A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Fine. Marry her if you want.”

  “That might not be a bad idea.”

  I gave up on the Greek. I’d get an A anyway. I looked up at my massive wingback. The poor dummy was in love.

  With my little sister, Peg. How odd of him.

  “Isn’t she a little young?”

  “She’s awful cute.” He blushed happily.

  “I guess. Well, I hope you both have a good time. Where is it? The Knickerbocker?”

  “Yeah. I hear it’s real nice.”

  “So they say.”

  “Will you double with us?”

  Glory be to God, as Mom would have commented.

  “I don’t date, Vince. You know that.”

  “Yeah . . . but . . .”

  “You don’t date either. What’s the matter with you?”

  “This is our senior prom.”

  “So?”

  “It happens only once in your life.”

  “How fortunate.”

  “I really want to go.”

  “Fine. There’s a dozen guys who will double with you.”

  “But Peg says your mother won’t let her go unless you come along.”

  “My mom, April Mae Cronin O’Malley, said that?”

  And a herd of cattle just jumped over the moon.

  I began to smell a rat and I knew its name too.

  “I suppose you and Peg have chosen a date for me too.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Let me guess—Rosemarie Helen Clancy?”

  “Well . . .”

  “You can sit here in this classroom and ask me till Judgment Day to go to the prom with that obnoxious little bitch and I’ll still say no. She has no morals.”

  And she sobs in the darkened church at night. And nurses me tenderly when I am sick. And I would like to hold her in my arms. And sometimes I daydream about taking off her clothes.

  Ambivalence? Fear? Stubbornness? Why did I make such a big deal of not going to the prom with her, especially since it was, after all, not a bad idea?

  I’m not sure why it became a matter of principle with me. Who knows what goes on in the head and the heart of a seventeen-year-old? Maybe it was merely anger that I was being manipulated by “the monstrous regiment of women,” as John Knox called them. Looking back on the prom, I am not proud of myself, even though I emerged again as a phony hero.

  Also to be candid once again—and don’t expect candor all the time in this memoir—I was frightened at the prospect of the U.S. Army claiming me before the month of June was over.

  The test that morning was easier than I thought it would be. As I finished the last part of it, I realized that I was close to being trapped. Peg probably reciprocated Vince’s crush. But it was unthinkable for her to venture anywhere without the dragon lady in tow. Or vice versa. So, we had to get a date for her too. Why poor little Chucky Ducky?

  Because (a) he was a hero and (b) if Peg could persuade Mom that it was a good idea, there would be no peace in the family until he had agreed. Thus the Bitch (a capital letter was already being added in my mind) would not have to worry about overcoming her Delavan reputation for being “fast.”

  They had already trapped me.

  Well, I wouldn’t go quietly.

  Our family meals were even more chaotic than in the past. Dad was overwhelmed with work and seemed to be flourishing. He lamented the “good old days when I could paint all day long,” but bent over blueprints while the paint boxes dried up, he looked like a harassed and bemused Merlin.

  Curiously enough, Dad was only a fair painter, too much mannered impressionism, I would say now. You simply couldn’t make Twin Lakes look like the place where Monet hung out, no matter how much of a romantic you were. But he was a fine architect, probably a great one. He did not recognize in 1946 what was obvious to me: that buildings, not canvas, were his métier. Mom continued to “help out at the office” and glowed with pride at her husband’s return to his profession. She must have thought how much it was like those few years they had together before the Depression blighted both their dreams. They were getting a second chance, which neither had expected.

  And what a second chance!

  “We’ve been lucky, dear,” she would sigh. “Unbelievably lucky.”

  “You said a mouthful.”

  That week Mom was also looking for “something with a little more room”—a larger apartment, perhaps in one of the rather elegant and expensive buildings over on Austin Boulevard.

  I considered my sister Peg carefully. Without my noticing it, she had turned into a young April Cronin: tall, elegant, with delicate, graceful, classic curves and a hauntingly lovely face. Not as voluptuous as Jane and not as bubbly either, but lithe and cool and supremely self-possessed.

  Whom was she like? Teresa Wright? No. Donna Reed? No. Cathy O’Donnell? Heavens no. Jeanne Crain? Blasphemy to suggest it. Nope, Peg was not cut from the same cloth as the wholesome actresses of the time. Ava Gardner? Well, maybe.

  A wholesome Ava Gardner? Maybe.

  Not too wholesome, however.

  Anyway, she indeed was on her way to being the real beauty that Mom had predicted for the noxious Rosie. Small wonder that poor old Vince was smitten.

  Not that her inseparable coconspirator at that age in life was hard to look at. In point of fact in those days, Rosie was unbearably beautiful, a slender girl with a subtly carved body and a pale, alluring face of the sort you normally saw only on covers of women’s magazines. Even if you hated her nasty tongue and her loud mouth and her foul temper, you couldn’t quite stop your imagination from undressing her. Not that my imagination, despite Dad’s books of paintings, had any clear idea what might lurk underneath the blouse and/or sweater and skirt, which were the uniform for fourteen-year-olds in those days.

  “Did Vince talk to you today?” Peg cocked one of her shrewd little eyes at me.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to the prom?”

  Not very subtle, that.

  “That’s a ridiculous question.”

  “Then you will take Rosie!” Peg clapped her hands gleefully.

  “Not if that fat little dope was the last woman in the world. Anyway, I don’t date.”

  “She’s not fat,” Peg stormed.

  “She will be just like her drunken mother and her disgusting little father. . . . ‘Let me tell you,’ ” I mimicked Jim Clancy, complete with the wave of the jeweled fingers, “ ‘how I made my last million. You see, there were these widows and orphans and I—’ ”

  “She’s not fat,” Dad remonstrated with me. “Not at all. She looks like her grandmother McArdle, who was one of the great beauties of the turn of the century.”

  “It’s not the turn of the century.” I reached for the potato dish. “These are good, Mom.”

  “We’re going to her house at Lake Geneva the day after.” Peg was close to tears. “It will be fun.”

  “Fine. I’m sure you can find someone else to take her.” I dug into the potatoes. “Someone who doesn’t know about her cheap escapades at Delavan. Me, I’m afraid that I might catch something from her.”

  A little strong, I’ll admit.

  No, stupid, rude, intolerable. Like I say, I was seventeen and scared stiff about the Army, which would carry me off to Fort Benning, Georgia, a couple of weeks after graduation. I’d never been separated from my family before and now truly did not want to leave them.

  Jane (laughing as always): “You’re a little brat, Chucky, you know that?”

  Peg: “Mom, make him stop!”

  Mike: “I think she’s the most beautiful girl in the neighborhood.”

  Me: “If you’re going to be a priest, you shouldn’t notice that.”

  Mom: “Chucky, I’m surprised at you.”

  Me (defensively): “Why me?”

  Peg: “ ’Cause she likes you, stupid.”

  Me: “She is too spoiled to like anyone but herself, a selfish little bitch!”

  Omnes: “Chucky!”


  We didn’t use that kind of language, not around the fair April, not even if you were Dad.

  Me: “I don’t care. I don’t like her. I wouldn’t walk to the drugstore with her.”

  Jane (trying unsuccessfully to be angry): “You don’t deserve a date that pretty.”

  Peg: “You’re stuck-up, that’s all. You think you’re too good for anyone.”

  Mom: “She really is a sweet little child.”

  Me: “You’re all conspiring against me!”

  “You were safer”—Dad rubbed his bald pate—“when Ed Murray was charging after you.”

  “Don’t I know it!”

  Mom played music from “The Desert Song” after supper. Sigmund Romberg was supposed to do me in. Rosie did not show up to do homework with Peg that evening, apparently having been warned off.

  I had won the battle, but not the war?

  On the contrary, I had struck out.

  “You will take that poor little child to the prom, won’t you?” Mom demanded as I tried to sneak off to my darkroom in the basement.

  “I’ll have to fix up my darkroom in the new apartment building,” I pleaded. “Maybe they won’t even let me have a corner of the basement.”

  Her fingers, steel strong from the harp, descended on my shoulder. I was a wicked little boy running away from home.

  “Then we won’t rent the apartment. You didn’t answer my question.”

  “April Mae Cronin O’Malley”—I was imitating my father—“you’d try the patience of a saint.”

  “You know how far that gets your father.” The fingers tightened.

  “I don’t like her.”

  “She’s a nice little girl.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “But you will, won’t you?”

  A will of steel to match her fingers? Sure.

  “All right.”

  “You’ll have a good time.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Have a good time?” The vise had not yet released me poor shoulder.

  “Yeah?”

  “Certainly not, but she’s such a sweet little tyke, I know you will.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  She sighed and let me go.

  It will be argued that my behavior was typical of an adolescent male who discovered that the obnoxious pest whom he had known since first grade had suddenly become an attractive young woman. Secretly, it will be said, I had always kind of liked her and now was both fascinated and disturbed by her. Deep down, it will be contended, I knew that her Delavan reputation was mostly exaggerated: she was only marginally “faster” than any Trinity freshman of her generation.

  My sisters and my mother, with my father’s amused acquiescence, were only forcing me to do what I wanted to do. Indeed I was delighted with the prospect of dancing with this troubling young woman.

  Yeah?

  I’m prepared in the interests of candor to admit the partial truth of that charge. The chemicals of young manhood were roaring through my bloodstream. I clung to my orderly plans and sensible goals as best I could, but my unruly emotions were threatening to get in the way. Ten years—my target for beginning to think about marriage—was a long time.

  And Rosie was as physically appealing as any girl I had ever known, despite the frowns of anger and hatred and contempt that often distorted her delicate, fine-boned features.

  I despised her parents and disliked her dagger tongue and hair-trigger temper. No, I’ll be more precise. I was afraid of her scathing intelligence, which, when combined with her undeniable sexual magnetism, made her a dangerous girl.

  So, I was ambivalent—attracted and scared.

  What seventeen-year-old, even in the infinitely more sophisticated world of the present, could admit to those emotions?

  Anyway, I rented the cheapest summer formal I could find, sent her an insultingly inexpensive corsage of wilted orchids, and embarked on the prom adventure grimly determined that neither of us would enjoy ourselves.

  And she and Vince had to come to our place to pick up Peg and me. We had both packed small bags to take with us to Lake Geneva after the prom. Mrs. Antonelli would join Mrs. Clancy as a chaperone, a precaution on which the good April had insisted.

  I turned off the news as they came into the apartment: there was a new Japanese government, the English were disarming two hundred thousand Polish troops who had served with them during the war. Truman was taking over the coal mines.

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll catch cold in that dress?”

  It was a peach-colored affair with thin straps, a deeply plunging neckline, hardly any back to speak of, showing her flawlessly smooth complexion—a lot of it. She looked as if she were about twenty-five.

  “Did you steal your suit from a corpse on Maxwell Street?”

  Even Mom raised an eyebrow at her dress, an eyebrow that said that she would never dress a fourteen-year-old that way, but then Clarice Clancy was never known for her impeccable taste, now, was she?

  “You will be the most lovely young woman at the prom, dear.”

  Rosie blushed happily at the compliment. “Not as pretty as Peggy, Mrs. O’Malley. She looks just like you.”

  When Rosie blushed, I had noticed before, the color began at her throat and then rose to her face. Now I observed that it also spread in the general direction of her breasts.

  Where was that desert island?

  Mom’s turn to blush. Clever little wench.

  “Take good care of my Chucky, he looks cute, doesn’t he? If only he would comb that awful hair of his.”

  “Oh, he can take care of himself, Mrs. O’Malley.” She flicked her long black hair contemptuously and tilted up her chin. “Unless he sees Ed Murray running after him.”

  “I think someone else”—Dad’s eyes twinkled—“may knock him out tonight.”

  “Shall we go?” I asked. “Maybe we can arrive at the Knickerbocker before the last dance.”

  “What do you care? You don’t know how to dance anyway. Why don’t you bring your camera and take pictures of the girls? That’s safer than talking to them, isn’t it?”

  My family laughed uneasily. Rosie’s tendency to overkill always troubled them.

  “More fun than some girls anyway.”

  Peg and Vince made such a handsome couple that I felt inferior even before we left our apartment.

  So we walked down the narrow stairs of the two-flat and out into the soft warmth of the June night, Vince and Peg hand in hand, Rosie and I as far away from each other as we could possibly be.

  And she was very, very beautiful.

  And my heart was beating very, very rapidly.

  Vince was driving his father’s car, a resilient 1939 Mercury. Rosie and I sat in the backseat—I didn’t hold the door for her—as close to the opposite doors as possible. One could have put the whole Black Horse Troop between us. We said not a word all the way to the hotel. I sighed loudly when she lit her first cigarette. Her glance of contempt would have withered a pine forest.

  I ditched her as soon as we hit the dance floor.

  It is still the custom, I believe, for young men who are, for one reason or another, pressured into such social situations before they have enough self-confidence to cope with them to find solace and courage in what the Irish with charming indirection call the Creature. Hence by the end of any given senior prom and despite stern laws to the contrary, at least half the young men have, to quote the Irish again, too much of the drink taken.

  I didn’t drink, but I found a crowd that had already killed much of the pain of the evening.

  “Who’s the dame you brought, Chucky? Boy, does she have a cute set of tits.”

  “Friend of my sister.”

  “Yeah. Does she put out?”

  “So I am told.”

  “Shit, this should be a good night for you.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Where’s she from? I’ve never seen her around. Great little ass too.”

  �
�Really?”

  “Yeah. Where did you say she was from?”

  “Elmhurst.”

  “Senior?”

  “Would a football hero like me date anyone younger?”

  “Great, great tits. Boy, would I like to get a feel of them.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Do they feel as good as they look?”

  “So-so.”

  Lies?

  Certainly.

  I danced with her twice. The first time she embarrassed me into it.

  “Find another date, hero?” She captured my hands and dragged me toward the floor.

  “You seem to be doing all right.”

  She shrugged her mostly bare shoulders and twisted her lips in an expression of revulsion. “You think you’re the only boy at the dance, but you’re not.”

  It was, I will admit, not unpleasurable to hold her in my arms, at the farthest distance possible and still be said to be dancing.

  “God damn it, Chucky, will you relax. I am not a football to be held while someone kicks it.”

  “For kickoffs only.”

  “You are an incredibly lousy dancer.” Her dark blue eyes sparkled with amusement.

  “Not very good at placements either. Anyway, your skin feels like a football’s skin.”

  It certainly did not. Rather it felt like thick cream.

  My face was burning. So, in truth, was the rest of me. The orchestra was playing “Tenderly,” a song that expressed my sentiments at the moment perfectly.

  She laughed like an experienced temptress. “Do you like me this way?”

  “What way?”

  “In a formal dress.”

  “You mean virtually naked to the waist?”

  “If you want to describe it that way.” She raised an eyebrow at my crudity. Most girls her age would have cried or yelled at me or both.

  “No worse than any other way.”

  “And don’t stay so far away.” She drew close, very close. “I won’t rape you.”

  Her head on my shoulder—she must have been wearing shoes with low heels—her breasts against my chest, she would not have had to rape me. Her waist felt incredibly slim. Her heart seemed to be beating in unison with mine. I found myself floating on a wondrous cotton-candy cloud.

  “Don’t struggle,” she continued. “You’re mine for another minute or two. Let me lead you.”