September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

  I figured that if my sons had those genes, at least they wouldn’t get caught.

  Kevin, the oldest, was the leader, the planner, and the plotter. If I didn’t know what they were up to, I would demand an explanation from Kevin.

  “What are you three troublemakers up to now?” I would say.

  “We’re going to buy horns, Mom,” he would say, the soul of innocence.

  “Horns that make noise?”

  “Not loud noise, Mom,” he said with an impish grin that always won my heart. “We figured that the O’Malley clan is short on wind instruments. So we’d provide the wind.”

  They ended up with cheap and battered instruments, a trumpet, a trombone, and a sax (which I told them was not a wind instrument). Kev had not told me the truth. The noise was loud, very loud, to the dismay of the staff at our home on the Rhine. Each one of them seemed to be able to play by ear. They taught themselves how to play and seemed to concentrate on John Philip Sousa. The United States Marine Band they were not.

  James, the second of the “Irish triplets” as they were often called, was the sensitive, affectionate one. He realized that Giovanni Batista Antonelli (Gianni) felt left out of the band when they came back to America and signed him on as the “little drummer boy.”

  Once he asked whether, “Dad was always like he is now when he was our age?”

  “He hasn’t changed much,” I said, hugging him.

  “He was a cool kid?”

  “Coolest kid in the neighborhood.”

  “He really hasn’t grown up much, has he?”

  Aha, a delicate question.

  “Well, he has graduated from a university and is a successful photographer and fine Ambassador for the United States of America, but he’s still the coolest kid in the neighborhood.”

  “Great!” he whooped, and ran off with what he interpreted as good news.

  I couldn’t keep the conversation a secret from my husband. He did not seem surprised at either the question or my response.

  “Not everyone realized I was cool,” he said judiciously. “Indeed the adjective didn’t have that meaning when we were their age. In fact, I was, however, the coolest kid in the neighborhood.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Usually.”

  Seano was the clown of the group, like his father always ready with the quick quip. “Mom, can’t we buy the neighbors earmuffs so they don’t have to listen to us?”

  They were a fun threesome, good kids, normal kids, got along fine with everyone, played at all the required sports, did well in school. The music, at first anyway, seemed a sideline.

  I’m sure it started that day in Bonn when Chucky explained jazz to them.

  “It’s a mix of African and American music. It began with dancing and singing in a place in New Orleans called Congo Square where the slaves were free to be themselves for two hours on Sunday afternoon. Spread up to Chicago when Pops came up the Mississippi. It keeps changing as time goes on, yet it’s always the same. It requires absolute mastery of the instruments and the ability to give form and structure to the music with improvisation. It’s America’s unique contribution to world music.”

  “Yucky,” April Rosemary snorted, though she had listened carefully to Chuck’s lecture.

  “Do you have any of his records around?”

  “I might have. I’ll look for them tomorrow.”

  He knew exactly where the records were.

  The triplets listened with rapt attention for several hours.

  “Cool,” they sighed in unison.

  “Do you know him too, Dad?” James asked.

  “Sure, when his band played in Cologne, your mother and I went up to listen and have a word with him. He recognized us immediately because your mother is so beautiful …”

  “He recognized your father’s hair.”

  “ … And he remembered the times when both your grandfathers used to come to listen to him in a speakeasy on Oakley Avenue during prohibition.”

  “Is he famous?” Seano asked, eyes wide.

  “He’s the most famous jazz musician in all the world.”

  “He shaped both instrumental and vocal performances,” I added. “Jazz is what it is because of Louis.”

  “Wow!”

  “If he’s famous,” Kevin wanted to know, “how come he knows you, Dad?”

  In his own country and among his own people … I’d let Chucky Ducky field that one.

  “Because I’m Gramps’s son,” he replied gently. “Gramps is a famous architect and painter.”

  “Oh …”

  “Your father is the Ambassador of the United States of America,” I said with a touch of pride. “And he’s published a lot of picture books.”

  Those accomplishments cut not a bit of ice.

  Gradually, Chuck indoctrinated these three innocents into the theory and history of jazz with musical illustrations. They listened to the Duke and the Count, to Dizzy and Bix, to Miles Davis and Johnny Coltrane. Their education, after we came home, was supplemented by visits to Gramps, who spun wondrous yarns and produced old thirty-five-millimeter films of Pops and Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday.

  I was astonished at my sons’ fascination with jazz. They were only kids, basketball- and baseball-loving punks who constantly pushed each other around and were never quite free of trouble in school.

  I guess they had been born with genes that demanded sound. Jazz provided the sound for them.

  So that catastrophic day in August, they were down on the beach serenading the community. Kevin’s trumpet, always off-key, had the sound of Satchmo in it—still tentative, still youthful. Yet he was hearing the music, the way it ought to be heard.

  Maybe I had a jazz trio on my hands.

  Dear God, I prayed with a shiver, let them all live to develop and enjoy their talent.

  I was lying on the porch under an umbrella in a bikini that was considerably more modest than those which my daughter’s generation affected. I had put on five of that witch Maggie Ward’s pounds, which made me figure I wasn’t too skinny.

  Chuck was taking a nap. For someone who is as hyperkinetic as he is, he has a damnable habit of being able to nap whenever he wants to.

  With or without sex.

  I was considering the possibility of complaining about the absence of sex on this perfect summer afternoon, when I heard him scream from inside, “Rosemarie!”

  Always prepared for the worst when someone shouts my name that way, I hooked my bra and dashed into the parlor.

  “What happened!

  He gestured at the old black-and-white television, which we both agreed was fine for the beach.

  Young Negroes were rushing the streets of what looked like a quiet suburban neighborhood with respectable single-family homes. They were burning cars, throwing gasoline bombs, smashing store windows, hurling rocks at the police.

  The camera zoomed in on a kid no more than fifteen with an angelic face just as he threw a fire bomb at a passing car.

  “Burn, baby, burn!”

  “Chicago?” I gasped.

  “Los Angeles … A place called Watts!”

  “Why?”

  “There was a rumor that the police beat a pregnant Negro woman. Apparently it wasn’t true, but they started throwing rocks at the police last night. Somehow the cops were not able to restore order. Now it’s totally out of hand!”

  The TV people interviewed Negro “experts” Stokeley Carmichael and H. Rapp Brown. It was the end of “Uncle Tom” activism they both asserted. The black (first time I heard that word) kids in Watts had taken their destiny into their own hands. They were telling “whitey” that either America would give them what they wanted or they would “burn it all down!”

  “Dear God, Chuck,” I murmured. “What must Dr. King think?”

  “He’s probably as horrified as we are. They didn’t understand anything he taught.”

  A “black” expert said to the TV camera. “Nonviolence doesn’t work. So we’re
taking to the streets.”

  “But, Chuck, it looks like they’re burning down their own neighborhood and looting their own stores!”

  “Television is turning mass looting into a political statement. I don’t understand it.”

  “It attracts people to watch, even if it does become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

  As we watched a fire truck pulled up to a blazing television and appliance store. Men and women of every age and size were dashing out, appliances piled into their arms. The teens threw rocks at the fire truck. Gunfire rang out. The firemen wisely turned and ran.

  “Whitey ain’t no good,” one rioter informed the national television audience. “His law and order don’t be my law and order. Burn, whitey, burn!”

  “Aren’t you destroying your own neighborhood, your own stores?” an interviewer asked a bearded youth clad in an African costume.

  “Those be Jew stores. Jews been exploiting us folk, you know. We’re chasing Jews out of our community. Let them exploit someone else.”

  “Who will build new stores?”

  “Don’t matter none, you know. Jews be gone, you know! Whitey be gone too!”

  “Anti-Semitism too,” my husband groaned.

  Not only was Watts burning; so too were the last ruins of the JFK Camelot dream.

  Both of us were Democratic liberals, albeit of the Irish Catholic Chicago variety, Chucky by birth, I by conversion and conviction (and flaky, ex-drunk enthusiasm). We believed in racial and religious integration. We believed in peace and prosperity and American knowhow that could create both. Our world was being torn apart.

  Many of the Chicago Irish did not. They were racists and anti-Semites like my poor father. In the O’Malley house attitudes on race and religion were not a big deal. Chuck often told the story of how he had soaped the windows of a Jewish dry goods store up on Division Street with anti-Jewish slogans. He came home and bragged to the good April of his accomplishment. She ordered him to return to the store, apologize to the owners, and clean off the soap.

  “They are as good as we are, Charles Cronin O’Malley. Better because they work harder and are smarter. You go up there this minute and apologize.”

  So he did. With the usual Chucky Ducky charm. They hired him to work at the store part-time. When he told the story to our kids, the explicit point usually was that you lose nothing by saying you’re sorry. However, the other theme got through to them too.

  “Just like Grams,” April Rosemary said with admiration. “Be nice to everyone because people are people just like us.”

  That was not a very pure form of ideology. But it was enough. Chuck and I believed in it. During the early sixties we thought that it was where our country was going.

  “Turn it off, Rosemarie.” My husband sighed. “We’ve seen enough.”

  I flicked the switch on the television.

  “We were wrong,” he said grimly, face in his hands. “We underestimated the hatred and anger that a couple of centuries of oppression created. The Civil Rights Movement is finished. Black Power is the new way to go. Without people like us along for the ride.”

  “They can’t win without allies, can they?”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “What happens next?” I sat on the couch next to him and put my arm around his skinny shoulders.

  “More Watts!”

  Appropriately a thick thunderhead moved in over the beach and temporarily extinguished the light of summer.

  “If Jack Kennedy had lived … ?”

  “Who knows.” He sighed. “Now the crazies are running things.”

  “I hope you’re not thinking of going out there with your camera?”

  He looked up at me in surprise.

  “What good could I do?”

  Young Americans were dying in Vietnam. Blacks were burning down their own neighborhood and spouting anti-Semitism. We were both in our mid-thirties, yet our world was dying, just like summer was.

  It took five days and sixteen thousand cops and National Guardsmen to bring peace back to Watts. Thirty-four people were dead, most of them Negroes. Two hundred and fifty buildings had burned to the ground. Martin Luther King was heckled by the young radicals when he suggested that they help rebuild the neighborhood, their neighborhood. Watts never was rebuilt, despite all the federal money which was poured into it.

  After I had clung to Chucky, I walked out on the deck. Against the chill wind I put on my robe. Down on the beach the sun was shining again. My sons were still blowing their horns. Mostly it was cacophony, but there were exciting moments. Little girls, including our Moire, were dancing together on the sand. Their mothers stood on the fringes of the crowd. Somehow they seemed to approve of the jam session. Perhaps because they could be sure where their kids would be when the Crazy O’Malleys, as the group called themselves, appeared. Even April Rosemary and her nearly naked bikini-clad gang watched some at a safe distance, enthralled despite themselves. I noted with transient pleasure that my child had the best body of them all.

  Earlier in the summer she had praised me when I had appeared for the first time in my own, as I say far more modest, two-piece swimsuit. (Not, however, pathologically modest!)

  “Mom,” she said, eyeing me critically as we walked down the long flight of steps to the inviting sand, “you really are a beautiful woman!”

  “I think I’m blushing, April Rosemary.”

  “That makes you even prettier. No wonder Dad loves you so much.”

  “He’ll love me when I’m old and not beautiful anymore.”

  “You’ll always be beautiful,” she said definitively. “I suppose you and Daddy make love a lot?”

  Ah, the question about which every teen worries, but lack the nerve to talk about.

  “We are deeply in love, April Rosemary, as you can easily tell, so we do, though not anything like several times a day.”

  She giggled at that.

  “Not enough privacy with us around … More than most of my friends’ parents, I bet?”

  “Probably,” I said cautiously.

  “I hope so.”

  She flounced off down the beach to her bevy of friends.

  What was I to make of that exchange! It didn’t fit any of the books I had read about adolescents and parental sex.

  I told Chuck about the conversation in bed that night as we were both slipping into sleep.

  “Hmm …” he replied.

  “Is that all you can say?”

  “Well, you did of course tell her that you weren’t beautiful but a broken-down drunk!”

  “Charles Cronin O’Malley! I’m serious!”

  “I thought that was your standard response when someone tells you you’re beautiful.”

  “You’re scoring points against me and I’m trying to talk to you about our daughter!”

  “Oh …”

  “So what do you make of our conversation!”

  “I think I’ll have to take a lot of shots of the two of you together this summer. In fact, I’ll even do a formal portrait of mother and daughter in alluring swimsuits!”

  Chuck was doing formal portraits that summer. He had even built a small studio in one wing of our summer home.

  “I’ll never pose for it!”

  “She’ll be delighted to pose for it, so you will too.”

  “No way!”

  I knew I would.

  “Can I go to sleep now, please, ma’am?”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I did too.”

  “You did not!”

  He sighed loudly.

  “I implied that your daughter strongly identifies with you, which is no great secret, and indeed adores you. She’s also trying to figure out how she can keep on adoring you and still become her own person.”

  “You read that in some book.”

  “It will work out all right but there may be a lot of heartache for both of you.”

  “So long as it works out …”

  However, m
y husband by then was dead to the world.

  I thought of that conversation on the day of the Watts riots as I looked down on the beach. Poor little Gianni Antonelli was pounding away on his drum, the only one of the gang who had any sense of tempo. The tune they were killing was, I thought, the “Notre Dame Victory March.” It was kind of hard to tell.

  Love flowed into me, love for my kids, for the joys of youth, for summer, for the Lake, the beach, everything. If only that moment of youthful fun could be preserved forever. If only I could protect them against the darkness which lay ahead for all of us. Perhaps if I were not a drunk and a neurotic I might be able to save them. As it was I could only watch in horror and tears.

  Sunlight faded away on the beach. A front was coming through.

  The future would be a lot worse than I expected.

  6

  “How many of you men have ever been married?” I demanded. “How many of you have ever lived with a woman or slept with a woman?”

  A couple of laymen put up their hands. The rest of the group—bishops and theologians and a few captive laity—stared at me in silence. Next to me, my red-haired husband grinned happily. Clancy lowers the boom, he was thinking.

  “Then how the hell can you claim to tell us married women what sex should mean in our lives?”

  Dead silence. Packy Keenan, Maggie Ward’s brother-in-law, was grinning. My shrink ought to be here instead of me. She wouldn’t make a mess out of it like I would.

  We had read Judge Noonan’s book on contraception on the way over and realized that the Church had begun to make a really big deal out of birth control in 1930. In the previous century priests had been urged not to “trouble the consciences of the married laity.”

  “What do you think sexual love means to a married woman?” I continued my tirade. “Do you really think it’s a debt I pay to my husband when his passions get out of hand? Do you actually believe that I could survive in my marriage if I gave up sleeping with my husband? Do you think that when a woman makes love with her husband she’s actually hoping for another child when she already has five of them?”

  We were at a meeting of the commission Pope Paul VI had established to advise him on the subject of birth control. On a hot June day we had assembled in a religious order retreat house a few miles outside of Rome. The nuns in charge had assigned priests and the laymen to one section of the stuffy building and the few women to another part. What right did women have to talk to bishops and priests about marital sex?