When Madeline Was Young (15 page)

It was an intolerable August for Madeline, the two-week wait for Mikey to visit, the unbearable excitement of his being with her, followed by the pining for him after he'd gone. I don't think the aunts could have stood any more necking in the water, Madeline in his arms like a baby. Or the hullabaloo of their splashing. Or his singing, morning, noon, and night, around the campfire, with or without a burning log.

By the time we were home from Moose Lake, school was about to start. Jerry's band was broken up for the moment, and the drums were returned to the O'Days' back porch. That seemed to be the end of it. Years later, I thought about how Mikey's drums had given him a certain cachet in the neighborhood. Madeline, too, had some prize possessions she could hold out as her drawing card. There was the Judy Garland Teen doll, a Cindy Kay, a Betsy Wetsy, also a Betsy McCall, a
Bare Bottom Baby, a Melody Baby Debbi, a TinyTeen, a Miss Deb-Teen, and a Twist and Turn Stacey. To name but a few. There was no one more electrified by the advent of the Cabbage Patch doll, and when Beanie Babies flooded the country, my father had to build yet another set of shelves for her room. Madeline, our fountain of youth. It was her collection that worked a charm on the Grove Avenue little girls, children too young and too dazzled by the display to worry over the fact that Madeline was taller than most of their mothers.

Julia was always firm in her insistence that the dolls belonged to Madeline, that she would not give them away. When Madeline still had us as her playmates, she and Lu and I would spread out the contents of the four trunks on the floor, emptying the drawers of the shoes and hats, stripping the metal hangers of their dresses. Naturally we always lifted the dolls' skirts to look underneath. Madeline would get angry if we were careless with the accessories, but she did like our inventions, the paces we put the characters through, their elaborate tragedies. Sometimes, though, we'd inadvertently tip her off into one of her legendary fits, if we put the wrong costume on a doll, or made a favorite into a silly figure. You couldn't always predict when or why she'd shriek and set off wailing through the house. We were used to the squalls, hardly noticing the turning point in the tantrum, when my mother could hold Madeline firm, rocking her until she was quiet. During the Mikey O'Day years, those outbursts, the hysteria for little reason, didn't occur nearly as often as they had. It was a good period for my parents.

There'd been an earlier time of relative peace, too, when Louise and I and Madeline were first roughly the same age, when we all started to play together. My parents were liberated into their own after-dinner conversation. It would have begun when I was four and Lu her precocious two. By day my mother could read the same book to us, Madeline in the crook of one arm, Lu and I in a heap on the other side, each absorbed in the adventures of Snip, Snap, and Snur. The three of us in my mother's circle, if given a chance just then, would have been happy not to grow even a minute older.

Chapter
Eight

MIKEY O'DAY MUST HAVE COME TO OUR DOORSTEP IN 1963, A
few months before Kennedy's assassination. The Fullers, then, had been on the East Coast for nearly three years. Figgy had moved to Georgetown with Arthur when Kennedy was elected, exactly as she'd envisioned. They'd dragged Buddy from the Princeton High School, and not long after sent him to a military academy in Fork Union, Virginia. You can pick out Figgy in the clips of Kennedy's inaugural ball, Mrs. Fuller standing right near Bette Davis in the few seconds when the stars were shown processing into the hall. Arthur worked for the State Department at first, was part of the Policy Planning Staff, an arm of State that was supposed to provide independent analysis and formulate long-term policies in relation to America's goals. Later, in the Johnson administration, he became an aide to the president. In 196
0
, it was essential to Figgy that Arthur get his appointment before the inaugural ball, so she'd be able to secure their invitation. Through his years in government, he remained one of the few men among his colleagues who did not have a real change of heart about the Vietnam conflict, as they called it then, who believed that we must not let our commitment to the South Vietnamese falter. There are blackand-white stills from the Johnson days, twenty or so haggard men around the table in their shirtsleeves, the sense that they've been there for days, they are never going to leave, and no one, but no one would think to make a wisecrack.

After their move to Washington, we might see Buddy and Figgy at Moose Lake for a weekend but they were no longer regular in their visits. Arthur usually didn't come along, because he was careening from crisis to crisis as his job required. But there was a memorable Christmas Eve party at our house in 1965, before Buddy enlisted, when they all showed up. The appearance must have been prompted by my grandmother's last illness, the Fullers alighting for twenty-four hours of their best attention. Our family holiday affairs were formal, the boys and men in suits and ties, the girls in red and green velvet dresses, the wives also in Christmas colors, except for Figgy that year, who wore black. Decades later, the aunts were still talking about that dress, which my father said surely had been cut off of Sophia Loren, Figgy snipping carefully around the wavy decolletage.

Russia arrived early in the morning to start her dinner rolls rising and to set us up at the kitchen table to polish the brass candlesticks and the silver. She covered Madeline with a tent of an apron and each year showed her how, pouring the pink clot of cleaner onto a rag, getting all of us to rub the utensils dutifully until our cloths bled black. Russia wore one uniform for the preparation, and before the party she changed into a second, identical uniform. In honor of the occasion, she added the pearl clip-on earrings Figgy had once given her, and a red ruffled apron that tied in a girlish bow at the back.

All morning Madeline would say, "Can I go upstairs now? Is it time yet?"

When the silver was done, Russia took her to the attic to retrieve the long green velvet dress from the garment bag. There was a matching headband, a tiara kind of thing with red silk roses on the top. Madeline was often at first shy in large groups, even among the relatives she knew, hanging back on the stairs, mysterious in her dreamy gown. Those were the moments when she looked like the Lady of Shalort, her eyes cast down, most of her in the shadows. Even though she'd come into her own with Mikey O'Day, if he wasn't with her, if she couldn't be with him in their bubble of love, she'd revert to he
r o
ld tentative self. At Christmastime Mikey always went to Kansas with his parents to visit the rich sister who had seven children and two massive trees for all the presents. So Mikey told us with a great deal of rapturous stuttering.

At our party, my mother, issuing her orders and manning the stove, was usually a little rattled, a little dazed. When she was sure everything and every person was in place, she'd come to the head of the table, and you could see, as she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and then looked to my father, that she had laid down her heavy load, that she had at last arrived at the gathering. She always forgot to take off her apron, so that she'd sit through dinner with meat stains up her front, her moss-green dress hidden from view. She was at her best in that hour, brightly flushed, the soft light shining through her ecstatic hair. Just when she was settled in her chair, she stood again, and we followed her lead, all eyes to the floor as we sang the Doxology, parents and children alike alarmed by the intimacy we'd been thrust into, raising our voices together.

There was an extra sparkle in the very air the night the celebrity family came to the party. I suppose I'd been looking forward to Buddy's visit. Everyone pointed out what a special occasion it was, to have the Fullers in town for Christmas. I remember how adult he seemed with the youngest cousins, how he stood in the hall with his dark coat on, pulling off his leather gloves, a finger at a time, expressing exaggerated shock at the boys' and girls' miraculous growth. It was as if he'd paid attention to them when they were four and five and six. Suddenly, somehow, he was in the category of fun uncle, and they behaved accordingly, piling on him. Buddy, crawling with children, had stepped across the divide and wasn't one of us anymore. He kissed Cousin Mona demurely on the cheek--and we cousins who knew, who knew, exchanged glances. Although he had been held back and had not yet graduated from high school, he shook her college boyfriend's hand and then gave him a fraternal slap to the arm.

The aunts and uncles of course were keen to know all the detail
s o
f Figgy and Arthur's fascinating life. When Mrs. Kennedy had been restoring the White House, Figgy, brandishing her Radcliffe art-history degree, had finagled her way onto the committee that was researching paintings and locating period pieces. Those years had been a heady time for her, charging around the Executive Mansion examining paintings Dolley Madison had had commissioned, and going to New York, to auction houses, to have a look on the First Lady's behalf. It turned out Figgy had acumen as well as taste; one of her stock stories was about standing on a street corner on the Lower East Side in 1939 and becoming friends with de Kooning. Later she sent the impoverished artist checks, acquiring paintings for next to nothing. Also, she claimed to have picked out Pollock long before Mrs. Guggenheim took notice. After I graduated from college, she took me through the Metropolitan, stopping at her favorite paintings to clutch her heart, to tell me who was a homo, who had died cruelly of syphilis, who had gone mad. Over the years she developed an encyclopedic knowledge, something she curiously didn't often talk about or flash; her profession, perhaps, was where she practiced restraint. She traveled a great deal to Europe as a consultant, and eventually, well after her White House years, she was hired as the curator at the Phillips Collection. It was Mrs. Kennedy, she would say, who taught her much of what she knew, who gave her a start. Now that we understand so much about JFK's prodigious appetite, I wonder how or if Figgy escaped an encounter with him. Certainly there was no one who took Jack's death harder than my aunt.

That Christmas was the last time Figgy came to a holiday party at our house, although it was primarily Arthur and my mother who argued. The dining-room table had been split open at its center and the five leaves put in, so that twenty of the adults and the older teenagers could sit together. Madeline always took her place right next to my mother, the two of them squeezed at the head of the table. In the living room there were four card tables for the younger children, the group of ten-year-old girls managing the toddlers' spilled milk and excusin
g t
hem their vegetables. No amount of insisting could convince Russia to eat with the elders. For a few minutes she'd lean on a stool in the living room, her plate in her hands, before she set it down and again made the rounds with her rolls.

My mother had simple ornaments, a blazing red tablecloth, greens that she and Madeline had gathered in the yard before the meal was served, the snow in a magical moment melting to glistening drops before the cloth was spotted with ordinary water stains. The brass candlesticks, gleaming after our labors, and with tall white tapers, gave the room at once its warmth and a churchlike solemnity. At Christmas I always had the sense that the neighbors fell away, that on the wide-open plain there was our single house, golden with light, the windows steamy with our breath, our life. My father's place was surrounded by the platters, and one by one, as the ritual goes, he heaped the plates with my mother's best efforts, adjusting for each person's taste, passing the wholesome turkey that had come from a family farm in Wisconsin, and the puffy damp stuffing, and steaming white potatoes from that same good farm, and an array of buttery vegetables including the detestable Brussels sprouts. There were the sweet things, too, fancy Jell-O molds that looked like the neighborhood women's church hats, and candied yams and cranberries popped open in their hot bath of maple syrup. I was always hungry in those days, and the sight of the turkey, its skin darkening and drawing taut and crisp over the breast as it was basted through the afternoon hours, filled me with a fluttery excitement.

When at last everyone was served, my mother, ever the hostess, asked the opening question, the most important inquiry, according to manuals on manners, that should from the start draw the group into spirited but congenial conversation. "So, Arthur," she said mildly, "how much longer do you think the troops are going to be in Vietnam?"

The relatives turned down the table to my mother, cocking their heads, as if they weren't sure they'd heard her. "You've got to love the woman," Figgy said, looking at the ceiling. Her tone was insincere
,
and I guessed that she was trying somehow to protect Arthur. He looked very tired, his lids at half-mast over his protruding eyes, as the vapors of his plate came up into his gray face.

The active combat had really only begun for American troops. There were mixed messages coming from the administration, the secretary of defense saying victory would take time while others predicted a swift fight to the finish. In November there had been the first major engagement between the regular U
. S
. and North Vietnamese forces. Arthur did take up Mrs. Maciver's question, speaking with a quiet pride about how the Third Brigade, First Cavalry Division, had defeated the NVA Thirty-second, Thirty-third, and Sixty-sixth Regiments in the La Drang Valley.

My mother, passing the cranberries, said quizzically, "The thing I've never understood is why Harry Truman didn't write Ho Chi Minh, back in, whenever that was, in 1945, it must have been, when Ho took over Hanoi. Have you ever read Ho's speech, the one he gave at the inauguration of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam?"