Free When Madeline Was Young by Jane Hamilton Page B

first, as is common in the brain-injured, she had short-term-memory disorder, paranoia, and depression; she perseverated, she lashed out, she was probably dysarthric, her slurred speech something my mother may have helped her overcome. As I remember her in my childhood, she often looked blank. If I now and then considered her injury, I imagined it as a blow that had dulled her thinking, that hadn't so much severed the connections, synapse to synapse, as it made the circuits weak, the electrical flash, if we could see it, a stuttering yellow, a reluctant flare.
    Through our growing up, my mother so often explained to Madeline that she'd had an accident, using the line if Madeline had a headache, a frustration, an upset. She did enjoy looking at magazines, and dressing dolls and herself, her interest in fashion undisturbed. I still hope that her forebrain is capable of synthesizing good dream material from the bombardment of impulses sent up from the brain stem, that her night life is full of silks and glitter, feather boas and high-heeled shoes, the glamorous strut down the runway. When I was a teenager, my secret maudlin streak was far more pronounced, and even though I knew Madeline could not recover, I half believed that Louise's music could captivate her beyond the usual power of song, that the aching beauty of Bach's Cello Suites could repair--for a split second and in exact proportion, beauty to area--the scar tissue in the white matter.
    Louise was a serious girl with thin brown hair to her waist, a gir l w ho always won the stare-down contests. She had my father's build, the long torso, the skinny legs, but my mother's large quick hands. So, when it came time to sign up for a string instrument in the fourth grade, it was the cello for Lu. She had the predictable burst of enthusiasm at the start, practicing ostentatiously, first very carefully putting the parts of the stand together, extending the trunk, another inch, easy does it, back a touch, until it was the exact height for her proportions. She opened her book to the lesson, arranged the chair, this way, that way, and set out the metal circle on the carpet that would hold the cello's stem. From the crushed green velvet of her case she removed her bow, and from the handy compartment up by the scroll, the bar of rosin. The sumptuous velvet and mysterious scarlet insignia embossed on the rosin box lent the whole enterprise an air of mysticism. She tightened the screw of the bow, again making subtle adjustments to the tension, and then she nursed the rosin along the horsehair with such thoroughness she became cloudy with dust.
    Whether it was the music itself or her teacher, the dashing Mr. Blau, Louise's enthusiasm extended beyond the initial rental period. She became obsessed with her cello, worshipping Mr. Blau and Johann Sebastian Bach, always referring to the master with his three-part name. A few years later, she also gave her heart to the ill-fated Jacqueline du Pre. My mother believed that music was the most spiritual of the arts, and she was all for my sister's devotion. But even she on occasion worried. That Lu would rather spend three hours practicing scales than playing kick-the-can on a summer night, that she couldn't break for five minutes for a Black Cow, seemed a sign of monomania rather than of a disciplined nature. My mother feared she'd make herself sick, that she'd shrivel without sunlight and exercise, or, worse, she once joked, that with her tendency for rapture she'd grow into the kind of fanatical teen who'd give herself up to a cult leader. Louise's lank hair fell down around her cello, and so it appeared that she and it were joined, were outgrowths of each other, that it would take nothing short of a treacherous surgery to separate the two.
    In her high-school days, her friend Stephen Lovrek came over several times a week to accompany her on the piano. As far as I could tell they were not romantic--or not in the usual sense. The two of them