We had much to celebrate that Christmas of 1952—two healthy children, success in my new career beyond any reasonable expectation, the promise that Vince would be home soon to meet his spunky daughter.
Leo Kelly had come home too, not dead after all. He had been brutally tortured by the North Koreans and had lost two fingers on his left hand. He was a physical and emotional wreck. Dad pulled some strings with someone at Fort Sheridan (he was Colonel O’Malley was he not?), who pulled some strings at Great Lakes Naval Hospital so that Rosemarie and I got in to visit Leo.
At first we did not recognize him. Then he opened his eyes, recognized us, and smiled.
“Hi… nice of you to come way up here . … You two married yet?”
“Two healthy children!”
“Wonderful.” He closed his eyes. “Sorry I couldn’t bring Christopher back for you, Chuck. He was the bravest marine of them all.”
What should we say to him? We didn’t dare mention Jane Devlin. Convinced that Leo was dead, she had married a real creep named Phil Clare. It was said that he cheated on her during their honeymoon.
“You’re a photographer now, Chuck?” he opened his eyes again.
“Kind of.”
“Would you send me your book up here? I’ve love to look at it. Not much good at reading yet.”
He closed his eyes. He seemed to be asleep. Rosemarie and I looked at each other and turned to leave.
“I’m going to make it,” he said. “I’ll show them all. When I get out of here, I’m going to Harvard to get my doctorate in political science.”
“We know you’re going to get better,” Rosemarie said fervently.
He smiled again.
“Stay in touch,” I urged him.
He mumbled something that we didn’t hear.
Then the nurse eased us out of the room.
I sent him copies of my two books. I don’t know whether he ever received them. We didn’t hear from Leo for many, many years.
The verdict wasn’t in on my exhibition. The river wards had not yet voted. They weighed in with their verdict the day after Christmas.
Monsignor James Mitchell, the “spiritual adviser” (read “Boss”) of the Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Action celebrated Saint Stephen’s Day by branding the exhibit “an obscene insult to all virtuous Catholic women” in a statement carried in The New World, our Chicago Catholic newspaper (which, in an earlier and far more liberal manifestation, had supported the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War).
The Monsignor was a specialist in dirty books and magazines. In fact, according to Father Raven, he was known in clerical circles as “Dirty Pictures Mitchell.”
The Council of Catholic Action was a paper organization, a front for Monsignor Mitchell’s crusade to keep drugstore magazine racks “pure enough for the Blessed Mother to look at them.”
It seemed that art galleries were in the same category as drugstores.
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Mugsy Branigan trumpeted. “He’s a prude.”
John Raven assured us that Mugsy, a master at ribbing, would hound Dirty Pictures for the rest of his life.
The Monsignor had not bothered to visit our gallery. “You don’t have to look at filth,” he told the secular press in a conference on Chicago Avenue across the street, “to know that it is filth.”
Neither would the band of thirty or so Catholic women who picketed us come through the door. “It would be a mortal sin,” one of them told the American, the Hearst afternoon paper that often appeared on pink newsprint.
CATHOLICS PICKET NUDE “ART” it announced in thick black headlines appropriate for the death of a pope or a president. Below the headline was a picture of the woman with a placard reading PUT SOME CLOTHES ON, ROSIE!
Next to that was a murky, dark, badly reproduced print of the cartwheel shot, copied through the window, which made it appear that instead of a two piece swimsuit, Rosemarie was wearing nothing at all.
The New World weighed in with an editorial damning the show on the grounds that children walking down Michigan Avenue during the Christmas season would be led into “grave sins of the flesh” by the lascivious picture in the gallery window.
In those days the avenue was not the Magnificent Mile it would later become; children did not amble down Michigan Avenue at Christmastime. Even if there were a few ambling kids, they probably would not have noticed the gallery if it had not been for the pickets; no one ever saw a young person peeking in the window, and, finally, the picture was utterly chaste.
But as I would learn in years to come, what matters often is not what reality is, but what the papers (and more recently TV) say that it is. The publicity was free and it brought us more patrons. All the prints in the collection were sold; we were assured that we would always be welcome at the gallery.
But none of us were quite prepared for the newspaper attention. We found it hard to believe that the press could so falsify the actuality of my prints and that our Church would engage in such irresponsible criticism.
Some things don’t change. The great Godard film Hail Mary was picketed by Catholic women who refused to view it. They knew it was immoral and blasphemous because they had been told that it was. The opinion of Catholic reviewers, some of whom were priests, did not change their mind.
Rosemarie remained cooler than I did, indeed cooler than any of the rest of us. She simply walked in and out of the gallery as though the pickets were not there. None of them recognized her in her white mink coat. Mom and my sisters glared fiercely at the parading women but said nothing. Dad joined the line of marchers to sow discord.
I was the only one who took them on directly. I remember very clearly my words to them, but they were so childish and ill-tempered that I will not bother the reader with a verbatim transcript.
Well, I did say to one woman in her thirties, her eyes filled with hatred, “Don’t you know the passage in the Gospel that says ‘Judge not that you be not judged’?”
“Jesus was talking to the scribes and Pharisees, not to good Catholics like us.”
I then said some very ungentlemanly things.
The next day I had a much better idea. I photographed the demonstrators.
Much later I would do a show called “Twenty-five Years of Protest,” which portrayed marchers from 1952 to 1977. The striking aspect of the faces in such shots is that, whatever the cause, the hate is always the same.
I would see the same women many times in the next quarter century. I never did like them.
Then the New York Herald Tribune appeared. I suppose because the Times had liked the show, its rival, which had not deigned to send a critic originally, had to dislike it. He went out of his way to cast a different vote.
One must admire the courage it takes for a man not quite twenty-five to display in a prominent Chicago gallery what are essentially family snapshots. Charles O’Malley has plenty of courage, no doubt. But like most men who achieve fame too young (in his case by working for Life and Look, journals that ought to stick with veteran photojournalists), he is devoid of sensibility and taste.
His prints are, not to put too fine an edge on the matter, vulgar. Mr. O’Malley is well within his rights to think that his wife and daughter are pretty. But there is reason to question whether it is proper for him to impose them on the rest of us. His wife is commonplace, not to say coarse, with the kind of face and figure we would have expected in Irish serving girls of a generation ago. His daughter is simply one more baby, ugly as all babies are.
Chicago is hardly a city where one would expect to find a promising young artist with a camera in his hand. In this respect alone, Mr. O’Malley does not challenge one’s expectations. Young he may be, but innocent of promise he also is.
His prints are surely not worth the price of a trip on the Broadway Limited. As a matter of fact, they are not worth the price of a ride on one of the city’s intolerable trolley cars.
Chicago Catholics, not the sort of people one would look to f
or guidance in matters of taste, are protesting the so-called exhibit as obscene.
They give too much credit to their co-religionist. Obscenity can sometimes have a certain appeal. Mr. O’Malley is not capable of rising to the level where his work can even be called obscene.
Few people in Chicago in those days read the New York Herald Tribune or even knew that it existed. However someone at The American must have read it because the next day its headline announced:
NUDE ART NOT WORTH
TROLLEY RIDE:
NEW YORK CRITIC CALLS
ARTIST’S NUDE WIFE “COARSE”
The show of Chicago nude photographer Charles O’Malley is so bad, according to a prominent New York critic, that it doesn’t even deserve to be called obscene. Calling O’Malley’s wife “commonplace” and “coarse,” the art critic of the New York Herald Tribune said the show was not worth the cost of a ride on a Chicago streetcar—twelve cents.
Years later at a civic dinner I encountered the man who was the editor of the Hearst rag at that time. He was a cordial, charming little Irishman about my height.
“Glad to meet you, Charlie.” He grinned happily. “I’ve always enjoyed your work. You’re a great credit to our city.”
“Oh?”
“Something wrong?” He frowned.
“What kind of a memory do you have, sir?”
“Pretty good, I think. Why?”
“Not as good as mine. I remember when you sent my wife to bed sobbing.”
“Your wife?” He seemed genuinely surprised and dismayed.
I quoted the story almost verbatim.
“Geez, I don’t remember that. I’ve seen the book. Everyone has. Great book.”
“You don’t remember what you did to us in January of 1953, just before Eisenhower was inaugurated?”
“That was a long time ago, Charlie.”
“If I edited a paper in which I said in screaming headlines that your naked wife was commonplace and coarse, would you remember?”
“It was a Hearst paper, you gotta remember, Charlie. We had our own formula that sold papers. Nothing personal.”
“Oh, yes, there is.”
I turned on my heel and with as much dignity as a five-foot-seven-and-three-quarters-inch man in black tie can muster stalked away from him.
You will note that he did not offer to apologize.
I exaggerated a little: Rosemarie did not break down because of the headline in The American. Peg did. Mom did. Jane did. Rosemarie smiled gamely. “It’ll fill the gallery all day tomorrow.”
“You’re not coarse.”
“‘Course I’m not coarse.” She jabbed at my ribs. “And it’s a commonplace that I’m not commonplace.”
She had stayed in the background earlier in the exhibit because she said that the model ought not to interfere with the artist’s work. The day after the headline, however, dressed in an electrifying white knit dress with red-and-green trim, she was at the door defiantly welcoming both the serious patrons and the morbidly curious.
Virtually all the members of both groups liked the pictures. Scores of men and women told her that she was lovely, a truism that caused her to blush and smile happily.
Until her father, loaded to the gills as we Irish say, stalked in, an outraged little bull charging into a china shop with snow clinging to his black coat (with felt lapels) like oversized flakes of dandruff.
“You worthless little slut.” He hopped up and down in front of her. “I’ll never be able to show my face in a decent home in Chicago ever again. I’ll be laughed off the Board of Trade. You’ve ruined my life.”
He smelled like a cheap tavern on West Madison Street.
“Please, Daddy, don’t—”
He slugged her in the chest and sent her reeling against the wall.
“Cunt!” he shouted, and whirled around to leave.
“No impulse control,” Ted would explain later. “Indulged totally as a child. Never learned to delay satisfaction of instant urges. He has the money to gratify himself, but is hampered by his physical appearance. That increases his rage impulse.”
I had my own rage impulse. I grabbed his coat on the way out. “I’ll kill you!” I shouted, intending only to throw him bodily out of the gallery.
Michael and Ted pulled me off him.
The American’s headline said:
DAD DENOUNCES DAUGHTER’S
NUDE “ART”
Rosemarie’s binge lasted six days.
21
“I don’t know what to say.” Ted McCormack tapped his pen on the desk in his office. “She’s not a classic alcoholic, that’s certain.”
“A.A.?”
“I’m sure that it won’t hurt. I’m glad she’s decided to try it. But her problem is more complicated than most. A.A. works by changing behavior. It doesn’t deal with underlying problems. In many cases that works. For Rose”—he shrugged—“God, Chuck, I’m not sure.”
It had been the scariest of Rosemarie’s explosions. It had lasted for almost a week, during which no one was able to talk to her, not even the good April.
She was not abusive or obscene as she had been after the oak tree collision. Rather she wept, continuously it seemed.
Mom and Peg took turns holding her in their arms and telling her how wonderful she was and how everyone loved her.
I searched the house for the bottles of gin and bourbon she had hidden before the binge began. She had carefully prepared the logistics of her drunk.
I found half a dozen bottles, but I must have missed at least that many more. She consumed a bottle a day for the six days and then stopped drinking and locked herself in her study for another day.
When she finally emerged, wasted and looking at that moment like she had aged ten years, she apologized to all of us, hugged her children, swore she would never drink again, and promised that she would attend A.A. meetings.
We all rejoiced, I with somewhat less conviction than the others.
“She doesn’t like booze, Ted,” I said to my uneasy brother-in-law. “When she’s … well, when she’s stable, she doesn’t touch it and doesn’t seem to miss it. I don’t think that it’s hard for her not to drink most of the time.”
“Then something snaps, and like it or not she tries to destroy herself with it.”
“Exactly. Probably it’s the result of her early family life.”
I was not ready to tell him about her father’s raping her.
“Everything is the result of early family life.” Ted smiled ruefully. “I don’t know what to say, Chuck. She may need long-term psychotherapy. Analysis even. And there’s no guarantee that would work.”
“I don’t think she’s ready for that now.”
“It’s a solution you should keep in the back of your head for the future. In the meantime maybe A.A. will do the trick. It often does.”
I thought of the untidy, slobbering, red-eyed, manic woman that my wife had become during that terrible week. She had degraded herself more than her mother had, poor woman. Would Rosemarie fall down the steps someday?
I shivered.
“What can I do, Ted?”
“Stand for reality, Chuck. Love her, but don’t tolerate another binge. Make it clear that you will think of ending the marriage if she does it again.”
“Ending the marriage?”
“You may have to threaten it But don’t threaten unless you mean it.”
I left his office frightened. I could not lose her, could I? Wasn’t that unthinkable?
A.A. had to work.
It did for a couple of years. Rosemarie went to her meetings faithfully, though she never discussed them with me. And she did not drink.
What would happen when another incident triggered her terrible self-destructiveness?
As the months went on, I persuaded myself that the problem was behind us.
I hardly noticed when she cut down on her A.A. meetings and then stopped going to them.
22
“You
won’t believe this, Cordelia”—Ed Murray beamed over his glass of burgundy—“Chucky knocked me out in a high school football game.”
My big blond nemesis from high school and my little blond friend from Notre Dame were enchanted with each other.
Cordelia Lennon smiled back. “Almost nothing about Charles would surprise me.” She was thinner than in the days when I’d first kissed her in the office of her magazine at Notre Dame. So she seemed little, almost tiny—a blond girl-child with haunted eyes.
Since the very first moment Cordelia had come through the door of our house, Ed had bathed her in a warm and gentle smile, admiring, protective, and hungry. Cordelia, still hurt and discouraged from her professional failure and the death of both her parents, resisted his tall, strong, South Side Irish charm for about a minute and a half. Then she gave herself over to his caressing expressions and began to reply in kind. They melted in each other’s warmth like butter in warm maple syrup.
Not instant love, surely; but instant chemistry between two hurt and lonely people.
Rosemarie had won again.
“I talked to Cordelia Lennon this morning,” she had informed me on an autumn day in 1953.
The war was over. Vince had come home—haggard and haunted but apparently happy. Carlotta was unsure of him at first, but now adored him. And another child was on the way. We were settling down to what some historians today, without much data, think of as the quiet Eisenhower years.
“From New York?” I kissed her and sank into my audience chair in her study.
“No, she’s come home. Someone finally told her the truth. Finally. She will never be a successful concert pianist.”
“Poor kid.”
“And she’s had some kind of unhappy love affair too.”
“She never had much taste in men.”
“Chucky, I’m being serious.”
“Yes, ma’am. Well, I’ll try to be serious too. Cordelia doesn’t make it quite into the top one percent of American pianists, but that doesn’t mean her talent and work are worthless. She can teach, she can direct parish musicals, she can bring joy to her family and her friends, just like Mom does with the harp without ever being a concert harpist.”
A Christmas Wedding Page 22
