We cheered.
Then he added, almost as an afterthought, that because of the unfortunate controversy there would be no salutory or valedictory address at the graduation.
“You really did scare them!” Mary Margaret said hugging her first born.
“Poor Aggie, she would have been happy with a chance to talk. Now she doesn’t get anything because of her bitch of a mother.”
“We don’t use that word!” all of us said together.
My wife and I made love in bed that night, our usual stress eased by the sense that we had at least done something right. We didn’t even need the usual symbolic glass of Bushmill’s.
As we expected, Lee Schlenk had his usual twist on the scene the next day.
TOMMY’S DAUGHTER YIELDS PRIZE IN CONTROVERSY
Both Mary Margaret and I, however, were relieved. The controversy was over. Nothing would spoil our first high school graduation. Alas, it is never that easy in the Beltway.
CHAPTER 25
SATURDAY MORNING we were eating breakfast with Ambassador and Ms. O’Malley (Rosie and Chucky) when Mary Rose entered the nook in her pale-blue graduation dress. I started the applause.
“It’s Mom’s dress,” she admitted. “I stole it from her closet.”
“Without asking permission,” my wife complained, not seriously.
“Look at how much money we’re saving!”
The Ambassador was destroying his usual huge breakfast. Mary Rose leaned against the fridge.
“What can we expect today, hon?” my mother-in-law asked.
“Nothing special. They’re going to give a big cheer for me when I walk on the stage. I told them not to but I can’t stop them. They wanted to boo Aggie. I absolutely forbade it.”
“You’re class president, aren’t you?” the Ambassador asked.
“I guess so.”
“And the boys voted for you?”
“They call me ‘The Boss!’”
“And they do what you tell them to do?”
“Of COURSE!”
“May it always be that way dear,” my wife said piously.
“You and Grams don’t have any trouble!”
Laughter around the table.
Pushy little brat!
“No one special among the boys?” Rosemarie asked.
“Nope, and I know you and Moms had already chosen your husbands at my age! I’m in no hurry.”
So we drove over to Gonzaga under the crisp blue sky, a gentle Beltway spring day, with only a hint of the humidity that would soon drench the city.
It was a nice ceremony. An ancient Jesuit, of whom the University had an apparently limitless number, delivered a fine short talk based on Cardinal Newman’s Idea of a University—knowledge as an end in itself without ever saying the words. It was a nice nod to our daughter.
Then the graduates were awarded their diplomas. Each of them, wearing the red and gold academic gowns without which one cannot have a Jesuit graduation, waited on the steps to the stage until the name was called by the headmaster. Then they walked across the stage to the president of the school and accepted the diploma while the next one in alphabetical order waited on the stairs. The president asked that we refrain from applause which most of us did. Typical Catholic event.
“Mary Rose Helen Moran,” the headmaster intoned.
The students jumped to their feet, applauded, cheered, and otherwise misbehaved. Both the president and the headmaster smiled.
Our daughter, slightly flushed, touched the top of her academic hat, much as Tiger Woods would have after sinking a thirty-foot putt.
“Agnes Lourdes Mulholland,” the Headmaster announced.
There was a hint of displeasure from the class which had returned to their seats. Mary Rose waved her hand in a quick little sweep and silenced the disobedient.
“What a wonderful mother superior she would make,” my mother-in-law whispered.
Aggie, a slender little blond with a hint of beauty, was weeping as she walked across the stage, paying a big price for her mother’s ambition.
I noted that our daughter had not left the stage at the other side, but stood waiting for Aggie. The two children, for that’s all they were, embraced and walked down the steps arm in arm. Their classmates cheered and applauded again. The president, the headmaster, and the faculty joined in. Smiling through her tears, Aggie touched her hat à la Tiger.
Mary Margaret and her mother were crying too.
Our child had learned something about civility—or Christianity to call it by its proper name.
The game was not over, however.
Outside, the cameras were clicking and the families cheering. Graduations were for the families even more than for the graduates. My wife and her father, a Pulitzer Prize winner, were banging with SLR cameras, none of these little digitals for the real pros. However, both their cameras were digital. At the end of the street there was a small line of pickets, mostly women, a man with a roman collar. Waving placards with endearing slogans like “Jesus Hates You, Slut” and “Your Daddy Murders Babies” and “Don’t Kill Children.” Bobby Bill Roads had unleashed his furies. A line of cops were keeping them at bay. The Jebs must have had a hint that something was going to happen.
The girl graduates were shedding their gowns to reveal their graduation dresses. The cameras continued to click away.
“Look how much money we saved on that blue dress,” I said to my wife.
Chucky O’Malley, whose ears and eyes were those of a brilliant photographer, turned suddenly. A woman from the picket line had broken through the police and was rushing towards the graduates. Thin, angry, clad in jeans and sweatshirt, she clutched a transparent plastic bag in one hand.
“Slut! Slut!” she shouted as she knocked Chucky down.
It all went into slow motion for me. She brushed Mary Margaret aside and threw the bag at my wide-eyed and frightened daughter!
“Slut!” She yelled. “Your daddy murders babies!”
The bag exploded as it hit Mary Rose and covered her with human excrement. The smell quickly permeated the air around us. I tried to move but my feet didn’t know where to go. Chucky, who had been taking pictures for at least sixty years, bounded back to his feet and continued shooting. TV cameras were all around us. Cops were shouting.
“Mary Rose,” a reporter shouted, jabbing a mike at her, “what are your feelings about what has happened?”
My daughter’s lips were quivering, she was about to burst into tears. Mary Margaret and her mother were trying to push through the wall of journalists. The cops were wrestling the screaming assailant away.
“I’m Miss Moran,” she said firmly. “The dress is my mom’s. I borrowed it from her closet. I’m sorry it’s ruined … I’m sorry too that people who claim to follow Jesus are so mean … Now I want to go home.”
For the second time that day people cheered her. The cops finally pushed the media people aside.
Her mother and I took our daughter home.
“I can’t say this when we get in the house,” she said with a laugh as we walked to our van and turned towards her angry classmates, “but now I am really full of shit!”
Later in our parlor while my wife and her mother repaired the damage, Ambassador O’Malley was flicking through images on his camera.
“This one, Tommy,” he handed me the camera. “If you folks don’t mind I can get in on the AP wire and on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow morning.”
It was an incredible shot of a furious woman slamming a bag of excrement against the breasts of a beautiful and astonished young woman.
Her mother and grandmother looked at it.
“You’re still really good, Chucky,” my wife said.
“He just holds his finger down on the shutter button,” her mother said. “Anyone can do it.”
“Mary Rose?” I asked.
“Huh? … Oh, go with it, Gramps. Fersure.”
She was coming down from the high she’d experienc
ed when she had heard the cheers at the crime scene, aware perhaps for the first time in her life how much ugliness there was in the world. Soon, I hoped, she’d come to realize that she had, if not exactly won the battle with ugliness, pushed it back a little bit.
Joe McDermott called from Chicago. There was unimpeachable evidence that the shite kickers (as he called them) were members of Mothers Against Murder, a group funded by Bobby Bill Roads and that Bobby Bill himself had met with them at his mansion outside of Shawnee before they left for the Beltway.
“I’m sure the D.C. police know that already, but thanks for the heads-up. I’ll pass it on if they ask me.”
“No objection if I leak it to the Daily News?”
I hesitated.
“Sounds to me like a legitimate news option.”
We had not, at Mary Rose’s imperious command, planned for a big graduation party. Just the seven of us and a few guests who might stop in … Mary Ann had whispered to her mother that there might be tons of people, so we secretly had stored sandwiches, soft drinks, and a huge cake in a freezer in the basement among the exercise machines.
It was a wise strategy. In the middle of the afternoon the guests began to arrive: Tina and Dolly and a delegation from my office, the senior Senator from Illinois and five other senatorial colleagues (one of them a Republican), and most of the senior class from Gonzaga. The latter visitation, our daughter asserted was, “like, you know, a total surprise!”
However, she turned on her charm for everyone. I understood now why she was class president, indeed why her classmates of both genders called her “Boss.” Mary Rose was a beautiful young woman whose laughter and grace were contagious. Who wouldn’t love her?
“Aggie?” she asked the boy who seemed to be the head of the first delegation to arrived.
“Her mother wouldn’t let her come. She sends her love … In so many words.”
Mary Rose nodded sympathetically.
“Well, I think we won that one, don’t you, Steve?”
“Fersure, Boss!”
We cut the graduation cake which disappeared almost at once. I drove the O’Malleys to National—which I dared not call Reagan in their presence. A grandchild was making her First Communion on Sunday afternoon.
“She’s an astonishing young woman, Tommy,” Ms. O’Malley said as we pulled up to the curb.
“Dazzling,” I said.
“Photogenic,” the Amassador said, “decidedly photogenic, especially under pressure. The photo, by the way, is already out on the wires.”
I was not sure that was good news.
I became melancholy on the ride back across the Key Bridge. Every parent is astonished when their child becomes, quite suddenly, a young person. Only yesterday … Why didn’t we notice what was happening when it was happening? Why had we been too busy to enjoy her progress towards the cusp of maturity? Were the satisfactions of being a member of the United States Senate worth missing the excitement of her dramatic climb to young womanhood? Why was a high school graduation party our first clear glimpse of who she was becoming?
At home the party was still raging, singing, dancing, youthful laughter. The celebration had overflowed the house into the patio. Mary Rose was the center of it all, enjoying the time of her life. These thoughts made me even more melancholy.
The smell of sweaty human bodies and beer-laden human breath was everywhere. The dance music was jarring. I wanted to go home, even though I was home.
A second cake had appeared from nowhere, this one an ice cream cake. My wife shoved a cardboard plate with a large slice into my hand. “Eat sourpuss and forget the weltschmerz.”
“Irish melancholy,” I argued.
“Same thing.”
“There’s no beer here, is there?” I asked.
“Not a drop. The Boss says absolutely not. Some of them had a splash of it before they came here … Finish your cake! I want to dance!”
So I finished my cake and we danced.
“You had a splasheen of something yourself.”
“A tiny sip of Bushmill’s Green.”
So we would make love that night. Twice in one week. That was unusual in those days, unthinkable later on.
When the mess was cleaned up, with enthusiastic help from the three daughters, and they had gone to bed, Mary Margaret and I sat on the couch in the parlor.
“Is the Senate worth all of this?” I began.
“Good question, Tommy. I was thinking the same thing.”
“I haven’t had much success in introducing civility into American political life.”
“Some progress,” she agreed, “but not much.”
“The work is taking its toll on both of us. We haven’t been able to watch our kids grow up. They’re suddenly strangers in the house.”
“That might have happened even if we were practicing law in Chicago.”
“That’s true,” I agreed.
“Look, Tommy, I supported your decision to run for the Senate. I didn’t think you’d win, but neither did you. A reelection campaign is likely to be hellish. All of Bobby Bill’s people and money will be thrown into it. Rodgers Crispjin must be salivating at the prospect. I’ll support you either way.”
“I guess I take that for granted … Maybe I shouldn’t.”
“Yes, you should … Are you leaning towards stepping down?”
“Sometimes.”
“Me too,” she sighed.
Our eldest daughter padded down the stairs, in pajamas, terry-cloth robe, and floppy slippers. She eased her way between us.
“I want to cry now,” she said simply. “Get it out of my system.”
So we huddled together as our first-born daughter sobbed and tears streamed down our cheeks.
Finally she was sobbed out.
“OK, I think I can sleep now,” she kissed us both and bounded up the stairs.
Halfway up she stopped and bent over the railing so she could see us.
“Thanks! I love you both! Night!”
“Night, Boss,” I said and we all laughed.
The next morning the picture was indeed front page in Sunday papers all around the country, including the Chicago Daily News.
In the Examiner, however, the headline on page four, bottom corner, announced.
MOTHERS AGAINST MURDER ASSAIL TOMMY’S
DAUGHTER
Protesters Call her Partner in Crime
However, the brief article, in which the leader of the protest called it a huge success, had no byline. For once we had shut up Leander Schlenk.
Copies of Ambassador O’Malley’s picture must have made it to the Italian papers. My brother woke us up at three in the morning to report that he was acutely embarrassed to see his niece “displayed” on the front of the “sensationalist” Roman press (I didn’t even know he was in Rome.) His friends in the Curia sympathized with him, he assured us. Why didn’t we consider the shame that such pictures brought to him and to the whole Church?
I listened and then asked him if he knew what time it was in the United States. He replied that it was three in the afternoon.
“Three in the morning,” I said and hung up.
One outcome of the controversy was that the New York Times wrote a generally sympathetic account of my efforts to improve civility in American political life.
SENATOR PUSHES FOR CIVILITY BUT ENCOUNTERS
THE OPPOSITE
A Don Quixote from Chicago
Despite the Don Quixote label, it was a reasonably fair and accurate piece, especially from the Times when the subject was Chicago. It celebrated especially my wife and daughters. It described the machinations of the Examiner and Bobby Bill Roads. It doubted that I could triumph over the elaborate campaign already launched by former Senator H. Rodgers Crispjin to recover the seat that he claimed he had never really lost.
The Times article may have influenced a lot of people who didn’t live in the state of Illinois, but it would not have much effect there. However Joe McDermott leaned hard
on the editors of the Daily News to reprint it. Cautious and careful as always, they hesitated, thought about it, hesitated again and finally published part of it.
Joe said that it would help a lot. That I doubted.
However, the Times article delighted my publisher because my second book Political Show Trials in America was about to appear.
All right, we had won that one. Who would they go after next? I would resign in a solemn high fashion and settle to writing, a neater—and much cleaner—way to earn a living.
CHAPTER 26
DURING THAT summer recess we decided that the kids, one in Georgetown University, the other two now in Gonzaga, might want to visit Spain. They debated Grand Beach versus Spain and finally decided somewhat reluctantly that they had never been to Spain before. They also informed us that the Spanish kids at both Ursuline and Gonzaga were “snobs” and “stuck-up” and made fun of the way we talked Spanish …
“We don’t lisp the way they do,” Marytre insisted. “I hate it.” Also in their experience Spanish boys were totally not cool. They thought they were irresistible but were “gross” and “creeps.”
Mary Rose said she had met an occasional “nice” Spaniard at Georgetown but she agreed that even the nice ones were snobs who looked down at “Mexicans like us.”
“The woman from Spanish TV thought we were dolts,” I said, “because we talked with a Sonoran accent. Who can we look down on?”
“Tex-Mex,” Mary Margaret said and we all laughed.
We traveled on official passports so the Spanish government knew we were coming and had security forces waiting for us at the airport and keeping track of us all through the trip. Not cool. We were invited to a round of dinners every night for a week. Even less cool, especially since the Spaniards have the bizarre habit of eating dinner at eleven P.M.
Least cool of all was an invitation to speak to the Cortes, the Spanish parliament. Mary Rose informed us that in various forms it went back to the thirteenth century. She had become our expert on Spanish history. She also spent a lot of time on her cell phone with a fellow Hoya named Daniel (NOT Dan or Danny) who was a Chicagoan but, heaven protect us all, a South Sider and a White Sox fan.
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