“I don’t get it,” Sean said.
“You’re not Jewish, Sean,” Moire Meg dismissed him. “Esther is … Still, Esther, as I read the books, I am impressed by the fact that Christianity is really a Jewish sect. In the time of the Second Temple, most Christians thought that they were also Jews. It was only after the fall of Jerusalem that sectarianism infiltrated into Jewish religious culture and the two cousin religions emerged.”
“I have not read that,” Esther said, now on the defensive.
“I can give you a list of books,” my daughter said. “The point is that the split between the synagogue and the Church was gradual and was not the intent of the best people on either side.”
“Why did the Lord permit that?” Esther asked, her fork poised over her salad.
“I don’t think it was a very good idea, to tell the truth,” my daughter replied. “Yet any Christian who understands knows that Jews are still God’s people.”
I stopped eating, so struck was I by the knowledge of this child of ours, a woman with my hair and eyes and her mother’s figure and grace and an intellectual brilliance which perhaps harkened back to the wisdom of some Druidic ancestor or perhaps a teacher in one of the hedge schools who was literate in Latin and Greek.
“And they will reunite someday?” Sean, still befuddled, asked.
“Who knows the ways of the Lord?” Moire Meg waved his question aside as irrelevant.
“Yet Christians persecuted Jews from the very beginning, didn’t they?” Esther asked, as she picked at her salad.
“Not for the first ten centuries. And then the persecutions were limited to the Rhineland in Germany for a long time. Most of the popes and bishops tried to stop the persecutions. Remember when St. Bernard went from Clairveaux to Mainz to stop a massacre? Since then, of course, we’ve done a lot of bad things to you guys. If I were Jewish, I wouldn’t trust Catholics very much, though to tell you the truth I’d trust Protestants even less.”
Esther realized that she was outnumbered and gracefully ended the disputation.
“My parents didn’t have many Irish Catholic friends, so I didn’t know your people until I went to Loyola. I think the Irish are great. I admire their religious faith.”
“Why did you choose Loyola?” I asked.
“I wanted to be near my poor parents who loved me so much and I couldn’t stand the paganism at Northwestern.”
The last thing those poor parents would have expected was that their daughter would become a strict Orthodox Jew at a Catholic university.
I felt very sorry for them.
We turned to discussion of classes at school, especially the advanced course in computer programming which Sean and Esther thought was wonderful. When she had discharged her obligation to outline her religious convictions to us, Esther became a delightfully witty young woman, full of laughter and fun and mimicry. She helped us clean off the table and fill the dishwasher and chatted merrily with us. Her family might be religiously secular but they must speak with the irony and inflections which are characteristic of American Judaism and which I have found delightful since my days in the darkroom in Bamberg with Max Berman, so many years ago.
No one can say, “So what can I tell you?” with as much expression and so many expressive gestures as an American Jew. I laugh every time I hear it.
Gram and Gramps delivered Siobhan Marie back home at the appointed time. I was surprised at how quickly the hours with Esther had passed. The child, always eager to exercise her charm, promptly embraced “Essher.”
“You must be so proud of her, Mrs. O’Malley. What a lovely grandchild!”
“I’m the kid’s mother.” Rosemarie laughed.
“I’m so sorry …” Esther looked like she wanted to escape into the first available hole in the ground. “I knew …”
Rosemarie embraced her.
“No problem,” my wife assured her. “Lots of people make that mistake. Sometimes I think of her as a grandchild too.”
“You’re certainly young enough to have a baby like this adorable little girl.” She lifted the happy Siobhan Marie into her arms.
“Just barely.”
When they were leaving to return to Loyola, she pecked at my cheek and embraced Rosemarie and Moire Meg.
“I was afraid to come for dinner, but I’ve had such a wonderful time.”
Outside the temperature had fallen thirty degrees and a fierce wind was blowing.
We gathered in the family room to review the day, the child with her toys.
“Well,” Moire Meg kicked off the discussion, “my sibling may well be an asshole, but he is certainly a gentle asshole … I suppose that no male raised in this family can help himself. All he knows is being gentle. No wonder she adores him.”
“If someone is talking about me,” I said, to cover my embarrassment, “I reject all the charges. I am not a gentle asshole.”
“Not usually,” Rosemarie agreed. “Always gentle and an asshole on very rare occasions.”
Moire Meg ignored our banter.
“She’s not ready to become engaged. If he were smart about women—like you are, Chucky—he’d forget about that until next year. Even then I don’t think she’ll be ready. She has too much of her own shit to straighten out.”
“You will tell him these things?” I said.
“Sure”—she shrugged her lovely shoulders—“but he won’t listen to me. He will have to learn painfully how the psyche of a woman works … She really likes us, you know. Wouldn’t mind us as in-laws at all.”
“Too bad by us it’s not Jewish,” Rosemarie sighed.
“No it isn’t. Even if she doesn’t stick with this Orthodox conversion, I don’t think she’ll ever go back to being a secular Jew. Sounds pretty hollow to me.”
“You don’t think she’ll stick with it?”
“How would I know, Chucky? She sure is fervent, but she doesn’t know much. You saw how I ran all over her, poor kid … She’s searching for who she is. Who knows what she’ll find out? She might make a nice sister-in-law. Ask me, I’ll say nothing will come of it, even if my dear brother smartens up enough to listen to what she says, which he certainly wasn’t doing today. Too bad, maybe.”
“Do you know who you are, Moire Meg?” I asked.
“Who, me?” She seemed astonished. “Sure, I know. I knew the minute I was conceived that I was Rosie and Chucky’s baby girl … Until this little brat came along and stole my identity … Didn’t you, Shovie?”
She lifted the tyke off the floor, held her in the air, and then cradled her in her arms.
“More!”
“We’ll scare dolly!”
“Can’t scare dolly,” the small one said, hugging the dolly the same way her big sister hugged her.
“Shovie loves Momeg.”
“I’ll put her to bed,” Moire Meg told us. “She’s dead tired.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“Hokay.”
“That young woman,” I observed, “will make some girl child a wonderful mother someday.”
“And drive some poor man crazy.”
“I know the experience.”
Rosemarie
1978
“What do you expect me to say about this portrait, Rosemarie?” Maggie Ward said sternly as she waved her little hand somewhat disdainfully at Chucky’s picture. “It’s beautiful and so are you, but is that appropriate material for our hour today?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me that it wasn’t me.”
“That’s absurd. Besides, even if it wasn’t you, it would hardly be appropriate for our conversation.”
“Chucky and I are having a big argument over it,” I admitted, feeling very guilty.
“You and your husband are arguing over this lovely picture? He doesn’t want to hang it at his exhibition and you insist that he does?”
“You know that’s not it.”
“The reasons for your resistance are appropriate matter for our conversatio
n?”
“It embarrasses me,” I said, trying a new track.
“You are quite chastely covered.”
“I might just as well not be.”
“Come now, Rosemarie. You know very well that the appeal of this marvelous photograph is that the photographer has both covered you and revealed you. Very ingenious.”
“People see my boobs and my belly and my thighs whether they’re covered or not.”
“And your nipples too.”
“Right, so I should be embarrassed, shouldn’t I?”
“The photographer has not objectified you or fetishized you. Clearly he enjoys your beauty and wants the viewers to enjoy you too. There’s surely nothing wrong with that, especially as he presents you as a person whose eyes and smile defy him and all his pretensions. You like being admired—what woman does not?—and you are still keeping him and us in our respective places.”
“I threw the brush at him and then I tried to hit him and we wrestled and, well, you know what I mean.”
“One would have thought it odd if you had not … Obviously you enjoyed the experience.”
“I always enjoy it when Chucky takes my picture,” I admitted.
“You don’t want other people to see you the way he sees you, however. I wonder why.”
“It’s not me,” I said stubbornly.
“I think, Rosemarie, that we can rely on a worshipful husband to know more about who you are than you do yourself.”
“NO!”
“Yes, my dear. Definitely yes.”
“I look like this to you? You know what a fouled-up, terrible person I am.”
“I cannot appreciate your attractiveness quite the way a man might, especially a poor dear man, as we Irish say, who is in permanent thrall to you. Yet that’s surely you in that picture, you at your best perhaps. That’s what Chuck is supposed to capture in a portrait, is it not?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.”
I knew very well that it would do me no good to become angry at the little witch.
“Moreover, how many times do I have to tell you that I will not permit you to project your lack of self-regard onto me. I do not think you’re a terrible person or even a troubled one, save on occasions like this.”
“I don’t like this portrait because I don’t have enough self-regard?”
“Intermittently. This is one of those times.”
What if she was right?
“I wonder how many of those who see this fine work of art will suspect that the woman is teasing the photographer and rather enjoying the tease and that in a few moments she will engage in rather aggressive sexual behavior with him.”
“NO,”
“He is, after all, her lover. Why would that not happen after an encounter that is intimate, revealing, and patently titillating? Is that not the story? What is wrong with the story? Why are you ashamed of it?”
“I am NOT ashamed of it!”
“Are you telling me that you’re proud of your abilities as a sexually attractive woman?”
“No … Well, yes. Why the hell not?”
“Indeed.”
“I’m no Mona Lisa, Maggie Ward!”
“That’s not exactly what I was suggesting.”
“I still don’t like it … You’re trying to tell me that I can’t admit to myself that this is me, some of the time anyway, because I don’t have enough self-regard to accept myself?”
“Have we not made that point several times in these conversations?”
“Uhm …” I growled.
“And I’m afraid it’s time.”
I had walked over to her office at Marion and North Boulevard, despite the wind. It was worse walking home, especially because I was carrying a twenty-by-twenty-four print. Drizzle lingered in the air. We did not need snow flurries tonight.
I felt terrible. There was no escape from this damn portrait. My friends and family and now my shrink had told me that I was acting like a silly child. I was acting like a silly child. What would happen to me after the picture was hung? Others would admire me. I didn’t want to be admired. My mother had been admired and she died a horrible death. I didn’t want to be ordinary either. Couldn’t I be kind of attractive in a nonspectacular sort of way?
I knew the answer. I didn’t want people to know who I was, even at my best, which apparently is when I’m preparing to sexually attack my husband.
I was thankful that I had worn a warm jacket. Why had I not driven over to Maggie’s office or called a cab?
Because exercise was good for me. It helped preserve my figure which I didn’t want people to know about.
“Damnation!” I exploded as I collapsed into the easy chair next to the fireplace. Missus somehow knew I’d come home cold, so she had lighted a fire for me. Then she brought me a pot of tea.
“Lady have nice time with doctor?”
“Brilliant time.”
“Is good.”
I unwrapped the picture and studied the face. Where had I seen that face before?
I sipped the tea eagerly. Lapsang Souchong. Strong enough to walk on. Missus understood.
In the hundreds of other pictures my husband had taken of me, I had become the Marthe of an Irish-American Bonnard.
Shit!
No, I had seen her somewhere else. Where was it? All dressed up in nineteenth-century clothes. I never wore nineteenth-century clothes.
Then I remembered. I ran up the stairs to the second floor and then to the attic. Over in one dusty corner was an ancient armoire, the door hanging loosely on its hinges. It had been my mother’s, poor dear woman. I stayed away from it because inside was all that was left of her, a few gowns, a wedding dress, some jewelry I could never bring myself to wear, a few pictures, a painting that Chuck’s father had painted when they were all young together.
Even the sight of the armoire in the corner of the attic would make me weep. I avoid it as though it were infectious. How goofy can a woman be!
I looked at the painting. She had been so beautiful, a slender blonde with pale skin, not at all like me.
The tears poured down my cheeks. Why had I exiled her into the attic? It had been thirty-two years since she had died. I had told my kids very little about my parents. Was it not time to forgive? Should I not hang the painting somewhere in the house so the kids would at least know what she looked like?
I wept uncontrollably. Outside an insane chatter of rain against the roof joined the howling of an angry wind. Perfect background—insanity and anger.
Gradually my sobs subsided. The flow of tears ended. I had cried myself out. Then, with the painting in one hand, and the photo album from the bottom of the armoire in the other, I trudged down to the second floor. I left the painting in an empty bedroom and returned to my office.
I phoned the elder O’Malleys.
“April? Rosemarie. Is Vangie around?”
He was meeting downtown with an art dealer from Tucson who planned an exhibition of the watercolors that he had been doing since his retirement. Wonderful.
“I was up in the attic this morning,” I said, trying to sound like I was in full control of my tears, “and I found a painting that he had done of my mom when you guys were flappers. Well, I know you still are! It’s a beautiful work. I’d like to hang it, in the parlor I think. If we chase Moire Meg over this afternoon with it, could Vangie maybe clean it and touch it up if anything has happened to it?”
Both of us were crying. Such bittersweet memories, now perhaps more sweet than bitter.
Then I opened the photo album.
On the first page, flowery printing on a pink label said simply, “Rosemarie Finn McArdle 1857-1928.”
Who had created the album? It must have been my mother. Despite the sentimental label, it was a very skillful job. The only memories I had of Mom were of a pale, vague woman, who was usually drunk. Now I was meeting her again, as a person who cared deeply for her grandmother and who had assembled an album of memories in her honor.
She had also named me after that grandmother.
On the first pages there were sacramental certificates, baptism, confirmation, first Communion, marriage—all from St. Patrick’s Church.
She had married Colonel Michael Patrick McArdle also at St. Patrick’s in 1875—eighteen years old. She didn’t waste any time.
In the first photograph of her she was wearing an unattractive school uniform with a large bow. A neatly lettered caption said “Saint Xavier Academy 1870.”
She was thirteen years old, five years before her marriage. So young. I was only a year older. I sighed loudly.
Then I looked at the face and cried out.
It was the one that I had seen in a mirror at that age. The eyes were as dangerous as those in poor Chuck’s portrait of me, the smile the same as that smile. She was being pious for the sake of the nuns. But there was just a hint of devilment. How well I knew that look. That was the person who threw snowballs at poor Chucky.
The next one was a wedding picture. Colonel Michael Patrick McArdle was a tall, ramrod-stiff Black Irishman with a thick beard, low forehead, and pale skin. His genes were in my three sons who, I had often thought, would look wondrously fearsome in beards. How old was he when he married my great-grandmother? He had ridden with Phil Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains in 1864 as an immigrant kid. Seventeen at the most. So eleven years later he was twenty-seven, twenty-eight, not too much older than his bride, an immigrant and a soldier who had made a lot of money. He looked even younger despite his beard and military bearing.
You hardly noticed him, however, in the wedding picture. The young woman next to him, his Rosemarie, was unbearably lovely. Her eyes were as dangerous as ever and the smile on her lips said pretty clearly, “Mike McArdle, I have captured you and I will never let you go.”
I closed the album and struggled for breath. All right, she wasn’t wearing a sleep shirt, but she was me. Or I was her. Mike’s wife was Chucky O’Malley’s wife.
More tears, a lot more tears.
Then I watched her life in news clippings and photos—children, grandchildren, including my own mom. A son who died from the flu, a lovely daughter who married. My mother’s wedding, her husband’s death in the early nineteen twenties. Summers at Geneva Lake in summer clothes which, while again not sleep shirts, did not require absurd corsets.
Second Spring Page 25
