When Madeline Was Young (32 page)

Along the interstate I thought almost nothing of her. It was 1993, after all, the year the Chicago Bulls were playing the Phoenix Suns in the NBA Finals, unarguably the most dazzling games of the century. There happened to be a call-in show on that subject for most of the eighty-mile trip, and yet even at the closing there seemed to be a great deal more to say about the players, their spectacular baskets--so lavishly remembered--the brilliance and stupidity of the coaches through the ages, the salaries, the trades, the tussles on the court. I was sure that Jerry Pindel and the old alley gang, in whatever states they lived, were following the games blow by blow, eager for the inevitable victory.

Jerry had turned out well by the world's standards, running a high-class resort in Tucson, a job that probably required him to be a showman on occasion. When I drove up the street, I didn't more than glance at the Lemburgers' house, the Rockards', the Van Normans', nor did I look at ours, the new coat of gray paint with the white trim, the evergreens in front gone tall and bushy. There was no need to look, when it was so clearly in mind. My father was at the door, in a crisp blue shirt and chinos, his summer work uniform. His hair was wet from the shower, his wrinkled face rosy from his scrub. How peculiar that he had bathed while his wife lay in bed, that he'd taken even ten minutes away from her when there was so little time left.

"Madeline 's upstairs," he said, embracing me lightly, as if my sister would be my first concern.

"All right," I said.

In their room, the spindle bed, the counterpane, the geraniums in their pots, old as trees, the library books stacked on the floor, the white curtains luffing against the screen--everything was in its place. Madeline was lying next to my mother, petting her shoulder. I went to her side and kissed her damp cheek, but she hardly noticed. My mother was on her back, the quilt up to her breasts, her eyes closed, her mouth slack, Julia Maciver with the still, smooth face of death. An arrhythmia, an embolism, phlebitis? "You can't," I murmured, peeling back the sheet to touch her stiff hand. The blood had begun to pool there, the skin darkening, no stopping, no turning back that lividity. She must have been gone for six or seven hours. "You can't," I said again.

My father pulled up another chair for me, and we sat watching her, in that watching waiting for our own understanding to come. Madeline was making a low drone, a continuous hum, what sounded like a machine in the far distance, an ominous hulk on its way. The noise was a comfort, someone among us knowing what to do. I'm sure my father and I talked about the cause of death and what needed to be done, but I only remember trying to converse with Julia. I admonished her, asking within myself, Why have you done this thing? Wha
t a
re you thinking, to leave us when we're not ready, when we haven't had enough?

I had been planning on there being entire decades before us when I'd agitate with my mother for her heart's desire. Decades when I wasn't in the thick of child-rearing responsibilities, when I wasn't working long hours seeing patients, decades when the dictates of the Hartleys' holiday regime would somehow have relaxed. Then--oh, then--my mother and I would march on the Capitol for whatever she said, for gay marriage, the family farm, medical marijuana, and, why not, universal health care. When all the battles had been waged, after my father and Madeline were in the grave, she'd come to live with us, spending her remaining strength trying to convert the Hartleys to her party. How the sisters-in-law would look back to their petty rivalries with fondness!

Louise arrived at the house, pale and dry-eyed, and we continued to sit watching the bed. She was another female who in adulthood had chopped off her long hair, who looked more girlish with a pixie cut. In middle age Louise still had a serious, determined air, no sign yet of mellowing. We talked again about what had killed Julia, a topic that distracted us from her death. My father recalled that the week before she'd had palpitations during her morning exercise, but she hadn't mentioned any distress on the following days. I gave an oration on arrhythmias--the prime suspect as far as I could tell--waxing upon tachycardias, bradycardias, flutters, fibrillations, conduction disorders.

"I wonder," Louise said, before I was quite finished, "if she chose to make her exit without interference from the medical profession."

I still had my hand in a fist, the crude model of the heart, about to explain what happens when the myocardium fails to contract as a whole. "What?" I said.

"She might have been fully aware that palpitations are a sign of heart disease, or whatever it is, and decided not to go to the doctor."

My father nodded twice, considering. "That seems unlikely," I said, as dispassionately as I could. "There's a large family of drugs o
n t
he market that suppress ventricular tachycardias. Mom would have known that it was unnecessary to die because she had an irregularity. Implanting a pacemaker, even, is relatively simple. It takes about an hour and is routine--"

"But maybe she had some deeper knowledge."

Louise and I had turned to each other, away from Julia. "I don't think Mom was ready to go," I said, "if that's what you mean. I don't think someone as vital as Mom would all of a sudden, because of a few palpitations, decide to give up the ghost. The problem with arrhythmia in our case is that it might not show up in postmortem, but, whatever the cause, we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that Mom was negligent about her health, or that she had an awareness of her own mortality."

"I'm not saying she was negligent. I'm saying she might have felt there was something wrong with her--maybe palpitations were just the tip of the iceberg--and she believed that her illness should take its course without anyone fiddling. There's great dignity in that approach--"

"Fiddling? An exam at an office, a prescription? Lu, that's hardly--"

"Children!" my father called out gaily, as if our squabble brought back the days of our youth, as if nothing could make him happier than our regression. "She may not have been ready," he said, "but how many times through the years has she wished for a swift departure?" Lu and I shifted in our chairs, looking at her again, as if that time she might answer. "Probably," he went on, "she would have returned her library books if she thought she was about to go west. She would have left a casserole or two. But you know as well as I that she didn't want to be strapped to a high chair outfitted with a drool bucket. She was often reminding me that I was to pull the plug without a moment's hesitation. I don't think there's anyone more enthusiastic about euthanasia than your mother."

Though that might be true, it had nothing to do with the matter a
t h
and. When I looked at her, I could do little to keep my bewilderment at bay. How could she, of all people, have such a sudden lack of consideration? Why hadn't she called me? What good was having gone to medical school if I couldn't be of use to her? This death was avoidable, and Louise and my father were wrong to comfort themselves with the idea of a secret wish on Julia's part. That we should be happy for her was absurd; to imagine that her premature passing was a blessing against imaginary illnesses down the road was to disregard wantonly her relish for life. I began to mutter. "I'm sorry for us," I said. "Maybe someday, Father, I can be glad for her, but not now. Not now. She's seventy-one. She's young! None of us are ready for her to go."

He put his hands to his face. Madeline 's hum grew louder. Louise knelt by him, softly saying, "Father. Father."

When you looked at her, at Julia Beeson Maciver, really studied her, you could see that she'd never been more at peace. Although the body was already at work breaking down, lactic acid flooding the muscles, the wrinkles were gone from her brow, and she did look serene. The skin on her arms seemed paper-thin, a covering that might flutter away with the slightest breeze, as if it couldn't have stood much more wear. Tessa had seen an Indian saint in a Sheraton Hotel in Illinois, and she'd reported that the woman's skin was giving way from hugging hundreds of people, day after day. And that seemed to have happened to Julia, too, all those years holding Madeline, sleeping against her, tucking her in, smoothing her hair, rocking her through a tantrum. Nevertheless, it couldn't be true that she'd grown tired of this world, that she wanted out.

When the medics came to take the body away, we thought ourselves ready. We'd gotten hungry and had stopped looking at her. It was not as difficult as we anticipated, to pry Madeline from the bed. Her yellow T-shirt was moist, and she was sweetly warm when she buried her face in my neck, that rumbling still going in her throat. When the men were set to move the bag that held Julia through the front door, I found myself gripping the gurney at her feet. The
y p
aused as if they had their own reasons for stopping, the need to shift the weight, and one of them scratched his cheek. After a minute. they lifted their load a little higher over the threshold, the signal that they were about to take her from us. When they were gone, I went down the basement and, like the child I'd reverted to, I sank to my old knees behind the bar, that place of refuge. Mother. Beloved. Don't go.

IT DIDN'T TAKE LONG for word to get out, and by evening we wanted for nothing in the Maciver kitchen. We sat at the table keeping up our strength with butternut-squash risotto, grilled vegetable pinwheels, orecchiete with broccoli rabe, tofu dengaku, slivers of Kobe beef raised in the foothills of Mount Haleakala, and twice-baked potatoes as long as my shoes. There was chocolate cake draped with a ganache that could put out our lights with a mere thimbleful. This was not the standard lasagna and banana bread that circulated in my part of the world in time of trouble. Most of the old neighbors had moved on, and the new couples seemed to have taken up cooking, or at least shopping at high-class delicatessens, rather than rearing squadrons of children. Gardening was the other activity that had replaced wholesale procreation, and they brought flowers from the raised beds in their yards. There was a strange festivity as we ate and the neighbors came and we oohed and aahed over their offerings; and when they left, we reviewed the visit, and through the conversation and the food the telephone kept ringing, and one of us leapt up, taking the phone to the dining room, trailing the ten-foot cord to tell the particulars again to another shocked relative.

It might have made sense to ask my father about the early days of his marriage to Julia, but he was so intent on his meal, moving slowly from beef to potato, chewing carefully, as if eating might now take up all of his time. For years I had wanted to hear the family history from him, but I realized, watching his knobby fingers work his knife and fork, and as he made his affectionate comments about the Grove
Avenue families of our time, that the story had always been visible, that my parents had lived it fully in our presence, no need to hear him frame it in words. I believe that I have never idealized the marriage, that what I saw was its truth. Her voluble yang to his steady, quiet yin; her calm, knowing yin to his abstracted yang. There was no person he wanted to talk to more than my mother, no greater pleasure than his homecoming to her, night after night. That was what Louise and I had understood through our childhood, that they'd celebrated each other in everyday life, and that their love was the sort that radiated outward. For a while in the 198
0
s, we'd tried to get our parents to find a group home for Madeline, but to no avail. "This is her group home," my mother had said. My father asked, "Move Madeline so we can do what? Go on a cruise, maybe get to sit at the captain's table? Drive cross-country in an RV? Smoke pot freely now that the children are gone?"

At some point in the far-off future, they planned to sign up for a retirement community, the three of them, or, if they didn't manage to clean out the house before they fell apart, a nursing facility. When Mikey O'Day left town, my mother had made it a point to keep Madeline busy. Miss Madeline still went to a morning program for the handicapped, and many afternoons she worked for Shelly, the neighbor who ran the beauty salon. Shelly had a cadre of senior citizens who were used to Madeline, who favored her gentle fingers moving through their wet hair before they got their weekly permanents. My mother had reminded us that there were more services for the disabled than there had been when we were growing up. Although none of us said so, I'm certain we'd all thought how Mikey O'Day had been the greatest service, occupying Madeline with his music and his ticket-taking for hours at a time. In her old age, Madeline was a favorite member of the Sunshine Club, an organization that went on trips to the zoo and sponsored holiday parties and dances. It was an ecumenical group-young, elderly, physically handicapped, mentally challenged. Through the years there'd been a few suitors, quiet, od
d m
en who called Madeline on the phone. She seemed to tolerate their entreaties, and she might deign to sit next to this one or another on a trip. That was the extent of the liberties she allowed.

The day before the service, Louise and Diana, with help from Madeline, went through the photographs and assembled the obligatory picture boards of Mother's life for the church viewing. They sat in the dining room all afternoon, sorting through the piles on the table, the years and subjects all mixed up. There was a book from my first few months of life, but otherwise my mother had not found a moment to arrange the photos into albums. "She had no organizational skills!" Diana exclaimed in amazement. There were quite a few pictures from the Mikey O'Day years, Mikey on the boat at Moose Lake, Mikey at the Dari-Dip, Mikey and Madeline sitting on the front porch, Mikey at our kitchen table, Mikey sitting in a kiddie pool in the Van Normans' yard, taking up the whole thing, with, as they say, a shit-eating grin on his face.