September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Yes?”

  “Chuck. I lost my key.”

  I opened the door.

  “No, you forgot to take it with you.”

  “Figures.” He slumped into a chair, his trench coat still on.

  I insisted that he take it off, so I could hang it up. I did not, I told him, want to be blamed for making a mess in the room. He scanned the room with a quick glance.

  “Someone took a long bubble bath,” he said. “You look very pretty incidentally.”

  “Thank you … Hard meeting?”

  “Terrible … The whole crowd was there. You’ll be happy to know, Rosemarie, my darling, that your husband, little punk from the West Side that he is, can now claim to be one of the Senior Advisers to the President. They were all there—Dean Acheson, John McCloy, Clark Clifford, George Ball, Mac Bundy, Generals Omar Bradley, Matthew Ridgway, Maxwell Taylor, and Earl Wheeler, Cabot Lodge, Abe Fortas from the Supreme Court, Arthur Goldberg from the UN, Cyrus Vance, Douglas Dillon, Arthur Dean, Bob Murphy (the senior career Ambassador in the Foreign Service.) In short they were all there, the whole Establishment, everyone who was anyone in American foreign and defense policy in the last twenty years and was still alive.”

  “Sounds like a lot of clout.”

  “Yeah, some pretty pompous people, not all of them, mind you. And who walks into this august crowd but an inconspicuous and innocuous little redheaded punk from the West Side of Chicago.”

  “Right!” I said as I moved him to the couch where he could more readily cuddle.

  “Don’t agree so quickly! … I’ve met a few of them of course. Most of them didn’t recognize me. Thought I was a waiter. Cabot Lodge gave me his coat to hang up, the phony jerk. He seemed surprised when I sat down at the table. Acheson, who didn’t know me from Elvis Presley, asked us if we might go around the table and identify ourselves. So we did.”

  “And you said?” I asked knowing that in those circumstances he would say something outrageous.

  He feigned surprise. “I said I was Chuck O’Malley from Chicago and I took pictures.”

  “And their reaction?”

  “They seemed surprised. Dean Acheson grinned his frosty WASP grin, ‘I believe you served in Germany on a couple of occasions, did you not, Dr. O’Malley? Once, unless my aging memory escapes me, as Ambassador to the BRD.’”

  “And you said?”

  “‘I was a Staff Sergeant in the First Constabulary Regiment the other time, Mr. Secretary.’ They sniggered a little. Not a whole barrel of fun these guys. John McCloy, who was sitting right across from me and had visited us in Bonn, peered at me in surprise.”

  “Bad eyes … Then what?”

  “Three guys briefed us till suppertime. Strictly objective reporting of the facts without the implication that Town Hoopes had put in his memo. Seemed to me that the facts alone made the case for getting out.”

  “Did they talk about it at supper?”

  “Clark suggested we avoid discussion till the briefings were over.”

  “Clark is it?”

  “Sure, everyone was on first-name basis. Dean Acheson was cooking up the Marshall Plan when I was still in Fenwick, but just the same he was Dean. And I, naturally enough, was Charles.”

  “Naturally.”

  “He took me aside at the drinks, one to a customer, and said, ‘Charles, if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re a genius with that camera.’ So I respond ‘Thank you, Dean. I’m glad you like my work.’ Matt Ridgeway, who was the General in Korea when I was over there with Eisenhower, said the same thing. He even remembered my shot of Ike climbing Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. Not your typical General. He’s clearly in favor of pulling out.”

  “The others?”

  “Hard to be sure. Bob Murphy is a hard-liner. So is Abe Fortas, though I think he is Lyndon’s man in the room. Maxwell Taylor too.”

  “Bundy?”

  I was kneading the back of his neck, which felt as tense as a two-by-four.

  “He walked back here with me, said to give his very best to you. ‘You were right all along, Chuck,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how we could have been so wrong. Now Lyndon thinks we got him into it and are betraying him.’”

  “And you said, Chucky?”

  “I said, ‘You weren’t able to protect him from the military.’ He agreed. He liked my pictures too.”

  I have argued on occasion that cuddling is one great advantage of marriage. With a lover you always have to screw. So we cuddled.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “We discuss and argue. The next day some of us go up to have lunch with LBJ in the Cabinet Room. Our formal charge is to render an opinion on Westmorland’s request for two hundred thousand more men. Everyone knows, however, that this is a possible turning point. The issue really is whether we ought to wind down the war.”

  “Why now?”

  “Combination of things—Tet, Clark Clifford’s taking over Defense, Westmorland’s request for two hundred thousand more men, the New Hampshire primary, Bobby’s announcement, the unease of men like John McNaughton and Town Hoopes. What is it that Eddie would call it?”

  “A chairos, a time of special grace … What’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know. Somehow I think Lyndon will mess it up if he can. Somehow I don’t blame him for feeling let down.”

  “I didn’t offer you a cup of tea, I’m sorry.”

  “Rosemarie, my darling, I’m dead tired. I just want to go to sleep and dream about that RAAF squadron leader—what was her name again?”

  “Emily Dawson. Don’t you dare dream about her.”

  So we went to bed. I slept pretty well. My husband tossed and turned all night long.

  18

  That night I had my rape dream. It comes in many forms. A hideous monster wakes me, tears off my gown and brutalizes me. The monster always is my father in disguise. This time he was a Vietnamese fisherman who tried to force a crowbar into me. I woke up screaming.

  Chuck stirred beside me, then folded me in his arms. I wept uncontrollably.

  “It’s all right, Rosemarie. I’m with you. It’s all right.”

  He thinks that he can make the dream disappear. I let him think that. I permit him to caress me and calm me down because it makes him feel masterful. The horror will never go away. I have to live with it for the rest of my life. Dr. Ward says I have pretty much beaten it. The dream, she says, will come back only in times of crisis. I pretend to go back to sleep because Chuck has another hard day ahead of him and needs his sleep. In my head I damn my father to hell for all eternity. Then I tell God I don’t mean it and I’m sorry. I say that I know He’s forgiven my father and I’m trying to do the same thing.

  I get up at five-thirty and take a shower. I order breakfast for the two of us, a small one for me because I know I’ll vomit and a big one for Chuck. Then, all bright and cheery, I wake him up.

  “Rise and shine, Sergeant, you have duty today.”

  He rolls over and buries his head in a pillow.

  “Go way.”

  “Blueberry waffles coming.”

  He groans, rolls over, and stares at me, like he doesn’t know who I am or where he is.

  “Squadron Leader Dawson?”

  “Bastard!”

  “Are you all right, Rosemarie?” he asks anxiously.

  “I’m fine. It was the dream again. The next morning I’m always all right, you know that.”

  Except in the early days of our marriage, when I might go on a drunk. Now I don’t even feel an impulse to do it.

  In fact, I’m not all right. However, I have been lying to him about the dreams since we were married and I don’t know how to tell him the truth now. After I vomit I’ll be okay until the next time. Fortunately they don’t come very often.

  As soon as he leaves for the White House, I put out a “do not disturb” sign, tell the switchboard to hold my calls, and do my vomit thing. Then I fall into bed and sleep for a couple of hours. I take another shower, dres
s up like an important Washington matron, and go out on a shopping expedition (during which I buy nothing except a couple of miniskirts) and return to our suite at the Hay-Adams feeling like a new woman. Almost.

  Whenever the dream comes, I tell myself how fortunate I am to have survived and to have a fine husband, a wonderful family, and a good life. More or less.

  In the afternoon, I called home to talk to the kids. April Rosemary squealed with joy.

  “MOMMY! I just got my acceptance from HARVARD!”

  “Wonderful!” I squealed back, resisting my impulse to say that it was actually from Radcliffe. “We’re proud of you! We’ll have a big party as soon as your father and I get back!”

  “How are his meetings coming?” she asked, completely uninterested in anything but her triumph.

  “He thinks they’re making progress. I’ll have him call you as soon as he comes back.”

  I sat at the window of our parlor, with Phyllis McGinley on my lap, and stared at the cherry blossoms which framed the White House like a Japanese watercolor. I had hoped that my daughter would have attended some middle western Catholic liberal arts college. Somehow she seemed too fragile for a place like Harvard, a hangout for crazies and freaks, albeit bright crazies and freaks. I was in no position, however, to be critical of elite secular universities, alumna of THE University that I am. I was a lot less mature at seventeen than my daughter and I survived easily enough.

  But times were different then—the mother’s endless lament!

  Chucky knocked at the door late in the afternoon. Naturally he had forgotten the room key again.

  His shoulders were slumped, his head bowed, his face glum. I kissed him gently.

  “Bad day?”

  “Good day, I think.” He sighed as he took off the utterly unnecessary raincoat and gave it to me to hang up. “But who knows?”

  He slumped into the couch. I sat next to him. After the Dream I was not very interested in sex for a couple of days. Yet I loved my husband. So I had arrayed myself in frilly underwear beneath my robe.

  He handed me a sheet of letterhead with “White House” embossed in blue at the top.

  “During my recent trip to Vietnam, an American familiar with the situation characterized it as the greatest fuck-up in American history. I concur with that evaluation. Nothing I have heard in the briefings or in our discussions has caused me to change my mind. We are trapped in a quagmire that we have created for ourselves. At some point when the public realizes how it has been deceived there will be a demand that someone be blamed. I don’t believe there will be any point in a search for blame. Every administration since 1945 made decisions which led with a high degree of probability to the present situation. We could have blocked the French when they tried to return to Indochina after the war. We could have refused to support them in their war against the Vietminh. We could have declined to assume responsibility for that part of the world when they left. We might have refused to send more military assistance in the first year of the Kennedy administration. Yet we did none of these things, indeed we barely considered them. Our decisions about Vietnam were as natural and as logical as our decisions about Greece and Turkey immediately after the war and about Korea in 1950. What is done is done.

  “The question today is whether we are prepared to recommend that the President decisively change course and that he admit in effect that we made a very serious mistake. As someone has said, the cost of victory in Vietnam would be so high that the American people would refuse to pay it. I sense very little disagreement in this room with that conclusion.

  “The question becomes how we implement our conclusion and how we tell the American people about it. I propose that we begin withdrawing our troops and set a deadline for completing that withdrawal, say a year from now. We tell the people the truth, something that we haven’t done thus far. Does that mean we have lost the war? No, it only means that we can’t win it and do not propose to spend more lives to maintain our credibility. We have learned that there are limits to our power to intervene, one of which is the stability and strength of purpose of the government on whose side we are intervening. We must cut our losses and get out now.

  “I question whether there is the will to tell this dramatic truth and take this dramatic action. We will try to fudge and compromise. We will try to appease the President’s wrath. We will not tell him the full truth, which among other things is that we either begin a withdrawal now or Richard Nixon will be sitting in the Oval Office a year from now and the war will continue for many more years and with many more casualties. Can anyone seriously dispute the fact that eventually we will have to leave? Is it not true that the longer we cling to the illusion that we can solve the problems of the Vietnamese that they were not willing to solve themselves, the more disorderly our departure will be and the more calamitous the blow to the nation’s prestige and perhaps to its self-confidence.

  “It is not enough to refuse to approve the military’s request for another quarter million men. That is not enough. We must strongly advise the President that he should begin a withdrawal now.

  “That will be difficult to do because he is sensitive to the appearances of betrayal, even though we have been candid with him in the past, if not as bluntly candid as we might have been. Nevertheless, this is a decisive time. Either we begin to leave now, with whatever humiliation and embarrassment, for we will leave later, much later with more humiliation and embarrassment and many more dead young men.”

  “Did they applaud?” I asked.

  He grinned, his terribly sexy little leprechaun grin, which always makes my heart ache with love. “Not exactly. Everyone was kind of quiet and serious for a moment. Dean said something like, ‘Charles, your prose style is as clear as your photographs,’ and they kind of sniggered and the discussion went on.”

  “You don’t mention Bull Run or the Little Bighorn or Pearl Harbor?”

  “I threw them in as an ad-lib. Too good a line to miss.”

  “You pushed the agenda farther then they want it to go?”

  “I think”—he put his arm around me—“we may edge toward my position tomorrow when we have lunch with the President in the Cabinet Room. Heaven only knows what he’ll do.”

  “So they’re letting you attend the lunch.”

  “I don’t want to go, but I don’t have much choice. LBJ wanted me on the committee, so he must want to see me.”

  “You’d better call home right now!” I said, remembering my conversation with our daughter.

  “About what?”

  “I want you to be surprised.”

  So he called and smiled happily when April Rosemary told him her good news.

  “I’m not surprised, darling, but I am terribly proud. You’ll show all those East Coast brats how bright we middle westerners are. Don’t ever become a Republican!”

  She must have sworn that she would not because he laughed loudly.

  “One happy kid,” he said to me. “What do you think about it, Rosemarie?”

  “I wish it was some other time. However, it’s her time and her era. She has to make her own decisions. We’ll do what we can to help her.”

  “So young to decide.”

  “Weren’t we all!”

  “I need a shower and then we’ll go out for supper.”

  “I’ve made a reservation at the Versailles. And bath, not shower, it’s more relaxing.”

  I stood up and removed my robe.

  “As always”—he sighed—“you’re the boss.”

  My heart was not in the project. The Dream continued to lurk on the fringes of consciousness. However, I loved my husband and I knew that he needed love. As it turned out our games in the tub, while not spectacular, were rewarding enough. A woman often finds that what starts out as mostly an act easily turns into the real thing, especially if she is deeply in love.

  “We acted like a pair of silly teenagers,” I said at the Versailles, blushing at the memory of the interlude in the tub.


  “Hmn … ?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I doubt that teens would have the patience or the creativity we displayed. I hope not.”

  “A lot of women my age would say we were too old for that sort of stuff.”

  “You don’t seem to be too old.” He grinned wickedly. “As I remember you started it.”

  “They say that we betray other women when we give in to male fantasies.”

  “All women say that?”

  “Those of us who disagree keep our mouths shut.”

  “Don’t women have fantasies too?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “You indulged in some of them today, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Probably.”

  “I should like to learn about all of them.”

  “You know most already … Anyway, the strongest fantasy is to be desperately wanted by a man who loves you.”

  “I can indulge you in that one forever.”

  We had no idea then how difficult that would be in the terrible years ahead of us.

  “Besides,” he continued, “what’s the point in being in a nice hotel suite with your spouse, unless you engage in a little extracurricular activity.”

  “Especially when to be in the same room with your spouse is to want to undress her like you did on our wedding night.”

  I wondered whether he had really said that at Tonsunhut or he had inserted it in his tape to excite me.

  “I’ll never live that line down. It’s true just the same.”

  I didn’t believe that for a moment. However, he did. I felt warm and complacent.

  “The future of our country and our family are at stake these days, Chuck.”

  “All the more reason to defy death with love.”

  The next morning he was anything but eager to walk across the park to the Cabinet Room in the West Wing.

  “Lyndon will mess it up, Rosemarie. Somehow, some way, he’ll keep the war going to punish the country for not supporting him.”

  When he returned that evening, he wrote out for me an account of the day, which I have saved.

  “Mac Bundy was the reporter. He presented our consensus delicately and gracefully. The present policy was not working. We could not continue it without a virtually unlimited application of resources. The American people would not support that. Much of the business, academic, religious, and political communities in the country did not even support the present limited war. Military victory in Vietnam is impossible under conditions compatible with the country’s larger interests. The fundamental goal should be to get out rather than to get in. Insistence on a military solution had dragged the President and the country into a morass from which escape was possible only if the goals and purpose of the war were changed.