Younger Than Springtime

by Andrew M. Greeley

  By the time the taxi dropped me off at our house on West End, I was thoroughly despondent.

  My parents were sitting in the parlor, reading the Sunday papers, an obligation as strict as the eleven o’clock mass at St. Catherine’s.

  “Turned cold,” Dad murmured.

  “Yep.”

  “Did Jim Clancy finally arrive?” Mom asked, not all that interested in the answer.

  “Yep.”

  “Did you meet any nice girls?” Mom again.

  “Yep.”

  They both put down their papers, comic sections as I remember.

  “Who?” they asked together.

  “Her name’s April Cronin.” I slumped into an overstuffed easy chair. “She’s a Democrat and she’s from St. Gabriel’s and her cheeks are red from the smell of the stockyards. She’s twenty, twenty-one in August, has a certificate in music from Normal, plays the harp and sings, and she’ll teach at St. Xavier’s Academy in the fall. She has brown hair and brown eyes and is kind of tall and dresses like a flapper. In fact, she is a flapper.”

  I awaited their protests and warnings.

  “Dr. Cronin’s daughter?” Dad asked cautiously.

  “Yep. His youngest.”

  “He’s quite a remarkable man. Decent fellow.”

  “Decent” was my father’s highest praise.

  “They have a lot of money,” Mom observed. “Does she seem spoiled?”

  “Nope. Not at all.”

  They didn’t even know April Cronin and already, despite her obvious disadvantages of geography and politics, they liked her.

  “So?” Dad folded his paper and tilted his head to consider me carefully.

  “So I’m still sailing for Italy a week from Wednesday.”

  “Could I ask why?”

  Looking back on that conversation, I realize that something in my voice or my manner must have given away how I felt. Dad had never asked me a question like that before.

  “Jim knew her first. He wants to marry her. I’ll have to wait and see.”

  “Is that altogether wise?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe”—Mom always searched for a compromise solution, in that respect much like April—“you should postpone Italy for a few weeks.”

  “I can’t explain why,” I sighed. “But my instincts are that I should go away now.”

  Neither of them replied. But I knew they were thinking what I was thinking.

  What if my instincts were wrong?

  24

  With loving concentration on each line, I had drawn a sketch of April on the El train.

  The handsome Italian American grandmother sitting next to me watched with obvious approval.

  “Pretty girl,” she said.

  “For Irish.”

  “You must have some Tuscan blood in you.”

  “The first bishop of Firenze was Irish.”

  That ended the conversation.

  After I had left my parents and went to my room on Sunday night, I had begun the sketch, working from memory because I was too bemused during the weekend to put a single line on paper.

  In my office in the Rookery that Monday morning, I studied the result of my El work. No doubt about it, she was the brown-eyed girl who had summoned me back from the dead at Camp Leavenworth.

  But that was impossible. April Cronin had been fourteen years old then, a skinny kid, no doubt. How could she have intervened in my dreams as a young woman of twenty?

  I threw my drawing pencil aside. How could she have appeared in my dreams—if it was a dream—at any age?

  And she thought she had met me before too.

  I picked up the morning Tribune. Pete dePaolo had won the Indy five hundred with the average speed of 101 miles an hour, in a Duesenberg Speedster. Jim, who was obsessed with sports, had probably read the papers and was now determined to push his car up to the same speed. Babe Ruth was back in form after his injury at the end of the last season. Red Grange was expected to break more records at Illinois this coming autumn.

  Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was the new president of Germany, the first democratically elected leader of the country. Typically, he was a monarchist. Eight years later he would appoint the absurd little man with the funny mustache as chancellor. Governor Al Smith had signed a law permitting 2.75 beer in New York, Chinese nationalists were rioting in the foreign Concession in Shanghai. The United States was back on the gold standard. The Ile de France had been launched and would provide luxury accommodations for a few of the half million Americans who would travel to Europe this summer.

  I didn’t want to be one of that half million.

  I threw the paper back on my desk and thought about the telephone in the outer office. A simple call to the office of the Italian-American line would cancel my reservation on the new Rex. I could walk over to their office at noontime and collect a refund on my advance payment.

  Instead I heaved myself to my feet, took off my jacket and hung it up, and walked over to the window. Dearborn Street was crowded with delivery trucks, most of them horse drawn.

  I pushed open the window and breathed deeply the spring air. The clang of streetcar bells—urging the horse-drawn wagons out of their way—drifted up on the warm spring air.

  Despite the faint smell of horse manure, it was a nearly perfect spring day, as soothing and tasty as a glass of the most expensive cognac—clear blue sky, light breeze off the lake, temperature in the high seventies. I planned to finish my work for the day by noon and spend the afternoon strolling along the lakefront from Grant Park up to Lincoln Park.

  I’d dream of the wonderful buildings I would design someday for the lakeshore. And dream of showing the plans and then the buildings themselves to an admiring April Cronin.

  The Rookery was so named because the building that had been on the site before it was constructed—a temporary city hall after the Chicago Fire—had become the headquarters for most of the pigeons in Chicago. The pigeons decamped from the area when the new building was finished, scared by it like a lot of the citizens of Chicago.

  Thirty years later in 1925, Mike Hurley, our senior partner, argued, “I don’t care whether it’s historic, I still like it.”

  Hurley was no admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright, who had redesigned the lobby so that it looked like a fairyland of wrought iron. But he grudgingly admitted that maybe we could learn from “that son of a bitch.” He had signed me on, he insisted, because “you do his kind of design but with common sense”—from Mike the highest of compliments.

  He was an infinitely flexible boss. “I don’t care whether you ever show up here in this damn masonry mausoleum, so long as you finish your work on time.”

  Could I wander off to Italy for seven weeks? No reason why not, so long as the design for the Unitarian church in Evanston on which I was working was finished by August 1.

  “Finish it in Rome, or, for all I care, Timbuktu.”

  “What if I finish it before I leave?”

  His wise old eyes examined me. “Don’t want to see it. The other partners won’t like it if you make the job look too easy. Finish the damn thing if you want, only don’t show it to me.”

  I didn’t want the church hanging over my head while I was in Rome, so I had just about wrapped it up. I didn’t dare tell my parents that I was working on a Protestant, much less a Unitarian church. They would have been convinced that it was a mortal sin.

  It would require another week’s work to finish the plans for the Evanston church. But now I didn’t feel like bending over the drafting board.

  There was no denying it: I was in love.

  I sighed and picked up my drafting pencil. I tried to concentrate on the spare, low lines of the church whose minister had told me “half fun and full earnest” (as Mom would say) that Unitarianism believed in “one God at the most.” I thought that my first drawing, intended as a joke, looked like a miniature Zeppelin hangar. The minister and his committee loved it.

  So, I was stuck
with a church that even the great Frank Wright would have thought extreme.

  Years later the church won me a national prize, a few dollars that at that time looked like a fortune. Even today the pictures of the All Souls Church show up in books about the history of the Third Chicago School. Seems that I anticipated it by a couple of decades.

  As a joke.

  In those days I thought of myself as a painter by vocation, an architect only to earn a living. Ironically, my paintings never won much notice (mostly because they didn’t deserve much notice) and I’ve achieved a little bit of recognition for my buildings, particularly for my churches.

  Whenever I see a picture of All Souls I remember how lovesick I was in the late spring of 1925—completely captivated by April Cronin in a day and a half.

  Instead of the balcony for the All Souls choir loft—two slender steel beams as my joke continued—I drew an imaginary body for the face I had already constructed, imaginary in the sense that it was purely speculative.

  No one in his right mind, I told myself as I admired the curves I had created, would decide to marry a woman he had known for only thirty-six hours.

  All right, I’d get to know her better. Postpone the nuptials a long time into the future, till, let us say, Christmas.

  There could be no doubt, however, that the more I knew April Mae Cronin, the more I would fall under her spell.

  She seemed to like me too, a thought that caused me to drop my pencil and stare out the single narrow window, with what I’m sure was a daffy smile on my face.

  A classic case of spring fever, a malady to which I’ve always been prone.

  There remained the problem of Jim.

  So, I couldn’t phone the Italian-American lines, could I?

  What was the “decent” thing to do?

  It was the word that represented the gentlemanly ideal for my father, an ideal that I respected. I could not escape the conviction that a “decent” man would give Jim the first chance.

  But she was the woman in the icehouse at Leavenworth, was she not?

  Yet Jim’s future depended on his finding the right wife, soon. Jim would finally get himself into some trouble from which his mother’s money could not extract him. “He’s too cute by half,” my mother would say, accurately I was sure.

  There were a few rumors in the neighborhood of brushes with the law.

  The most serious of which was a shoot-out in a Negro speak at Madison and Halsted. It was serious not because the police would have been upset over disorderly conduct in the Negro neighborhoods, but because the speak was owned by Bugs Moran, a character not likely to take kindly to someone damaging his property.

  The bullets in Jim’s big lugar were blanks, and I’m told he turned crimson and burbled with delight when the patrons of the speak—Negro and white—dove under the tables.

  No one else was amused. Jim was lucky to escape with his life when the manager of the speak, a gentleman who had spent several years in the Joliet prison on a murder charge, found out that his ammunition was phony.

  Typically, Jim could not understand why anyone was upset. A few tables and chairs had been damaged, some hooch had been spilled, nothing more. Jim promptly paid for the damages and left a handsome gift to the manager, who warned him that Mr. Moran would appreciate it if he didn’t come back.

  Jim often insisted that he didn’t like colored people. I think he disliked them because somehow they frightened him. However, he had learned to keep his dislike to himself when he was around me.

  On the other hand, he was normally charming with Negroes; he laughed and joked and talked their way without patronizing them.

  “They’re a hell of a lot of fun,” he would say. “Really know how to enjoy life.”

  The individual Negroes of whom he would say something like that were apparently not the same people as those who scared him.

  “And their women.” He’d shake his head in admiration. “They really know how to be women! Boy, if they were white, I’d marry one.”

  I thought that wisecracking with Negro women went too far, but they seemed to find him cute and amusing.

  As did white women.

  He was a strange blend of acute sensitivity and blind insensitivity. I would try to point out his inconsistency but he could never comprehend my arguments.

  My father insisted that “the colored” were every bit as “decent” as white people and that there would be no trouble between the races if each “stayed in its own place.”

  When I was young, that seemed an eminently reasonable position—separate but equal in words I had not then heard. But as I grew older, I couldn’t understand why if they were equal they had to be separate.

  I was afraid that Jim would either end up in jail or have his throat cut by some colored person who didn’t find his humor amusing.

  I realized even that summer that Jim was at some kind of turning point in his life—maybe because he was losing his hair. His jack-in-the-box mask no longer worked quite the way it used to. It seemed frayed around the edges. His gifts were as charming as ever, but his jokes were becoming more dangerous. He was struggling to grow up but he didn’t quite know how to do it and receiving little help from his mother for whom he was always her “adorable little boy.”

  April’s prediction that someday he would grow up was accurate enough as a diagnosis, but problematic as a prognosis.

  His only hope, I told myself, was marriage to a woman who would straighten him out, the accepted wisdom about wild young men in those days. He needed someone like April, I thought. I wanted her but I didn’t need her the same way. The only decent thing to do was to give him first chance.

  I am not given to either idealism or self-analysis. I’m a romantic. I’ve always insisted that my “decent” response to the problem of Jim and April was romantic and not idealist.

  Similarly, in 1942 when I was prepared to go off to New Guinea with the Illinois National Guard in the name of decency, the reasons were less ethical ideals, but romantic dreams.

  I was saved from those dreams only because someone was more romantic even that I am and ruthlessly so.

  But in 1925, my desire for April, also profoundly romantic, challenged my sense of “decency.” I would compromise—cancel the trip to Rome but postpone my pursuit of April Mae until Jim had his chance.

  Brilliant solution, I told myself, a credit to a politician’s son.

  Mike Hurley caught me mooning over the drawing board.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he barked. “I knocked on the door…Hey, am I paying you to design churches or nude women?”

  Mike’s bark was loud, but his bite was nonexistent.

  “Sorry,” I sighed.

  “Is she real?” He adjusted his half glasses to examine the drawing more carefully.

  “Yep.” I sighed again. “Met her at Twin Lakes on Saturday.”

  “She pose for you?”

  “Nope. But didn’t say she wouldn’t. Plays the harp,” I added fatuously.

  “Don’t tell me the Irish bachelor is falling in love.”

  “It could happen.”

  “Might be a good thing for you.” He smiled his vast, kindly smile and leaned his huge bulk against the doorframe. “Are you still going to Rome next week?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “I won’t argue,” he laughed genially, “but only because I’ve learned that I never get anywhere when I argue with you.”

  After he left my office, I worried a little more and then went into the outer office and phoned the Italian-American Line and canceled my reservation on the Rex.

  I returned to my own tiny cubiculum and put the drawing of April in my jacket pocket, with the same reverence a priest would put the ciborium back into the tabernacle.

  I concentrated as best I could, with my heart beating rapidly, on All Souls Unitarian Church of Evanston.

  A couple of hours later Jim bounded into my office, as usual without knocking.

  “Joh
nny, I’ve got wonderful news!”

  My startled hand jumped an inch, defacing the decoration I was designing for the center of the choir loft rail.

  “Knock, damn it!”

  “I’m sorry”—his apology was perfunctory—“I’m so excited that I—”

  “Did the Board close down early?” I demanded irritably, as I tried to erase the line I had extended. Then I decided it was an interesting addition and left it there.

  “It’s two o’clock!” He pulled out his big Bulova watch on a gold chain and examined it. “I’ve been off work for a half hour…and you’d never guess what I just bought!”

  He danced around the room like half of a vaudeville song-and-dance team.

  “What did you just buy?” I asked, as always never able to remain impatient at his enthusiastic innocence.

  He reached in the pocket of his white vest, pulled out a small square box, and flipped open the lid.

  “See? Isn’t it swell? Awful expensive but, of course, I got a deal! Isn’t it really swell?”

  “It” was an engagement ring, two carats at least. Churlishly I wondered if he had bought it from a fence.

  “For April?” I gasped.

  “Sure, who else? Won’t she love it?” He clasped the box to his chest. “Johnny, tell me she’ll love it.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be impressed.”

  “And you know, Johnny.” He continued to prance around my office like a kid in the lion house at the Lincoln Park Zoo. “You know, you were right yesterday about the way I described her. Those are not nice words to use about a woman you’re going to marry. A man should have only pure thoughts about such a woman, especially when she is as pure as April is.”

  I wasn’t so sure that a man could possibly have “pure” thoughts about a woman he proposed to take to his bed. Or that April was all that “pure.”

  “Women are meant to be desired,” I said piously, “but respected too.”

  How respectful was the drawing tucked away in the darkness of my jacket pocket?

  Well, a little respectful.

  “You’re right, Johnny, you’re always right. Tell me that she’ll say yes.”