“Anti-Semitic in its worship of German volk,” opined the Sun.
We were all devastated. Rosemarie, just over her last spree and pathetically penitent in response to my fury, began yet another fling, but stopped it when I ripped a gin bottle from her hands and smashed it on her kitchen floor.
She ran away sobbing again, but this time to our bedroom.
“Don’t hit me, please,” she begged when I followed her. “It’s all my fault.”
“I’ll never hit you, Rosemarie.” I engulfed her in my arms.
Better, but still not very swift.
What astonished me about the reviews in the Chicago papers was their anger. Even if my photography was pretty bad, what was the point in their fury? I was hardly a threat to anyone, a twenty-three-year-old with a Leica and a Kodak and two years of service in Germany. Why use howitzers to slap me down?
I would later learn that the Chicago literati—the review editors of the papers and their friends who reviewed for them—were driven into paroxysms of rage when someone in Chicago who was not one of their Lake Front group did anything that suggested talent or success. My talent might still be very much in question, but to have a book of prints published when many “much better” photographers (in their own social circles) were not published was an intolerable affront.
I am not kidding about the Lake Front either. A brilliant young intellectual, Isaac Rosenfeld, who died a few years later, wrote an extraordinary essay about Chicago in those days, contrasting the Lake Front culture with the barbarism of the rest of the city. It was a marvelously poetic exercise, thick with dazzling images and forceful metaphors. Even those who lived west of Halsted Street and read it were impressed, despite the fact that we were the targets.
For all its brilliance, the article was wrongheaded. There were a half dozen Frank Lloyd Wright homes within walking distance of our house on Euclid Avenue, a fact that demolished Rosenfeld’s argument all by itself—although it was the kind of poetic vision that cannot be demolished by mere facts.
A published photographer not quite twenty-four was bad enough, Irish and Catholic was worse, and from the West Side of Chicago settled the matter. How could I be any good?
I didn’t much care, worried as I was about Vinny. What difference did reviews make when the photography was nothing more than a hobby anyway?
They troubled my wife and my family more than they bothered me. “Hell, Dad,” I said, “I’m surprised they bothered.”
I was locked into doing more books anyway. As the reader has doubtless noticed I am quite unskilled at extricating myself from messy situations into which I have stumbled, mostly through error and mistake.
More books would mean more bad reviews, tears from Mom and Rosemarie, and snide comments from some parishioners in back of church after Mass on Sunday.
As in, “I thought that was a pretty good review in the Sun last Sunday.”
I’d smile and say thanks, though I would be tempted to reply that I doubted that the person ever opened the book review section of the paper except when he heard there was a review that suggested I was anti-Semitic.
To complicate the blend of light and shadows that summer, I was able to repay all her capital to Rosemarie before our daughter made her momentous appearance.
“A check for a hundred thousand dollars?” she gasped, for once surprised at something I’d done. “Rob a bank?”
“Made it on October and March wheat.”
“But you never go to the Exchange anymore except to take those beautiful, terrible pictures.”
I had, need I say, not taken any shots of her father. The temptation to do so, however, was gargantuan. I secretly prided myself on my great virtue in exercising such restraint.
“I took a short position and stuck with it. Every time I made a big gain, I simply put it back in more futures. It looks like the grain market will turn around with the shortfalls in winter-wheat goals, so I terminated the position.”
“Oh, what does that mean?” She patted her large belly as if to assure the busy child within that Daddy was not necessarily a bank robber. “Do you have as much money as I do?”
“Nowhere near it, but enough for a while.”
I had beaten the bastards and made more money from that one day’s plunge than I would make in a decade with the two O’s. I laughed in Jim Clancy’s ugly face when I terminated my position. I told myself that a lot of the money I had won was his.
I was the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.
“Wonderful,” Rosemarie said. “Then you can concentrate on your photography for another year at least?”
And more if I wanted to. I didn’t think I’d admit it to her. “Well, I won’t have to live off of you for a while.”
“Don’t get on that subject again. It’s crazy. Are you going to invest your profit again?”
“In blue-chip stocks—until I find a trader I can trust.”
After he breaks the bank, the smart man quits, right?
“How marvelously brilliant of you, Chuck. I guess you showed Dad.”
“Lucky.”
Oh yes, very lucky indeed. The cautious, conservative, timid trader had plunged in where angels feared to tread and had made a killing in the process. Like the kid who won three dollars and fifty cents in the dime slot machine, I proposed to pick up my winnings and go home. Reckless bulls are commonplace in the exchanges, though most of them don’t last long.
Reckless bears, however, are a rare breed. In fact, there are those that contend I exhausted the species. I wanted to get away from a battleground on which I did not want to belong. I wanted to terminate financial dependence on my wife. I was furious at those who thought of Heartbreak Ridge as an occasion to make money. So I made an appallingly bad investment decision in a moment of angry impulse.
And won.
What are you up to now, I asked the Deity that night.
John Kane said I was brilliant.
I insisted that I was lucky.
He disagreed.
So I did escape the Board of Trade and did end my dependence on Rosemarie’s money by violating all my own rules of probity and caution. I wanted to be wiped out and I became modestly wealthy instead.
No, to tell the truth, I didn’t want to be wiped out. I wanted to WIN! And I beat the hell out of Jim Clancy in the process, not knowingly, not deliberately, but nonetheless effectively.
John Kane, my red-faced Irish friend, told me that Clancy had taken a terrible beating in the falling grain markets.
“He hung on too long, a mistake the likes of himself never does. I think he was trying to catch you. Watch him, my lad, he’s dangerous.”
“You’re handling my account from now on”—I patted his shoulder this time—“you watch out for him.”
I had to keep a small account, mostly to justify my showing up at the Exchange a couple of days a week with my camera. Now that I was not screaming and waving in the pits and periodically losing my breakfast in the men’s room, I found the Board of Trade a fascinating place. I thought that maybe I’d write a dissertation on it someday. Or an article.
Now I could spend more time on my doctorate. It was fun taking pictures at the Exchange. Despite my sobriety as a child, I always, as Mom pointed out happily, loved circuses.
They had clowns in them, you see.
And the Board of Trade was high comedy, filled with clowns, good and bad, happy and sad, greedy and generous.
That’s what my pictures said.
None of the money I had “earned” by a combination of stupidity and good luck would bring Vince Antonelli back alive. What difference did my money make?
It made a lot of difference to Jim Clancy.
“Don’t you aim that goddamn camera at me,” he screeched at me one afternoon in the Trader’s Inn, a bar across the street from the Exchange.
“I wasn’t planning on it. I don’t take pictures of drunks.”
“Not taking any of that cheap little thing you’re married to?”
“You’re a fine one to talk,” I fired back at him.
He elbowed his way through a throng of loud, gesticulating traders, who were still coming off the excitement of the session with their third drink in twenty minutes.
“You threatened me once,” he snarled into my ear.
“The threat stands.” I picked him up by his shoulders and shook him, like a cat would shake a mouse. “You leave her alone or I’ll kill you.”
“Big talk.” He waved his drink at me, like it was a grenade with the pin pulled.
“You saw what I did to you in the pit, without even working up a sweat. Leave us alone or I’ll wipe you out.” Big talk. No substance. Dumb to say it with others listening. Very dumb.
“I’ll get you before you get me, I promise you that. There’s a lot you don’t know.”
“I’m quivering.” I turned on my heel and walked away from him.
“And your pictures are trash, just like your father’s paintings.”
I had shot off my mouth once that afternoon. Leica in hand, I strode out of the tavern before I did it again.
The day after I had returned my initial capital to Rosemarie, I drifted into the house from a photo exploration of the Frank Lloyd Wright homes in the neighborhood to discover that Rosemarie was talking money on the phone.
“Absolutely not, we wouldn’t think of it. I don’t care if you are Life magazine. My husband will not agree to the use of his prints unless we’re paid for them. What?” She grinned over the phone at me, and waved me to my assigned leather chair. “No, we won’t charge for an interview. But you’re going to have to pay five hundred dollars for each picture. You can afford it.”
I closed my eyes and bowed my head. It was too late now.
Did I want to appear in Life?
Well…
What I wanted didn’t matter anymore.
“Fine, you have a deal. ‘Where is he now?’” She looked around the room. “Well, he’s not here now. Maybe you can send your reporter around tomorrow morning about ten or so?”
I shrugged my shoulders, knowing, with my eyes still closed, that she was looking at me for agreement.
I might as well agree. Be a good boy, like you’re supposed to, Charles Cronin O’Malley.
“Hooray!” she screamed. “They bought it!”
She thumped down on my lap, a heavier burden than she was eight months ago, but still a pleasant enough encumbrance. I put my arms around her and hoped that after the birth of our daughter (I knew enough not to dissent from that prediction) her once astonishing waist would recover its former slimness.
“We don’t really need the money.”
“Sure we do, if we want to establish that you’re a great photographer.”
“How did they find out about the book?”
“From the review in the New York Times next Sunday. Mr. Close called me while you were out to read it to me. It was great.”
“What did they say?”
She waved her hand. “Oh, I didn’t bother to write it down. You can read it Sunday.”
“I guess I can wait.”
“It’ll be good for you. You’ll have a bit of an idea of what I’m putting up with from this rambunctious daughter of yours.”
Need I say that I still have that yellowed clipping that I picked up at Midway Airport first thing Sunday morning.
After one has explored at first quickly and then very carefully this extraordinarily subtle and nuanced view of Germans and Americans in Germany in the years after the end of the war, one wonders what sort of man the photographer might be. Quite senior, one assumes, a big, bearded man with broad shoulders and a bowed head and eyes agonized by the ambiguities of life. But the picture of Mr. O’Malley on the final page, taken by a certain Rosemarie Clancy O’Malley—one presumes his wife—reveals a slight, clear-eyed Irishman with freckles and, one wagers, red hair. His youthful good looks suggest laughter and charm.
One returns to the excellent book with heightened interest. If young Mr. O’Malley is so gifted today, what can we expect of him in the years to come?
The first printing promptly sold out. The book made a quiet appearance in the windows of a couple of Loop bookstores. A small ad, with the Times quote, materialized in the Chicago Tribune. It was more than either of us had expected.
“If only Vince is safe and Peg has her baby and the little brat here is all right when she gets tired of pounding on my stomach.”
“A big order.”
“God”—she tapped the breakfast table—“wants us to ask for big things.”
Even God would have found it hard to mediate our argument the day after said brat had come into the world.
“It is April, isn’t it, Snookums?” She tickled the little girlchild who, having exhausted the available nourishment, was now calmly sleeping. “We won’t back off, will we?”
“The poor child is asleep.”
“Nothing poor about my little April.”
“Our little Rosemarie.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Monsignor Mugsy likes me better than you.”
“Compromise?”
“Well…”
“How about”—I thought for a moment—“April Rosemarie?”
“Doesn’t scan.”
“I gave you the first name.”
“Don’t like it. Here, you hold her for a minute. Don’t be afraid, you’re not going to drop her.”
“She’s so small.”
“That’s the way they come.”
“I have to take her picture.”
“Oh yes, that’s right. You’re the fresh-faced charming young Irish photographer, aren’t you?”
“My agent spreads that stuff. … I’ve got it: April Rosemary!”
She arched her eyebrows thoughtfully. “Well…”
“It does scan.”
“I know that.”
“Well…”
“Give her back to me.” She reached out her arms. “What do you think, Snookums?”
Snookums opened her eyes, thought better of it, and went back to sleep.
“See, she thinks it’s beautiful too. We win, poor old Daddy, you lose.”
Naturally.
“April Rosemary?” Monsignor Branigan peered over the top of his glasses ten days later.
“Mary the mother of Jesus,” Peg, the godmother, was reciting her lines. “And two saints, Saint Rose of Lima and the baby’s grandmother—”
“Who has to be a saint to put up with the lot of you galoots,” the pastor chortled. “Okay, Rosemarie, you win, like you knew you would.”
So, imperturbably asleep, our first child was introduced into Catholicism. I was taking pictures of her by then. Those would be some of the pictures that would change my life decisively and permanently.
Her maternal grandfather appeared at the baptism.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
“Your mother invited me. It’s my granddaughter, isn’t it?”
He ignored me and my family, fawned over Monsignor Mugsy—who was politely distant—and leered at April Rosemary.
“Prettier than you were at the same age, Rosie,” he said. “A lot prettier. Looks like your grandmother.”
Rosemarie’s Grandmother Clancy, to judge by the painting that was preserved in our upstairs hallway, was the one from whom Jim Clancy inherited his ugliness.
“I’m glad you like her, Daddy. We’re so proud of her.”
“I hope we can all be friends now, huh, Chucky?”
He extended his slimy hand. Caught up in the spirit of the ceremony and feeling at peace with the world, I took it.
Later I found him pawing at Rosemarie in our kitchen as she was picking up a tray of dainty sandwiches to bring to the baptismal celebrants in the front room.
“Daddy”—she cowered, shamed and terrified—“please.”
I pulled him away and threw him against the fridge. “Leave her alone you sick little bastard.”
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br /> He grabbed a knife from the sink and lunged at me. It was only a table knife that would barely have penetrated warm butter.
I twisted it out of his hand and threw him against the kitchen door. “Get out of here now and never come back or I’ll kill you. This time I mean it.”
“I can’t go out in the rain without my coat.” He was crying. “I just want to be friends.”
“Rosemarie, get your father’s coat.”
She hurried out of the kitchen, too frightened to say a word.
“You sick, slimy little demon, what the hell do you think you’re doing!”
“I’ll get even,” he sniveled. “Just you wait, I’ll get even!”
A little boy who has lost his shooters in a marble contest. Yes, that was it, Jim Clancy was a spoiled child who never grew up.
“Here’s the coat, Daddy.” She turned and ran.
“Out”—I pushed him out the door, he skidded on the porch and slipped down the first couple of stairs—“and stay out.”
He pulled on his tailor-made raincoat, hunched his bald head between his shoulders, and, bereft of all dignity, sloshed around the side of the house.
Evil, as we would all learn later when the Israelis tried Eichmann, and Hannah Arendt wrote her book about the trial, can be bland and pathetic. I remembered again his laughter when I started to vomit on the sailboat eleven years before.
His laughter and the chocolate ice-cream bar that made me sick again.
“Are you all right?” I whispered into Rosemarie’s ear.
“Fine… I didn’t tell anyone else. I said that Daddy didn’t feel very well.”
“I’m sure that’s true.”
“Poor sick man.”
“I agree, Rosemarie. Poor sick man.”
And as we would later find out to our dismay, dangerous too.
Rosemarie drank herself into oblivion that night.
I couldn’t blame her.
1952—1961
20
I was in Korea when Kevin Patrick O’Malley was born eleven months and twenty days after his sister—a classic Irish twin.
I did arrive at St. Ursula’s only five minutes late for the beginning of the baptismal rite. It was a baby boom baptistery, already occupied by Charley and Ted McCormack, Carlotta Antonelli, and a very dubious April Rosemary O’Malley, not at all sure that a little brother was a very good idea.
A Christmas Wedding Page 19
