Free When Madeline Was Young by Jane Hamilton

within, that the piazza around her, the pale gold of the early-afternoon sun framing her, had made her seem otherworldly. He came steaming to her from the other side on his bike, riding it scooter-style, pushing off, both feet on the same pedal. When he got close he was unnerved and lost his balance. Dio mio! The only person in all of the piazza and he comes at her as if he meant to run her over. He had to drop the handlebar, falling into her, the two of them clutching each other, trying to remain upright. As he got hold of himself he managed to say, "At this moment--I see in the piazza the angel." He reached out with just the right amount of hesitation, Buddy might have said, and touched her cheek. "Are you--true?"
    "So much of Madeline's fate involved the bicycle," Figgy always said at that point.
    Two days later, when Mrs. Schiller came into Madeline's room at the pension in the morning and found the girl missing, she recalled the handsome stranger in the lobby the night before, the same man--wasn't he?--they'd seen behind the counter at the leather store. Before she phoned the police, she demanded that the desk clerk arrange for two tickets on the earliest departing train to anywhere else. The mother apparently had had previous experience combating her daughter's passions. When Madeline stole into her room before breakfast, she found her bags packed. Mrs. Schiller, dressed in her gray traveling suit and her hat with the plume, came briskly through the door to announce the waiting taxi.
    There was no use protesting that the night had passed in chast e g etting-to-know-you activities, the walk in the dark up to San Miniato, the church door magically open, the two of them sitting together, huddling, if the mother must know, in the chill, teaching each other to speak. An Italian lesson, that was all. Wasn't really the shopping, the Fendi handbag and the pink silk dress, for the purpose of becoming acquainted with just such a man--a man with a solid family business? There'd been the stroll in the dawn to his house, the parents' apartment, where they made hot chocolate. After that consoling drink he took her downstairs to knock on the window of the baker, begging him to let the signorina have a sweet pastry fritter. The mother would have none of it, and away they went, Madeline in that tragic pose, turned to look longingly through her tears out the back window of the taxi all the way to the train station.
    For some time afterward, she had a secret correspondence with the Italian. She understood that he'd gotten married or killed when the letters came back to her unopened via the friend who'd served as the accomplice. She was inconsolable for months, so the story went, until my father rescued her from her grief. I like to believe that Madeline had gotten over Italy, that in the first year of her marriage the doe-eyed man careening across the piazza never intruded upon her fantasy of the future Maciver infants asleep in their cribs.
    Although the Schillers had nothing to recommend themselves, Figgy couldn't help approving the story of the Italian. If there was anything she might love Miss Schiller for, let it be her pluck, for that single night shivering with the ghouls and the handsome leather salesman up in San Miniato. When I once asked Figgy why she liked that story, which was after all a fairly ordinary schoolgirl story, she looked at me with pity, as if she'd just realized I'd been too young to hear such a tale. And she was right, I was too young--but that was something it would take me years to know.

    Chapter Five
    THREE YEARS AFTER MADELINE'S ACCIDENT, MY PARENTS married in a chapel up near Moose Lake. It was a brief ceremony, and except for Figgy and Bill Eastman, none of the 17 0 people from the first Maciver wedding were invited. Figgy and Bill in fact were the only witnesses. My mother's parents were dead, and the one brother in California did not make the trip. There was no mention in the Chicago paper of one Julia