“There’s always a first time.”
Jim cut in with a complaint to the waiter.
“Jimmy.” April’s tone suggested a kindergarten teacher reproving a mischievous child. “The poor dear man is doing his best. You shouldn’t embarrass him.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass him. I’ll leave him a big tip.” Jim’s eyes widened in surprise. How could anyone misunderstand his fun? “Honestly I will.”
“Money doesn’t erase humiliation.”
“Why not? If I had his job, it sure would.”
At the Lincoln Garden’s Cafe, Louis Armstrong himself came over to meet my party. I introduced him to April and Clarice. Jim, he already knew.
“Miss Cronin is a musician too, Louis,” I said (I never could call him “Satchmo”). “She plays the harp, two of them actually.”
“Hey.” He bowed over her hand. “Maybe the Hot Five should add a harpist.”
April was so awed by the presence of fame that she had no riposte other than, “I hope you’ll play ‘Big Butter and Egg Man from the West.’”
“For you, Miss Cronin”—he bowed again and smiled—“we’ll play it the long way.”
Louis was twenty-four that summer, as marvelously handsome as he was incredibly gifted. Married to Lillian then and happy in the marriage, he was at the prime of the first phase of his career though even greater achievements were yet to come. Still, his trumpet solo in “Butter and Egg” (the title means small-time big spender) was hailed even then as worthy of Mozart or Schubert.
“You take care of yourself on your trip, Mr. John, you hear?”
“I’ll be here the first week I’m back.”
“Give this to the band for us.” Jim slipped an envelope into Louis’s pocket.
“I sure will.” He rolled his eyes. “You are one nice man, Mr. Jim.”
Jim glowed with pride.
It was at least a five-hundred-dollar tip. Jim did not understand anything about jazz, so he didn’t comprehend how great Louis was. But he knew that the Hot Five were class, so he treated accordingly.
Louis winked at me as he walked back to the band, just to make sure that I knew it wasn’t the envelope that had brought him over to our table. I winked back.
“Isn’t he a gorgeous man,” April sighed, “just the most gorgeous man you’ve ever seen?”
“April!” Clarice protested, almost automatically. “He’s colored!”
“I don’t care.” April lifted her drink. “There’s nothing wrong with being colored. Those poor people are every bit as good as we are, maybe better. It’s a shame they’re not Irish like we are but, as my mother says, not everyone can be Irish and it might be a dull world if they were.”
I almost laughed. Then I realized from the serious cast to her brown eyes that she meant every word of it: God had somehow erred in not creating the world entirely Irish, but given that mistake the other people were every bit as good as the Irish, and maybe a little better.
It’s one approach to tolerance and equality.
“South Side Irish,” I murmured.
“Of course.” She smiled benignly at me.
“Isn’t he swell!” Jim pointed at Louis who was just swinging into “Butter and Egg.” “Isn’t he wonderful!”
To my astonishment, Jim left us early at the Lincoln Garden’s Cafe. “Momma expects me home for the end of a party she’s giving for her friends. You know what Momma is like.”
“That’s no way to court a girl,” I told him as I walked him to the door.
“You know Momma,” he repeated. “Hey”—he grabbed my hand and pumped it up and down—“have a swell time in Rome. Meet a lot of swell girls.”
“I’ll try to enjoy myself.”
“Say a prayer for me next weekend, will you please? I’m going to give her the ring up at Twin Lakes.”
“I hope everything works out.”
“We’ll be married right after Christmas. Momma will like her, I just know she will. Won’t she, Johnny?”
“How can anyone not like her?”
“Right. She’s such a swell girl. Momma has to like her.”
As I walked back to my two dates, I thought that there was absolutely no chance that Mrs. Clancy would like April. On the contrary, she would hate her. And there was not much more chance that April would accept his ring.
Still, women were unpredictable. Who could tell what April might do?
I danced with both of them before I brought them back to Canaryville.
“April doesn’t understand why you’re going off to Europe,” Clarice informed me bluntly while we danced.
She was surely a beauty, light and sweet in my arms. If it were not for April, I might fall for her after all. Romantic that I was, I felt sure I could protect her from her vicious father.
“It’s part of my professional training,” I lied. “I really must take advantage of the opportunity.”
“She’ll miss you.”
“It’s only a few weeks.”
“She’ll be unhappy all summer.”
“I’ll write,” I lied again.
The next dance was a Charleston.
“I don’t do that dance,” Clarice insisted.
“I do!” April jumped and dragged me back toward the dance floor. “Now remember, Vangie, up on your heels, down on your toes. Say it after me!”
Dutifully I echoed her. “Up on your heels down on your toes.”
After the dance, she observed that I showed some signs of improvement.
“And you don’t stare at my legs anymore.”
“Yes I do. I’ve learned to be more discreet.”
“Fresh.” She dragged me back to the table. “Your turn, Clarice. He really is quite hopeless.”
“You don’t miss Jim at all, do you?”
“You’re entirely too perceptive, Clarice Powers.”
Do I have to say that the taxi stopped first at Clarice’s house?
I paid off the taxi driver in front of April’s house on Emerald.
“Planning on staying in the neighborhood overnight?” she asked.
“On the South Side? My life would be in danger. I’ll take the streetcar home—Halsted to Madison.”
The homes on her block, the famous and fashionable 4200 block on Emerald, were big and elegant, hiding behind vast trees and faintly illumined by gaslights. The important people who lived on Emerald preferred gaslight to electricity and were affluent enough to have their way. We walked slowly down the street, in no hurry to say goodbye.
Somehow, our hands were linked.
“Were you ever very sick?” she asked. “I keep thinking that somehow I saw you when you were sick, so sick that your face was blue. I know it’s silly but I keep seeing that picture.”
I squeezed her hand. “I’ve never been sick in my life, knock on wood. Except, when I was in the Army, I had the Spanish flu. Collapsed on the parade ground. At first they thought I was dead.”
“My aunt and uncle died from it,” she said softly. “So did lots of people. You’re lucky to be alive.”
“I know.”
We had reached the corner. Silently we turned back toward her house.
“Did it have an effect on your life?”
“Some, maybe. I guess I’m not as ambitious as I might have been. I don’t want to be the richest architect in the world.”
“Daddy says you’re a very good architect, maybe the best at your age in the city.”
“How does Daddy know?”
“He asked people, silly!”
Her father was checking up on me? I was both offended and delighted.
“Why?”
“I guess because his daughter came home from Twin Lakes and told him about this funny boy who stared at her all weekend long.”
“Lasciviously?”
“What does that mean?”
I felt my face flame. “Lustfully.”
“I didn’t tell Daddy that.”
“Is he mad at you for meet
ing a boy from the West Side?”
“He says your father is an honest politician, of which there are not many in the Republicans…. Are you really a Republican?”
“I’m a secret Democrat, but I haven’t told my father.”
“Well, I’m glad of that.”
We walked up the stairs to the front porch of the Cronin home, a broad shelf that extended around three sides of the vast house. A big oak tree obscured the pale streetlight. We were alone in almost total darkness.
There was no one else in the whole world. It was a warm, soft night in spring, with the scent of roses in the air. And a delicious woman suddenly in my arms.
If this were not love, then love did not exist.
Our lips met and fused. Our bodies merged, struggling to occupy the same space. Then there was no longer any time. Or any space. The two of us were on a distant star, united in body and soul forever.
My fingers explored her body, delicate throat, firm breasts, solid hips, harsh stays in her corset (yes, even flappers wore them). She moaned softly as I probed but did not try to pull away from me. On the contrary, she clung even more desperately to my waist.
I almost told her I loved her.
Then, in unspoken agreement, we parted.
“My,” she sighed. “You bring out the harlot in me.”
Not a word that a convent girl should use.
“You’re not a harlot,” I said, trying to recapture my breath.
“I suppose not. Poor things probably don’t enjoy it. I guess I do. I think we’d better say good night now.”
“Good night, April Mae Cronin.”
“Good night, John Evangelist O’Malley.”
Our lips touched again, quickly, carefully.
“Promise me you’ll write often.”
“Every day,” I lied.
It was a long ride home on the streetcar.
26
April is not mentioned once in the diary I kept of my journey to Rome.
I’d like to think the tic-tac-toe doodles (the craze started that summer) in my notebook represented periods when I mooned over her.
In fact, they are doubtless attempts to figure out you could always win the game.
Stuffed in the back pages of the notebook, however, are the love letters I wrote to her from Rome.
The diary rests on the desk in front of me now. My son has pasted a label on it that informs the world in his bold, blunt printing, “Rome Diary, Personal and Confidential. Not to be opened without written permission of author.”
The diary can be trusted, I think, in what it says. But its pretense that there was no such person as April Mae Anne (with an e) Cronin is dishonest. My resolution to give Jim Clancy a fair chance was honored even in my diary, which no one but me would ever read.
I did not brood about April during my voyage and my stay in Rome. Yet, she was always on my mind, lingering at the edge of my consciousness, like an image for a portrait that I would paint someday.
I didn’t mail the love letters, written when my love affair, if that’s what it was, with Siobahn was tormenting me. To mail them would have compromised the integrity of my noble decision, as it seemed, to give Jim Clancy his chance.
I won’t quote the letters. They are even more embarrassing than my diary. The boy who wrote them, however, was very much in love, more than he realized.
In a way, I suppose you could say that April lurked even in the pages of the diary, her pert nose upturned in dismay at the foolish late adolescent whose heart she had captured.
Consider this excerpt written the third day at sea on the Rex:
Until this summer I thought there was no hurry about marriage. Did not my father survive as a bachelor till his middle forties? Now I can hardly wait till I have a wife. I must be candid about this change: It is mostly a biological need that either I did not recognize before—which given the force of the need seems unlikely—or that has suddenly exploded in me. On ship to Cherbourg last summer, I hardly noticed women. This summer I find myself noticing women of whatever age from schoolgirls to matrons in their forties.
Not to put too fine an edge on my desires I want to take to bed almost any presentable woman I encounter, regardless of her state in life. Mind you, I have no wish to force or to hurt such a woman. On the contrary, I yearn to overwhelm her with tenderness and affection.
Can it be that attraction to one woman excites attraction to all women?
This biological need is not unpleasant. I am more alert, more interested in the world, more careful to record my emotions in this diary, and my images in a sketchbook, more friendly, even charming, with my fellow passengers. The quiet recluse on the Norman- die has become a delightfully witty young man on the Rex.
A young man, I hasten to add in the name of honesty, whose reaction to the bodies of women is that of a fifteen-year-old.
All true enough, if self-conscious and precious. But not a word about the woman who had stirred up all this hunger.
There are many pages about Laura, the Bryn Mawr student who was my shipboard romance. I will not quote them because now they seem embarrassingly infantile. My sketches of her seem to have been lost long ago. Since I rarely throw out sketches by accident or mistake, I must have deliberately disposed of them.
The shipboard romance is a pleasant institution that I presume arose sometime in the early part of the last century when Atlantic passenger crossings ceased to be a life-risking adventure. Since there is not much to do on a crossing and since the odds are against meeting a fellow passenger ever again, the temptation to fight boredom with romance is almost irresistible, at least among those traveling in first and second class. Unattached men and women (and many that were attached) paired off, sometimes with ruthless efficiency, on the first day and settled down with one another for the rest of the trip.
Since the voyage is likely to occupy a week at the most, seduction must proceed quickly if precious time is not to be wasted. The degree of potential involvement must also be specified, however implicitly, so that the two partners need not consume their limited energies in clarifying that which they are willing to give to one another.
How many such liaisons became liaisons? How much hasty coupling took place in cramped bunks and dark cabins?
My guess was and is that most such romances were consummated at least once or twice. Was not that the point of it all? Did not the whole ritual aim at brief release of tension and satisfaction of curiosity—as well as sweet memories to be recalled in subsequent nostalgia, sweeter usually in recollection than the events had been in reality?
I chose a pretty, fragile girl, prone to motion sickness, homesick because of her first separation from her family, one whom only the cruelest exploiter would proposition. The reason must have been that, however frantic my biological desires, all I wanted was companionship—and perhaps someone to nurture and protect.
Poor Laura. I wonder what ever happened to her. She is probably an affluent and contented grandmother somewhere along the Philadelphia Main Line, with only the most vague memories of her crossing on the Rex in the late spring of 1925.
Could I have dragged her into bed with me? It would have been the easiest thing in the world. In her vast gray eyes there was total surrender the first time I took her into my arms. She was a victim looking for a predator, not exactly wanting to be taken, it seemed to me, but helpless to prevent it.
Even without my Headquarters Troop silver armor I was the good knight protecting a fair damsel. Laura and I huddled in each other’s arms, kissing and caressing with gentle affection, while we shared our deepest secrets.
Not so deep, however, that I told her about April.
She was to spend the summer in Florence. The last time I saw her was in the old stazzione in Rome. We had come up from Naples, alone together in a compartment on the Settebello. We had clung desperately to one another on the trip, although not so desperately that Laura had not slept part of the way. We exchanged Italian addresses, promised that we would see
each other during the summer, swore eternal loyalty, and kissed passionately before I scrambled off the train.
I’m sure we both meant every word of our vows at the moment we spoke them.
But by the time I had unpacked (matched luggage that had been a going-away present from Jim) and was settled that afternoon in my pensione and she caught her first sight of the Arno, those vows were already being transformed into nostalgic memory.
As proof, I cite the embarrassing entry in my diary:
Although I will never see her again, I know that I will never forget Laura and the brief love we shared this glorious spring.
The truth is that, until I opened my diary to use it as a resource for this memoir, I had forgotten her completely.
As more people, especially young people, cross the Atlantic in airplanes, the shipboard romance will disappear. It will be a mixed blessing. The memories that will be lost are sweeter than the actuality. But after a certain age in life, you want to preserve as many memories as you can, especially if you are an incorrigible romantic.
There were two other young women that summer, Siobahn, an Irish girl staying at the same pensione, and Paola, young assistant bursar on the Rex whom I encountered on the return trip.
I was cultivating frustration that summer, exulting in my sacrifices in the name of my lost April.
My diary is much more useful in recalling Rome:
There are at least four different Romes. The first is pagan Rome, the ruins of the empire, the Forum, and the other monuments, like Hadrian’s Tomb. Although I came here to study the architecture of that world, I confess I find pagan Rome dull. I’ve never been one to enjoy staring at the monuments of the past all that much. I’ll do my sketches and study the decoration, but only because that’s the excuse I gave Mike Hurley for the trip.
Then there is ecclesiastical Rome. While it is unthinkable to me that I’ll ever be anything but a Catholic, it is the Irish American (West Side Chicago) variety to which I’m committed and not the empty churches, scruffy clergy, and pompous pageantry of Rome’s version of Roman Catholicism. I attended a papal audience before His Holiness went up to the hills for the summer. I was utterly unimpressed. What good is all the display when the people of the city never go to church and hate their clergy?
Younger Than Springtime Page 27
