It was like throwing a slow curve ball to a home-run hitter.
“Your name is…?”
“Kurtz, Christopher K. Kurtz.”
“Ah. Now, Mr. Charles C.—”
“I’m a Democrat.”
“Indeed. That is interesting information. Now Mr. Charles C. O’Malley, Democrat from, I presume by your disreputable accent, Chicago, how do you reply to Mr. Christopher K. Kurtz, who I suspect is also from Chicago?”
“With all due respect”—this would be the only fun class in the university, of that I was now sure—“to my distinguished colleague, I think he has it all wrong. You have to be really happy before you become a saint. I mean you work all your life at being as happy as you can and then toward the end, maybe you get to be a little bit of a saint.”
That was not bad for the spur of the moment, was it?
I noticed that some of the other guys were writing it down. My distinguished colleague from Chicago stared at me thoughtfully and wrote it down too.
Our teacher was now contemplating me very carefully. “Have you ever seen any serious suffering, Charles C. O’Malley?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Could you describe it to us?”
“I was in the Army of Occupation in Germany. Near my office was a railroad station in which the prisoners came home from Russia, the few who did come home. Women would wait for the train every afternoon for their husbands or fathers or sons, their poor faces bruised with loneliness and grief. Occasionally the man they were waiting for would be on the train.”
“I see. Were some of them happy, those women who came back day after day?”
I had never thought of the question. But naturally I had an answer. “They would be a lot happier if their man were on the train, sir; but I thought there was…well, a sort of faith that put purpose in the lives of some of them. And purpose gave them a little more to live for than a lot of other people had…. They didn’t complain, sir.”
The classroom was as silent as the Holy Cross priest’s graveyard at midnight. I didn’t quite like what had happened. The man had tricked me into thinking and I’d managed to sound more profound than I really was.
Anyway, the discussion floodgates opened. I enjoyed the rest of the class, because it seemed almost like I was teaching it.
“Have a drink with me?” Christopher Kurtz asked when the class adjourned.
“I don’t drink.”
“Neither do I.”
“We must be the only two left in the university. We’d better close ranks.”
So I met the best male friend I ever had.
Christopher put on his double-breasted overcoat, white silk scarf, and galoshes (really) and we trudged through the snow toward the Huddle. In an apparent concession to collegiate style, he didn’t wear a hat. I was dressed in combat boots and a parka with pockets big enough for my Leica and four or five rolls of film—my usual outer garb from December to the last April thaw. As he talked, he gestured with his hands, a sideways motion cutting through the air like an auto salesman or a precinct captain or a priest.
I remember that he said something about the relationship between happiness and sanctity being the most important religious question in the life of a layman, maybe in the religious life of anyone. I thought to myself that it was strange that two young males, walking across a barren campus as the temperature plummeted toward zero, would discuss sanctity.
“You’d almost think this is a Catholic school, Christopher. We’re talking religion after class, and the class wasn’t even religion class.”
He laughed and turned up his coat collar against the wind. “Someday it will be a Catholic university, Charles. Men like us will make it so.”
“Why aren’t you studying to be a priest?” I demanded. “Anyone who talks as much as you do about God’s love ought to be a priest.”
“Why?” He brushed the fallen snow off his thick hair. “Do priests have a monopoly on religion?”
I admitted that they didn’t.
He had attended Quigley, the high school seminary, for four years before coming to Notre Dame. He felt that his vocation was to be a layman, representing the Church and Christ in the world of work.
“Only sisters and priests have vocations,” I replied promptly. “Like my brother who goes to Quigley now.”
“What year?”
“Third.”
“Is he a better human being than you are?”
“I’d never admit it.”
“Every baptized person has a vocation, you and I as much as your brother or my classmates who will be ordained.”
I didn’t really believe any of it, but I was fascinated by the naturalness with which this young man discussed God and religion and church. As naturally as we would later discuss girls at the Huddle and back in my room.
That first day of our friendship, in my room, I at my desk, Christopher sitting on my bed, almost without realizing what I was doing, I told him about Trudi.
“You never heard from her again?”
“Not a word.”
We were silent for a moment. His eyes flicked as they had done before to the shot of Rosemarie on my desk. “Is that her?”
“No, that’s just a friend of my little sister.”
“Beautiful woman.”
“Pretty girl.”
He shrugged his right shoulder, a signal I had already learned that he didn’t agree but was stipulating the point so our discussion could continue.
“Why do you think Trudi disappeared?”
“I’ve asked myself that a thousand times. I don’t know…. Maybe because she figured that it wouldn’t work out if we were married and she came to America. A lot of other German girls her age thought the opposite….”
“Would it have worked out?”
“Maybe, probably not, I don’t know.”
The Angel of Judgment breaking into the room, Father Pius, my hall rector on another rampage, broke the conversation.
“I’ve caught you this time, O’Malley. Remember you’re on your last chance.” He fell to his knees as if he were about to pray and poked his head under the bed oblivious to Christopher’s feet.
“Where’s the beer, O’Malley? I know it’s here.” His eyes shone with a holy light, a young monk going to the lions.
“Try my desk, Father.”
He rampaged around the room, shoving aside chairs, tossing jackets and sweatshirts on the floor, pulling up bed sheets. “I’ll find it, never fear.”
He too glanced at the picture of Rosemarie, with disgust and anger. “You’re evil, O’Malley. We’ll get you yet.”
“Good luck.”
Unable to find a trace of the forbidden beer, he swept toward the door.
“You forgot to check the girls in the closet, Father Pius.”
He knew that there were no girls in the closet and he knew that I knew that he knew. Yet he could not prevent himself from yanking open the closet door and pushing around the mess inside.
“Maybe they’re lying on the floor, Father.”
He jerked my pile of army fatigues off the floor and threw them back with disgust.
“I guess they must have sneaked out when we weren’t looking.”
“You’ll laugh out of the other side of your mouth when we finally catch you.” He lunged toward the door to the corridor.
“Father Pius.” I raised my voice just as he propelled himself through the door.
“Yes?” His face was contorted with rage.
“Knock next time.”
He slammed the door so forcefully that the picture of Rosemarie fell off my desk.
“Father Pius, my hall rector,” I explained to Christopher.
“So I gathered. He’s supposed to be nuts. Be careful of him.”
“I don’t drink and I don’t have any girls in the room, worse luck for me.” I resorted Rosemarie to her proper place. “Why should I worry about him?”
His right shoulder went up. “He doesn’t seem to like your fr
iend.”
“That’s his problem.”
“Just so long as he doesn’t make it your problem…. Anyway, Charles, let me ask you a favor.”
That was the language of Chicago politics that we both understood.
“Sure.”
“Would you write up in a short article the scene in the Bamberg Bahnhof you described in class today?”
“Sure…why?”
“We have a little magazine, for students around the country. We’re always looking for good stuff.”
“You won’t use my name?”
“Not if you don’t want us to.”
“Okay.”
He had the delicacy not to ask why I did not want my name used. I could not have answered the question anyway. I suppose the truth was that I did not want publicity, even the most minimal, to interfere with my dreams of private bliss.
Which, when you consider what was to happen to my life during the next four decades, was pretty funny.
I checked out Christopher Kurtz with Vince.
“A really nice guy, Chuck. Everyone likes him. Not the student politician kind either. He’s not running for class president. He probably ought to be a priest.”
“He has a vocation to be a layman.”
“Huh?” Vince rubbed his dark jaw. “What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure. So you think if he wants to be a friend, it’s all right?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Don’t tell Peg.”
“I don’t tell Peg everything.” He was flustered but happy at the mention of that magic name.
“You’d better or you’ll be in real trouble.”
So I wrote the article and Christopher and I became close friends. I learned that he was a determined student who worked very hard for his B grades. He planned to be a lawyer and then perhaps a federal judge, “to bring Christian values into that sector of human life.”
I got A’s without much effort and performed in class with an easy, not to say obnoxious, flare. And I wanted to be an obscure accountant of whose existence everyone else was unaware.
The contrast was not lost on me. So great was my respect and admiration for Christopher that my conscience was a bit troubled, not sufficiently however to inhibit my outrageous performance in the Cath Lit class.
It was mostly French Cath Lit or, as I persisted in calling it, Frog Lit.
It required no great effort to stir up sedition in that class. I was not your typical Chicago Irish anti-intellectual Notre Dame drunk. I had grown up in an atmosphere in which books, art, and music were respected. I had read, had I not, James Joyce because a young woman had written me a letter when I was in Germany in which she said that the last waterfall of “yeses” was powerfully erotic. I was familiar with Greene and Waugh.
But the whole gloomy gus Frog crowd, as I told Christopher, turned me off. Péguy, Claudel, Bernanos, Mauriac, Bloy—the entire creepy bunch were grim, depressing, and a waste of time.
Occasionally, when attacking the Frog “crowd,” I remembered the French noncom at the checkpoint outside of Stuttgart and shivered with a memory of the fear of that night.
It was easy for me to adopt the pose of the anti-intellectual and disrupt the class, much to the delight of the professor. He was especially pleased the day I savaged Diary of a Country Priest and its ending: “everything is grace.”
“That little bitch was grace, sir? Come on, isn’t the author unfair to God? She’s a devil, not a grace.”
The prof beamed appreciatively. “It requires great literary taste, Mr. Charles Cronin O’Malley, to make such a tasteless observation.”
Even Christopher laughed at that.
Many years later after I saw Robert Bresson’s film adaptation of Bernanos’s novel, I reread the book and marveled at my youthful insensitivity. Gloomy it surely was, and also a masterpiece. By then I had learned that grace is indeed everywhere.
I gave Christopher my first and only draft of my article “Faces in the Bahnhof” that day.
He glanced at it quickly. “It’s easy to see why you’re a photographer, Charles.”
“I’m not a photographer, I just take pictures.”
The next day he cornered me after my English composition class.
“The editor liked your piece, Charles. Liked it a lot. Could I introduce you?”
“Why not?”
So I moved to the fringes of the Compact group.
Headquartered in two windowless rooms in the basement of old Sorin Hall, a building that I argued would forever smell of the unwashed bodies of Holy Cross priests from yesteryear, Compact was a joint Notre Dame–St. Mary’s venture. Such a phenomenon was rare in those days when the administrations of both schools thought that the existence of the other was a personal affront and that the presence of members of the opposite sex in such proximity was a threat to the eternal salvation of their respective student bodies.
“Cordelia, this is Charles O’Malley.” Christopher was smooth at introductions, as at everything else. “Charles, this is Cordelia Lennon, the editor of Compact.”
“Do sit down, Charles.” Her voice was soft and low. “That was a beautiful piece. Were you really in Germany for two years?…You look so young.”
“I was born at a very early age.”
Her laugh, as fastidious and delicate as her voice, was more enthusiastic than my flip response merited. Could it be that I disturbed her as much as she disturbed me?
It was a possibility that merited further exploration.
Cordelia (definitely not Delia—which is what she would have been called in St. Ursula—as I found when my first attempt at the nickname was gently but firmly corrected) did not fit my image of an editor. Rather she looked like a model from the pages of Vogue’s special section on freshmen college fashions, a model perhaps for the tan sweater and skirt she wore. She was short, no more than five feet two, doll-like in her seeming fragility, with soft white-blond hair bound tightly in an elegant roll on the back of her head, the lightest of blue eyes, and a body that, especially in a sweater, made it hard for you to keep your eyes above her chin.
She was a graduate of the Convent of the Sacred Heart and “ladylike” in the precisely disciplined fashion that such quasi-novitiates developed in their students. The kind of girl you wanted to take home to mother.
To my mother, whose daughters and foster daughter were too vivacious ever to be inhibited by convent discipline?
Ah, that was the question—which, to admit the truth, I asked myself that very first day.
“Christopher said that I might be able to persuade you to help us with our little magazine?” She fluttered her hand at the confusion in the office. “I don’t like to impose, but it is a such an important Catholic apostolate and your article shows such sensitivity and taste.”
Me? Sensitivity and taste? I felt ashamed of my smelly sweatshirt.
“You bet.”
“That you have taste?” Her eyes twinkled.
“That I’d be delighted to help.”
“We’ll be very grateful indeed, Charles.”
One learned very quickly that despite her china-doll appearance, Cordelia’s personality was not fragile. She not only supported Compact with her family money, she ran it with a steadfast hand. Indeed, of all the characters who hung round the offices, she and Christopher were the only ones who worked seriously at the job.
Her editorial decisions were delivered in an almost inaudible voice with a tonal question mark at the end, but they were both definitive and final—and as far as I was concerned unfailingly tasteful. You could tell that she had made up her mind when she put on her rimless glasses.
Another shortsighted woman in my life!
When she asked you to do something, it was always in the form of a polite, not to say diffident request. But you did it as if you had been issued a royal command.
Like my mother?
Not really. As appealing as Cordelia was, she did not have the wit and the slightly dement
ed giggle of the good April.
At least not near the surface of her character.
She was a music major at St. Mary’s, a diligent student of the piano, firmly convinced of her talent and her promise as a concert pianist, a conviction with which no one disagreed.
I listened to her play a transcription of a Bach prelude for me in a music room in St. Mary’s the week we met.
After the first few passages, it was evident that her friends and teachers were not telling her the truth. Cordelia had “taken” music since preschool and was technically perfect. All the notes were in the right place. But her playing was innocent of spirit and energy—wooden, in fact, and dull. Of training, she had a lot; of talent, very little.
The comparison with Peg was inevitable. My sister was, except when in defense of Rosemarie, a mild-mannered, sweet-tempered young woman in whose mouth butter would find it hard to melt. But put the violin bow in her hands and she became a frenzied, almost frightening, dervish. Peg had immediate access to the ice and the fire, the demons and the angels, in her young soul. Despite her technical skill, perhaps even because of it, Cordelia Lennon was innocent of access to her own depths.
Perhaps the convent had imposed a barrier that would never be broken.
How did her piano compare with Rosemarie’s voice?
Rosemarie, who was she?
As I listened to Cordelia’s passage through Bach, both authoritative and mechanical, I fantasized about the various diverting ways one might strip her, not merely of clothes, but of inhibitions.
For the purpose of improving her skills as a pianist. Obviously.
In bed I would call her “Delia” or even “Deal” and make her like it.
Like I say, I was twenty.
I had determined to take her to bed?
Not at all, but it was a diverting fantasy as I listened to her stolid progression through the Bach themes.
When she was finished with the piece, she rested her fingers on the piano keys, tilted her head, and smiled demurely, awaiting my verdict.
“I don’t know much about music, Cordelia.” I rose from the bench on which I had been sitting. “Our family isn’t very musical. But it sounded great to me.”
Three lies.
But she was beautiful and I was twenty.
Then I kissed both her tiny hands.
Younger Than Springtime Page 10
