When Madeline Was Young (7 page)

The late night I remember in particular took place after the honeymoon with us was over for Arthur, or maybe everyone was exhausted from vacation, tired of sunburns and water sports and long afternoons, tired of there always being someone to talk to, tired of cooking for thirty, meal after meal. Possibly Arthur's grace period for us lasted only a few weeks rather than years, although it did seem to me then that they'd been discussing Kennedy's nomination for several seasons. The conversations I've recalled may have taken place all in one evening, or may have been spread out over many days, no wa
y n
ow to tell. In any case, around midnight I'd come back to the summer kitchen, hoping to find another slice of cake. My mother and Arthur were both speaking loudly, and I wondered if they'd drunk more than they'd meant to. "You cannot be serious, Mrs. Maciver!" His cigarette was burning to ash between his fingers. "To say that war is wrong is to say that existence is wrong. Don't interrupt me again, I know what point you--"

"We understand more than ever the cost of war, Arthur. That's what we're talking about here. I'm not saying private transformation--what is required to change society--won't take generations. But I believe, I do believe it is within our power to evolve as a species."

I knew enough to be embarrassed for my mother, talking about private transformation with Arthur. I understood in broad terms that he was a realist, his eye to our vital national interests and the balance of power, someone who could see all the rulers across the globe poised as they were about to make their incautious or evil moves.

Arthur yawned. "Private transformation, oh my, yes. To protect what we love, my dear--in fact, to love--is to have to fight against those who can't love. Every schoolboy knows this. Every babe in the woods who has lived through the last twenty years understands that we make war of course so that we may live in peace."

"Those who can't love," my mother repeated. "Those who can't love because the class system has relegated them to poverty, the class system has deprived them of education." Her voice was growing louder. "Schoolboys and schoolgirls know what injustice is on their first step on the playground, and the sensitive begin to realize the value of civil disobedience in the fight against injustice in junior high, when they read Thoreau--"

And then he said it, the line everyone would remember for years to come. "Oh, for Christ's sake, Julia!" He slammed the table with his fist. "To love," he cried, "to love means we must kill."

The two of them were speechless for a minute, she dumbfounde
d b
ecause he was in earnest now, the coquetry stripped back to reveal the self, and he startled that he'd said that truth in her company. "You listen to me," my mother said, rising from her seat.

He beat her to center stage, leaping onto his chair, raising his fist, and bellowing the usual war cry:

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead.

In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and

But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood
,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage . . ."

I suspect Figgy loved Arthur best when he was dazzlingly goofy. She clapped, she swooped up and reached for his hand, as if he were a famous crooner on the stage. He bounced down and let her embrace him, and when that was over she dragged my mother from her seat, her arm around her old friend, no hard feelings. Most of the others got up, too, well on their way to their hangovers. Grandmother, on the far end of the house, would have been long asleep.

Still, my mother couldn't leave on the note of theatrics and poetry. As she cleared the last of the bottles from the table she said, "I have no doubt that you'll get to Washington, Art, that one way or another you're going to have a part to play. You've been well groomed for your role." Was there disdain in her voice? "What troubles me is the fact that you, your ilk, those of you who govern, see suffering as an abstraction. As has happened since time out of mind, you men make war without having to fight it."

Arthur had a bad back and had not gone overseas in World War II. But he had served for a few years, working in Washington, in Intelligence. My mother might have known that he would loom up over th
e t
able, one hand in a pool of spilled wine, the other in a smear of butter. "My ilk, Mrs. Maciver? My ilk?" He had tried to defuse the argument with Shakespeare, and there she was again, provoking him. "You think your guy, Stevenson, understands power and force, much less keeping the peace? You think so? He'd like nothing better than secretary of state under Kennedy, but he'll never get that appointment. This is a man who spends his morning deciding when he's going to take a shit. It's all fine, Julia, all very sweet to worry about hunger and poverty the world around. It's all very well to dedicate yourself with elegant turns of phrases to a fuzzy idea of morality as you search for world opinion--"

My mother put out her hand to stop his speech. Over his noise she said, "The fact remains, you will never be on the front lines! You will always now, if you get to Washington, when you get there, be one of those who draft policy, who will make orders that will kill our sons."

Arthur, I knew, would never do anything of the kind. He and I had gone out in the tin boat to fish, and all through the early-morning quiet he had talked about the physiology of invertebrates, about Wisconsin waterways and glaciers, about the Algonquian tribes; he'd told me how best to spear a beaver. There was no subject he didn't know about or want to understand, and I was sure he would do all he could under any circumstance to keep Buddy and me out of danger.

My mother must have at an earlier time admitted to Arthur that she was something of a lapsed Quaker. She must have explained that she no longer attended Meeting because three of the ladies who always spoke, who went on at length about the beauties of this world, distracted her from the inner light. She would have liked them to shut up. That night on the eating porch, Arthur put his arm around her and kissed her cheek, something she submitted to a little stiffly, I thought. "If you really think Kennedy is the hawk, Mrs. Maciver, then vote for your fellow Friend, Richard Milhaus. He may take you back to the faith."

Figgy was indulging me in the kitchen, scooping another lump o
f i
ce cream onto a second piece of cake. She called out, "You talk as if Kennedy has already been elected and declared war, Julia. What the hell is the matter with you? You seem to forget he's experienced combat. He's not going to be eager to stir up trouble. For once we have the chance to have a sexy president--come on, give in to his handsome mug. I know you're not going to vote for ugly old Nixon, so why haul yourself kicking and screaming into the future? Our man has a sense of destiny not only for himself but for the nation."

My mother had come to the sink with the empty bottles. "If he wins," she said, "it will be because his poppa buys the office for him, just as he bought the Senate seats for his boys."

Figgy flicked the lights. "It's late, love. It's later than it's ever been up here. It's bedtime. Kennedy for president! Good night."

My aunt's womanly intuition told her that her husband was going to Washington, that he was going to be important, and that she, Mrs. Arthur Fuller, would be invited to have tea with Mrs. Kennedy on several occasions. Also, they'd enroll Buddy in a private school along with other White House staff children. Finally, he'd start to make something of himself.

Chapter
Four

THERE WERE A FEW STORIES MY AUNT LIKED TO TELL ABOUT
Madeline, but none gave her so much pleasure as "the Italian episode," as she called it. Through the years, the Moose Lake house, the broad front porch gave Figgy and me the opportunity to talk about the family, to cloak those conversations, that gossip, in the mantle of history. Because I was the closest of the cousins in age to Buddy, because he and I were nearly brothers for a time, she felt an affinity for me that she did not have with the other boys. Although I've heard the Italian episode on several occasions, I didn't understand her relish in it until fairly recently. I thought she enjoyed it primarily because it was the single complete story from Madeline's life before she was ours. The big event, Figgy would say, in Miss Schiller's record as herself.

"Did I ever tell you about the Italian episode?" she'd say. "Remind me," I always said.

We might be in the dark on the Moose Lake porch, or in a cafe in New York City. "Miss Schiller," she'd muse, as if she could conjure the woman she'd known briefly. "Miss Schiller." Wherever we were, the Italian episode began with Madeline's high-school graduation, Mother Schiller watching the boys parade across the stage as if they were auditioning for the role of her daughter's husband. The day after the ceremony, Mrs. Schiller took Madeline to Italy to shop for clothes, to look at the famous paintings, and, most important, to send pictur
e p
ostcards to the neighbors: We stood in a swoon in the Bargello. One afternoon in Florence, Madeline managed to escape the hotel, to take a walk across the Piazza Santa Croce alone. She had grown tired of being forced to feel in front of the broken statues, all those lost arms and blank eyes, and the unconvincing marble swirls of pubic hair. In that free quarter-hour, Madeline at last was at liberty to develop her own sensations. The Italian who provoked her had dark curls and, let's say, the famous Florentine smile and the liquid eyes. Although Madeline needed no special effects, it would be tempting to report that she seemed to be lit from within, that the piazza around her, the pale gold of the early-afternoon sun framing her, had made her seem otherworldly. He came steaming to her from the other side on his bike, riding it scooter-style, pushing off, both feet on the same pedal. When he got close he was unnerved and lost his balance. Dio mio! The only person in all of the piazza and he comes at her as if he meant to run her over. He had to drop the handlebar, falling into her, the two of them clutching each other, trying to remain upright. As he got hold of himself he managed to say, "At this moment--I see in the piazza the angel." He reached out with just the right amount of hesitation, Buddy might have said, and touched her cheek. "Are you--true?"

"So much of Madeline's fate involved the bicycle," Figgy always said at that point.

Two days later, when Mrs. Schiller came into Madeline's room at the pension in the morning and found the girl missing, she recalled the handsome stranger in the lobby the night before, the same man--wasn't he?--they'd seen behind the counter at the leather store. Before she phoned the police, she demanded that the desk clerk arrange for two tickets on the earliest departing train to anywhere else. The mother apparently had had previous experience combating her daughter's passions. When Madeline stole into her room before breakfast, she found her bags packed. Mrs. Schiller, dressed in her gray traveling suit and her hat with the plume, came briskly through the door to announce the waiting taxi.

There was no use protesting that the night had passed in chast
e g
etting-to-know-you activities, the walk in the dark up to San Miniato, the church door magically open, the two of them sitting together, huddling, if the mother must know, in the chill, teaching each other to speak. An Italian lesson, that was all. Wasn't really the shopping, the Fendi handbag and the pink silk dress, for the purpose of becoming acquainted with just such a man--a man with a solid family business? There'd been the stroll in the dawn to his house, the parents' apartment, where they made hot chocolate. After that consoling drink he took her downstairs to knock on the window of the baker, begging him to let the signorina have a sweet pastry fritter. The mother would have none of it, and away they went, Madeline in that tragic pose, turned to look longingly through her tears out the back window of the taxi all the way to the train station.

For some time afterward, she had a secret correspondence with the Italian. She understood that he'd gotten married or killed when the letters came back to her unopened via the friend who'd served as the accomplice. She was inconsolable for months, so the story went, until my father rescued her from her grief. I like to believe that Madeline had gotten over Italy, that in the first year of her marriage the doe-eyed man careening across the piazza never intruded upon her fantasy of the future Maciver infants asleep in their cribs.

Although the Schillers had nothing to recommend themselves, Figgy couldn't help approving the story of the Italian. If there was anything she might love Miss Schiller for, let it be her pluck, for that single night shivering with the ghouls and the handsome leather salesman up in San Miniato. When I once asked Figgy why she liked that story, which was after all a fairly ordinary schoolgirl story, she looked at me with pity, as if she'd just realized I'd been too young to hear such a tale. And she was right, I was too young--but that was something it would take me years to know.

Chapter
Five

THREE YEARS AFTER MADELINE'S ACCIDENT, MY PARENTS
married in a chapel up near Moose Lake. It was a brief ceremony, and except for Figgy and Bill Eastman, none of the 17
0
people from the first Maciver wedding were invited. Figgy and Bill in fact were the only witnesses. My mother's parents were dead, and the one brother in California did not make the trip. There was no mention in the Chicago paper of one Julia Beeson marrying Aaron Maciver, no cascade of wedding gifts, no rehearsal dinner or reception. You could say that they practically eloped, or that they wanted their marriage to be a secret, but I think, more reasonably, my father, unlike his sister and his first wife, was glad for any ritual to be a quiet affair. In the single photo of the day, my mother, overtaken in a silver box of a suit that belonged to Figgy, has her mouth wide open in a madcap grin. Figgy has used that picture against her, making predictable comments to me about how Julia had gone cuckoo in the moment of her conquest. My father is holding steady, looking straight at the camera. I imagine he's just made a wry comment, the trials of his previous marriage having cultivated in him a darker humor. He is probably wondering in disinterested tones if his sister should be smoothing the collar of the Reverend Monder's robe, and in such a casual manner.