A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

It is hard for me to explain what it was like to be a teenager during World War II. I have no experience of what it was like to grow up when there was not a war, when you did not take it for granted that every month or so the parish would bury another one of its young men.

  Did we talk about the war all the time? Perhaps more than teenagers talked about Vietnam. Perhaps less. We didn’t have it in living color on TV every night. It was all far away. We read about it in the papers and followed the maps on the front page, if we read the papers, which most of us didn’t. We heard Gabriel Heater on the radio at night begin often during the early days, “There’s bad news tonight,” so often that it became a joke. Then we heard, “There’s good news tonight,” more often. Kids my age thought it would be over before we would be drafted, but only because at fifteen, eighteen looks like forever.

  We saved money perhaps for war bonds. You gave $18.75 to the government and it promised to give you back $25 in ten years, a rotten return on investment as it turned out. Fortunately, someone persuaded my parents to cash in all our war bonds in 1946. Who? I never asked. I knew it was Rosie, who must have heard it from her father.

  We tended victory gardens, counted ration stamps (which was an unnecessary fraud on the American people because there were never food or gasoline shortages), and cheered at the great victories.

  But unless we were fascinated by the war, we barely knew where Midway Island was—that tiny spot of land near which in five minutes the dive bombers (SBDs) from the Enterprise and the Hornet destroyed four Japanese carriers and ended all hope they might have had of winning the war.

  It was said in the papers then that sixteen of the eighteen bombs dropped on the largest carrier were direct hits. It turned out later to be an exaggeration—five or six hits were enough with all the bombs and aviation gasoline on the deck.

  As you can guess, I was one of those fascinated by the war, alas, I suppose, the way I would be fascinated by the pennant race. It was a great big game, more deadly than some but still not the horror that war really is.

  Later when I watched the documentaries—Pearl Harbor, Ploesti, Schweinfurt, Anzio, Rapido River, Arnhem, Stalingrad, Kursk—and realized how ugly and evil and deadly war really is, I felt guilty about my adolescent insouciance in the face of death and destruction.

  Yet, sometimes I would hear on the news that “only one of our planes is missing” and wonder about that one young man and those who loved him.

  I sang the war songs—“The last time I saw Paris, its heart was young and gay,” “There’ll be blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover just you wait and see,” “I left my heart at the stage door canteen.”

  I worried about the war and the people in it. I took the film Casablanca far more seriously than it was intended to be taken. How many women were there like Ingrid Bergman, I wondered, whose lives had been destroyed because there wasn’t a Bogart around to save them? Or a Claude Rains to order the roundup of the “usual suspects”? (A phrase that became popular with us at Fenwick whenever anything went wrong. We also loved the great Bogart line “Not so fast, Louie!”)

  So I prayed.

  My parents were wrong in thinking that my devotion was a sign that I wanted to be a priest. The decision on my junior retreat that I would choose accounting instead merely formalized an instinct I had always had about the priesthood.

  I was devout because Mom was devout. If she did it, I wanted to do it. If she prayed through the Depression, I prayed through it too—for people who were less fortunate than we were.

  She prayed for everyone—on both sides. So concerned was she about the Japanese and German boys who were being killed that I did not have the nerve to remind her that the B-24s she was painting were destined to kill Germans and Japanese. I’m sure, Pangloss that she was, she managed to harmonize her work and her prayers. She prayed that Dad would not be sent overseas, that Mike and I would not be drafted, that Jane’s various boyfriends would not be killed or injured. She prayed for almost everyone.

  Since she prayed, I prayed with her. She rose at five forty-five to walk over to St. Ursula to receive Communion before the six-o’clock mass and then walk to the Central bus (before we bought the jalopy) for her ride to work. I would accompany her to church, accept her kiss on the forehead, and then trudge through the snow (it always seemed to be snowing) back home to help Jane serve the breakfast that had been prepared the night before.

  I was in church when the young woman began to cry because I went to the Sorrowful Mother novena.

  “It always works, my dear,” Mrs. Burns, the elderly woman below us on the second floor (with the patience of a saint to put up with our music), told my mother in the middle 1930s. “If you put your trust in Our Sorrowful Mother, she’ll grant you anything you want. She’ll even work miracles. Believe me, I know.”

  The devotion spread through the country in the middle 1930s, a religious response to the Depression. On cold winter Fridays, tens of thousands of people would stand patiently in line in front of Our Lady of Sorrows Church on Jackson Boulevard to gain entry to one of the fifteen services that were held there from early morning to late at night. Most of them had come on buses, many of them were not dressed to resist the winter cold, some of them barely had the money for the extra bus rides.

  Novena Notes, the little magazine published by the Perpetual Novena, became the most influential Catholic paper in the nation. Its weekly report of favors granted, prayers heard, requests answered, cures accomplished, was eagerly devoured by the faithful.

  I find in the vast pile of papers in my basement archives a yellowed little booklet with an unhappy young woman on the cover—“Novena in Honor of Our Sorrowful Mother.”

  Consider the prayer for the fifth station of the Sorrowful Mother (there were seven such, distinct from the fourteen stations of the traditional Via Dolorosa):

  O Mother of Sorrows, who wouldst not leave Calvary until thou hadst drunk the last drop of the chalice of thy woe, how great is my confusion of face, that I so often refuse to take up my cross and in all ways endeavor to avoid those slight sufferings which the Lord for my good is pleased to send upon me. Obtain for me, I pray thee, that I may see clearly the value of suffering, and may be enabled if not to cry with St. Francis Xavier, “More to suffer, my God! Ah, more!” at least to bear meekly all my crosses and trials.

  All language I have since learned is symbolic, all religious language doubly symbolic. The rhetoric in that kind of prayer may have its uses, even if I doubt that many folks ever used the term “confusion of face” in their daily discourse. It was not my cup of tea then and still isn’t, if only because I think God can understand straightforward idiomatic English.

  So, Mom and I went to the novena at St. Ursula. I suppose I was the only teenage boy there. When altar boys failed to show up, I would go into the sacristy, dress in cassock and surplice, light the candles and the incense, and lead the priest around the seven stations with a cross.

  John Raven assumed I’d be there when he made his appointment list.

  “Isn’t he devout?” they’d say. “That cute little redhead?”

  John had it better. “Doesn’t he love his mother?”

  Sometimes he’d add, “With good reason.”

  I realized that visiting the church after the novena did not make up for failure to attend. I would have to begin my nine Fridays again. However, no harm would be done by saying some prayers.

  So, there I was in the church, praying for someone I knew who had been killed in action.

  And I heard the woman cry.

  Should I do something? I wondered. Should not the ever resourceful Chuck O’Malley, age sixteen, who had saved his father from death in the jungles of New Guinea, find the woman and heal the pain that caused her tears?

  And stumble on his face in the process?

  She was, I told myself, probably a woman who had lost a husband or a lover in the war. Once before in my surreptitious visits to the basement gymnasium/church of St. Ursula, I had se
en a woman mourning her husband. It turned out that he was missing in action and came home alive and well.

  I had not said anything to her. In fact, feeling powerless and guilty, I had slunk out of the church and hurried home on my bicycle. But that time it was broad daylight. I had heard her sobs as I walked down the stairs to the church. This was somehow different. Night. Winter. Undulating red light. A sob heard in the darkness.

  So I made the sign of the cross, indicating to the Deity that my prayers were over, rose from the kneeler, genuflected reverently, and began to prowl the church in search of the agonized woman.

  What I would have said if I had talked to her escapes me even today.

  Probably something extremely intelligent like “Can I help?”

  A sixteen-year-old, redheaded punk helping a mourning woman?

  Absurd.

  I picked my way down the main aisle. The weeping grew fainter. So, she was not in the back of the church.

  I crept up the left side aisle. No, not here either. She must be over on the other side.

  I crossed in front of the altar, remembering to genuflect again, lest God think I was becoming too familiar.

  She was in the front of the far row of pews, right next to the confessional. I decided that it was best to approach her quietly from behind. So I groped my way down the main aisle again and back up the right side aisle. I stopped a few pews behind her. The sobbing stopped, not because she had heard me, but because she seemed to be cried out.

  Now what was I supposed to do?

  She blew her nose, sniffled, and then blew again.

  A car came through the parking lot next to the church, its headlights casting two quick beams of light on the windows high above us. In the brief flashes of light I saw the outline of her bent head, long hair, and fragile body.

  Rosie! My Rosemarie!

  When, I wondered, did the first train leave for Kabul? Or Kathmandu?

  Fearful that she would hear my thumping heart, I retreated back down the aisle and vaulted up the stairs on tiptoe—a feat that seemed possible then.

  Only when I was out in the bitter-cold night air, crunching across the playground toward Menard Avenue, did I begin to breathe more easily.

  I didn’t stop to reflect about my spineless exit until I was safely back in front of our Philco. She probably was home now. What could I have done or said?

  I know that I expressed the firm intent to murder Jim Clancy if I ever had the opportunity—although I had no solid grounds to think that he was the reason for his daughter’s weeping.

  I told no one about the incident. I tried to forget about it and succeeded. Mostly.

  In later years I often asked myself what would have happened if I had quietly sat next to her and asked if I could help.

  I might have fallen on my face.

  Again.

  One of my most memorable moments during 1945 was the Sunday the whole family, en masse, strode out of the ten-o’clock mass at St. Ursula’s.

  Franklin Roosevelt had died at Warm Springs, Georgia, the previous Thursday. All who were alive at that time can tell you exactly where they were when they learned of his death. I came home on a warm, sunny April afternoon from a softball game in the St. Ursula schoolyard (they let me play right field because few balls were hit to right field). My mother was sitting in the kitchen, crying softly.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked anxiously.

  “The president is dead!”

  “Now we’re stuck with Truman!”

  “Hush, dear, he’s a nice man too.”

  “He’s no Roosevelt, Mom.”

  The family gathered together solemnly in the parlor after a silent supper to say the rosary for FDR.

  “He beat the Depression, he won the war,” Dad announced. “We all owe him a lot. This country will never forget him or what he did. He saved us, not once but twice. Thank God he lived to see victory in Europe.”

  A lot of Americans hated Roosevelt, but those who admired him thought he was the greatest president in history. I was the only one in the family who didn’t weep through that rosary. But I felt as rotten as I ever had in my life.

  The next Sunday at mass, Msgr. Joseph Meany celebrated the president’s death.

  Joseph Peter Meany was a tiny man, a shriveled gnome, not much over five feet three, thin, bald, and like my mother, nearsighted and too vain to wear glasses. He compensated for his height, so my father said, by communicating with mere mortals in a deep bass bellow.

  Meany firmly believed, Dad also said, that within the boundaries of St. Ursula he was God.

  At least.

  “Everyone,” Mom would sometimes protest with little conviction, “thinks he’s done such a splendid job as pastor.”

  That observation was also true. Meany Meany, as we kids called him, was of that generation of Irish pastors who could have counted on the complete loyalty of a majority of his parishioners even if he had been caught fornicating with the mother superior on the high altar during the solemn mass of Easter Sunday.

  “Sure,” Dad would snort. “It was a brilliant financial decision not to build the new church in 1937 because he thought prices were going down even more. Now we won’t have the church till after the war is over. If then.”

  My father had some interest in the topic. He had designed the long-awaited new church. For free. In the middle of the Great Depression.

  Rarely did any parishioner who was not wealthy speak to the pastor. He inurned himself in his suite after mass each day (at the most a seventeen-minute exercise) and descended only for meals. He would talk to no one in the rectory offices. Rarely did he attend wakes or funerals or weddings, and never did he make a hospital visit. His curates had to make an appointment to talk to him, and sometimes they waited for weeks.

  He kept, locked in a sacristy safe, a special bottle of wine to be used only at his masses, a much more tasty and expensive vintage than the wine assigned to the other priests. I speak as one who had sampled both, with more restraint, I hasten to add, than certain other altar boys (who depended on me to open the monsignor’s safe).

  Monsignor Meany was convinced that John Raven’s name was James and called him that, as in “James, that car door ought not to be open. Take it off!”

  So great was the power of the pastor’s command that John Raven, as he later admitted, without any hesitation or reflection, drove the monsignor’s sturdy old LaSalle straight into the offending door and continued serenely down Division Street as the door bounced a couple of times on the bricks before it halted at a stoplight.

  “Serves the damn fool right!” the pastor crowed.

  No one ever complained about damage to the car.

  The other priests called Father Raven “Jim” at the meals that the monsignor attended.

  The pastor thought that William McKinley was the last American president not to be tainted with Communist sympathies, took the biased news stories in the Tribune as Gospel truth, insisted that FDR was a Jew, opposed aid to “bloody England,” became a fan of Father Coughlin when the “radio priest” turned anti-Semitic (the same time that my father made me stop selling Coughlin’s paper, Social justice, after mass on Sundays), and firmly believed that Roosevelt had conspired with the Japanese to launch the Pearl Harbor attack. Meany never spoke against the war, exactly; but whenever someone from the parish was killed in action, he would audibly mutter, “Another young man murdered by that Jew Roosevelt.”

  That he would easily have won reelection as pastor if such had been required pointed to the monsignor’s extraordinary personal piety, as evidenced, people would say, for example, by his pilgrimage to Lourdes in the spring of 1939. They did not add that the monsignor shipped to France on the same boat that he favored with his presence both his LaSalle and his housekeeper. (I forget her real name, but we kids called her Mrs. Meany Meany.)

  My father lamented that the monsignor got out of Europe before the war started in September. “Hitler probably would have given him an Iron Cross.�
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  “Vangie!”

  “With oak-leaf cluster!”

  “They don’t give oak leaves—” I began.

  “Enough from both of you.”

  Wisely, we both lapsed into devout silence.

  On the Sunday after the president’s death, the monsignor scrambled over to the pulpit in our basement church after John Raven had read the Gospel and before John had begun his sermon.

  Meany leaned against the podium and glared fiendishly at the congregation, a gargoyle from a French cathedral.

  “All I have to say,” he chuckled, “is that God certainly has been good to the United States of America!”

  “I won’t stand for this!” I said so loudly that the whole congregation heard me.

  Was that my voice? I wondered.

  A demon must have got inside me and ignited my grief at the loss of a president who meant so much to so many people and my permanent dislike of the monsignor.

  What do I do now?

  I rise up from my seat at the end of the pew and walk out, that’s what I do!

  I was halfway down the aisle before I thought to look back. Dad and Mom and Jane were right behind me, as were a couple of dozen other good West Side Irish Democrats. (Peg, Rosie, and Michael, still in grammar school, had gone to the children’s mass at nine.)

  Audible gasps filled the church. The monsignor had disappeared, apparently unaware of the diminutive anarchist and his Pied Piper march out of mass.

  “I hope you never learn to make bombs, Chuck,” my father said with a laugh.

  “Someone had to say that, darling,” the good April informed me. “I’m glad you did.”

  All of the rebels piled into cars and drove over to St. Egbert’s for the eleven-fifteen mass.

  The legend said that I led a revolt at St. Ursula. Peg, who was furious that she had missed the fun, was closer to the truth: “Your mouth is quicker than your brain, Chucky. Sometimes it knows what you should do better than you do.”

  It would not be the last time that happened.

  7

  When Msgr. Joseph Meany reached out from the tomb in the spring of 1945 to prevent Rosie from crowning the Virgin Mary, the monsignor’s ghost encountered a grimly determined exorcist—my mother, April Cronin O’Malley.