Still, Jim needed a good woman, I told myself, to bring some stability and happiness into his erratic life. We had been close friends since first grade. It would be immoral…well, at least wrong…for me to court April until he made up his mind that he wasn’t interested.
She would keep, wouldn’t she?
And I was leaving for Rome in ten days. When I came back, the romance between Jim and her would be long over. Then, if I still wanted to, I could begin my pursuit.
Would I still want to? Did I want to even now?
The answer was a clear yes. April was a woman to spend your life with.
I stirred uneasily, the stodgy Irish bachelor in me protesting against such a hasty decision.
Well, I replied to him. There’s no rush. I am going to Rome in ten days. When I return, we’ll see.
The only trouble with that strategy was that April might find someone else while I was away.
I was furiously jealous.
She wouldn’t dare.
I sighed. It was all too complicated.
“Something wrong, Vangie?”
“Hot, that’s all,” I replied.
I sure was.
As one grows older, I have noted, there is a tendency to think it was hotter in summers when you were growing up than it is in the present, a judgment for which the weather records provide no substantiation.
So, I checked with the Weather Bureau. Memorial Day 1925 was the hottest in history—a high of 93.
In southern Wisconsin, it might have been a degree or two cooler.
So my sense of being on fire was not all internal.
“I think it’s time for a swim. Clarice?”
“Fine.”
The two of them trundled off to the “ladies” beneath the pergola. You did not remove your beach pajamas in public, even if you were wearing a swimsuit. Worse luck for my racing imagination.
I awaited their return with, as the reader might imagine, considerable interest.
In the space of a half decade, enormous progress had been made in women’s swimwear—revolutionary progress, compared to which the recent appearance of the bikini is only a small adaptation.
Even during the war years, the presumption among those who designed such garb was that one was simply not supposed to see women’s flesh on the beaches. The swimming “costume” was just that—a dress with a skirt that reached below the knees and stockings that protected everything below that. You could sit on the beach in such garb and stand in the water, but you certainly could not swim in it.
By 1925, however, young women like my two charges were wearing one-piece jersey suits that reached only to mid-thigh, exposed a considerable amount of back and neck, and clung to the parts of the body that their flapper dresses denied.
Scandalous, delightfully so.
When Clarice and April emerged from the pergola, every eye on the pier and the beach turned toward them, a fact of which I’m sure April was very well aware. Her suit was light gray, Clarice’s light blue, both with broad white belts. They walked toward me with confident indifference, as though they appeared on the street every day in such dress. In fact, it was surely the first time that they had worn the suits and they were very anxious about public reaction.
“They might as well be stark naked,” an elderly woman whispered behind me.
She exaggerated, but in terms of recent fashions her point was well taken.
Clarice was surely the more beautiful, a trim, flawlessly curved body, an ideal of youthful beauty for any era. April was taller and more slender. But her legs were splendid and her breasts, now clearly outlined by the swimsuit, were full and firm, as I had hoped they would be.
“You both look lovely.” I rose to greet them and tried to smile approvingly.
“Thank you,” they said together, blushing at my compliment.
“It’s the first time we wore these”—April was a bit flustered—“and they’re, well, kind of embarrassing, aren’t they, Clarice?”
“Yes, they are.”
“You feel like you almost don’t have anything on, and you know that a lot of older women are watching you and don’t approve and—”
“There’s one thing you have to say about such swimsuits.”
“What’s that, Vangie?” She cocked a suspicious eye, expecting that I would say something to which she would have to object.
“You can swim in them.”
“Right.” She grabbed my hand. “So let’s swim!”
I was unceremoniously yanked into the lake. The muscles in her bare arms and legs, I observed as I plunged into the lake, were solid and strong.
Twin Lakes is little more than a glacial mud puddle. It requires only a week or two of warm weather to heat it up for swimming. But that Memorial Day weekend it was still at least twenty-five degrees cooler than the air.
I screamed in vain protest and tried to pull away from her.
“Coward,” she shouted and abandoned me.
Swim she did, with a sure, even stroke, out into the lake twenty or thirty yards. I followed.
“Don’t you wish that every day was the first day of summer?” she said when I caught up with her.
“If it were the day I first met you, it would be wonderful indeed.”
“Blarney.” She swam back toward shore.
I followed her in. She and Clarice appropriated a place for themselves on the pier, tucked towels around themselves, and settled back to luxuriate in the warmth of the sun. I stretched out on the pier and indulged in my ability to nap whenever and wherever I wanted.
April Cronin had exhausted me, I told myself as I drifted into a world where there were no moral choices necessary between friendship and love.
I was awakened from dreams, I fear about firm young breasts, by a shattering blast of cold. Water was rushing up my nostrils and into my throat. I was drowning in the Arctic Ocean.
I sputtered and wheezed and somehow managed to come up for air.
April Cronin was guffawing at me. “Time to get up, sleepyhead.”
“You pushed me off the pier,” I said, furious at her.
“You looked so funny when you hit the water.” She backed away from the dangerous light in my eyes.
I grabbed her and shoved her under. She broke free and surfaced, bubbling and laughing.
“Beast!” she shouted, dove under the water, and tackled me.
It was a glorious wrestling match. I was stronger than she, but she was a sturdy young woman, quick and determined, and not in the least afraid of me.
So, I suppose, have young people begun their summer romances since the species began.
Then our play turned serious and demanding, fun transformed into sexual invitation and response.
We stopped abruptly. I felt foolish and ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “My fault.”
“I started it,” she said sheepishly, her face averted. “I guess the water isn’t cold enough.”
“Not nearly cold enough.”
The two of us stood there, water up to our chests, afraid to look at each other, afraid to speak, caught in a mix of pleasure, guilt, and possibility. Time seemed to stop. There was only April Cronin and John O’Malley and an encompassing lake. All the possibilities of the moment and of a lifetime rushed through our imaginations. A playful relationship had suddenly become somber. It would be playful again perhaps, but never quite as innocent.
We had ventured to the far side of innocence in a single day, indeed in a few hours.
We might not speak of the violent emotions that had captured us during our play, but we both knew about them and we knew that, whatever else happened between us for the rest of the day and beyond, those emotions would be the context of our future.
It was terrifying and wonderful.
“I think it’s colder farther out,” she said. “I’ll swim this way.” She gestured to her left. “You swim that way.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The water was not cold enough
to make any difference.
Nor was my repeated mental resolution to sail for Rome the second week in June.
22
After supper, as the sun went down, April played her Irish harp and sang on the terrace in front of the clubhouse.
Almost everyone was there. No movie theater, no TV (though a transatlantic television broadcast had taken place that year), no taverns, no transportation for many of the guests: April was the only show in town.
She wore a plain white blouse and skirt and looked like an angel come down from the empyrean.
I fell completely in love with her while she played and sang. Her voice was sweet, clear, and pretty—not quite good enough for a concert stage, but wondrous in the fading twilight of a Wisconsin Memorial Day. She was a wonderful actress, putting herself into the various roles her show demanded.
And she was marvelous with the Irish harp.
All right, she didn’t have to know about Jelly Roll Morton or ever hear of the “Dead Man Blues.”
I sat on a stone bench near her and fantasized about a painting of a bare-breasted harpist, now bathed in the colors of twilight.
Her program was ingenious. She began with a medley from RoseMarie, then did “One Alone” from The Desert Song. Then she sang the Irish American songs that everyone expected—“Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” “My Wild Irish Rose,” “Mother Macree,” and (not strictly Irish American) “Danny Boy.” Then she did a lovely ballad in Irish that made you want to cry, as do most Irish-language songs, regardless of their content. Then she turned to an aria from the final act of Figaro, and finally, just to prove she could sing anything, she offered a Gershwin medley, ending with a raucous, honky-tonk, speakeasy rendition of “Lady Be Good.”
I told myself that she sang that just for me.
Afterward I carried her harp back to the Drake for her.
“You’re a swell singer,” I told her.
“Good enough for parish musicals and family concerts,” she said firmly. “Not much more.”
I considered denying that statement and decided that with April Cronin denial of the truth would not work.
“You could be a concert harpist.”
“In an orchestra, maybe. But Dr. Thomas already has more harpists than he needs. It’s all right, Vangie, I don’t mind. You do what you can do and enjoy it, instead of feeling sorry for what you can’t do.”
“You sound like a wise old woman.”
“Do I?” I saw her white face glance toward me in the dark. “By the way, you shouldn’t look at me that way when I’m playing the harp…. Well, it’s all right to look at me that way. But it shouldn’t be so obvious.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I was flattered. But it’s hard to sing and play when you’re wondering if everyone else knows what’s going on in a man’s mind.”
“Oh. I was only thinking of a painting.”
“An immoral painting.” She had made her point and was now teasing me.
“Not necessarily.”
“Yes it was.”
We had arrived in front of the Drake and were facing each other in the glow of the single pale streetlight.
“I don’t know whether I should ask about the painting,” she said.
“It would be a portrait of a lovely young woman playing a harp in front of a stone house on a hot summer night with the colors of twilight all around her.”
“With her clothes on?”
“Some of them.”
There was a pause.
“No,” she said finally.
“I wasn’t proposing such a painting…and even if I were, it wouldn’t be dirty.”
“I know that.” She took the harp from my hands. “But the answer is still no.”
“Forever?”
She walked up the steps to the porch. “I didn’t say that either…. I’ll wake up Clarice and we’ll meet you down by the pier. I’m terribly thirsty.”
“I understand. Bring your tin cups.”
She chuckled and disappeared in the darkness.
For the rest of the night I forgot about Jim.
The three of us sat at the end of the pier and demolished one of my bottles of single malt.
April Cronin drank like I did, slowly and carefully savoring the taste of each delicate sip.
“Nothing like Celtic whiskey,” I said, “after Celtic music.”
“Scotch whiskey after Irish music.” She jabbed at my ribs. “Bring Irish the next time you come up here.”
“When are you returning?” I asked politely.
“Weekend after next.” She added a touch to her tin cup. “You too?”
“I’m sailing for Rome in ten days.”
“Oh.”
“I want to paint Roman churches and ruins. With those two terrible new buildings on Michigan Avenue we’re entering an era, I fear, of silly decorations. Maybe I’ll learn in Rome how to do decoration that has taste.”
“Like poor Mr. Sullivan did at Carson’s?”
“Yes.”
So, she knew about architecture too. Was there anything that this astonishing girl did not know?
“You mean Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building?”
“Wedding cake and in the city that produced Burnham and Sullivan.”
“And Mr. Wright.”
“Yes and Mr. Wright too.”
“And John the Evangelist O’Malley?”
“Not the same class, I’m afraid.”
“But good enough?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
I risked a question about jazz.
“Well, I don’t happen to think that the Red Onion Jazz babies are better than the Red Hot Peppers.”
“You’ve heard both bands?” I asked incredulously. “I bet neither of them play at White City.”
“I don’t go just to places like White City. Why, I even heard Bessie Smith sing ‘St. Louis Blues’ at the Arcadia.”
Which was more than I had done.
“So you like jazz?”
“I find it very interesting…. I bet you’ll tell me. Other boys won’t. What does the word mean?”
I refilled Clarice’s empty tin cup.
“Most Negro people will tell you”—I tried not to stumble over the words—“that it is a slang word for ‘lovemaking.’”
“How interesting!” April gulped and sipped at her drink.
“How terrible!” Clarice murmured, swaying slightly as she drew the tin cup to her lips.
“The music,” I went on lamely, “works only when the musicians are in close harmony with one another, almost like lovers when they are, er, making love.”
“I see.” April sounded dubious. “Well”—she took a deep breath—“my mother says there’s nothing wrong with lovemaking when you love someone.”
“April!” Clarice’s voice was slurred. “Nice girls don’t talk about such things.”
“My mother also says that love without lovemaking is almost as bad as lovemaking without love.”
“April!”
April’s mother was frequently quoted on matters of controversy. I had begun to suspect that on some occasions the quotes were made up to fit April’s own opinions.
“I’m sure she’s right,” I said agreeably.
“I hope lovemaking isn’t as difficult as ‘King Porter Stomp.’”
“It is reputed to be even more fun.”
We both laughed nervously.
“Well, thank you for explaining what the word means.”
“I hope it doesn’t turn every jazz piece into a temptation.”
She paused to consider that observation.
“No more than they already are.”
It was my turn to gulp.
While we were exploring my place in the history of Chicago architecture and the meaning of jazz, Clarice was guzzling my single malt like it was water. Once when she reached for the bottle, April gently stopped her arm.
Obediently Clarice stopped drinking. She was pretty drunk by t
hen, however.
“I’m sure you’ll enjoy your trip in Rome,” April said piously. “Maybe you can have an audience with Pope Pius.”
“He’ll be up at Castelgandolfo where they go in the summer. Anyway, why should he want to see an engineer from Chicago?”
“Who designs buildings and paints pictures.”
“Which are not immoral.”
“Only suggestive,” she laughed. “Pour me a little drop more.”
“A little more than that,” I said, filling her cup halfway.
We sat on the pergola and watched the stars at peace with each other and the world. In the distance on the other side of the lake, a jazz band was playing in the local dance hall, not very good jazz by Chicago standards.
I wished that the night would last forever.
Why the hell should I go to Rome?
“What time is it, Vangie?”
I pulled my watch out of my watch pocket and peered at it in the darkness. “As best I can make out it’s eleven-thirty.”
“Good. We mustn’t drink after midnight if we want to receive Our Lord in Holy Communion tomorrow.”
“You receive every Sunday?”
My parents were of a generation that made its Easter Duty with fear and trembling. I wasn’t quite so frightened of Holy Communion—or perhaps not so convinced of my own unworthiness.
“Every day. Naturally.”
A daily communicant who would not exclude the possibility of modeling for a “suggestive” painting. More and more interesting, this April Cronin.
“You think you’re worthy to do that?”
“Certainly not,” she said promptly. “No one is worthy to receive Our Lord. Ever. But Communion is food for our soul, so we should take it every day, just like we take food for our body. It makes us less unworthy, doesn’t it, Clarice?”
Clarice was sleeping.
“Oh, dear. I’m afraid we’ve kept poor Clarice awake by our chattering. I think we’d better walk back to the Drake.”
We had to guide “poor Clarice” back to their cabin.
“Wait here,” April whispered to me. “I’ll put her to bed and come back.”
“Wonderful.”
She returned in about ten minutes. I was so preoccupied by my fantasies that I did not hear her until she was next to me.
Younger Than Springtime Page 22
