Younger Than Springtime

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Rosemarie bounced and danced beside me as I slouched down Fifty-seventh Street.

  “Someone really has to do something about your clothes, Chucky. You’re not half bad-looking, you know. If you’d dress right and stand up straight, you might amount to something yet.”

  “You want me to look like an accountant as well as studying to be one?”

  She clapped her hands and howled at that. “An accountant who won a prize from Life.”

  “For a picture of a kid with bare shoulders who might not have had anything on beneath the cropping.”

  “But who in fact had a swimsuit on because the photographer was scared.”

  “Of her strong right arm, known to devastate tennis balls and fresh young men.”

  “Depends on the man,” she said primly. “Anyway, congratulations on the prize. It’s a great achievement.”

  “Thank you.” I felt myself blushing. “I’m still going to be an accountant.”

  “Chucky, you can be anything you want.”

  More unrestrained laughter. She was as scared of this date as I was.

  That thought almost undid me again. Rosemarie was a person like me, what I would later learn should properly be called a “thou,” an other who could feel the same anxiety and pain I felt.

  Bad business.

  “So how come you’re not in a dorm?” I demanded. “I thought freshmen, oops, first-year students, had to live in dorms.”

  She flicked an eyebrow at my correct use of the University of Chicago terminology. “I live at home,” she said brightly. “At 1101 North Menard Avenue.”

  “That’s what the University thinks?”

  “It’s also the truth.” Her eyes flared and her skin, always prone to blush, turned pink. “I just happen to have a pied-à-terre here that I use sometimes. That’s all. Pied-à-terre means—”

  “I know what it means…. So your own apartment and your own car and you’re going on eighteen.”

  “Not bad, huh?” She grinned. “I know, I’m a spoiled rich brat—”

  “No you’re not.” I dug my hands deeper into my pockets. “I don’t believe that anymore. I suppose I never did.”

  “Chucky, you astonish me.”

  “Well.” I was sure I was blushing more than she was. “I wouldn’t quite—”

  “Your twenty-first birthday worked wonders. You should have one every year. Happy birthday, by the way. You don’t look a day over fifteen.”

  “And you don’t look a day under twenty-five.”

  “Thank you.” She bowed ceremoniously.

  “How is your father?”

  “He’s all right.” Her face was guarded, neutral. “Same as ever. Part of growing up, I guess, is understanding that you can’t change your parents or even help them all that much.”

  How had he and his alcoholic wife produced such a striking and vital daughter?

  “He doesn’t mind your living out here?”

  “He doesn’t have any choice…anyway, I can take care of myself.” Then, decisively changing the subject, “Hey, is this your first date?”

  She shoved me into a store that from the outside looked like it might be an opium den. It was not much more prepossessing inside, a few bare tables, some wooden chairs, the smell of exotic food, a timeless Asian woman behind the cash register.

  “ ’Aro, Rosie,” said the woman, smiling broadly. “Cute boy.”

  “Her son.” I bowed. “Can’t you see the family resemblance?”

  “Ar Irish rook arike.” The woman bowed back.

  “Don’t make fun of her.” Rosemarie grabbed my arm fiercely as we were led to the table and whispered in my ear. “Orientals have trouble with the L. What she said was—”

  “I know what she said,” I grumbled.

  Naturally, Rosemarie had already made friends with the woman of the house. She probably knew every shopkeeper on Fifty-seventh Street. Everyone liked Rosemarie—when she was sober.

  I considered the lovely young woman who sat across from me, brimming with happy devilment. I didn’t know much about such matters, but it seemed a reasonable bet that her beauty was durable. She would always be attractive. Unless, like her mother, she set about destroying her attractiveness. Unless, like her mother, she would kill herself with an accident in a drunken stupor before she was forty.

  “So?” she demanded, her appetizing lips curving up in an impish smile.

  “So what?”

  “You didn’t answer my question: is this your first date?”

  “Well.” I pondered the issue. “There was my senior prom…”

  She dismissed it with an abrupt wave of her hand. “You were shanghaied.”

  “You ought to know about that.”

  Could I call my nights with Trudi in Bamberg when I was a member of the Constabulary in the Army of Occupation dates? We would not discuss that issue. And Nan Wynne, the cute WAC lieutenant I had kind of dated in Bamberg.

  “There’s Cordelia…I don’t know whether—”

  “Definitely not.” She waved her hand again. “Cordelia would never say that she was dating you. Whatever happened to her, anyway?”

  Her sapphire eyes turned shrewd. She was trying to solve a problem over which she and Margaret Mary, a.k.a. Peg, had pondered long and hard last summer.

  “Promise you will tell Peg?”

  “That I will tell her?” Rosemarie paused in mid-flight.

  “I can’t have you two worrying about that all year.”

  “Brat.” She slapped my hand playfully. “Well, what did happen?”

  She suspended the conversation long enough to give her friend from behind the cash register a detailed order of what she wanted and what I wanted.

  It saved me the trouble of making my own decisions. Or of even reading the menu.

  “And?” She returned to her cross-examination about Cordelia.

  “She didn’t think romance was consistent with her ambition to be a concert pianist. Felt we were getting too serious. I guess I agreed.”

  “She dumped you?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “How did you feel?”

  “Hurt for a couple of days. Then relieved.”

  “Not brokenhearted?”

  “No.”

  She was silent a moment with thoughts of her own. “Is she any good?”

  “As a pianist? To tell the truth, no, she isn’t. I mean she hits all the right notes and her training is the best her father’s money could pay for and she works hard; but, alas, practice and teachers and dedication are no substitute for real talent, of which, by comparison, my sister the fiddler has lots.”

  “Poor kid.” Rosemarie’s sympathy was genuine. “Did you tell her?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Her exquisite forehead furrowed into a dangerous frown.

  “I don’t think she would have believed me. Who am I, just because ours is a musical family, to make such judgments? And I thought it would be cruel to destroy her illusion. Maybe she needs it now. Maybe it won’t do her any harm.”

  “We all need our illusions.” Rosemarie nodded solemnly.

  “I guess.”

  “Just like your illusion that you’re going to be a stuffy old accountant…. Anyway, have you seen her this semester?”

  Like an Irish country woman about to buy a new farm, Rosemarie Helen Clancy was getting the whole lay of the land. Careful, little one, a single date does not a romance make.

  Especially with someone who certainly will not marry until 1954. If then.

  “Yeah, I saw her a few days ago at the office of Compact, her magazine, you know.”

  “And?”

  “And she didn’t ask me to work for the magazine. I think I’m just one more Notre Dame boy now.”

  “Stupid.” Rosemarie seemed angry, more at Cordelia than at me.

  “What about Christopher?”

  “What about him?” She tapped her finger impatiently on a knife.

  “You can’t ask a
bout my romances and expect me not to ask about yours.”

  “It’s different.” She abandoned the knife.

  “How?”

  “I’m me and you’re you, that’s how.”

  “Hmm…”

  “Anyway,” she sighed. “He is a very nice boy. I don’t know how he puts up with you as a friend.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “You be quiet, while I explain. I think he was getting pretty serious about me and I had to warn him it wasn’t a very good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “ ’Cause I’d drive him crazy, that’s why not. He really is a very quiet and serious boy.”

  Not quite what Christopher had told me.

  “North Side German.”

  “Something…Which reminds me, Notre Dame boy, why aren’t you there today? Is the Feast of the Holy Rosary a holiday or something?”

  “Feast of the Holy Rosary?”

  “Right. October seventh. Anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto at which John of Austria, a year older than you are, routed the whole Turkish fleet and saved Europe. Chesterton wrote a poem about it… “Dim drums throbbing on a hill half heard where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred”…which doesn’t explain why you’re not at Notre Dame.”

  “Because I’m here in Hyde Park taking you to dinner at this sumptuous Oriental restaurant for my first fully certified date.”

  “Something is wrong, Chucky.” Her eyes were soft with compassion, the compassion I had wanted and that now embarrassed me. “What is it?”

  “I was thrown out. On my birthday.”

  Well, I would take any pity I could get.

  “Why?” She dropped the spoon with which she’d been approaching her pale yellow soup—egg drop if I remember rightly.

  “For drinking.”

  “But you don’t drink!”

  “I was framed…. My rector didn’t like me. He’d been trying to get me for months. So finally he had to make up the evidence. I was told to be on the five o’clock South Shore.” I would not tell her that the photo of her had angered my hall rector. No point in burdening her with that knowledge.

  “Bastards!” She pounded the table, spilling some of our soup. Her wonderful face was dark red in anger. “They have no right…where are you going to school…out here?”

  “I guess we’re schoolmates again, Rosemarie. They accepted me this afternoon. The good April wanted to make sure that I told you so you could take care of me.”

  She didn’t laugh. Her eyes filled with tears.

  I took her hand. She enclosed it in her two hands.

  “I’m so sorry, Chuck. I know how much Notre Dame meant to you. Since you were a little boy you wanted to go there. It’s not fair.”

  I tell you, sympathy from a pretty woman you can’t beat.

  “They seem to want me here,” I said with a pretense of manliness.

  “All those lonely months in Germany you dreamed of the Golden Dome.” Tears were falling down her cheeks now. Her grip on my unprotesting hand tightened. “They have no right at all to do what they did. They’re a disgrace to God and the church. As bad as nuns.”

  “It’s over.” I tried to sound like I had been healed of all my resentment. “Maybe a good thing too. Like Mom said, I never was really happy there.”

  That theory was dismissed with yet another abrupt hand wave. Her hand quickly returned to join its partner enfolding mine. “How do you get out here? On the El?” Then she grinned broadly and her face lit up—an unfailing sign that she had thought of something outrageous, something that she ought never to say and was about to say it anyway. “Well, I hope you don’t think”—she doubled up, hands to her face to stop the laughter—“that you’re going to be my roommate!”

  I joined in the laughter and discovered that in our shared amusement all my hurt and confusion had been swept away.

  So that’s what Christopher meant by consolation at the breast?

  “The idea had not occurred to me”—I struggled for a straight face—“but I don’t think I could afford the rent.”

  “Mind you”—she held up a warning finger—“if you’re caught in a blizzard and agree to be locked up in the parlor, I might—”

  “An attractive offer. Free?”

  “Nothing is ever free, Chucky Ducky. Now eat your egg drop soup. It’s good for you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Charles Cronin O’Malley, are you holding my hand?”

  Patently I was.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Well, it’s my right hand, so I can eat…You’re becoming dangerous, Chucky. You invite me out for your first date and then you hold my hand.”

  “I’d never do that.”

  “And you certainly won’t put your arm around me when we walk home or kiss me good night either.”

  “What absurd ideas!”

  “I’m glad to hear it…. Now eat your egg drop soup.”

  “I have something else to tell you.”

  “Hmm…” she said, swallowing a spoonful of the delicious soup. “I can tell that it isn’t good.”

  She squeezed my hand reassuringly.

  “I had your picture tacked to the wall in my room at the Dome—”

  “Hey!” She pounded the table. “I’ve at last made it as a pinup!”

  Then her exuberance withered and her grin faded into a dangerous frown.

  “You mean they threw you out because of the picture?”

  “Not exactly…Father Pius was gunning for me because of the picture. He tore one copy up, so I made a sixteen-by-twenty and tacked it on the wall…. So you were really a tackup!”

  “Tacky.” She permitted a tiny smile to suspend her rage temporarily.

  “I’m sure that’s why he planted the beer in my room.”

  “We’ll get even, Chucky. We’ll get even.”

  “It would be a waste of our time to worry about that,” I said piously.

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “I didn’t belong there.”

  “You think you belong here?”

  “As long as you’re around, I do.”

  “How sweet!” she exclaimed, her anger dismissed.

  My sister Peg claims that I have a quick mind and a quicker tongue. She says that I get in trouble because my tongue races ahead of my mind. That had often been true in Bamberg. It was still true. My compliment had exploded spontaneously off my lips. Now I was in trouble. Yet, it was worth the risk to see the radiance of her smile.

  And at such a trivial compliment!

  “My body is not dirty, Chuck, is it?”

  Now she was sad again. And fragile.

  “Not that I’ve ever noticed,” I said with an approving glance at her.

  She grinned again. “They’re wrong, aren’t they!”

  For an answer I sang “Younger than Springtime.”

  She joined in the chorus. Everyone in the restaurant joined the second chorus.

  “Not a bad act!” she said exultantly. “Maybe we could go on the road…. Tour all the Chinese restaurants. Now eat your egg foo young before it gets cold.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I put my arm around her waist as soon as we left the restaurant. She responded in kind.

  “Well,” she said, feigning a sigh of relief, “I’m certainly happy we’re not walking back to my apartment embracing one another.”

  “That would be vulgar.”

  “Exactly. And it would be even more vulgar to sing as we do it.”

  “The natives would think we’re crazy.”

  “Shouldn’t let the Irish Catholics in because first thing you know the whole neighborhood will go to pieces.”

  “Right.”

  I began to sing “Younger than Springtime” again. We worked our way through South Pacific on the way home. To her home, that is. The natives smiled. Even Hyde Park locals had to smile at Rosemarie.

  When she was washing “that man right outa my hair,”
she pretended to scrub my wire-brush red head.

  “Careful,” I said, “you’ll cut your fingers.”

  “Just filing my nails.”

  In the lobby of her apartment building, she sighed. “At least I don’t have to worry about fighting off a kiss at the end of this date.”

  “Certainly not,” I said, drawing her close.

  My kiss was sweet and gentle and tender—and the most satisfying kiss thus far in my life.

  Rosemarie sagged against me, her head on my shoulder.

  “Oh, Chuck,” she gasped. “What a wonderful kiss. You’re the one entitled to consolation after what they’ve done to you. Instead you console me.”

  Was that what I’d done?

  “I didn’t kiss you,” I insisted as we clung to each other.

  “I know that,” she giggled. “So you won’t kiss me again the same way.”

  “I’d be afraid to,” I said, repeating the kiss, this time even more tenderly.

  “Thank you, Chuck,” she said, slowly slipping out of the embrace, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  Why was she crying? Better not ask.

  “Good night, Rosemarie,” I said. “Great date for the first time. You won’t hear from me again in a day or two about going to the movies.”

  “I wouldn’t expect to,” she sniffed.

  “Great, so I won’t be talking to you.”

  “And I won’t tell Peg anything about our first date.”

  “Naturally not.”

  I kissed her forehead and departed that lobby as quickly as I could.

  With a song in my heart!

  “Younger than Springtime,” of course.

  I hummed it over and over again on the ride home on the Illinois Central and the Lake Street El. I would have to avoid Peg when I got into our house. No, that wouldn’t be necessary. The good Margaret Mary would pretend to know nothing, lest she disturb the delicate fabric of our initial relationship.

  I was, unaccountably, a very happy young man.

  34

  “This Princeton isn’t a bad place,” Jim Rizzo assured me. “There’s some former gyrenes like me and they’re good guys even if they are kind of stuffy.”

  We were in the Magic Pub, Jim, Monica, and I. It was the fifteenth of October, 1949, a date I have always remembered very easily and not because the Communist armies had captured Canton, as we used to call it.