September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Maggie Ward says that we must assume that we will never see her again and work through our grief.”

  “Heaven forbid that I should seem to be in disagreement with that good witch of the west. She’s right of course. However, another part of you should always be ready for surprise. That’s how God wants us to live.”

  “All right,” Chuck interrupted, “I see your point. She’s out in the world by herself trying to find an identity. What if she becomes a druggy in the process?”

  “I have enough confidence in her intelligence and strength to bet that, while she may experiment with drugs, she’ll never completely succumb to that culture.”

  “She’s an innocent,” I protested.

  “A tough innocent.”

  “She hurt us terribly, John.”

  “I know that, Rosemarie. She doesn’t realize how much. When she does sorrow and guilt will overwhelm her … Are you two ready to forgive her?”

  “Damn you, John Raven,” I snapped, “for demanding that we be Christians when we don’t want to … We’ve forgiven her already, haven’t we, Chucky?”

  “That’s what Christians do, isn’t it?”

  “Do you think we ought to try to hunt for her?” I asked. “Hire a private eye to find out where she is …”

  “I don’t know about that, Rosemarie. If you do find out, leave her alone. The more you push, the less likely the story is to have a happy ending.”

  “Why, John, why?”

  “The times, Rosie, the times! Three years ago she would have gone to Africa with the Peace Corps, three years from now she would be in South America with the Jesuit volunteers. These are terrible times to grow up.”

  We talked about it as we walked back to our house.

  “What do you think, Chuck?”

  “I agree with John Raven. We should leave her alone.”

  “Couldn’t we at least know where she is and what she’s doing without interfering in her life?”

  “Do you think if we find out where she is we can then leave her alone?”

  “We’ll have to, won’t we?”

  “I hope so. John is right. If we push her too hard, we might destroy whatever little hope we might have.”

  “She’s not John’s daughter.”

  “Do I get veto power about what we do if we find her?”

  “We’re in this together, Chuck. I don’t want to push her. I just want to be in the background if she needs us.”

  “And wants us?”

  “And wants us.”

  So it was agreed. We hired a top-flight agency to see what they could learn. Initially they found no trace of her. It was as if my firstborn child had disappeared from the face of the earth.

  Nonetheless we made Kevin’s graduation from Fenwick a glorious event. The band played with the good April on the piano, Maria Elena as the lead singer, and myself as the backup. We bought out all the ice cream at Petersen’s. Chuck and I did our expanding repertory of musicals. Peg, now concertmaster of the West Suburban Symphony played a Vivaldi sonatina. We all sang the night away. Kevin would stay home with us and commute downtown to DePaul, where he would study composition and the trumpet, a surprising admission that someone could teach him anything about that instrument. Maria Elena had already started voice lessons there.

  With the boys working in Chicago, we drove back and forth from the Lake often because we thought that Moire was entitled to her summers at the Lake too.

  Toward the end of the summer there was a rock festival in Woodstock, New York, to which a hundred thousand kids, it was claimed, flocked. For that generation it was a landmark event. For those of us who were in earlier or later generations it was a disgusting orgy. Despite all the peace symbols that were displayed, politics hardly mattered. Rock and roll really didn’t mean peace; it meant sex and drugs. Despite TV commentaries marveling at the vigor of this “historic” new youth movement, clips showed half-dressed young men and women cavorting around with pot in their mouths and booze in their hands. Their bodies were painted wild colors, their hair was long, they bragged that since they were being “natural” they did not have to worry about the shortage of toilet facilities. The men looked like hairy satyrs frolicking around a Renaissance painting, the women were, it seemed to me, less happy in their role of endlessly violated virgins. One news program allowed a dissent from its wild-eyed enthusiasm. A boy, as satyrlike as the rest, told the camera, “This is a freak show here. Everyone is zonked out on LSD. I came here to listen to music not to fry my brains.”

  Our April Rosemary couldn’t be there, I told myself.

  The next night our man landed on the moon. All of us cheered at our house at the Lake as mankind took that one step, though I could not for the life of me understand what was the point in going to the moon. Because it was there, maybe. I did cheer with the rest of them.

  “How can we land on the moon and not be able to end a war?” Jimmy asked.

  “Landing on the moon is easy, Jim,” my husband replied. “It requires good logistics and lift power. Ending a war requires wisdom.”

  The week after at our routine lunch, Peg said, with some hesitation, “I think there’s been a sighting, Rosie.”

  “Woodstock?”

  “I’m afraid so … Do you want the details?”

  “No, don’t tell me … Yes, I want to know.”

  “Some of Carlotta’s friends from Rosary College went down there. They report that it was like totally gross. However, they claim to have seen April Rosemary.”

  “In what condition?”

  Peg drew a deep breath.

  “Totally naked, her body painted red, zonked out on LSD, cavorting around with a crowd of naked boys.”

  “I suppose we might have expected that,” I said, too angry to weep. “It’s a wonderful way of finding out who you are.”

  I told Chuck when I came home from lunch. He put his face in his hands and wept.

  1970-71

  25

  Nineteen sixty-nine turned into 1970. The war went on. Nixon and Kissinger talked and negotiated and lied to us. The Vietnamese knew they had won and were not prepared to deal with us. Boys kept dying.

  One of the boys who died was Maria Elena’s brother Batiste—twenty years old. We went to the funeral at St. Francis of Assisi down on Twelfth Street. We expected an emotional funeral—public grief, weeping and wailing and hysteria. Instead the Lopezes were grim and restrained, even more controlled in their sorrow than we Irish are. Thus for our stereotypes.

  Nixon went to China and made some sort of peace with Chairman Mao, not enough for the Chinese to lean on their allies to end the war. Why should they? What was the payoff in it for them? Still it was a major diplomatic victory because we had detached the Chinese from the Russians. Big deal, I thought, when boys like Batiste have to die in a foolish war.

  Chucky and I began to drift apart. At first neither one of us noticed. It was a slow, gradual, and pernicious drift. He was wrapped up in his 1968—Year of Violence exhibit, which he now planned to be his biggest and best. When you’re forty, you want to do something really big. Worry about my children preoccupied me. I was still writing my secret stories—with the door closed to my “study” so no one would know what I was doing.

  There were fewer conversations between us and fewer fights too. We didn’t laugh together much anymore. We made love less frequently, which ought to have been a signal. We didn’t want to see it. I stopped seeing Maggie Ward and joined one of the first “consciousness-raising” groups in our neighborhood. Most of the women were the wives of doctors who resented their inferior status as “doctor’s wife.” They wanted to be their own person, just like April Rosemary, to have an identity of their own. They hated their husbands, who did indeed sound like arrogant insensitive fools. Bitter words at the group’s meetings were a substitute for telling them off. The women agreed that “doctor” would not hear what they were saying.

  I figured that my relationship with my husband was different. Ch
uck was not an insensitive jerk. Yet my identity was clearly “Ambassador O’Malley’s wife.” No one ignored me, not twice anyway. But I was not doing anything that would give me a special identity distinct from my husband. I was writing and polishing, rewriting and polishing my stories. However, no one knew about that. Why I wondered at first did these women need to have careers of their own? Had they not willingly submerged themselves in their husbands’ careers? Was it not unfair to blame “doctor” for their own decisions?

  Still, Betty Friedan had written her book The Feminine Mystique and the feminist movement was taking shape all around us. I agreed with most of their goals. Chuck probably did too if he noticed the emerging movement. We didn’t discuss it. However, I didn’t hate men. Or so I told myself.

  There were more sightings of our daughter. Someone thought they had seen her on the beach at LaJolla with the surfing crowd. Better that than Woodstock. Jimmy, who went to one of the many antiwar marches in Washington, was positive he had seen her from a distance.

  “What did she look like, Jimmy?” I asked him, my stomach turning with fear.

  “She looked like Sis, except she was wearing old clothes. When she saw me, she ran away in the crowd. So I was certain it was her.”

  “Was she on drugs?”

  “Didn’t seem like it. I think she’s okay.”

  The Harvard girl we had talked to called us to say that some of her friends had seen her in a drug commune in Vermont.

  Our private eyes checked out these stories. They were unable to find her, though it did appear that she had been in the drug commune for a while.

  The “Red Army” faction of the “Weathermen” faction of the SDS came to Chicago for their “Days of Rage” demonstration, which was supposed to be a repeat of the battle in front of the Conrad Hilton. However, few Chicago kids joined them and the police were paragons of restraint.

  Hundreds of them in motorcycle helmets and with clubs in their hands swarmed up Michigan Avenue and into the Gold Coast. They smashed store windows, attacked doormen in elegant apartment buildings, stopped autos, pulled out passengers and beat them, and shouted, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!”

  The Governor sent in two thousand National Guardsmen. After a couple of days the Weathermen had either been arrested or left town.

  It’s hard to know what they were up to. Did they really think they could launch a revolution in Chicago? Or were they symbolically attacking their parents in the Gold Coast. It was an era of demonstrations for their own sake, “liturgical protest” Father Dan Berrigan called them.

  I absolutely forbade my husband from rushing downtown and photographing this nonsense.

  “Those kids are killers, Chuck. You’re the ideal target, an old white male.”

  He didn’t give me much of an argument. He’d done enough scenes of violence.

  We were both worried that April Rosemary might be among them—which is really why Chuck wanted to photograph the melee. Peg asked Vince, who was still working for the Mayor, to find out anything he could about her.

  “None of them have ever heard of her, Rosie,” he said, with a shrug of his shoulders.

  Sometimes I thought I saw her in TV clips among the protesters in one march or another. Chuck would get the tapes, which we would watch carefully. It was evident that she was not in the crowd, though I refused to admit it to him.

  Then in the spring of 1970 Nixon and Kissinger decided it was time to invade Cambodia and set loose the furies which would lead to the genocide in which several million people were slaughtered by the Communists. The campuses of America blew up in protest. At Kent State University in Ohio, nervous National Guard kids opened fire on protesters and killed seven of them. Then the campuses really went crazy.

  “It used to be panty raids in spring,” my husband mused. “Then there was streaking naked across campus. Now it’s protests. Anything but study for exams.”

  “People don’t get killed in panty raids,” I snapped.

  “Yeah,” he said glumly.

  Students and faculty went on strike at many schools. They demanded a “moratorium” on classes in October so that they could campaign for a “peace Congress” in the November elections.

  “Strange kind of strike,” Chuck commented. “Teachers get paid and students get final grades. Can’t beat it.”

  I ignored him as I usually did in those days.

  Vince confided to us that the Mayor was hoping the colleges in the Chicago area would approve the moratorium.

  “Look,” Chuck protested, “the current Senator from Illinois is Ralph Tyler Smith who was appointed to fill the place of the late Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen when he went to his reward. Senator Smith is a Republican and wears electric green suits. Against him we are running no less a person than Adlai E. Stevenson III, who is as lazy as Gene McCarthy but who has a great name and is against the war. He is, as they say, an odds-on favorite to win. You turn posses of hippie kids loose on the electorate and they’ll vote for Ralph Tyler Smith.”

  “Oh, the kids won’t campaign.”

  “What will they do?”

  “Play basketball and drink booze. What else do kids do when they don’t have to go school?”

  “Then why let them loose on the grounds that they will campaign against the war.”

  “Otherwise,” Vince said, “they might burn down the schools.”

  Vince’s cynical prediction was accurate. Once again I understood that it doesn’t take many people to create a riot or a protest march or even a Woodstock. Most of the other kids hated the war and experimented a little with drugs. Otherwise, they weren’t much different from previous generations, my own included.

  While Peg and I had always been best friends, we rarely discussed my marriage as best friends usually do. My husband was her beloved brother. I could hardly talk about him with her. She could tell when things were good and when they were bad and would occasionally make a very general comment.

  Like “Tough times with Chuck these days.”

  To which I would reply, “You know how he can be, Peg.”

  She would nod solemnly, though I don’t think she knew at all. So she would worry about me. It was nice to have someone worry about you.

  I attacked him now at the consciousness-raising meetings. He was an arrogant jerk who thought he was funny. He did not care about my career. I was merely a useful adjunct to his work. I kept the books, paid the bills, helped in his lab, and received no credit for any of those things.

  Deep down I knew this was unfair. Looking back at those times, I understand that rage at poor Chuck had become a kind of substitute for drinking. Oddly enough, or perhaps not so oddly, I was never tempted to turn to booze in those awful times. I could kill myself with that stuff, just as my poor mother had.

  Then Kevin came home from school one day, gathered the two of us together in the kitchen, and told us that he was giving up his draft deferment.

  “I don’t believe in the war,” he said, “yet I know that it’s not fair that guys from poor families have to fight it and I don’t. It’s part of the experience of my generation. I have to do it.”

  My heart stopped beating. Why did all my kids have to be idealists?

  “Batiste’s death?” Chuck whispered.

  “I’ve been thinking about it all winter. I made up my mind at his funeral. As you can imagine, Maria Elena does not want me to go.”

  So formal, so carefully rehearsed.

  “No woman ever does,” I said softly.

  “Is there any way we can talk you out of it?” Chuck asked.

  I wanted to strangle him for being so calm and rational about it.

  “No, Dad, there isn’t. I’ve made up my mind. I know that you and Mom will be unhappy about it, especially with Sis on her hiatus. I can’t do anything else. Besides, Sis will be home soon, I’m sure of that.”

  Two children lost to the damn war.

  “Mom?” He turned to me.

  What was I supposed to say?


  “I don’t want you to go, Kevin,” I said slowly, feeling my way, “but I respect your integrity and maturity. If you feel that’s your duty, I’m not going to throw myself on the floor at the doorway and make you walk over me.”

  We all laughed, somewhat hollowly.

  Dear God in heaven, you made me say that. You made me sound heroic. I don’t feel that way at all.

  We had our usual family party for him at the Lake before he left for Fort Benning. Like all our parties it was a jolly, madcap affair. The Crazy O’Malleys were still crazy, even if their hearts were breaking. Maria Elena, now a senior at Providence High School, watched Kevin’s every move with sad, adoring eyes.

  Without Kevin to pull it together the jazz band fell apart that summer. After basic training they sent him to Officers’ Candidate School, waiving the requirement that he should be a college graduate because he was so intelligent. Lt. Kevin Clancy O’Malley, combat infantryman.

  “Ranks me,” Chuck said stupidly.

  “Second Lieutenants in the infantry have the highest casualty rate,” I said reprovingly.

  “I know that, Rosemarie. I know that.”

  “Then why didn’t you stop him?”

  “Do you think I could have stopped him?”

  “No.”

  My heart was a lump of lead, beating only under protest. I tried to write a story about losing a son to the war. I couldn’t put words on paper after the first couple of paragraphs.

  We had another family party at the end of the summer (I invited Maria Elena and she accepted, as if she already considered herself a member of the family). This one to send Jimmy off to St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, on a basketball scholarship.

  “I thought they played only hockey up there in the polar regions,” Chuck said.

  “It’s a great Benedictine cultural center,” the new collegian said proudly.

  “We may have told you that on occasion,” Chuck replied.

  We had always said that St. John’s was one of the bastions of our kind of Catholicism.

  “No way,” Jimmy argued. “I’d remember.”

  It was good that he didn’t remember. If he had, he might have rejected the school out of hand.