When Madeline Was Young (23 page)

IN THE YEARS THAT HAVE PASSED, I've read quite a bit about the war.

I've watched the documentaries, not only out of interest, and out of dismay at my own willful ignorance at the time, but also out of a sense of obligation to Buddy. Whenever I see anything about the period or read about it, I can't keep from inserting Buddy into the scene. It's Buddy rounding up a group of Vietcong, holding an M--
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6 to their backs; Buddy smoking a reefer in camp; Buddy giving directions t
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is men over a shortwave radio; Buddy going into a madam's hooch with a slim Vietnamese teenager. It's the best I can do for him, to have tried to imagine his life. Including his being decorated by President Nixon and returning home to people who spat on him and finding himself a good wife. Those are among the forces that compelled him to remain in the military, to train young men in the armed forces for future conflicts.

"Where's Buddy?" So said Stephen Lovrek in the crisis moment.

Right after Buddy's son was killed in Iraq, Diana threw herself into the task of persuading me to go to the funeral. As I said, she was skillful, restating her arguments in each round but also throwing a surprise punch now and again. First she usually talked about how sad it was that we'd never visited Buddy, that she'd never met the man who had meant so much to me as a boy. Next, she'd speak about family responsibility, about the importance of my representing the Aaron Maciver branch of the clan. She'd bring up the idea--which proved to be fanciful--that all the cousins were going to the funeral: I would be the only one missing. "Your absence will serve, as usual," she'd say, "to draw attention to yourself."

This is something she has said to me before in other appeals. I'm not sure if she is being ironical--my husband, the show-off--if in that one complaint she is proving herself capable of irony. It is true, however, that I had not gone to Buddy's wedding, not gone to any of the family reunions that have been thrown over the years, and I'd avoided Moose Lake on the few occasions he'd visited. He had never had ownership in the property, because Figgy had sold her shares to my father in 1970, going for a killing. She didn't need the Wisconsin place when Arthur had the island in Maine. In order to buy out his sister at full market value, my father dipped into Madeline's retirement fund and spent his inheritance from his mother.

I have found it difficult under any circumstances to leave my office on short notice, inconveniencing my patients and colleagues. "Mac, sweetheart," Diana said in round four or five, "I know you have an old score to settle with your cousin, I know you do, but it's--"

"Diana." How she enjoyed stirring up drama, something you'd think she'd tire of with so much family around her, the sisters-in-law always either building toward a tizzy or in the whirlwind of one.

"You know you're holding a grudge, you know you are!"

"Men don't hold grudges," I pointed out. "It said so in the paper recently." Women, according to the study, nurture along their hurt feelings for years, backstab, gossip, don't forgive. Men are more likely to blow up or beat the shit out of each other and move on. "At my stage of life," I explained, "there is no reason to be acquainted with Buddy except for a sentimental notion we may have had about each other. There is no tragedy when time and distance have easily done their work."

"Mac," my wife said sorrowfully, her hands to my shoulders, "I just can't understand you. I try, and I cannot."

In fact, Diana understands plenty. She knows I mean to protect my dignity by being quiet, a tactic she does not approve of. Risk being a fool, she has instructed through the years. If I drink too much and, a rare occurrence, end up dancing in my socks in Mikey O'Day fashion, or singing a tone-deaf selection, she becomes very excited, as if she has found herself a new man. When she demands I pipe up, she often goes at it strenuously, a beagle baying to my fox in the hole. Nonetheless, if I were fond of aggravating her, I would say so. She is in many ways on the opposite end of the scale in temperament and personality from Sophia Cooper, the girl I earnestly loved in college, and yet she is a far better wife than Sophia would have made. Not that I am to speak or think, not ever, about wives in terms of good, better, best, or for that matter conjure the valiant beagle in the same breath as a woman, on pain of death from my daughters. But there is no doubt that Diana in her role of wife has allowed me my life's work as well as the joys of a family. I try to honor her for that feat, not only with thanks in every day but with a shower of gifts which she has circled in the catalogues before the major and minor holidays. Let me never forget Sweetest Day, which falls somewhere between Mother's Day and Valentine's Day, a tricky, no-man's-land observance.

Before Diana, when I was at Oberlin College, I fell in love with Sophia, a long-brown-haired violinist. She was not a beauty by conventional standards, something my roommate pointed out. The first time I saw her, she was onstage in rehearsal, bow poised on the strings, waiting to make her entrance in a Schumann quintet. From the beginning, she was set apart from the usual zealots, those students who called themselves musicians, who read their scores in the dining hall over their veal Parmesan. Sophia had a narrow jaw and an overbite that made her mouth jut forward--please let me say with impunity--in a weaselish way, but a nice weasel, a soft, bright-eyed weasel, a rare Mustela you'd want to trust. Her overbite was one of her features that drove me wild with love. I suppose it was in part the temporomandibular dysfunction that made her look so eager and focused. I didn't expect her, then, to play as if the music was revealing itself to her, as if she was continuously surprised at the turns it was taking. It wasn't so much that she was playing her violin, she said, but that the music came through her. She was able to argue for hours about intonation and phrasing, as all her peers did, but also to lapse into a learned forgetting, so that the music could spin itself into the requisite gold. There were probably others on campus who had that Zen approach to their art, but she was the one, I thought, who really lived it. Other appealing features: her hair went past her waist, her enormous glasses came down nearly to the maxilla, so much of her oversized on her small self or askew or a little bit bestial.

Louise ended up going to Oberlin, too, because of the conservatory that was part of the college, and for a few years we were there together. Stephen Lovrek, incidentally, came along also, a person I studiously avoided whenever I saw him in the library or the cafeteria. He dropped into the jazz warp, and Louise hardly ever saw him at school. On vacations at home, they resumed their classical music as if nothing as large as an aesthetic had separated them. For a while, Louise and Sophia and a trombonist friend of Lu's and I were a foursome. There was competition between my sister and my girlfriend:

claims of possession on Sophia's part, and superior knowledge of my habits on Louise 's.

"I think it's interesting," Sophia would say, "that Mac always listens to everyone else's opinion before he'll comment. You don't know if he's looking upon you with benevolence, or if he thinks you're an idiot."

"Benevolence!" I'd insist.

She'd turn to look me up and down. "Or he'll say one quiet thing that you realize after a minute is funny."

"The only person Mac has ever strenuously argued with is my mother," Louise would counter loftily. "Which is perverse of him, since my mother is probably the only person he agrees with wholeheartedly on just about any subject. If he was married to her he'd be--what's the word?--uxorious. And of course," she'd add, "of course he's funny."

"Do you think," Sophia might forge ahead with some deference, "he's going to be one of those doctors who always speak in Latin, who assume that the lay person knows what the flexor pollicis longus is?"

"He'll talk that way until one of our cousins shoots him." Louise was gratified by laughter all around.

When Sophia announced that we were going to join the vegetarian eating co-op Louise said, "Are you kidding? Mac, a vegetarian?" Without as much as the hint of a smile she said flatly, "Hilarious." She turned to me. "I'll make sure to put a weenie in your mailbox every few days so you don't croak."

They'd start talking about music and forget about me, but I remained happy in the glow of their initial rivalry. Sophia had the creamy skin, if English literature is reliable on the subject, of a milkmaid. There were no pores across the sweep of her faintly pink cheek. When I mentioned the miracle of her epidermis, she snorted and said it was insane to think that a subjugated worker's skin could resemble the liquid that came from a dirty cow's udder. I called her Lass or Miss Cooper, both of which she tolerated despite her feminist tendencies.

She was dramatic and moody and very deep. In order to keep company with Sophia Cooper, I was ordered to read Jane Austen and George Eliot and Virginia Woolf and Henry James. No one should have to endure James, not even for love. She insisted that I spend my spare time in the music library, sitting before the turntable, listening to all of the Beethoven string quartets. I had no requirements of her other than that she make demands of me. I could have dropped out of Oberlin and still received a liberal-arts education merely by attending to the syllabus of Miss Cooper.

I had a dream once that I was her violin, that I was the wood, the varnish, the cunning bridge, the pegs and their holes, the strings, the ungainly chin-rest. Sophia took me out of the crimson velvet sepulcher of the case and swooned. I woke as if from a nightmare, soaking wet, understanding that I would have gladly dissolved to a note on the page if it was the note that Sophia cherished. My sister said she had never seen me in such a state, and it's probably true that I was never in love that way, before or after. None of Buddy's advice about women served me, no comfort in the idea that there were girls around me for the taking if the one didn't work out.

Miss Cooper made it plain that I was not the end of the line for her, that her goal was to travel the world as a member of a string quartet. The labor and intimacy of the group would consume her energy. Even if she wasn't so lucky, she had no interest in settling down, and less in being a doctor's wife, being woken at three in the morning, watching me stagger into my pants to go deliver a baby. "No thank you," she said politely. "There I'd be stuck at home raising the family, nursing along the colds and earaches with no help from the resident expert. I've seen how it goes, Mac, seen my uncle working seven days a week while my aunt, on the verge of collapse, manages the kids, the house, the relatives, the holidays, the PTA meetings." In a firmer tone she said, "No."

I don't think I actually believed that she was as ahead of her time as she seemed, that she wouldn't come around to my idea of marriag
e a
nd fulfilling domesticity. Aside from her crushing view of my wife's future, we fumbled along--joyfully, I thought--learning the ropes together in the college beds that kept us conglutinated, one to the other, beds designed for the students to learn intensively about sexual relations. Sophia taught me anatomy in a most thorough, satisfying, and profound way, an educational method not possible from dissection or observation--should that have been practical. I don't mean to sound clinical or unfeeling, because the experience was as far from being cold and intellectual as it could be. She had very few inhibitions, which is something I knew even then to be rare. She would demand that I put my fingers inside her so I could feel the intensity of her orgasm, so I could know where it originated, which muscles were triggered. This instruction, she said, was for the benefit of my future patients, information she was sure I could put to use in some way. She was not very practiced, if she is to be trusted, outside of one former boyfriend and her deliberate exploration of her own body, but she did have a gift for anticipating a person's need, and also no hesitation in claiming what she must have, making me think she would perish if I couldn't help. When we remembered, we offered up thanks that the dorm hours for women were abolished before we met. Finally, I understood the gratification Jerry Pindel had wanted Madeline to render unto Mikey O'Day. I wondered briefly and slantwise now and again, did Madeline take Mikey O'Day into her mouth? As much as I didn't dwell on the idea, it occurred to me that Mikey's capacity for rapture might have its limits, that his head might have exploded with that particular stimulation. And what of Madeline? For Sophia that service seemed to be as interesting and involving to her as it was ecstatic to me.

I noted that she was most grateful to me in our lulls, that it was as we rested, my arms around her, that she seemed to say, Yes, I am with you. It was in those interludes that she admired my coarse thick hair, my brown eyes, that she traced my mouth, kissing the top lip before she dedicated herself to the fuller bottom lip. She would become posi-

tively soppy with approbation and, even better, ownership. "My love," she said, holding me fast. This evident binding of her to me made jungle sense, the female sealing herself as best she can to the male for protection while she carries her child to term, an idea I would never have dared mention. During her devotions after the urgency, I could do little but submit as she sang my praises. In those moments I knew that she'd stay with me, that with such strength of feeling, and biology on my side, she wouldn't have the heart to break it off.

Before our senior year, we spent two weeks at her family's cabin in New Hampshire, just the two of us in a pine forest in the White Mountains. It was a stretch of time when I had a happiness I knew couldn't last, and yet I also believed that it would, that it must, that it couldn't help itself. It rained for three days, and we stayed in bed. Beyond the pattering on the roof there was silence. When the sun shone we did mean to get up. On the occasions when we tossed aside the sheets, she practiced the violin and I studied, preparing for the fall term. Together we cooked simple meals. Veiny soft French cheeses with pears, sourdough bread that we made with starter from a long, venerable, yeasty line. Soup that she conjured out of lentils and a few vegetables. We were living on the cool mountain air and love, love! And the spindly sprigs of parsley that grew in pots on the porch. I managed to keep up my strength without so much as a morsel of animal flesh, without sneaking out of the house to get a gyros sandwich, as I used to do when we were part of the vegetarian co-op. We took walks and washed each other in the pond with biodegradable soap. She read Edith Wharton to me and sometimes let me win at Scrabble. As always, I declared my love to her before and during the peak moment, and she returned the favor afterward. There seemed to be no end to our subjects, her music, her books, my science, the Eastern gods, American politics--even if we didn't always discuss them out loud. What was on the verge of being said was understood between us as much as those things we articulated. Or so I thought. Curiously, I didn't ever tell her, not really, about Madeline. My story for her wen
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ike this: Madeline was my older sister, compromised in a sickness that occurred before I was born. I didn't explain the first marriage, the accident, Buddy's revelation at Moose Lake, Mikey O'Day, all those things that had nothing to do with Sophia Cooper or my life with her. They were omissions I later regretted.