Read Online When Madeline Was Young by Jane Hamilton - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jane Hamilton
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peace."
"Those who can't love," my mother repeated. "Those who can't love because the class system has relegated them to poverty, the class system has deprived them of education." Her voice was growing louder. "Schoolboys and schoolgirls know what injustice is on their first step on the playground, and the sensitive begin to realize the value of civil disobedience in the fight against injustice in junior high, when they read Thoreau--"
And then he said it, the line everyone would remember for years to come. "Oh, for Christ's sake, Julia!" He slammed the table with his fist. "To love," he cried, "to love means we must kill."
The two of them were speechless for a minute, she dumbfounde d b ecause he was in earnest now, the coquetry stripped back to reveal the self, and he startled that he'd said that truth in her company. "You listen to me," my mother said, rising from her seat.
He beat her to center stage, leaping onto his chair, raising his fist, and bellowing the usual war cry:
"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and
But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood , Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage . . ."
I suspect Figgy loved Arthur best when he was dazzlingly goofy. She clapped, she swooped up and reached for his hand, as if he were a famous crooner on the stage. He bounced down and let her embrace him, and when that was over she dragged my mother from her seat, her arm around her old friend, no hard feelings. Most of the others got up, too, well on their way to their hangovers. Grandmother, on the far end of the house, would have been long asleep.
Still, my mother couldn't leave on the note of theatrics and poetry. As she cleared the last of the bottles from the table she said, "I have no doubt that you'll get to Washington, Art, that one way or another you're going to have a part to play. You've been well groomed for your role." Was there disdain in her voice? "What troubles me is the fact that you, your ilk, those of you who govern, see suffering as an abstraction. As has happened since time out of mind, you men make war without having to fight it."
Arthur had a bad back and had not gone overseas in World War II. But he had served for a few years, working in Washington, in Intelligence. My mother might have known that he would loom up over th e t able, one hand in a pool of spilled wine, the other in a smear of butter. "My ilk, Mrs. Maciver? My ilk?" He had tried to defuse the argument with Shakespeare, and there she was again, provoking him. "You think your guy, Stevenson, understands power and force, much less keeping the peace? You think so? He'd like nothing better than secretary of state under Kennedy, but he'll never get that appointment. This is a man who spends his morning deciding when he's going to take a shit. It's all fine, Julia, all very sweet to worry about hunger and poverty the world around. It's all very well to dedicate yourself with elegant turns of phrases to a fuzzy idea of morality as you search for world opinion--"
My mother put out her hand to stop his speech. Over his noise she said, "The fact remains, you will never be on the front lines! You will always now, if you get to Washington, when you get there, be one of those who draft policy, who will make orders that will kill our sons."
Arthur, I knew, would never do anything of the kind. He and I had gone out in the tin boat to fish, and all through the early-morning quiet he had talked about the physiology of invertebrates, about Wisconsin waterways and glaciers, about the Algonquian tribes; he'd told me how best to spear a beaver. There was no subject he didn't know about or want to understand, and I was sure he would do all he could under any circumstance to keep Buddy and me out of danger.
My mother must have at an earlier
"Those who can't love," my mother repeated. "Those who can't love because the class system has relegated them to poverty, the class system has deprived them of education." Her voice was growing louder. "Schoolboys and schoolgirls know what injustice is on their first step on the playground, and the sensitive begin to realize the value of civil disobedience in the fight against injustice in junior high, when they read Thoreau--"
And then he said it, the line everyone would remember for years to come. "Oh, for Christ's sake, Julia!" He slammed the table with his fist. "To love," he cried, "to love means we must kill."
The two of them were speechless for a minute, she dumbfounde d b ecause he was in earnest now, the coquetry stripped back to reveal the self, and he startled that he'd said that truth in her company. "You listen to me," my mother said, rising from her seat.
He beat her to center stage, leaping onto his chair, raising his fist, and bellowing the usual war cry:
"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and
But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood , Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage . . ."
I suspect Figgy loved Arthur best when he was dazzlingly goofy. She clapped, she swooped up and reached for his hand, as if he were a famous crooner on the stage. He bounced down and let her embrace him, and when that was over she dragged my mother from her seat, her arm around her old friend, no hard feelings. Most of the others got up, too, well on their way to their hangovers. Grandmother, on the far end of the house, would have been long asleep.
Still, my mother couldn't leave on the note of theatrics and poetry. As she cleared the last of the bottles from the table she said, "I have no doubt that you'll get to Washington, Art, that one way or another you're going to have a part to play. You've been well groomed for your role." Was there disdain in her voice? "What troubles me is the fact that you, your ilk, those of you who govern, see suffering as an abstraction. As has happened since time out of mind, you men make war without having to fight it."
Arthur had a bad back and had not gone overseas in World War II. But he had served for a few years, working in Washington, in Intelligence. My mother might have known that he would loom up over th e t able, one hand in a pool of spilled wine, the other in a smear of butter. "My ilk, Mrs. Maciver? My ilk?" He had tried to defuse the argument with Shakespeare, and there she was again, provoking him. "You think your guy, Stevenson, understands power and force, much less keeping the peace? You think so? He'd like nothing better than secretary of state under Kennedy, but he'll never get that appointment. This is a man who spends his morning deciding when he's going to take a shit. It's all fine, Julia, all very sweet to worry about hunger and poverty the world around. It's all very well to dedicate yourself with elegant turns of phrases to a fuzzy idea of morality as you search for world opinion--"
My mother put out her hand to stop his speech. Over his noise she said, "The fact remains, you will never be on the front lines! You will always now, if you get to Washington, when you get there, be one of those who draft policy, who will make orders that will kill our sons."
Arthur, I knew, would never do anything of the kind. He and I had gone out in the tin boat to fish, and all through the early-morning quiet he had talked about the physiology of invertebrates, about Wisconsin waterways and glaciers, about the Algonquian tribes; he'd told me how best to spear a beaver. There was no subject he didn't know about or want to understand, and I was sure he would do all he could under any circumstance to keep Buddy and me out of danger.
My mother must have at an earlier
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