"Come, lamb, blueberry muffins for breakfast." But the morning in front of them was just as uncertain if Madeline opened her eyes, stretched, swung her feet to the floor, and padded in her uneven tread to the bathroom. The augur of a happy day? A few minutes later, by the time she got to the table, she might turn her bowl of cereal over and sit, her arms crossed, refusing to move.
"You'd want to smack her in the face," Figgy said.
In the evenings, when my father walked in the door from work, Madeline quit stirring the pudding or working at the sewing cards that occupied her, shoestrings in different colors threaded through cardboard pictures. She'd burst from the chair, the thick threads spilling, the stack of cards falling to the floor. She pitched herself at my father. "Hullo, Julia," he called to his wife through that assault. When he sat down to dinner, Madeline climbed into his lap, pulled at his face, pressed his cheeks together. She must not have liked her place at the side of the table, Mr. and Mrs. Maciver at the heads. "Talk to me," she said to my father. "Tell me about your day," she said in a mocking voice. "Talk to me. Tell me. Talk, talk." My mother was firm in her conviction that he should indulge her, that he should shove back in his chair and rock her for as long as she needed. As my mother saw it, Madeline was just waking up to the fact that she'd been injured. Or, as Figgy might have said, "jilted."
"Keep rocking her," Julia instructed her husband. Madeline must have known she'd lost something. What was it that had once been so close and yet now was blurry in the distance? Not a dress or a dog, larger than that--a house, was it? A whole town, a lake, a thing you felt you were a part of but couldn't in any way hold? "This will pass," I imagine Julia assuring my father when they were alone in their bed, before the specter appeared from the other room.
"It took the accident to reveal the nature of his first wife to your father," Figgy told me. "I don't think he had ever admitted to himself that she was spoiled. It was the crash that brought her character to the fore, front and center, for him to see."
As all couples must do when they have children at home, my parents would have had to be hasty and quiet after the lights were out. Before Madeline made her entrance into the dark bedroom--and who could tell when she would open the door?--they might have their moment. I have turned over their love for each other any number of times in my mind. They were not either of them rudely self-interested, as Figgy insisted through the years. But I do wonder if my father at the start of the marriage harbored the sadness of having to be eternally grateful. My mother, knowing that she owned that gratitude, that she'd have it for the rest of her life, was able then to make light of her burden. I would guess that both of them cared for Madeline as devotedly as they did because it was she who had given them to each other. I'm certain this is a subject they never discussed, and yet she knew the facets of his feelings just as he might have understood something of hers, too. They'd begin to kiss out of all that gratitude, and quickly, quickly, like teenagers fearing discovery, they'd move together without completely removing their clothes, my father's boxers down to his ankles, my mother's nightgown up to her chin. Surely my father experienced some kind of religion in that hurry; surely it's possible that my mother's needs and talents were absorbing even as they were different from Madeline's.
There was an evening early on when Madeline bit Julia on the underside of her forearm. My mother had been wiping up a lump of mashed potatoes at Madeline's place, including the thin gravy that had run into the groove of the table. Madeline leaned forward to take the nip. There, in a snap, was the portrait of the new family: my father squinting at the women as if he didn't think he was seeing straight, my mother staring at her own arm, and Madeline unable to withdraw, although she seemed as startled as anyone, teeth to flesh. Julia finally put her other hand on Madeline's head and said, "Lamb, this is going to bleed.
Why don't you come and help me wash it out." She spoke as if there had been a spill on a piece of linen, as if a swift application of cold water would remove the stain.
Off they went into the kitchen. My father, for encouragement, took himself to the bookshelf. When the poetry anthology, fifteen hundred pages, proved too unwieldy, the poems he kept hitting too fanciful--"Whenas in silks my Julia goes"--he settled on the life story of Helen Keller. Now, there was a monster child if ever there'd been one. He walked the long route to the kitchen, turning the pages and reading even as he came through the arch. "Where's Anne Sullivan when you need her?" He closed his eyes to feel for the countertop, not irreverently and not in mockery of the play, which hadn't been written yet, but to try to understand total blindness.
My mother burst out laughing.
He did open up to inspect the puncture Madeline's eyetooth had made. "You all right, Julia?"
She stroked Madeline's hair, her long fingers extending over the crown of the head, the slow pull down the length of it, past the shoulders. "You are our demon, aren't you?"
"No!" Madeline had her hangdog expression, the trembling mouth, chin down, misery mixed with contrition.
"You're our great big girl, of course you are," Julia said, taking her into her arms, careful of the bruise coming on.
While she went with Madeline to run her bath, my father sat down to read the manual on child care and training he'd bought, scientific advice for parents, a guide to conditioning that he thought might be useful for both Madeline and the future Macivers.
"They were sweet to her in a way that made you want to puke." So said Figgy. "They doted on her together, as if she were a pet, a chimp they'd befriended in the wild. It was your mother's doing. Your father was the yes man, making inane comments along the way, which I guess kept them laughing."
How lonely it must have been for Julia by day, cut off from her nursing work and her old college friends, surrounded by women in the neighborhood, most of them busy with their own households and normal children. She wiped up the cereal on the floor as Madeline thrashed and spewed. "This will pass," she must have kept telling herself, taking hope from that wish. She ate her dinner at the end of the table while my father rocked Madeline, hummed in her ear, patted her hands, waited for her to get tired of the game, his food growing cold. My mother dismissed the behaviorists Aaron was reading, those who believed not in the slow effect of love but in conditioned responses. She declined to act on Russia's advice--Russia, who, like Figgy, had no patience for sparing the rod. "She will come around," my mother promised. "In another year she won't be doing this."
She did want Madeline to be able to use what remained of her gifts, to sharpen them, if she could. When Russia wasn't in the house to worry about the mess, they covered the kitchen table with newsprint and painted on rolls of brown butcher paper.
In summer, on the downstairs back porch there was always a card table with a beginner's paint-by-number project going, an assortment of horse, dog, and cat themes. My mother was not artistic herself, but she could see how engaged Madeline was, lining up her tubes of paint, setting out the brushes, how she'd go into a reverie even before she'd make a mark. Julia was interested in the care Madeline took with color and shape, how her feel for design was not entirely gone. Over the first winter they made a quilt, the dining-room table for months littered with rags and half-finished squares, the floor ankle-deep in scraps, straight pins glittering between the oak boards. It was an undertaking my mother later admitted almost killed her. When spring came, they knelt in the grass next to the flats of petunias and impatiens, Madeline determining the arrangement.
"Your nursing degree for this?" Figgy said to my mother, watching the taffy making in the kitchen. "I thought you were going to save all the poor people, the colored children of the South. Aren't you losing your mind? Can't you put her away?"
"Pull," my mother said, handing her a dull brown lump.
"Julia. There are places for people like her. Why can't I get that through your head? You don't have to live like this. She's never going to get better."
"She can learn, even if her capacity is limited. She can h
ave enjoyment. She's very opinionated about what she likes. It's funny how she still has her eye. I should show you her paintings--"
Figgy, who had studied art history, said, "Spare me."
"She knows how to make a thing look nice. And she cares. Believe it or not, I'm learning from her. She has no idea that she's a teacher, but she's made me think about the self, about what we are without memory, without a sense of time."
My aunt stared. at Julia. "Finally, getting the education you've always wanted. And taking style tips seriously. From a half-wit."
"Keep pulling," my mother said.
"Do you know what I think, Mrs. Maciver? I think she's childish on purpose. What is she now, my ex-sister-in-law, or is she my niece? I can't keep it straight. I think she only means to annoy with her tantrums. When she had--what was that tyrant nurse's name, the one who cared for her at first?--Nurse Kimball!--Madeline was a model patient for Nurse Kimball of the ugly face and big voice. What are you going to do, bring up baby until you drop dead? Have you thought of that?"
"Wait. Stop right now. Are the ridges starting to hold their shape? Is the taffy--wait, wait, what does it say--is it opaque, firm, and elastic?"
Although Figgy never paid Madeline much attention, she did bring her extravagant gifts, dolls for grown-ups, she explained to me, not little girl bric-a-brac. After she presented Madeline with a Shanty Town Scarlett O'Hara doll, she said to Julia in singsong, "I'll get her something even nicer if you lock her up."
The first time she mentioned her fatigue with Bill Eastman and her idea of divorcing him, Julia turned to pet Madeline's hair, as if that action might demonstrate to Figgy one's duty to stay the course. Figgy got the gist. "I'm not like you, Julia." She felt strongly enough to repeat what was evident. "I'm not anything like you."
My father was gone all day, but even if he'd been home I think Madeline's affections would have changed. To battle the kindness of her caretaker for long would have taken real endurance, and it's not surprising that she eventually capitulated to my mother's program of industry and safekeeping. They walked down the alley hand in hand, Madeline drawing to Julia's side when they passed a barking dog behind a fence. They went to the community pool, both of them in their modest suits, Julia sitting on the edge while Madeline, towering above the waterline in the shallow end, held her nose and turned incomplete somersaults. She'd come spraying up, digging into her eye sockets with her fists, coughing. My father once remarked, watching her at Moose Lake, that Venus obviously had sputtered at her birth. Every Thursday afternoon Madeline stayed with Russia, so that Mrs. Maciver in her few free hours could do her work with the League of Women Voters, and once in a rare while Grandmother came out on a Saturday so the honeymooners could take their walk in the forest preserve.
At dinner, a few months before I was born, Madeline made her declaration to my father: "I don't like you anymore." She was sitting at her own place, pushing her mushrooms to the edge of her plate with a teaspoon. It was as if she were the one who was finally breaking up.
He nodded slowly. "I'm sorry to hear that."
"I like Julia better."
"Understandable."
Lifting her fine chin higher, she said, "There's going to be a baby in this house."
"Imagine that." He raised his eyebrows down the table at my mother.
At last, a baby for the couple, however you wanted to slice that pair. In the photos, Madeline is holding me, bent over, absorbed in my downy newborn face, my mother near her on the sofa. There's a picture of the four of us, Madeline and my mother standing side by side, both of them smiling at the photographer, my father slightly apart, peering over at the bundle in Julia's arms. It does for all the world look like the future, two mommies with the guest sperm donor. Not long after my arrival, my father found Madeline asleep on the floor by the crib. I don't think they worried that Madeline would hurt me purposefully but, rather, that her solicitude, her extravagant care, might make her headstrong. She didn't waver in her dedication to her self-appointed job as night and day nurse, always on hand with supplies my mother needed at the changing table, warm wet washcloths, fresh diapers, pins, rubber pants. My mother took pains to teach her how to hold me, protecting the soft spot and the neck, fearful of the inevitable, that day when she would find me gone, the buggy missing from its place on the back porch.
The first time it happened, Mrs. Van Norman brought back the abductress and the booty in the pram. My mother had fallen asleep on the sofa during my afternoon nap, had closed her eyes for a moment while Madeline cut out pictures from a magazine. Mrs. Van Norman was large-boned, with coarse blond hair that she raked into a ratty pile on top of her head. Even though she had twelve children of her own, she had energy to spare for the rest of us. It was Madeline 's unusual speed crossing the street with the buggy, hurrying as if she already thought she was pursued, that had made Mrs. Van Norman wonder if the girl should be alone with the baby. When she had walked Madeline back home and stood on the front steps, she suggested that my mother employ any of the eight older Van Normans to help her with the one infant. "One infant!" she crowed, as if a single child in the home, and as if assistance for one child, were both outrageous jokes. Rather than scold Madeline or hire Stacey Van Norman, my mother vowed to keep herself awake, to be vigilant through the afternoons.
Ah, but Julia was so tired. The next time Madeline made off with me, she did not take into consideration her route, did not imagine that everywhere, everywhere there were spies. Russia was beating a rug on the front porch of Mrs. Blum's house, several blocks away, when Madeline came prancing up the street. Where were we going? I wonder. Were we about to hop the Soo Line, my first ride in a boxcar, and would we sleep in haystacks and rob a bank and steal a Chevrolet Cabriolet? I picture Madeline dressed for the event in an aqua-andblack polka-dot skirt, the type Louise called a rwirly skirt, and black patent-leather heels, a matching pocketbook, and an aqua sweater, the sort that sheds, leaving behind her a trail of soft rabbity threads.
When Russia saw the fashion plate, she didn't waste her energy crying out. She threw the rug aside and tore down the sidewalk, going straight for the ponytail. Not just a yank or two, but a continuous pull as she shook. No one, not before the accident or after, had ever rattled Madeline Schiller's brains. No one had struck her. What satisfaction for Russia, finally, just like Miss Figgy said to do, giving the devil the business. Madeline's shrieks woke me, and I cried, too.
"You take this baby again, I'll steal you away, you hear? Russia's going to kidnap you for good, how you like that? Take you down to Black Irwin." Madeline screamed louder. "You think Russia don't know what you do? You think you can hide from Russia?" She gave a last rug. "Russia, she know everything."
Whether Madeline was most afraid of Russia or the idea of Russia's bogeyman, Black Irwin, she never took me out by herself again. Still, the hair pulling did not seem to affect her motherly pride. "Look at my baby," she'd say to strangers in the park. "My baby has a new tooth." Or, glancing into someone else's buggy, "My baby is bigger than your baby." Because my father was often gone, Madeline may have believed that I belonged far more to her than to the part-time husband.
He was away for collecting expeditions in Africa for three- and four-month stretches. When he reappeared, tan and stringy and with a reddish beard, he seemed for a time a stranger. He brought with him bolts of hand-printed fabric, and pottery, not all of it broken, and the animals of the ark carved from exotic woods, the elephants with ivory tusks, the dark-brown seals so smooth Louise abandoned her dear blanket and walked around holding them against her cheek. I remember my father embracing my mother in the kitchen after he'd been away, his face in her short, nappy hair for what seemed like half a day. He had given her presents to show her how much he'd missed her, a muumuu with green and gold swirls, and a necklace of velvety black seedpods, and still he seemed to feel it necessary to prove his love by clinging to her. Madeline watched them standing together, and when she got tired of looking she turned to m
e, trying to get me to hug her. I wriggled away, running into the hall in hopes she'd come after me. Around the circle of the downstairs we went, time after time passing our parents in their clasp.
STATISTICALLY, with eighty-five children on the block, there were bound to be some abnormalities, a chance for a Down's-syndrome baby, a case of spina bifida, a clubfoot, a cleft palate. Whether it was the sheer volume of prayer in the St.
Rita's parish or lady luck, the Gregorys had nine unscathed specimens, the Lembergers fourteen, the Van Normans twelve, the Pilskas also an even dozen. The Rockards had eight, counting their ten-year-old who was killed on the El tracks the year I was fifteen. "God," Mrs. Van Norman said, "and the older brother failed to watch out for one curious boy."
Madeline, then, was the handicapped woman on the 400 block of Grove, and on the 3. block there was Mikey O'Day, neither of them, however, disabled by birth accidents or the roulette of genetics. The divide of the cross street was enough to keep us from Mikey's orbit when we were very young, his house far off, in a distant realm. But we'd heard the story and we knew what he was: birdbrain, screwball, goopus, dunce. His stupidity was a result, the older girls said, of meningitis. If it didn't kill you it would put your eyes out, an affliction, we'd thought, that was only likely to happen if you were running with a stick. Or your brains would shrivel, your skull like a gourd, nothing but dry bits rattling around, the seedy leftovers of intelligence. He'd had the sickness as a baby, Mary Beth Van Norman explained, so he didn't know he'd been born a genius. I used to lie awake thinking of Mikey, long before I met him, wondering if he would have liked to know that for fourteen months he'd had the potential to be famous and maybe rich. Even though Madeline's plight was similar, I didn't think about her in the same way, I suppose because she was always just Madeline, and because she often had tantrums over nothing at all. I could be pragmatic as well as soppy-hearted, and I thought that if she knew she'd once been smart she might never have stopped screaming.
When Madeline Was Young Page 8