September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “I was wondering when you were going to get around to that,” she said with a gentle smile. “I’m sure you call me that behind my back as in that bitch Maggie Ward.”

  We both had to laugh, which was probably her idea. I calmed down a little.

  “So, Maggie, he nodded, and said that he’d better call the police and fire department ambulance. Peg asked him to call her father too. He said that we should tell the police the truth. We had been listening to records and when we came down the steps we saw the basement door open and went down the steps and found my mother. Peg wiped her fingerprints off the poker and put it back on the fireplace. The police didn’t ask many questions. Mom, they said, had been drinking heavily and had tripped over her robe when she was going down the stairs to the basement. They asked why she would be walking down the stairs. I managed to remember that she hid her whiskey down there. The coroner ruled it death by accident. No one could have imagined that two frail-looking teenage girls had killed her, poor woman.”

  “They didn’t kill her, Rosemarie,” Maggie insisted. “Father Raven was right. It was an accident. As they struggled for the poker, your mother fell against the door, she lost her balance, tumbled down the stairs, and fractured her skull.”

  “Her robe was open when we found her. She looked so beautiful. We closed the robe …”

  “You weren’t listening to me, Rosmarie. I said that you and Peg did not kill her. It was an accident, a tragic, terrible accident. Peg was trying only to wrestle the potentially lethal poker out of your mother’s hands.”

  “But …”

  “No buts!”

  I realized that she was right. A big, ugly glob broke loose in my brain.

  “Yes,” I said with a huge sigh of relief, “it was only a tragic, terrible accident.”

  “Why did you bring it up now? Surely not because of the incident at Marquette Park?”

  “Oh, no. I learned the night before that my daughter and my niece know about it. Carlotta heard her parents discussing it one night. They won’t tell anyone. They’re as tight-lipped as we were at their age.”

  “You told your husband, of course?”

  “No … He knew. Peg must have told him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell him?”

  “I was afraid that he’d be disgusted with me, maybe leave me …”

  “Do you think he might really leave you?”

  “He said he would if I didn’t stop drinking.”

  “Is that what he said?”

  We had been through this before.

  “Not exactly …”

  “Not at all … What did he really say?”

  “That he would leave me if I didn’t get help,” I admitted, again feeling miserable.

  “You got help, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I sounded like poor April Rosemary talking to me.

  “And you still are getting help?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “So what if you went home tonight and drank half a bottle of whiskey?”

  “He’d hold me in his arms and help me climb back on the wagon.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Probably … Maybe … I don’t know …”

  “You DO know …”

  “Yes, I do know … Still, he didn’t tell me about the child he sired in Germany!”

  “Ah, today is the day for revelations.”

  “Her name was Trudi and she and her family were Germans who were fleeing from the Russians.”

  “Indeed.”

  She looked like she wished the time had run out. It had not.

  I now felt very guilty.

  “There was no reason to tell me. We weren’t engaged or anything. He didn’t know about the boy until I saw them in the art gallery in Stuttgart. He had to be Chucky’s son.”

  “He denied it?”

  “No, I tied on a real drunk and flew home.”

  “ash.”

  “That’s when he insisted I see a shrink, Dr. Stone and then you.”

  “Why did you get drunk?”

  “Because,” I admitted promptly, “I was ashamed of my behavior. Actually it was a very touching story. They were only kids. Chuck saved their lives. She disappeared when she found out she was pregnant because she knew he’d feel bound to bring her home and that would be a mistake. She’s a fine woman. We’ve become friends. We visited them a couple of times when we were in Germany …”

  “And all of this comes out today when you’re trying to live down your image of yourself as the Pirate Queen of Marquette Boulevard?”

  I sighed my agreement.

  “Rosemarie,” she said, “you are two different women: one is brave to the point of recklessness, forthright, articulate, charming, beautiful. The other is frightened, anxious, self-hating.”

  “I’m trying to bring them together.”

  “That is quite impossible. It would be much better if you could learn to cherish both of them. Now it’s time.”

  Cherish both of them? I thought as I left her office. That would be the day

  1967

  9

  Ninety sixty-six slipped into 1967 quietly enough for the O’Malley clan. April Rosemary was on top of the junior class at Trinity, where I had once been. She was also active in the Oak Park Young Peoples’ Anti-War Movement, which was as small as it was noisy. I was uneasy with her becoming a “radical.” My husband insisted that we were against the war too. She had been able to do what I had failed at—she could simultaneously be a radical and keep the nuns happy. They were all against the war too, as the Fathers Berrigan and Sister Liz became the idols of nuns and priests all over the country.

  Kevin, now a sophomore, was a towering forward on the Fenwick basketball team, his brother Jimmy, almost as tall, was point guard on the freshmen team. Sean was in eighth grade and leading the St. Ursula team toward a championship. They continued to blow their horns, now with considerably more skill and much better instruments. Gianni Antonelli now had a whole battery of drums. My three sons were charming, intelligent, studious young men. Kevin, the most studious of them all now, was reading “Catholic” novelists—Waugh, Mauriac, Green, Bloy, even Gabriel Fielding. I suspected that he had many deep thoughts, but he kept them to himself.

  As for Moire, she had made her First Communion and was becoming more adorable every day, as for reasons of genes or conscious imitation, she grew into a womanly imitation of my husband.

  Said husband refused to show any interest in photographing campus unrest or the race riots around the country. He was now a portrait photographer and nothing more. It was, he informed me, not our time anymore.

  “Will it ever be our time again, Chuck?”

  He pondered the question as though it had never occurred to him before, though he had been thinking about it every day.

  “I don’t know, Rosemarie. The barbarians are at the gate. Students take over administration buildings with the encouragement of the faculty. The administration backs down and gives in to their outrageous demands. The kids use highbrow rhetoric but they’re mostly interested in sex and drugs.”

  “And rock and roll …”

  “And rock and roll indeed.”

  Not all of the students were articulate. We got used to seeing them on television trying to explain why they had invaded the office of a university president and destroyed all his papers, including records of his life’s research work.

  “We had, you know, to protest, the, you know, genocidal policy of, you know, this university, against, you know, black Americans.”

  “Spoiled rich kid, thinking he’s a radical because he’s got long hair and old clothes,” Chuck would sputter.

  “Egged on by faculty,” I would add, “who would sooner work out their father figure hangups than do their own work.”

  Meanwhile, there were a half million young Americans fighting in Vietnam, body bags coming home every day. The Democrats had been creamed in the 1966 congressional election.

>   “I couldn’t believe he forgot the lessons of the 1950 off year,” my husband moaned. “You don’t have a war going on in Asia with draft troops when you’re having an election.” The Democratic ticket in Illinois and Cook County took a beating too. Some journalists said the Mayor was being punished by black voters for defeating Dr. King. Martin had left town with an empty “summit agreement” crafted with the mayor and various religious leaders of Chicago, some of whom actually believed in his campaign and others of whom were afraid not to be at the “summit.”

  The Mayor easily won reelection with a large majority of both whites and blacks voting for him. No one seemed to notice that.

  Television, we were told by television people, had changed the nature of reality for Americans. Now we saw the burning and looting of the race riots, the campus violence, and the jungle combat in Vietnam on the national news. It seemed to me, however, that just the opposite was the case. The violence was assimilated to the primetime programs and became no more real than they were. Ho-hum, one more city burning, one more shot of Vietnamese bodies. So what will happen on Star Trek tonight?

  I did not like what it was doing to my normally effervescent Chucky. He had come to hate all reporters and anchormen. They were frauds, phonies, and fakers, he insisted, not without considerable reason. The special target of his dislike was Walter Cronkite, whose pose of gravity and responsibility deeply offended my husband, especially because when Cronkite pontificated about Germany he revealed his blatant ignorance.

  “Hypocrite,” Chuck would snarl.

  “Charles Cronin O’Malley,” I informed him in my Marquette Park persona, “I am on the verge of ordering you to give up the evening news and the New York Times.”

  It was a cold night in late January with a half foot of snow on the ground. It suited my mood perfectly.

  He cocked his head and grinned at me. “On the verge of?”

  “I don’t propose to lose my comic little leprechaun to idiots like Cronkite!”

  “On the verge of an order isn’t an order.”

  “Okay, I order you not to watch the evening news or read the New York Times.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and flipped off the TV. “What a relief!”

  “How did we get hooked on all this stuff?” I asked, cuddling him in my arms.

  “Jack Kennedy,” he said. “He taught us we could make a difference. He was wrong.”

  “Will our time ever come again?” I asked, maybe for the hundredth time.

  “Maybe, Rosemarie, maybe. It’ll be many years into the future. We’ll have a long conservative reaction before then. People will come along who will try to abolish the New Deal as well as poor Lyndon’s Great Society. Americans don’t like the war, but they don’t like the looting blacks or the screaming kids or sex and drugs. It will all catch up with us. Twenty years to work that through the system.”

  “How long can Lyndon last, Chuck?”

  “Not very long. For all his braggadocio, his skin is a lot thinner than was Jack Kennedy’s. Young men are dying and their parents are blaming him. College kids are calling him a murderer, the blacks, for whom he thought he did so much, are tearing the cities apart. Because he’s trying to run the war without increasing taxes, inflation is going up. McChesney Martin at the Fed has tightened interest rates, so there’s a recession and unemployment and the workers have turned against him. That melancholy which is so much part of his personality will catch up to him. Then you can’t tell what he will do.”

  “Will he run again?”

  Chuck raised his hands as if balancing the odds, just as Pope Paul VI had done.

  “Sixty/forty that he won’t.”

  “Would you go back if he invited you?”

  “You know what I said when Mac Bundy called and asked if I’d accept the UN when Adlai died in London?”

  “You told them you’d come back only when we began to withdraw from Nam.”

  “Still stands.”

  Mac Bundy had left for the Ford Foundation and Bob McNamara for the World Bank. They couldn’t take the war either. My Chucky and George Ball had left before there was any blood on their hands.

  In the back of my head that cold January night in 1967 I worried about all my children. I worried about them all the time. In a couple of years all the boys would be eligible for the damn draft. What would happen to them!

  What would happen to April Rosemary? Now she seemed to be moving to the left. She was currently interested in the Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society. Written by someone named Tom Hayden (presumably Irish and Catholic), it was a lot of unintelligible nonsense, the kind of thing that some kid with a Catholic education and no experience of life might dream up.

  “Isn’t this wonderful, Mom?” she asked me, showing me a marked paragraph? Isn’t it a wonderful vision!”

  We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we will inherit … We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love. In affirming these principles we are aware of countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in the twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated, and that he is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs … Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal …

  “It’s impressive, April Rosemary,” I said. “A little obscure about details. It won’t be easy to achieve those goals.”

  “Oh, we know that, Mom, but at least those are great goals!”

  It was not up to me to tell her that her father and I had the same goals only a few years ago and we had discovered how easily human dreams go wrong.

  It those days, SDS did not mean what it would later come to mean, young people blowing themselves up as they were manufacturing bombs in a New York house.

  “Rosemarie my darling,” Chuck said to me that night I had forbidden him to fume any more at Walter Cronkite, “I think we should walk down to Petersen’s!”

  “In the snow!”

  “Why not? We’ll have the place to ourselves!”

  So we did and sang songs all the way to Chicago Avenue and all the way back. We were indeed the only customers. Still we sang the songs from South Pacific and Rosemarie like there was a huge, national audience listening to us.

  For a few moments we were young again, without a care or worry in the world.

  Except that when I was young I had many cares and worries, like how I was going to tell the man I loved that my father had sexually molested me.

  What was I doing as 1966 slid into 1967 and 1967 stumbled toward 1968?

  Besides worrying about my children?

  I was still his assistant. I set up the studio for his portraits, I helped in processing the film, I kept the books, I paid the bills, both for the photography and for our house and children. I read a lot of books.

  And when I could find a few spare moments, I would sneak off to my office on the first floor and write my little stories. I showed the stories to no one, not Chuck, not Peg, not the good April, who was for all practical purposes my mother, and not to my daughter.

  I was afraid that they would all laugh. If I had spoken about that fear to Maggie Ward, she would have laughed at me.

  We also turned down invitations from some Catholic liberal friends of ours to meet with Dan and Phil Berrigan. We were against the war as much as anyone. We were also against the doctrine of “liturgical protest” against the war.

  We heard from Father Packy Keenan, who had been with us at the birth control meeting, that the word in Rome was that after two years of vacillating, Pope Paul had decided not to adopt our recommendations for change. The shadowy figures in the Vatican had warned him that he would destroy the credibility of the papacy if he did. The battle now was between those who wanted him to issue an encyclical reaffirming the tradit
ional teaching and those who wanted him to do nothing because the issue was not sufficiently mature.

  “That argument would fly with most Italian popes,” Father Packy told us. “You never decide something that you don’t absolutely have to decide. This man is too scrupulous to accept such an argument.”

  With all my other worries, the birth control issue did not rank very high. All the laypeople I knew had already made up their minds.

  We had a big birthday party for Peg and me. Everyone came. Music and tennis all day long. Kids played softball on the beach. Too many memories from the past. We can’t be thirty-six I told my best friend, when she had laid aside her violin for a moment (concertmaster of the West Suburban Symphony now).

  I feel much older, she said to me. So much has happened.

  That was one way of looking at it.

  Last summer we wore bikinis, I said.

  Absolutely.

  Summer at the Lake that year is a blur in my memory. The concerns that bothered me had not changed much, though I had a hard time recalling them precisely because of the following lunatic summer. The boys went to basketball camp, Moire took acting lessons, April Rosemary, who had loved the beach more than any of us, insisted on working in the city at the Oak Park Bank as a clerk. She had to save money, she told us, for her college education. She was planning on Harvard and she knew that cost a lot of money.

  How like her father, I said to her father.

  Neither of us, however, would have dared to tell her that we could easily pick up the whole tab for Harvard. She drove up to the Lake for long weekends in the Chevy convertible we had purchased for her. (“At least in modest comfort,” the Port Huron Statement said.) “Missus,” our Polish housekeeper, kept half an eye on her.