Younger Than Springtime

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Dad was very careful with a buck, just like my older son. I never did acquire that virtue. The reason I didn’t buy a car was that I didn’t want to offend Dad, who would have taken it as a judgment on his own wisdom. I bought a LaSalle when I married. Then, six or seven years later, when the LaSalle collapsed, I couldn’t afford a new car.

  My kids can believe that I didn’t own another car till I was over forty because they were around then. My grandchildren either don’t believe it or figure that was about the time autos were invented.

  So when I needed a car I could always call Jim Clancy.

  The trio finished their composition and I applauded. Jim joined in as he always joined in when I did something.

  I gave the trombonist five bucks and whistled the opening theme from Rhapsody in Blue, which was played for the first time that year and was, I felt even then, a masterpiece. He responded on his instrument.

  “That Mr. Gershwin writes like he was a Negro man,” the trombonist laughed.

  “He must have listened to a lot of you for many years.”

  “Sure sounds that way.”

  Jim grinned at the black man, his contagious winning grin that made everyone want to laugh, and slipped a bill into his hand, a twenty at least.

  “Did you give that trombonist five bucks?” Jim asked incredulously as we walked through the candy store. “No wonder you never have any money. You should have let me take care of it.”

  “Five bucks wouldn’t be much toward a down payment on a Duesy,” I responded. “Or even a Ford.”

  “That’s different.” He frowned at me. “The Duesy is an investment.”

  I was fond of Jim, but I had no illusions that he was sensitive to irony, a fact that did not prevent me from often inflicting my irony on him.

  He was short, only about five eight, and handsome, curly black hair, with a lock hanging over his forehead, bright blue eyes, pale skin, a dimple in his chin, and a quick winning smile—a cute little boy with, alas, a hairline receding much more rapidly than mine.

  He worked at the Board of Trade, in a seat that his mother, a widow with lots of money and delusions of social prestige, had purchased for him. He was at that time reasonably successful at riding the waves of the exchange but not nearly as successful as he would later be. Even with his mother’s ample funds and his own profits and the sale of his Stutz, he ought not to be able to afford a Duesy.

  I’m sure he had found a deal. Jim always found deals.

  My eyes winced in the bright spring sunlight and winced again at the sleek silver car with enormous whitewall tires (the spare tucked in next to the engine), thickly spoked wheels, and bright red hubcaps. Sports cars haven’t changed all that much in their shape since 1925. Later they would add superchargers to the Duesys that would let you drive them at 150 miles an hour. In 1925, Jim couldn’t get his much over eighty.

  “Like it?” he asked.

  Jim was an enthusiast about everything, a young man of boundless energy and vitality, a jack-in-the-box always ready to pop open and laugh at you. I liked him partly because I realized that his enthusiasms were a balance to my more languid approach to life and partly because I admired his verve and drive. He was fun to watch in action.

  Maybe I patronized him a little too, but I was young and didn’t realize that you didn’t act that way with your friends.

  “You bet I do…. Does the new girl come with the car?”

  “She doesn’t even know about the car.” Holding his boater straw (not strictly appropriate because Memorial Day was a week away), he climbed into the front seat. “Hey, that Boston Store box has your name on it.”

  I knew before I opened it that it would be a boater straw hat of the most current fashion.

  “Thanks, Jim,” I said simply, having learned long ago to graciously accept his generosity.

  Not only was Jim astonishingly generous; he also knew how to lavish gifts in such a way that it seemed as if you were doing him a favor by accepting his gift.

  “Can’t have you wandering around Italy looking like a hillbilly…. Put it on, I think it’s the right size.”

  It fit perfectly, well, as perfectly as a boater ever fit anyone.

  “All the girls in Rome will chase me when they see it.”

  “Hey, you really like it?”

  “Perfect.”

  “April will love it on you, Johnny.”

  “April?”

  “My fiancée. Almost. She plays the harp. Come on, let’s go. Better put the boater back in its box. Two harps.”

  “At the same time?”

  He turned on the engine and honked impatiently at a horse-driven garbage wagon that had pulled out of the alley in front of us. In the mid-twenties many wagons were still drawn by horses—produce, milk, ice, garbage.

  “One’s an Irish harp. That’s smaller. She even sings in Irish.”

  He spun the car around the corner and roared down Twenty-sixth Street toward Western Avenue.

  “Is she from Ireland?”

  “No, from St. Gabriel’s.”

  “Back of the Yards?” I asked in mock horror.

  A date from West Africa would offend my mother only slightly more than one from Canaryville.

  “You’ll like her. She’s great. So’s her friend. They’re going to be up at Barry for the Memorial Day weekend. You will come, won’t you?”

  We wheeled down Western, racing north at forty-five miles an hour.

  In those days, you might pass a couple of cars every block. The only obstacles to high speeds were the doggedly moving streetcars. The police were no problem at all, not if you had a few bucks to pay them off.

  “Barry is a dull place.”

  Barry Country Club was a summer resort run by my father’s Knights of Columbus Council. It was a great assembly place for the West Side Irish, and a useful marriage market. The golf course was adequate, but the rest of the place was a summer camp at the most, not a country club.

  “After Europe I suppose it’s not much,” he admitted.

  Jim’s enthusiasms were vigorous, but transient. He was never unenthusiastic, but the objects of his energy changed rapidly. Sometimes I would not see him for weeks, and then he would pop up and bounce across my path with a new project about which he was deeply excited, whether it be west suburban property or a handball match.

  I invited him to come to Europe with me every time I booked a ticket on the Lusitania. His mother would not permit him to go because she was afraid that shipboard life would have a harmful effect on “little Jimmy’s delicate health.” As far as I could see, the delicacy existed in her mind only.

  “I suppose I could stand it for a weekend,” I said. To tell the truth I felt sorry for him.

  “Great.” He ran a yellow light and careened around a green milk wagon, scaring the poor horse that was pulling it half to death. “You’ll really like her friend too. I’ll pick you up at your office after work on Friday?”

  The Board of Trade closed down at one-thirty. So that afternoon Jimmy was legitimately free to drive his new silver car. We worked till five-thirty. But no one cared when I came or went so long as my drawings were done on time. Normally I finished my work before lunch and did my own sketches in the early afternoon.

  “At home after supper,” I said as we leaped around the corner of Jackson Boulevard and roared west at fifty miles an hour. I held on to my corduroy cap. “I should eat with the folks.”

  They would be so delighted that I was going up to Barry that they would not have minded my missing the evening meal. But I figured that it would be one less dull evening if we arrived late.

  I knew from experience to be skeptical about my friend’s “swell” girls.

  “Great!” he hollered above the noise of the Duesy’s 4250 RPM. “We’ll have a swell weekend!”

  We made the trip from Western to Austin Boulevard—four and a half miles with maybe a dozen stoplights—in six minutes. We didn’t stop for any of the red lights.

  Jim dropp
ed me off in front of our house on West End and then roared back to Austin Boulevard. He and his mother lived at that time in a suite in the Chateau Hotel at Lake and Austin, across the street from the El Station (his cars were parked in a garage around the corner on Mason and Lake). In those days, a suite in an elegant apartment hotel was considered a fashionable way to live.

  “Does Jim have another new car?” Mom demanded. “It makes a terrible noise. Is it a Ford?”

  Mom thought all cars were either Fords or Packards.

  “No, it’s a Duesenberg.”

  “Is that an expensive car?”

  “Probably worth ten thousand brand-new.”

  In the mid-nineteen twenties a new Ford cost between two hundred and fifty and three hundred dollars.

  “Where did he get that kind of money?”

  “He didn’t get it, Mom. He bought the car from the estate of a bootlegger who offended Al Capone.”

  “No!”

  “Well, something like that.”

  My parents were so happy that I was “finally” going to spend a weekend at Barry that they soon forgot about Jim’s “bootlegger” car.

  They also admired my new boater.

  “He is the sweetest boy,” Mom admitted, “when he wants to be. He doesn’t have to do things like that.”

  “He genuinely likes giving things to people.” I tilted the hat at a rakish angle and wondered what “April” would be like. “No strings attached.”

  “There are always strings attached to gifts.” My father glanced up from his evening paper. “That’s not always bad.”

  I settled down on the porch with my sketchpad and began yet another drawing of the girl with the brown eyes. One part of my soul was convinced that she was real and that somehow, someday, I would meet her.

  I finished the sketch long before dark. We were on daylight saving time by then, the fourth or fifth year of that experiment of which my father disapproved because it was contrary to nature.

  The trip to Twin Lakes, on which they were setting so much store, almost never occurred. Friday at noon Jim called my office (we had one phone, in the outer office) to say that a business matter had come up and that he couldn’t make it till late Saturday night.

  “I’m really sorry,” he said, his voice racing at top speed, “but it’s a very important matter.”

  “Well, maybe when I get home from Italy—the end of August.”

  “But the girls have already gone up. They’ll be terribly disappointed. Couldn’t you ride up on the train tomorrow morning? They’ll meet you in the hack at Genoa City.”

  The original station wagons were called depot hacks.

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  I had no desire to entertain two of Jimmy’s “swell girls” for most of the day. And, judging from past experiences with Jimmy’s “business opportunities,” possibly the whole weekend too.

  I was most particularly not interested in a girl from Canaryville who played not one but two harps.

  And probably never heard of Jelly Roll Morton’s “Red Hot Peppers.”

  “Please, Johnny,” he begged, the sound of tears—authentic but not to be taken too seriously—in his voice. “Just this once. As a personal favor. I’ll owe you one.”

  It was an old argument, one he had often used on me and always with the same effect. There was enough Irish politics in my bloodstream that I could not resist an appeal for a personal favor.

  “All right,” I said, “for the last time.”

  And I thereby changed my life.

  20

  “What does the e stand for?” the rhapsody in blue demanded.

  She had leaned against the hood of the depot hack, folded her arms, tilted her head, and cocked an eyebrow at me.

  “The e?” I stumbled as my face grew warm.

  “John E. O’Malley. Jimmy wouldn’t tell us what the e stands for.”

  I hesitated. “Edward.”

  “If you don’t tell the truth once,” she smiled, half fun and full earnest, “how can someone believe you ever again?”

  “Evangelist,” I gulped. “As in John the Baptist. You know John the Evangelist and John the Baptist.”

  “How cute!” She clapped her hands. “Vangie for short.”

  I would have jumped back on the train and returned instantly to Chicago except for one reason.

  The young woman in the blue summer flapper dress and the helmetlike blue hat (and blue gloves) was the girl with the brown eyes from my dream.

  “And what is your middle name, Miss Powers?” I tried to regain my balance. Admittedly, there was a glint in the dream girl’s eyes but she wasn’t supposed to be a hoyden.

  “I’m not Miss Powers.” She waved her hand at the gorgeous willowy blonde standing in the background. “She is Miss Powers. I’m Miss Cronin. You can probably call me April.”

  “April what?”

  I was taken aback for the second time. I had assumed that the quiet blonde was Jim’s girl. How could it be that he was practically engaged to the young woman who had pulled me back from the grave?

  “April M. Cronin.” She lifted my duffel bag and tossed it, effortlessly I noted, into the backseat of the hack.

  “Mary?”

  “Close…get in, you don’t plan to stand out in the heat all day, do you?”

  I was suddenly wounded by sexual desire, demanding, powerful, pervasive. My eyes, working on their own initiative, stripped away her clothes.

  She sensed my searching evaluation and turned away, flustered but not displeased.

  “Where’s the driver?”

  My unruly imagination would not put her clothes back on all weekend.

  “I’m the driver, am I not, Clarice?”

  “You certainly are,” the sleepy blonde agreed.

  “Do you want to drive, Mr. O’Malley?” She held out the keys, which I would have accepted from her at peril to my right arm. “Don’t you trust a woman at the wheel of an auto?”

  “I’d trust her more than I’d trust myself.”

  “He’s not so bad, is he, Clarice?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  Clarice seemed to have stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine; her white dress, hat, and gloves might have graced a mannequin in Marshall Field’s windows. Her face and figure were perfectly shaped, a model or a movie actress, perhaps, a fantasy woman, cool, reserved, aloof, unattainable.

  The kind of woman Jim could be expected to pursue.

  Instead of my brown-eyed, vivacious tomboy.

  My imagination ruled out of order any consideration of an unclad Clarice. It was too fascinated by April M. Cronin.

  “Well,” that latter worthy demanded, “are you going to ride with us or are you planning to walk to Twin Lakes?”

  She and Clarice were already in the front seat of the Chevy. Gingerly I got in behind them.

  “I’ll ride with you, of course. And count myself lucky to be borne to Twin Lakes by such fair damsels.”

  She turned around to consider me, an examination almost as obvious as mine of her.

  “I suppose, April M. Cronin, that if you are driving this station hack, you are not only a competent driver but an excellent driver. And does the m stand for Mae with an e?”

  “Hmpf,” she snorted, turning back and starting the ignition. “You’re a good guesser. And my confirmation name is June. Also with an e. April Mae June Cronin, the whole of spring.”

  Clarice giggled.

  I later learned that her confirmation name was in fact Anne with an e, an inevitable name for an Irish woman who has already honored the Blessed Virgin with a previous name. The claim to the third month of spring had been made up out of whole cloth. I charged her with the very falsehood that she had denounced in me.

  “But that’s different,” she said calmly. “You knew I was making it up.”

  That was that.

  One of her traits, I was to learn over that Memorial Day weekend, was that she
combined a stern code of moral principles, sterner even than my mother’s, with great flexibility of application. In a lesser person than April Cronin such a combination might have been called hypocrisy. In her case, however, the blend seemed to fit neatly into her character and personality.

  I received a hint of another trait as we bounced over the gravel road from Genoa City to Twin Lakes.

  “You’ve known Jimmy a long time, haven’t you?” she asked as she guided the station hack with competence matched only by her confidence.

  “Almost all my life. We went through St. Catherine’s and St. Ignatius together.”

  “Isn’t he the sweetest boy?” she demanded enthusiastically. “So kind and so generous and so much fun?”

  “He certainly is,” I said, determined to match her enthusiasm and still baffled by the harsh fact that my best friend was in love with this astonishing creature.

  She then spent at least five minutes praising Jim, periodically interrupting her litany with demands for agreement from Clarice, “isn’t that true, Clarice?”

  Clarice always agreed.

  And I mumbled my hypocritical assent to the praise.

  That night at the dance hall down the lake from Barry (about which more later) she flipped the coin over. “Poor dear Jimmy, he’s so sweet and so much fun. I’m sure he’ll grow up soon.”

  Innocence and shrewdness, naïveté and cunning, were mixed in her seamlessly, although you had to listen closely to catch the shrewdness and the cunning.

  That hot spring morning I wondered how “almost engaged” she was and how I could possibly survive in life without her.

  “You play two harps, Miss April Mae June Cronin?”

  “Only one at a time.”

  “Will we be fortunate enough to hear you play one of them this weekend?”

  “After I dragged the Irish harp up on the train—that’s the small one—”

  “I know what a Celtic harp is.”

  She ignored the interruption. “—I’d play it at the drop of your funny hat. In fact, I’ll play it even if you don’t drop your hat and even if no one comes to hear me play it. Isn’t that true, Clarice?”