Younger Than Springtime

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Funny thing,” Jim went on expansively, “I take to this law stuff. For some crazy reason I seem to be real good at it. Some of my professors actually treat me with respect, even if they do think I’m a greasy little wop from Chicago.”

  Monica slapped his arm.

  “I’ve told you, James, that I don’t ever want to hear you use that word.”

  “Even though it’s true,” I added. “Actually I prefer the phrase ‘cutthroat Sicilian.’”

  In high good humor we all laughed. Jimmy and Monica were to be married on Thanksgiving weekend. He had found an apartment for them in Princeton and a job for her in a Catholic school. They would go on their honeymoon over Christmas and then settle in for the two and a half remaining years of law school. The only shadow in their lives was that Big Tom had forbidden Monica’s family from having any part in the ceremony. So it would be a small wedding, much to the dismay of his family, which loved big weddings.

  There was also continuing good news about Tim Boylan. He was now taking some courses at the Pier and seemed to have settled down, most of the time anyway. He and Jenny seemed to be falling in love.

  All was right in the world.

  They insisted on taking me home because of the thunderstorm. I can’t remember why we dropped Monica off at her Austin Boulevard apartment first. If I were engaged to such a delightful woman, I would get rid of the red-haired punk first.

  Or maybe I was a chaperone.

  Anyway, we turned left at the Judson Baptist Church and on to Potomac and entered Oak Park.

  “I am one very lucky guy,” Jimmy told me. “There were three or four times I thought I wouldn’t live another hour. Now I’m going to Princeton and a wonderful woman is willing to take a chance on spending her life with me. I don’t deserve it, but that’s not going to stop me.”

  Before I could answer, the end of the world happened. We were crossing Taylor Street, the second street in Oak Park. Jim was driving slowly because of the rain. A sizzling flash of lightning illumined the intersection. A car plowed into us at high speed. Jimmy’s battered twelve-year-old car spun around and tipped over. I flew through the air and landed on the parkway to the accompaniment of an ominous roll of thunder. There was another burst of lightning and more thunder, this time almost instantly after the burst. The Ruskies are closing in on us, I thought. All we need is Wagnerian music. I reached for my weapon. No, I wasn’t in Bamberg anymore. I was in Oak Park, not a notoriously dangerous place. A third flash of lightning revealed that the car that hit us had disappeared.

  Then I smelled leaking gasoline. That could be dangerous. I’d better get my corporal out of the car. Or was Trudi still in it?

  Despite my confusion and my flight through space, I was able to walk, somewhat unsteadily, to the ruined car. It wasn’t my Bamberg Buick. It was an old jalopy. Surprisingly my corporal was Jimmy Rizzo. No, I wasn’t in the marines. What was a marine captain doing in my car?

  The smell of leaking gas was strong. I’d better hurry before the fire came. I pulled on the driver’s side door. It wouldn’t move. I uttered some curses of which the good April would not have approved and yanked again. The door fell off and I fell on the street.

  A voice in the back of my skull warned me to hurry; the car was about to blow.

  Jimmy was unconscious. In retrospect the sound advice would have been not to move lest I complicate his injuries. I pulled him out of the car and across the slick pavement on which water and gasoline were mixing, onto the parkway, and over the sidewalk. I made it to the lawn and indeed up to the bushes. Then the car exploded in a dirty orange fireball that knocked me off my feet.

  The Oak Park fire department and police arrived about a half century later. They found me lying on the lawn gasping for breath, next to a very unconscious Jimmy Rizzo.

  “Who are you, kid?” a cop asked me.

  “Cronin, Charles C. Staff Sergeant, First Constabulary Regiment…”

  I rattled off the first numbers of my serial number and then lost the rest of it.

  “You’re not in the service any longer, kid. You’re in Oak Park…. You really a sergeant?”

  I struggled to my feet.

  “They always ask that…. How’s my driver?…No, Captain Rizzo…is that my blood?”

  Your Legion of Merit winner almost fainted.

  I told the police what happened. Someone had rammed us and driven off. Hit and run. I was thrown free and landed on the parkway. I smelled gasoline and pulled him out of the car. Then it exploded.

  “You saved his life,” the cop said.

  “How is he?” I asked again.

  “Unconscious. His breathing is shallow. I’m no doctor, but I think he’s probably got a concussion. I think he’ll be all right.”

  “He was talking about the four times in the Marines he thought he was going to die when they hit us.”

  “I was a marine too. We’ll take good care of him, Sarge. We’d better take you down to West Suburban too, just to look you over.”

  “I’m fine.”

  My legs wobbled under me. The ex-marine steadied me.

  “They’ll just look you over…. Did you get a good look at the car, maybe catch its license number?”

  “It was night and pouring rain. It might have been red.”

  “That’s not much to go on. We’ll see what we can find out.”

  In fact, it was a red Ford, late model and, while I had not seen its license number, I knew what it was. Instinctively I kept that information to myself. For the present.

  At West Suburban Hospital, a relic in those days of the Edwardian era, I was examined at considerable length and pronounced in “good” condition with cuts and abrasions. They put me in a bed and gave me a sedative so I could get a good night’s sleep.

  “Mr. Rizzo,” I was informed, “is in satisfactory condition with a fractured collarbone and a concussion. He has regained consciousness but is still very confused. You both were very lucky.”

  “Angels,” I replied. “Legions of them.”

  At some later point, the O’Malley clan arrived en masse, the womenfolk looking pale and distraught, Dad angry.

  “You’re not the only one who flies out of cars,” I said to him.

  Rosemarie’s face, tearstained and drawn, came into focus.

  “There is a serious possibility,” I said, resisting an impulse to touch her hand, “that I will survive and live a reasonably normal life. However, I will need constant care and affection and must be humored at all times.”

  Though I was a patient in a hospital and had barely escaped death, they laughed at me.

  At that point, according to eyewitnesses, I fell asleep. There was considerable concern among the O’Malleys that I had slipped into a coma. It took a resident, two interns, and several nurses to reassure them.

  A priest brought me Communion the next morning. The resident told me that I would be released in the afternoon.

  I stole up to the next floor to visit Jimmy.

  The room was filled with noisy Sicilians lamenting the accident and celebrating his recovery.

  “Well, Captain, sir,” I said as I worked my way through the crowd. “That was a close one. That 88 had our range.”

  His left arm was in a sling. There were some minor bandages on his face and neck. Otherwise he looked fine, but a little confused. Monica clung to his free hand with grim determination.

  “The Japanese didn’t use 88s, Sarge,” he said with a grin. “The medics say you saved my life.”

  “I don’t think, sir, that the captain’s lady would look good in black.”

  They all laughed. It wasn’t really that funny, but I guess they needed laughter.

  Monica hugged me fiercely.

  “Chuck, I owe everything to you!”

  “Only an invitation to the wedding, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Sarge.” Jimmy removed his hand from Monica’s grasp to shake mine. It was not exactly a firm grasp. Monica promptly recaptured it.

&nb
sp; “I think the woman looks good in black,” he added, “especially if it’s lace, but I guess I’ll have to wait to find out.”

  More nervous laughter from the Sicilian contingent and a modest blush from Monica.

  I backed away to make room for worried aunts, cousins, and sisters. Mrs. Rizzo, a handsome woman with a touch of gray in her hair, was sitting on a chair fingering her Rosary beads.

  “I’m Salvatore Damico,” a tall, saturnine man with deadly brown eyes informed me.

  “Hey, Uncle Sal,” I said, shaking his hand.

  “I want you to know, Sergeant, that Jimmy is family. I value his happiness. He wants to go to Princeton, I say fine, Jimmy, go to Princeton. He wants to marry a beautiful Irish girl, I say, fine, Jimmy, you have great taste. If someone saves Jimmy’s life, I say, hey, Sergeant, I owe you. Anytime you need a favor there’s a marker there to pick up.”

  For those who don’t understand the rhetoric of this particular subculture, that’s high praise indeed. Maybe someday I’d need to pick up a marker.

  “I appreciate that, Uncle Sal,” I said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  That’s also the appropriate response.

  “And, I tell you this, I swear on my mother’s grave that if I find out who did this to you and my nephew, he’ll wish he’d never been born.”

  There was silence in the room for a moment. A jihad had been proclaimed.

  I filed that fact in my memory.

  I knew who had tried to injure us, perhaps to kill us. The question now was what to do with that knowledge.

  My parents came over in the afternoon to bring me home. I was treated as if I were a fragile newborn who had just been removed from an incubator. Naturally I reveled in my new status. Take it whenever you can get it.

  I was installed in a couch in the music room. Mozart was put on the phonograph to soothe me. Peg brought me a huge dish of chocolate ice cream. I was lapping it up with little attention to table manners when Rosemarie drifted in, solemn and sympathetic, but also determined.

  “Red Ford, Chuck?”

  “What else?”

  “License number?”

  “It was 405–216.”

  “You saw it?”

  “I was flying through space, so I didn’t see it. But no one but you and I know I didn’t see it.”

  She nodded solemnly.

  “What are we going to do about it?”

  I almost changed “we” to “I.” Then I thought better of it.

  “Intimidate Big Tom.”

  “You think he actually tried to kill you?”

  “Maybe not actually kill. Maybe just send a message.”

  “Loud message, Chuck.”

  “Very loud.”

  “How do we intimidate him?”

  Patently we were both crazy kids. But I’d been down similar roads in Bamberg. And, however different, Rosemarie was Jim Clancy’s daughter.

  “With my own ears I heard my good friend Sal the Pal swear on his mother’s grave that when he finds out who tried to do us in, the aforementioned party would wish he’d never been born.”

  She shivered.

  “We’re not going to do that, are we?”

  “Certainly not. We may need only to threaten.”

  Thereupon the two of us outlined a plan. It was madness, but if I do say so myself, brilliant madness. Rosemarie and I were a dangerous team, a nice irony if one considers the story I had read about our ancestors.

  35

  “What do you two want to see me about?” Big Tom stood at his desk in his sumptuous office in the West Side Bank Building at Harlem and First Avenue in Melrose Park, a glitzy postwar product that my father did not design and of which he would be acutely ashamed if someone had assigned responsibility to him.

  Rosemarie responded, taking charge at the beginning.

  “We told the woman who did not want to let us in that we wanted to see you about a red postwar Ford, license number 405–216.”

  “What about it?”

  Big Tom glowered at us, his face red beneath carefully groomed (and probably dyed) wavy silver hair, a hurricane ready to sweep away two trivial sand spits.

  “We have reason to believe that it was driven by two off-duty Chicago policemen who attempted to kill your daughter’s fiancé on Saturday night and that these policemen were your employees.”

  Rosemarie was mimicking Mr. District Attorney, a radio series character of the day.

  “Prove it,” he sneered.

  “We also have here photographs of the same car and the policemen watching a softball game at which your daughter and her fiancé were present.”

  I laid out the first set of pictures.

  “Moreover,” Rosemarie continued, “we have witnesses who will testify that these men began to follow your daughter when she moved out of your home because of your opposition to her marriage.”

  “That marriage will never occur.”

  “If your hired killers had been successful the night before last”—I pointed an accusatory finger at him—“the marriage would never have occurred. And I might be dead too.”

  “I would not have mourned for either of you,” he laughed. “The world would be better off without you. But you won’t be able to prove those charges.”

  “We may not have to.” Rosemarie laid the second set of pictures on his huge and perfectly empty oak desk.

  “These are photographs of the same policemen assaulting me in front of my home in Oak Park the day after I took the photos in our previous exhibit. You’ll note that the red Ford is clearly visible in the picture because we used color film. So too are the faces of the two policemen. Finally, the last photograph is an enlargement that shows the license plate on the car. You will note its number.”

  “None of this has any implication for me. You two little brats get out of my office.”

  However, he made no attempt to throw us out.

  “Providentially, I made a report to the Oak Park police about the, ah, visit on that morning. They’ll have a record. When I tell them that I can identify the car that crashed into us the other night, they will remember the incident. Your cop friends will be in real trouble. They might want to name their employer to get off easier than they otherwise would.”

  Some of the color faded from his face.

  “Cops protect one another. If these outrageous charges are made, the Chicago cops will provide alibis for their own.”

  “I’m sure they will. However, the Oak Park police are notorious for their incorruptibility.”

  “It might not make any difference for you.” Rosemarie took up our scenario, as we closed in.

  “What do you mean?”

  A muscle under one of his eyes was beginning to twitch.

  “I mean,” I went on, “with my own ears I heard a certain Salvatore Damico, also known as Sal the Pal, say that he had sworn on his mother’s grave that when he finds out who tried to kill his beloved nephew, that person would wish he’d never been born.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s your risk,” Rosemarie said coldly.

  She was, beyond all doubt and all my doubt, quite a woman.

  “Have no doubt, Mr. Sullivan,” I said, “that unless you satisfy us, we will move on this matter today. We will not inform Mr. Damico. We will not have to. He will find out. By tomorrow evening you might well wish you’d never been born.”

  He sat down in the vast chair behind his desk.

  “What do you want?”

  “Four things,” Rosemarie replied, her voice as cold as the Arctic tundra. “The first is you leave us and Mr. Rizzo alone. You stop interfering with your daughter’s marriage to Mr. Rizzo. You refrain from all punitive actions against them for the rest of your life.”

  “And the final thing we want, Mr. Sullivan”—I delivered the coup de grâce—“is that you write out in your own hand and sign this confession.”

  I laid it on his desk.

  It read:

  “I, Th
omas Francis Sullivan, do hereby confess that I authorized two off-duty Chicago policemen who were in my employ to do serious bodily harm to my daughter’s fiancé, James Rizzo, on the night of October 15, 1948. I further confess that I understood clearly that Mr. Rizzo’s death might occur as a result of this bodily harm.”

  “I won’t do it,” he shouted.

  “Fine,” I said. “You can keep the pictures. Incidentally, all our evidence is in a safe place and safe hands, so it won’t help you one bit if you try to harm us.”

  “Indeed,” Rosemarie continued. “One of our associates has been authorized to call Mr. Damico at eleven o’clock this morning unless he hears from us that he should not place the call. Before making the call, he will unseal an envelope that outlines our evidence against you.”

  “He” clearly was Margaret Mary O’Malley.

  He opened a drawer in his desk and removed a blank sheet of paper.

  “On your personal letterhead,” I said lightly.

  He stared balefully at me and hesitated.

  Then, shrugging slightly, he put aside the blank sheet and removed a letterhead from another drawer. He carefully copied our neatly typed document.

  I picked up our original and his copy from the desk, glanced over them, and nodded.

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Sullivan. You might want to consider the fact that if our morals were like yours, Sal the Pal would already be working you over.”

  “See you at the wedding,” Rosemarie said cheerfully as we left his office.

  Before I closed the door, I glanced back. Big Tom Sullivan had shrunk. He was slumped over his desk, head in hands, a beaten man.

  That night Monica called me to say that there was really good news. Her father had come to the hospital, shaken hands with James, had a nice conversation with both of them, and said that he had no objections to the marriage. I called Rosemarie in Hyde Park and told her the good news.

  “Well,” she said, “he was a good loser.”

  “I don’t think so,” I replied. “He knows how to lose and put a good face on it.”

  36

  L’affaire Sullivan was an isolated incident, albeit a fascinating one in my courtship of Rosemarie Helen Clancy, if it can be called a courtship. I told myself it wasn’t a courtship. She never said it was. My quixotic and erratic quest was against my better judgment. To pursue it nonetheless was to risk everything I thought I stood for. She was not the kind of sober, sensible woman I told myself I wanted to marry. She would not wait till 1954. I knew about her drinking problem. I knew about her parents. I remembered her sobbing in St. Ursula’s Church that night so long ago. It made no sense at all. I thought about her ugly, evil father.