When Madeline Was Young (6 page)

Although all of it seems innocent now, and harmless, what I remember is my terror of Grandmother, the idea of her wrath. In truth
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she was as mild a Victorian as they come, a woman who loved the thought of her family surrounding her even as she found it wearying. She did narrow her eyes down the table at us for an infraction as inevitable as belching; of course she did, because she was sure that if civility was taught to a child everything else of importance--schooling, profession, marriage--would fall into place. Her round face was weathered, and she wore her steel-colored hair in a loose bun. Even when she smiled fondly, I thought her severe. I suppose I dreaded what might come on the heels of her disapproving glances because Buddy claimed she'd once whipped him with a stick. That punishment, he explained sagely, had had the effect of making him her favorite. Outside of her stern word--"Hush!"--and her strict adherence to the rules of cards and parlor games, she never lived up to her tyrannical reputation; that is, she never found us out, she never had to exercise her dreadful power. Years later, I learned that one summer she'd demanded my mother join her in a raid of the boathouse, that Grandmother trembled at the thought of disciplining the younger boys, who she was certain had beer. Grandmother afraid of us! How dare she invert the world order and think us fearsome.

In those days I also quaked to think that Buddy would find out just how chickenhearted I was. He could see clearly that I was a weakling, but I hoped he didn't realize the depths of my cowardice. I was frightened of footsteps in the night, robbers in the kitchen, their climbing, climbing up the stairs to my room, wherein I would be smothered. I was afraid that a funnel cloud would sweep me away and set me down in a stranger's living room. What to say? Where would I sleep? Of course I feared the Russians, such cruelty in their thick accents and their bleak homeland. I was afraid of measles and meningitis, diseases that would blind me or kill me or, worse, reduce my brain to pulp. There was a man in the next block at home, Mikey O'Day, who it was said might have been the next Einstein if a fever hadn't turned him into a lunatic.

The only danger I loved, the only time I was thrilled being fright-

ened, was in Buddy's company. We'd creep through the grass, Buddy either scouting out ahead of us or, more often, in the rear, watching the movement of his troops, making sure each boy played his role. He called me Brains in a jaunty, self-deprecating way, and I took him at his word: "You're the great mind here, so pipe up with your suggestions." I did have an educated knowledge of the grown-ups' patterns, because I had the habit of lingering at the supper table out on the cookhouse porch. It was often restful, sitting alone in the midst of the adults, unnoticed, listening and not listening to their arguments, waiting until the secret box of chocolates was taken from its hidden place and indiscriminately passed hand to hand. So it wasn't all dull, as the other boys thought. And sometimes the conversation, idling along, would flare up, the gibes tilting beyond good humor, the voices tuning higher, the summer heat rising.

The Macivers were fast eaters, gobbling their meat, swallowing in a hurry what they had not taken care to chew. Those indelicate manners must have come from the fur-trader line, from the ancestors who'd make a hasty rabbit stew over a small fire, eating quickly in case the enemy lurked. Therefore, the descendants with nothing to fear couldn't help savaging their sweet corn and swilling down the apple sauce. When the job was soon done, they'd sit for hours in front of their dirty plates, picking at the bones and drinking, the Roosevelt Democrats, the Adlai Stevenson zealots, some of them table bangers, versus those who were smugly in the Eisenhower camp. I could report to Buddy that the mothers were unpredictable in their movements, getting up now and again to check on the babies, and sometimes, according to my mother, dropping asleep on the nursery floor, finally, at odd hours, tiptoeing through the creaking house to their rightful beds. The fathers--how enlightened they were--often did the dishes, their talk drifting out the windows, carrying over the lake as our battalion prowled along the side of the fence. We could hear them when Petie shinnied up the trunk of the arborvitae onto the roof, when he threw down a ladder of dubious strength that we'd fashioned of rags in the afternoon.

We all went for the month of August in that golden age, my parents; my sister, Louise, who was two years younger than I; and of course Madeline. The 195
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s and even the 196
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s stretched on indefinitely, that everlasting period before my mother and Figgy had their break. Didn't they then miss each other, they who seemed to be opposites and yet were from much the same New England stock, both born and bred in the heartland? My mother hailed from a Quaker family of modest means, the Beeson parents treating their two children with respect and teaching them to do good works. The Macivers, with their old money and six children, had the same starch even if their philanthropy was showier. Figgy did carry herself as if the Boston blue-bloods had been waiting for years for her to arrive in Harvard Square. She must have known, though, that she needed her own kind at Radcliffe, someone like my mother in her inner circle, a girl from home who could check her now and again. My mother, for her part, oppressed by the venerable institution, was often buoyed up by the antics of her saucy roommate.

I suppose the two of them had always had what you might call friendly arguments, long before the 1960 presidential campaign, and well before my mother left Radcliffe. After her junior year, Julia came home to Chicago to go to a Catholic women's college for her nursing degree. "Wait," Figgy said to her at the time, "wait just a minute. Listen to me. No one, no one drops out of Radcliffe and then enrolls in St. Anne's. And no one who was raised a Quaker, for Christ's sake, goes to St. Anne's. What the hell is the matter with you? You can't give this up just because your father is sick! A hair shirt, Julia, is not a garment that's particularly becoming, especially on someone with your frame."

Figgy was bronzed and busty, on the dock her cleavage glowing as far as the eye could see. She wore one-piece bathing suits that had sashes and sparkles and little skirts. What a contrast to my mother's standard-issue high-school swim-class tank, a suit made from a thick, dull cotton that never dried, with a panel across the front thighs, the V of the crotch never to be seen.

If you had seen my mother in her prim swimming costume, you wouldn't have suspected that she could keep up during happy hour, starting with scotch on the lawn and moving on to the gallon jugs of wine through dinner and afterward. The sky went rosy beyond the trees and then to black while she and Figgy's new husband, Arthur, the Yale man, bantered with a lively step, with a happiness that kept me at the table. I liked Arthur very much, not only because everyone said he was brilliant, because he was well on his way to becoming someone, but because of the interest he took in me and also the way he spoke to my mother. I knew it was possible he loved her, but of course in the proper brotherly manner. Certainly in the beginning, when Figgy brought Arthur to show him off, my mother was the favorite of his in-laws. He had wonderfully smooth skin for a man, a blush down his jaw, and sleek black hair that he combed away from his forehead, such health from the Ivory Tower. In the early days of Figgy's marriage, his enthusiasm for us seemed sincere. He listened with real thoughtfulness, as if nothing engaged him more than our ideas and hobbies. He wanted to know why my mother didn't trust the Kennedys, not the father, not the sons, and why she could make her pronouncements with careless verve.

"Kennedy's going to take us to war if he gets elected," she said over her plate heaped with corncobs. "Because, Art, because he's going to have to do something to prove he's as anticommunist as the big boys. The way he's been raving about Cuba, he makes Nixon sound like a dove."

Arthur had black-framed glasses tight to his face, and behind those lenses soft dark eyes, slightly thyroidal, bovine in their lashy sweetness. "Mrs. Maciver," he said soothingly, adjusting himself in his seat, coming close to the edge, readying himself for the night's work, "I suspect you haven't gotten over Stevenson's failure to beat Ike, two failed presidential races, such a shame. Still in mourning. But you don't strike me as an alarmist. Let's talk about the personalities in this race for a minute, aspects that have been troubling certain people." He ran his tongue over his top lip and then wiped the edges of his mout
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ith his thumb and index finger. "You don't mind at all about Jack Kennedy's Catholicism, for instance, but I'll bet Nixon's brand of evangelical Quakerism offends you."

Arthur could call Kennedy "Jack" because he was personally acquainted with him. My mother smiled broadly at her brother-in-law and batted her short eyelashes, something I'd never seen her do before. "I only want a president who's Episcopalian," she said. "I only vote for candidates who were once junior vestrymen and senior vestrymen and after that senior wardens."

That, apparently, was FDR's religious-education profile. Arthur nodded approvingly, not perhaps because of her love for Roosevelt but because of the particularity of her knowledge. In less than a year's time, he would go to work in the Kennedy administration, in the State Department, Arthur Fuller, part of the famous brain trust. The other aunts and uncles talked politics as most of us do, from our corners, without much historical context for our own thinking, and without an idea of the real personalities who affect the backroom discussions. Arthur, we all knew, spoke from an intimate understanding of the players, and a deep command and even experience of world affairs. If he was a frightening man, it was only because he grasped how dangerous other people were. On the occasions when he didn't offer an opinion, or the facts, it was out of discretion; it was because he was trustworthy.

While my mother and Arthur, and sometimes Figgy, too, were flirting with each other at the table, my father was off shining his flashlight at the bats up in the barn for the little boys, or in bed with one of the books of his childhood, Penrod or Stalky and Company. Arthur and Mrs. Maciver, in the meantime, were possibly the only people after dinner in Antigo, Wisconsin, that summer of 1960, who on several occasions discussed the fighting that was already going on in Southeast Asia. It was funny, I thought, how he called her Mrs. Maciver, as if she deserved that respect, or as if he, and only he, were allowed to mock her in that simple way.

"It's clear, Mrs. Maciver, that Laos is where the next crisis is goin
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o take place. But let me ask you this. You really think North and South Vietnam would be fighting again if we'd used massive retaliation in '54, what Dulles was pushing for? You can't tell me that the postwar ambivalence hasn't been a disaster for Indochina."

"Art, Art, Art!" No one but my mother called him Art. "Dulles wanted to use nuclear weapons against the Vietminh. He recommended--"

"Yes, yes, he did. Quick and effective, as opposed to this bloody struggle that drags on and will continue to drag on. It's a complicated issue, isn't it, both sides with valid arguments. Do you bomb a hundred thousand civilians, women, children, to destroy Hitler's war machine? Let me take a wild guess where you come down. You'd like everyone at the United Nations to sit around a very large table and have a good long talk. The Reds and the Free World sharing banishes, rice cakes, pampushki, orange juice, and vodka in the morning, another round of stimulating talks in the afternoon, and by cocktail hour everyone is holding hands and singing, 'Peace, I ask of thee old r-i-i-iver, peace, peace, peace.' " He had a light baritone, and everyone laughed at his lovely rendition of absurdity. "Do you think, Mrs. Maciver, that the fall of China was of any consequence?"

My mother always looked well when she was with Arthur on the porch, and sometimes, with a drink in one hand, she'd reach across the table for Figgy's cigarettes, all debauchery and merriment. "I think," she'd say, "what you fellows misjudge is the force of communism in Indochina, a force you believe transcends nationalism. Vietnam's interest in communism is trifling compared to their wish for self-rule."

He'd study her over his glasses for a minute, chin to chest, and then he'd want to know what she'd been reading, who she'd been talking to, how she'd arrived at her opinion. For a while they might review, harking back to the Han Dynasty, an ancient time when the Chinese had first overthrown the Kingdom of Nam Viet. My mother was perfectly able to interject and correct through the history before they returned to their initial positions--Arthur insisting that Chin
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as using Viemam as its proxy to spread communism through the region, that substantial bombing would have settled the matter with fewer casualties than there'd already been; Mrs. Maciver holding firm about Vietnam's wanting little more than self-determination.

Julia's nonchalance about the dangers of communism on the other side of the world was considered a sign of perilous ignorance, but even so on those nights Arthur had the charity to seem both amused by her ideas and intrigued by her logic. At first she hadn't approved of Figgy's divorcing her Harvard man, Buddy's father, and running off when the baby was only four toward Arthur Fuller. But once Julia had met the replacement, she could hardly keep casting judgment. Figgy, after all, clearly had made a bad choice in Bill Eastman, had been charmed by his pedigree and his bucking of it. She had been sure his aspirations to be an artist would pass. For a time they'd lived the bohemian life on the Lower East Side, playing at being poor among those who were genuinely talented and poverty-stricken. It turned out, however, that Bill was able to lose money nearly as quickly as the trust fund was turned over to him, and he was also unreliable in every other respect. He died of alcohol poisoning when Buddy was seventeen. Arthur, in contrast, was not only wholesomely fun-loving, but a whippersnapper professor at Princeton, a think-tanker with important friends, piles of dough, a frugal nature, and an island off the coast of Maine. For example, whenever Figgy and Arthur came to Moose Lake they always had to stop in Chicago to have dinner with Leo Strauss.