When Madeline Was Young (10 page)

"No," I tried, "not that--"

"There was no graceful way out for poor, poor Julia, no comfort but to be holier-than-thou, hauling that hulk around with her everywhere she went."

After my mother died, I thought that Figgy might become softer, perhaps even a little reverent. "There's nothing more tedious than a righteous woman," she blazed on. "I'm sure your father wanted to paddle their big tyke now and then. I'm sure he kept going on his expeditions for as long as he could to escape the--situation."

I'd refill her glass, wondering if she'd soon tire.

"To get as far away," she'd explain, "from the saint as he could."

In all the time since, most every imagining and remembrance I've had of my parents has been a remonstrance to Figgy. She is helpless now, having suffered a progressive stroke, multiple cerebral infarction. I find myself arguing with her still, although I haven't seen her in years. It is to her I owe a debt for the details, the small scenes she described that have made it possible to see some distance into the Macivers' marriage. But if I can on occasion muffle Figgy's rhetoric, I find that my parents after all are capable of moving around in their past without her.

It was, I think, on the whole true, what she told me about the firs
t y
ear: Madeline did howl and kick and throw things, staggering from upset to upset, her anger directed at Julia. This in an era when families were not as pharmaceutically girded for trouble, no reliable antidepressants for mother, no liquid nortriptyline administered in a glass of apple juice for daughter. It's likely, too, that Julia had disposed of the crude sedatives Grandmother had passed on to her for the patient. Though it sometimes seemed apparent what Madeline understood, it was impossible to predict what might provoke her, when she might fly into a rage. She would wake next to my mother, and she might scratch Julia through her nightgown or dig her nails into her cheek. "Good morning, lamb," my mother would say, carefully pulling away, climbing to the end of the bed to get out. On a better day, the enfant terrible whimpered and hid her head in the pillow. There was the long coaxing to the kitchen table. "Come, lamb, blueberry muffins for breakfast." But the morning in front of them was just as uncertain if Madeline opened her eyes, stretched, swung her feet to the floor, and padded in her uneven tread to the bathroom. The augur of a happy day? A few minutes later, by the time she got to the table, she might turn her bowl of cereal over and sit, her arms crossed, refusing to move.

"You'd want to smack her in the face," Figgy said.

In the evenings, when my father walked in the door from work, Madeline quit stirring the pudding or working at the sewing cards that occupied her, shoestrings in different colors threaded through cardboard pictures. She'd burst from the chair, the thick threads spilling, the stack of cards falling to the floor. She pitched herself at my father. "Hullo, Julia," he called to his wife through that assault. When he sat down to dinner, Madeline climbed into his lap, pulled at his face, pressed his cheeks together. She must not have liked her place at the side of the table, Mr. and Mrs. Maciver at the heads. "Talk to me," she said to my father. "Tell me about your day," she said in a mocking voice. "Talk to me. Tell me. Talk, talk." My mother was firm in her conviction that he should indulge her, that he should shove back in his chair and rock her for as long as she needed. As my mother saw it
,
Madeline was just waking up to the fact that she'd been injured. Or, as Figgy might have said, "jilted."

"Keep rocking her," Julia instructed her husband. Madeline must have known she'd lost something. What was it that had once been so close and yet now was blurry in the distance? Not a dress or a dog, larger than that--a house, was it? A whole town, a lake, a thing you felt you were a part of but couldn't in any way hold? "This will pass," I imagine Julia assuring my father when they were alone in their bed, before the specter appeared from the other room.

"It took the accident to reveal the nature of his first wife to your father," Figgy told me. "I don't think he had ever admitted to himself that she was spoiled. It was the crash that brought her character to the fore, front and center, for him to see."

As all couples must do when they have children at home, my parents would have had to be hasty and quiet after the lights were out. Before Madeline made her entrance into the dark bedroom--and who could tell when she would open the door?--they might have their moment. I have turned over their love for each other any number of times in my mind. They were not either of them rudely self-interested, as Figgy insisted through the years. But I do wonder if my father at the start of the marriage harbored the sadness of having to be eternally grateful. My mother, knowing that she owned that gratitude, that she'd have it for the rest of her life, was able then to make light of her burden. I would guess that both of them cared for Madeline as devotedly as they did because it was she who had given them to each other. I'm certain this is a subject they never discussed, and yet she knew the facets of his feelings just as he might have understood something of hers, too. They'd begin to kiss out of all that gratitude, and quickly, quickly, like teenagers fearing discovery, they'd move together without completely removing their clothes, my father's boxers down to his ankles, my mother's nightgown up to her chin. Surely my father experienced some kind of religion in that hurry; surely it's possible that my mother's needs and talents were absorbing even as they were different from Madeline's.

There was an evening early on when Madeline bit Julia on the underside of her forearm. My mother had been wiping up a lump of mashed potatoes at Madeline's place, including the thin gravy that had run into the groove of the table. Madeline leaned forward to take the nip. There, in a snap, was the portrait of the new family: my father squinting at the women as if he didn't think he was seeing straight, my mother staring at her own arm, and Madeline unable to withdraw, although she seemed as startled as anyone, teeth to flesh. Julia finally put her other hand on Madeline's head and said, "Lamb, this is going to bleed. Why don't you come and help me wash it out." She spoke as if there had been a spill on a piece of linen, as if a swift application of cold water would remove the stain.

Off they went into the kitchen. My father, for encouragement, took himself to the bookshelf. When the poetry anthology, fifteen hundred pages, proved too unwieldy, the poems he kept hitting too fanciful--"Whenas in silks my Julia goes"--he settled on the life story of Helen Keller. Now, there was a monster child if ever there'd been one. He walked the long route to the kitchen, turning the pages and reading even as he came through the arch. "Where's Anne Sullivan when you need her?" He closed his eyes to feel for the countertop, not irreverently and not in mockery of the play, which hadn't been written yet, but to try to understand total blindness.

My mother burst out laughing.

He did open up to inspect the puncture Madeline's eyetooth had made. "You all right, Julia?"

She stroked Madeline's hair, her long fingers extending over the crown of the head, the slow pull down the length of it, past the shoulders. "You are our demon, aren't you?"

"No!" Madeline had her hangdog expression, the trembling mouth, chin down, misery mixed with contrition.

"You're our great big girl, of course you are," Julia said, taking her into her arms, careful of the bruise coming on.

While she went with Madeline to run her bath, my father sat down to read the manual on child care and training he'd bought, scientifi
c a
dvice for parents, a guide to conditioning that he thought might be useful for both Madeline and the future Macivers.

"They were sweet to her in a way that made you want to puke." So said Figgy. "They doted on her together, as if she were a pet, a chimp they'd befriended in the wild. It was your mother's doing. Your father was the yes man, making inane comments along the way, which I guess kept them laughing."

How lonely it must have been for Julia by day, cut off from her nursing work and her old college friends, surrounded by women in the neighborhood, most of them busy with their own households and normal children. She wiped up the cereal on the floor as Madeline thrashed and spewed. "This will pass," she must have kept telling herself, taking hope from that wish. She ate her dinner at the end of the table while my father rocked Madeline, hummed in her ear, patted her hands, waited for her to get tired of the game, his food growing cold. My mother dismissed the behaviorists Aaron was reading, those who believed not in the slow effect of love but in conditioned responses. She declined to act on Russia's advice--Russia, who, like Figgy, had no patience for sparing the rod. "She will come around," my mother promised. "In another year she won't be doing this."

She did want Madeline to be able to use what remained of her gifts, to sharpen them, if she could. When Russia wasn't in the house to worry about the mess, they covered the kitchen table with newsprint and painted on rolls of brown butcher paper. In summer, on the downstairs back porch there was always a card table with a beginner's paint-by-number project going, an assortment of horse, dog, and cat themes. My mother was not artistic herself, but she could see how engaged Madeline was, lining up her tubes of paint, setting out the brushes, how she'd go into a reverie even before she'd make a mark. Julia was interested in the care Madeline took with color and shape, how her feel for design was not entirely gone. Over the first winter they made a quilt, the dining-room table for months littered with rags and half-finished squares, the floor ankle-deep in scraps, straight pins glittering between the oak boards. It was an undertaking my mothe
r l
ater admitted almost killed her. When spring came, they knelt in the grass next to the flats of petunias and impatiens, Madeline determining the arrangement.

"Your nursing degree for this?" Figgy said to my mother, watching the taffy making in the kitchen. "I thought you were going to save all the poor people, the colored children of the South. Aren't you losing your mind? Can't you put her away?"

"Pull," my mother said, handing her a dull brown lump.

"Julia. There are places for people like her. Why can't I get that through your head? You don't have to live like this. She's never going to get better."

"She can learn, even if her capacity is limited. She can have enjoyment. She's very opinionated about what she likes. It's funny how she still has her eye. I should show you her paintings--"

Figgy, who had studied art history, said, "Spare me."

"She knows how to make a thing look nice. And she cares. Believe it or not, I'm learning from her. She has no idea that she's a teacher, but she's made me think about the self, about what we are without memory, without a sense of time."

My aunt stared. at Julia. "Finally, getting the education you've always wanted. And taking style tips seriously. From a half-wit."

"Keep pulling," my mother said.

"Do you know what I think, Mrs. Maciver? I think she's childish on purpose. What is she now, my ex-sister-in-law, or is she my niece? I can't keep it straight. I think she only means to annoy with her tantrums. When she had--what was that tyrant nurse's name, the one who cared for her at first?--Nurse Kimball!--Madeline was a model patient for Nurse Kimball of the ugly face and big voice. What are you going to do, bring up baby until you drop dead? Have you thought of that?"

"Wait. Stop right now. Are the ridges starting to hold their shape? Is the taffy--wait, wait, what does it say--is it opaque, firm, and elastic?"

Although Figgy never paid Madeline much attention, she di
d b
ring her extravagant gifts, dolls for grown-ups, she explained to me, not little girl bric-a-brac. After she presented Madeline with a Shanty Town Scarlett O'Hara doll, she said to Julia in singsong, "I'll get her something even nicer if you lock her up."

The first time she mentioned her fatigue with Bill Eastman and her idea of divorcing him, Julia turned to pet Madeline's hair, as if that action might demonstrate to Figgy one's duty to stay the course. Figgy got the gist. "I'm not like you, Julia." She felt strongly enough to repeat what was evident. "I'm not anything like you."

My father was gone all day, but even if he'd been home I think Madeline's affections would have changed. To battle the kindness of her caretaker for long would have taken real endurance, and it's not surprising that she eventually capitulated to my mother's program of industry and safekeeping. They walked down the alley hand in hand, Madeline drawing to Julia's side when they passed a barking dog behind a fence. They went to the community pool, both of them in their modest suits, Julia sitting on the edge while Madeline, towering above the waterline in the shallow end, held her nose and turned incomplete somersaults. She'd come spraying up, digging into her eye sockets with her fists, coughing. My father once remarked, watching her at Moose Lake, that Venus obviously had sputtered at her birth. Every Thursday afternoon Madeline stayed with Russia, so that Mrs. Maciver in her few free hours could do her work with the League of Women Voters, and once in a rare while Grandmother came out on a Saturday so the honeymooners could take their walk in the forest preserve.

At dinner, a few months before I was born, Madeline made her declaration to my father: "I don't like you anymore." She was sitting at her own place, pushing her mushrooms to the edge of her plate with a teaspoon. It was as if she were the one who was finally breaking up.