Younger Than Springtime

by Andrew M. Greeley

  She paused to reflect on what I had said, as though it were something important.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I don’t know anything about love, Monica. Except I recognize it when I see it.”

  She drew a deep breath.

  “Would you say that to your little Rosie?”

  Unfair! Besides, Rosemarie was a good four inches taller than Monica.

  “Rosemarie,” I said firmly, “is my foster sister. Moreover, if any man tried to do that with her, his life and health would be in serious peril.”

  “She is certainly breathtakingly lovely.”

  “Furious temper.”

  “Maybe I should have beat up on Jimmy!” she said with a fond smile.

  “Right! Slap him! Hit him! Punch him in the stomach! Kick him! Stomp on him! That’s the way to deal with your ex-marines!”

  “I could never hit him, Chucky,” she said sadly. “I love him too much.”

  “My point.”

  “Did you know that he could go to law school at Michigan or Princeton? On a scholarship?”

  “Jimmy Rizzo an Ivy Leaguer?”

  “He looks quite civilized when he dresses up.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  We both laughed, unindicted coconspirators.

  “You think he did the right thing?”

  “Certain kinds of Italian American men,” I said, making it up as I went along, “see themselves as gallant knight-errants. You happened to find a particularly gallant one. Maybe he knows a little bit more about you than you think he does.”

  “Maybe,” she sighed. “Anyway, Chuck, thanks for listening.”

  “Anytime.”

  My next stop was Marco’s drugstore corner. The neighborhood was stark and barren under a somber gray sky, a bungalow belt in need of postwar retouching. The leafless trees reached to heaven like souls in purgatory pleading for release this November.

  The boundaries of life were still circumscribed by neighborhood boundaries. Where else did you go than to the corner of the neighborhood drugstore?

  Why the drugstore?

  Who knows?

  In fact, the customs were changing as more and more of the vets bought old jalopies like Jimmys’ 1937 Chevy. It became possible to have several drugstore corners in neighborhoods surrounding your own. A member of our softball team boasted that he had twelve corners where he could hang out. His bride-to-be made him promise to give them all up. Wives tended not to like street-corner societies.

  “Didn’t catch you at church this morning, Captain, sir,” I began.

  “Nine-fifteen in the chapel,” he said with his usual genial smile. “Didn’t want to bump into certain people.”

  “If I were a couple of years older, I’d want to bump into her,” I said.

  He thought that was very funny.

  “How the hell is it going at Notre Dame? Still like it?”

  “Hate it passionately.”

  “I figured you would…. You don’t belong at a place like that.”

  “Where do I belong?”

  He laughed again. “I don’t know, Chuck, someplace special where you can appear out of the mists and disturb people’s consciences.”

  “Is that what I do?”

  “Yeah, that’s what you do…. You see, I gotta give Monica time to make sure. It’s like investing in a future down at the exchange.”

  “Risky.”

  “Too risky the other way, you know?”

  “Maybe…Don’t give her too much time.”

  “You gonna steal her on me?”

  “She’s a one-man woman, Jimmy,” I said, once more making up the words as I went along. “You’re the one man. For Monica it’s either you or no one.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “It’s obvious.”

  It was indeed, though I had noticed it only in front of St. Ursula’s an hour before.

  “Then I don’t have to rush.”

  “You do have to rush. If she gives up on you, she’ll give up permanently on men.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  I didn’t say what I was thinking—that if I were as much in love with a woman as he was with Monica and she loved me as much as Monica loved him, I would be driven out of my mind until we could take off each other’s clothes and jump into bed. Jimmy should ignore Uncle Sal and Big Tom, and follow his gallant instincts to carry off the fair maiden.

  What right did I have to that opinion? What did I know about love?

  Enough, as I had said, to recognize it when I see it.

  Jimmy was finishing up college and managing one of Uncle Sal’s restaurants.

  “I sure wish I’d had a year or two of college before I joined the Marines,” he said with a shake of his head. “I never thought I’d be a collegian. Seemed part of another world. Now they want me to go to law school.”

  “Where?” I said, playing dumb.

  “DePaul, Kent, Michigan, even Princeton. Can you imagine me in Princeton?”

  “If you comb your hair…”

  Self-consciously he reached for his thick black hair, which was perfectly combed.

  “You bastard,” he said with a laugh. “You’re a hell of a one to talk.”

  “It’s useful for scrubbing pots and pans…. What does your family want you to do?”

  “Uncle Sal says when I graduate from college in June I can take over all his restaurants. He insists that they are a hundred percent legit.”

  “And your parents?”

  “Uncle Sal is family. He’s been good to us. But they want me to go to law school.”

  “Is anything the boys run a hundred percent legit?”

  “Yeah. Absolutely. But not a hundred percent of the time, you know?”

  He raised his hands in the familiar Italian gesture that means, in effect, what more can I say?

  “What do you think Monica would say?” he continued anxiously.

  “Monica loves you, Captain, sir, as any idiot can tell. Hopelessly. She’ll love you no matter what you do. But I think she’d agree with your parents. Moreover, if I dare say so, Captain, sir, she’d fit in just fine at Princeton.”

  “She’d fit in perfectly,” he said proudly, “anywhere.”

  “At a gathering of the wives of the boys?”

  He frowned. “I see what you mean…. Hey, I’ll drive you home.”

  “I can walk,” I said. “I need the exercise.”

  Our house seemed empty. But as I prowled around looking for family, I found Rosemarie, curled up on a sofa reading War and Peace. She was clad in the young woman’s fatigue uniform of the day—full skirt (red plaid), bobby socks, saddle shoes, blouse, and sweater. Her casual loveliness took my breath away.

  “Hi, Rosemarie, where’s everyone?”

  She didn’t exactly live with us. However, there was an empty room on our third floor that was dubbed “Rosie’s room.” She could drift in and out of our house with no questions asked.

  “Huh?” She stirred on the couch, distracted by my interruption.

  “O’Malley, Charles Cronin, ma’am, serial number—”

  “Don’t be silly, Chucky.”

  “I was only wondering where everyone was.”

  She put her finger in place and sighed, causing her delectable breasts to move up and down beneath her sweater and my heart to skip several beats.

  Lusting after her, I warned myself, is almost incestuous.

  “Oh…Don’t you think I’d make a good grand duchess, Chucky?”

  “A grand grand duchess,” I said, reclining in a chair at a safe distance from her.

  She sighed again and sat up on the couch.

  “What did you want to know?”

  “Whether my parents and my siblings have deserted me forever.”

  “Oh, that! Peg and Jane and the good April are out shopping. Michael is singing at the cathedral. Your dad is meeting with contractors. I’m the chatelaine. Do you know what a chatelaine is, Chucky Ducky?
”

  “A low-level grand duchess…Go back to Tolstoy. Sorry to interrupt you.”

  “Okay.”

  She stretched out on the sofa and returned to Moscow in 1812.

  “Napoleon,” she informed me, “was a jerk.”

  “A brilliant jerk.”

  “Hmm…”

  Silence.

  Why did she have to be a drunk!

  “Rosemarie,” I blurted without thinking about what I was going to say. “Why do women, especially older women, turn me into a confidant?”

  She closed Tolstoy again, but did not abandon her position on the sofa.

  “That’s so obvious, Chucky, that if you don’t see it, I can’t explain it.”

  “Try.”

  She sighed in protest, put a bookmark in War and Peace, and rearranged herself on the sofa.

  “You’re a good listener and you’re smart and you’re sweet and you care about people and you’re cute. Kind of a magic little good-luck charm. Now don’t try to tell me that you’re none of those things, because you’re all of them, even if you are the most stubborn boy I’ve ever known.”

  “Oh.”

  “Who was confiding in you today?”

  “Monica.”

  “Monica Sullivan?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think of her?”

  “Diminutive but lush.”

  She laughed and bells pealed somewhere in the distance.

  “Look who’s talking diminutive!”

  “I’m taller than she is!”

  “Not much…If she’s got any brains she won’t let that James Rizzo get away.”

  “I agree. The problem is him.”

  “As the good April says, it is always the woman who has to slam the door.”

  I had never heard her say it, but I had no doubt that she had said it.

  “‘Lush’ is a good word for Monica,” she commented after a moment’s judicious reflection.

  “I kind of thought so too.”

  “Am I lush?”

  Aha, a challenge!

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Then what am I?”

  As usual the word came without thought.

  “What about lithe?”

  Another moment of judicious reflection.

  “I kind of like that.”

  “I thought you might.”

  “Just a minute.” She sighed and rose from the sofa.

  She returned shortly with a tray that contained four ham and cheese sandwiches on rye and two mugs of hot chocolate.

  “You’ll get your ice cream when you’ve eaten your sandwiches.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am. I didn’t say I was hungry, ma’am.”

  “O’Malley, Charles Cronin, Master Sergeant, Army of the United States, you are always hungry.”

  “If I hadn’t come up with the word ‘lithe,’ would you have fed me anyway?”

  “I knew you’d come up with something sweet, Chucky Ducky. I just wanted to see what it would be.”

  “The word,” I said, building on my success, “implies that you are not a Juno or a Venus but a Diana.”

  “Blarney…Diana rising from the sea?”

  “She doesn’t rise from the sea.”

  “I know but I’d like to…. Kind of Diana on the half shell.”

  Where does a high school senior come up with that kind of allusion? But then why was a high school senior reading Tolstoy?

  “As I remember the painting, she didn’t have any clothes. Naked Diana on a half shell?”

  “Chucky,” she said with a faint blush. “You’re impossible…. Eat your lunch and then I’ll drive you downtown so you can take the South Shore back to that horrible place.”

  “I can take the El.”

  “I know you can take the El. But if you want your ice cream, you’ll let me drive you downtown, understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I won’t try to seduce you, Chucky Ducky, I promise.”

  “Wow! I was really worried!”

  “I hate that place. Every boy down there looks at you like you’re a potential slave being paraded naked across a stage.”

  “Not an inaccurate observation…Even Vince?”

  “No, Vince is an exception, but he has to be.”

  “Right.”

  “That Mount Carmel boy you knocked out at the football game, he’s a nice boy too…. What’s his name?”

  “Ed Murray. And I didn’t knock him out.”

  “Yes you did, Chucky Ducky. He knocked you out when you scored the winning touchdown, then you knocked him out on the kickoff.”

  Instead of trying to argue with this utterly false legend—a bootless task—I tore into the second sandwich.

  “Three for you, one for me.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I was distracted from my nourishment, but not greatly, by the observation that Rosemarie’s eyes were dancing with merriment. She thought I was funny.

  “You didn’t add ‘funny’ to your litany of my admirable qualities.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

  She donned her silver fox jacket and led me out to her Cadillac.

  “You had a car in Germany, didn’t you, Chuck?”

  “A jeep at first and then my very own Buick.”

  “You should have one here.”

  “Can’t own one at Notre Dame unless you have a wife.”

  She merely laughed at that.

  On Washington Boulevard as we rode downtown, she asked, “You really hate it down there, don’t you, Chuck?”

  “I’m not wild about the place.”

  “You’re homesick.”

  It was a flat statement, not a question.

  “Kind of.”

  “More so than when you were in Bamberg.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Your family is only two hours away here.”

  “Yeah, but the other five days of the week are worse than Bamberg. In Bamberg I was free. Down’at the Dome, I’m not free.”

  “You don’t belong there,” she insisted as we paused for a stop light at Cicero Avenue.

  That was the second time today someone had told me that.

  “Where do I belong?”

  “I don’t know…. Someplace where they appreciate you.”

  “I’ve planned to go there as long as I can remember. The real Notre Dame is nothing like my dreams.”

  “I know.”

  With the light fading on a dismal November Sunday and my hopes fading with them, there’s nothing like sympathy from a lovely and sensitive young woman.

  Careful, Charles C., you’re asking for trouble.

  Yeah, but such nice, warm trouble.

  “Maybe I’ll get used to it.”

  “You could go to the Pier or DePaul or Loyola and live at home. They leave your private life alone. And you’d be with the family.”

  That possibility sounded appealing, just at that moment very appealing.

  “I have to try it for a year.”

  “You’ll never be happy down at that terrible place.”

  “Maybe…Where are you going to college, Rosemarie? Sorry I never asked.”

  “The University,” she said promptly.

  “What university?”

  “In this city there is only one university—the University of Chicago!”

  “That Communist place!”

  “Don’t be a naïve bigot, Chucky.”

  All right, I won’t.

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll lose your faith?”

  “If I haven’t lost it at Trinity High School, I’ll never lose it…. Don’t worry, Chuck, I’ll be an Irish Catholic all my life. I wouldn’t know how to be anything else.”

  That settled that.

  “I’ll wait and see how I feel at the end of the year. Maybe I’ll get some good courses.”

  “Loyola and DePaul would take all your courses from Bamberg. You’d be a junior like you should be.”
>
  That was probably true. And they wouldn’t take the crap I was picking up at the Dome. I was wasting my money.

  But, no, I wouldn’t quit. An O’Malley never quits, Mom always said.

  However, she defined “quit” very loosely.

  “I guess I have to figure out who I am.”

  “Like everyone else.”

  “Like everyone else, Rosemarie.”

  Silence.

  “It’s not fair,” she exploded passionately.

  “I agree…. Only what is it that’s not fair?”

  “You’re always helping other people to be happy and you’re not happy yourself.”

  That, I thought, was an exaggerated statement of my virtue.

  We turned onto Warren Boulevard, which paralleled Washington Boulevard, probably the only two one-way streets in the city.

  “It will work out, Rosemarie,” I said finally, breaking an agonized silence. “It will just take time. Maybe I have to adjust to the postwar world.”

  “Well, there’s never going to be another depression. That’s what my father says and he knows business, despite everything else.”

  What was “everything else”?

  “Does he?”

  “You simply have to realize, Chuck,” she exploded again, “that you’re special.”

  I wasn’t special. I had a quick smile and a quicker tongue and unlimited nerve and I was considered “cute.” So I charmed people at Fenwick and in the Constabulary, but not at the Golden Dome.

  “I can’t see myself that way, Rosemarie.”

  I expected her to blow up at me.

  Instead she said, “Someday you will.”

  When we arrived at the South Shore Station on Michigan Avenue at Randolph, I had a headache and felt melancholy. Despite the headache, I wished Rosemarie were driving me all the way to Notre Dame.

  She hugged me and kissed my cheek. A sisterly kiss. Too sisterly in fact. I noticed in the dim illumination of the street lights that her face was wet with tears that I did not deserve.

  “Thank you for the ride, Rosemarie.”

  “See you at Thanksgiving, Chuck.”

  On the interminable train ride, I alternated between elation at Rosemarie’s affection and agonized confusion over who I really was.

  However, it was November, the purgatory month, wasn’t it?

  6

  There was happy family news at Thanksgiving when Jane and Ted announced that they would be married during Christmas vacation. Ted finally had the nerve to stand up to Doctor, as his father was always called—with a tone of reverence required in one’s voice.