Really? Yeah, really.
A flush slowly crept down her cheeks and throat.
“How elegant you are, Charles. Thank you.”
Elegant and arguably out of my class.
“Isn’t it wrong to lie to her?” I asked Christopher later.
He crossed his hands thoughtfully underneath his chin.
“What do you see her future to be like?” he asked.
“Marry someone, maybe a Notre Dame athlete. Kids, family, home in Kenilworth or Lake Forest.”
“Anything wrong with that?”
“I don’t suppose so.”
“She’ll play for parish recitals and maybe the organ in church. She’ll direct little musicals and choruses. And she’ll always have a nostalgic memory of how she gave up a career in the concert world for family and love. Her regrets will be occasional at most. Why take away her dream?”
Why, indeed.
“She’s pretty damned determined.”
“We don’t lie to her. We tell her she’s good and she is, as good as the best teachers and the most industrious practice can make her. There’s only a couple of us who know better and we have no obligation to say what we know.”
“Would the right kind of man—”
“Unlock her depths?” Christopher sighed. “Marriage doesn’t do that very often, Charles. Besides, what if there are no depths there?”
I thought to myself that it might be fun to search for them.
A notion that returned on that raw, windy March day in the Huddle when Christopher suggested that marriage to Cordelia might be a happy alternative to being consumed with passion.
“You’re saying that because Cordelia is available and I’m horny I should marry her. What about love?”
His right shoulder rose a quarter inch. “Would you ever hurt her?”
“Of course not.”
“Would you be faithful to her?”
“Sure.”
“I think”—he searched carefully for words—“that at our age we don’t know what love is. Probably we’re not capable of it. If a girl is attractive, if we think we can’t live without her in our bed every night, and if we have the right answers to both those questions, then we’ve gone as far as we can on the road to love.”
It was clear-eyed realism on a subject about which we are not programmed to be clear-eyed realists. I was convinced that he’d missed something important. Ought not some weight be given to the fact that I liked and admired Cordelia, indeed was fascinated by her delectable mixture of femininity and toughness?
There was another factor that had escaped Christopher’s realism, but it would take me years to comprehend it.
“Why don’t you marry her? You obviously like her.”
He smiled easily. “Not my type, I guess. She doesn’t affect me like she so patently affects you. Incidentally”—he lowered his voice—“the woman herself has just entered these premises.”
We met every afternoon at the Huddle, away from the chaos of the Compact basement offices, to discuss the magazine in relatively quiet circumstances.
Above the fur-lined collar of her blue coat, her face glowed from the wind. Cordelia was even more radiant than usual. My heartbeat increased noticeably.
Maybe Christopher was right. Why not date her for a while? I gulped. That would mean asking her for a date, a ritual at which I had less practice than sexual intercourse.
“Here’re the galley sheets for your article, Christopher.” She removed them from a book she was carrying in gloved hands and sat between us. “They seem fine, but you still have time to revise.”
As she removed her gloves and the matching scarf that protected her perfectly groomed hair from the wind, I moved my Leica from her place on the table and picked up the book. Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism.
“I do wish you’d let me see some of your pictures, Charles.” She fluffed her hair deftly.
“Soon…. What’s this book about?”
“It’s very interesting.” She folded her hands, a pious novice. “It’s about the relationship between God and art. When an artist makes something, he’s really acting for God and like God. That’s what you do”—she smiled and actually winked at me, the hussy—“when you make a picture, just as Eric Gill does when he makes a statue.”
Eric Gill was an English Catholic artist, greatly admired by the Compact crowd, a convert, as all the English Catholics they admired seemed to be.
“God snaps the shot?”
She nodded briskly. “You and God.”
“I never noticed Him peering over my shoulder.”
Christopher brought a Coke for her and yet another malt for me.
“Charles! You know what I mean…. Thank you very much, Christopher.”
Later in my life another woman would explain Art and Scholasticism in different terms that made much more sense. I still found the book itself impenetrable.
Cordelia and I had a minor argument about using my name with the article. I still declined. I didn’t want to be associated with the Compact bunch. I went over to the basement of Sorin every day because I liked Christopher and was half in love with Cordelia. I wanted a lot more time to figure out what I thought about their magazine and the people who worked on it with them. As I worked on their addressograph file I played the role of the typical Notre Dame goon, which was not altogether a false part, because I was wary of being identified with the rest of them.
Why? I ask myself almost four decades later.
I page through some of the old issues of the short-lived magazine. From the vast .wisdom of hindsight, I can say that the articles and the poetry were fresh and notably less naive than most college writing I’ve seen since then. We discussed complicated religious and social issues with enthusiasm and confidence if rarely with mature intelligence. But, dear God, we were not angry or cynical.
I hated the addressograph. I still smell the plates, an outhouse smell I protested to Christopher, who praised my aptitude for striking metaphors. How are you supposed to put in alphabetical order plates on which the type is backward? My passion for neatness and order was profoundly affronted by that diabolical machine and the mess it made.
But that’s what Cordelia wanted me to do.
I think of Cordelia’s glowing face on that March afternoon and of the delightful twist of her torso as Christopher helped her off with her coat. I close the pages of the magazine and sigh.
They were a mixed bunch, a couple of ex-seminarians like Christopher talking about the lay vocation—which seemed to me then to be a compensation for having left the seminary; some vets in combat boots who claimed to be “Catholic Workers” and “socialists” and treated me with contempt when they found that I was part of the occupation army; a few very intense young women, mostly from art or music or drama at St. Mary’s, some of them very angry. A young nun and an elderly priest were the “moderators” though they seemed to take their orders, like everyone else, from Cordelia.
None of the girls were as attractive as she was—the vets drooled over her—but I never bothered to look very closely at them.
They were part of the “joint YCS”—Young Christian Students—of St. Mary’s and Notre Dame. They fancied themselves the intellectual and literary elite of the schools, although the rest of the student bodies were unaware of their existence. The group was based on the Young Christian Worker movement, I was told, founded by a Belgian priest named Cardijn before the war. They met every week to discuss the Bible and social problems. They thought of themselves as the link between the Church and the world. They insisted that to “play their role” effectively they must be professionally “excellent”—“really good at what we do,” Cordelia would say gently. “Whether it be law or music or philosophy or,”—with a nod at me—“photography.”
“Picture-taking.”
They’d all laugh. Chucky Ducky the team mascot and envelope addresser.
Compact was the national magazine of the group, mailed to “college chapters al
l over the country” with stamps purchased by the money of Dennis Lennon, Cordelia’s architect father.
“He’s a very gifted man,” my father said slowly when I asked about him. “He designed some brilliant churches before the war. Inherited money, so he can pick and choose his commissions. I’ve met him a couple of times and admire his work. I’m not sure he represents any trends for the future though, not that it’s necessary to do that. You’re dating his daughter?”
He sounded astonished.
“Ogling her.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
My father never criticized a rival or a colleague, a rare trait in all professions and especially rare in his. I interpreted his comment to mean that Dennis Lennon was good but stuffy.
I often wondered whether the group would have existed at all if it had not been for Cordelia’s good looks and money.
And willpower.
Why was I skeptical?
I didn’t understand the philosophy books they gave me to read—Maritain, Gilson, Simone. I could make neither head nor tail out of Simone Weil, who was their heroine, or Charles Péguy, who was their hero. Cross Currents, their favorite magazine, might as well have been written in Russian for all the sense I could make out of it. Commonweal, their second favorite magazine, struck me even then as being priggish and dumb. In later years they invariably attacked my own work. I did not (and do not) have a very metaphysical mind, but I knew I was not stupid. In fact, I had better grades than any of them, little Miss Lennon included. So I suspected they didn’t understand much more about what they were reading than I did.
I was dubious that there was a Catholic answer for all the questions the world was asking. They saw the world in hues and shapes that did not allow for its complexity.
I was more interested in women than in ideas.
Cordelia especially.
And, finally, I was afraid to be labeled a religious zealot.
“That’s all right,” Christopher would assure me. “There are many different vocations. Didn’t Jesus say that in His father’s kingdom there were many houses?”
“Did He?”
“He did.”
“Smart man.”
Yet they fascinated me. They represented enthusiasm, energy, dedication, and a side of my religion of whose possible existence I had not dreamed. They were not the last of this “new breed” of Catholic I would encounter during my life.
And, I reflect, as I gingerly open a yellowed copy of the journal, they saw what would come with the Second Vatican Council more clearly than most of us, perhaps more clearly than they realized.
In March of 1949, Cordelia—and Christopher—were much more important to me than Jacques Maritain or Charles Péguy.
“Finally”—she adjusted her glasses to examine the last item on her agenda—“it does not seem that there will be many YCS members coming to our convention on Easter Monday. Only a few high school seniors have enrolled and we were counting on them.”
A “movement” that was going to change both the Church and the world was forced to rely on high school seniors, brats Peg’s age, to fill out their ranks?
And Rosemarie’s age?
Rosemarie who?
“I suppose”—she touched her tightly bound hair, a gesture that said she was labeling a phenomenon so that she could understand it—“that their moderators discouraged them.”
Cordelia’s categories for organizing the world were reasonably broad and moderately flexible, so long as she could express them precisely.
“We want quality not quantity,” Christopher said serenely that afternoon in the Huddle.
“And brats that age might be disciplinary problems.”
“We’ll put you in charge of them, Charles…” She smiled lightly. “Anyway, this issue of Compact will be ready for the meeting. Maybe”—the same hint of a wink—“we’ll have a lot of interest in its one anonymous author.”
“Modest.”
“Scared,” she said, accurately enough.
“Prudent.” As always Christopher was the peacemaker.
I saw a notice of a Mozart concert that night on the Huddle’s bulletin board next to our table and acted impulsively.
“Are you going to listen to Mozart tonight, Cordelia?”
“I might.” She regarded me with a faintly quizzical smile.
“Might you go with me?”
“I might.” She reached out and touched my hand.
“Uh, I don’t have any tickets.”
“There’s never a shortage of tickets for serious concerts at Notre Dame, Charles. I have two anyway, so you’ll be my guest.”
“He accepts,” Christopher interjected. “With delight.”
My heart beat wildly as I bent my head against the wind and hurried back to my room in search of decent clothes.
I had come to a turning point.
9
The small concert hall at St. Mary’s was almost empty.
“Are we too early?” I asked the lovely young woman in a dark brown jersey dress who was, on her initiative be it noted, leaning on my arm.
“All concerts here attract the same small group of people, Charles,” she whispered. “The same for lectures. That’s why the apostolate of YCS is so important. The Church is the mother of all culture and it must no longer abandon its children. Mozart was Catholic.”
“And a Mason,” I added.
She glanced at me in surprise. Charles the Uncultivated was not supposed to know that.
“You’re a very interesting young man.”
“That’s what my hall rector says.”
I had been able to recall enough images of how Dad was attentive to the good April so that I was not a complete dullard on this my first real date. I don’t know whether Cordelia expected my minor courtesies, but she always smiled and said “thank you.”
Even when I helped her off with her coat and whistled, quite spontaneously, at her dress.
“Few enough dates here,” she laughed. “A girl should dress up for one, particularly at a concert.”
“I’m not complaining.”
When we were seated and she opened the score for the first serenade, I looked around again.
“This isn’t fair, Cordelia. Those musicians”—I pointed to the quartet, all young, who were tuning up their instruments—“will have to perform to a nearly empty house.”
“If you’re a good musician,” she said, putting on her glasses and considering the first page of the score, “you perform your best for an audience of one. Besides, to be crassly commercial about it, their pay doesn’t depend, thank God, on the size of the audience.”
“What’s the matter with Catholic schools that they can’t do better than this?”
“I bet that they don’t do any better at IU or Purdue. Maybe worse at Purdue.”
“It’s still terrible, like you said…”
She closed the score and took off her glasses.
“Charles, did you know about the concert or even the Chamber Music Series until you saw the notice on the bulletin board in the Huddle this afternoon?”
“Caught that, did you?” I said.
“Did you?” She frowned at my evasion.
“No.”
“And you’re brighter than most of the boys at Notre Dame and you’ve read more.”
“I see your point. A lot of work to do for the YCS?”
“A lifetime, but that’s all right; we’ll win.”
“Well, I’m lucky. I found both the series and a lovely musician to take to it.”
“Shush.” The violinist had lifted his bow. And then in a whisper, “Thank you.”
Cordelia Lennon had been taught all her life that music was work. If you were invited to a chamber music concert, you dug the scores for the program out of your personal collection or you found them in the college library and you settled down to following every note.
Need I say that among the children of April Cronin O’Malley that was an unacceptable response
to music?
“Poor dear Mozart wrote the music to be listened to, not studied.”
I thought about that line of the good April, hesitated, decided to ignore its implications, and then, despite my decision, I reached over to my date, took the score out of her hands and closed it. Then I took one of her tiny hands firmly in both of mine and moved it in the general direction of the armrest on my seat where I firmly imprisoned it.
She stiffened, looked sharply at me, then smiled happily. I freed one of my hands for a moment, took off her glasses and put them in her purse. Obediently she leaned against my arm.
The poor kid was as frightened about this date as I was. That made me feel even more tender toward her.
The two of us relaxed and reveled in the music.
At the end of the recital, hand in hand, we approached the quartet. “Don’t apologize,” she whispered. “Just thank them.”
“Yes, mother.”
She snickered and squeezed my hand.
So we thanked them and asked them where they had studied and where they were going on their tour and wished them luck. The girl who played the viola thanked us in her turn, in a rich New York Jewish accent. “We really appreciate people like you.”
“Is it too cold to go for a walk?” I asked my date as we left the hall.
“Certainly not.”
It was indeed too cold, but there wasn’t any other way to find any privacy in the Notre Dame world of those days. Neither of us was aware of the cold anyway.
On your first date with someone you think you are beginning to love, the gloves that separate your hands hardly exist.
I don’t remember what we talked about. Everything and anything, I suppose.
“From the first time I saw you I wanted to take you out.”
“And from the first time I saw you I wanted to go out with you.”
Perhaps, I thought, this is going a little too fast.
“Time to be walking back. Eleven o’clock curfew tonight.”
How dumb can a Catholic school be, even in 1949.
In front of her residence hall, I knew with a certainty that did not admit question that she expected me to kiss her.
The rules in those days said you did not “neck” a girl on her first date.
Younger Than Springtime Page 11
