When Madeline Was Young Read Free Page A

live. If she died we wouldn't believe it; and so it was up to the doctor to make the story true. For a minute, as I stared, I forgot the patient and the death and the panicked mother. It was as if I were in the room alone with the doctor, as if he were speaking to me while he attended to Madeline, as if he were telling me to step into my future. He had glanced at me just once, but in that look he had seemed to say, Watch. And I thought if you were going to pass on, it wouldn't be so terrifying with his hands moving gently over your face and throat, and if you were going to live, suddenly because of that cupped hand on your cheek, you'd be glad you were staying. He touched Madeline 's forehead, he made her take a sip of ginger ale, and then he listened to her heart; he stared dreamily at the floor, tuned into the intricacies of her particular glub-glub, the whisper that seemed to tell him her history. As he removed the earpieces of his stethoscope, he said to Madeline, "The flu always seems worse in summer, doesn't it, young lady?" I recall noting that he would call her "young lady" because he was feeble and old. Anyone, compared with him, was young. He patted her leg. "You're just about over the hump, even if it doesn't quite feel like it." To my mother he said, "I don't see signs of scarlet fever, nothing dangerous here. She should feel better in a day or two."
    Soon after he left, I went into the woods to sit on a stump in the near darkness. I was often crying in those days, and it always embarrassed me even in private, even as I couldn't help it, the girlishness of it. The shame made me cry harder, stuffing my fist in my mouth to keep from making noise. The doctor had said that Madeline was going to get well, that the worst was over, and so there was that relief. I thought I was for the most part grieving for Madeline, for her brus h w ith death. Although she would survive, I was sorry for my neglect of her through the years, and sorry, too, for the wretched games I'd played, pretending she was the dog and I the master, she the servant and I the king, she the wife and I the commanding husband--Madeline, always the one who barked and fetched and scrubbed. I sobbed with useless contrition. Without knowing I was probably also crying because never again would I feel awe for Buddy in the thoughtless way a younger boy idolizes someone else. It seemed terrible that he had spoken about her to me--the big secret, pal--and then she had almost died, perhaps a cause and effect, his words somehow infecting her. And it seemed especially harsh to be miserable in a place that had always held the greatest of happinesses. I would have thought it worth weeping, I'm sure, if I'd understood that those summers would not come again, that Buddy and I would never be together at Moose Lake as we'd been all those years before.
    Much later, when my sister, Louise, and I were both at Oberlin College in Ohio, I told her about that night at the lake, when Buddy informed me that I could, with impunity, have my way with Madeline. I explained that I'd figured out the pieces by talking to our aunt Figgy and also the cleaning lady, Russia. Louise said, "But Mad You knew about Madeline. We've always known. I remember looking at the photo album with Mom when I was little, how she pointed at each person and explained." Louise repeated, "We've always known."
    I understood again that it was Buddy who had made the story seem like a sensational deceit, a tabloid headline. When, in fact, our parents had absorbed Madeline's tragedy into everyday life so seamlessly it was unimportant to dwell on the circumstances. They had the balanced sense of both the absurdity of existence and the importance of using our gifts, of finding the work we were meant to do. Hardly the stuff of soap opera. It had taken me years to see that Buddy had told me about Madeline for no other reason than to impress his kid cousin in the moment: Buddy Eastman knew what it was to feel up a girl.