September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Does he say that?”

  “He kind of hints at it.”

  “Asshole.”

  TV came to our front door to talk to us. Our youngest child answered their ring and glared at them.

  “Go way!”

  “Is your daddy home?

  “Go way!”

  “Your mommy?

  “Bad people! Go way!”

  “Bad?”

  “My daddy says you’re bastards!”

  Then she giggled and ran into the house. Her father’s daughter all right.

  “Do you have a reaction to the new encyclical, Dr. O’Malley?”

  The airhead blond pronounced the word like it was sigh-ike-el.

  “I think the Pope has taken a somewhat greater risk than he might have imagined.”

  “How is that?”

  “He believes that his own personal authority will outweigh the common experience of married people about the importance of sex in their lives.”

  “Do you think that the Catholic laypeople will accept his authority?”

  “That remains to be seen. My impression is that they’ve already made up their minds. This decision has come too late for them to change their minds.

  “And priests?”

  “I would suspect that in the confessional many priests will continue to tell the laity that they should follow their consciences.”

  “Will many people leave the Church because of the encyclical?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “How can they remain Catholics and disobey the Pope?”

  “There’s a long history of Catholics remaining Catholic on their own terms. I would not be surprised if many American Catholics will now join that history.”

  “Mrs. O’Malley, how do you think Catholic women will react?”

  Ah, so I am not invisible. I must be careful, controlled, calm.

  “I don’t know how others might feel. I wonder how the Pope can make such an important decision which will affect my life and the life of every Catholic woman in the world without consulting us.”

  So far, so good, Rosemarie. Stay cool.

  “Do you feel that the Pope does not understand women?”

  “What troubles me is that he seems to assume that it is unnecessary for him to understand women!”

  Clancy lowered the boom, boom, boom, boom!

  Which is precisely what my husband sang when the media left.

  Clancy, I must confess, was inordinately proud of herself. There were many phone calls after the interview aired. They had rearranged it so I received top billing. They used both of my sound bites before they gave Chucky Ducky any airtime.

  “Well,” he said, “at least I had the last word!”

  “We will make love tonight,” I informed him, “to respond personally to the Pope.”

  “If you insist!”

  “I insist.”

  “I wanted to tell those people it was the biggest fuck-up in the history of the Catholic Church.”

  In retrospect it surely was. Reaction from the various conferences of bishops around the world to the encyclical was at best lukewarm. Some (like the Canadian) actually seemed to reject it. Groups of theologians pointed out ways around it. Most parish clergy ignored it in their sermons the following Sunday. Priests who were waiting for an excuse to leave the priesthood and marry departed in droves. Instead of confirming papal teaching authority, the encyclical damaged it badly. Catholics stopped listening to the Popes when they spoke on sex. Maybe they should have done that long ago.

  The Pope was so astonished by the reaction that he never wrote another encyclical. Indeed, one of his biographers later reported that he even considered resigning, which is what he should have done. He decided against it, however, on the grounds that he was the “father” of the Church and that one cannot resign from fatherhood. That argument, it seemed to me, was of the same validity as the arguments in his encyclical.

  Chuck and I would discover that our presence on the birth control commission made us pariahs in some ecclesiastical quarters. A small Catholic college revoked an offer of an honorary degree. The local bishop ordered a larger university to ban him as a commencement speaker. A couple of Catholic papers attacked his photography, which they had not noticed before, as prurient.

  “Mr. O’Malley,” a clerical editorialist wrote, “is obsessed with womanly flesh.”

  “I should hope so,” I commented. “Isn’t that how God made men to be?”

  Chuck wouldn’t let me send the letter.

  “Rosemarie my darling, you have lowered enough booms on this issue.”

  “That’s what you get for giving the Pope honest advice, which presumably he was seeking!”

  I got even with all of them by writing one of my secret short stories about a couple who engage in spectacular lovemaking the day the encyclical appeared. The story was a comedy because sex, I believe, is of its very nature comic. It was not a completely autobiographical story.

  I did not, however, show it to my husband. Or anyone else.

  21

  “They’re planning on tearing the city apart,” Vince said at supper a couple of days before the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

  We were having supper at a small fish restaurant up the Lake from our homes. All four of us had tired for the moment of the Country Club. There were just too many people there who did not share our heartaches.

  “Why?” I asked. “What do they hope to accomplish?”

  “The kids want to protest the war.”

  “How do they think breaking up the Democratic Convention will stop the war?”

  “They don’t think, Rosemarie,” Chuck said sadly. “Does our daughter think? The horror of the war overwhelms them. They believe that if they will it strongly enough, the war will stop.”

  “They’ll elect Nixon,” I protested.

  “They don’t care. They think there is no difference between Nixon and Hubert.”

  “If I hear that once more,” I complained, “I’ll scream.”

  “Like my brother says all the time”—Peg shook her head sadly—“they lack experience, a sense of history, political realism, and teachers who will challenge their naïveté.”

  “It’s an interlude,” her brother said. “We’ll get through it. In years to come their own children will look back on their parents’ behavior and be embarrassed.”

  “If they live to have children.”

  “Some of their leaders are far more cynical,” Vince said as he polished off a plate of sea bass and looked at the empty plate like he wanted more. “We’ve received warnings from the FBI and the CIA that some of the leaders have phone conversations with the Russian Embassy every week.”

  Chuck had learned to be skeptical of both agencies during our years in Bonn.

  “Red baiting?”

  “I don’t know, Chuck. The documents look pretty good to me. The Mayor thinks they’re Communist agents. I doubt that. I wouldn’t be sure that they’re not getting some money from our friends over in Moscow.”

  “Why, Vince? Why should they care?”

  “Anything that disrupts American society makes them feel good. Tearing a city like Chicago apart is worth a few extra rubles even if it does not have long-term effects.”

  “They’d rather deal with Tricky Dicky?” I demanded.

  “Like the kids, they don’t think.”

  “What about the cops?” Chuck sipped at his iced tea.

  “You mean are they capable of protecting the city? Sure they are. We’ll have the National Guard in town too.”

  “They didn’t do too good a job during the riot …”

  Vince hesitated.

  “I’m not sure that they have enough training yet to restrain themselves when young women shout obscenities and throw feces at them.”

  “We might have a couple of riots, one of them involving the police?” Chuck pushed his point.

  “I’ve warned the Mayor. He has a lot of confidence in the Chicago police.”
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  “Too much?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Sounds like a bad scene,” I whispered to my husband, after we had made love that night.

  “We’ll stay up here,” he murmured, his mind on other things at the moment. Like me.

  “We will NOT,” I said. “You’ll be in Chicago taking pictures and I will be with you.”

  “Anything you say, woman”—he sighed—“as long as you keep doing things like that to me.”

  “Silly!”

  It was not only the crazies like Jerry Rubin’s Yippies who planned to make trouble for Chicago. The media came prepared to attack the city relentlessly and did so without any regard for fairness or even truth. Unfortunately the Mayor and the cops played into their hands.

  It’s hard to understand their reasons. Did they want to elect Nixon? Hardly, but then like the kids and like the Russians, if they were supporting the protesters with their money, they weren’t thinking beyond the spectacle of the event. Their paradigm was simple enough. Because of Mayor Daley and the city of Chicago, the Democratic Convention was a disaster and the Democrats lost the votes of those who were appalled by the behavior of the city.

  Whence that paradigm? I think some of them, like that faker Walter Cronkite, really hated the city, for no other reason than, like the man said about Mount Everest, it was there. In their WASP (and Jewish) minds Irish Catholic politicians like the Mayor were an inherently evil people as were the “white ethnic hard hats” who voted for him. They were the people who the media blamed for the war. Hence they must be punished. So the media made common cause with the crazies and the kids and in favor of the disruption of the convention.

  It was also, as my astute husband said, a great story, a “historic story.”

  They ignored the facts that the Mayor was antiwar as were the “white ethnics” whose sons were fighting it. Such facts never bothered people like Cronkite when they made up their minds.

  Upon arrival in Chicago, Cronkite blamed the Mayor for a strike which inhibited the networks from establishing their bases at the convention till the last moment. The strike, he argued, was a tactic the Mayor was using to censor the national media in a city which was becoming an armed camp.

  He knew nothing about Chicago labor relations, or he wouldn’t have said something so foolish on national television. But the temper of the times was such that no one cared about even the semblance of journalistic ethics. Some TV crews staged fake shots of kids who had been beaten by police in Lincoln Park, then unwrapped the bandages as soon as the shot was over.

  Chuck and I wandered through the park, which was occupied by the Yippies of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, comic anarchists who were perhaps more of a serious threat to the city than the serious protesters. For the most part they were rich kids playing at revolution, and a stylistic one at that. Dirty skin, body stench, bizarre clothes, foul language, the beat of rock and roll on portable radios, and drug-induced dreamy faces made them revolutionaries—as of course did excreting their bodily wastes on the grass of Lincoln Park.

  Scotty Reston, the pompous jerk from the New York Times, would later cry that the protesters on the streets of Chicago were “our children!” They were not his children in fact or my children, in the latter case not yet anyway. Nor were they the children of most Americans or of typical Americans. Lincoln Park in those days before the convention was a preview of what Woodstock would be in 1969—a youth culture more interested in sex and drugs than politics.

  Some of them murmured sleepy and incoherent obscenities at us as we toured the park. None seemed to object to Chuck’s camera. “Make love, not war,” others would mumble at us. We found an occasional child who was prepared to argue coherently with us, using only a minimum of “you knows.”

  “Like, man,” one girl with a strong New York accent said, “we want to show the absurdity of capitalism and laugh the country out of war. We don’t hate anyone. Hatred is not cool, you know?”

  “You hate the cops, don’t you?”

  “The pigs, well, they’re not really human, you know, but we don’t want to hate them, just make them laugh.”

  “In five years,” Chuck said, “she’ll be an upper-class matron in Westchester County and belong to a country club. Now she’s sticking it to her parents.”

  “Most of them will be. Not all. Some are hooked on drugs forever. Look at that kid over there against the tree. He’s in another world, spaced out completely … Do you think that will happen to any of ours?”

  “I hope not.”

  “If it does, do you think they will come back?”

  “I hope so.”

  We stopped on Clark Street to talk to some of the cops.

  “Fucking spoiled brats,” one said.

  “Deserve a good spanking,” another told us.

  “And a solid clout on the head with a billy club and a night in jail,” a third claimed. “Rich white trash.”

  He was black.

  “I can hardly wait till we get the word,” the first concluded, “to drive these dirty vermin out of our park.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Chuck said, as we walked down to Grant Park. “This could get bloody before it’s over.”

  “What if a hundred kids are killed?” I asked, thinking that one of mine might be among them.

  “Let’s hope and pray not.”

  “It’s a volcano ready to explode, Chuck. What can we do?”

  “Rosemarie, we’ve learned by now that we can’t do much of anything.”

  “Except stop by the Cathedral and pray.”

  So we did.

  The only difference between us and most of the crowd in Grant Park was that they thought they could do something. A few of them were spaced out on drugs, rock and roll continued to play, they wore ragged clothes, bags of excrement were ready to throw at the pigs. Yet most of them were relatively ordinary kids who didn’t want to start riots. They wanted only to stop the war—and believed that disrupting the Democratic Convention in Chicago was a strategic way of doing it.

  “We’re going to march on Mayor Daley’s home in Bridgeport tonight with candles to protest,” a young woman with a Kansas accent and corn-colored hair to match informed us with shining eyes. “We’ll let him know how the young people of America feel about the war.”

  “Do you think he doesn’t know?” I asked gently.

  “He supports the war,” she said stubbornly.

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “Well maybe when he sees us in front of his house singing peace songs he’ll oppose it even more.”

  She was pretty, she was innocent, and she was trying.

  Our daughter was not in the crowd across from the Conrad Hilton Hotel facing cops across the street in front of the hotel. She was up on the fifteenth floor in the McCarthy headquarters. Both of us had our doubts about Gene. It was irrational perhaps to blame him for Bobby’s death. Yet it was hard to forget that he’d been a spoiler. Moreover, his indifferent response to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, suggested what a lazy president he would be. Yet April Rosemary was still choosing politics over riot. Anyway, she had to make her own decisions, didn’t she?

  I yearned for the days a few years ago, when we made some of the decisions or at least talked her out of the bad ones.

  We had a quick sandwich with Vince at Berghof’s.

  “The Mayor,” he told us, “is trying desperately to persuade Ted Kennedy to run. This morning he thinks he made some progress.”

  “Ted’s terribly young,” I said. “Isn’t the Mayor exploiting the name?”

  “The Mayor wants to pull the country together,” Vince replied. “He thinks Ted can do it.”

  “He also wants to win the election,” Chuck said. “Don’t we all?”

  “Any more assassination rumors?”

  “Lots of them, Rosie. There are plans to kill the Mayor and McCarthy and Hubert. There is a plot to trick the cops into killing one of the young women in McCarthy’s campaign,
preferably a black one.”

  I would remember that plot the last night of the convention.

  “Any truth in them?”

  “In the present circumstances, Chuck, we can’t afford to ignore them. It’s explosive.”

  “People are going to be killed!” I said shivering.

  “I’m afraid of that too.”

  We went home with heavy hearts, I to my exercise room, Chuck to his darkroom.

  “Daughter on phone,” Missus informed me. “Too much sweat. Too much exercise is too much, ain’t it?”

  “You’re right, Missus, as always.”

  “Hi, Mom,” April Rosemary said. “I’m staying down a little late. We’re going to march on Bridgeport with lighted candles tonight. All very peaceful.”

  She wasn’t exactly asking my permission, but she was seeking my approval. It was Martin’s strategy. Stir up a riot with a peaceful march: nonviolence generating violence.

  “Do you think the ordinary people in Bridgeport support the war? It’s their sons who are dying in it.”

  “I don’t know, Mom. Probably not.”

  “Then why invade their neighborhood? They’re not the enemy. Neither is the Mayor. He has spent the whole day trying to persuade Senator Kennedy to run.”

  “REALLY!”

  “Missus is from Bridgeport. Is she the enemy? Is she responsible for the war?”

  “No …”

  “What’s the purpose of the march, then, except to get your pictures on television and maybe to incite some crazy cops to riot?”

  “They won’t, will they?”

  “We talked to some of them today. They think their city has been invaded by obscenity-shouting, shit-throwing revolutionaries. No telling what they might do.”

  Silence.

  “We have to do something, Mom.”

  “And you’re doing that by working for Senator McCarthy.”

  “We have to do more. Kids our age are dying right now in ’Nam.”

  “We know that April Rosemary.”

  “I’ll be careful … I promise.”

  “You’ll be staying at the hotel tonight?”

  “I thought I would … They’re good kids here, really, Mom. No”—she giggled—“shit-throwing revolutionaries.”