When Madeline Was Young Read Online Free PDF

kind of thanks to her, extend the invitation to see the remarkable collection, the behind-the-scenes splendor? Over those birds that were presumed to be extinct--the great auk, the ivory-billed woodpecker--Julia nearly wept, and over many of the others--the indigo bunting, the chickadee, the hooded merganser, the common junco--she bent low and held her throat. He had thought she would enjoy them, but her reaction was beyond his expectation. Her appreciation for the dead was so great he couldn't resist asking her into the woods to show her the variety of the living in her own city. She was a quick study, and when she went to the nearby state park with him the following spring, to see the migrating warblers, she had done her lessons well, spotting without his help the chestnut-sided, the magnolia, the black-and-white, the Wilson's, the bay-breasted and golden-winged. Eventually, with the aid of a tape-recorded tutorial, she came to know the songs almost as well as he did. Although he'd been taught that comparison is odious, how could he not remark to himself that Madeline had never been interested in his work, that, for all her decorating sense, her artistry when it came to arranging flowers and furniture and putting suit with tie and shoes, she had not been seized by the magnificence of the birds? In the woods she had always grown cold, or she was dying of heat, or she was eaten alive by mosquitoes, frailties he had done his best to love. My father was impressed by Julia's quiet appreciation of beauty, by her stoicism when she was uncomfortable, by her intellect, and by her empathy for those who suffered, by her plans to become a nurse, to work in Appalachia or with Negroes in the city, a place where the need was acute. All that in addition to my mother's sly ridicule of his loudmouthed sister.
    In the years before their marriage, my mother came to the apartment to cook a meal, to read to Madeline, to play Go Fish, to look at fashion magazines, to dress paper dolls. Julia would hold Madeline's face and speak to her, making a loving tableau. She told her stories , she tried to stretch her memory, gently, gently, so that Madeline, her head to her shoulder, as if in contemplation, didn't always become enraged by the challenge. My mother understood that a woman who had once been athletic, who had shot archery and enjoyed swimming, more than anything needed to be worn out, that it was important to keep the body moving. Julia may have known, before research began to bear the evidence, that exercise is important to cognition. Madeline had come out of the accident with a hitch in her walk, with an ungainly stride. It was, if I had to guess, a result not of the brain trauma but of a wrenching of her limb in the wrecked wheel. You had to look three times at her--once as a matter of course, and then at that odd lope, and again to see that it really was a lovely young woman. In summer my mother took her to the beach, and together they'd sink down out of the July heat into the cool water, Julia moving Madeline 's arms to remind her of the strokes she'd used in synchronized swimming. She was with Madeline through her hysterectomy, a surgery the doctor had suggested in order to make Mrs. Maciver's life easier. As Figgy told it, my mother's attorney cousin arranged for my father to be legally separated from his wife. It was my mother, then, according to the lore, who orchestrated the divorce.
    "ONLY A DESPERATE MAN would have taken your mother seriously,"
    Figgy told me not long ago, when we were up at Moose Lake. "How else," she said, "could Julia have landed herself a husband?"
    "Figgy," I said wearily. It wasn't the first time she'd spoken to me about my mother in disparaging tones.
    "Mac! Sweetheart, come on!" My aunt leaned forward on the porch, after all those years still showing off her cleavage in her low-cut blouse, the withered bosom and her pearls at last giving her a patrician elegance. She said, "Your mother saw her chance and