“I think I want to marry her.”
“I should hope so. That’s what people do when they’re in love. When?”
“Like maybe a year after I graduate.” He shook his head sadly. “Or two years. I don’t know.”
“Two or three years from now. Why not next year?”
“She’s too young.”
“She’s as old as the proverbial hills.”
I sat back on the chair behind my desk, feeling I was almost that old.
“I don’t know whether she wants to marry me.”
“She doesn’t speak of it and if she did, I’d probably not quote her. But, take my word for it, she does.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“You’ll get it.”
“Yeah, but a man should be ready to support a family when he marries, you know?”
“Nonsense, my dear Vincent,”—I waved an airy hand—“absolute nonsense. Look around this university. The rules have changed.”
I was well aware that I was giving advice that I had refused to follow myself.
So what? I was telling a friend what he wanted to hear and what he should hear. Do as I say, not as I do.
“Yeah…but…”
“Have you talked to the ineffable Margaret Mary about these questions?”
“Gosh, no.” His eyes widened. “I’d be afraid to.”
“Talk to her. Why do you have to do it all by yourself?”
“We’ve never discussed marriage, Chuck, I mean I’d have a hell of a lot of nerve if I brought it up.”
“Then, my good man, get yourself a hell of a lot of nerve. How long have you been dating? Three years now? Four years this prom season. Isn’t it time to let the poor girl know that your intentions are honorable?”
“She knows they’re honorable.” He blushed.
I couldn’t imagine either of these innocents in a scene like mine with Cordelia. Not yet anyway.
“I didn’t mean that, dope. I meant it is time to hint broadly that you want to be a permanent part of her life.”
“Yeah?” He lifted his head out of his hands. “But what if she doesn’t want me?”
“Does she give any signs of that?”
“Well…no, but—”
“But, what?”
“But…I’m an Italian, my father’s a tailor, we still don’t have much money. Your family is wealthy and Irish and I’m not sure that…”
Dear God, the poor goof.
I stood up, walked over to the disconsolate halfback, and bent down to his ear. “I have something to say to you, Vincent. I will whisper it, but don’t you forget it. Bullshit,” I whispered softly. “Again I say to you bullshit!”
“Yeah?” He brightened considerably.
“Yeah. I have with my own ears heard the woman of the house, the good April, refer to you as ‘poor Vincent.’ Better even than the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think you would be let into the house if she didn’t approve?”
“Well…”
“Having committed the ultimate miscegenation of marrying a West Side Irishman, how could she draw the line at an Italian?”
I almost said that we were not rich, but from Vince’s point of view we were.
He left my room happy. Peg owed me one.
I felt enormously satisfied with myself. June wedding in 1951. Peg would be young, only a junior in college, and a lot of violin work ahead of her. But she’d stick at it and they’d be happy.
The scenario would write itself very differently in the next twelve months.
But that autumn of 1949 few of us had even heard of Korea.
On a sunny Indian summer Thursday morning in the first week of October, I was reading Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio in front of my blown-up photo of Rosemarie and looking forward to the celebration of my twenty-first birthday that night in Oak Park. I’d catch the South Shore after my last morning class, cut the silly religion class that was my only Friday obligation (Christopher would respond to my name at the roll call), and spend the weekend with the family—thus avoiding the insanity of the Michigan game the coming weekend.
I was happy when the team won and even listened to the games on the radio, but I couldn’t take the pep rallies and the cheering sections and especially the drunken alumni in the stands.
The gloom of Winesburg was interrupted by the rector and Father Clarke and Father Tierny, the prefect of discipline (dean of students to you moderns).
They burst into my room without knocking or warning.
“We’ve caught you at last, O’Malley,” the rector chortled. “And you’re on warning.”
They rushed to my bed and pulled a dozen bottles of beer from under it.
“You will be on the three o’clock train,” the prefect of discipline announced happily. “Good riddance to you.”
“This will make a man out of you,” said Father Clarke.
“The university will be free from your evil soul!” Father Pius exulted.
Rosemarie’s picture would no longer desecrate his hall.
They turned around and marched out.
That was that. Caught, tried, judged, and executed within thirty seconds.
Could I appeal? Sure. Would my appeal be granted? Not a chance. Maybe, if I were contrite enough, they might take me back next year. I was in no mood for contrition.
Need I say that it was not my beer? Nor that of anyone in the hall as my neighbors assured me when they came back from class to find me packing. Someone had planted the beer and tipped off the rector.
Who? Did I have any enemies that hated me that much? I doubted it then and I still doubt it now.
The rector who wanted to get rid of me and was driven to it by the naked shoulders of Rosemarie?
Almost certainly.
Close to tears, Christopher helped me pack, promised to send on my books and laundry, and rode with me in the taxi to the South Shore station.
“I’ll ask my father if we can file suit—”
“Don’t bother. I don’t belong here, Christopher. Father Pius did me a favor.”
“It’s so goddamn unfair.”
“Not your language.”
“Appropriate language.”
We shook hands at the station and promised we would not let Father Pius interfere with our friendship.
I thought, as the train pulled away, that maybe he ought to go back to the seminary. But if anyone could make something of this lay-vocation stuff, it was Christopher.
We stayed in touch, talking on the phone once a week, eating lunch and playing handball or tennis during the summer till he graduated in the spring of 1950. Since he was NROTC he owed the Navy a few years. He asked for a commission in the Marines, against all my advice.
“Family tradition, Charles. My father fought at Belleau Wood; anyway, I get seasick. It’ll only be three years.”
He was a lieutenant in the Marine division that landed at Inchon a few months later, the last real victory the American military has managed to win. Shortly after he went ashore with X Corps at Wonson on the other side of Korea. Somehow he had already become a captain.
I prayed for him every night, without much confidence that my prayers made any difference.
16
During the melancholy ride to Chicago on the South Shore for my twenty-first birthday party, while an autumn rainstorm obscured Gary and East Chicago and Whiting and Hegwisch, I tried to sort out my life.
I was shattered, ashamed, guilty. I had done nothing wrong, I had been framed, yet still I felt guilty.
How can you be ashamed when you’re innocent?
Authority, I would later learn, has the power to make you ashamed when it decides, however unjustly, that you are guilty.
If enough people tell you that you are a criminal, then you begin to think and act like a criminal.
I knew in my head that I was right when I told Christopher that I didn’t belong there. But Notre Dame had been pa
rt of my program since I saw Knute Rockne All American during my grammar school days. I had served in the Army for two years to make Notre Dame possible. Now it had been snatched away from me by a madman.
What was left of my grand design? How would I put the pieces back together?
I had failed my parents; they would be ashamed of me; how could I face them at the birthday party tonight; how could I tell them that I had let them down?
Ridiculous self-pity, you say? Sure was. The O’Malleys were nothing if not loyal to one another. Mom and Dad had never been convinced that I belonged at Notre Dame. There were lots of other colleges that would be delighted to take my government money. What difference did one lost semester make?
My carefully arranged plans had been disturbed. I was losing time. My frantic (now I’d say compulsive) effort to make up for the years wasted in the service had been ruined.
Then I realized that my parents would be hurt because I was hurt.
That infuriated me even more. The worst pain of all was knowing that my pain, impossible to hide even if I tried—and I told myself I would try—would hurt them more than anything else.
Okay, Charles C. O’Malley is an adult. He will take this like an adult. He will laugh it off to protect his parents and his brother and sisters.
No, he doesn’t want a final meal. No, he won’t require a blindfold.
Many young men were expelled from Notre Dame in those days (and for years after) on similar charges, most of them willing to admit their guilt, some arguing still that they were covering for friends. They all agreed one way or another with the comment of the third priest. It had helped them to mature, to grow up, and to become a man.
It didn’t do that to me at all. Rather, it made a fervent anticlerical out of me.
Many years later, at a professional convention, I asked a young Holy Cross priest, wearing a brown suit and a plaid tie as had become the fashion in that era, what had ever happened to Father Pius.
“Oh, he’s doing parish work out in the Pacific Northwest. He had a nervous breakdown, let me see, about 1955.”
“How did they notice the difference?”
The young priest eyed me thoughtfully. “Crazy all along, eh? I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ve only met him a couple of times but the legend is kind of weird.”
“Ah.”
“Well,” the priest continued, “it seems he was caught one day by a group of students planting a couple of six-packs under someone’s bed. Turned out that he’d been doing it for years and no one in the community became suspicious. There were so many expulsions at Notre Dame for drinking back then that the superiors didn’t notice how high his rate was.”
“Any reason for this unrecognized zeal?”
“This particular kid kept a picture of his girlfriend on his desk. In a scanty swimsuit, as I remember the legend.”
“And the others who had been expelled?”
“Were you one of them?”
“Funny you should ask.”
“There was no way of knowing after the fact…” His voice trailed off.
“I had a picture of a woman with bare shoulders on my desk, Father.”
“My God!”
“That’s what I said too.”
Notre Dame was not the only Catholic institution that entrusted the supervision of the lives of young lay men and women to deeply troubled religious in those days—and much later. It was probably not the worst offender either. Religious orders ought not to permit themselves to be suckered into the position where they are trying to regulate the lives of laity the way they regulate the lives of their own members. They can’t do it effectively. Moreover, they turn people away from the church when they try.
Many, many years later, Father Hesburgh called to offer me an honorary doctorate. “Chuck, we’d like you to give the commencement address this spring. And flatter us by accepting an honorary doctorate.”
“I have a long history with Notre Dame, Father.”
“Well, we can let bygones be bygones, can’t we, Chuck?”
“No,” I said.
“I had hoped you might welcome a reconciliation after all these years. Forgive and forget, you know what I mean?”
“Forgive and forget, Father?” I thundered. “I was innocent. I did not drink then. Everyone knew that. I was expelled unjustly. If the university is willing to publicly apologize and change my record then I’ll think about your degree.”
“Well”—he tried to placate me—“we’ll certainly change the record to read that you withdrew instead of being expelled. But that was so long ago—”
“It was only yesterday, Father,” I shouted. “I want an apology.”
“Well, I don’t see how—”
“Then stuff your honorary degree you know where.”
I was still shaking with rage when I hung up the phone.
When I told my priest the story, the good Father Blackie clapped his little hands with leprechaunish glee. “Good enough for him, says I,” he exclaimed. “I wonder how many of their generous contributors are men they threw out long ago.”
“Men who now say that the experience made a man out of them,” I continued, still angry.
“We churchmen, particularly if we are in religious orders, are like the Bourbons. We never learn and we never forget. We expect the laity, of course, to do both. As you must do now by calling poor Father Ted and apologizing to him.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
So I called him back, apologized, and accepted his offer of an honorary degree.
“It is a kind of an apology, Chuck, isn’t it?”
“I’m sure it is.”
“And the senior class wants you to give the commencement address.”
I laughed and said I would. Later I was told that it was the funniest graduation address in the history of the Golden Dome. Chucky Ducky forgives and forgets? Well, more or less.
My outburst shows how great was the pain as I rode home on the South Shore that lovely Thursday evening. And how long the hurt from such pain can endure.
I dreaded the front doorbell. I’d have to tell them that I was thrown out, probably because of the photo of Rosemarie.
Mike threw open the door and rushed back to his viola.
The family chorale struck up “See the conquering hero comes!” from Handel’s Judas Maccabeus.
Sad sack that I was, I couldn’t help but grin.
“I am not the frigging Duke of Buckingham!”
“Chucky!”
The walls were hung with banners: “Chucky the Prizewinner!”
“Chucky Wins!”
“Twenty-one and Winning!”
“A Voting Citizen and a Winner!”
“All the Way with Chucky!”
What the hell!
I was embraced by everyone. Mom, a happily pregnant Jane, Peg, Dad, Mike, Ted, wished me a happy birthday and congratulated me on my victory.
No Rosemarie?
I looked around. Indeed, no Rosemarie.
Except an enormous, much-larger-than-life blowup of my shot of her, hanging on the parlor wall with a vast gold and blue ribbon on it.
“What have I won?” I asked. Did they consider my expulsion from Notre Dame a victory? No, they didn’t know about it. Unless Vince had phoned Peg and I had sent word through Christopher that he was not to spoil the party.
“First prize!” Peg hugged me and shouted gleefully. “First prize and a thousand dollars!”
“What?”
My father endeavored to restore some order. “The two she-imps submitted your picture of Rosie to Life’s college photographer contest. You won, going away if you ask me; you get a thousand dollars and a full-page picture credit in Life, which is not a bad achievement for someone not quite twenty-one.”
“Huh?”
“We did it! We did it!” Peg exulted. “We won Chucky his first first prize!”
“You brats!” I protested, as happy as they were.
My head was whirling
. How much could you crowd into one day? Expelled, celebrated, rewarded. Someone please turn off the merry-go-round.
I danced with the three women and sang, hollowly, the Notre Dame “Victory March” with them.
The prize and the expulsion were for the same reason. Someone had a sense of humor.
“Why did you bring your two duffel bags home?” Mike pointed at my khaki luggage. “And all your clothes?”
I didn’t want to tell them.
Suddenly it was as quiet as a wake.
“Have you finally left that terrible place, dear?” Mom asked softly.
“Well…yes.”
“Hooray,” Jane shouted uncertainly.
“Why?” Peg demanded.
What do you do now? Ruin the party? No.
“I just don’t belong there.”
“They threw you out,” Peg insisted, her eyes blazing. “The dirty bastards.”
“Right on both counts.”
“But, dear, why?” Mom was badly shaken for the first time in all my life.
“For drinking.”
“But you don’t drink!”
“Ironic, isn’t it?”
“What happened?” Dad was grim-faced, angry.
“A priest, my hall rector, never did like me. I think he framed me. They all came in and found beer bottles under my bed. I was on probation because they had thrown out my roommates last year for the same offense.”
“That’s crazy, son.”
“Bastards!” Peg screamed, beautiful in her rage. Lucky Vincent.
“I know it’s crazy.”
“Why didn’t he like you?” Mike frowned, still too innocent in the ways of the church he hoped to serve.
I thought of the picture. Because of Rosemarie.
That was an irony I would keep to myself.
“Didn’t like my red hair, I guess.”
My family was as supportive as I knew it would be.
Dad: We should sue.
Michael: Rotten Christians. Disgrace to the priesthood.
Mom: You were never happy there, dear.
Jane: It’s their loss. Someday they’ll know that.
Peg: (Words of consolation muffled in a sobbing embrace.)
Mom: Well, I’m glad that’s over with. It just wasn’t the place for you. Now you’re free from them.
Younger Than Springtime Page 17
