When Madeline Was Young Read Online Free PDF Page A

ecstatically, their animal shame.
    Very occasionally I let myself think of that kind of thing. I suspect that not long after the accident my father knew he couldn't continue the old communion. There was the canopy bed, excessive in lace and ribbon, that he and my grandmother bought to entice Madeline away from him, a garish little-girl delight to seduce her to her own room. It is an embarrassment to recount that detail, my grandmother in those early days setting the tone for the household, shopping for the changed Madeline, doing what she could to ease the strain. Figgy through the years pestered me with the idea that they were wrongheaded, re-creating Madeline 's childhood, forcing upon her a young girl's tastes and enthusiasms. We used to argue about it, she saying that Madeline deserved the respect of an adult, that, even if she was incapacitated, she didn't have to play with dollies and puppets and finger paints. I contended that Madeline gravitated to comforts she could grasp. And, furthermore, she used brushes and tube paints and a palette. I see now that it is a fair question, to ask how much of Made-line's disability was imposed upon her. In fairness, too, it is a question that should be answered in terms of intention. Although the particulars are gruesome--the pink wallpaper, the vanity table with gold trim, the shelf of toys--my father, my grandmother, my mother meant to care for their charge the best they knew how; they meant to help her hold still in her new self.
    IT WAS A FEW MONTHS after my father's marriage to Madeline that my mother had quit Radcliffe and come back to her native Chicago to get a degree in nursing. Figgy tended to highlight the farcical, but my mother also wasn't a reliable narrator, she who thought her own life unremarkable. It is either fantastical, then, or an ordinary coincidence that my mother was the nurse's aide who bathed Madeline and changed her sheets in the hospital after the accident. During those weeks at the Evanston Hospital, Julia Beeson and Aaron Maciver ate dinner together--the closest Julia had ever come to having a date, Figgy said. In the cafeteria they ate tough roast beef coated with a thick, dull gravy. "Imagine it's caramel," my mother advised. I suppose they spoke about Madeline's prognosis, they spoke about her strength, her endurance. It's also likely that they discussed the invasion of Normandy. There may have been talk about the difficulty Julia had had at Radcliffe, the intense snobbery there, all those Winslows, Cottings, and Cabot Lodges. The wealthy Quakers and Unitarians had been so cool in their generalized liberal kindness, and she couldn't escape the feeling that she was a charity case, the match girl on a scholarship in her ragged stockings. When she had to leave Radcliffe to care for her ailing father, it was something of a relief, an excuse for escape. She confessed that to Aaron, confessed that her father's illness and death had saved her from the oppression of her classmates and the family expectation that she be a colossus of knowledge. What a deliverance, she said, to do honest work, to pay for her own college education toward a useful degree. Aside from that intimacy and the balm of sympathy as the crisis went on, surely what sealed my parents' bond was their mutual affection and veiled scorn for Figgy. My father, but softly, imitated his sister's capacity to work through a room of men until she'd lassoed the most eligible bachelor, and my mother, with such fondness, impersonated Figgy cozying up to the professor and at cocktail parties becoming chums with the president of the board.
    After the patient was safely home, Aaron invited Julia to the museum to show off the collection to her, drawer by drawer. He was not yet curator, but he had a position in the bird division, making skin s a nd assisting with the cataloguing. Because of Julia's genuine concern, she had soon, inevitably, become one of Madeline's constellation of caretakers. Why not, as a