I was very proud of my slender, winsomely attractive boy priest. My husband, ignorant bastard that he can be on occasion, winked at me.
“How long, Chuck?” Ed went on, looking to his magical brother for answers, like he always did.
“Seven more years, more or less. The military told LBJ that they wanted a million men for seven years and he never said no to them.”
“Can the country survive seven more years?” Packy asked.
Chucky Ducky loved playing the expert role. He took a deep breath, and said, “You remember the spring of 1945? I was reading the papers then, maybe you guys weren’t. The war in Europe was over. The Japanese were using their suicide bombers against our ships at Okinawa. The public was growing tired of the war. Some anti-Roosevelt columnists were hinting that it was time to make some kind of arrangement with the Japanese. Our leaders should have learned then that the American people have no stomach for an extended land war in Asia. The atom bomb made the question moot. Today, the people are turning against this war. If the leadership does not have the courage to pull out, we’re going to have lots of trouble ahead.”
I felt a chill run up and down my spine.
“I hope you’re wrong,” Packy sighed.
“What do we hear from Rome?” I asked, deliberately changing the subject.
“Nothing good.” Packy grimaced. “The Curia and Father Ford, you remember him that white-haired American Jesuit who sulked around the meeting, have persuaded the Pope to issue an encyclical which will reject the commission’s report and reassert the traditional doctrine. The only question now is whether Pope Paul will make it an infallible teaching.”
“In God’s name why?” I demanded. “Don’t they understand how the laity of the world will react?”
“They have persuaded the Pope that the authority and credibility of the papacy are at stake. If he reverses the teachings of the past, he will destroy his own credibility and that of his successors. The Pope would like to make a change but he feels he can’t.”
“How did they refute our arguments?” Chuck asked
“They don’t discuss them. The issue isn’t sex anymore, it’s papal authority.”
“So they dismiss married love and worry only about the authority of the Pope?” My husband now was truly angry.
Packy sighed. “That’s about it. Ted Hesburg from Notre Dame called me from Rome the other day. He’s trying to mobilize people to talk the Pope out of the idea of issuing the encyclical. He wasn’t very hopeful.”
“Don’t they realize,” I shouted, refilling the clerical wineglasses like the good hostess I try to pretend that I am, “that they will destroy papal credibility? Why establish a commission, why debate the issue, unless there’s a chance of change?”
“The Pope is absolutely convinced that the commission wasn’t representative and that the simple Catholic laypeople will accept his teaching.”
“How many good simple laypeople does he know!”
“Rosemarie, my darling,” Chucky cautioned me, “that is expensive wine and this is your favorite Irish linen tablecloth.”
“Regardless!” I waved my hand like a queen empress. “Eddie, what will you priests do?”
“Mostly ignore it. We’ve made up our minds already!”
“See!” I crowed triumphantly, as though poor Packy were Paul VI.
My husband deftly removed the wine bottle from my hand.
“Priests and nuns,” Eddie went on, “are in a pressure cooker these days. There has been so much change in such a short period of time. They expect a lot more change, including celibacy. Many want to marry. They figure that change is just around the corner. When they discover it is not, they’ll leave in droves to marry. They’ll say they can’t preach the encyclical. Those that stay won’t preach it either. But it’s a great excuse for looking for a widow or a nun or a rectory employee or a teenager to take to bed.”
Pretty strong stuff from such a mild young man.
“You’re not going to do that!” I shouted, pointing my finger at him.
“Yes, your holiness,” he said, blushing.
I collapsed into my chair and laughed with the rest of them.
“Teenagers,” Chucky Ducky observed with dancing eyes, “are notoriously unsatisfactory in bed.”
More laughter. I was nineteen when we married.
“There are,” he said archly, “some well-known exceptions.”
“Are they really so cut off from reality over there, Packy?” Chuck continued.
“Why wouldn’t they be? They have no contact with the world outside the Curia Romana, with its competitiveness, its ruthless envy, its backstabbing, its endlessly shifting cliques, its patronage. They think they don’t need to be in contact with the rest of the world because they have a monopoly on the Holy Spirit.”
“And its homosexual love affairs?” I asked.
“There’s some of that too.”
My husband deftly turned the discussion to one of his favorite subjects—Charles Cronin O’Malley, boy photographer in Southeast Asia.
We laughed not at the war, but at the hapless hero of the stories, a mask in which my poor husband devoutly believed.
Inside I was still steaming at the Pope.
After the priests had left, I went to April Rosemary’s room. Dressed in a sweatshirt and Bermuda shorts, the required uniform in those prejean days, she was poring over her homework. The room was compulsively neat, a habit she had certainly not inherited from her mother.
“Hi, kid,” I said.
“Hi, Mom.”
“How’s it coming?”
“Tough, I don’t think I’ll ever make it to Harvard.”
“Radcliffe.”
“Same difference.”
“Our place would be delighted with you and they wouldn’t treat you like a second-class citizen because you’re a woman.”
“But look what they did to the students that took over the administration building. Didn’t they throw them out?”
Unlike Columbia and Berkeley, THE University did not cave in to the radicals. Chuck and I were secretly proud of that.
“They think that education is terribly important out there, April Rosemary.”
“How can anything be more important than ending the war?”
“Your father is going to a meeting at the White House tomorrow to try to end it.”
“I know”—she looked up from her book—“he’s one of the good guys. I’m sorry I was rude to him this afternoon. I’m such a jerk …”
“No you’re not,” I said, hugging her.
It was still easy to reach out to her. She was still reaching back to us. How long, I wondered, would that last.
17
We flew from Midway Airport to Washington in a Vickers Viscount propjet on a lovely day. Chuck was poring over the Hoopes memo once again, making notes in the margins and on the reverse side of the printed pages.
“This is the revolt of the clerks,” he said to me as we waited to board the plane. “The lower echelons of the Defense and State Departments have seized the opportunity of the present confusion to make the case that they have secretly been arguing for a long time.”
“What do they intend to do?”
“Stage a coup d’etat against Lyndon.”
“Bring him down?”
“Maybe.”
We settled into our seats and ordered tea—black.
“Have anything to read?” he asked me.
“Couples by John Updike.”
“Any good?”
“Dirty and dull. I don’t see how anyone can make sex boring.”
“Not everyone is married to a man like me.”
I ignored him, as he deserved to be ignored.
“The creeps in this story screw a lot and don’t have any fun.”
“Updike is Protestant.”
“I could write better erotic stories than these.”
He glanced up from the memo and look at me intently.
�
��Why don’t you? Then I would retire my cameras.”
“Too busy,” I lied.
“Well”—he pulled an envelope out of his jacket pocket—“here’s my last tape from ’Nam. Finished on the plane back.” He produced a tape player from his briefcase.
The Viscount, whining like an angry infant, started its takeoff run.
“Why did it take you so long to give it to me?” I demanded.
“You’ll see when you listen to it.”
I opened the envelope, removed the tape (which was labeled “Vietnam Tape” in Chuck’s intolerably neat script), placed it in the recorder, and put on the earphones.
As I listened my hands began to perspire. The damn fool! Why take such terrible chances? Then I resolved that I would not be angry at him. Chuck, I told myself, as I had told his parents and my kids repeatedly, is Chuck. He’s a weird little boy and God takes care of weird little boys.
A couple of times I turned to frown at him. He pretended to be poring over Town Hoopes’s memo but he was watching me out of the corner of his eye.
I stopped the tape at the end and rewound it. My heart was pounding. I thought about his crazy adventures, especially the woman from the RAAF and the jeep chasing his plane out on the runway. Great danger maybe, but also low comedy.
Why the hell did he snap the Vietnamese fishermen with the bars in their hands?
When were they going to appear in the papers? Probably not for a long time. I would never look at them! Never!
Well, not till we returned to Chicago.
I began to listen to it again, this time in earnest.
Why was I terrified when I heard it the first time around? Don Quixote was sitting next to me on the Viscount, with a complacent smile on his face. Bastard.
When I finished the second time, I jammed tape and player back at him.
“About that Aussie woman?”
“I thought you’d ask that first.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Would she have slept with you?”
“I was so tired after floating in the South China Sea for most of the day that I didn’t think about it till the next morning. By then it was too late. I’d already shown her your picture.”
“And told her that lie about everyone wanting to undress me!”
“Gospel truth!”
“And every time is like taking off my clothes on our wedding night!”
“More Gospel truth!”
“You forget that I had to put you to bed that night because you were wiped out by champagne!”
“I don’t remember it that way.” He giggled.
“You don’t remember anything!”
“Did you really think I’d be angry when I heard the tape?”
He pondered that.
“Any sensible wife would be.”
“Whatever made you think I was a sensible wife?”
“There’s that.”
“Maybe for five minutes, then I realized once again that God loves weird little boys and takes good care of them.”
He chuckled.
“I was terrified when they said you were missing in action. Then even before the family swarmed over to our place, there you were on the phone saying that you knew exactly where you were and hence couldn’t be missing.”
“Like I said.”
“The good April just sighed, and said, ‘well isn’t that just like Chucky, always playing his little joke.’”
“Sounds like her … You called Tom McCarty’s wife?”
“Of course. Poor woman was sobbing. She didn’t know whether to believe me or not. I put on my queen empress tone and then she did believe me, which of course she wanted to do.”
“Did the Navy ever get around to telling you I was not missing?”
“Not yet.”
“Figures.”
We were silent for a few moments, as if digesting the story of a weird little boy snapping pictures of a fishing boat of people who might very well kill him.
They served us breakfast. Still tense, I gulped down my orange juice.
“No more combat photography, Chucky Ducky.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Were you ever scared?”
“All the time,” he replied promptly.
“I’m glad you came home alive,” I said, somewhat lamely.
“Yeah, you know, I’m kind of glad too.”
Washington was awash in early cherry blossoms when we checked into the Hay-Adams. Chucky kissed me and departed for the White House. There would be briefings during the afternoon, then supper, then more briefings. The next day would be devoted to discussion and then the following day some of the participants would have lunch with the President and summarize the sense of the meeting. Chuck had argued, tongue in cheek, that he and Dean Acheson, Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, would do all the talking at the lunch.
“You think they’ll let you into the Oval Office?”
“The day they start showing pornographic films at the Vatican … Look at this”—he handed me a piece of paper—“it is from a memo John McNaughton wrote. It tells the story”:
The ARVN is tired, passive, and accommodationprone … The North Vietnamese/VC are matching our deployments … Pacification is stalled … The GVN political infrastructure is moribund and weaker than the VC infrastructure … . South Vietnam is near the edge of serious inflation and economic chaos … . The present U.S. objective in Vietnam is to avoid humiliation. The reasons why we went into Vietnam to the present depth … are now largely academic. Why we have not withdrawn from Vietnam is, by all odds, one reason: (1) to preserve our reputation as a guarantor, and thus to preserve our effectiveness in the rest of the world. We have not hung on (2) to save a friend, or (3) to deny the Communists the added acres and heads (because the dominoes don’t fall for that reason in this case), or even (4) to prove that “wars of national liberation” won’t work (except as our reputation is involved) … . The ante (and commitment) is now very high … . We are in an escalating military stalemate …
“What will the people say when they find this out?”
“They’ll vote for Richard M. Nixon,” he said as he left our suite.
As soon as the door closed, I took off my clothes and dived into bed. Suddenly I was very tired. I had terrible dreams. I was on a raft in the South China Sea, naked, of course, as I usually am in my nightmares. The fishing boat was just a few yards away. April Rosemary was screaming obscenities at me and brandishing a crowbar. Then I was trapped in our house at Long Beach, which was burning down. I was trying to lead my children out of the burning building. A woman in an Air Force uniform was shooting an automatic weapon at us to prevent us from escaping. Fire engines were screeching outside. I woke up. They were still screeching. I rushed to the window and peeked out of the drapes. Lafayette Park in bright sunlight and awash in cherry blossoms was still there.
I fell back on the bed in a cold sweat and panting for breath. I covered myself with a sheet and willed myself to simmer down.
I would probably have to tell that snoopy little bitch Maggie Ward about the dream and then interpret it for her.
That wouldn’t be hard.
She would want to know whether Chuck was in the house with me or had he abandoned us and left us to burn to death.
No, he wasn’t there. The bastard!
After I had calmed down, I took a long and soothing shower, put on a comfortable terry cloth robe, and ordered supper from room service. The evening news on television reported that well-informed sources were saying that there was fierce controversy within the administration about the request General Earl Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had brought back from Saigon for two hundred thousand more troops. According to the sources, the President was prepared to grant the request, over the strong opposition of junior level people in the State and Defense Departments. Unlike Robert McNamara, the new Defense Secretary, Clark Clifford, was a hawk on Vietnam and would endorse the milita
ry’s request.
“Sure,” I informed the fool on the screen, “that’s why he’s meeting with a crowd of people that have read Town Hoopes’s memo.”
“With Senator Robert Kennedy now formally in the race for President, the advisers closest to the President argue that he cannot afford to be seen as bending his Vietnam policy to win votes away from Senator Kennedy.”
“Bullshit!” I shouted at the screen, just as room service knocked at the door.
I did not try to explain to the grinning black waiter that I was shouting at an electronic image.
“Dinner for one, ma’am?”
“Yes,” I said, “my husband is on the other side of the park eating on the American taxpayer.”
“Yes, ma’am. Chocolate ice cream for two, however?”
“Two chocolate ice creams for one. I’m on a diet.”
I wrote a big tip for him on the check.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, and departed, surely convinced that I was round the bend altogether.
I had lost five pounds during Chuck’s excursion to ’Nam. I’d catch hell from that worthless snoop Maggie Ward.
After I had disposed of every ounce of steak and french fries and every bit of ice cream, I opened Couples again and with a sigh learned more about their joyless coupling.
How could one read a book about sexual romps, described vividly, and not experience even the slightest erotic feeling? Was Updike trying to say that sex was inherently boring or only the sexual games played by this particular crowd of dull people?
“To hell with them,” I said, throwing the book aside. “I need a nice warm bath, a long warm bath.”
I didn’t expect that there would be sex tonight. More likely cuddling, which is often better than sex for me and, I think, for him too. Weird little boy that he is, my husband likes to be mothered.
Nonetheless in the tub I permitted myself some pleasant fantasies about the games he played with my boobs the first night he came home.
After the bath I powdered and anointed myself and put on a very traditional gown and peignoir, with lots of lace, said my rosary, and settled down to read Phyllis McGinley’s new collection of poems.
Someone knocked on the door about ten-thirty.
September Song Page 18
