When Madeline Was Young (13 page)

Still, she could only go so far with them. The girls she'd played with when they were four, five, and six would outgrow her, and there'd come the year when she wasn't invited to birthday parties. There the crowd would be, next door or across the alley, in their pointed hats, the plank laid on two sawhorses, the paper tablecloth fluttering in the breeze, the penny carnival in place, the polka-dotted noisemakers and bags of favors, the fluted muffin cups filled with gum drops set above the plates. If my mother hadn't been alerted, if she hadn't taken Madeline away, and if Madeline noticed the big event, there was no help for her. She'd stand at the kitchen window for a minute before she banged up the stairs, down the hall to her room, slamming the door, the sound of her sobs coming from under the coy-

ers, the gathering of her breath, the hiccupping of those gasps before another round.

There were a few years in the cycle when the boys who had been her friends disregarded her, but there were some of them who, when they came into adolescence, might look at her again. As if she hadn't been living on the block all their lives, they'd one day encounter her sitting on a lounge chair at the pool. They didn't know what to call the confusion in her of naivete and experience, but, whatever its name, she was smiling at them. I have through the decades wondered if the haziest memory of the Italian was with her, if on a rare day his words gently sounded in her ear as she woke. "At this moment--I see in the piazza the angel." She seemed especially emboldened at the pool, confident, even as she limped along the pavement past the diving boards, her ponytail swinging, her painted toenails shining, the rhinestones of her cat-eye sunglasses sparking. "Hi, Kevin!" she'd call. "Hi, Jerry."

She didn't look in her mid-forties poolside, in those glamorous shades, her figure so trim. I'd watch from my wet spot of cement and that old sadness would come over me, something I didn't know how to stave off. For a reason that baffled me, Miss Vanderbeak, my high-school English teacher, had made me memorize "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways." I'd lie there dripping wet, those awful words looping through my head.

She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove
,
A Maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love . . .

I knew what the boys were doing. I understood the liberties they took. They could easily stare as much as they pleased at Madeline, at the places they would have liked to touch on the girls their own age.

With my understanding of her predicament, then, I should have been glad that Mikey O'Day had come into Madeline's life; I might
,
anyway, not have minded so much that he'd barged into our lives. After he'd appeared at our door that first time, my mother, at dinner, said down the table to my father, "Madeline had a visitor this afternoon."

"A visitor, Maddy?"

She turned a terrible red, a blush that started below her clavicle. "Mikey O'Day," Louise said grimly.

"The one who sings at the Dafi-Dip? Who got written up in the Journal?"

A boyfriend, Father, for your old wife.

I remember how my parents looked at each other, a long wordless exchange, or so it seemed to me. It was my father's lopsided smile, an expression I didn't recognize, that made me think the wrong ideas were being relayed; out of misguided impulses, they might very well agree to something that couldn't be right for Madeline. It's nice, I could imagine my mother saying, that she has a friend, both of them in the same boat. It's nice, nice, nice; nice all around.

"He ate all the sugar," I said, the only charge I could bring against Mikey in the moment.

Madeline had just taken a drink, so that when she began to laugh, when she couldn't stop, the milk, in a most unprincesslike moment, came out of her nose.

After dinner, my parents usually sat downstairs, my mother in the wing chair with the weak light, and my father on the sofa under the brighter lamp. In that softly lit quietness they read. If we came downstairs in fear or sickness, they'd glance up at us as if they hardly knew where they were, as if they hardly knew us. That night, when they'd settled in, I went noisily to the shelf, searching for a book. I wanted to ask how it could be fine for that pair to--what were we supposed to call it?--date, go steady, rob each other's cradle? I don't think either one of them noticed me bumping around in the corner, blowing dust off the books, clapping my hands at a mosquito.

In those days my father referred to Mikey as "the Gentleman
Caller." He'd come in the house after work, kiss my mother at the stove, ask her about her life and times, and then wonder if the Gentleman Caller had shown up.

"After breakfast, before lunch, and all afternoon," my molher would say, looking at her husband fondly and perhaps helplessly.

We had in fact been invaded by Mikey O'Day and his endless colored metal boxes of LPs and 45s. Louise would go to her room to practice. She'd stuff a towel along the crack under her door to keep out the laughter and music that blasted up the two flights of stairs, the noise that was irrepressibly joyful, that could annihilate whatever melancholy piece she was working to perfect.

Chapter
Seven

THAT SUMMER WAS A SEASON OF ONE ABSURD EPISODE AFTER THE
next, so that after a while I forgot to be astonished. Or perhaps it is truer to say that I was conclusively stunned after one of the boys down the block died; I settled into an unhappiness that it would not have occurred to me to try to shake. It was the summer Mikey O'Day got a Ludwig Accent Combo drum set for his forty-second birthday, the summer Cody Rockard was killed on the third rail, and throughout, rain and shine, it was the star-bursting summer of Madeline's romance.

From the beginning I could see that my parents had resolved to let Mikey O'Day in the house, into the basement, without supervision; later, unfathomably, they allowed him to visit her in the bedroom. This was well before teenagers, without blushing or asking permission, bounded up to their boudoirs to watch a movie and shake their bedsteads. I stayed on in my role of sentinel just long enough to witness their first thrill, which I wished I could have rewound and erased. Right after, I realized that, on the one hand, I was invading their appalling privacy, and, on the other, they didn't care if I was around. They were going to come together even if I was wedged between them.

When at last they were ready for their moment, I was aptly standing at the bar, mixing explosives in the name of chemistry. There had been at least four long afternoons of record playing, Mikey carefully removing a 45 from his metal box and the
n f
rom its sleeve, setting the holy object on the turntable and the needle into the groove. He danced with abandon, that terrific head a flower on its stalk, blowin' in the wind. He wasn't without grace, and there was always the beauty of his liberty. As far as I could tell, he never had as much as a flicker of self-consciousness, never doubted his word or deed. He'd get his arms jerking up and down in that rock-and-roll standard as if he'd been wound nearly to the breaking point.

Madeline sat cross-legged watching him, although you might have thought she was looking at her shoes. After he'd shown her how easy it was to breeze around the room, to twist and shake, he'd try to get her to be with him in the song. He'd take her hand and pull her up. She was as stiff and bashful as he was loose and carefree. When he yanked at her she'd shriek and giggle. If he was able to drag her nearly upright he'd stumble over air and fall down, taking her along with him. Right away she'd sit and smooth her dress and hair. He'd crawl around in time to the music, and after he'd get himself standing again, the whole routine would begin anew: there was the judicious choosing of the record, followed by the dance, the entreaty, the near success, the tumble. I had never known how much endurance it took to woo a girl. It was funny, I guess, how diffident she was even though she was at some point going to succumb. The big questions: How long would it take? How much more work was he going to have to do?

On the fourth or fifth afternoon, I'd gone out of the room to rummage around in the storage drawers by the laundry, and as I was coming back he managed to pull her toward him, close that time, and keep her. Finally, for whatever unknowable reason, she'd decided to let him. Her sleek body and his tubbiness in a slow dance. There was lounge music playing, Jim Reeves maybe, singing, "I love you for a hundred reasons but most of all I love you 'cause you're you." All at once she let her straight spine soften. She bent her knees and laid her head on his shoulder. His brows shot practically up to his scalp, his eyes were half open, no fluttering of the lids, the opalescent whites agleam. So that was how a person arrived at real ecstasy.

She seemed to be concentrating, her own brow furrowed. Or else she was about to cry. From happiness maybe, or from the strain of holding out for days, or from a sadness she couldn't understand? Or possibly from the magnificence of the feeling. It was awful to see. I knew the kiss was coming, nothing to do but drop the tray of empty baby-food jars on the cement portion of the floor. The whole package made a satisfying noise, the burst of metal and the breaking glass, all those jars, on the pitiless cement. Needless to say, the dancers busted apart as if they'd been shot in the chest. Without speaking, I picked up every shard. Their moment had passed, and my tenure as sentinel was over. There was very little of their future I wished to see.

Mikey's birthday was a few days after that, the unveiling of his parents' gift, the Ludwig Accent Combo drum set. There were two toms, a snare, a floor tom, and a bass drum, each in an elegant gray with a mother-of-pearl finish. Also, a ride symbol on its stand and a hi-hat, that pair of cymbals on a shorter stand, a single press to the foot pedal to make them clash. The set was fearsome with potential, a present you'd offer with trepidation to anyone who liked to make noise. Still, Mikey crashed and banged with so much enthusiasm you wanted to forgive him. He made it seem like it wasn't necessary to have any coordination in order to enjoy the instruments.

The O'Day parents had had six children, all of them gone off except Mikey, none of them any longer at the mercy of Mrs. O'Day's lavish care. I don't think I ever saw Mikey with a dirty face, with grass stains on his pants, or in socks that weren't sparkling white. Lu once said that he always looked like a baby who's just had his bath. Mrs. O'Day kept him in ironed blue jeans that turned up at the cuffs, and crisp plaid shirts, a fresh T-shirt underneath. He was well trained, always washing his stubby square hands before meals in the downstairs bathroom. His nails were clipped to the pads of his fingers, and I suppose his mother kept his toenails in that shape, too. Mr. O'Day did his part for his son, building Mikey a platform on their back porch for the drum set, so you could see from the alley the blur of his body and his sticks.

Ours was an age when very few people had air conditioning, when the windows were open all night long. At eight-thirty in the morning, Julia faithfully went around the house and slammed the sashes shut against the heat. But before breakfast, as the fathers were going to work, the spangle of the hi-hat, the direct cracks to the drumhead, and the tremor of the reverberations came to us from a full block away.

The set had come with a tutorial book, a play-along record that had a variety of songs in different styles. So there was also the matter of the stereo system, Mikey cranking up the volume in order to hear the guitars and leads over his own noise. That Mrs. O'Day let him practice at dawn should have tipped my mother off to the fundamental unreasonableness of her person. The racket must have driven the neighbors out of their minds, but no one had the heart, or maybe it was courage, to complain. Although in that era there was not yet a Bill of Rights for the handicapped, no Special Olympics or support groups for the parents, although it was a time when we could all use the colorful words for insanity without much guilt, there was of course the usual general wish that there be communal tenderness for the disadvantaged. Mrs. O'Day, at least, seemed to have depended on such a spirit. You might think that my parents and the O'Days would have commiserated about their common plight, but as far as I can tell my mother never spoke personally to anyone outside the family, never had a friend in for the purpose of private complaint. It was a matter, again, of dignity rather than repression, something I have tried to explain without success to my wife. Russia often said the good Lord couldn't make everyone perfect, a failure I wanted to question her about. Why, after all, suffer an imperfect God? "Bless his very own self," she often said when she saw Mikey coming up the walk.

That summer, I played tennis more than I'd planned and walked the streets, and when I was home I lay on my sweaty bed reading books I considered deep and philosophical--science fiction, on the whole. I felt a prisoner in my own house, forced into my cell by the couple downstairs. I'm sure my mother was around, but I don't re-

member her in those first days. Perhaps she had disappeared in order to let nature take its course, or maybe she, too, couldn't stand to watch the lover boy squeezing up against Madeline on the sofa, nibbling at his morsel. It was hard to say which was worse, who you wanted to look at less: Mikey at his worship, or Madeline, screeching like a schoolgirl, like a twit. It wasn't until I'd acquired the wisdom of the ages that I realized that, beyond her coyness, she was the one who had the real passion; although Mikey was always wooing her, she was the one more in love. Louise, as I said, had retreated to her own room with the cello, and so I didn't have the benefit of her playing freely downstairs. The Bach was muffled by the insulation she'd wadded around her door. She and I hardly knew what to say to each other, passing in the hall, glaring for the same reason.