Younger Than Springtime

by Andrew M. Greeley

  I had mixed feelings about such a marriage. She was my beloved sister, he my best friend. They were too young to marry. Yet in those days, in the aftermath of the war, men and women married young. Half of Jane’s class at Rosary had engagement rings when they were sophomores, almost all of them by the time they were seniors. My children refuse to believe, as a matter of solemn principle, that people married so young when we were growing up. In the years before and the years after our time marriages occurred much later. But our generation was reacting to the Depression and the war and grabbing, almost desperately, at a chance for happiness before the Depression came back or we went to war with the Russians.

  Parents reacted differently. The colonel and the good April were delighted at the prospect of Jane’s marriage right out of college. They would be equally delighted if Peg married at the end of her sophomore year. She could continue her violin training at the Conservatory even after marriage. They viewed my determination to postpone marriage till I could support a wife and family as distressingly stuffy, even old-fashioned.

  Other parents, however, foolishly tried to resist. Big Tom Sullivan objected to Jimmy Rizzo’s Sicilian background, Dr. McCormack complained that Ted was not engaged to the daughter of a surgeon like himself. They also used, however, the secondary argument that their child was too young to marry.

  I was on their side as far as my own life was concerned, but I realized that I was voting in the minority among my generation. Peg a mother at twenty-one?

  I didn’t like the picture.

  Moreover, I realized as sleep claimed me that if I should abandon my principles, I could have myself a wife in a couple of years.

  Rosemarie?

  Sleep snuffed that image out. I cannot remember whether it came back in my dreams. Probably it did.

  I went back to Oak Park on Sunday night with Dad, delighted with the respite of the weekend and dreading the grain pit the next morning.

  “You’re certainly a good influence on Rosie,” Dad said to me.

  I came close to saying, “And she on me.”

  Instead I said, “The poor kid has terrible problems.”

  I felt like someone on a slippery water slide who wanted to get off. Now.

  Jim Clancy was always in the middle of the grain pit, his vast shirt soaked in sweat, his little face twisted in a diabolical grimace, his tiny paws waving frantically above his mountainous body—a troll come down out of the Black Forest.

  Small wonder that poor Rosemarie was a mess.

  “You’re O’Malley, aren’t you?” he demanded one day at the end of a trading session.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Like it here?”

  “It’s all right, sir.”

  “It’s a place where they separate the men from the boys,” he whined, proud of the originality, as he saw it, of his turn of the phrase.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “My daughter says you’re smart, tough. Real man.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Was that what she thought of me?

  “You want a seat here? I’ll buy you one.”

  Not for all the Rosemaries in the world.

  “That’s very kind, sir, but I’m still in school.”

  “When you get out, we’ll talk about it. Right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ll like it here. I can see it in your eyes. You’re a real fighter.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  A real fighter I was not. Nor could I survive, I told myself, tensions so stormy that many traders had to lose themselves in drink or sex during the long afternoons after the trading sessions ended.

  And by none of the standards available to me was James Clancy a man. If to be unlike him was to be a boy, put me on the list.

  So I read William Butler Yeats and James Joyce (Portrait, which I loved) and books on the business cycle on the El riding back and forth from the exchange and DePaul.

  I read Sigrid Undset (who died that year) and John P. Marquand’s Point of No Return. I sat alone at the Rockne to watch All the King’s Men and The Third Man.

  Was there ever a cinema shot to compare with the face of Orson Welles in the first shot of Harry Lime?

  The film has always haunted me. I dig out the videotape every once in a while. The drab despair, the poverty, the hunger, the determination to survive, were like what I had seen in Bamberg. The first time I showed it to my wife, she asked, “How did you stand it, Chuck?”

  “I counted the days till I would go home.”

  There was more to it than that, however.

  I hummed the tunes from South Pacific, I thought of Rosemarie, no, I fantasized about her every time I sang “Younger Than Springtime.” I played softball (poorly), marveled at Larry’s tricks at the pub, listened to the problems of my new friends, and tossed restlessly in bed at night as I tried to figure out what life meant.

  It was not a bad summer, all things considered. Metaphysics and epistemology were marginally interesting and the homework requirements were negligible. Since DePaul was a Catholic college, ND would have to accept the courses. Or so I told myself.

  4

  Notre Dame was unimpressed by both me and my credentials.

  I had hoped to be admitted as a second-semester sophomore, only a half year behind my high school class. I had taken for granted that the University of Maryland courses I had taken in Bamberg would make me at least a first-semester sophomore. In fact, I was a first-semester freshman.

  “You have to take the freshman theology and philosophy courses,” the stern-faced, restless Holy Cross priest with heavy aftershave smell who was my “adviser” insisted. “Then the sophomore courses next year. Then we’ll see what we can do”—he waved his hand contemptuously at my transcript—“about these other credits.”

  “But I have four philosophy credits from Bamberg…”

  “Those courses were not in Catholic philosophy. They’re worthless.”

  I was dismayed. With a dismissive wave, the “adviser” had told me that my hard work in Germany had been a waste of time.

  “But, Father…”

  “This is our university and we run it the way we want to run it, young man. If you want credit for these pagan philosophy courses, you can risk your immortal soul at a state university.”

  “Can I appeal?”

  “It won’t do you any good. Our philosophy and theology requirements are never waived.” He scowled at me in contemptuous disapproval. “The trouble with you postwar veterans is that you were never in any danger. The real veterans did not complain about the way we run our university. Men like you want to take the university away from us.”

  The basic problem between me and the Golden Dome folk was that I didn’t understand a split in my own character. Or perhaps I should say that what seemed to me to be a seamless character appeared in their environment a badly bifurcated personality.

  I wanted the orderly life, but I did not want a life of externally imposed order. I would make my own order, there was no need for the outside world to inflict its order on me.

  Moreover, I wanted an existence in which I could predict today what I would be doing a year from today with little fear of being in error. That did not mean that I wanted to exclude art and music and literature from my life. I may have deplored the chaos in our family, but I surely did not reject its musical and artistic concerns. I was not, I told some of my Notre Dame friends who admitted they couldn’t quite figure me out, an artist but I wanted to be able to enjoy art.

  “But what good does it do?” one of them asked, his handsome fair-skinned Irish face wrapped in a puzzled frown. “I mean, how will art help your career?”

  That said it all. I had avoided, as best I could, the enticing Rosemarie Clancy because I thought she was crazy and drank too much. At the Golden Dome of the National Championship years I encountered a different kind of madness, one that was not personal, but institutional.

  To put it succinctly, it was a madness that believe
d passionately that education could be accomplished without a need for thought.

  Father Pius found me reading Ulysses. I would catch up with Rosemarie even if I would not see her.

  “That book’s on the Index,” he wailed. “You can’t read it without permission of your confessor.”

  Father Pius assumed that his role authorized him to enter anyone’s room without knocking at any time of the day or night.

  “I have his permission,” I replied.

  That was that, except the rector made one more mark against me in the notebook he kept.

  This is the same Charles Cronin O’Malley who was careful not to lie to anyone while he was suckering Special Agent Clarke, the FBI bounty hunter who wanted to turn Trudi and her mother and sister over to Red Army rapists.

  “Why did I do that?” I asked myself after he had left my room. I was pretty sure that Joyce had never been condemned by the Vatican. Why did I not look it up and inform the rector he had made a mistake?

  I’d get a check against my name anyway and it would be a waste of time.

  I even struggled through Ulysses a second time and pondered Molly Bloom’s outburst at the end. It suggested that sexual pleasure was as important to women as to men. Maybe even more important.

  It was a scary idea.

  And a glorious one too.

  Did women yearn for sex as much as men?

  I would learn over the years that the answer is yes and no—yes, they do, but no, not the same way. Even now I’m not sure, from day to day, that in practice I understand what that answer means.

  I also felt vaguely that maybe Molly’s yes said something religious too.

  In that early part of my Notre Dame interlude, I had persuaded myself that I liked the school and was happy in my choice. But my anger was already building up, preparing for an explosion.

  The assumptions of the system were simple enough: if you gathered together a group of young men, kept them under strict disciplinary supervision, constrained them to sit through sixteen required philosophy and theology courses, pressured them to receive Communion everyday and go to confession often (“hit the rail,” “hit the box”), minimized as best you could their contacts with young women, warned them against the dangers of reading forbidden books, and imposed on them strict habits of study and memorization, then you would produce devout Catholic laymen who would be successful in the world of business and profession.

  It seemed to work. The young men complained about the regulations and the boredom of the required courses; engaged in drunken orgies when they were off campus (the high jinks at the Christmas bashes of the Notre Dame Club of Chicago were already legendary in the late nineteen forties); and treated their dates like raffle prizes of whom they were shortly to be deprived.

  However, the monastic spirituality and the course requirements did appear to turn out graduates who remained loyal to the church. And they were indeed successful in their chosen careers.

  That most never read a book after they graduated, that many teetered on the brink of alcoholism, and that a considerable number were incapable of sustained intimacy with their wives—none of these seemed to cause the Holy Cross priests any second thoughts.

  In fact, there was never much doubt about our religious affiliation. We were Catholics, what else could we be? And our success in the postwar boom required only that we stay sober long enough to hold a job. The self-congratulations of the priests who ran the Catholic colleges in those years like they were second-class seminaries were not merited. Like everyone else in the late forties, they were riding the wave of history and taking credit for it.

  These are bitter reactions long after the fact—and I suppose they reveal how deep my anger was. At the time, I was troubled and confused.

  And unhappy. At first I was caught up in the excitement of coming home, seeing my family, admiring our new house on Fair Oaks in north Oak Park (technically we lived in St. Agedius but we still went to St. Ursula’s because Dad was building the new church), renewing friendships with my classmates—many of whom were ND students—and cheering myself hoarse at the pep rallies and football games. Moreover, I had a sense of moving forward again toward my life, behind schedule perhaps but at least moving. There was now a neat and orderly path mapped out for me. The days of confusion and uncertainty, of folly and comedy, were over.

  Within the first couple of months, however, I began to realize that I had been happier in Bamberg. After my basic training I had more freedom in the Army than I did under the Golden Dome.

  That time was also the most confusing in my young life. I had virtually given up the camera and the darkroom. My business courses were competent but boring. I hated the dry casuistry of Healy’s Moral Guidance and the high-flown unintelligibility of Farrell’s Companion to the Summa—the theology textbooks on which my generation were introduced to the Catholic heritage. In philosophy classes we studied Saint Thomas and his answers to the questions posed centuries later by such enemies as Descartes, Hegel, Kant, and Spinoza—obviously stupid from the explanations we were given of their positions. Marx, Freud, Dewey, William James, all of whom I had read with great curiosity in Germany, were dismissed as so patently wrong and so completely unimportant as not to deserve refutations.

  Nor did one dare to ask probing questions in most of the philosophy and theology classes. Such questions, indeed almost any questions, were a sign that the questioner was losing his faith and deserved both prayer and a failing grade.

  Our “Apologetics” course was designed to produce answers to all the questions that “non-Catholics,” clever and dishonest objectors, might raise against our “Holy Catholic Faith.” By refuting such carping, we proved that our Church was the only true faith and that all other religions were lies, heresies, and infidelities.

  Could you be a Protestant and still save your soul?

  Yes, if you remained in good faith because of your “invincible ignorance,” but, in the words of our Apologetics teacher, “It’s hard for me to see how an intelligent and well-educated Protestant can remain in good faith. You’ve read our answers to them. Would they not convince an intelligent and sincere man that Protestantism is an indefensible heresy?”

  Fortunately, no one took these classes very seriously. The young men dreamed of weekends, girls, and beer. Only the few of us who were a little less certain about the goals of our lives might be frustrated by an education half of which consisted in memorization of answers to test questions that passed out of our heads as soon as the tests were returned.

  If you didn’t drink and didn’t have a girl and had no plans to let off steam on weekends, you were a little strange. You might even start to think; that was an inadvisable response to Notre Dame of the nineteen forties.

  Notre Dame in the era was a men’s locker room with all the noise and the smells and the dirt and the crudities and the foul words about women that one would expect to find in a locker room, a boisterous, raw, rank den of coarse and horny animals.

  The noise and the smell especially affronted me, worse even, it seemed to me, than a military barracks.

  There is nothing wrong with men’s locker rooms (I will not attempt to comment on what women’s locker rooms might be like but rather be content with my male fantasies on the subject) except when one claims that the locker room is in fact a university.

  I’m not sure that the all-male Holy Cross Order of priests realized how crude our locker room manners and mores were. Those few men who might have found them offensive probably thought that by hitting the box and hitting the rail often we exorcised our gross behavior as well as our moral guilt.

  Their seminary, I reflect now, was probably a men’s locker room too.

  The Holy Cross sisters administered St. Mary’s College across the road and were patronized by the priests and were often the target of mean little jokes about “Sister Mary Holy Water C.S.C.” It was assumed that since they were women they were inferior and that their women’s college was inferior. Actually, as I woul
d learn later, the young women were better educated than we were.

  I rode the South Shore home to Chicago and the Lake Street El to the Ridgeland stop where Peg or Mom would pick me up in one of the several family cars that now seemed to clutter around our big Tudor house—including a now grotesque Cadillac with tail fins.

  I would try to find a South Shore train on which there would not be many of my fellow Domers. Bad enough that I had to put up with their inanity all week long without having to listen to them babble about booze and broads on the train. I read a lot of fiction in defiance of the anti-intellectualism of the school. Waugh’s The Loved One. Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, each one of them a heavy hitter. I also reveled in Christopher Fry’s play The Lady’s Not for Burning. I fell in love with the play’s heroine and fantasized about saving her, though the hero beat me to it.

  In our new home I had a room and bath of my own for the first time in my life. We would sing (Finian’s Rainbow, Kiss Me Kate) and talk and laugh and dream. I would dread the return to Notre Dame, not clear in my own head why.

  “Are you happy there, darling?” Mom would ask.

  “More or less.”

  “You look”—Dad would frown over his port—“stifled. Are they getting to you?”

  “There are times,” I would admit, “when it all seems pretty dull.”

  “Maybe you just ought to come home and go to the Pier,” Jane would say. “They leave your private life alone there.”

  The University of Illinois’s Chicago campus in those days was on Navy Pier.

  “What private life?” Peg would laugh.

  “You ought to take pictures again,” Rosemarie would conclude the litany of advice. “I can’t believe you’ve given up the camera.”

  Rosemarie?

  Sure, she was still part of the family. Her long hair had returned after her brief surrender to Dame Fashion. With the exception of our walk on the beach the day of my photograph of her, I was never alone with her during the first year after I came home from the service. I did not want to be alone with her. She was more lovely, more mysterious, more fragile than ever—sometimes just an adolescent girl and sometimes a dazzlingly beautiful mature woman, so beautiful, so graceful, so seemingly self-possessed that you gasped for breath when she walked into the room. And as doomed as ever, I thought. I firmly resolved that I would have nothing to do with her.