He was the same rival Dad had to fight, wasn’t he? Couldn’t I rout him if I wanted to?
The drinking problem scared me. What would I do with a drunken wife?
Then why “date” her even if the dates were in places like Chinese restaurants in Hyde Park?
Because she enchanted me with her beauty and her intelligence and her laughter and her embarrassingly obvious love for me, because she was irresistible, because I longed for a woman. And perhaps because I had always loved her.
In a way it was my father’s courtship all over again. Different woman, but same enemy. A much more powerful enemy this time around.
I didn’t think about that then—not as far as I can remember. However, even today I remember vividly the compliant firmness of her body and the sweet warmth of her lips.
Like our first tender embrace on Fifty-seventh Street was yesterday.
It did not take me long to figure out how the University worked. Its very distinguished faculty was bored by most students and affronted by the pushy ones who asked stupid questions. Professors valued wit and originality. Whatever else may be said of Charles Cronin O’Malley, he was long on both.
I turned in my assigned paper in a medieval history class at the end of the second week of the quarter.
“What’s this?” the tall, austere professor with silver hair asked suspiciously.
“My term paper, sir.”
“It’s not due till the end of the quarter!”
I reached for the paper.
“No, I’ll keep it,” he said sternly. “You realize that I will probably give it a failing grade. No one could possibly finish a respectable paper on a medieval city in this period of time.”
“I have an obsessive need for closure, sir.”
He examined my face carefully as he tried to figure out whether I was pulling his leg—which of course I was.
“Well, we’ll see about that, Mr…. ah, O’Malley.”
“Yes, sir, Irish Catholic Democrat from the West Side of Chicago.”
“Indeed.”
Rosemarie, who had somehow managed to get in the same class, was staring at me anxiously from the doorway.
“You’re out of your mind, Chucky Ducky,” she protested in the dark and dingy corridor of the 1155 East Fifty-ninth Street Building, a place where the Holy Inquisition might have held court.
“Wait and see,” I said, whistling “Younger than Springtime.”
At the beginning of the next class, the professor announced solemnly that he’d like to see, ah, Mr. O’Malley after class. He didn’t have to look around for me because, as in all classes, I sat in the front row. It was easier to take on a professor from there.
He held the paper in his hand. A small A was printed on top of it.
“You were in Bamberg during the war, Mr. O’Malley?”
“After it, sir. For eighteen months. In the Constabulary. First Constabulary Regiment.”
“Very few young men your age would have asborbed so much of that city in such a brief period of time…. By the way, how old are you?”
“I only look sixteen, sir. I achieved my citizenship a couple of weeks ago.”
“The photographs are especially good,” he said with a faint hint of a smile. “You could have an excellent career as a photographer.”
“Thank you, sir. I plan to be an accountant.”
He actually laughed as though he didn’t expect that outcome. He was being careful because he wasn’t sure what odd manner of person he had encountered.
“We actually had two very bright graduate students here before the war. Husband and wife. I suppose they were swallowed up in the war.”
“The Richters, sir. Kurt and Brigitta?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. Are they still alive?”
“Yes, indeed they are, sir. Doktor Richter was captured during the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, sir, as I’m sure you know. Miraculously he survived and has returned to Bamberg. He is now teaching again at the university. It is rumored that he may be the next rector there. Frau Doktor Richter is the chief translator at our headquarters and is finishing her book on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg. They both are active in Herr Reichkanzler Konrad Adenauer’s party.”
I removed a picture of the Richters from my wallet.
“They have three children now, sir.”
I didn’t tell him that the youngest was named Karl Krönin Richter.
“Amazing! My colleagues will be delighted to know. I’m sure we can write him at the university there…. Ah, is this young woman with you, Charles?”
Rosemarie was standing a couple of inches behind my right shoulder, ready to do battle if I should be threatened.
“Never seen her before in my life, sir.”
“Would you mind repeating for Chuck what you said about his photography, sir?” she said with her most demure smile.
“What…? Oh, yes. He should certainly pursue it as a career. He is very, very good. In fact, there is an interesting exhibition at the Art Institute just now on postwar photography…”
“Well, that’s a sure A,” she said to me in the corridor. “You own that man. And he’ll tell everyone about you. You’ll be a legend in the first quarter. I’m sure you’re pulling something like that in every class.”
“The Richters,” I said modestly, “were a lucky break.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Chucky Ducky,” she said with considerable admiration.
“A little guy like me has to survive in this strange environment.”
“You could have survived that way at Notre Dame if you wanted to.”
“They wouldn’t have cared about Bamberg and they would have rejected the pictures. They would have given me a D.”
“C minus,” she replied. “Come on, let’s get lunch. I’m starved.”
37
“You’re a fraud, Charles Cronin O’Malley, a fraud, a phony, and a faker.”
“I cheat besides.”
My teacher and opponent that weekend before Halloween in 1949 leaned against the back of the bench in Skelton Park, an official place for nighttime beer drinking in my generation—despite the vigilance of the Oak Park Police Department. She was breathing heavily, her wondrous breasts moving up and down in delightful spasms. Her sweat-soaked white tennis blouse and skirt clung to her in a most appealing outline. Only a boor could win a set from such a vision, especially a boor in Army fatigues.
“You pretend to be a terrible athlete and actually you’re not bad at all,” she continued to pant.
“I’m not as good as you are.”
“Of course you’re not. Still, when-I’m finished with your lessons, you should be able to beat me about a third of the time.”
Rosemarie didn’t like to lose. Neither did I, for that matter, but I had had lots of practice at losing and she very little. Or so I thought then.
“More like a fifth.”
“Regardless.” She shrugged her comely shoulders and for good measure nudged my stomach with her tennis racket.
Indian summer had continued into late October. Rosemarie was staying at our house for the weekend. She had cajoled me into a tennis match at the park down the street. Peg, who under ordinary circumstances could have been expected to join us, pleaded that she had to practice the violin, a sure sign that they had been conspiring.
I knew the agenda—first we teach Chucky to play tennis, then we make him accept a car so he won’t have to ride that horrid El train back and forth to school, then we dress him up properly so he looks right.
Then?
I didn’t want to consider the next item on the agenda. But I knew that Peg and Rosemarie could count on the enthusiastic support of my sister Jane, her husband Ted, my brother Mike, and my parents in executing the whole agenda.
I was the moth skirting the candle, the lemming hesitating on the edge of the cliff.
“You’re falling in love, Charles,” Christopher told me on the telephon
e the day after our first date.
“Certainly not,” I replied uneasily.
“Awfully close to it.”
“A mild infatuation.” I pleaded.
Christopher remained silent.
“Are you still there?” I felt my face twist into a suspicious frown.
“I don’t want you to be angry at me.”
“When has that ever happened?”
“You’re right. Still…”
“Let’s have it.”
“God has thrown the two of you together…and don’t say it: with a considerable assist from the University of Notre Dame.”
“All right. So?”
“So if you hang around her, you’ll end up marrying her—probably sooner rather than later. She’s beautiful; she’s available; and the male mind at our age figures that a girl in hand is worth two in the thicket.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“I know I have.” He was so calm, so rational, so much a Scholastic philosopher. A lay Saint Thomas without the Dominican robes. “You’re not immune from the ordinary human drives, Charles.”
“I’m well aware of that, Christopher; but as I’ve told you often when we’ve discussed the subject of the ravishing Rosemarie, I know her too well. She drinks too much, she’s the daughter of a monster and a drunk. She’s a bad risk…doomed probably.”
“When your blood gets hotter, you will hardly notice those problems.”
“You’re warning me that if I don’t get out now, it might be too late, say next week?” I laughed as I said it, knowing how ridiculous such a suggestion was.
“Say next Christmas.” He didn’t laugh.
“Not a chance. I can control my passions.”
“I’m warning you because I think I should, but I’m not sure I want you to control your passions.”
“You want me to marry her, don’t you, Christopher?”
“Yes, I do. I think it would be a good match.”
“Why does that matter to you?”
“Because I love you both.” His response was prompt, blunt, and utterly unsentimental. North Side German.
“I understand that.” A lump rose in my throat. Sentimental West Side Irish. I didn’t understand it at all. “And I appreciate it, but I’m not courting Rosemarie and I’m not going to marry her.”
“We’ll see, Charles,” he laughed easily. “We’ll see. Frankly, I envy you.”
“Why should she want to marry me?” I changed tack. “She’s only eighteen. She could have her choice of almost anyone. Why me?”
“I suppose she thinks she loves you.”
“Is in love with me?”
“That too. But, Charles, face it, she loves you. The poor kid has always loved you.”
“Why?”
He seemed to think that question was hilarious. “If you can’t answer that, Charles, I’m sure I can’t answer it for you.”
So, my lay father confessor was no help.
After our dinner at the Chinese restaurant, I tried to be virtuous and avoid Rosemarie. “See you around the campus,” I said cautiously, after our two modest kisses.
“If I don’t see you, I’ll see you.” She grinned mischievously, threw open the door, and rushed up the stairs like a herd of zebra fleeing a leopard.
That was Rosemarie: don’t walk, run.
And that, I told myself, was that. Clean, neat, definitive. No passionate kissing, no tears, no promises.
To be able to avoid someone at a small university with a relatively compact campus (especially in those days) requires that you be alert so that you can see that person. Thus to avoid Rosemarie, I had to be on the lookout for her.
Right?
Surprisingly I didn’t find her for several days, so there was no opportunity or occasion to avoid her. You’d think that she’d stand out in a student body where good-looking young women were so scarce one might suspect they were going out of fashion.
Especially good-looking young Celts.
Nonetheless, despite my considerable efforts to spot her so I could avoid her, four days went by without any opportunity to put my virtue to the test.
Then I saw her in the reading room of William Rainey Harper Memorial Library, a locale as cozy as Union Station and as quiet as a mausoleum. She was sitting at a desk in the far corner of the room, a stack of books at her left arm, a notebook in front of her, head bowed over the notebook, pencil poised, ready to write. (I have good eyes, at least when I’m looking for women to avoid.)
While I watched she began to write in the notebook.
I failed the test to my virtue. Totally and completely. I walked over to the table and sat down across from her. She continued to scribble feverishly. The books were closed, so she was recording thoughts, not taking notes. Her face was intent, serious, dedicated. And, to be honest, a little frightening.
Today she was wearing a brown skirt and a beige blouse; her hair was still tied behind her head. All business.
And so radiant that she illuminated the whole drab, dour William Rainey Harper reading room.
Sensing finally that someone was at the table with her, she glanced up at me, warning me, whoever I might be, that an interruption would not be welcome.
Then she smiled and the rest of the reading room, the rest of the world in fact, disappeared.
“Chucky,” she whispered. “What are you doing here?”
“Admiring your diligence.”
“Silly.” She reddened. “Wait till I’m finished and we can walk up to Jimmy’s for a hamburger.”
“Okay.”
Thus for my virtue.
We established a pattern. I would arrive in the reading room at eleven-thirty, sit across from her and study quietly till noon, and then we would walk over to Jimmy’s for a hamburger and a beer (in those days eighteen-year-old women were “legal” while men had to wait till they were twenty-one, a law that only made sense if you agreed with Rosemarie and Peg that women were superior to men and in better control of their vices).
Jimmy’s was a bar on Fifty-fifth Street at which the University intellectuals and the working class met in a strange juxtaposition. It made the intellectuals feel tough. I don’t know what, if anything, it did to the truck drivers. They were, it seemed to me, a rough, foulmouthed crowd. Most of them eyed Rosemarie appreciatively whenever we walked in, but no one made a crack about her. You don’t mess, I guess, with a grand duchess.
The hamburgers were good.
Then depending on what day of the week it was, I would walk with her back to her apartment and return alone to the reading room or ride the Fifty-fifth Street bus over to the E1 and down to the chambers of O’Hanlon and O’Halloran. On Wednesdays we both went back to the reading room because we had an afternoon class.
I wasn’t courting her, however. Not at all.
I did not refuse, however, to be bathed by and absorbed in her smile whenever she looked up and saw me across the table in the dark, intimidating reading room.
You say that I was already hopelessly in love with Rosemarie Helen Clancy and lacked the honesty and the integrity to admit it to myself?
You say that I used the excuse of her background and her problems to cover up the fact that I was terrified of her?
I was making a fool out of myself, I won’t deny it. I was your typical immature late-adolescent male caught in the tug of the energies that keep our species in existence while he still pretends to himself that he is in control of himself and his energies.
Indeed, all my behavior since my honorable discharge over a year before had been immature. The last mature thing I did was to drive Trudi and her mother and sister from Bamberg to Stuttgart one jump ahead of the cop who wanted to turn them over to the Russians. I won’t hide behind the pretext that I was merely a late-adolescent male trying to escape the tender trap. I added to the stereotype a special twist of dishonesty and perversity.
I had even stopped going to church on Sunday in protest against my treatment at Notre Dame, as if G
od and Monsignor Mugsy and Saint Ursula were to blame for my hall rector.
Mom and Dad never said a word about my refusal to get up on Sunday morning.
I could imagine her saying, “It’s just a stage the poor dear is going through.”
The trouble was that she was right and I knew it even then.
I did not understand then and I still don’t understand what Rosemarie could have seen in that obnoxious little squirt.
So as Halloween approached and Indian summer persisted, as my Yankees beat the Dodgers, Jackie Robinson, the first black player in baseball, was elected National League player of the year (which led to a celebration at the O’Malley supper table), Rosemarie and I went forth on weekends to Skelton Park (pronounced by generations of kids as “skeleton” park because, as it was alleged, skeletons appeared there at night) for my compulsory tennis lessons.
Weekends at the crazy O’Malleys’ were usually chaotic. I had hoped when we left behind our tiny Depression apartment in the ten hundred block on North Menard for a big home on Fair Oaks Avenue in Oak Park my parents would finally put their lives in order. But the confusion, mental and physical, merely multiplied to fill up the available space.
I’m not sure how we earned our label “the crazy O’Malleys.” Possibly it arose from our inability to find things or to come on time or to keep our home in order or to sustain grudges or to live within our means when the means were meager indeed. However, the title fit; everyone else in the family was proud of it.
Need I say I was offended by it? I was not crazy. I kept accurate records and files, I was never late, my quarters were always impeccably neat, I did not forget offenses, and I budgeted my finances carefully and conservatively.
Younger Than Springtime Page 37
