Younger Than Springtime

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Two women were waiting by the car, Gypsies. The older one was slender and handsome, the younger a budding girl, perhaps no more than thirteen or fourteen. Mother and daughter? Older and younger sister?

  “Hey, you trash,” Jim bellowed, “get away from my car! What have you stolen? I’ll have the police after you! Give me back what you’ve taken! You shouldn’t be around decent people.”

  It was an outbrust like I had never heard from him before. He had always despised Gypsies, but he had always been courteous to them, as he was with Negroes.

  “We took nothing, sir.” The older woman extended her arms in supplication. “We are not thieves. We only tell fortunes.”

  The younger woman huddled close to her.

  “Give me back what you took”—Jim was livid with rage—“or I’ll call the sheriff and have him strip off your clothes and search you.”

  “Jim,” April said mildly, a mother reassuring a frightened little boy, “we left nothing in the car, remember? Mrs. Kennelly warned us about Gypsies.”

  “Lay off, Jim,” I said firmly. “We have no grounds for suspecting them.”

  My mother had told me when I was a little boy that Gypsies, “like the Irish tinkers,” were “poor dear people,” who if they stole occasionally did so only because they were so badly treated that they had no choice. She may not have understood the Romany culture, but I agreed with her instinct that they were “poor dear people.”

  “Grounds?” Jim exploded. “They’re Gypsies, aren’t they?”

  “We tell the ladies’ fortune?” The older woman glanced shrewdly at me. “For free? You lady?” She motioned toward April.

  “I don’t know…” April hung back, frightened by the strangeness of the two women.

  “Tell mine.” I held out my hand.

  The woman took my hand and peered into my palm. She was dirty and she smelled of many dank aromas. Yet there was a certain dignity about her. She might be a fake and a thief, but she still had her pride.

  “Ah, sir,” she murmured. “You are an artist, no? I see difficult times for you, much hard work, but great happiness and then wonderful success.”

  “Read my palm, please, ma’am?” April extended her hand.

  The woman smiled. “Gladly, kind lady.”

  “They’re trash!” Jim was pacing back and forth furiously. “They should be run out of the county.”

  No one paid any attention to him, which made him all the more angry.

  “You are a musician, kind lady,” the Gypsy purred, “a good one. You will marry soon and will have many fine children who will love you very much. And a good husband too.”

  “And me?” Clarice was next in line.

  “Hookers,” Jim whined. “Frauds and hookers.”

  The woman examined Clarice’s palm closely and frowned. “You will have a very beautiful child, lady, a daughter, I think. She will do many wonderful things that will make you proud of her.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Thank you very much.” I gave the woman a five-dollar bill. “You’re very perceptive.”

  She bowed her thanks, like a slave to a master. Then she smiled, a knowing smile that said, “We understand each other, don’t we? You know I’m in the entertainment business.”

  “Wasn’t that astonishing?” Clarice spoke with awe. “How does she know those things?”

  “Was it a sin, Vangie?” April was anxious. “The priests say it’s a sin to have your fortune told.”

  “Tar and feather them!” Jim jumped into his car. “If the sheriff doesn’t get rid of them, decent people should run them out of the county.”

  We continued to ignore him.

  But I worried nonetheless. Had the nervous breakdown really happened?

  “Come on.” I tried not to sound too superior. “There’s drafting ink on my hands. April’s fingers are callused from plucking harp strings; how could you not have a beautiful child, Clarice? And naturally April will be loved by her husband and children.”

  “Lucky guesses?” Clarice was puzzled.

  “Shrewd reading of people.” I smiled.

  “How did she know I would be married soon?” April was not yet satisfied.

  “You’re at an age when young women marry”—I gestured easily—“and you’re very attractive. She has every reason to think her guess would be pretty accurate.”

  “And all your sisters were married before they were twenty-two,” Clarice chimed in. “You know how much you’re afraid that you’ll be an old maid if you put off marriage.”

  “Clarice!” April’s face turned as red as the barn behind her.

  “Well, let’s go eat supper.” Jim banged on the horn to get our attention. “I’ve got some great hooch stored away for after supper. Top quality.”

  “If April is an old maid”—I opened the car door for her—“the male half of the human race will have gone out of business.

  “Vangie!” She continued to blush.

  Clarice and I laughed at her, both enjoying April’s rare loss of poise.

  “Move over.” Clarice climbed into the car after her. “I want to take a bath before supper.”

  “I’ll be back in a jiffy, Johnny,” Jim promised. “I’ll really open her up.”

  He blasted the horn and roared away.

  I watched the Duesy’s dust with a vague feeling of unease, like a toothache that one doesn’t have yet, but might have in a day or two.

  Jim was getting worse. Even if I allowed for his infatuation with April—which somehow seemed to be without passion—and for his frustrations at not being the center of attention for much of the day, he was still becoming stranger.

  What would happen to him?

  What could I do to help him?

  As I waited for him to return, I figured that the answer to the first question was that he would destroy himself and that the answer to the second was that there was nothing much I could do to prevent such a fate.

  Despite the heat, I shivered.

  How, I wondered, could someone be fated so young in life?

  As my son-in-law the psychiatrist with whom I consulted as I was writing this memoir puts it, some sort of semipsychotic interlude probably did occur that summer. The first of many. Even now I wonder whether if I had stayed in Chicago that summer I might have been able to protect him.

  I suppose I worried about the same thing as I trudged down the gravel road that summer of 1925.

  You see, he didn’t come back for me.

  I waited a half hour, then forty-five minutes. Finally I realized that he’d forgotten about me—not maliciously of course; something else had claimed his attention. He responded to the new interest, perhaps the hooch he had secreted for after supper. I had simply ceased to exist.

  I began to walk back to the “country club.”

  But April and Clarice should have reminded him.

  It was a half-hour walk, under a hot sun and through thick curtains of humidity. My feet hurt from shoes that were not meant for walking on a golf course, much less down a gravel road. With each step, I became more angry at the three of them.

  I strode into the ovenlike dining room, and over to the table that they shared with several other young people.

  “Where you been, Johnny?” Jim glanced up at me, a big scoop of mashed potatoes on his fork. “Come on, sit down and have some roast beef before it’s gone. It really tastes swell.”

  “What took you so long?” April asked in all innocence.

  “I walked.”

  “What?”

  “Jim said that Mr. Evans would pick you up.” April’s brown eyes were troubled.

  “Yeah.” Jim gobbled his mashed potatoes. “I met him in the parking lot after I dropped off the girls. He said he was driving over to the links and he’d bring you back.”

  The conversation almost certainly never happened. But now Jim was convinced that it had.

  “Sit down and eat”—April smiled sweetly—“you look star
ved.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I shouted and strode out of the dining room, conscious that every eye in the room was watching me.

  Unfortunately for me, I was hungry. I paused in the clubhouse on my furious march back to the priests’ house, and purchased three Hershey milk chocolate bars—five cents each.

  The roast beef had indeed smelled tasty.

  While I was nursing my anger, determined to keep it alive, and soaking my feet in hot water, Jim burst into my room.

  He was wearing a gray double-breasted summer suit, white vest, white straw hat with a gray band, and gray and white saddle shoes.

  Despite the obvious quality of his clothes, Jim did not wear them well any longer. His gray tie was improperly tied and the buttons on his jacket were in the wrong buttonholes. Perspiration had already disfigured the jacket.

  “You just have to help me, Johnny. What are friends for if they don’t help when someone needs it?”

  “Friends don’t strand you without a ride.” My temper was still smoldering.

  He didn’t hear me, and he certainly didn’t remember my walk back from the golf course.

  “She has to marry me.” Jim sank onto the edge of my cot. “She’ll save my life. She really will. She’ll take care of me just like Momma does.”

  “Jim—”

  “You’ll do it, then?” He leaned forward eagerly. “You’ll ask her if she’ll marry me?”

  “I can’t do that, Jim.”

  “Why not?” He was baffled. “You’re my friend, aren’t you? And I love her.”

  “It’s not done, Jim. Girls don’t like it. It would be counterproductive.”

  “I don’t see why.” He lowered his head and began to sulk.

  “I can’t play John Alden to your Miles Standish.”

  “Huh?”

  Mistakenly I tried to tell him the story that every school-child had heard. Jim quickly lost interest in it. Instead of listening to my explanation of the story, he devoted his attention to biting his fingernails.

  “You have to help me,” he whined. “You’re my friend.”

  “Let me explain something about women, Jim. You have to adjust your tactics to their tastes. Like this afternoon, you embarrassed them on the golf course when you fibbed a little about your score. And when they wanted to have their fortunes told, you ignored what they wanted and embarrassed them again—”

  “I didn’t fib, honest, I didn’t. I beat you because I’m a better golfer. Gee, I hope you’re not mad at me for that. If you’ll ask April to marry me, I’ll lose tomorrow.”

  I tried once more. “And when women are enjoying a conversation, you shouldn’t break in with your own stories—”

  “What does that have to do with April marrying me? Momma will be so pleased with me when I introduce April to her—”

  “And you should always offer to carry a woman’s luggage and open the door for her before you rush through it.”

  “I keep forgetting…” He waved his hand as if gallantry were an unimportant detail. “Will you ask her tonight?”

  I gave up.

  “We’ll see, Jim.”

  “That’s what Momma says when she means no.” He brightened as another thought rushed into his head. “Say, I forgot, we’re going to drink my booze back of the hill when it gets dark. They’re watching young people at night around here. Meet us there, will you, John. Above the parking lot. It’s swell booze.”

  He bounded out of my room, now totally dedicated to our drinking adventure behind the hill that overlooked the Barry grounds—and from which you could smell all the outhouses.

  If you asked me now what happened to Jim that summer, I’d say that the strain of losing his hair and frustration in his love for April pushed him around the bend—and set a pattern for the rest of his life. He really did love her, in his own Peter Pan fashion. But he had no idea how to manifest that love after he had showered her with presents.

  Even my promise of kisses for April would not have persuaded me to join in that adventure—if I were not worried that he might blunder into trouble and lead April and Clarice after him.

  He was wrong about the hooch. It was terrible.

  I found them in the underbrush above the parking lot, sitting on a Barry blanket. From the murmurs and the soft laughter around us we were not the only ones engaged in violations of the Volstead Act.

  A haze, permeated with the fragrance of the privies, had settled on the hill, thick, sticky, irritating. The candle that the girls had lighted cast dim shadows. The ground underneath the blanket was rocky and uneven.

  “Have some.” Jim’s voice was already slurred as he poked the bottle in my direction. “It’s swell stuff, the best.”

  Silently April handed me a tin cup.

  With some effort, I didn’t spit it out.

  “Kind of strong,” I said as the roof of my mouth caught fire.

  “The best,” Jim said again, “my friends give me only the best. I didn’t even have to pay for this, would you believe that, Johnny, it was absolutely free.”

  “A real bargain.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw April empty her cup into the underbrush. I waited for an opportunity to do the same.

  “May I have some more?” Clarice spoke with tipsy courtesy. “It’s simply marvelous.”

  “I told you it was swell booze,” Jim proclaimed triumphantly.

  He and Clarice finished the bottle within a quarter hour. April and I listened silently to their babble.

  “We’d better help them back to the Drake,” she said when our two friends had dozed off. “Do you think they’ll be sick?”

  “After drinking such high-quality gin?”

  “Vangie, you’re being nasty,” she laughed as she struggled to help Clarice to her feet.

  “Just ironic.”

  “Are they sick, do you think, poor dears?”

  “They’ll be all right when they sleep it off.” I pulled Jim off the ground. “Come on, Jimmy boy, time for beddy-bye.”

  April chortled. “I bet you sound just like his mother.”

  “God forbid.”

  At the entrance of the Drake, exhausted from our efforts, we paused for breath.

  “What do you want to do after we put them to bed?” April asked.

  I realized that I would have her to myself for the rest of the evening.

  “Dance hall?”

  “I hate to spoil the night for you, Vangie, but I’m not quite up to the Charleston. The pergola? You can tell me more about your trip.”

  “I think I made some promises on the pier this morning, didn’t I?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “Yes you do.”

  She laughed softly.

  29

  “John?”

  “April?

  “Are you alone?”

  “Completely.”

  “Good,” she sighed.

  She emerged from the haze, a white blur in the dark, a sweet-smelling white blur.

  “Did you have any trouble putting poor Jim to bed?” she sighed again as she sat next to me on the damp stone bench of the pergola.

  “Just dumped him on top of the sheet and left him.”

  “Poor Clarice,” she sighed for a third time, sounding not unlike Siobahn.

  Of whom I ought not to have been thinking.

  “I don’t know what will happen to her,” April continued. “Daddy says you do your best for your friends and then it’s up to them and to God. Do you agree, Vangie?”

  “And their parents.”

  She shuddered. “Her father is an awful man.”

  “So is his mother.”

  “Lets not talk about our friends anymore.” She rested against my shoulder. “I’ve had enough of them for one day.”

  “Me too.”

  I drew her close, her back against my chest, my arms around her waist, hands against her belly. She nestled against me easily and gratefully.

  She had changed to a simple blouse and
skirt—no corset this time, thank goodness.

  “I love you, John E. O’Malley. I’ve never said that to a man before. But I say it now and I mean it.”

  “I was about to say the same thing to you, April Mae Anne (with an e) Cronin.” I kissed her forehead. “I love you too.”

  “I beat you to it,” she giggled. “Daddy says that when I make up my mind, I move fast.”

  “I think my mother would say the exact opposite of me.”

  “I wanted to say I loved you all day. I was afraid as I walked over here. I prayed to the Blessed Mother to give me courage.”

  “And she did?”

  “Certainly.” She nuzzled closer to me. “I would never have had the courage without someone’s help.”

  Our affection that night was quiet and gentle, we were too hot and too tired to be passionate. Brief kisses and soft caresses suited both our moods.

  Nonetheless, I did unbutton her blouse, ease the camisole from her shoulders, and kiss her breasts in the dark.

  She moaned contentedly as my lips touched her flesh.

  We huddled together for what seemed only a few moments and at the same time all of eternity.

  Then, knowing that it was time, we stopped.

  “I can walk back to the Drake by myself.”

  “In the dark at this time of night? Don’t be silly.”

  “I can take care of myself,” she protested as we walked down the steps of the pergola.

  “I’m sure you can, but I’m still walking back to the Drake with you. To the door of the Drake,” I hastily added.

  We laughed together, knowing that we could trust one another. More or less.

  At mass the next morning I noticed that April received Holy Communion. She noticed that I did not.

  “Do you think it’s all right to receive Communion after what we did last night?” I asked her bluntly.

  “Well, I thought about it. Mama says that men and women were made by God to love one another and that everything else depends on the time and the place and the person.” She was counting off points on her slender, elegant fingers. “So, it seemed that you were the right person and this was the right place and last night was the right time. Mama also says that sometimes it would be wrong not to do things that the priests disapprove. So…”