When Madeline Was Young Read Free Page B

That was all he'd wanted to tell. I stood like a dolt in Louise' s d orm room at Oberlin, having revealed the great lie, the substantial weirdness I'd trumped up at the center of the Maciver clan. Only to find there was no secret and no pathology. "Maybe," Louise suggested kindly, "you were way too young when Mom told you and couldn't make sense of it."
    Somewhere along the line, Buddy, in his superior wisdom, might have spelled it out, might have explained that my father, Aaron Maciver, had married Madeline Schiller on March 27, 1943. Did Buddy spare me that information because he knew I would not have wanted to hear such a thing out loud? Did he know that I was the type of boy who found it hard to believe that my parents hadn't always lived under the same roof? Even as I held the knowledge in a far fold, a neural nook and cranny, that Madeline had once been my father's wife, I was also sure that, despite the evidence about my parents' separate upbringings, they had actually been born married and loving each other. Buddy's news, if he'd carried on with it, would have been full of complications, but most probably I would have entertained none of them. I had no wish to think about how my father had extracted himself from one union in order to make another. Ridiculous! No doubt I had rejected my mother's account, told to me as one tells a three-year-old a strange fact of his life so that it is reduced to normalcy. At some point, however, I must have been scared to death and therefore rejected the story, relegated it to the world of make-believe. Because, if Madeline had been my father's bride when she was only a girl, or seemed so, that meant that I might already have gone to war or left home or not been my parents' child, and all without realizing it.
    So--the facts, what stands as truth. In 1943, my mother, Julia Beeson, was a junior at Radcliffe College, not yet having borne either Louise or me in any other dimension or lifetime. She was invited to Aaron Maciver's wedding in Chicago, never having met him, because she was the roommate and good friend of my father's sister, Figgy, nee Fiona, the maid of honor. Figgy would have demanded my mother come to her brother's wedding to meet a rich cousin, a poor relation, a h andsome brute, a homely sailor--anyone at that late date would do to put a little romance into Julia Beeson's schoolmarmish life. The event had been scheduled to coincide with Radcliffe's spring vacation, the bride, so said Figgy, having gone to great lengths to accommodate the scholars. Figgy understood that it was essential to find an important man in order to become important herself; she wished that her closest friends would ultimately land boyfriends from the same echelon, so that years away they would find themselves seated next to each other at a State Department dinner. But first, for Julia Beeson, a man, any man.
    According to my aunt Figgy, Aaron Maciver's bride wore a silk sheath that so conformed to her long, slim body that you imagined the silk was her skin, her skin the silk. At the altar, before my father and Madeline said their vows, the minister, standing a step up from them, put his hands on the shoulder of the bride and groom, and made the unfortunate remark clergymen sometimes can't help making in the heat of the moment. "If you two," he said, "could see twenty-five years into the future, you would not have the courage to make this commitment." He said the line tenderly, and many of the couples in the congregation laughed knowingly. Madeline and Aaron smiled quickly, privately--how little the minister understood the depths of their love! My mother, in the back pew, may have smiled, too, thinking herself adult enough to realize the hazards of matrimony. My father, overtaken by emotion during the vows, could hardly bleat out the required "I do." He did cry easily, a habit I knew I came by honestly. Figgy maintained that when he married Madeline, tears slipping down his cheeks, the women in the