When Madeline Was Young (34 page)

I had on occasion wondered past the simplicity of my parents' goodness, wondered how much or if any of their dedication to Madeline had to do with the fact that they owed her their life together. Was their care a kind of payment? Would they have taken any handicapped young woman into their home, into their arms? I would have liked to know how much impurity goodness can have and still be considered goodness. "What," I said to Figgy, "did you think of the eulogy?"

My aged aunt clattered a fork inside her empty glass and sighed. "Lovely, very nice." She sighed again, her signature bosom rising and falling heavily. "I'm just sorry her caritas didn't extend to me. Your mother tried to believe that we all need each other, the dummy and the scholar, the king and the serf, the left and the right, but she couldn't really pull it off. Those of us who were wrong--wrong!--made her so angry. Maybe the afterlife will even her out. Maybe death is like taking a hit of Prozac."

Surely it was safe to say that Julia Maciver in the box in the closet was about as evened out as a person could get.

"Oh well," Figgy said, closing that subject. "Do you think we can talk your father into setting Madeline up in some kind of place? I'
m s
ure he doesn't have a clue how much your mother took care of Miss Schiller. He still works every day, doesn't he?"

I had no idea how he was going to cope. Although he had retired, he continued to drive to the museum several times a week for his research on migrating populations through Chicago. Every morning for twenty years, spring and fall, he or one of his workers had picked up the dead birds that smacked into the glass structure of McCormick Place, cataloguing them, charting the species on the move across that part of Lake Michigan. Since my mother's death, we hadn't had time to discuss Madeline 's future in any detail. She had cried herself to sleep most nights, and in the mornings she'd come to any of us who were near for consolation, sitting beside us, her large blue eyes beseeching, as if she thought we might somehow help, as if we might be able to stitch our mother back into herself merely because Madeline was sad. Her grief was unalloyed with regret, pure in her every gesture.

Over the years she had grown to like my father well enough, to accept him fully as part of the family. On the day after the service, Lu and I again tried halfheartedly to talk him into placing Madeline into assisted living. "We'll assist each other's living!" he said. "We'll manage. We've always managed."

We knew better than to remind him that it was Julia who had taken care of the home front. We didn't press him to sell the house, to pack up all the relics of our childhood that were still in the attic and our rooms, to sell everything that wouldn't fit in a five-hundredsquare-foot condominium. "Madeline and I," he said, "will be fine."

FOR SOME TIME AFTER JULIA'S DEATH, Louise and I were braced for
a d
omestic disaster in the old household, one of them falling or having a stroke, or growing too lonely to carry on. It was Russia who helped Madeline find a new place for herself. On her first Wednesday after the service, after she'd set Charles in motion with the mop and pail
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after she had dismissed my father, telling him what to buy at the grocery store, she laid out what Madeline must do in order to deserve her rest at night. Over the weeks she helped her refine her egg-poaching techniques and made her mistress of the coffeemaker. In short order Madeline mastered the art of heating Lean Cuisine to perfection in the microwave, and she learned to sort colors and measure out soap for the laundry. She took wifely pride in her decorations-a pitcher of marigolds on the table, an arrangement of seashell soaps in the powder room. But it was on that first morning that the ground rules were put in place. "Charles, come here," Russia snapped, just after she'd ordered him away. She dictated a schedule to him, leaning over to see that his careful printing was neat enough, and then she affixed the list of seven theses to the refrigerator. "Monday: Dust. Tuesday: Change Sheets. Wednesday: Make Russia Breakfast. Thursday: Wash Clothes. Friday: Clean Sinks. Saturday: Buy Fruit. Sunday: Praise."

This list, which surely includes all things, which my father read out every morning for his own amusement, seemed to bring the day into focus for Madeline. It made it possible for her to rise in the morning with purpose. She combed her short hair, put on the clothes that she'd laid neatly on the floor the night before, and descended to the kitchen to start the coffee. On Saturdays they went early to the farmers' market in the high-school parking lot, smelling the tips of the melons before they purchased them, and carefully picking out apples from the bins, for Madeline did not like marks or bruises. On Sundays they went to Reverend Hollister's church for praise, and also to feel closer to my mother, as if she might linger there, as if they could be alert to her presence more naturally in that sanctuary. On the weekdays they sat at the breakfast table, Madeline watching the Today Show on the little TV my father had bought, and he reading the paper. It was what retired couples did the world over.

Chapter
Fifteen

THERE WERE NO CRUISES OR ELDER HOSTELS FOR THE
reinstated Mr. and Mrs. Maciver, although they sometimes came to Moose Lake in the summer, when we were all there. They had a routine. A short walk in the morning, breakfast, and sitting on the porch, my father reading, Madeline looking at magazines. They often both had a nap in the afternoon. Madeline stayed in the south bedroom, in the iron bed where, long before, she had been so sick. Diana did what she could to try to fill in for my mother, inviting Madeline to the store, giving her tasks in the kitchen, and they gardened together, the two of them in straw hats out in the overgrown flower beds. In brief spurts Madeline seemed to enjoy digging holes for the flats of annuals and pulling weeds. She had a white cushion she knelt on, and she patted the earth around her plants with real conviction.

For several years we'd owned Moose Lake with three other Maciver families, running it as a time-share proposition, each of us with two weeks in the summer, and months on end, if anyone wanted, in the winter. Although we could have used the place with Louise, her children were quite a bit older than ours, and they were usually busy with their instruments or at camp. Without cousins for the girls, and without the rule of my grandmother, the estate, even when it was all ours for a stretch, was diminished. I had wanted to carry on the Victorian rules
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but somehow that ironclad tradition didn't take. I suppose it was no fun to have rules to break if there was not a band of girls and boys to scheme with. Copulation, I'm sure, did take place in the boathouse, my daughters with their high-school and college beaux. They didn't know what they were missing, didn't know that their pleasure was hardly worth the trouble without the threat of punishment.

I wondered if for Madeline there was the lingering sense of the romantic days when there had been twenty children, when at dinner there were two long tables on the porch, and the lineup of babies in their high chairs, always someone for her to mother. When my daughters were teenagers, they didn't love the lake and couldn't be persuaded to come without their friends. They complained that there was nothing to do. One of my younger cousins had for a time lobbied for a TV on the premises, including a satellite dish and a gaming apparatus, but we elders won the day, much to the girls' disappointment. Tessa was the only child who knew to take up a book. In our weeks, they put on their little suits and tanned on the dock, waiting for me to take them water-skiing. Madeline, in her sleeveless blue cover-up dress that came to her knees, holding her hat to her head, was always the watcher, calling to me from the back of the boat when a girl went down. My daughters were polite with her and formal. Madeline was after all a lady in her seventies, the innocence or impassivity in her wrinkled face a strangeness to them. She'd sit on the end of the dock watching them wrestle each other on the raft, those small, muscly, near-naked Amazons. They were part boy, part woman, part beast--hard to say what Madeline thought as she looked on. In the new era, the trunk of Lincoln Logs was dusty in the corner of the living room, and the sheet over the dollhouse never came off.

There was a bright afternoon when I came upon her at the fire pit. She was squatting, bending over her long haunches, marking in the ashes with a stick. "Miss Madeline," I said, "what are you making?"

"Don't know." She put her chin to her knee and kept scratching. Nothing to do but make an occasion of it, setting fire to the paper trash already assembled--the two of us, poking at the glowing embers.

I'VE HAD A FEW real lapses in my adulthood, at least that I can identify. One was the blankness on the day that started with my father's phone call at breakfast, when he announced that my mother had died sometime in the night. I had registered very little through those hours, until suddenly I found myself on my knees behind the bar in the basement. There was another incident like that in Italy, an hour or so when I refused to see the world as it was, stubborn in my unwillingness to take into account what I knew. That time was not a blank, however. If anything, the afternoon was too full of emotion--rich, you might say, with operatic feeling.

It was 1998, five years past Julia's death. Louise 's daughter Isabel was marrying a boy she'd met during a college program in Rome. Marty Raffin was a solid citizen of the Northwest, a boy who had climbed Mount Rainier several times, pickax in hand up the broad glacier. Not someone you'd immediately think to insert as bridegroom into the cobbled piazza of a dinky medieval town in Tuscany. The couple was going to be married outside of Fiesole, in the garden of a professor they'd befriended in their charmed semester a few years before. It was a small gathering--Louise 's family and ours, the groom's parents, and the three friends who had been able to afford the trip. I'd been surprised when my father, nearly eighty, had said that he and Madeline would come along. In all his collecting expeditions, he'd never been to any of the European cities except to pass through the airports. Before he died, he said, he'd like to add an Italian bird or two to his list--an orchetto, a garletta, a mignattaio--and also to see if the sparrows and wrens, those species that had been brought to the New World, sang differently in the presence of the pervasive smell of garlic. "Not to mention the pleasure of seeing my granddaughter get married," he said. He noted that he still had his own teeth and he could walk and he was not yet incontinent. "Real readiness," he declared, "for travel of any kind."

We were sitting at a long table in a low-ceilinged peasant cottage of a restaurant in Fiesole, on the night before the wedding, havin
g e
aten a meal of such tenderness and simplicity that everyone's present seemed sublime and the future destined to be happy. There had been fettuccine with cream-and-butter sauce, delicately garnished with shaved white truffles, and veal chops cooked with sage and white wine, and asparagus from a northern spring, neither too fat nor too thin, bundled up with prosciutto that had been aged a year and a half, the fine balance of savory and sweet, moist and firm. A bowl of fruit, each glossy strawberry more perfectly ripe than the last. While everyone else had drifted out to the street, into the evening, my father and I sat, two men submitting to Italian-style digestion, grappa as our aid. As we lingered there, I wondered out loud if Madeline had any memory of her European trip, over sixty years earlier, when she'd met the suitor, when her mother had swept her away from Florence. The question was theoretical at that point, something to consider lazily, whimsically, on a full stomach. It was poignant, I said to my father, wasn't it, that Madeline had returned here at this stage of her life?

He untucked his napkin from his shirt and dabbed at his mouth, one side and then the other. "What's this, now?"

I reminded him that Mrs. Schiller, the first mother-in-law, had taken Madeline to Italy before the marriage.

"What marriage?"

"She must have been in high school. Before you and she got married. Your wedding was in 1943, so probably their Italy trip was 'y or so. Before the war."

I'd never seen him looking confused as an old person will, the brow sharply furrowing, the eyes going vacant even as they narrowed. He was still usually so quick that his befuddlement startled me. "Nineteen thirty-seven?" It took me a minute to realize that his difficulty didn't stem from memory loss, not really. Time had done its work to absorb Madeline fully into our family; it was as if for him she had always been a Maciver, as if there had never been any Schillers.

"I don't recall that," he said, giving up the search, the frown for the most part easing from his face. "It beats me."

Madeline was outside, standing by the fountain with the bride.

They must have been talking about the wedding dress. Isabel appeared to be conjuring it with her fingers, first floating them over her breasts and then her arms widening in the promise of a full skirt. Madeline put her hands to her mouth and laughed, out of sheer delight at how beautiful it was going to be.

AFTER THE WEDDING, after the sun-drenched day as advertised, and the dark-haired bride sealing her vows in her ivory lace, and another meal that filled our hearts with gladness, after that we spent three days in Florence. My girls--twelve, fourteen, and sixteen--shared a long white room with a close-up view of one small section of the Duomo's intricate marble walls, the jewel box of gargantuan proportions. Every morning they threw open the shutters to the ringing of the bells, and although they'd been woken early they were awestruck instead of annoyed. I liked to think of the three of them and Madeline lying in the starched sheets of their dormitory, waiting for the bells to peal across the city, as close as they'd ever come to being novitiates. They knew better than to ask Madeline to braid their hair, because if it didn't go well, if Madeline got frustrated, it would spoil her morning. But she did some of their preening, one after the next waiting for the in-house beautician to brush and comb and make their ponytails. You could see that she was nervous and excited, taking on the responsibility of hairdresser to the princesses.