? To tip the scale, there was something glaringly primitive, downright Biblical, about their odor. Whenever they entered a room, the place immediately steamed up, a blast of all the fruits of the Garden: mangoes in their shampoo, kiwis in their shaving cream, peaches in their lip gloss, pineapple in their deodorant. Cucumbers, the lone vegetable, graced their conditioner.

"Mac, sweetheart," Diana said, her voice rising a pitch or two, "this is what people do. They go to funerals."