When Madeline Was Young (31 page)

She saw me as the door opened. "Mac?" She came two steps toward me. "Mac Maciver? Is that you?" She set her violin down--her halfmillion-dollar instrument, right there on the pavement--and threw he
r a
rms around me. She no longer smelled of the co-op, no longer drenched in the odors of dark sesame oil and boiled kale. She was a woman who wore expensive perfume, who ate not only meat but brains, who used makeup that had been tested on animals. "Mac--oh, Mac!"

I would have been glad to leave her after that embrace, satisfied with the outcome. But she had time for a drink--plenty of time, in fact, for dinner. Her husband would have gone to bed hours before, falling asleep with the baby.

The baby!

"Gabrielle," she said, returning to her violin. "Five months old yesterday. Oh, but you're here! This is wonderful, this is perfect, this is glorious."

"Glorious," I repeated. The music, I remembered to say, had been transcendent, her playing bewitching.

"We four were in accord tonight," she said, slipping her arm through mine. "More or less."

I recall little about the walk to the restaurant, or the food, outside of the cervelle that she ate. It was almost as if we were back in New Hampshire, as if all the years had fallen away and we were again those two young people strolling through the woods down the path to the pond. We'd believed then that we'd been sprung from our families into our own lives. Although the evening is a gleamy blur, I know we did not explicitly discuss the terminal night our senior year, when Louise and I had been rolling around in the dorm bed, squalling like infants. She did ask after my sister, and was pleased to learn that she had a place in the Cleveland Orchestra. It was the mention of Louise that led gracefully into her apology for leaving me abruptly before graduation. She said that she'd always wanted to write to me, to search me out, to conclude respectfully what had been so important to her.

Those years in New Jersey rose before me, day after day, night after night, the miasma of that time, the mute suffering as I'd tried to heal from her. When I couldn't speak, when I only nodded, she said
,
"You were such an odd mix, Mac Maciver, of seriousness and exuberance. You were the only uptight hedonist I think I've ever known." With her long fingers she dipped whatever we were eating--oysters, for starters, maybe--into the spicy sauce, and then put the fleshy mass into her mouth.

"You were serious, too," I managed.

"I was only serious about my playing, but you--you were quiet and intense about everything, about each of your classes, about baking bread, about buying a pair of shoes, about being learned, about . . . making love. But then you'd sometimes bust out of yourself . . ."

In the interest of moving the conversation along, I told her that I had been rereading some of her assigned books--not The Ambassadors, no, but Middlemarch again. And she asked did I relate to the character Lydgate, the young ambitious doctor? I wondered if she was actually asking if I, like Lydgate, was trapped by marriage in a backwater with small-minded people. I replied that some of Lydgate's challenges in a provincial hospital were similar to those I encountered, and that the book had much more meaning to me than it had in college. She had set me on my path, and since then, without once communicating, we had read many of the same books. It is well known that there is no greater aphrodisiac, none, than the realization that you and your acquaintance have been reading the same treasured lines at roughly the same time.

Out on the pavement, she asked me where I was staying. I drew her to me, and in that firm hold, that minute, another, and a little longer, she somehow understood that I couldn't invite her back. "You are beautifully old-fashioned," she said to me as I opened the cab door for her. She kissed me in that unrestrained way I remembered so well. "I do love you still," she murmured, and then the door slammed and she was off.

It was one o'clock in the morning, and I was walking along Columbus Circle. Madeline appeared before me, Madeline in her mourning over Mikey O'Day. When Mikey had left for Florida, th
e t
wo of them had understood that they would be able to visit each other. But Mikey was far more a creature of the moment than Madeline. They couldn't very well carry on much of a friendship by phone, so little to say without the actual presence of the other and their old routines. The communication trailed off, and before Mikey could come back the next summer, he'd found another place to sing and, according to Mrs. O'Day, another girl. No matter that girl. In my slightly sad but still exhilarated drunkenness, I would have traded that evening to Mikey and Madeline if such a thing were possible. I would have given them the chance to walk ahead of me to the hotel, where they could, just once, have renewed their old bond.

WHEN LOUISE AND I WERE BOTH IN COLLEGE, those late summer day
s w
hen we were packing, my mother would always say to Madeline, "You're going to be my only girl left at home." She said it again before Louise 's wedding, and again, nonsensically, when I married Diana. Buddy was up in Alaska then, and could not get to the ceremony. It was in 1978, during the Carter years, the president my mother rejoiced in and Figgy and Arthur loathed. They abhorred what they called the president's phony homespun graciousness, the undermining of our sense of national identity, the hoax of the energy crisis, and the pussyfoot approach to rescuing the hostages. We all knew the arguments they would have had if they'd been in each other's company. Diana thought my mother intelligent and fascinating. She liked to tell her relatives about that, how smart Mrs. Maciver was. Julia had enjoyed Sophia Cooper the two times she had visited me at college, but I think, despite her progressive thinking, she had the good-wife approach: she knew that in many ways Diana would make a better home for me. She saw how much we were in love, how smitten I was, and trusted that I knew best. If she worried, she didn't let on. She didn't change her tune in our company, continuing to talk as if we all had the same interests, as if we'd listened to the State of the Union Address and were concerne
d a
bout gas consumption and had run to the library to check out the Pulitzer Prize--winning novel. She and Diana discussed the new math, ability grouping, and children's literature, even though my fiancee was going to quit teaching second grade when we moved back to her hometown. The future Mrs. Maciver was going to try to get pregnant directly after the wedding. She had been told by the family doctor that she might have trouble conceiving because of her irregular periods and her tipped uterus, and she was anxious to get to work on our project.

"Be good to each other," Julia said to us when we announced our engagement.

How could we do otherwise? I had studied--so I thought--my parents' marriage. I believed that marital felicity came from lively conversation over a well-prepared dinner, children, reading at night, bed, and, in the morning, work. Marriage should contain those things, and if a person had his health none of it should be too difficult. And what did Diana think? She was thrilled by the idea of being Dr. and Mrs. Maciver, excited by our plans to move to her hometown so we could surround ourselves, on all sides and beyond the sides, by her large and close-knit family, the five brothers and their broods, the three sisters and their children, the parents and grandparents.

In the heat of anger once, Diana said to me that my parents could not be as happy as I thought they were. I had invented their happiness--as always, I had blinders on, blinders, and couldn't see what my mother and father were.

"What are they?" I said, thinking of myself as a tired old horse plodding down the street with patches close up to my drooping eyelids.

"They are--they are--"

"I know it sounds unlikely, their contentment," I tried to say without whinnying. "I know it sounds impossible to you."

The handful of Macivers sat up front on the groom's side of the church, as custom dictates: my parents, Russia, Madeline, Louise and her husband, Dale, and their two daughters. Three of the cousin
s c
ame with their wives, but no Figgy, no Arthur, no Buddy. As Diana came floating down the aisle, blue-eyed and pink, her ringlets on top of her head, I knew there was little to regret. Still, for a minute I was certain I was in cardiac arrest. Just as Buddy had said might happen to him when he married. How good it would be to look out and see him there, the drill sergeant reassuring me that my heart would continue to beat. The mass of Hartleys on Diana's side, all of them having given their approval, smiled upon us in our hour of fulfillment. I had learned their rituals, enough of them to know what teams to root for, what meat, what cuts to grill for the gatherings, what kind of jokes would play. I had done my studying, and I might just as well have made a dive into them, mosh pit style, so they could carry me to their home.

Chapter
Fourteen

IT WAS JUNE 1993, JUNE I t, WHEN MY FATHER CALLED TO
tell me my mother had died in her sleep. I thought that he must be mistaken, that he had misread the event he was about to narrate. "I don't believe what I'm saying to you," he began "but it appears that Mom died sometime in the night." He spoke as if he were relating an everyday occurrence, as if he were telling me about old Mrs. Lombardo walking her schipperke dog past the house.

"Sometime in the night? What--where is she?" "In her sleep."

He's gone mad, I thought. Or else she was having a dream so deep, lying so still in the hush of her fantasy, that the attentive husband was crying, Wolf, wolf! We'd all laugh about his overzealous care later. My mother couldn't be in any mood to die, and in her sleep, too, a squandering of an experience, one she'd like to have while awake.

"Where is she?" I asked again.

"Right here in bed. I haven't moved her."

She was seventy-one, her outrage and interest as sharp as ever, her hair a salt-and-peppery rumble, her face a little rounder than it used to be, her laugh a little looser. She had enough padding to keep that future old-lady osteoporotic hunch at bay, and she was in fine shape, walking two or three miles a morning. It was not possible for her to be dead. All th
e s
ame, I barked my orders. "I'm going to hang up. I want you to call 9
1
1. When you've done that, Father, call me back." She might have suffered a stroke, a cerebral embolism that had paralyzed her, that had rendered her unconscious.

"Mac," my father said gently, "she was cool when I woke. I've felt for her pulse, I've listened for her heart. There is no life in her."

When he'd gone through the motions of checking her vital signs for my benefit, he said, "If you can come now, soon, I'll wait to make the call. So you can see her as she is."

Louise got on the next flight, and I drove down, both of us going home without our families. Diana was already riding a bus to the children's museum with Katie's class and would be away for most of the day. According to the calendar, she had her usual breakneck schedule, dentist appointments for all the girls after school, Lyddie's piano lesson, and the regular Friday-night dinner for her parents. Followed by cribbage club with the sisters and the in-laws. I was grateful not to have to face her: she would absorb the fact immediately, her empathy forcing me to the quick. I put myself in the car, squarely in the seat, in the void of no time, of not yet knowing, not yet, not yet. I would drive on. Although I have no memory of taking care of any work detail, I must have called the office before I left. A death in the family, I might have said, without elaborating.

I had always imagined her going with a short illness at an advanced age--aging for Julia that would take place without the side effects of senescence. She'd wake one morning with a wildly disseminated cancer, an invasion that had occurred without her notice, with no pain. It was the way to go--diagnosed on Tuesday, dead by Friday. There she'd be, set up in a bank of pillows, her hair spun to an airy white, giving last-minute instructions, and also making a pronouncement that would elevate the past to legend and illuminate our futures. Everything that one wants from the dying.

Although I didn't yet understand that she was gone, I did know that once the medics came she would be taken from the house. Tha
t w
as the evil I could think to prevent. If I had my way, if we could buck the law, I'd insist she be laid out in the parlor for a week, so we could begin to adjust to the idea of her leaving. How I missed the days long before my birth! At the hospital morgue or a funeral-home viewing, she could not very well be herself. For a second I imagined standing with Russia next to the casket, hand in hand, talking quietly about Miz Julia. But that was absurd, too, just as ridiculous as my mother being laid out anywhere or being cremated, cooked down to a paltry heap of dust. According to her wishes, that fistful would be buried in front of the headstone that was already in place at the Moose Lake cemetery.

To see the body in her own bed was the best I could want in my state of not knowing, the intimacy of her things around her, Julia at the center in her nightgown with the rips in the armpits and the tattered sleeves. If she had to be dead, I reasoned, then she should stay in her room. I could also at least hope for a sense of the ineffable close by. Even those who are not afflicted with religious conviction so often plan in the last moment of their loved one's life, at the last gasp, to see the glimmering of the spirit as it rises up and passes out the window or through the ductwork. I had never felt that breeze or seen the vapor, as some have reported, but I was sure that with Julia, even hours past her death, there had to be--there would be something of her remaining in the air. That is to say, I had the optimism of a person in shock.