Second Spring

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Before I lapsed into drug-induced unconsciousness I saw that RAI was reporting the arrival in Rome of Alois Cardinal Lorscheider of Fortazaela in Brazil. The good guys had a strong ally and the Curia was caught in another lie, not that it would bother them in the least. I couldn’t follow the Italian of the newscast very well. However, Cardinal Siri was mentioned often.

  The phone rang. I ignored it. I was suffering from a cold. I had no obligation to pick up a ringing telephone. Then I thought of children and grandchildren in America and reached for it.

  “O’Malley,” I mumbled.

  “Daddy?”

  April Rosemary.

  “I think so.”

  “Mom said you had a terrible cold.”

  “I would doubtless be dead already if she hadn’t given me one of her legendary hot toddies.”

  “Oh, Daddy, those things taste good but they’re not a cure for anything. Colds are caused by viruses.”

  “In a couple of years, kid, you’ll be telling young Johnny Nettleton and his successors that they must button up when they go outside lest they catch a cold.”

  She giggled.

  “You’re being funny like you always are when you’re sick.”

  “Leave them laughing says I.”

  “You were at the funeral this morning?”

  “A drab, dreary affair. The Vatican wanted to get rid of the poor man with as little splendor as possible.”

  “The crowd looked awfully angry.”

  “At this very moment Madame la vôtre mere is trying to peddle some of my pictures of the crowd to a news service. They make the same point. The local folk firmly believe that he was poisoned.”

  “Was he, Daddy?”

  “Kid, they gave the job to a man with poor health and then didn’t insist someone take care of him. Same result.”

  “Oh … Tell Mom I called. She’s been worried about me. Like a little idiot I wasn’t taking my medicine. I just wanted to tell her that I’m feeling much better now. Jamie is such a dear.”

  “I’ll report that discovery.”

  She giggled again.

  “You’re terrible, Daddy.”

  “At least on that you and your mother agree … Keep taking the medicine.”

  “Yes, Daddy. I will.”

  As I slipped back into my dream world, I wondered what I was doing weary and sick in a hotel room in a foreign country. Why was I fixated on the outcome of an election for the leadership of an institution which was permeated by dishonesty and corruption? I was an old man. This was crazy.

  I went back to sleep.

  I found myself running through the endless marble corridors of the Vatican. A papal corpse was chasing me, waving a rusty crosier. I turned a corner, pushed opened a door, and found myself in a room filled with cardinals in their pretty red clothes. Burn him! someone shouted. Their crosiers turned into lances and they began to chase me. I ran out of the room, ducked around a corner, grabbed my camera, and leaped out to take a picture of the charging cardinals. They had changed into the 1945 Chicago Cardinal football team. Ed Murray was leading them. I dropped my camera and ran again. Suddenly the Sistine Choir appeared out of nowhere and intoned “Tu es Petrus.” I wasn’t Peter, I was Charles Cronin O’Malley. I ran right through them. The cardinals, still in 1945 NFL garb, were right behind me. Somehow I escaped into the Piazza. Raimundo and Rosemarie, the latter in a diaphanous red robe, told me that they were chasing me because they wanted to make me Pope. I was a compromise candidate.

  This is a drug-induced dream, I told myself. This is a silly dream. I should wake up and get out of here.

  So I did wake up. With a sigh of relief, I rolled over and went back to sleep. Marshal Goldberg, the great Cardinal back of that era whom I had met at a party, greeted me and dragged me to the papal throne inside of San Pietro. The rest of the cardinals, now back in ecclesiastical crimson, tied me to the throne. I will not be Pope, I insisted. Rosemarie, help me.

  She charged up to the throne stark naked and cut the ropes. The cardinals fell back in horror at the sight of an unclothed woman. I followed her as we both ran down the steps and out of the Aula, knocking several TV cameramen down.

  Then I was running again through the streets of Rome. This time Rosemarie was chasing me. She had become a science-fiction monster with several heads and a dozen or so hands, in each one of which there was a long and shining sword. I dashed into an old palazzo, perhaps the Farnese, down a long hallway, into a side room, and then into a closet inside the room. I slammed the door and collapsed on the floor, exhausted and gasping for breath.

  The door burst open and Rosemarie dashed in. She began to carve me up.

  “Rosemarie! Don’t!”

  I sat up in bed, shivering with terror. Rosemarie stood at the door in a chic new raincoat. She was carrying several shopping parcels.

  “Chucky!”

  I pulled the bedcovers over me and fell back onto the bed. I continued to shiver.

  “A dream?” she said, depositing her parcels on an ornate chair.

  “Nightmare,” I mumbled.

  “The doctors say that you are prone to them when you have a cold. Your whole organism reacts in anger at the viruses. You’re especially likely to have strong reactions … Chucky, you’re shaking like a leaf … Do you have a chill?”

  I had terrified the poor woman.

  “I want another hot toddy.”

  She sat on the bed and cuddled me. I stopped shivering.

  “Nice new raincoat.”

  “It was on sale.”

  Naturally it was on sale. No Irishwoman ever buys anything that’s not on sale. She didn’t have to tell me this because it was her money she was spending. Yet the genetic programming requires the explanation.

  “They wanted to make me Pope.”

  “No!”

  “You wanted to make me Pope! You were chasing me with twelve swords, one for each of the tribes of Israel.”

  I wasn’t sure that there were twelve. The tribes of Israel were a gloss.

  “How could I have twelve swords?”

  Her perfume was soothing, reassuring.

  “You had twelve arms.”

  “A Rosemarie monster! … Do you really want a hot toddy?”

  “No. I just want to go home.”

  “You’ll have the cold at home too.”

  “I hate this stinking city and the stinking Vatican and the stinking papacy. I want out!”

  “You don’t hate the Church?”

  “Course not. The Curia only thinks that it is the Church.”

  “It’s your call, Chucky. I’m ready to go home if you are …”

  “One good reason why we should stay?”

  “It would be nice to have the next Pope in your new exhibition.”

  Typically my wife had thought of the important fact.

  “I guess so … Well don’t change the reservations.”

  She hugged me fiercely. This was perhaps what married love was all about.

  “I’m sorry, Chucky. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “If you hadn’t, they would have forced me to be Pope.”

  “I’m glad I came in the nick of time.”

  The dream was still terrifyingly real.

  “Your eldest called to say that she had been a little idiot and was taking her medicine again. She sounded fine. She also alleged that her husband was a dear.”

  Rosemarie sank into a chair, a woman exhausted in the pursuit of good works.

  “She’ll be all right … It doesn’t seem possible that this meek little child was a rebel in the Underground only a few years ago.”

  “Bad times.”

  “They were indeed … The photo editor at the Reuters bureau loved your pictures. Said the one from yesterday appeared all over the world with the credit line that I had insisted on of course. Bought these two today. Those kids look like real bomb throwers, don’t they?”

  I glanced at the prints sh
e had sold. I had caught all the anger of the crowd at the funeral. The days were over when mobs would storm St. Peter’s. Yet the idiots over on Vatican Hill ought to wake up to the truth that people knew about their fun and games and were not amused.

  Nothing like giving the Divine Wind something to aim at.

  “Are you up to having a bite to eat?”

  I consulted my stomach. It wondered when I was going to ask.

  “Only a bite.”

  “I’ll call room service.”

  “I’d rather take a shower and try their coffee shop or whatever they call it.”

  “Good.” She popped up from the bed. “You’re feeling better already.”

  “If you didn’t take such good care of me, I’d have to feel better.”

  “I like being a mother.”

  Which was what it was all about.

  Outside the rain continued to beat against the window.

  Perfect weather for burying a Pope.

  Again I wonder if those terrible men who were in such a hurry to get rid of the poor Pope’s body for the good of the Church might not have been ready to get rid of him for the good of the Church.

  Rosemarie

  1978

  “I don’t know why, Rosie,” Dr. Kennedy, the internist at Oak Park Hospital, had said to me. “Maybe it is connected to the extraordinary sensitivity that makes him a great artist. However, Chuck’s organism reacts very badly to virus assaults. He recovers of course, but they are traumatic experiences for him.”

  “He doesn’t think he’s a great artist … I mean he won’t cut off his ear like that Van Gogh did, will he?”

  “I think not. Yet even an ordinary cold will deplete his energies and leave him severely depressed.”

  “Is there any threat to his life in these events?”

  “I don’t think so. His health is excellent, as the tests at Northwestern indicated. A serious incident of viral pneumonia might present some problems but nothing we couldn’t deal with.”

  I wouldn’t be a wife and a mother if that were enough to stifle my worries.

  I called Dr. Kennedy from Rome while Chucky was in the shower and described his symptoms.

  “No difficulty breathing, no dark sputum, no tightness in his chest?”

  “None of those.”

  “It sounds like a simple upper respiratory infection. Keep treating the symptoms. Remember lots of water and orange juice.”

  “He says that Sicilian orange juice doesn’t count because it’s so red.”

  He laughed.

  “That’s what Chuck would say … You might warn him about the depression which is inevitable with virus attacks, especially for him.”

  “I will.”

  I would not, however, quote the doctor. There was no point in my husband knowing that I was worried. Life would be very difficult without him.

  Then I called April Rosemary. Jamie Nettleton answered.

  “Hi, Rosie,” he said, “there’s a glow back in your eldest’s eyes. She’s doing fine … She says her dad is sick?”

  “Her father’s organism reacts badly to viruses. He has truly awful dreams.”

  “What’s going on over there?”

  “Awful stuff.”

  “Sounds that way … Here’s April Rosemary.”

  My daughter was contrite for having caused so much trouble.

  “It wasn’t you, kid. It was your damn hormones. No one is responsible for their hormones. Don’t worry about Dad. He’s doing fine.”

  “He was so funny on the phone … Give him my love.”

  “And ours to Johnny.”

  Johnny’s grandfather, Colonel John Nettleton, and his wife, Polly, had been Chuck’s commanding officers during his time in Germany back in the nineteen forties. Apparently my husband had even then been too much.

  He emerged from the shower, wrapped up in a terry-cloth robe, and collapsed on our bed.

  “Woman,” he said in his fake Irish brogue, and sighed. “I’m not long for this world. I need me tea and me praties.”

  “I can call room service and order tea and praties.”

  “And yourself taking me metaphors literally.” He closed his eyes and smiled beatifically. “A dish of chocolate-chip gelato would do nicely, however, wouldn’t it now?”

  He was in one of his silly phases, which I adore and it’s a good thing I do or I’d kill him.

  “Ah, no, won’t we go downstairs to have something more substantial, just as soon as I catch me breath.”

  “You should remember what Dr. Kennedy said to you.”

  He frowned.

  “Which thing he said to me?”

  “About depression during and after viral attacks?”

  “Depression? Me depressed?”

  “Yes, you depressed.”

  “I can be depressed if I want to.”

  “You can’t help being depressed. It’s physiological. You just have to remember not to take it seriously.”

  “How can I not take it seriously?”

  “By listening to me.”

  “Oh, THAT!”

  For the next couple of days we divided our day into three parts, morning photographs—or, as he would insist, picture taking—afternoon nap, evening early dinner before I put Chuck to bed. Each morning he would announce cheerfully that he had beaten the cold and each evening he would be almost incoherent at bedtime.

  In truth, however, even in full health Chuck could be incoherent when he was in one of his moods.

  “Conclave,” he muttered one night as he was going to sleep.

  “Hmm …”

  “No,” he said, “conclaves.”

  “That’s right—there will be two of them this year.”

  “Great idea.”

  In all honesty, I would have liked some serious loving. That’s what a woman has a husband for, among other things. Well, as a lot of women say, it’s not the only thing in a marriage. Certainly not, but I’m not sure most of us would be able to put up with our husbands if there weren’t some high-quality lovemaking on occasion. Taking care of the husband when he’s sick is really what intimacy is all about.

  Normally with Chucky this was hardly a problem. I haven’t had any other lovers, so I can make no comparisons. However, from listening to my friends talk, I suspect that a lot of men are clumsy and insensitive, perhaps because their wives really don’t want to instruct them. I lucked out with Chucky Ducky in more ways than one. Somehow, he knew me from almost the beginning. Maybe it’s part of the artistic sensitivity which Dr. Kennedy talked about.

  I could wait. Chucky Ducky wasn’t about to go away.

  He didn’t know everything about me. No man ever knows everything about his woman (and vice versa, though I think we do better because we spend so much time with children). Sometimes I send him mixed signals, which is my fault. Still, he does pretty well. He works hard at it too.

  It turned out the next morning that he was planning a book about the two conclaves, one that would portray both the splendor and the ugliness of the Vatican. That meant we would hang out in front of the Vatican each morning to take telephoto shots of the various cardinals, usually with the most unflattering expressions on their faces.

  It was a profoundly subversive scheme. We both loved it.

  “You’re supposed to be a writer, woman, aren’t you?”

  “Some people think so.”

  “Then why don’t you start taking notes?”

  “For what?”

  “For the text and commentary in this book—something like, how did you put it again, ‘Why should women take seriously rules about sex from celibate men who have never had children, wear funny dresses, and don’t particularly like women.’”

  “Brilliant idea!”

  I pulled out my notebook and began to write.

  Everyone looks stupid, venal, and arrogant on some occasions. Church leaders (Catholic or not) probably look that way more often than the rest of us, since they figure they have a monopoly on God.
However, cardinals about to elect the religious leader of a billion people, plus or minus as Chucky says, seem to look that way most of the time. So most of the shots we sent around the world that week and stockpiled for our book were not particularly flattering. Nor were those that we took in the Sala Stampa, particularly of my old friend S’ter. He who holds the camera, I realized, gets even.

  Some of the men, like Franz Koenig, who came to talk to us in the Sala or at press conferences, were brilliant, gifted, honest men. We’d put them in the book, just to show that there were good guys too. The surprising thing was that the distance between the good guys and everyone else was so great, perhaps everyone else was insecure because they were not very bright.

  “Your photographs,” Adolfo said with a hint of a smile at supper over the weekend back at Sabatini’s in Trastevere, “are attracting some notice around the world.”

  “Good,” said Chuck as he destroyed a dish of pasta. “That’s the general idea.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “There is some suggestion that you are trying to make the cardinals look like fools.”

  “Who, me? Would I do that?”

  “Men like Suenens and Lorscheider laugh and say they are merely realistic pictures of men hard at work on difficult decisions.”

  “Certo,” I said. “What else would Chucky be doing?”

  “Subverting the Church.”

  “How could they say that if they saw my picture of Papa Luciani?”

  Adolfo laughed.

  “And the next pope, you will photograph him?”

  “If he’ll let me,” Chuck said meekly.

  “And what will he look like?”

  “There’s a difference, Rae, between a formal portrait and a news shot. In formal portraits I try to present men as they are but in the best possible way. I don’t lie, but I give them every possible break.”

  “Even Siri?”

  “He has the same rights as everyone else.”

  “Bene. That will be useful should any questions arise.”

  “Will it be Siri?” I ask anxiously.

  “There are two camps”—he toyed with his wineglass—“inside the Siri camp. There are those who realize their own weakness and hope to use a strong first-ballot showing to enhance their negotiating power. And there are others who believe their own propaganda and will fight to the bitter end, just as they or their predecessors did the last three times. They see it as their last chance to undo the Vatican Council—which of course is impossible.”