When Madeline Was Young by Jane Hamilton Page A

my father squinting at the women as if he didn't think he was seeing straight, my mother staring at her own arm, and Madeline unable to withdraw, although she seemed as startled as anyone, teeth to flesh. Julia finally put her other hand on Madeline's head and said, "Lamb, this is going to bleed. Why don't you come and help me wash it out." She spoke as if there had been a spill on a piece of linen, as if a swift application of cold water would remove the stain.
    Off they went into the kitchen. My father, for encouragement, took himself to the bookshelf. When the poetry anthology, fifteen hundred pages, proved too unwieldy, the poems he kept hitting too fanciful--"Whenas in silks my Julia goes"--he settled on the life story of Helen Keller. Now, there was a monster child if ever there'd been one. He walked the long route to the kitchen, turning the pages and reading even as he came through the arch. "Where's Anne Sullivan when you need her?" He closed his eyes to feel for the countertop, not irreverently and not in mockery of the play, which hadn't been written yet, but to try to understand total blindness.
    My mother burst out laughing.
    He did open up to inspect the puncture Madeline's eyetooth had made. "You all right, Julia?"
    She stroked Madeline's hair, her long fingers extending over the crown of the head, the slow pull down the length of it, past the shoulders. "You are our demon, aren't you?"
    "No!" Madeline had her hangdog expression, the trembling mouth, chin down, misery mixed with contrition.
    "You're our great big girl, of course you are," Julia said, taking her into her arms, careful of the bruise coming on.
    While she went with Madeline to run her bath, my father sat down to read the manual on child care and training he'd bought, scientifi c a dvice for parents, a guide to conditioning that he thought might be useful for both Madeline and the future Macivers.
    "They were sweet to her in a way that made you want to puke." So said Figgy. "They doted on her together, as if she were a pet, a chimp they'd befriended in the wild. It was your mother's doing. Your father was the yes man, making inane comments along the way, which I guess kept them laughing."
    How lonely it must have been for Julia by day, cut off from her nursing work and her old college friends, surrounded by women in the neighborhood, most of them busy with their own households and normal children. She wiped up the cereal on the floor as Madeline thrashed and spewed. "This will pass," she must have kept telling herself, taking hope from that wish. She ate her dinner at the end of the table while my father rocked Madeline, hummed in her ear, patted her hands, waited for her to get tired of the game, his food growing cold. My mother dismissed the behaviorists Aaron was reading, those who believed not in the slow effect of love but in conditioned responses. She declined to act on Russia's advice--Russia, who, like Figgy, had no patience for sparing the rod. "She will come around," my mother promised. "In another year she won't be doing this."
    She did want Madeline to be able to use what remained of her gifts, to sharpen them, if she could. When Russia wasn't in the house to worry about the mess, they covered the kitchen table with newsprint and painted on rolls of brown butcher paper. In summer, on the downstairs back porch there was always a card table with a beginner's paint-by-number project going, an assortment of horse, dog, and cat themes. My mother was not artistic herself, but she could see how engaged Madeline was, lining up her tubes of paint, setting out the brushes, how she'd go into a reverie even before she'd make a mark. Julia was interested in the care Madeline took with color and shape, how her feel for design was not entirely gone. Over the first winter they made a quilt, the dining-room table for months littered with rags and half-finished squares, the floor ankle-deep in scraps, straight pins glittering between the oak boards. It