September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “They believe they can, Rosemarie. They don’t understand that nothing is secret anymore. Your good friend Cardinal Heenan will go back to London and spill the beans by telling everyone that they must prepare the laity for change lest they be shocked when it happens.”

  Which it turned out is exactly what he did.

  The next day we went down to the Vatican to meet the Pope. This time I had brought along my papal black clothes, economizing as I almost never do.

  He was a charming and gracious little man, with bright eyes and a wonderful smile. Alas, he was as agonized as Pope John had been cheerful. Try as he might, Chuck was not able to get a good picture of him—just like later he would be unable to get an adequate shot of Richard Nixon.

  He thanked us for our work on the commission. It was, he said, a very difficult matter with enormous implications. As Pope he had to worry about the whole church and about the shock that a change would cause among the simple faithful. One had to balance so many different problems. He raised his hands in an almost despairing motion of a man trying to maintain a balance.

  I could not help but like him. I even felt sorry for his heavy burden. Yet I also remembered the heavy burden of women who had too many children and whose health had been ruined by too many pregnancies. I also thought of the marriages that were being eaten up by the stress and strain of trying to cope with the birth control teaching and still salvaging their love life.

  So I opened my big, shanty-Irish mouth again and said that I thought men and women I knew would be shocked if there wasn’t a change.

  He sighed and raised his hands again in the balancing motion.

  “What do you think, Chuck?” I asked my husband as we rode back to the Monte Mario.

  “We gave the poor little guy what he wanted and he’s scared stiff of it.”

  “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “So do I … Rosemarie.” He put his arm around me. “You were absolutely sensational at that meeting. I was never more proud of you.”

  “I’m just a loudmouth, shanty-Irish fishwife,” I said sadly.

  “You don’t believe that,” he insisted.

  But I did.

  Well, at least I half believed it.

  Finally, as we would later find out, birth control and married love would cease to be the issues, to be replaced by the issue of the authority of the Pope. The hard-core conservatives on the commission—the handful of Italian cardinals and bishops and a couple of their house theologians—would lose the argument about married love. They would win the argument about papal authority.

  1966

  7

  “Martin,” my husband said to Dr. King, “it’s not a good idea. It won’t work. You can’t win and you’ll be fighting the wrong people.”

  It was in December of 1965, the year all our trouble began. We were sitting in Dr. King’s hotel room in downtown Chicago. Aware that his clout with younger blacks was slipping, he was planning to found a Chicago Freedom Movement to end segregated housing in Chicago, just as he had ended transportation segregation in the South.

  “Chicago is the most segregated city in the North,” he replied to my husband. “It’s the place we must strike first.”

  Chuck sighed. He was no defender of Chicago housing practices, but he saw the problem in a wider context than did either the Civil Rights Movement or the national media, which always loved a chance to stick it to Chicago.

  “Your enemies are not the poor ethnics who are trying to defend their neighborhoods and their homes from racial resegregation. Your enemies are the suburbs to which the rich can flee to escape what they see as the crime and the violence in the city. Gage Park and Marquette Park are not the right targets. You should be marching in Highland Park and Orland Park and Palos Park and Lincoln Park and Lake Forest and Kenilworth. Even our neighborhood Oak Park. If those neighborhoods could be integrated, it would take the pressure off the city housing markets and white people would have nowhere to run. They would have to stay in the city and adjust to integration.”

  Chuck and I were both strong believers in integration, though we had the feeling that we were losing ground as we had that year on everything else.

  “We will integrate Gage Park and Marquette Park,” Dr. King insisted.

  “I’m not sure you will, not yet anyway. In the end blacks will move into those neighborhoods and like all the other neighborhoods in the city where that has happened they will promptly be resegregated. Eventually you will have an all-black city and all-white suburbs. Do you want that?”

  Dr. King hesitated.

  “So long as our people will have decent housing, we might be willing to take that chance.”

  The conversation was always calm and controlled, but not exactly relaxed.

  “Daley won’t let you get away with it,” I said. “Like him or not, he doesn’t intend to let that happen and he has the votes and the power, even the black votes.”

  “We’ve fought other strong men before.”

  “This is Chicago,” Chuck said softly, “not Montgomery. Marches won’t do it here. Housing is a different set of problems.”

  “We will force Chicago realtors to sell homes to black people,” he insisted.

  The argument went nowhere. We parted as friends who had agreed to disagree.

  “There are racists in Marquette Park,” I said to Chuck as we rode home on the Lake Street L.

  “Sure there are,” he agreed. “And they will demonstrate against the parades. But most of the Lithuanians out there will stay home. They don’t particularly want racial integration. They are afraid of crime and violence and falling property values. They love their neighborhood. They remember, as most folks don’t, that they were victims of both the Nazis and the Communists during the war and that they are the survivors. But they don’t like hate or violence. Martin is trying to stir them into violence like he did Sheriff Clark in Selma. It won’t happen. Dick Daley won’t let it happen.”

  “He did not seem to understand that the white working class are not the appropriate scapegoat. If he could integrate the suburbs …”

  “Like Oak Park?”

  “We’ll integrate anyway, Chuck. It’s already happening. And most of us won’t panic. We have the resources to integrate without resegregating. Marquette Park doesn’t.”

  “They’re white ethnic Catholics, Rosemarie, the perfect scapegoat. It’s not fair to go after them.”

  Chuck was right in principle. To select the Lithuanians and Slavs as targets and not go after the rich Lake Front Liberals or suburbanites was to misunderstand terribly who the real enemy was. However, Dr. King’s strategy called for marches and demonstrations in the city. The white ethnics were the only available target, however questionable the morality of attacking them.

  Whatever one might say about the theory of integrating Chicago housing by the strategies the Civil Rights Movement had used in the South, in practice I was right. In Chicago you don’t fight City Hall. You make a deal with it. Richard J. Daley was not about to let Martin Luther King or anyone else take Chicago away from him. He was no racist and he believed in cautious racial integration—but in his style and his own terms. He would win. King would eventually have to leave town with an empty compromise.

  “I feel like weeping,” I said as the L train rumbled on.

  “Me too,” my husband admitted. “We’re liberals in an era when radicalism is becoming chic. So we’re losers.”

  It would later be said that, since we liberals were not part of the solution, we were part of the problem.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked as we got off the Lake Street L at the Oak Park Avenue stop.

  “We’re not going to do anything. We’ll sit it out. Like we’re sitting everything out these days.”

  Naturally, my Chucky Ducky was not capable of sitting anything out. Not as long as he owned a camera.

  (I pause to think that if any of my grandchildren should read these notes, they’ll think we were crazy. How could we tak
e politics so seriously? How could we worry about riots and marches and demonstrations and even about wars? Didn’t we know that our convictions about politics were all wrong? Didn’t we understand that you couldn’t change the world or even our country much by political involvement? Where did we get this idealism that drove us during the 1960s? They will probably lump it with the very different idealism that the 1960s generated, which they now know had more to do with sex and drugs and rock and roll than it did with peace and justice. They won’t understand that ours was the pragmatic idealism of the early 1960s, of the brief three years of John Kennedy’s presidency.

  How can I explain to them that we cared deeply about peace and racial justice but that we felt that you worked for both by winning allies, by making compromises, by dealing? Will that make any sense to them at all? Were our dreams so obliterated in the abyss of the 1960s that even the memory of them was lost and only our own personal heartaches survived.

  Or perhaps the wheel will have turned again and my great-grandchildren will perhaps understand why we suffered so much because our friend Dr. King and his colleagues never thought through their strategy for dealing with Chicago.

  Maybe I’ll erase these last paragraphs which I had to write, if only to explain to myself why I felt so sad that December evening we walked home from the L as a light snow dusted Oak Park.)

  I’ll put these lines in parentheses.

  Chuck could not have sat out that summer of 1966 at the Lake, not when so many good photographs were demanding to be shot on the Southwest Side of Chicago. So we found ourselves on a hot summer day in 1966 on Marquette Road as Dr. King’s marchers—mostly black, but not entirely—protected by vigilant, if unenthusiastic, police marched into the Lithuanian neighborhood of small and neat bungalows with carefully cropped lawns and statues of Mary standing in silent bafflement.

  Martin believed in nonviolence. But nonviolence worked only if the violent attacked you. He challenged the violent to be violent.

  We should have been at Long Beach. We were having April Rosemary problems again. Chuck didn’t think they were all that serious. I did. Perhaps because I was a drunk and my mother had been a drunk, I was afraid that my daughter would become a drunk too. Didn’t alcoholism run in families?

  My daughter and I had been good friends at the end of the previous summer. Chuck had remembered his sleepy resolution to do a formal portrait of both of us in our swimsuits. I insisted that I would have no part of such indecencies. My daughter had determined that I would. She won of course. At first I bluntly refused to wear the new suit she had purchased for me.

  “I will have no part in pornography,” I said sternly.

  “Mo-THER! You’ll look sweet in it.”

  Chucky Ducky didn’t help matters when he whistled like the wolf he is at me when he saw it.

  “Doesn’t she look totally sweet, Daddy!”

  “Among other things.” He sighed.

  I had to admit that I wasn’t totally grotesque. I had put on the ten pounds which that bitch Maggie Ward had prescribed. I was still exercising every day in the gym I had installed in the basement at home near the darkroom when I had bought the house in 1949.

  While Chuck’s journalism efforts involved snapping hundreds of pictures, now with a motor-driven feed on his Nikon, his portrait style was fastidious, not to say fussy. The background for our portrait was a mirror which reflected both our backsides (to which I objected in vain) and the Lake surging with whitecaps under a cumulus sky. I figured that it was supposed to say something about the turbulence of femininity. I didn’t like that either. Naturally I said so.

  Chuck messed around with light readings—naturally he had set up a battery of lights. After all, it was a formal portrait even if the clients were dressed in virtually the ultimate in informality.

  I complained about the delays, the repeated light readings, the rearrangements of lights, the interminable proofs he made with a Polaroid, the focusing and refocusing of the lens on his huge portrait camera, the glare from the light, and the whole silly, quasi-pornographic project.

  “Mo-THER,” my daughter reprimanded me, “you’re being a total bitch.”

  “I think she looks gorgeous when she’s being a bitch,” Chuck said with a wink for April Rosemary’s benefit.

  “She more gorgeous when she’s laughing,” the little brat said. “Make sure, Daddy, you take a picture when she’s laughing.”

  I was outnumbered. My daughter and my husband were conspiring against me. I felt awkward and embarrassed. Chucky had photographed me often. I was the wife-model of artistic legend. He had even captured me on film with my daughter. Now, however, that daughter had the body of an adult woman, if not the maturity. I didn’t like the idea at all. My modesty was offended by the whole project. I had argued that morning to my husband that he should take only our child’s picture. He dismissed me as a puritan.

  Earlier in that summer, I had said to my daughter under our personal umbrella on the sand, “You made me blush yesterday, April Rosemary. It’s my turn. You have the best teenage body on the beach.”

  Blush she did, down to the tops of her breasts.

  “Mo-THER!”

  “I admit I’m prejudiced, but I’m still right.”

  “I am NOT beautiful.”

  “Now I sound like you and you sound like me.”

  We both giggled. A few moments later she ran away from our umbrella to join her friends, embarrassed and pleased. Then she turned around and ran back to me.

  “Thank you, Mom.” She kissed my forehead and ran off again.

  I wept.

  So after an eternity of purgatorial fussing around, Chucky Ducky finally emerged from under the hood, grinned at us both, and said, “Laugh!”

  April Rosemary buried her elbow in my ribs and chortled, “Laugh, Mo-THER!”

  So we laughed.

  The absurd hilarity of the situation exorcised my silly false modesty. I relaxed and enjoyed the fun. The scene was not pornographic, not erotic. It was only comic. My husband and daughter had perceived the comedy and I had not. Poor, dumb, stupid me. Anyway, I enjoyed the last several minutes of it as Chuck shot several packs of color plates.

  “Now the two of you go down to the beach and leave me alone in the darkroom. I’ll totally not tolerate distractions.”

  We both hugged him fiercely. Laughing, we ran down the steps and dove into the cold water of the Lake.

  “That was fun, Mommy.”

  “Great fun!”

  The portrait, which hangs in the parlor in our House on the Lake—and stops all traffic when strangers visit us—is, I must admit, a huge success: two gorgeous women laughing at themselves, the photographer, the mirror, the Lake, the whole world, and life itself. With little protest from us, he hung it at his next exhibition. I suggested that he call it “April and Rosemarie Revisited,” the title of his first book. Instead he titled it, “Mother and Daughter Laughing.”

  I would look at it often in the terrible years to come and wonder whether the miracle of laughter would ever return.

  My daughter and I were no longer buddies the summer when we were in Marquette Park watching the march of the Chicago Freedom Movement. It seemed to me that she was in constant trouble. She stayed out after curfew, she and her pack of friends harassed and tormented the cops, they lighted bonfires on the beach without permits, they blocked traffic on the streets, they threw rocks at the streetlights, they cavorted through people’s yards at night.

  The police brought her home to us twice, once for throwing rocks at a police car (a felony we were assured) and another time for disturbing the peace on the beach (only a misdemeanor) after she and her friends, having sneaked out of their homes after curfew, terrified a few of the local citizenry by the size of their beach bonfire.

  By the time the police had dragged her into our house, awakening all of us, including her brothers, who were fascinated by the ability of their sister to raise hell, she was pale and contrite. She was very sorry, sh
e regretted that she had embarrassed us. Actually she hadn’t thrown any stones at the police car as, she insisted, her cousin Carlotta would testify in court. However, she shouldn’t even have been with those who were throwing stones. She would never do anything like that again.

  “Not till next time,” I said bitterly.

  Chuck frowned at me, a rare signal that I should keep my big mouth shut. We both knew that the stage of harassing the local police was a rite of passage for those in their mid-teens, taken seriously neither by the police nor the kids. Peg and I had pretty much done the same thing when we were that age. My husband, needless to say, never was a juvenile delinquent.

  He reassured the police that we took the matter very seriously, that he was deeply troubled by his daughter’s behavior, that she would be sternly punished, and that he personally would guarantee that she would never throw a stone at Long Beach ever again.

  The cops left, expressing satisfaction with their night’s work.

  “What about Carlotta?” I demanded when they had left. I knew that April Rosemary and her cousin were as close as Peg and I had been at that age.

  “She escaped capture,” my daughter replied glumly, as if she were in a police lockup.

  “How?”

  “She ran. I stayed behind to tell the cops that none of our crowd had thrown any stones.”

  “Did Carlotta throw stones?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Young woman,” Chuck said, imitating General Radford Mead under whom he had served in Bamberg after the war, “go to your room. I’ll deal with you in the morning!”

  “Yes, Daddy … I’m sorry, Mommy.”

  Off she went, head bowed in guilt.

  “Now, Rosemarie,” my husband began.

  “Don’t, ‘now, Rosemarie’ me!” I exploded.

  “The only difference between you and my sister at the same age is that you two would never have stayed to proclaim the innocence of your friends.”

  That was only too true.