September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “He’s obsessed with it.”

  “In her own, uh, modest way, she is too. Arguably more so.”

  “It’s supposed to be comedy.”

  “Oddly, Rosemarie, I did comprehend that.”

  “You haven’t told me what you think of them.”

  “Oh, I thought I had … Well”—he opened to the first story and hesitated—“you know, Rosemarie my darling, why do I have the sense that another story is already taking shape in your agile imagination?”

  Oh, damn. He’d be watching me for the rest of our marriage, looking for hints that I’d be taking mental notes.

  “Get on with it, Chuck! Are they publishable?”

  “Oh, is that the question?” he feigned surprise. “I thought the answer to that was obvious.”

  He fingered the pages of the top story again, as if weighing the proper answer.

  “Well, the first three are in their present highly polished condition sure New Yorker material. That doesn’t mean they’ll publish them because they are a persnickity lot … You would need an experienced and influential agent … The rest of the stories are also brilliant light but telling comedy. In short, Rosemarie my darling, you’ve got it.”

  “I don’t know any agents,” I grumbled, thinking to myself I would surely be ravaged before the day was over, which wouldn’t be all bad.

  “If you wouldn’t accuse me of interfering in my wife’s career because I wanted to claim credit for it, I might be able to find one such …”

  “Damn it, Chuck, don’t be an asshole all the time.”

  “Well, then I’ll make a few phone calls.”

  “Thank you,” I said. It was time I changed modes. I should stop pretending to be angry, like the idiot girl in the stories often did to cover up her fear.

  “Sometimes that woman is an awful idiot,” I observed, trying to change the mood. “I don’t know why he puts up with her.”

  “Possibly”—Chucky sighed—“because he’s hopelessly in love with her. Implacably in love. He could never not love her … Something like God loves us.”

  “Possibly,” I said, averting my eyes so I wouldn’t lose all control and break down completely.

  “You are not fair, Rosemarie,” he said, suddenly very serious.

  “I know I’m not, Chuck. I know I’m not. I’m so sorry.”

  The waterworks behind my eyes opened. I began to sob, this time great, heaving sobs of pain and guilt, real guilt not neurotic guilt.

  “And?” he said, kneeling besides me, his arm around my shoulders.

  “And?” I gasped.

  “What comes after contrition?”

  “A firm purpose of amendment?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Chucky, my love, I promise I’ll never do it again … Well not more than once a week.”

  Then we both laughed and wept together.

  Then I added the magic words that I had wanted to say for twenty-one years.

  “Chucky Ducky, my magical darling, I surrender.”

  This would, I reflected, make a great story for the series.

  Then he slipped his hand inside my blouse and tickled me.

  “Chucky,” I cried, “you know what that does to me!”

  Quickly his fingers ignited my body chemistry. The chemicals had been dormant for a long time.

  He kept right on with his deadly work.

  “We’re going to the Conways’ for dinner.” I sighed.

  “And I’ll take every opportunity this evening to tickle you some more,” he warned.

  “I’m not a sex object for male fantasy,” I protested with a patent lack of sincerity.

  “You’re not a sex object. You’re Rosemarie my pride with whom I’m about to have a second honeymoon right here at home. You said you’d surrendered.”

  “Third,” I said, like the woman in the stories always correcting. “The second was after I gave up drinking.”

  As we walked through the soft spring air to the Conways’, Chuck said, “So the gypsy woman was right.”

  “What gypsy woman?”

  “The one in Dad’s painting. The one who told your mother that she would have a daughter who would be a very great woman. Those stories are the frosting on the cake.”

  “I’d forgotten about that prophecy.”

  “No one else has.”

  This was my fourth second chance. I’d better not let it slip through my fingers. God would certainly not give me a fifth. Well, maybe he would.

  I’m afraid I was incoherent at the dinner party. My poor body, denied what it wanted for so long, was punishing me by rampaging out of control.

  However, I did manage to accomplish one important goal of my life.

  “If any of you guys want to have a surprise fortieth birthday party for me,” I said to Peg, who was also at the dinner, “I wouldn’t mind, just so long as you tell me the date.”

  My best friend, whom I rarely surprised, was astonished. “Rosie, you said you didn’t want a party.”

  “I changed my mind,” I said imperiously.

  They all laughed.

  Our love that night was like that when Chuck came home from ’Nam—gentle, healing, and like rich dark chocolate. We ritually enacted my total surrender to implacable love which would never, never let me go.

  In the early phases—I still had my panties on—I looked into the eyes of my lover and saw there for the first time what I had always refused to see before. He loved me as a beautiful woman. He had always loved me that way. I was in truth beautiful—I twisted in an agony of pleasure at that idea. If I took care of myself, I would always in some way be beautiful.

  Maggie Ward, I thought just before I stopped thinking about anything, had been right all along.

  1972-1974

  27

  Kevin’s letters from ’Nam were always funny. He wrote about the inconveniences of military life, the different men in his platoon, the sickness of life in Saigon, the fun he had in teaching Vietnamese kids how to play basketball, the irony that the American involvement in the war would end in 1973 (as everyone was predicting) just when it was time for him to come home.

  There was never any hint of either fear or danger.

  Maria Elena and I compared notes on our letters. She would graduate from high school in the spring of 1972 and go on to DePaul. I sensed that she had become more confident and more mature in the last three years and that her heart ached as much as mine, no, more than mine, for Kevin. He was the love of her life. Dear God, I prayed, protect them both. They’re so young.

  Seano also was rewarded with a basketball scholarship to St. John’s. He hesitated about taking it.

  “I know Jimmy likes the place,” he said. “He’s half a monk anyway. I don’t know whether I belong in a monastery.”

  “It’s up to you, Sean,” I said. “Thanks be to God, we can afford to send you anywhere you want.”

  “Well, that’s probably not fair either … I’ll give it a try. Kev says we can win their championship and start a jazz band too.”

  “Can one do jazz in that cold a climate?” Chuck asked.

  “Dad,” said my third son, “you can do jazz in any climate, so long as you have soul.”

  “I’ll have the house all to myself,” crowed twelve-year-old Moire Meg. “No more messy boys around.”

  “Except Daddy,” I corrected her.

  “Mo-THER, you know that Daddy isn’t messy at all.”

  Politics that year were enough to make my husband and I want to vomit. The various “movements” had captured control of the Democratic party. Politicians were being replaced by “the people.”

  “So long as,” my husband said, “they are people with a Ph.D.”

  A committee headed by George McGovern had introduced “reforms” into the Democratic party which would put it in a wilderness for a long time. The idea of the “reforms” was “balance.” Blacks, minorities, young people, women, and gays were to be represented at the convention in their exact proport
ion in the population. Delegations which did not honor this rule could be challenged before the credentials committee.

  The media kept telling the world that this was the most “balanced” convention ever, another “historic first.” Professional politicians, party hacks, and their backroom deals were forever banished. The party no longer needed the kind of delegates who had nominated Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey. Rather they needed the kind of balanced delegates with Ph.Ds from Harvard who would nominate a sure loser like George McGovern.

  As for smoke-filled rooms, that hateful and mean Frank Mankiewicz engineered a deal by which the credentials committee rejected a duly elected Illinois delegation headed by Mayor Daley for a self-selected delegation elected at caucuses by so-called “activists and reformers” who displayed the required “balance.” Mayor Daley, the commentators said gleefully, was being punished for the police riots in Chicago.

  Somehow, there was no room for George Meany either. The labor bosses were a burden to the party as well as the urban machine bosses. The Democrats no longer needed them because they had the minorities, and the women, and the gays, and the young.

  Chuck turned off the television in disgust.

  “Just an accident that they’re both Irish Catholics,” he snorted.

  “Honey,” I said, “who needs Irish Catholics when you have the gays and the young?”

  McGovern himself knew better. He chose a Catholic senator from Missouri as his vice president, said he was a “thousand percent” behind him when it was reported that the poor man had undergone some psychotherapy, and then dumped him for Sarge Shriver, a Kennedy in-law.

  It didn’t do any good. The President’s campaign was a carefully orchestrated triumphal procession. No one realized at the time that dirty tricksters from CREP (the Committee to Reelect the President) were breaking into Democratic headquarters in the Watergate complex.

  My renewed love affair with my husband continued unabated. We had a huge party to celebrate the publication of my first story. Kevin would be home soon. Who cared about politics anyway? Camelot was dead and buried long ago.

  April Rosemary? Although, she was still a dull ache in my soul, I was resigned to the likelihood that I would never see her again.

  It was evident that McGovern might carry Massachusetts and nothing else. The columnists who had celebrated the “balance” at the convention, hoped without much confidence that, as one New York Times guy put it, the “legions of the young” would turn out for McGovern and spoil the predictions of all the polls.

  We went to the polling place and with heavy hearts voted the straight Democratic ticket, like we always did.

  The “legions” of the young did not turn out and those that did, like everyone else, voted for Richard Nixon. The “young” in the balance crowd at the convention turned out to represent no one but themselves.

  Chuck had put away his cameras. The 1968 show was enough for a while, he said. There was nothing left to photograph. An occasional portrait maybe and a lecture somewhere, though not at Catholic colleges who were afraid of their bishops.

  Well, he took some pictures of me, which I felt were really softcore porn—forty-year old woman as Playboy Bunny.

  That’s completely untrue. They were in fact wonderful pictures of a woman whose beauty turned out to be durable. I had to say something didn’t I?

  The week after Nixon’s triumph two officers in Army dress blue uniforms rang the front doorbell. As soon as I opened the door I knew why they were there. Kevin was dead.

  I resolved that I would not, repeat not, break down. The task of these two men, one them a chaplain (Southern Baptist) and the other a captain was a difficult one. I would not make it any more difficult for them.

  “Come in, gentlemen,” I said. “I think I know why you’re here.”

  I served them tea. They informed me that our son Kevin Clancy O’Malley had been killed in action in Vietnam. The captain told me that Kevin had died fighting for America and freedom. The chaplain told me that Jesus would make him lie down in green pastures. I readily agreed with both comments, though I didn’t believe the first and thought that the green pastures damn well better have a lake and a beach.

  The body would be returned to America for burial, if we wished, at Arlington National Cemetery. We didn’t wish. He would be buried in the family plot at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside. Would we like a military burial—taps, a fourteen-gun salute. I thought not. If we did, I could call them at the number on a card they had given me. They presented me with a flag for the burial ceremony.

  Chuck found me later sitting on the couch, the cold teapot next to me, the flag in my lap. I could not move, could not think, could not feel. He glanced at the flag the two men had brought for Kevin’s burial, sat down next to me, and put his arms around my shoulders. Then we both wept bitter tears.

  We were also notified by the Defense Department that he had been recommended posthumously for the Distinguished Service Cross.

  Big deal.

  Those were terrible days. I felt that my heart had been cut out. I wished that I was the one who had died. I lost faith in God, but I couldn’t sustain that for long. I tried to hate Lyndon Johnson, but that wouldn’t do any good either.

  I was, for public purposes, a brave and resilient mother. I had to hold the family together, protect my husband from despair, assuage the grief of my surviving children, console poor devastated Maria Elena.

  That’s what brave Irishwomen did, wasn’t it?

  I wondered if April Rosemary knew.

  How could she?

  While we were waiting for the return of Kevin’s body, Monsignor Raven presided over a memorial Mass at St. Ursula’s. The new funeral ceremonies were like an Easter Festival. O death where is thy victory, O death where is thy sting! John preached a beautiful homily about idealism and heroism.

  Chuck’s cameras never came out of their cases.

  No body, however, appeared.

  Chuck called the Department of the Army. An indifferent bureaucrat assured us that the “process was under way” and would be carried out.

  After two weeks, he called the President. He was put right through to the President, who remembered him very clearly. Naturally I was listening on another phone.

  “Best picture anyone has ever taken of me. How’s your beautiful wife?”

  “Not very well at the moment, Mr. President. Our son was killed in Vietnam. The Army seems to have misplaced his body.”

  “Dear God, how terrible. My sympathies to you. I’m so sorry. I really am. I wish I could … Anyway I will call the Secretary of the Army personally and ask him to be in touch with you.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. President. Congratulations on your victory.”

  “Thank you very much, Chuck. I’m looking forward to four more years of service to the country.”

  “He was very nice,” I said.

  “Yes, he was.” I felt guilty for all the terrible things I’ve said about him.

  However, the Secretary of the Army did not call that day. The next day, while Chuck was out, a Colonel called from the Department of the Army.

  “Mrs. O’Malley, I’m calling you with reference to your son, First Lieutenant Kevin Clancy O’Malley.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We have no record of the death of Lieutenant O’Malley. Obviously, then, there is no body to be delivered to you.”

  “I have right here in my own hand a copy of the notification that he was killed in action.”

  “No, ma’am, we have no record of sending such a notification.”

  “But I have it!”

  “You can’t possibly have it, ma’am. We never sent it.”

  “And another notification that he was awarded posthumously the Distinguished Service Cross.”

  “We show no communication with reference to First Lieutenant Kevin Clancy O’Malley. I’m very sorry.”

  “I’m his mother,” I sc
reamed. “I brought his body into the world and I want it back.”

  “We cannot provide any information about his body.”

  I hung up.

  I was hysterical when Chuck came home.

  He said some very bad words and then grabbed the phone.

  “Pat, Chuck O’Malley here. I need a favor.”

  I was listening on the other line.

  “You got it, Chuck,” Moynihan replied in the best Chicago political fashion.

  Chuck spilled out the story.

  “Oh, damn, damn, damn! Those idiots. As the war runs down, they have lost their ability to cope with casualties. I’m sure the President did his best. I’ll be back to you.”

  He called us at midnight.

  I answered being the lighter sleeper.

  “O’Malley residence.”

  “That you, Rosemarie?”

  He sounded very tired.

  “Yes … let me wake Chuck up.”

  I jabbed him and he grabbed the phone.

  “I’ve some very good news for you …”

  “You found his body!”

  “Much better than that. I found him. He’s alive. Wounded in action. I’m afraid he lost a foot to a land mine. He’s very much alive and is being flown back to this country for further medical treatment at Great Lakes. And they did award him the Distinguished Service Cross. The Secretary of the Army apologizes both for the mistake and the behavior of the idiot who called you.”

  “Alive!” I said in disbelief.

  “Are you sure?” Chuck gasped.

  “Quite sure. I didn’t call you till I had checked all along the line. He’s alive and, please God, he’ll lead a long and happy life.”

  “Is this a dream, Pat?” I said between sobs.

  “It’s the wide-awake world, Rosemarie. I think the O’Malley clan had better prepare itself for one of its legendary parties.”

  “They reported me missing in action when I was over there,” Chuck said.

  “The wish in your case, Ambassador O’Malley being, as my wife would say, the father of the thought. Come visit us in India and teach me how to be a diplomat.”

  He said we would. That’s another story.

  Before anyone else I phoned Maria Elena.