Second Spring

by Andrew M. Greeley

  If she had wanted to try film, I wouldn’t have objected.

  What right has the Baron von Frankenstein to complain?

  “I don’t know where my eldest got her tongue,” Peg, beaming with joy over her foster sister’s triumph, whispered in my ear.

  “From grandmother April.”

  “Chucky!”

  As for the good April, she merely said to everyone who would listen, “Well, poor little Rosie has always been cute. She gets more cute every year.”

  “Chucky Ducky,” poor little Rosie whispered in my ear, “I want a couple of life-size blowups. You can do that, can’t you?”

  “I suppose so … Where will you put them?”

  “For starters one will go downstairs in your workroom.”

  She kissed my forehead.

  “Okay,” I said with little enthusiasm.

  So.

  So. I sat in the corner and listened to it all, up to my neck once again in the slough of despond. Why had I become so excited by a silly little scheme that I had not really cooked up?

  Because I was desperate for excitement.

  I rejoiced with Rosemarie. She was entitled to the celebration. I was only a fraud, playing a foolish game for quick laughs.

  I’d better get back to work on the damn Conclaves thing.

  Rosemarie

  1979

  In March I began to worry seriously about Chuck.

  One cold day with the wind howling through the barren trees, the slush frozen on the streets and sidewalks, and snow flurries sifting a deceptive white sheen over the whole ugly mess, he appeared in my office with the same set of Conclaves prints. I was working on the galleys for my new story.

  “My heart isn’t in this anymore, Rosemarie,” he said.

  I’d never heard him say anything like that in all the years of our marriage. If Charles C. O’Malley, Ph.D., started something, he finished it.

  He had gone into a tailspin after our triumph over the Blast and its allies. He should have been celebrating. I don’t know how he pulled it off, but I knew that he would. It was a real Chuck O’Malley masterpiece. He had every reason to rejoice. Instead he stewed. He couldn’t explain to me why he stewed.

  “It all seems so silly.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged.

  “I don’t know.”

  When his show started at the end of the month, there would be some critical reviews from those New York narcissists who had to prove their worth by dissenting from the collective reaction and there would be those who believed that nothing good can come out of Chicago. However, the show would surely be a huge success. Everyone would talk about the portrait of Helen Clancy, the writer. I figured I could live with it, pretending to be flattered even at those times I might be a little bit embarrassed.

  “Have you had cosmetic surgery, Ms. O’Malley?”

  (No.)

  “Do you dye your hair, Ms. O’Malley?”

  (What do you think?)

  “How do you keep your figure, Ms. O’Malley?”

  (Genetic luck and hard work.)

  “Is the character in your stories really based on your husband, Ms. O’Malley?”

  (No way. My husband is a far richer, far more multifaceted character.)

  “What do your children think about having celebrities as parents?”

  (They don’t believe it.)

  ETC.

  I had gone through this comic routine with him. His response was only mild chuckles.

  He said he didn’t think he’d go to the opening. He’d probably catch another cold on the plane.

  Then he comes into my office and tells me that his heart isn’t in the Conclaves book anymore.

  This stuff was getting to be too much. I resisted the temptation to lose my temper.

  “Why not, Chuck?” I said.

  “I don’t like attacking the Church. It’s the only one we have. Sometimes it’s not much. We could be doing a lot of harm.”

  “We’re not attacking the Church, Chuck. We’re honestly depicting its leaders and the cronyism which produces them. We’re implying that the Church would be a lot better at its mission if this were changed. This is criticism, I admit. Didn’t Paul criticize Peter? Didn’t St. Catherine criticize popes? Is there not a public opinion in the Church like Father Ed says?”

  “I know all these things, Rosemarie. All I’m saying is that I don’t want to do it. Not now anyway. Maybe not ever. It’s all right with me if you arrange the prints and write the commentary. My stomach ties up in knots when I think about it. The Church has enough troubles without my adding to it.”

  I thought of the birth control commission and our honest efforts to furnish good advice to Pope Paul. Now we were degenerates, outcasts. I didn’t want to get even. I merely wanted change. I wanted women to have some input into decisions about the sexuality of women.

  Someday maybe. Not today.

  “All right, Chuck. I understand. At least I think I do. You don’t mind if I work on it after I’m through with my galleys here?”

  “No, not at all. I just can’t do it anymore.”

  He trudged out of my office, like a sick little puppy.

  I would have to talk to Dr. Berman again.

  He agreed reluctantly to attend the opening in New York. On the plane he started to sneeze and cough.

  “Three colds in a winter,” he laughed. “Three strikes and you’re out.”

  At the Photography Gallery he was his old charming self again. The leitmotif of his comments was that he was now the man who had made the portrait of Helen Clancy, the famous author.

  “We better take him home first thing in the morning, Rosie,” Moire Meg warned me.

  I agreed.

  He stumbled around at La Guardia like a man in a trance.

  “I think I have a fever,” he mumbled, as the plane took off.

  “You’re burning up, Chucky.”

  He went into chills twice on the trip.

  It seemed to last forever. We circled Chicago several times because of a weather front that was coming through the city. Purgatory is waiting for a plane to land in Chicago during a winter snowstorm.

  Finally, in the blowing and drifting snow we found our way to the emergency room at Oak Park Hospital. Fortunately, Dr. Kennedy was on the premises. He ordered X rays and blood tests. Then he put an oxygen mask on Chuck and sent him to intensive care. I knew that it was all a nightmare. I would wake up and he would be fine.

  “It’s very serious, Rosie,” he said. “Chuck has a powerful, pneumonia-like respiratory infection and a fever of a hundred and four. We’re doing all we can to bring the fever under control. I don’t know exactly what it is … We’re doing our best …”

  “How serious?”

  “Very serious.”

  “Potentially fatal?”

  His face grim, he took a deep breath.

  “I hope and pray not.”

  “Mom,” Moire Meg whispered, “we better say the rosary.”

  Chuck

  1979

  One of the things that happened in 1979 was that I tried to die. I also met a very strange woman.

  I was pretty sure I would die as soon as I heard Dr. Kennedy’s voice at Oak Park Hospital. He was worried. Well, he should be worried. I was sick, burning up with fever, shivering with chills. I was, I told myself, not long for this world.

  Really.

  I didn’t really mind. Everyone had to die sometime. Maybe I was a little young by current standards, but that was the way of it.

  Some of the women in my family were murmuring prayers at the bedside. It was soothing, like the monotone of the living rosary in the St. Ursula schoolyard so long ago. May crowning. Rosemarie deliberately fell off the ladder into my lap. Terrible child.

  I don’t mind if You take me, I told God, but You have to take care of her.

  The voice in my head wasn’t God, but what was left of my own consciousness. “She can take care of herself. She always has.”
<
br />   Right.

  I’d miss all the Crazy O’Malleys.

  Then people were chasing me—rednecks, cops, blacks, Vietnamese, cardinals. Demons all of them. The Vietnamese kid whose head the Marines had blown off in the basement of the Saigon Embassy demanded his head back. I told him to bother the Marines, I didn’t have it. Then a lot of black-clad nuns screamed at me. They were replaced by a swarm of feminists who tore the frames off the wall at one of my shows, then a horde of screaming critics who objected to my being Irish.

  I kept ahead of them. I ran down alleys and side streets and main streets and expressways and swam across Twin Lakes and Lake Geneva and Lake Michigan and the Tiber and the Grand Canal.

  A pope condemned me in Latin, then in Greek, then in broken English.

  I shouted back at him. A swarm of Swiss Guards marched at me with their pikes at the ready. They were followed by cardinals with faggots and lighted tapers. They were burning me at the stake because I was a degenerate. The flames were burning all around me. I tried to think of something clever to say, but it was too hot. In self-defense I slipped down into the darkness of death. As I did I heard Edward administering Extreme Unction to me.

  No, Sacrament of the Sick.

  Later, much later, I opened my eyes. Rosemarie was smiling down at me.

  “You had us worried, Chucky,” she said.

  “Sorry about that.”

  Then I caught fire again.

  The next attacks were fragmentary, disorganized, terrifying. I could no longer run. I was lost in a frozen forest, buried deep in a cave, hiding among a pride of lionesses who didn’t seem to notice me. I was immobile, doomed, almost dead.

  Then I looked up and saw a woman standing next to the bed. She seemed to be wearing a red dress and a blue cape. Her wide brown eyes were kind and her smile gentle. I knew who she was.

  Power, calm, love.

  “Have you come to collect me?” I asked.

  “Collect you, Chucky?”

  “It is said that you or your friends collect people when they’re dying.”

  Her smile broadened.

  “We do that sometimes to help people who are frightened to cross the line. Someone who is as reckless as you are won’t need that kind of help.”

  “Curious.” I sighed and closed my eyes.

  Later, I don’t know how much later, I opened them. She was still there, still smiling.

  “Then why are you here?”

  She seemed surprised.

  “To take care of you.”

  “Why me?”

  “That is the kind of question you should never ask of us.”

  “I see.”

  Again I closed my eyes.

  “How do I know you’re really out there? Maybe you’re only a creation of my feverish brain.”

  “Fever and medication.”

  “Right.”

  “Couldn’t it be a combination of both?”

  “I guess so.”

  Then it didn’t seem an unreasonable possibility.

  How do I remember all this? Hey, if you have a visit from her, you remember it all, maybe because she wants you to remember it all.

  “You’re very sick,” she said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Rosie is terribly worried about you.”

  “Rosemarie,” I corrected her.

  “Sorry,” she laughed.

  Her laughter was like chimes echoing across a mountain meadow in spring.

  “She can take care of herself.”

  “You will recover, Chucky. That’s why I’m here. And don’t ask why we’re concerned about you. We’re concerned about everyone.”

  I wondered who the “we” were. Better not to ask.

  “I have a hunch I’m kind of special. Why?”

  She lifted her shoulders in an unmistakably Jewish gesture.

  “That should be evident.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “We are very fond of Rosemarie.”

  “You should be.”

  “You saved her.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Come on, Chucky, you know better than that. You were right the other day when you thought that she was your masterpiece and not that very clever portrait.”

  “You can read thoughts?”

  “Only faces … I’ve had a lot of practice.”

  I sighed and closed my eyes again.

  I was very sick. Delirious probably. Yet I was having a rational, more or less, conversation with someone from another level of reality.

  I opened my eyes, much later I think.

  “Are you Jewish or Catholic?”

  She thought that was very funny.

  “I mean you look Jewish, kind of, but you also remind me of Rosemarie.”

  “That ought not to surprise you.”

  “If you say so.”

  “We must get down to business, Chucky.”

  “Anytime you say. What’s business?”

  “Your identity crisis. It has to go.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that you must value your work for what it is, a major contribution in your field. It means you must value yourself as a great man who couldn’t take himself seriously even if he tried. It means you must treasure the gift that we gave in your wife. It means that you must believe that there is much important work for you yet to do. It finally means that you must not question the depth and power of our love for you.”

  “Is that all?”

  “It’s not as much as it seems. It’s really very simple.”

  “I can see that.”

  “People will come to you and tell you what you must do. Some will be completely wrong. You will have no trouble recognizing them. Others will be partially right. They will be very dangerous. Beware of them.”

  “Who should I listen to?”

  She seemed surprised.

  “Rosemarie, who else? She is your guiding star, your destiny, your illumination on the way home.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Remember, she is your reality check.”

  “Okay.”

  The Lady was preparing to leave. I wished she would stay.

  “I would tell you to always love her, though you know that you have no choice in the matter.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Now I will get rid of this illness. As a bonus I’ll see you contract no more colds.”

  “Can you really do that?”

  She laughed and bent over to touch my forehead with the palm of her hand.

  The sickness disappeared.

  “Do you have to leave me?”

  “I’ll never leave you, Chucky.”

  The scent of flowers filled the air around me.

  I opened my eyes.

  All the women in my family were looking down at me, rosaries in their hands, tears rushing down their faces.

  “The whole monster regiment,” I said, and winked.

  “Are you all right, Chucky?” my wife asked.

  “I’m fine. I want to go home.”

  “His fever’s gone,” someone said.

  I repeated my demand.

  “I want to go home.”

  I looked around the room. Intensive care. No flowers. Yet the smell of flowers was everywhere.

  Nice effect.

  Chuck

  1979

  “So.”

  “So get me out of here.”

  “So you have been very sick, Chuck. Dr. Kennedy wants to be certain that you don’t have a relapse.”

  “I won’t have a relapse.”

  “You are also very weak. A severe trauma assaulted your organism. It will take time to recover.”

  “I have work to do. My wife and I are doing a book about the conclaves.”

  “Despite your rediscovered energy, how long do you nap every day?”

  “A couple of hours,” I admitted.

  “So.”

  “So. I should cool it?”

  �
�You will have no choice. You must be patient with yourself.”

  “That’s what my wife says.”

  “So. You must listen carefully to me, Chuck. You will make no serious decisions for the next six months, do you understand?”

  “If you say so …”

  “Many physicians neglect to tell their patients that pneumonia leaves a terrible depression. It is not like your recent identity crisis. Your organism will protest against what was done to it. This protest on some occasions will be very powerful. You must be wary of it. Tell yourself that the depression is purely physical and that eventually it will go away.”

  “All right,” I said. “Seems reasonable.”

  “With your permission I will also tell your wife.”

  They’re ganging up on me. I feel fine. I just want to go home.

  “That’s a good idea. Thank you.”

  It would keep him happy.

  “So.”

  After he left, Sister Mechtilde came to see me again. A tall, thin woman in her middle forties, she had returned to the hospital after years of work in South America. Her experiences with the very poor natives out in the jungle were fascinating. I was less enthused with her self-appointed role as my spiritual director.

  “You have had a very easy life, Charles.”

  Nuns still did not like nicknames.

  “Compared to your people, I have.”

  “Your lifestyle could sustain a whole village.”

  I had tried to argue economics with her. She dismissed my explanations with a wave of her hand.

  “It is not right that Americans be so comfortable and these people so poor.”

  Her theme was that God had given me a new chance at life. I should dedicate this new chance to the service of the poor and the oppressed. I should live a radically simple life.

  “God will judge you sternly if you return to your old ways.”

  I thought she was wrong. The Lady who had come to visit me had represented a different God. Yet perhaps this was a continuation of her message.

  “You must humble yourself and serve the poor,” she insisted.

  Rosemarie was standing at the door. She was dressed in a severely tailored brown silk suit with a yellow scarf. Important writer in town. Her frown was a warning of a coming explosion.

  “I wish, Sister, that you would leave my husband alone. He has been very sick. He does not need your preaching.”