“Only one nun bawled me out and I received Communion this morning.”
“I’ll agree to pose for your picture of the girl and the harp”—she was brisk and efficient—“on one condition.”
“I think I’m dreaming this conversation,” I said, truthfully enough. “But what is the one condition?”
“That you agree to marry me.”
I gulped. “I was about to ask you, April.”
“I beat you again. Is it a deal?”
“Sure it’s a deal. The painting after the wedding, I suppose?”
“If you want”—she colored slightly—“but wouldn’t it be more fun before the wedding?”
“It sure would.”
Then she began to kiss me, paying no attention at all to my aches and pains.
I didn’t pay any attention to them either.
So, we were married, at Thanksgiving as it turned out. April stole the show at the Black Horse Ball. Her parents liked me as much as my parents liked her.
Jim and Clarice were both in the wedding party. Jim never quite forgave me for marrying April. Clarice went back to Europe.
Both sets of parents suffered hard times at the end of their lives. But my parents lived to see the first three of their grandchildren—Jane Marie born in 1926, Charles Cronin (a pint-sized redhead) born in 1928, Margaret Mary born in 1931. And her parents, we always felt, liked our kids more than the other grandchildren.
For April and me there would be difficult times too, more difficult than we could have imagined; and our marriage, like all marriages, has had its rhythms, its ups and downs, but even in the lowest moments we have never stopped loving each other.
And, more important, we have never stopped being in love.
No man could ever stop being in love with April.
Our friends speculate as to which child is more like her.
Some say it is effervescent Jane, our cheerful firstborn. Others say it is Peg, our intense and tender violinist. Still others think it is Michael, our devout priest-to-be.
But April and I know they are wrong. The one most like her is Chuck, our contentious, difficult, frustrated accountant, the self-professed white sheep of the crazy O’Malley clan, whose words you’ll probably read after mine because I’m convinced my memoir will only be a prelude to the one he will write someday.
He is the one most like his mother, a passionate romantic just like her.
Charles’s Love Story
1949
32
I read the manuscript twice. I wept after the first reading and sobbed after the second.
Dear God, I prayed, what a lucky guy I am to have those two as parents. No wonder all the O’Malleys are crazy!
I actually fell on my knees and repeated the praise, though God and I were not exactly on speaking terms because I was holding him responsible for Notre Dame.
Images, emotions, regrets, hopes, expectations, caroused around my head. I was as excited as I had been when we rounded up the black market gang outside of Bamberg, but then I understood the nature of the excitement. Now I realized that it would take much of my lifetime to sort out the meanings in Dad’s memoir.
I wanted a wife like April Cronin.
Come to think of it, I had always wanted a wife like her.
I jumped off my bed and rushed down to the heated room in the cellar where Dad’s paintings had been stored. I knew that I had seen a painting he called Romany Women when I was much younger. Though it was three o’clock in the morning, I had to see it.
As with everything in the life of the crazy O’Malleys, the storeroom was in chaos—half a hundred paintings propped up against the walls, piled on the floors, stacked in unstable heaps, covered with dust, the room illumined by a single forty-watt bulb. I suppose I should have been surprised that there was a storeroom, except that Dad treasured his paintings even if he didn’t take very good care of them. Poor man, I thought as I searched through them, he’s a great architect who wanted to be a great painter. Some of these are pretty good, but not quite good enough.
Some demon murmured folly about a photographer who wanted to be an accountant. You won a prize, the demon insisted.
And look what that got me, I said, dismissing the demon.
I found Romany Women under a mound of awful watercolors. As I had suspected it might be, it was the best thing Dad had ever painted, absolutely brilliant. The frame was broken, the stretcher loose, and the canvas was covered with dust. Fortunately it had not been torn. Gingerly I removed it from the mound and placed it delicately against the door. Compulsive neatness freak that I am, I tried to order the mound above it. And thus found the three nudes.
They were quite good too. Two of them were respectable and decently erotic, ingenious filmy protections in some but not all strategic places. The third was, what shall I say, candid, but reverently candid. The model was quite breathtaking. Who was she?
Mom!
The Girl with the Harp!
Embarrassed and guilty, I quickly turned them over. So, the legend was true!
I grinned complacently. Yeah, I was a lucky guy all right. No wonder I saw things differently from Father Pius. Too bad I couldn’t have hung one of them in my room at the Golden Dome!
I hauled Romany Women upstairs to the breakfast nook, hunted for a pencil and paper by the phone, didn’t find anything, and returned to my eagle’s nest to write out in my precise script, “If you guys ever expect me to sleep here again, you’ll hang this masterpiece in the most prominent place in the house. Charles C. O’Malley.”
I then slept peacefully.
I caught them the next morning as they were eating their usual leisurely breakfast over the papers, a custom that had survived from the less hurried days over on Menard Avenue.
“I want a girl, just like the girl, that married dear old Dad,” I announced, imitating Donald O’Connor, the song and dance man of the day, as I bounced into the room.
I kissed Mom fervently. “Woman, you’d try the patience of a saint,” I informed her. “April Mae June Cronin indeed! You were nothing but a troublemaker! And that’s all you are now too!”
I kissed her again.
“Well, dear,” she said mildly. “You’ve always known that, haven’t you?”
“Dad”—I clapped him on his shoulder—“you never had a chance, not from the first day.”
“He always knew that,” Mom said, now flushing brightly.
“You liked the story?” Dad asked, still anxious.
“Great, great story! Now I understand why all the O’Malleys are crazy, with only one exception!”
“You understood more about Mr. Clancy?” Mom said, frowning.
“What a jerk. Why did poor Clarice ever marry him? No wonder she fell down the stairs…I gotta run. Registration day at the University.”
“You see why poor Rosie is the way she is, dear?”
“Rosemarie? Oh, she’ll be all right. I wouldn’t worry too much about her. She found herself a family.”
Neither of them replied. I had the feeling I had missed something. No time for it now.
“You will hang that gorgeous painting, won’t you?”
“If you want us to, Chuck,” my father, greatly pleased, replied. “We certainly will.”
“By the way,” I said as I left the breakfast nook, “I think one of those nudes should be hung somewhere too. The Girl with the Harp.”
I didn’t look back. I thought, however, that I heard laughter. Or at least sniggers.
Later that day I noted that the University (as everyone in Hyde Park called it in the blithe assumption that there was no other) differed in two obvious respects from Notre Dame.
It was outstandingly ugly even in a beautiful Indian summer.
The natives all looked strange.
The former phenomenon resulted from the fact that, as my father warned me, “Ralph Adams Cram’s pseudo-Gothic does not a Cambridge make.”
The latter resulted from the even more disturbing fact
that few of the inhabitants were Irish Catholics, the only group that to my eyes did not look strange.
I didn’t think I’d like it here. Not at all. Wouldn’t it be better to seek out O’Hanlon and O’Halloran, Certified Public Accountants, and work till the next semester began? Then I could enroll in Loyola or DePaul or even the Pier.
(The University of Illinois at Chicago was then located at Navy Pier, a far more attractive setting than the present concrete monstrosity west of the Loop.)
I also discovered a similarity between this pagan institution and the Catholic school on the banks of the south bend of the St. Joseph River: bureaucratic underlings did not know what to do on registration day with a student that didn’t fit recognizable patterns.
I submitted credits (carefully saved from summer school), filled out forms, answered easy questions on tests. Every time I asked a question I was told that someone else would have to answer.
I was shunted from Ida Noyes Hall to the blockhouse Administration Building and back three times before I found an office in the upper reaches of the latter (an unsuccessful attempt to break with Cram’s Gothic) where I was told by the young woman at the desk in the outer office that I had perhaps come to the right place but I would have to wait at least an hour.
I waited three hours. I managed to court all the available varieties of self-pity and despair during that time.
All right, I was free from Notre Dame. My dishonorable discharge had given me freedom.
But now what was I supposed to do?
Finally, I was shown into the office of the assistant registrar, who seemed to specialize in my kind of cases.
She looked over my transcripts with apparent interest. “Oh my,” she said in a rich East Coast voice. “What a lot of school you’ve had!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you’ve performed very well in our tests; you’ve obviously worked hard in your courses and done a lot of reading on your own.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well”—she peered at me over her glasses—“we will certainly admit you. And I see no problem about classifying you as a third-year student. Incidentally, that is the term we use here. There are no such things as juniors or seniors. Or even sophomores or freshmen. And, while we’re at it, I should tell you that we call our professors ‘Mister’ not ‘Doctor’ or ‘Professor.’”
“How democratic.”
She grinned back at me. “You’ll have to take some core courses this quarter and next quarter. Then I see no reason why you should not be able to graduate next year, assuming, as I think we might, that you do well in your courses.”
It was the Hutchins era at the University and standards were more flexible than they would be later. But the University has always been freer of ritual requirements than most colleges, believing that if it made a decision it was obviously the right one.
“Are you sure, ma’am?” I was dazed.
“Quite certain.” She smiled. “Welcome to the University, Mr. O’Malley.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
I rode down the elevator and walked out into the late afternoon sunlight of the Quadrangle. According to the crumpled map I had studied all day, Swift Hall, the Divinity School, was on my right, the Physical Sciences on my left. Ugly still, but they seemed to want me. Ugly but warm. What the hell, Notre Dame had only been ugly to me.
I put the map in the pocket of my khaki Ike jacket. The wind had changed from southwest to northeast. It would be cold tonight, blanket weather. Winter was creeping down from the polar regions.
Somehow that thought exhilarated rather than depressed me.
I fumbled in my pocket for a dime.
I would walk back to the public phones in the lobby of the Ad Building.
It was time to phone Rosemarie. Did Dad’s memoir move me to make that call?
I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. Anyway, I told myself I wanted to thank her for helping me to win the prize and tell her that we were schoolmates again.
Maybe I should invite her to have supper with me.
33
I resolved that at the fourth ring I would disown the call and hang up. Halfway into the ring, I moved my finger toward the hook, ready to click it off.
“Rosemarie Clancy.” The tone was crisp, efficient, a chief nurse maybe or a novice mistress in a progressive religious order.
My palms were sweaty, my heart was pounding swiftly. I was like a kid calling for his first date.
Well, maybe that’s what I was. I almost hung up.
“Rosemarie Helen Clancy?”
“Certainly…” A touch of asperity in her musical voice. “Who is this?…Chucky?” Fear replaced asperity. “Is something wrong? Who’s sick?”
“Me…maybe.” I shifted the phone from my right to my left hand. “I thought maybe I could take you to supper tonight. I don’t know this neighborhood very well. You’ll have to choose the restaurant—”
“What?” She now sounded like I had announced the conversion of the pope to Mormonism. “You’re inviting me on a date?”
“Uh…well, I thought we could celebrate my prize—”
“Our prize,” she said promptly, contentious even when being invited to dinner.
“Precisely,” I said, regaining some of my confidence. “So you’re entitled to at least one dinner.”
“You’re not angry that we entered the picture?”
“I should be, but I’m not.”
“Uh-huh. So I’m being invited to one inexpensive dinner?”
The brat was laughing at me.
“Your adjective.”
“Well, there’s a nice Chinese place around the corner on Fifty-seventh Street…. Do you like Chinese food?”
“Never had any.”
“Willing to take a risk?”
“Two in one day?” It was my turn to laugh, somewhat sheepishly.
“Let me see…it’s four-thirty. I can be ready by six. Is that all right? Not too early?”
“I’m hungry already.”
“You’re always hungry, Chucky Ducky.” Now she was teasing me. “See you at six. Does Peg know you’re calling me?”
“No. And don’t tell her.”
She laughed again, an impish, to-hell-with-you laugh.
I was certain as I left the public phone booth in the lobby of the University Administration Building that she was already on the phone to my sister.
Still, given the fun she could have had at my expense, I had been let off easily.
I walked out into the glory of Indian summer. I was very well aware that my decision to phone Rosemarie was impulsive and dangerous. I had been driven to it, one mean-spirited corner of my brain told me, by the need for womanly comfort in an unpleasant turning point in my life.
I was hurt, lonesome, and bewildered. I needed solace; so, as Christopher would have said, I was seeking warmth at Rosemarie’s breasts—figuratively, I hasten to add.
Why had she not rejected my invitation, an insult surely to suggest a date at the last minute?
Probably because, damn her, she perceived that it would be much more fun to bait me about my bad manners.
I slouched through Hyde Park, killing the hour and a half, angry at her and angry at myself. I considered forgetting the whole business, but I feared the wrath of Peg, the most loyal and loving of sisters save when she had to choose between her friend Rosie and me.
Today Hyde Park, saved by the University and urban renewal from racial resegregation, looks picturesque. In October of 1949, it seemed only old and depressing, despite the colors of Indian summer and the pungent, poignant smell of burning leaves.
The immediate postwar era was coming to an end, though we didn’t realize it then. The Russians had exploded their first atomic bomb; Communists in East Germany and China were establishing governments. What we would later call the Cold War was under way. The X-1 had soared to sixty-three-thousand feet, and Jackie Robinson, the first black player in the major leagues, would win the MVP awa
rd although his Dodgers would lose the World Series to the Yankees. Leon Hart of Notre Dame would win the Heisman trophy. The last encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic was attended by six of the sixteen surviving Civil War soldiers.
And I had a date with Rosemarie Clancy.
Promptly at six, I pushed the doorbell in the vestibule of her apartment building at Fifty-seventh and Kenwood.
“Yes?” Still brisk and efficient.
“I’m on time.”
“Remarkable. I’m ready.”
“Even more remarkable.”
A moment later I heard a crashing noise on the stairs; Rosemarie was graceful, but not quiet, like a hundred does rushing through a forest—when she wasn’t a timber wolf.
She flung open the door, eyes dancing with mischief.
“Oh, good,” she exclaimed. “I was afraid you’d overdress for the Chinese place.”
I was wearing a sweatshirt and Army fatigues.
“I could comb my hair.”
“Waste of time.” She grabbed my arm and shoved me out of the vestibule. “Come on, I thought you were hungry. I know I am.”
I obeyed her without protest because I was dazzled by her good looks. I had known her most of my life, yet I was not immune from a deep gasp for breath every time I saw her.
She was dressed simply, doubtless expecting that I would not be ready for an elegant restaurant—dark blue skirt, light blue blouse, no discernible makeup, long hair braided behind her head, low shoes so that her five feet five inches did not threaten my five feet seven and three-quarter inches—an efficient, dedicated undergraduate at, by its own admission, the world’s greatest university (just as the Chicago Tribune in those days claimed to be the World’s Greatest Newspaper, whence the letters WGN for its radio station.)
She looked like a serious student, but one whose beauty would cause people to stop in the street and stare, a rare enough phenomenon in Hyde Park.
I was so troubled by the events of my twenty-first birthday and so bemused by her wide shoulders, swelling breasts, narrow waist, and flowing hips that I almost kissed her there in the vestibule of the three flat. That would have been the end of everything.
Younger Than Springtime Page 34
