Madonna by Andrew Morton Read Free Book Online

was in and out of the hospital undergoing painful and debilitating radiotherapy, the children, bewildered if unsuspecting, were frequently farmed out to relatives, Madonna, then four, often staying in Bay City with her maternal grandmother. During their regular early-morning visits to church, prayers were offered more fervently, the rosary whispered with real urgency and passion. Everyone was praying for a miracle.
    Still nursing baby Melanie, Madonna Senior gamely attempted to run a home and minister to her children. All too often she slumped exhausted on a sofa in the sitting room as her children climbed all over her, wanting her to play or tearfully asking her to resolve disputes, or simply wanting a cuddle. Interpreting her mother’s listlessness as rejection, little Madonna redoubled her efforts for attention, on one occasion drumming her fists into her mother’s back in frustration when she was too tired to play with her. She vividly remembers the time her mother burst into tears and how she impulsively put her arms round her in a childlike gesture of comfort and support. Little Nonni recalls feeling stronger than her mother, that she was the one consoling her. ‘I think that made me grow up fast,’ she has said.
    As Madonna Senior’s condition deteriorated she spent more time in the hospital, her children seeing the forced cheerfulness and wan smiles, their father’s quiet desperation – Madonna remembers him crying just once – and the relentless optimism of the adults around them. Yet they recall, too, how their mother was always laughing and joking with them, so that they looked forward to their hospital visits. Even when, in the final weeks, she was visibly wasting away because she could no longer keep down solid food, she remained cheerful, her faith and her inherited ‘Fortintude’ a comfort and source of strength in the face of the inevitable. On her last night, December 1, 1963, Madonna Senior, her six children gathered around her bed, brightly asked for a hamburger, such was her determination to keep up appearances. An hour after the children were led from her room, she was dead.
    This comforting tableau of saint-like stoicism and carefree courage is now part of family folklore, the almost biblical imagery of her last supper – particularly her final request for that ubiquitous, all-American dish – helping to fix and burnish her memory. In a way this story, often told in the family, disguises as much as it reveals, the matter-of-fact, almost jolly, manner of her parting smothering the relentless tragedy of the death of a young woman, only thirty, saying her final goodbyes to six young children – one still just a baby, the eldest not yet eight – ironically at the start of the Christmas season, but also when the whole of America was in deep mourning for the death of President John F. Kennedy, assassinated nine days earlier in Dallas, Texas. The awful confluence of these tragedies, one national, the other family, was almost overwhelming for the Fortins and Ciccones. For all concerned it marked the passing of an era of innocence, the end of an American dream.
    Yet in the immediate aftermath of Madonna Senior’s death, so much was suppressed, so much left unsaid, so many untangled and unresolved emotions, of remorse, guilt, loss, anger and confusion, that in the atmosphere of resolute normality, it is little wonder that Madonna, then five, could not properly grasp the concept of her mother dying. It was only at her funeral at the Visitation Church in Bay City – the church where Madonna Senior had married eight years earlier – that her eldest daughter started truly to absorb the enormous and permanent change in her family life. The service of High Mass was deeply emotional, weeping and wailing a continual counterpoint to the hymns and prayers. It is not hard to see that, for little Madonna, a sensitive and imaginative child, this wave of suffocating emotion was both terrifying and