September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

  I refused to open my eyes.

  “I ache in every bone of my body,” I said.

  “More medicine?”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Ouch! … Yes, immediately!”

  “How are you?” I said after I swallowed the pills he gave me.

  “Headache … Sometimes I see double which is all right when it’s two Rosemaries. Otherwise, I’ve been worse.”

  “Like at Little Rock … What time is it?”

  “Around noon … I thought I had better tell you. The sons have planned a concert here this afternoon featuring this Hispanic girl who sings like Billie Holiday, if you can believe it. I told them I didn’t think you’d want to cancel it. I knew you’d want to get a look at her.”

  “Certainly!”

  How dare this little tramp try to vamp my oldest son!

  A tramp it turned out she wasn’t.

  Quite the contrary, she seemed a sweet freshman turning sophomore, a shy child, tall and slender with a café au lait complexion and a lovely figure in her gray shift.

  “I’m happy to meet you, Mrs. O’Malley. I’m sorry you were hurt last night.”

  Sitting at our grand piano, the good April was an addition to the band. Clearly the guys had been working out with Grandma, who had been there in the beginning when Pops Armstrong was playing in the speakeasies on the West Side.

  More secrets.

  “We’re going to experiment today with some Latin blues”—Kevin played the smooth master of ceremonies—“which Maria Elena taught us and which we think are pretty cool.”

  The music began. Pops was present in our parlor, not perfectly smooth by any means but still real. The kids were imitating still. They were getting better at it.

  Then the awkward almost-fifteen-year-old began to sing. As the song eased out of her mouth, some of it in English some of it in Spanish, she was transformed. The music took possession of her. She was an adult woman who knew all the suffering that the blues describe. Her man had done her wrong. She was too young to know such suffering, but the music knew the suffering and she put it on like a form-fitting dress. Her voice was deep and rich and sultry—and somehow, like all good blues singers, carried a little touch of hope.

  She wasn’t Billie Holiday. Rather she was Bessie Smith at the very beginning of Chicago jazz.

  She smiled and nodded at each of the instruments as they improvised around her and she wrapped them into her soul. She gave a special smile at the good April as the piano joined in.

  We were all in heaven.

  Chuck rolled his eyes.

  “Now,” said the good April, “poor Mrs. O’Malley was always good at this song. Maybe, Maria Elena, she can back you up vocally.”

  “Gee, that would be wonderful,” the girl, fourteen years old again, said awkwardly. “If you can.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world, dear.”

  So Kevin’s mother and his current crush blended their voices, one soprano, the other alto around and about and in and out and up and down. She grinned impishly at me, briefly a fourteen-year-old again, and then urged my voice up to the top and let me plummet down to the bottom, where she gently caught me. We bonded in that song and I hoped that my son would never let her get away. The good April ended with a Count Bassie three-note, Maria Elena echoed it, and then I added a final fading echo.

  Much applause at the end.

  “Maria Elena,” my husband said, turning on his full charm, “I always let my wife express our family position first, but before she does, I think you have an enormous talent and should take very good care of it.”

  Sometimes the poor man says exactly the right thing.

  “Thank you very much, Mr. O’Malley,” she said, blushing deeply.

  “Sometimes, dear,” I added, “Mr. O’Malley says exactly the right thing, not very often, but this was one of those times.”

  “It’s the pain pills talking.”

  Might I call her mother and propose she join us at Long Beach for the Labor Day Weekend? Oh, yes, I might. So I called Mrs. Lopez, a very gracious woman. I told her what a wonderful talent her daughter had. I said if she would give her permission, I would protect her like she was my very own at the Lake. If it wasn’t too much trouble, her mother said. She is still very young. No trouble at all.

  When we stopped by Maria Elena’s spotlessly neat home in the Back o’ the Yards neighborhood (west of the yards), the child and I did our little improv together, to the delight of the large and handsome Lopez family. Her mother hugged me.

  “We have played mariachi in our families for generations. We are very proud of Maria Elena.”

  I hope, Kevin, you know how much I’m investing in your future.

  That evening, while the band (including the good April) performed on the porch of our house against a harvest moon smiling benignly over the Lake, I whispered to my husband, “It’s only a kid’s crush, Chucky.”

  “I remember we both had kids’ crushes when we were about their age.”

  I replied with the immemorial exclamation of parents, “Times were different then!”

  “The hell they were, Rosemarie my darling … You really coopted that poor kid.”

  “Just like the good April coopted me.”

  “That’s not the way I remember it …” He closed his eyes again and reentered the world of sleep.

  Earlier when she had jumped into the warm waters of the Lake, she was wearing a very modest one-piece swimsuit. Someone, doubtless either Carlotta or April Rosemary, provided her a bikini for the rest of the weekend, much to poor Kevin’s delight.

  It was a wonderful weekend, lovely weather and the sweet and low-down melancholy of summer coming to an end. It would be a long time before we had another like it.

  Chuck and I were mending slowly, the hot days and the warm nights erased temporarily the horrors of 1968. Only April Rosemary seemed quiet and not quite present.

  “Something wrong, kid?”

  “It’s all so happy”—she burst into tears—“and I’ll miss it so much!”

  “Boston is only two hours away from Chicago, dear.”

  “I know … Now it seems like two million miles away.”

  I hugged her and we cried together.

  There was one last disaster—Richard Nixon won the election by less than 1 percent of the vote. The media folks insisted that the election had been lost in Chicago in August. In a way they were right. Humphrey’s campaign lagged badly through September and early October because the big money people in the Democratic party believed the media story. Then in the middle of October as Hubert soared in the polls, they had second thoughts and began to contribute—just a little too late. The real experts agreed that if the election had been in the middle of November instead of the beginning, Hubert might have pulled off the biggest upset since Harry Truman. I hope Walker Cronkite et al were happy

  There was, however, a more basic reason why Humphrey lost—the war. Nixon announced that he had a “plan” for ending the war. Americans were so desperate to end the mess that many of them believed him. In fact, he was lying as he did on so many other occasions before it all caught up with him.

  Hubert’s people told him in early September that his only hope was to firmly disown the war. They drafted a speech which, while respectful of the good intentions of the administration, made it clear that he would end it as soon as he was elected. He liked the speech. He said he had to show it to Johnson first. Lyndon tore the hide off him. Nothing was ever heard again about the speech. Humphrey would go to his grave knowing that if he had delivered the speech he would have been elected. Lyndon had won the final round with the rest of us. His war went on and became Nixon’s war. More than twenty-five thousand more Americans would die, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.

  Why did Hubert lose?

  The Mayor was not talking Malaprop when he said that Mr. Humphrey lost because he didn’t get enough votes. He should have …

  Several
months after the election, Chuck showed me a clipping that he had carefully underlined.

  DOVES SUPPORT DALEY, MICHIGAN STUDY SAYS

  According to a report by the University of Michigan’s National Election Study, the majority of American voters who wanted immediate withdrawal from Vietnam approved of the way Chicago’s Mayor responded to the convention riots in Chicago last August. Forty percent of the Doves, those who wanted immediate withdrawal, approved of the amount of force the Chicago police used, twenty perent more of them said that the Chicago police had not used enough force.

  So the media had deceived itself. The public, even the antiwar public, did not accept their interpretation. Funny thing—Walter Cronkite never mentioned that finding on his program.

  We encountered the Mayor later in the winter at a political party. He shook hands with us vigorously and asked how our health was. I assured him that it was fine, given the fact that he had not passed an ordinance against winter weather.

  “Heh, heh,” he said. “That’s a good idea … I want to thank you for standing by us in that time of trouble.”

  After our magical Labor Day weekend was over, we settled down to the demands of the school year and autumn. We drove April Rosemary to her Radcliffe dorms in Cambridge. The place looked like an Ivy League school is supposed to look. The preppies had been replaced, however, by hippies. Our daughter was a very unhappylooking young woman when we prepared to leave.

  “It’s up to you, kid,” I said, when we were saying good-bye. “We can turn around and all three of us drive back to Chicago.”

  She shook her head. “No, Mom. I’m not a quitter … Daddy, happy fortieth birthday. I’m sorry I won’t be there for the party.”

  After we had picked our way through the traffic mess of Boston and eased onto the Interstate, I said to Chuck, “I’m not sure that this is a good idea.”

  “I’m not either, Rosemarie … What can we do? I’m sure we couldn’t talk her out of it. We could refuse to pay the bills. She’d rebel against that.”

  “I don’t want to do that,” I admitted. “Did you notice that before the cops broke up our little party in Gene McCarthy’s offices, she told her friends how proud she was that we had marched with Martin at Selma?”

  “You bet I did.”

  “She’s so young, Chuck, so young.”

  Chuck’s birthday on September 17 was an uproariously funny event as always, songs and stories and jokes and even impromptu dances by Moire, who had started to “take” Irish step dancing. Chuck reacted bravely to the critical turning point in his life. However, he seemed quite satisfied with his life so far.

  “All I ever wanted to be,” he told us, “was an accountant, a quiet man with a good, steady, conservative job. The monstrous regiment of women, as John Knox called them, in my life, that is my mother, my sister, and my wife, ordained otherwise. So here I am, a harmless little fellow with a camera permanently attached to my hand. I want to take a picture now of that monstrous regiment giving me my orders!”

  It was a great party, as all the O’Malley family parties are. We all missed our eldest, who had never been missing before. We now knew how important she was to the family.

  At Christmas, the week of our nineteenth wedding anniversary, as improbable as that seemed, she was with us, but not really with us. She seemed distant, preoccupied, unhappy. Her preliminary grades were terrible. She solemnly promised that she would have passing grades in all her subjects by the end of the year.

  “We don’t care about the grades, April Rosemary,” I said to her. “We care only about your being happy.”

  “I care about them,” she said grimly.

  “You do any photography?” Chuck asked her.

  “Right now that seems silly,” she said.

  When she kissed us good-bye at O’Hare, there was a certain air of grim finality about.

  I worried. So did my poor husband who, poor man, has fewer ways to express his worry.

  We had, it would turn out, a lot to worry about.

  In early February of 1969, Chuck was invited to the White House to do a formal picture of the new President. Neither of us wanted to do it. We did not like the man one bit. On the other hand Chuck had done portraits of three presidents in a row and hated to break the string. After all, he was our President, like it or not.

  Nixon had been courting many of the old Kennedy friends, perhaps thinking he could win them over. His proposed domestic policies were radical for a Republican. He’d brought Pat Moynihan into the White House to be his principal domestic adviser.

  So we flew to Washington and were picked up by a Secret Service limo. Pat Moynihan was there to greet us and create out of whole cloth, so to speak, the social niceties. I had the impression that both the President and his wife looked to Pat as to a tutor as to how a president should act.

  Nixon seemed a genial and gracious man and welcomed us warmly, as did his wife. Both were quite nervous in our presence. As if the little redhead punk from the West Side of Chicago was armed and dangerous.

  “The only trouble with him,” I later told Chuck, “is that his smiles don’t match what he says and his gestures are either one sentence ahead or two behind.”

  “He’s not a disturbed man like LBJ was. He’s disturbed in his own unique and special way. How do we ever get these losers as presidents?”

  We could not have anticipated then what a loser he was.

  The shoot was difficult because the President had a hard time sitting still and being quiet. He wanted to talk about Whittier College in California. Southwest Texas State Teachers College and Whittier College! We knew how to pick them, didn’t we?

  Chucky’s philosophy of portraits is that they are supposed to be honest but not insulting. You don’t try to make the subject someone he’s not, but you also want to present him as the best of him is. With Tricky Dicky that was tricky. We ended up with a portrait of a man who was very smart and very determined. Others would come to see Tricky Dicky in the portrait. However, they were reading that into the picture. Both the President and the First Lady loved it.

  “What’s going to happen?” we asked Pat later in his tiny cubicle in the basement of the West Wing as we drank tea.

  “I think you’ll be surprised on how liberal he will be on domestic issues. He really would like to bring Americans together. I wish he and the men around him were not so defensive and suspicious.”

  “Paranoid?” I asked.

  “Ah, Rosemarie, you speak with the Irishwoman’s instinct for the honest word!”

  “And the war?” I asked.

  “That’s Henry’s domain … Henry Kissinger. Just now our policy on the war is very intricate, very complex, and very Mittel European. They both want the war to end. Neither wants to compromise American prestige, as though it were not already compromised beyond repair.”

  “He seems a bit odd,” Chuck observed.

  “It is worth remembering that Henry does not lie because it is in his interest to lie but because it is in his nature to lie.”

  With that happy thought we drove back to National Airport in a Secret Service car and took the shuttle up to Boston. We drove over to Cambridge in a Hertz car to visit our daughter. She did not seem particularly happy to see us.

  “How could you take that awful man’s picture?” she began.

  “He’s our President,” Chuck told her, “the President of all of us.”

  “He’s not my President,” she insisted.

  “Spoken like a true Democrat,” I said.

  She didn’t laugh at that. Indeed she didn’t laugh much at all.

  She was thin, pale, and tired. She wore a sweatshirt and jeans and no makeup, not that she ever used or needed much. Her studies were very hard, she admitted, much harder than at Trinity, though she had to admit that the education she had received at her high school was better than that which most of the other Harvard students had received.

  “They’re very smart,” she said, “and they talk big, but most
of them are phonies. It’s taken me a while to figure that out.”

  “So you’re as smart as they are?” I asked cautiously.

  “Smarter actually”—she laughed mirthlessly—“not that it makes any difference. It’s all a silly competitive game around here.”

  She mellowed a little as the day wore on, mostly because of Chuck’s funny stories about the band and about Moire, who wanted to be a member and was permitted to clang the tympani triangle.

  “Kevin still have the hots for Maria What’s Her Name?”

  “I think,” Chuck said smoothly, “that he still has a certain romantic attraction toward her, a very discreet one.”

  “She’s sweet.” My daughter frowned. “Probably too good for bro.”

  Then she laughed, the first and only laugh of the visit. By the time we left for an evening flight back to O’Hare, she actually hugged and kissed us affectionately.

  “She doesn’t like it there,” Chuck said to me on the plane. “She’s going to prove to herself that she can do it, then she’ll come home.”

  “It’s a lot more complicated than that,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Womanly instincts.”

  “I know better than to disagree with those.”

  “There’s trouble brewing, Chucky, terrible trouble.”

  I didn’t know the half of it.

  24

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  I am writing to tell you that I passed all my courses as I promised I would. It doesn’t make any difference to me whether I pass or fail because studies are irrelevant. But I know it matters to you that your investment wasn’t wasted. So I hope that makes you happy.

  I am not returning to Harvard. It too is totally irrelevant. I can’t imagine a place more irrelevant. I hate it. I will never return here.

  I am also leaving your family. I know this will hurt you and I’m sorry for that. I must live my own life and find my true self. I cannot do that as part of your family. I would like to be able to say I’m grateful to you for all you’ve given me, but I’m really not grateful at all. You have made me a spoiled irrelevant young woman. You have cheated me of the opportunity to discover who I really am. You have made me a silly, adolescent child.