“Women of the house,” I shouted as I burst into the breakfast room, “I want me breakfast!”
“Chucky!” the good April, Peg, and Rosemarie exclaimed together.
They were sitting around the table in pajamas and robes chattering over their tea and coffee, doubtless about me and how cute I had been at the dance.
“We thought you were still in bed, dear!”
“I’ve been working since sunup.” I laid the prints on the table and piled bacon and waffles on my plate.
“I’ll make you some fresh ones, dear. … Oh, what cute pictures! You are clever with your cute little camera!”
I swallowed a large glass of orange juice as they looked over the pictures.
“No men in them,” Peg protested with a frown.
“Women are more interesting.”
“Only two women,” Rosemarie murmured. “You should have taken a picture of Jenny to send to that idiot in Galway.”
Naturally I had.
“Such beautiful young women,” Mom said as she poured batter into the waffle iron.
“They don’t look like us, not really,” Peg said slowly. “Too perfect.”
“She looks like you.” Rosemarie gestured at one figure. “The other one isn’t me at all.”
I shoved a syrup-drenched quarter waffle into my mouth.
“Ingrate!” I tried to say.
“Don’t talk with food in your mouth, dear.”
“They’re wonderful, Chuck,” Peg said. “They really are. You see us all too clearly—shrewd, scheming fish-wives all dressed up for a party, but conniving every moment.”
“I don’t see anything,” I said, sticking to my historic position that I was merely doing archives and not interpreting. “The camera is the only one that sees.”
“It’s embarrassing to be seen the way we really are.” Rosemarie shook her head. “Kind of spiritually naked. You shouldn’t see us that way, Chuck.”
“Rosie darling,” the good April came to my defense as she replaced my vanished waffle, “you don’t understand what Chucky has done. He sees two strong, beautiful, and tender young women and celebrates them. He’s really very clever with that little camera.”
“And very determined,” I added.
My sister and foster sister looked up at me, still frowning.
“What did you say?” Peg asked.
“I agreed with the good April that the two grand duchesses were strong, beautiful, and tender young women—which is obvious—and added that they are also very determined.”
The glanced at each other, exchanging signals, and then laughed together.
“You win, Chuck,” Peg said. “Very determined indeed. And they’re wonderful pictures. You must make some prints for Vince.”
“I always said you were a genius, Chucky!” Rosemarie hugged me. Both of them then kissed me, interfering with my consumption of waffles.
“Of course,” the good April concluded as she placed a new stack of waffles on my plate, “he’d love to take pictures of you with your clothes off. That’s why he’s going to be a photographer.”
“Curses, I’m found out!” I mumbled as my face burned.
I dared not look at my two young models.
Later, when I was in the darkroom making more prints, Rosemarie knocked on the door.
“May I come in, Chuck?” she asked meekly.
I had never admitted her into my sanctum before.
“Okay.”
“At least I knocked,” she said as she entered and gently closed the door. She was still wearing her pajamas and robe.
“That you did.”
She glanced around the walls.
“Is this a Rosie exhibition or something?”
“A Rosemarie exhibition,” I corrected her.
“Doesn’t it distract you from your work?”
“A lot less than the real person when she enters my darkroom.”
“I knocked.”
“You did.”
“You didn’t knock last night.”
“I didn’t.”
Enough of this conversation, I told myself. I embraced her and kissed her. She didn’t fight me off.
“I’m glad you’re not wearing that armor this morning.”
She giggled. “I hate it too.”
“Now the real Rosemarie is in my arms.”
“Not too much to her.”
We locked in an ardent embrace.
I pushed aside her robe, opened the top buttons of her pajamas, and caressed her breasts, warm, firm, delicious.
“Chucky…”
“I’ve wanted to do this since your breasts first appeared.”
She leaned against me. I touched both nipples gently, then carefully redid the buttons and rearranged her robe.
“You don’t own me,” she said, struggling for breath. “You have no right to think you can do whatever you want to me.”
“I certainly don’t own you, Rosemarie my love, but still you’re mine and always have been and always will be.”
“I could say the same thing to you.”
“I hope you do.”
“All right, Chucky Ducky,” she said, laughing. “I will. You’re mine and always have been and always will be.”
In such exchanges are lives predestined.
She slipped out of my arms. “Which is why I came. You didn’t give me a chance last night to say I love you. I do, Charles Cronin O’Malley. I do love you and I’ll always love you. Now I’m getting out of this room before the aphrodisiac smells destroy me completely.”
I let her go and leaned against my worktable.
Conquest.
Whose?
Just then I was in love and it didn’t matter.
She opened the door again and poked her head into the darkroom, her face crimson. “I’m more embarrassed by what your camera sees than by what you might have seen if you were hiding outside my shower.”
She disappeared again before I could respond.
I am embarrassed as I tell this story of St. Patrick’s Day, 1950. We were so young and innocent. We knew so little of life and its tragedies. Two young people fell in love, married, and they all lived happily ever after. Wasn’t that what it was all about?
We were too young. In our defense, in those times, shaped by the war and the postwar prosperity, people married young. Twenty-two and nineteen did not seem unreasonable ages to make lifelong decisions.
5
Peg was pounding on the door of my room.
“Wake up, Chuck! Rosemarie had an accident.”
It was a Saturday morning in late May. Mom and Dad were at Long Beach, opening the house for the summer and enjoying a rare respite from the obligations of the firm. The new staff members had eased their work, but not their need to be obsessive about it.
However, they felt they were entitled to at least one weekend off, mostly because Rosemarie virtually ordered them to take it.
“You should celebrate the first grandchild with two weeks’ vacation, not two days’,” that imperious matriarch-in-the-making had announced.
For Charles John McCormack had made a somewhat early appearance and shortly thereafter had been inducted into the Mystical Body, as we used to call it, and now the People of God.
Both of which were dumb names for the Church.
That’s right: Charles McCormack. And so that there would be no doubt that Uncle Chucky (not, as I would have thought, the far more promising “Uncle Charley”) was the one being honored, that worthy was pressed into service to be godfather when Monsignor Mugsy poured the waters of Baptism over the child’s sleeping head. Rosemarie, radiant at the tiny kid in her arms, was of course the godmother.
“She’s entitled to it,” Peg whispered in my ear. “If she hadn’t bawled Ted out, he would have never broken with Doctor.”
News to me.
Perhaps the child’s name was suggested by the fact that the new McCormack was tiny and had red hair, which even then showed signs of turning kin
ky.
Doctor had not come to the Baptism. He had taken one look at Charles John in the nursery at St. Anne’s Hospital and announced, “Sickly child. Must take after his mother’s family,” and departed.
As I understood the hints and allusions, Doctor’s “allowance” had been terminated and replaced by a “loan” from my parents, to use Rosemarie’s vocabulary. Ted, I suspected, was going through the torments of the damned as he struggled to break away from Doctor’s domination. Perhaps he was learning, as he prepared to begin his own psychiatric practice, that there are some parents whom a child can never please, no matter how hard they try.
Then there were the crazy O’Malleys, who were pleased with almost anything. Or almost nothing.
They were, heaven knows, pleased with my budding “romance”—as they saw it—with Rosemarie.
And especially delighted when the two of us walked down the aisle of St. Ursula’s gym to receive Communion together at eleven-fifteen Mass.
Despite my liberal interpretation of sin when I had romanced Cordelia, I debated, only half seriously, with Rosemarie about receiving Communion. I argued that the “necking and petting” in which we were engaged had to be confessed on Saturday night if we were to receive Communion. Moreover, I insisted, the most that was to be tolerated between Confession and Communion the next morning were very chaste pecks on the cheek.
Rosemarie thought that was funny.
“We don’t intend to stop, Chucky, so why pretend?”
“Absolution is valid so long as we intend to try to stop.”
“We don’t even intend to try to stop. Anyway, do you think God is going to send us to hell for a little gentle loving? Isn’t that the way He made young people? Isn’t that how He prepares us for marriage?”
It didn’t seem very gentle to me.
“I think God probably understands,” I admitted, “but the Church doesn’t.”
“I’ll bet on God,” she said,
I would let the marriage remark pass completely unnoticed.
Our foreplay was in retrospect pretty mild. We both enjoyed it enormously. Unlike many young women of her generation, Rosemarie was not given to drawing lines. Rather she trusted me completely. She was a gift to which I could do whatever I wanted. Such a strategy guaranteed that I would be both restrained and gentle.
“You trust me too much,” I told her after one particularly joyous romp in the front seat of her convertible.
“No,” she said, rearranging her hair. “If it was some other boy, I would be trusting him too much, but not you.”
“You have me all figured out?” I grumbled.
“You’re an intriguing mystery, Chucky.” She pinched my cheek. “I could spend a lifetime trying to figure you out and not succeed. But I do know that you won’t exploit a woman. Probably you couldn’t if you wanted to.”
Rosemarie was not pushing me toward the altar, not even toward the kind of commitment that seemed to exist between Peg and Vince. She seemed quite content to trust me in this as in all other matters.
“You’re ogling me, young woman,” I said as we sat on a bench at Skelton Park after I had beaten her 2–1 in a tennis match. “That’s why you lost.”
She laughed happily. “You are a terrible distraction, Chucky Ducky. Put your shirt back on before the Oak Park cops come and arrest you.”
I did as I was told.
“Besides, you ogle me too.”
“Do you know what I do when I ogle you?”
“Certainly! You imagine that you’re taking off my clothes!”
“You don’t object to that?”
“If it were some other men, I would.”
“You do the same thing?”
“Not exactly.” She pushed me flat on the bench and covered my face with kisses. “Don’t ask personal questions like that.”
I had a hard time picturing myself as sexually attractive. “Cute,” maybe, but little more.
I was about to graduate from the University. I had figured out the system—or rather I had finally accepted Rosemarie’s definition of it. Glib talk in class counted for nothing, although many of the verbal young people in the undergraduate college thought that it did. Flair was more important in tests and term papers than rote repetition of lectures and notes, the exact opposite of the Notre Dame standards. Since, heaven knows, I was not devoid of flair, I did pretty well, though not as well as Rosemarie.
I had not replied to Palmer Tennant’s invitation. All I wanted to be was an accountant. Still, I might earn more money in the accounting market if I had a doctorate.
Doctor Chucky?
No. Charles Cronin O’Malley, Ph.D. It had a nice ring to it. Well, why not? That would show them all, though I wasn’t sure who it would show, save for Notre Dame—and they wouldn’t notice.
Maybe I could continue as I had—school and work and GI Bill and living at home. Why not?
No way to support a wife and family?
Well, who was expecting a wife and family?
Having won her argument about my taking my camera out of mothballs, Rosemarie had returned to her voice lessons. I had never seen her so happy.
The “postwar” world was going strong, despite increasing signs of a serious recession. GM had developed a one-piece windshield, RCA had developed a color TV tube, educators were complaining that TV was getting in the way of homework, Kurt Weill and Nijinsky had died, the Vietminh had started a war against the French, Joe McCarthy had launched his anticommunist crusade. Everyone at the University was fighting about George Orwell’s 1984. Elizabeth Taylor married Nicky Hilton, we were singing “Mona Lisa” and “C’est si bon,” and Rosemarie and I had loved King Solomon’s Mines.
“You only liked it”—she poked me—“because Deborah Kerr was naked in it.”
“Not naked enough,” I responded, earning yet another poke.
“Chucky, you are obsessed with women’s bodies.”
“Would you rather have me uninterested in them?” I asked, squeezing her thigh.
“Well, I’d never swim naked in a pool like that.”
“I bet you would.”
“Only with a man I loved.”
“Fair enough.”
Only a few of us knew where Korea was.
I heard whispers around the house that Vince and Peg would be married in two years, after he had finished two years of law school and she three years at Rosary.
“So young,” Mom had whispered to Dad—a remark that has been on the lips of every mom in human history.
“Older than you were.”
“That’s different. Times were different then.”
That has been the rejoinder of moms for the whole of human existence.
Since the war, Catholic women who attended college had been almost expected to be engaged at graduation, and it was not uncommon for them to leave college after two years to work for a year, so that they would be married before their twenty-first birthday. Moreover, the experience of the vets who combined education and marriage and parenthood had demolished the notion that a man should postpone marriage until his education was finished, at least.
My commitment to such a doctrine was becoming increasingly theoretical, although I would not have admitted it.
We didn’t know it then, but we were in the midst of the baby boom.
6
“An accident?” I said to Peg that morning in May when she woke me up. I shook my head, trying to shake sleep out of it, still convinced that I was dreaming.
“Her father is away someplace. The housekeeper never answers the phone at night. Mom and Dad are down at the lake. She’s in Jackson Park Hospital. Where’s that?”
“On Stony Island, I think.”
“Is that a city or something?”
“No, it’s a street, sixteen hundred east. Is she hurt?”
“I don’t know,” Peg wailed. “Can we drive out there and find out?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
The sun was just beginnin
g to peek over the roof of Jackson Park Hospital when we arrived. Peg charged into the lobby and up to the reception desk.
“We’re members of Miss Clancy’s family,” she said smoothly. “She was raised with us. Everyone else is out of town. May we go up to her floor and talk to the nurses?”
A modest enough request, no? And in those days it was much easier to get by a hospital reception desk.
On the third floor, Peg searched out a wispy young intern who might not be immune to her charms.
He was putty in her hands.
“Miss Clancy is all right,” he said. “Lucky to be alive I’d say. A slight concussion. Some stitches on the top of her head which that wonderful black hair will hide. Two spectacular shiners. She’s resting quietly now.”
“May we see her, Doctor?” there was a pathetic plea in the title. “We were raised together and the rest of the family is out of town.”
“Well…,” he hesitated.
“It would reassure her to know that someone cares.”
The young man nodded sagely. “You’re right. It has been a long night for her. She’s in 310. Try to be quiet Other people on the floor are still asleep. I’ll tell the nurses it’s okay.”
“Impressive,” I said when we were alone.
“A snap,” Peg replied.
Rosemarie was sitting up in bed, looking battered and confused. A bandage around her head and two ugly black eyes. Her hair fell in disorder against a white hospital gown. She looked as gorgeous as ever. Not quite indestructible, perhaps, but just then maybe the next best thing to it.
“Rosie!”
“Peg!”
Embraces, hugs, tears.
“Hi, Rosemarie.”
“Hi, Chuck.”
“What happened?”
“I’m ashamed of myself,” she murmured. “I wasn’t even all that drunk.”
“Down on yourself again?” Peg sighed.
“I guess I must have been. I’m glad no one was in the car with me. I could have killed them.”
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