Younger Than Springtime

by Andrew M. Greeley

  My family had converted Notre Dame’s expulsion into an honorable discharge. From what?

  They also gave me a prize and a thousand dollars and a picture in Life.

  I was not a photographer, only a picture-taker. Okay. You’re still in Life.

  I did feel free, honorably discharged. Free to ride on the mad merry-go-round. Back in Riverview again.

  Dad: Where will you go to school now?

  Me: Wait till the next semester and enroll in DePaul, I suppose. All the colleges are too far into the first semester now.

  Peg: (suddenly intelligible) No! The University of Chicago! Oh, Chucky. (Another hug.) It starts tomorrow!

  Dad: You could try it, son. Nothing lost if you don’t like it.

  Peg: (brightening dramatically) And you can take care of Rosemarie!

  Mom: (faint reproving tone) Perhaps Rosemarie could take care of Chucky too.

  Just then, giddy and light-headed, battered by surprises and still on my personal Flying Turns, I wanted someone to take care of me.

  I took a very deep breath.

  “Don’t tell her until I’m sure they’ll accept me.”

  17

  The next day I walked in the cold rain from the Sixty-third Street El Station to the Classics building to take my “aptitude examination.” I was a late applicant and would take it by myself in a tiny, grimy classroom presided over by a single bright-eyed young “proctor.” He gave me the huge stack of paper and informed me that I would have six hours, which included my time out for lunch, if I felt eating was more important than gaining admission to the university.

  “I’ve been in the military,” I replied as I took off my rain-soaked Ike jacket. “I can endure privations.”

  “Good for you,” he said sarcastically. “I’ll see you here at four o’clock. I must continue to work on my dissertation.”

  “Aren’t you afraid I’ll cheat?”

  “I’d like to see you cheat on that examination!” he said with a sneer. “Our tests are cheatproof…. Incidentally, almost none of the late applicants attain adequate grades in this examination.”

  “I will,” I assured the closing door as I sat down to begin my work.

  The test was long indeed but easy. My various educational background—Fenwick, the University of Maryland, Notre Dame—had prepared me well. I finished it a half hour ahead of time, removed three Hershey bars from my Ike jacket and munched on them contentedly. They’d have to take me in—if I wanted in.

  As I ate I glanced over some of my essays. Ah, the Irish gift of glibness, what a blessing! If the rest of the University would be this easy, I’d have no problem here.

  “Breeze,” I said to the proctor, when he returned as I finished off my last bite of candy. “Finished two hours ago, but didn’t want to walk out on you. I think I’ll like it around here. A lot easier than Notre Dame.”

  I took my leave whistling “Younger Than Springtime.”

  The rain had ended and the sun had returned. I turned to “The Last Rose of Summer” as I walked over to the El.

  That night, my father came to my room. I was lying on my bed, deeply morose again. What a terrible mess I had made of the first twenty-one years of my life. Already I hated the University of Chicago, but it was my last chance.

  He sat down on the chair next to the bed. He was holding a stack of typescript.

  “I have something here,” he said uncomfortably, “that your mother thinks you should read.”

  “The good April’s wish is my command,” I said, trying to sound happy.

  “It’s something I wrote while you were away,” he said, frowning nervously and rubbing his forehead. “A kind of a memoir. For our children and grandchildren. We were going to kind of leave it for them after…well, when we’re not here anymore.”

  “That sounds like fun.” I sat up and reached for the manuscript.

  “But we think you ought to read it now.” He pulled the pages back, not quite ready to give them up. “In your, ah, special situation…We’d just as soon you didn’t mention it to the others.”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die!”

  He laughed uneasily.

  “There’s some material in here about our courtship…”

  “Great.” I continued to reach for the pages.

  “I think I look pretty dumb…”

  “The good April disagrees, I bet.”

  He blushed and relinquished the text to me.

  “Naturally…I was not all that clever a suitor.”

  “You won the girl, isn’t that what counts?”

  “Come to think of it, I guess I did…. You’ll probably think us dreadfully old-fashioned.”

  “Not as old-fashioned as I am.”

  He smiled, pleasant memories of the pursuit of April Mae Cronin doubtless flitting across his imagination.

  “You’ll have to judge for yourself…. Your mother wants you to read it—and I agree with her….”

  “Of course.”

  “Naturally.” He grinned as would an unindicted coconspirator. “We both feel that you will understand a good deal more about Rosie if you realize what her parents were like when they were your age…or maybe a little older.”

  “I’m interested in my parents, not her parents.”

  “We think you should know more about them.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Two other matters, Chuck.” He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “A man should always assume that his wife’s pleasure is more important than his own.”

  I nodded. I already knew this from my sorry affair with Trudi. Yet, it was useful to hear it again.

  “And I know why I wasn’t sent to New Guinea.”

  “Who told you?” I demanded hotly. “Rosemarie? She was the only one who knew and she was guessing!”

  My father grinned; he had caught his contentious son in a mistake.

  “The congressman you talked to,” he said. “I’m sure I’d be dead if you hadn’t. Thank you for giving me another chance.”

  He closed the door softly.

  I pounded the bed in frustration. Couldn’t you keep anything secret?

  I was, needless to say, greatly pleased that he had found out about my Sunday-morning visit the month after Pearl Harbor.

  I picked up the manuscript.

  I assumed then that this was one more part of their ongoing campaign to persuade me to “take care” of Rosemarie. Only much later would I realize that it was more of a warning about what I might encounter if I did fall in love with her.

  John’s Love Story

  18

  1918

  I died the first time on the parade ground of Camp Leavenworth on November 11, 1918. The armistice ending the Great War (later called World War I) had already gone into effect. But I didn’t know that because I died before they announced it at morning assembly.

  It was my own fault I died that day. I should have been nowhere near Camp Leavenworth.

  I had graduated a year early from St. Ignatius College, lied about my age in my rush to don the uniform and fight the Hun, and at the age of seventeen years and nine months was inducted at Fort Sheridan and shipped off to Kansas. I was three days past my eighteenth birthday that morning I slipped noiselessly to the parade ground. If I had not been in such a rush to defeat the Kaiser and waited till my eighteenth birthday, I would not have volunteered—all chance of glory was lost—and would not have been stricken by the Spanish influenza two hours after the war was over.

  I knew I was dying from the flu when I dropped my rifle and sagged toward the ground. I had seen other men, their faces black, collapse during assemblies the past week, many of them dead before they hit the ground.

  My only thoughts, as I was overcome by sudden exhaustion and—I can think of no other word—peacefulness, were that I would not mind dying if I had just one chance to paint a portrait of a woman I loved.

  Which shows what a romantic I was in those days.

  Dumb eighteen-year-old
kid, I was sure it would not happen to me. But I was still scared, we all were. The flu was sweeping the country. It was, we were told, the Black Death all over again. Almost everyone in the world might die.

  I figured I would miss the others.

  Even when two of the men in my wooden Spanish-American War barracks had succumbed, I was sure I was immune. In the letter I had written to my mother the night before I assured her that there was nothing to worry about, the flu was abating, the war would be over soon, and I would come home.

  Hence, I was surprised when I suddenly felt very tired as our lines formed up that morning. I had learned to sleep on the thinly covered wooden bunks and had bounced out of bed at reveille wide awake and eager for the day. I was no lover of the military life, despite my father’s record in the Spanish-American War and my grandfather’s in the Civil War. A couple of months of training had disillusioned me. In the next war, I told myself, neither I nor my children would be taken in by the craziness that drove men to enlist.

  Which shows how wrong you can be.

  I was happy and eager that crisp morning as the sun came up in a clear sky over the plains of Kansas. I knew I’d be getting out of the army soon and could go home again—not exactly covered with honor perhaps but at least possessing an offer of a commission.

  The Spanish flu hit you almost instantly. One moment you were feeling fine, the next moment there was a sudden weariness, and the moment after that you collapsed—quite possibly dead.

  Twenty million people died in the pandemic, not counting the victims in India after the plague had stopped everywhere else (as abruptly as it had started the previous summer), in the rest of the world, one percent of the human race, far more than had died in the war. In the United States half a million died, about one half of one percent of the population. The virus hit the United States in late August in Boston, leaped across the country in October, and then disappeared in late February. A hundred thousand died every month. My mother told of counting the crepes on the doors as she rode home from the Loop on the Washington Boulevard bus—sometimes three and four in a single block.

  The country panicked, as might well be imagined. Schools were closed, meetings canceled, plants shut down. There was a terrible shortage of coffins. What might it have been like if there were television or even radio in those days?

  Don’t expect to find much in the history books about the Spanish influenza. It was a far worse disaster for America than the war, but no one wanted to remember it when it was over. Or to think about the possibility that it might come back again.

  A lot of people, they said later, died of pneumonia that was caused by complications from the flu itself. Sulfa and penicillin would have saved many of those lives as they did the lives of men and women infected by later and milder varieties of the flu.

  But no wonder drug could possibly have saved those who died almost instantly.

  As I did.

  I do not even think I felt the ground as I hit it. Terrible weariness invaded my body, the rifle slipped out of my hands, I thought about painting a woman I loved, even saw her face momentarily, and then slipped toward the dust from which I had been told the previous Ash Wednesday I had been made.

  Then nothing, not even blackness.

  Nothing at all.

  Then from a very great distance a pounding. And soft voices. Southern voices. Damn, why couldn’t they talk good, Chicago English like we civilized people did?

  I was angry that they were disturbing my nap. I tried to shut out the sounds of their voices and the raucous pounding of hammer on wood.

  What the hell were they making at this hour of the night?

  “Thirty more today,” one of them said. “Shit, we’re going to run out of ground to bury them in.”

  “And wood to make these coffins.”

  “Did you ever think someone might be making a coffin for you tomorrow?”

  “Just my luck, I’ll get it my last hour on this duty.”

  “We won’t catch it as long as we wear these masks, that’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Do you believe that shit?”

  They both laughed uneasily.

  Bad duty. Making caskets for flu victims. But that was no excuse for the noise. Why wouldn’t they go away and let me sleep?

  “This redhead kid is the youngest I’ve seen yet. Can’t be more than sixteen.”

  Bastards. I was eighteen. And three days.

  I thought of waking up and telling them. I decided against it. Ignorant rednecks.

  “Doesn’t matter how old you are. He’s as dead as the rest of them. Come on, let’s toss him on the box and load him on the truck.”

  I was aware that I was lying on a flat surface, flat and hard and that I was terribly cold. Too hard and too cold to be my bunk in the barracks.

  What did they mean, dead?

  I wasn’t dead. Just taking a nice nap, that’s all.

  Then I felt myself being lifted up, like a sack of turnips. No, not turnips. Potatoes. That’s the right word, a sack of potatoes.

  I was dumped unceremoniously into a box of some sort.

  “Big kid—don’t hardly fit.”

  “I reckon he don’t mind much. Give me a hand with the top.”

  What the hell was going on? Were they putting me in a coffin?

  I’d better wake up and stop them.

  I tried to sit up. My body wouldn’t respond. I tried to open my eyes. They wouldn’t move. I tried to talk. My lips were frozen together.

  Then I heard nails being pounded above my head. A lid being attached.

  Why fight it? It was only a nightmare. Go back to sleep. Forget the whole thing.

  “Get Joe Pete and Jimmy Jack to help.”

  “Hey, you guys, this is a heavy one. Give us a hand and we can get the hell out of here.”

  Ridiculous mistake. But it didn’t make any difference. I’d nap for a few more minutes and then Mom would wake me up and I’d rush for the bus down to St. Ignatius.

  The box was lifted up and carried some distance, jostling me uncomfortably. Then it was dropped abruptly on another platform. Like the slow train to Wisconsin.

  What a joke! They thought I was dead.

  Well, a little bit more sleep and it would all go away like the foolish dream that it was.

  Then I saw the woman’s face again, not pretty exactly, not in the ordinary sense of that word. No, her face was etched in vitality and character, a special kind of beauty all her own. A lovely elegant body to go with the face. I would paint that too…

  Not if I let them bury me alive.

  I still thought it was a dream. No one was really trying to bury me alive. But even in a dream you fight them when they want to bury you alive.

  I tried to pound on the top of my coffin.

  At first my fists wouldn’t move. I tried banging my head against the sides. It moved slowly back and forth, just barely hitting the wood.

  I smelled the wood for the first time. Like sawdust in a meat market.

  “Y’all hear anything?”

  One of the hillbillies.

  “You’re crazy, Jim Bob, they’re all stiffs.”

  “I don’t know. I thought I heard something.”

  “Naw! I don’t hear nothing.”

  “Come on.” A third voice. “Start the fucking truck. Let’s get these stiffs over to the graveyard.”

  I pulled my fists out of the bonds in which they seemed to be trapped. Almost without instructions from me, they began to pound the top of the coffin.

  “Lordamercy!”

  “One of them’s trying to come back from the dead.”

  “Fuck the colonel! Let’s get the shit out of this place!”

  I heard them starting to run. That’s fine, hillbillies. Run away and leave me in this thing.

  I threw myself against the side of the coffin. It seemed to tilt. They had not piled it on the truck too securely. I heaved again and the casket sailed through space and crashed to the ground.

 
The lid flew off. I sat up and yelled, “Come back, you damn fools!”

  They kept on running.

  I felt very tired again and considered lying down again, just for a few more minutes.

  But the sun was sinking and I was cold. I’d take the nap back in my bed.

  So I lurched out of the casket and looked around. I was in front of the icehouse—so that’s why I was so cold.

  No shroud? The rumor was right: They’d run out of them!

  I trudged back to my barracks. No one was around. In the mess hall for supper.

  I fell into my bunk and back to sleep.

  Later that night I was carried by stretcher to the base hospital, which looked like a brick Gothic castle, where I was an object of curiosity for an hour or two—someone returned from the dead.

  Then the horror of the sick and the dying all around distracted the doctors and nurses from me. I was deposited in a cot in a corridor with a high ceiling. Later that night, in the dim light of a kerosene lantern, a doctor leaned over me. “You’re lucky, son. You’ve no right to be alive. It’s all gravy for you from now on.”

  Since then I’ve often wondered how many other cases there might have been where the haste and fear that followed the Plague of the Spanish Lady caused unconscious men to be diagnosed as dead, perhaps even to be buried alive.

  I stayed in the National Guard for more than two decades, but never did work up the nerve to ask a doctor whether there were any records of similar cases. I guess I didn’t want to know.

  Is my recollection of waking up in the icehouse the product of a fevered mind? Maybe I was in the hospital all the time. The next morning when I woke, weak and still sick, but over the worst of the flu, I wondered that myself. Maybe it was all part of the same nightmare.

  I didn’t ask the hospital staff. They were too busy with men who were sicker than I was.

  But in the disorderly stack of papers in front of me as I write this little memoir, there is the yellowed telegram my parents received from the War Department informing them of my death on November 11, 1918.

  Underneath it is the telegram two days later telling them that I was still alive.