The cookie problem becomes worse every year. When we were married, I had not the slightest idea about cooking. The O’Malley daughters had learned the art from the good April. Somehow I seemed to have missed the lessons. Chucky never complained about my early efforts, nor did he complain when I began my lessons with Italian cuisine and he ate pasta every night. Through the years of cooking courses I became the best cook in the family—or so Chucky wisely says. However, my top specialty became pastry. That skill is not especially helpful for maintaining my figure, but if I have the willpower to beat the drink, I can certainly beat chocolate. Anyway, the extent and the variety of my cookie repertory imposes great demands every year at Christmas.
As in, “Rosie would you ever make some of those adorable …”
Naturally I do.
So as the joyous season approaches, I go into overdrive. I am convinced that I am the only one in the family capable of putting it all together. I have Missus to help me, which makes it easier, but still I become something of a raving maniac. My husband enjoys me when, as he says, the Christmas train rushes into the station.
Christmas 1978 was especially difficult. I fell behind schedule with all the work on my story and the exhibition, Chucky had gone into a deep purple funk, a letdown after the success of the show, and I was trying to cope with the discoveries about my family.
I left the first Rosemarie’s album on a table in our parlor to be inspected by anyone whose attention it might catch. I had not brought the albums from East Avenue over to our house yet. Sorting through them and arranging them properly was a long-term task which I would probably have to delegate to my husband—if he ever struggles out of the purple morass. It would be the kind of archival work on which he dotes.
Sorting the pictures, however, was not the issue. I had seen enough of them and heard enough of the good April’s stories to have a sense of the time and places described in Vangie’s wonderful memoir. I knew my mother as I had never known her before—her goodness, her hopes, and her terrible destiny. I didn’t want to know those things about her and yet I did. I had to put her at peace in my life and perhaps restore some sort of a relationship with her memory and indeed with her, other than a quick prayer before I went to bed every night.
It was not fair, I often thought, that God should have been so good to April Mae Cronin and so unconcerned about Clarice Powers. April had lucked out on parents, Clarice had not. Neither for that matter had I. Why do You do things like that, I demanded often in the days leading up to Christmas.
There were no answers. There never are.
Why did I make it, more or less anyway, and my mother didn’t? Rosemarie Finn’s genes? Surely that can’t be all?
Ten days before Christmas I was working late in the kitchen with some Polish recipes which Missus had taught me and wondering about my mother and myself. My husband drifted in, wearing those terrible Army fatigue clothes he affects when he’s playing photographer.
“Christmas train is coming into the station,” he said.
“On time!”
“How many new varieties?”
“Only one or two, not counting the fruitcakes … Chucky, stop stealing my cookies!”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, grabbing for a third.
“If I let you near them, you’ll destroy all my work.”
“What better cause than to keep your husband supplied with energy?”
“You can have everything that’s left over after Christmas.”
“Always leftovers for the poor little guy … Who hasn’t been much of a husband lately, I’m afraid.”
The hormones were stirring in his bloodstream, at long last. I should pretend that I wasn’t interested. Make him plead for it.
Dumb idea.
“You’re the best husband I’ve ever had, Chucky. You’re entitled to one of your deep purple moods every decade or so.”
“I rather thought it was mood indigo.”
Then and there in the kitchen, a spatula in my hand, we sang “Mood Indigo” together, danced as we hummed it, then sang again.
Nothing came of the interlude. My fault.
The next morning at breakfast, he murmured, “I got a good night’s sleep last night.”
“Haven’t you been sleeping well? I didn’t notice.”
“Rosemarie, my love, I could reactivate our family rock group in the bedroom when you are asleep and you’d never notice it.”
“That’s true. You always seem to go right to sleep.”
“And then wake up in a couple of hours and can’t get back into my dream world.”
“Why not?”
“Dr. Berman,” he said, returning to the account of the previous day’s fiasco of the Chicago Bears, “says it’s a sure sign of depression.”
“Do you take medication?”
“No, I’d never be able to hide that from you.”
“True.”
Our daughter joined us in the kitchen with a stack of toys.
“Play with me, Rooshie?”
“Mom has cookies to make,” Chuck answered. “She’s promised us each two of them. I’ll play with you.”
“Hokay, Chookie.”
Chuck
1978-1979
My spirits usually pick up as the Christmas train pulls into the station. The O’Malley clan loved Christmas as all good Christians should. While I disapproved in principle of all the money which was spent on cards, wrapping paper, gifts, and food, I had learned as a youth to keep my mouth shut on these matters. Thus I gradually became an unindicted coconspirator in the festivities. Indeed, as our house gradually filled up with small ones, I wisely opted to be on their side at Christmas because I felt that childlike wonder was the only sensible response to the day. The kids didn’t exactly understand the reason for wonder, but they at least weren’t swept away by the social demands of the season.
So I would take my position at the foot of the Christmas tree (which early on, Rosemarie realized I could not be trusted with) and play with them and their new presents. Unfailingly they let me into their world of make-believe, assuming perhaps that I was not really a grown-up. That’s fair enough. I really wasn’t.
I played with the kids and my wife was the Christmas train, bearing cookies, fruitcakes, pastries, chocolate cakes, and presents. After a while this division of labor worked out. Then suddenly our kids were grown-ups, but they soon produced kids of their own and we had ourselves a new kid who was quite content with me as a playmate because I understood her games.
As the Year of Our Lord 1978 wound down, however, the usual Christmas spirit pickup did not happen. I pretended that it did and fooled everyone but myself and maybe Rosemarie.
I continued to work with the conclave pictures, slowly seeing order and themes within them. Rosemarie, when not acting as engineer on the Christmas train, agonized, constructively, I thought, over her mother.
So we were drifting into Christmastime in a pleasant state of alternative sexual arousal and fulfillment. I even went so far as to descend on Marshall Field’s and lay in an extensive supply of Christmas lingerie for her, not that she lacked for such accoutrements.
Then the November issue of the Gramercy Blast appeared in my mail. I opened it in my workshop in the basement. The paper was a second-generation attempt at imitating the Village Voice—its tone hip, worldy, knowing, cynical. Its problem was that, unlike the Voice, it appeared at a time in which people were tired of that tone. This issue contained a powerful blast against me.
O’MALLEY PHOTO FRAUD IN CHICAGO
Those of us who were together at the Democratic Convention in Chicago know that the city is about as culturally sophisticated as Addis Ababa. Thus we expect very little from it and are never surprised. Nonetheless, it comes as a shock that the city’s once prestigious Art Institute would devote its space to the retrograde and degenerate work of Charles C. O’Malley.
Not to put too fine an edge on the matter, O’Malley, in addition to being an obscenely bad photographer, i
s a fraud as a human being. The detritus with which his propaganda machine befouls the environment is a tissue of falsehoods. He did not receive a medal for his service in Germany after World War II. Indeed, he was involved in the black market in that country. He never completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago. He was not beaten at Little Rock. He did not march at Selma. He was not assaulted by thugs during Martin Luther King’s days of rage in Chicago. He did not go to Vietnam. He was not attacked by police during the 1968 convention.
He exploits his assistants who do all his work. He has prevented his wife from pursuing a career of her own. He exploits the bodies of women. His prints celebrate patriarchal discrimination against women, the young, nonwhites, and gays and lesbians.
In the recent vomit show in Chicago he presents pictures of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon, Maureen O’Hara, and his naked wife in the same room, utterly unaware, it would seem, of the negatively transgressive context of such a statement.
The portrait of his wife is especially offensive. We must say that the aging woman should join a feminist group to have her consciousness lifted along with the other parts of her anatomy. In a quest for sexual titillation, he reduces the naked wife, a willing victim perhaps, to the status of a passive object, a fetishized whore, an aging Playboy bunny. As he himself admits, “I’m just a fast-talking punk from the West Side of Chicago who takes pictures. I still sees the world through the fuzzy eye of a box camera.” Such a person may become rich pandering to the narcissistic needs of the aging white fat cats in his portraits. One cannot expect him to take a stand against such clients’ racist, sexist, ageist, homophobic vision of the human species. Nonetheless, he is still open to the charge of profound immorality.
DIANA ROBBINS
My throat was dry, my stomach tight, my heart pounding. It was as though someone had pulled up to me as I stood on a street corner waiting for the light to change and drenched me with a bucket of vomit and diarrhea.
I didn’t know what to do. Surely the woman couldn’t get away with such an attack.
No, just as surely, given the fading but still virulent ideology of ten years ago and its influence in the media, she could. She would argue that she had written a “revolutionary discourse.”
I stumbled upstairs looking for my wife. A tray of steaming oatmeal-raisin cookies had just been removed from the oven. I stole two of them.
I tried the office. She was poring over one of her many Christmas lists, manifests for the Christmas train.
“You stole one of my cookies,” she said, looking up at me.
“Two actually.”
I gave her the Blast.
“What’s this, Chuck?” She began to read it.
Then she erupted from her chair, screaming, “Bitch!”
The dead out at Mount Carmel Cemetery might well have heard her.
“Cheap, lying bitch,” she continued. “We’ll kill her, bury her, wipe her from the face of the earth.”
The fearsome pirate queen Granne O’Malley could not have been more terrible to behold.
“I’m not sure I want to get into a fight with her …”
“You shouldn’t have to get in a fight with her. We have lawyers for that. I’ll get copies of this to Vince and Ed and Charlotte and tell them we want to destroy this rag and everyone who works on it. They’re dead!”
“I’m not a lawyer, I don’t know what we can do.”
“Plenty. We’ll have to find out what their resources are and decide whether we want to sue them in federal or local court and in Chicago or New York.”
“What good will a suit do?”
“It will catch them up in their lies, prevent the Photography Gallery in New York from backing out of their contract to do the show, and maybe enhance the sales of the catalogue. This article is reckless disregard for the truth. Not only are their statements untrue, they either know they are untrue or should know they’re untrue. The punitive damages will be sky-high.”
“We don’t need the money!”
“We do need your reputation. I won’t let this bitch harm your reputation.”
“She’s nasty to you too.”
“An aging Playboy bunny? I think that’s kind of funny.”
“Do we have to do it before Christmas?”
“Good point.” She bent over and kissed me slowly and lovingly. “No reason to ruin Christmas. I’ll call a meeting of our legal team for St. Stephen’s Day.”
“Where did you learn all that stuff?”
“From listening to Ed and Vince and Charlotte. They speak their own language … I’m a writer, Chucky, I study what people say.”
“Just like the little redhead.”
She grinned and settled back in her chair.
“Something like that. I know what he’ll say before he says it.”
“Do I have to go to this meeting?”
“Of course not. You should forget about it. We have lawyers to take care of this shit.”
“Can we afford legal bills?”
“Chucky, don’t be silly!”
“There’s better things to do with our money.”
“They’ll pay plenty, don’t you worry.”
The die, I realized, had been cast. Granne O’Malley reveled in the possibility of battle in defense of the poor little redhead’s honor. My heart continued to pound. My throat was still dry.
Merry Christmas from Diana Robbins and the Gramercy Blast.
On the way down to my workshop, I encountered Siobhan Marie, who informed me she wanted to play. I agreed. Actually she wanted to pump me about what Santa Claus might have in mind for her. She assured me that she had been nice, not naughty.
“You’re always nice, Shovie!” I said, lifting her off the ground.
“Not ALWAYS,” she giggled.
“Santa doesn’t tell me his plans,” I argued.
I wasn’t quite sure what we were giving her. So I didn’t have to lie when I denied all knowledge.
“Ah, tell me, dia.”
“No!”
“Chookie!”
Christmas was a huge success. Santa treated Siobhan Marie with accustomed generosity. The family rejoiced in two new engagements—Charlotte Antonelli had landed a River Forest lawyer named Cletus McGrath and Chris McCormack was engaged to a decorative but sweet blonde from Atlanta, whose name I didn’t quite catch.
Charlotte and April Rosemary were laughing happily.
“I never thought it would happen!” Charlotte burbled.
“I knew it all along … And he’s so cute.”
“I love him,” Charlotte said simply. “So do Mom and Dad.”
Peg seemed content.
“He’s one of our own, Chuck. I’m so happy that she didn’t join forces with some Rush Street hippy.”
There was much music and singing and dancing and kissing and, in various bedrooms, lovemaking.
My wife and I, the acknowledged leaders of song, led in each of the venues our long repertory of Christmas carols—including “White Christmas” in the quasi blues idiom with which Irving Berlin had written. Sad stuff.
The stalwart Joey Moran escorted Moire Meg to midnight Mass and showed up at our house with her afterward. He made no attempt to corner her under the plenteous mistletoe. Later, when he also appeared at the Big Party in my parents’ home, he did kiss her among universal cheering. Moire Meg did her best to appear offended by his discreet brushing of her lips but she was not successful.
Astonishingly, Esther came to the house on East Avenue, where my parents greeted her warmly and pressed some mulled wine upon her.
“We don’t drink much in this family, dear,” the good April assured her. “A lot less than I did when I was a flapper.”
“I think you’re still a flapper, Mrs. O’Malley,” she replied, saying exactly the right words.
Seano was in attendance but did not seem happy.
“She didn’t quite give him his walking papers,” Moire Meg informed me. “The
poor kid is dazzled by him. She doesn’t want to end it, but she will.”
In our own bedroom Rosemarie and I staged an extended modeling of the new lingerie I had purchased for the Christmas train.
“This is excessive, Chucky Ducky. You bought too much.”
“I’ll take it back.”
“You certainly will not … You don’t expect me to put on that thing, do you?”
She gestured disdainfully at a contraption that was part corset, part bra, and part garter belt.
“Entirely up to you.”
“Well,” she said, “let’s see how it works.”
It worked just fine.
“The idea is that a woman puts it on sometime early in the evening and the man takes it off sometime later in the evening.”
“Sometimes with fumbling fingers.”
We were having so much fun that we forgot about the conference with our lawyers the next morning.
I enjoyed a good night’s sleep.
The next day was a holiday, but we had scheduled our conference in Rosemarie’s office for after lunch so that our legal minds would be clear after a good night’s sleep. In fact no one but Charlotte seemed awake. Outside, large snowflakes were drifting lazily by the window.
“I have here copies of an article in a hip New York paper called the Gramercy Blast. Its ambitions are to be the Village Voice for the younger generation. Those ambitions seem to exceed their talent. The article is an attack on my poor husband. We seek relief, which I’m sure you can provide for us.”
It all sounded so formal. My Rosemarie’s ability to mimic the way lawyers talk was scary. She was a woman who was even more dangerous than her eyes suggested.
“I should add,” she went on while they were reading the article, “that while Chucky is here today, I don’t think he should become deeply involved in whatever action we might take. He has better things to do. I will act for him as befits an Irishwoman warrior witch. We will consult with him when necessary.”
“That’s alliterative,” I offered. “Woman warrior witch. One could extend it to say ‘wild woman warrior witch’ and even ‘wild wanton woman warrior witch.’”
Second Spring Page 29
