Second Spring

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “I’m NOT a genius,” I said impatiently.

  “Yes, dear,” she said, patting my arm patiently.

  Vince and Peg joined us, his eyes always on the door, waiting for the entrance of someone who was his responsibility.

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “They’ll elect Mike Bilandic mayor. Then in ten, twelve years, young Rich will take over.”

  “Does he have the moves?”

  “All his father had and more.”

  Another priest came in and we had to pray again. Rosemarie made a face as she knelt on the floor.

  “They should have kneelers,” she complained.

  After the priest left, shaking hands with almost everyone in the room, Vince gave us our tickets for the Mass.

  “Get here early. The hangers-on will be trying to sneak in. They’re real pests.”

  “Why are we here, Vince?” I asked. “We were not this important to the Mayor.”

  “Because you’re Peg’s brother,” Rosemarie cut off the answer, “and because the Mayor thought you were a genius.”

  “And because Mrs. Daley liked my wife’s funny stories about Irishmen.”

  Outside the steeds of night raced across the sky and cold winds swept across the Lake. Crowds were already lining up for the beginning of the wake inside the church. I realized that this was an important historical turning point for my city. The neighborhoods, which the Cronkites of the country despised, would turn out in massive numbers for one of their own.

  Rosemarie, her hand shivering, tried to start my Chevy. It didn’t want to start. After several tries, she jabbed the keys at me.

  “Charles Cronin O’Malley, get this car started.”

  I turned the ignition once and the Chevy leaped into action.

  “It’s all in knowing how,” I said modestly.

  “How do you turn on the heat?”

  I pushed the levers at the top.

  We eased out of the parking place and picked our way past cops and toward Halsted Street.

  “Heaters in these American cars are no good … Chucky, I’m freezing.”

  I snuggled close to her. She didn’t, under the circumstances, seem to mind.

  “Such wonderful, low-key people,” she mused, as we warmed up. “They couldn’t be pompous and self-important even if they wanted.”

  “Folks from the neighborhood.”

  “Right! The media will never be able to understand that.”

  Nor did the editor of the New York Times, who turned space in the op-ed page over to one of the Mayor’s most vicious critics.

  I still couldn’t figure out why I was at the private wake.

  “We shouldn’t have been there.”

  “Speak for yourself … If you want, I’ll drop you off at Thirty-sixth and Halsted and you can wait in line with the rest of the city.”

  “I’d have to walk home?”

  “You bet.”

  “I guess I won’t.”

  “You’re just angry because Sis Daley agrees with me that you’re a genius.”

  I dropped the issue.

  “You were striking in your papal dress.”

  “You’re just saying that because you want to sleep with me tonight.”

  “What’s the point in being married on a cold night like this unless you snuggle up with your spouse?”

  She rested her hand on my knee for a moment, banishing all the cold in the car.

  “You’ll want to do more than snuggle up.”

  So I did.

  And so we did later on, exorcising death with a commitment to life and love.

  Local TV at ten was filled with pictures of massive lines of people slowly edging into the old church.

  “The national news had some of these pictures at five-thirty,” Moire Meg informed us. “They were like totally awed.”

  That long lines of people on Thirty-seventh Street and on Lowe waited to get into Nativity the next day despite the terrible cold and a windchill which hovered near zero astonished the national media.

  The next day as Rosemarie, in the same cloth coat and a different black dress, worked our way through the police lines for our reserved seat—which now I was willing to accept—we encountered a national CBS reporter and cameraman.

  “Dr. O’Malley,” she asked. “You are Dr. O’Malley, aren’t you?”

  “Sometimes Ambassador O’Malley, sometimes Chuck.”

  “Are you surprised at the big crowds of people who have passed through this church and are here waiting for the Mass to begin?”

  “We call it the Eucharist these days … And, no, I’m not surprised at all.”

  “Why, sir?”

  “Well, he was one of us and we loved him, unlike phony Chicagoans like Studs Terkel and Mike Royko.”

  “A zinger,” my wife said. “You didn’t mention your good friend Walter.”

  “They would never have used it. This they might.”

  “I don’t think they will.”

  For once in the last ten years of our marriage, Rosemarie was wrong. They did use it.

  “Like you were totally good,” Moire Meg assured us breathlessly. “And, Rosie, you looked totally beautiful.”

  “Not embarrassed by your father?”

  “Oh, no! You smiled like you were kind of proud of him.”

  “Imagine that.”

  So it had been when we were in Bonn. The media stories were all about the Ambassador’s wife and children.

  Inside the church I settled into the torpor I desperately seek when I know that I’ll have to sit through a long and wandering homily which all the Irishwomen in church would insist was wonderful. Well, not my wife. She was actively anticlerical. I was only passively so. I would turn them off. She would squirm and mutter to herself.

  Someday a group of people would assemble in a church for my obsequies. I hoped Edward would avoid the clichés.

  What could be said about me?

  I had been a decent son and husband, not spectacular but on the whole more good than bad. I had remained faithful to my wife. I had tried hard at the good father role and at least none of my kids hated me. I had tried to serve my country a couple of times and eventually given up in despair. I had taken an unconscionably large number of pictures, a few of them were presentable.

  He was born, he grew up, he loved, he lived, he died. Not much to remember. A few good deeds, not many bad deeds. A life that was not completely wasted.

  He could have done so much more.

  I know. My reveries turned to prayer.

  What more can I do between now and my own funeral Mass?

  I was sad when we trudged back to Oak Park after the ceremony finally came to an end.

  Sad for the Mayor, sad for all who must die.

  Sad for myself.

  Sad sack.

  Chuck

  1977

  “None of us on the Hill trust this guy,” Timmy Boylan informed us.

  Timmy’s body and mind had been shattered in the Hurtgen Forest, three days after he had arrived in the First Division as a replacement in September of 1944. A big, handsome Black Irishman with thick black hair that covered half of his forehead, he recovered his bodily health in an Army hospital and returned to the neighborhood, where he promptly set about destroying the existing beer supply on the West Side. Though he was two years older than I, we became friends of a sort because we both read books.

  “Charles C.,” he’d say with a roguish laugh and a crooked grin, “we’re misfits. We read books because we like to read.”

  I’d sit in the Magic Tap with him for hours on end, sipping Coke while he downed brew in great gulps, arguing about Proust.

  “These are our times lost, Charles C. Only since we’re both misfits, we’ll never be able to recall them.”

  I’d hold up my camera. He’d laugh.

  I tried to persuade him to see Dr. Berman, the shrink with whom I had shared a darkroom in my days in Bamberg, defending the United States from the Red Army.
To my astonishment, he did. Then he stopped drinking and began to date, even half court, a lovely, freckle-faced Irish kid named Jenny Carlson from St. Lucy’s. He enrolled in “The Pier,” as the first branch of what would become the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle was called because classes were held in the cavernous halls of Navy Pier. Brilliant kid that he was, he aced his classwork and seemed destined to earn his visa to suburbia in record time.

  Then he disappeared again, without saying a word to poor Jenny or Dr. Berman or to Charles C. O’Malley. Rosemarie and I hunted him down in Ireland, where he was seeking the simple life as a hotel manager out in the Irish-speaking reaches of the County Galway, a stone-sober hotel manager. Eventually, Jenny, by then a nurse, dragged him back to the neighborhood where he belonged. They had a couple of kids, he became in rapid order an assistant state’s attorney, a judge, and a member of the House of Representatives of the United States of America.

  He still had the roguish laugh, the crooked grin, and strange notion that he and I were kindred spirits, indeed that we understood each other. We were both frauds, he seemed to hint, and we knew it but no one else did. Rosemarie and Jenny (from whose face the look of absolute worship never disappeared) and the two of us were eating supper in the Monocle, a restaurant in the Capitol Hill district of our nation’s capital.

  “That’s what Pat Moynihan said at lunch today,” I replied.

  “In the Senate Dining Room, I hope, Charles C.,” he said, his black eyes twinkling. “Rosemarie H. deserves at least that.”

  “She deserves the White House Mess,” Jenny announced.

  She and I were sipping from a half bottle of wine. Our mates had turned over their glasses.

  “Actually, the State Dining Room,” I countered.

  We all laughed again.

  “What’s the matter with Jimmy Carter that you guys don’t trust him?”

  “He treats the Congress of the United States,” he said, rubbing his fingers through his thick silver hair, “like we are the Georgia State Legislature. He sends his poor white trash staff up to us with his marching orders. Then when we get set to march, the white trash change their minds. Drives poor Tip O’Neill crazy.”

  “Tip” was the legendary Boston Irish Speaker of the House who had guided the Congress through the impeachment years.

  I had not particularly liked Jimmy Carter. Maybe it was Irish Catholic prejudice against his Southern Baptist piety. He had admitted during the campaign that he had looked at women with lust in his heart.

  “What’s the point of God’s creating women,” my good wife had protested, “if not to stir up desire in men? How does that pious dope thinks the species continues itself?”

  That’s the kind of thing Rosemarie says when she’s offended.

  “It’s like he’s running a government in exile over a true American who has to work in a foreign country that is not responsive to his wishes. Because he walked to the inauguration and carries his own bags and doesn’t have a chief of staff, he figures he represents the America of Andrew Jackson which is the whole of America.”

  “Because he’s a peanut farmer and a Southern Baptist,” Jenny joined, “he thinks the rest of us are.”

  I was not surprised. I had kind of expected that Carter would be ineffectual.

  “He’s supposed to be very bright,” I suggested.

  “Nuclear engineer and that stuff,” Tim chortled and waved his arms. “That’s a pretty narrow field and it doesn’t teach you anything about how to work with a Congress for many of whom presidents just come and go and they go on.”

  “He’s not a liberal?” Rosemarie asked. “I thought he was.”

  “He says all the right things … Another steak, Charles C.?”

  “I’d say yes and my wife would veto me and I don’t have enough votes to override.”

  “Chucky!”

  “In response to your question, Rosemarie H., he makes all the right liberal sounds and, God knows, he believes them because they’re part of his personal religion, but he has no idea how to get legislation on them through Congress. Worse than that, he never will.”

  “Ronald Reagan waits in the wings,” I said.

  “God forbid, Charles C.”

  “Isn’t Hamilton Jordan acting as chief of staff?” Rosemarie asked.

  “He pronounces his name as Jerden. Tip calls him Hambletonian Jerkin, which is a pretty good name. He doesn’t have a clue. Even some of the Southerners in Congress call him ‘poor white trash.’”

  “And the President and his personal family?” my good wife asked.

  “They use the same words,” Jenny Boylan said. “Timmy and I think it’s cruel. See what you think tomorrow afternoon.”

  The remnants of the meal were cleared away. The waitress offered dessert. The other three declined. I ordered chocolate ice cream in line with my principle that it is at least venially sinful to refuse dessert. My wife, good woman that she is, sighed audibly.

  “So, Charles C., what about this UN job that presidents seem to want you to take?”

  “Huh?”

  “The rumor is all over the Hill that Jimmy Carter will offer it to you tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Huh?” Rosemarie said.

  “News to me.” I put down my teacup.

  “The story is that you were the best ambassador in the Kennedy years, that LBJ offered it to you because you were perfect for the job, and that you turned it down flat because you were opposed to the Vietnam War.”

  “I don’t know who ranks the ambassadors,” my wife answered for me as she often does, “and LBJ never really offered it to him. He just bullshitted around like he did all the time.”

  “Rosemarie,” I pleaded weakly, “such a terrible expression to describe the behavior of the President of the United States.”

  “Accurate,” she replied crisply.

  “Well, Charles C., if he offers it to you, will you take it?”

  “No,” I said firmly. “No way.”

  “Why not?”

  “I would not want to serve in an administration which has a big majority in Congress and doesn’t know what to do with it.”

  Rosemarie did not intervene in the conversation. Generally her silence means agreement.

  “You were a great con in Bonn, Charles C. You charmed everyone. The ideal non-diplomat diplomat.”

  “If you check the article in the New York Times newspaper about that interlude, you’ll find that I was a success because of my witty and beautiful wife and dazzling family.”

  “That’s not altogether true,” aforementioned wife commented.

  “You are one of the great cons in the history of the West Side of Chicago,” Timmy persisted. “Did you not con me into believing that this lovely woman was pining for me and thus trick me into giving up my Connemara paradise—mind you, Rosemarie H.”—he put his hand on Jenny’s—“you are part of the con.”

  “I don’t think, Timmy, that I want to try to con the whole world about an administration that doesn’t know what it’s doing or how it’s doing.”

  “Secretary of State we might consider,” my wife announced, without any prior consultation.

  “I fear,” Timmy grinned his best crooked grin, “that Cyrus Vance has that job all sewed up.”

  “Genetic entitlement,” I said.

  In the years since, I have been grateful to Mr. Vance. I would have taken that job if offered. Then, I would have had to cope with the mess of the Iranian occupation of the American Embassy and President Carter’s inability to do anything about it.

  The next afternoon we traipsed across Lafayette Park from the Hay-Adams en famille. Moire Meg carried Siobhan, whom she referred to as her “big sister” because her mother, she argued, had to help with the shoot.

  The Carters were amiable people. I don’t quite know what poor white trash means, except that you don’t own a big cotton plantation. I would describe them as just plain folks from down home with a strong strain of authentic Baptist piety. They wer
e about as different from my clan as anyone in America could have been. Yet we all found it hard not to like them.

  “Not everyone has to be from the West Side,” Moire Meg whispered to me.

  “As your grandmother April would have said, it’s not their fault.”

  Siobhan’s little sister giggled, as she always did when the wisdom of the good April was cited.

  The President and his wife made a big fuss over our youngest to which she replied characteristically with coos and grins.

  They also invoked God’s blessings on her.

  Our two daughters were seated in the Cabinet Room with lemonade and cookies while my good wife and I prepared for the shoot.

  Jimmy Carter was not an easy subject. I try to capture my people at their very best while at the same time being honest about them. In my portrait of this President I wanted to show him as the intelligent, sincere, and devout man he was and leave it to others to wonder whether there was anything about him that suggested he should be President.

  All I could get at first was a man who was tense, laboring under an enormous strain, perhaps suspecting that the job might be too much for him.

  “How many presidents have you photographed, Charles?”

  “One way or another,” my wife answered for me again, “five. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford.”

  “Did any of them seem relaxed in their job?” he asked.

  “Not at all, Mr. President,” I answered. “They all were trying to learn a job that no one can ever really learn.”

  “I know what you mean,” he said with a faint smile that I managed to capture.

  “I think the problem with America,” he said, “is that we’re in the slough of despond. The war, the protests, the scandals have sapped our spiritual energy. We need to renew those energies. We need to rediscover the faith that we’ve lost.”

  That was the same message that he delivered later when he came down from the mountain (Camp David) to urge rejuvenation on America. The media quickly dismissed his Gospel message. The problem was not spiritual but the incompetence of the presidency.

  “I’ve been saying pretty much the same thing,” I said as I signaled Rosemarie for a slight shift in the lighting. “The country is in an acute hangover.”