September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “My guess is that the main difference between now and then,” he went on implacably, “is that you threw the stones, ineptly to be sure, in those days and Peg did not.”

  That also was only too true. Damn, why did I have to remember.

  The next day, Chuck grounded her for the next two weekends, a punishment which she accepted quietly.

  I called Peg.

  “Apples don’t fall very far from their trees, do they, Rosie?”

  “They’re both little brats,” I insisted.

  “So were we, though the good April worried about neither of us … Carlotta admits she threw a stone, but only a small one and she didn’t hit anything. She also claims that your daughter is, like, totally innocent.”

  “Times have changed, Peg. We have to be more careful than the good April was.”

  “What does my all-wise brother say?”

  I sighed.

  “Same thing as you. We were as bad if not worse at the same age.”

  “How would he know? He was off in Germany, defending us from the dirty red Communists.”

  And getting his German mistress pregnant, I thought bitterly. I promptly reminded myself that Trudi and I were friends now and that I had no reason to be angry at Chuck, not being one to cast the first stone.

  “He always has been good at guessing.”

  “I don’t think you should worry as much as you do about April Rosemary. She’s a good kid.”

  “I know she is, Peg, but these are bad times, and worse coming.”

  “I’m afraid of that too.”

  Neither of us knew how bad. Neither did anyone else.

  Two weeks later, on a Friday night, April Rosemary returned home before the curfew. Chuck was reading The Group by Mary Mc-Carthy, despite the fact that I told him that she made me furious. I had tossed aside The Valley of the Dolls, after forbidding him to read it on the grounds that it was a sinful waste of time, and had begun to plow through the Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, my kind of writer. Charlie Parker was playing softly on the stereo, the boys were down on the beach, up to some mischief no doubt. Poor little Moire was sound asleep, worn-out by a day of constant running, like all her days. A light breeze was slipping in from the Lake.

  “Young woman?” I said firmly.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Aren’t you going to kiss your father and me good night?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She bussed Chuck’s forehead.

  “Terrible book, Daddy.”

  “So your mother tells me.”

  I thought he shifted uneasily.

  As soon as she bent over me I smelled the beer.

  “April Rosemary Cronin, you’ve been drinking!”

  She sighed and sank into the couch. She bowed her head and stared at her sneakers. Chuck closed his book and watched carefully.

  “Yes, ma’am. Only a half bottle of beer. I hated the taste and spit some of it out.”

  “You expect us to believe that?” I snapped.

  Chuck frowned. I had gone too far.

  “I took a couple of drags on a joint too. It made me sick. That’s why I came home early.”

  “A joint!”

  “You know, Mom, marijuana.”

  If she were confessing the truth about that, then she probably had told the truth about the half bottle of beer. I strove to control my terror.

  “I didn’t know that was available up here.”

  “Kids can get it easier than a bottle of beer. Most of our crowd takes a sniff or two and don’t like it.”

  She was still staring at the floor, a penitent novice caught by an ever-vigilant mother superior.

  “I’m sorry I said I didn’t believe you, April Rosemary,” I said. “We trust you completely, even if sometimes it sounds like we don’t.”

  She looked up with a wan smile. “Don’t do it completely. But don’t worry about me either. I’ll never become an alcoholic. I wouldn’t have the willpower to beat it like you did.”

  “We don’t recommend you try it, kid,” Chuck interjected, saving the day for me. “Don’t undersell the strength of your own character.”

  “I don’t know how Mom did it,” she replied to Chuck. “I mean her own mother would have murdered her with a poker if Aunt Peg hadn’t pushed her down the stairs and killed her.”

  Total silence. The Bird on the stereo was the only sound for a moment or two. I had never told Chuck about that awful day. I assumed he knew about it. His face at the moment was as expressionless as that of a Greek statue down at the Art Institute.

  “Who told you that story?” he asked finally.

  “Carlotta. She heard her mother and father talking about it. So she told me. Don’t worry, Daddy, we won’t tell anyone else. We are as good at keeping secrets as Mom and Aunt Peg were at our age.”

  I bounded to the couch, threw my arms around her so we could both sob together.

  “I’d better go bed,” she said finally, easing out of my arms. “How long are you going to ground me, Daddy?”

  Chuck eyes were shining.

  “Let me think, kid … What about from five to six tomorrow night?”

  She giggled and ran upstairs.

  We were quiet again.

  “You knew?”

  “Yeah. I worried about that scene a few years ago and asked Peg what happened.”

  “I never could tell how much was a dream and how much actually happened. Your dad and Father Raven helped us to cover up. It wasn’t murder, Chuck.”

  “I know that, Rosemarie.” He replaced our daughter on the couch next to me. “It’s none of my business, but have you told your shrinks about it?”

  “No … Not yet. It’s time now, I suppose … Long past time.”

  “What do I know?”

  The next morning, Peg and I went for a sail on our beach boat. Carlotta and April Rosemary pushed the boat away from the shore for us. Carlotta looked like a luscious and sultry Italian actress. The impression was completely inaccurate. She was a sweetheart, not at all like her tempestuous, if wholesome-seeming cousin.

  Peg steered the boat while I worked the sail, a routine that was almost twenty years old.

  “April Rosemary knows about what happened at my house that day.”

  Peg frowned, displeased but not upset. “How did she find out?”

  “Carlotta heard you and Vince talking about it.”

  “We weren’t above eavesdropping were we? Kids are that way, my brother the worst of the lot.”

  Why did my best friend in all the world have to be so self-possessed all the time!

  “The statute of limitations never expires, does it?”

  “I asked Vince that once. He said that if the question ever arises, we’ll do a polygraph test and that will be that. It wouldn’t be fun, but no big deal … I suppose that was the conversation that the little brat heard.”

  “You told Vince long ago?”

  “Sure. No point in being married to a lawyer if you don’t get good legal advice free. Not right after we were married and not when he came home from Korea and was feeling sorry for himself until you told him off. Maybe eight, nine years ago … You tell Chucky?”

  “No … He didn’t seem too surprised last night though.”

  “He doesn’t miss much.”

  There was a lot lurking behind that reply. Like true best friends we tell each other everything—except some things that it’s better for the other not to know. We have an implicit agreement about that which meant I could not explore any further, not that I wanted to.

  “He asked me if I had told my shrinks.”

  “And you haven’t?”

  We turned about and angled out into the Lake. We’d race back to the beach with our little spinnaker ballooning out ahead of us.

  “I wasn’t sure what really happened …”

  “And now you are?”

  “Now I realize that I knew all along.”

  “So?”

  “I’ll have t
o tell that Maggie Ward bitch. She won’t seem a bit surprised. Don’t all her patients tell her the same story?”

  “I bet she’ll be surprised. She just won’t show it!”

  We tacked out several times, so far out that the shore was a distant line against the horizon.

  “We better go back, Rosie. Along about now the guys will start to worry.”

  “Good enough for them.”

  So we came about. I tugged on the spinnaker sheet and we raced toward the shore at maybe five knots an hour, which seemed like sixty on a highway.

  “Thanks, Peg,” I shouted over the rush of the wind.

  She knew what I meant.

  “A life well worth saving,” she replied, tears streaming down her face.

  We surged toward the beach, hooting and hollering. I pulled up the centerboard. The little boat tipped over just before it hit the beach and, with utter lack of respect, tossed us into the light surf. We laughed and yelled like we were sixteen again. Our daughters helped us up, then captured the boat. Our husbands looked up from their books and then looked back. The band made derisive brass sounds while poor little Gianni beat a fast tattoo on his drum.

  That day at my house on Menard Avenue had been the St. Crispin’s Day for Peg and me. I whispered a prayer for my poor mother as our daughters helped us drag the boat up on the beach.

  “Mom,” Carlotta informed her, “you and Aunt Rosie are as crazy as any teenagers on the beach.”

  No one disagreed.

  So the next day, a sizzling Sunday afternoon, my husband and I proved who was really crazy on Marquette Boulevard.

  Most of the crowd along the street watched silently as the black people, linked arm in arm, marched down the street, singing the spirituals I remembered from Selma. It felt strange to be on the other side. I told myself I hadn’t changed, Martin had. No one was preventing the march. There were no police dogs or state troopers with bullwhips. The police were protecting the marchers. Couldn’t the marchers see the difference? Still I was sick at heart.

  A few stupid people shouted curses at the marchers. They were the ones the TV cameras were picking up. Naturally. You get a couple of guys shouting in your lens and it looked like a race riot. Chuck was concentrating on the real story—the impassive Slavic faces.

  Then it happened suddenly and without warning as such things always do—like the rifle shots on the road from Montgomery back to Selma.

  A big guy with dirty blond hair and a bloated beer belly underneath an old-fashioned undershirt smashed my husband in the face, first one punch and then another. Chuck was unprepared, he reeled back and collapsed, facedown, protecting the damn Kodak with his body. Another guy, cut from the same bolt of cloth, began to kick him.

  I lost it. I can’t believe I did what was on every television news program in Chicago that night. I went after the guy who was kicking my husband. I clawed his face, kicked his shins, and pushed him up against a lamppost. Then I kneed him in the groin. He kind of collapsed. The other guy, the one who had hit Chucky came after me. So I kicked him in his private parts, just as my husband reached out and grabbed his ankle.

  The police arrived then, just a few moments too late, to see three men on the ground and one frothing hellcat, in expensive blouse and shorts, poised for further attacks.

  “These bastards attacked my husband for taking pictures,” I yelled at a big Irish cop. “He didn’t waste his film on the fockers!”

  Fortunately for me, the television sound track didn’t pick up that outburst.

  “Is he the little redhead?” the cop asked me.

  Chuck, still clutching the Kodak, rolled over and looked up at the cop. His face was covered with blood and his eyes were woozy.

  “O’Malley, Charles C., Staff Sergeant, First Constabulary, serial number …”

  He drifted off into unconsciousness.

  Later he denied all memory of the event. I have always suspected, however, that the military identification was not just his unconscious.

  The cops, having learned from the TV people that Chuck was someone famous, rushed us over to Holy Cross Hospital, staffed by the Sisters of St. Casmir, whose founder, Maria Kuropas, had fled from Russian soldiers at the age of seventeen because she was determined to found a religious order in America.

  Why not?

  The doctors informed me that Chuck had a broken nose, a slight brain concussion, and possible internal injuries. They would set his nose, and keep him in the hospital overnight for observation. I called the Lake and told Peg what had happened and that she should not believe what she saw on television.

  Then I addressed the media who were waiting outside.

  “This is Holy Cross Hospital. It is owned by the Sisters of St. Casmir, who were founded by Mother Maria Kuropas. She fled from Russian soldiers at the age of seventeen because she believed that God wanted her to found a religious order. You will note how clean the hospital is: you could eat off the floor. It is arguably the cleanest hospital in America. I don’t want you guys messing it up. It is very much part of this working-class community, which I think that Dr. King, with whom I marched at Selma, has mistakenly targeted for today’s march when he might better have marched in Lincoln Park, Orland Park, Palos Park, or Highland Park. Or even Oak Park.”

  I was on a roll all right. I couldn’t believe my diatribe when the kids enthusiastically showed me the tape when we returned to the Lake.

  “How’s your husband, Mrs. O’Malley?”

  “We haven’t asked Father to anoint him yet. The rednecks down in Little Rock did a much more thorough job on him.”

  “You weren’t there, were you, Mrs. O’Malley?”

  “No, I was not.”

  They laughed. Only when I saw this quite attractive, if I do say so, and wild-eyed matron on tape, did I understand why. Not Rosemarie Clancy O‘Malley, but Grace O’Malley Pirate Queen.

  Later in the evening when Chuck was conscious but not altogether clear about what happened, one of the nuns showed up at the door with five urchins trailing behind her.

  “Children want to see their father,” she said. “I’m boss here, so I say hokay.”

  April Rosemary led the urchins in.

  “We made Aunt Peg and Uncle Vince drive us,” my older daughter explained. “Mom, you were really sensational!”

  Only poor little Moire, trailing her red-haired dolly behind her, kissed her daddy first.

  “At least one of my kids,” Chucky said, “thinks I was the hero!”

  8

  “Nonsense, Rosemarie,” that bitch Maggie Ward informed me, “you were delighted with the warrior image you projected. You loved every second of it!”

  I wanted to storm out of her office. I couldn’t do that, however. She was my lifeline to sanity.

  “I embarrassed my whole family.”

  “I don’t believe that and neither do you. Your older daughter told you that you were the bravest woman in the world.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I have a teenage daughter too.”

  “She thinks I saved her father. She loves him more than she loves me.”

  “We won’t even discuss such absurdities.”

  “You didn’t see me on television.”

  “Rosemarie, everyone in Chicago saw you on television. You were, as your daughter doubtless told you, totally cool.”

  “I can’t see myself that way. I mean if I did see myself that way, it’s so different from my …”

  “Self-image?”

  “I guess,” I said miserably.

  “That is the problem we have been dealing with, isn’t it?”

  “Peg and I killed my mother,” I said.

  Her eyes flickered for just a second. Cool broad herself.

  “Ah,” she said.

  “I suppose I repressed it before.”

  “Or didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “My mother was a dear sweet woman when she was sober. A little vague maybe and ineffectual. She adored m
e the way she would adore a pretty little doll. She didn’t know what to do about me, which is why I went down the street to the O’Malleys every time I had a chance. I think she knew my father was abusing me. She blamed me for it, especially when she was drunk, which was most of the time toward the end. This one day—Peg and I were fifteen—we were listening to Frank Sinatra records at my house. Mom, in a dressing gown, stormed into my room and ordered Peg out of the house. She called her a cheap little slut. Peg decided she’d better leave. You could call Peg anything you wanted, it was like water off a duck’s back …”

  “And … ?”

  “I walked down to the door with Peg … It all gets kind of blurred now because I want to forget it … The stairs from the second floor ended just a few feet in front of the door to the basement stairs. Mom stumbled down the stairs and shouted that she wanted the little bitch out of her house. I was never to associate with her again. We didn’t argue. We knew Mom would forget about it when she sobered up …”

  My memory went blank. What happened next?

  Maggie Ward’s eyes seemed filled with warmth and reassurance. I had to go on, I had to tell the story at last.

  “We weren’t moving fast enough,” I continued, my voice sounding like the croak of a sick hen. “Mom rushed into the parlor and grabbed a poker from the fireplace. She said something about my being a bold stump who needed to be taught a lesson. She swung the poker, I tried to duck, but it hit my side and I fell down, with a terrible pain in my ribs. She raised the poker again over her head. I tried to say the Act of Contrition because I thought I was going to die …”

  “And Peg grabbed the poker?”

  “They wrestled for it. Peg told me later that she knew Mom would kill me.”

  “And your mother fell against the door to the basement?”

  “I think so …” I was sobbing now, close to hysteria. “I don’t know exactly how it happened. The door never quite shut. She fell against the door and it sprang open. There was a terrible crash. Peg stood there, her face as white as the snow outside the house. She held the poker in her hand. She was staring at it blankly.

  “We both dashed outside. Then Peg said we had to go into the basement to see how badly she was hurt. She wasn’t breathing, there was a line of blood flowing from her mouth. We’d better go get Father Raven. We ran through the snow to the rectory, which was only two blocks away. Peg did all the talking. He drove us back to the house in his car. He prayed over her and anointed her and gave her the blessing for the dying. Then he said to me that my mother was dead and asked what happened. Peg told him in clear and careful detail. Dear God, Maggie, she was so … I’m sorry, Dr. Ward …