Paul suppressed a yawn. “I suppose so.”
Jack sipped his beer while Paul slipped a dollar bill to the bartender.
“It can be done,” Jack said softly. “It will cost a few dollars, but it can be done.”
Paul’s interest was aroused. “You can get the exams?”
Jack looked around nervously. “With a few dollars, maybe five hundred.”
“Sounds great,” Paul assented. “You want to stop by my house this evening?”
“Sure,” said Jack with feigned unconcern. “I might just do that.”
After Jack left, Paul wondered why he had become involved in such a crackpot scheme. It was fun to outwit the faculty, most of whom were pompous frustrated federal judges. But he wasn’t going to study very hard anyway, so what difference did it make if he knew what the questions were? Besides, even senile Dean Weaver would smell something fishy if Paul Cronin did better than his gentleman’s C.
Paul didn’t often question his own motives. He simply wanted to be a leader of other men, to be recognized when he walked down Michigan Avenue the way he was recognized in the corridors of the law school. It seemed to him to be a perfectly legitimate ambition. And he had all the talent necessary for the task. What the hell, why not aim as high as you could? Paul felt a headache coming on, as almost always happened when he thought too much about himself. He ordered another beer. How much did he really want to “settle down” with Nora and enter politics? He knew there was a lot of work to be done, crime to be fought, racial justice to be pursued, the Russians to be watched—all the things Jack Kennedy was talking about.
The Kennedys did not bother trying to analyze themselves. Why should he?
Halfway through his beer, the headache disappeared. So, too, had all qualms about paying for the theft of the final exams.
* * *
“Sit down, young man,” said Joseph James Motherwell, S.J. “You’re in big trouble.” His eyes widened and his lips pursed as if in wonder at the size of Sean’s trouble. “I want to talk to you about it.”
Joey Jim was a New Deal Democrat from downstate Illinois, a pixielike seventy-year-old who talked with a nasal twang and clipped words as though he were a cowboy. A superb teacher with impeccable academic standards, his childlike face beamed with pleasure whenever he caught a student unprepared. His thin white hair and rimless spectacles made him look like an innocent angel, one that the seminarians had learned could be very dangerous if you hadn’t studied the night before.
“I guess I’m going to be clipped,” Sean said.
“Clipped?” Motherwell beamed with pleasure. “Why, young man, most of the faculty want to expel you.”
“What have I done?” Sean asked. He wondered why he wanted to stay.
“You’ve made a serious mistake, young man.” Motherwell readjusted the sash of his tattered old “Jesuit” cassock. “You’ve been born the son of a rich father who has high ambitions for you.”
“Father Motherwell, Dad is a man of taste and refinement. However, there are a few things that obsess him. One of them is his desire that I become a priest. It may be crazy, but he’s my father and I won’t apologize for him.”
“I don’t think it’s a crazy idea at all,” Motherwell said. “You’re one of the most gifted seminarians to come through this place in the last twenty-five years. You keep the rules, you’re devout, you have great influence on others, you work hard, you have vision and imagination. Perhaps you’re a little too cautious and conservative, but that’s a good way to begin.”
Joey Jim almost never paid compliments. Sean was thunderstruck. “But—”
“But nothing, young man. Not everyone is as envious as the Rector or your classmate Mr. Fitzgibbon.”
“Roger? He’s one of my best friends.”
“Well, now, I don’t know about that.” Motherwell’s eyes were hard. “He was the one who told them about the tailor-made suits your father sends you. They found them in your closet.”
“I’m being clipped for tailor-made suits?” Sean was astonished.
Motherwell tilted his head and became even more of a pixie. “Don’t you think that’s a good reason to clip someone, young man?”
“I don’t wear the suits.”
“They think”—Motherwell pointed a finger at Sean—“that when your father finds out you’ve been clipped, he’ll try to buy ordination for you. Then they’ll persuade the Cardinal to dismiss you. So you’d better not tell your dad, eh?”
“Did you block the expulsion?” Sean asked.
“I wasn’t the only one, young man.” He pursed his lips knowingly. “A group of us said we’d go to the Cardinal and protest.”
Sean stood up. “Why, Father? Why go to all that trouble for me?”
“Well, young man, let’s just say that I like to keep the Rector on his toes.”
* * *
The Second City playhouse was cramped, uncomfortable, and unbearably hot; the drinks were expensive and not very good; and the wit of two young comics named Alan Arkin and Severn Darden was quite beyond Paul Cronin’s comprehension. Yet, when one of his Jewish classmates, Tony Swartz, proposed that they take their dates to the fashionable new comedy review, Paul had quickly assented. Swartz was a class leader and destined for one of the prestigious downtown law firms. Paul was cautious with Jews; he had not known any when he was growing up, but they seemed to fit his father’s stereotype—industrious, bright, and different.
To his surprise Nora seemed to enjoy the Second City wit and to be especially amused by a skit about football returning to the University of Chicago. Nor was she put off by Tony’s slightly bitchy intellectual date, a slender, dark-skinned woman named Muriel. Muriel had made a few disparaging remarks about Catholic virgins when Nora mentioned she was a student at St. Mary’s College but backed off when Nora ignored her in her most aristocratic manner.
Tony had been frankly admiring Nora’s cool beauty. Paul was not sure whether to be proud or offended. He was even more uncertain when Nora banned all talk about Senator Joseph McCarthy, a favorite whipping boy of the law school students: “Let’s not ruin the evening with that man. The Democrats will win a majority in the Senate next autumn and he’ll be finished.”
“Dad wouldn’t like to hear you say that,” he said cautiously.
“Uncle Mike is not likely to hear me say that,” she replied, ending the discussion.
“Did they call you in on the exam theft?” Tony asked Paul as they were returning from a trip to the men’s room.
“Yes, but the Dean admitted that no one who had the questions beforehand could have done so poorly with the answers.” Paul laughed. “I think Jack would have carried it off if he hadn’t been so hungry.”
“I feel badly about Jack being expelled, but he sure messed up the curve.” Tony shook his head.
Paul was glad when they reached the table and the conversation ended. He did not want to remember how, in his panic, he had hinted to the Dean that Jack Coles might have been the source of the advance information.
On the whole, Nora was more of a success with his friends than he had expected. And his good-night kiss did not catch her off guard. Her lips and tongue responded eagerly and her body pressed tightly against his. Catholic virgin she might be, but she was not bashful about necking.
“You’re not a bad kisser, Paul Cronin,” she said appreciatively, her fingers lightly touching his neck.
“I could get to like this too,” he agreed.
“We’ll have to try it again.” She brushed his lips quickly this time and disappeared through the door of the house on Glenwood Drive. The Old Man apparently was off in Paris or Berlin or somewhere.
A nice girl, all right, with a great build and a fierce, prickly temper. Why, he wondered, as he drove back to his apartment near Lincoln Park, was he so wary of her? Probably because she seemed in such complete control of everything, including her passions.
* * *
Outside, the birds were singing and the blue sk
y seemed to be smiling contentedly down on the Rhine River.
“More wine?” Jenny Warren filled Mike Cronin’s glass and returned to the delicate kisses with which she had been teasing and rewarding him. Thank God he was still capable of responding to such a woman, even if she was fifteen years younger.
“I love you, Michael,” she said simply. “I don’t understand you, but I love you and I’d do anything for you.”
“I’ll probably think of something before tonight.” He laughed, trying to hide his wavering emotions.
“I only wish…” The kisses stopped and she leaned back, her fingers tracing a light design on his chest.
“What do you only wish?”
“I only wish I knew what haunts you so I could help make it go away.”
He almost told her.
* * *
“This will make a man out of you, son,” said the Rector, a fat foolish man with long flowing hair. “It will teach you the danger of vanity.”
Vanity was the reason being given for the delay of his ordination to minor orders. Motherwell had won a point, though. The Rector promised Sean that if he stayed out of trouble during the summer, he would catch up with his classmates in the fall. It also seemed that Jimmy McGuire had done the unheard of—defended him to the Rector in the name of his classmates.
“Vanity is a bad thing,” Sean temporized, refusing to admit his guilt to a charge that had been so obscurely made. In the course of the Rector’s rambling explanation, his sin seemed to be virtually nonexistent.
“We all have to be humble, son.” The Rector folded his hands piously on his massive oak desk, inherited from the Cardinal Mundelein era.
“Humility is a good thing.” Sean wondered why he was taking such crap from a seminary at which he did not want to stay. Why was he making such foolish sacrifices when he was not even sure that he really wanted to be a priest? Was it his vocation or his father’s? If they had only thrown him out, the decision to leave would not have been his.
“Some of your teachers had very glowering things to say about you,” the Rector assured him. He meant glowing.
“That was very kind of them,” Sean agreed. Damn you, Motherwell. If it hadn’t been for you, I might be out of here and doing what I want to do.
And what do I want to do?
I want to take Nora away from Paul. That’s what I want to do.
CHAPTER SIX
1954
Sean Cronin glared at the brown spires of St. Mary’s College. He could hardly wait to see Nora, yet at the same time he was resentful that he had been given the job of bringing her home at the end of the school year. It was Jeremy’s day off and Paul was busy with the last details for his summer clerkship in a law office.
“This place is worse than a convent,” Sean muttered to Tom Shields, who was waiting to pick up Maggie Martin.
“Academically it’s excellent, Sean,” the thin studious young medical student replied. “The Christian Culture program that Nora is in provides a first-class education. Much better than the one I received at Notre Dame.”
“All they need is a course in cooking and diaper washing,” Sean sneered.
“Come on, Sean. You don’t mean that. You’re proud of Nora’s intelligence, just as I’m proud of Maggie’s.”
“I’d be even more proud of them if they’d get their asses out here so we could escape from this creepy place.” Sean was still angry from the injustice and the humiliation of the clip, but he was unable to release his pent-up emotions by speaking about it, lest his father hear and make matters even worse.
Finally, the two young women appeared, both clad in the Bermuda shorts that they were strictly forbidden to wear during the school year. Nora’s long auburn hair flowed loosely in the spring breeze. Maggie made a soft, cuddly counterpoint to her tall, austere friend.
Sean packed Nora’s suitcases in the trunk of the Cadillac and quickly drove to the crowded streets of South Bend and then the hot concrete of Highway 20 with its gas-belching trucks and flat northern Indiana farmland. A road to hell, he often told himself, paved with bad intentions.
Finally, he broke his silence. “How can you put up with that cruddy place? Pious nuns simpering around. Rules from the late Middle Ages. Irrelevant education and phony liberal crap.”
Nora had been humming “Three Coins in the Fountain,” as it played on the car radio. “Maybe it is a bit old-fashioned. Yet when Sister Madeleva reads her poetry, I see something to be said for the tradition. It needs to be modernized, but I don’t want it to be lost.”
“Women writing poetry, the acme of irrelevance.”
Nora slammed the radio dial. “What’s going on? You haven’t said a friendly thing since I came out of the dorm. You didn’t kiss me; you didn’t say it was good to see me; you’ve sulked, complained, and sneered. If you’re trying to pick a fight with me, you’ve damn well succeeded. What’s eating you?”
“Nothing,” he snarled. “Not a goddamn thing.”
“All right.” She moved as far as she could from him in the copious front seat of the Cadillac. “I can sulk as long as you can … longer. Until judgment day if I have to. We’re supposed to be friends, and I can wait till you treat me like one again and tell me what those bastards at the seminary have done to you now.”
Nora’s unerring instincts shocked him even more than her language, words he had never heard from her before.
“I’m sure you can outsulk me, Nora,” he said sheepishly. And out poured the story.
She was sympathetic and supportive. “I won’t tell Uncle Mike,” she promised.
“I know you won’t.”
They were quiet for a time, sharing the powerful emotions of their friendship. Nora made him turn off U.S. 20 and drive toward La Porte. It was a different world: trees, shade, old, old homes, front porches, quiet side streets.
“What a lovely little town,” he said.
“It means the Gate, of course,” she said. “It’s the northern end of what was once the Great American Forest. People traveled through here for hundreds of years because it was the gateway to the prairies. Dunes on the north and forests to the south. And what’s more, Mr. Smart-ass Sophisticate Sean Cronin, it’s older than Chicago and fifteen minutes from Oakland Beach. You’re such a terrible conservative you’ve never bothered to come down here and see it.”
Sean laughed. It was good to be with Nora again.
They ate hamburgers at a tiny lunch stand overlooking a small azure lake on which kids were water skiing. Nora boasted that she had learned how to ski in Fort Lauderdale at Easter and offered to teach him. He told her that he had learned the summer before at the villa—a northern Wisconsin prison of sorts to which seminarians were sent during the summer to keep them separate from the laity to whom in a few years they would be ministering—and that he would gladly beat her at a competition.
They both laughed happily.
“They will ordain you a priest, won’t they?” Nora asked after they had ordered ice-cream sodas for dessert.
“Sure, if I want to put up with their bullshit. I half wish they’d thrown me out. Then I wouldn’t have to make my own decision.”
Nora was baffled. “You want to be a priest, don’t you, Sean? You always have.”
“I don’t know.” He was admitting his doubts to her for the first time, indeed the first time to anyone. “I’m not sure. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I wonder if it’s not Dad’s vocation instead of mine.”
“Couldn’t Uncle Mike be supporting the right thing for the wrong reason?”
“Maybe so. I’m so confused I don’t know. If they’d thrown me out, I would have had a sign from God.”
“God doesn’t work that way.” She dismissed his heresy decisively. “Anyway, what would you do if you were thrown out and cheated of making your own choice?”
“Probably take you away from Paul,” he said impulsively.
Nora almost choked on her soda. “Oh, Sean, I’m not Paul’s. I’m not anyone’s. N
o one is going to take me away from anybody. Besides, if you should ever marry, you don’t deserve to be stuck with somebody like me. You would need someone a lot better.” She grinned impishly and went back to her soda.
You declare your love for a woman and she thinks it’s a joke. Serves you right, Sean thought to himself. “You are going to marry Paul, though?”
“He’s lots of fun and he’s a good kisser.” She grinned again. “And he’s sweet to me, and it will make Uncle Mike happy … and I think I love him. Don’t worry, Sean, I’ll make up my own mind.”
Sean kept his fingers firmly on the wheel of the Caddy all the way back to Chicago. He was afraid that if he freed even one arm he would embrace Nora, kiss her, and then try to hold her in his arms for the rest of his life. It was an excellent idea. Unfortunately, he had offered to marry her and she had not even heard. It was also against what the spiritual director would have called “God’s Holy Will.”
* * *
The enormous front lawn of the Cronin house on Glenwood Drive was perfect for a garden party. Long green canopies were hung, tables filled with filets and lobsters and ham and corned beef were arranged around the lawn, three bars were in constant operation, serving the best wine and whiskey that money could buy. A five-piece string orchestra played Viennese and Irish music, while waiters in formal dress passed through the crowd, politely offering their trays of delicacies. God cooperated with a glorious Saturday afternoon in June.
All this was in honor of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the man of the hour for most Irish Catholics. Everyone in the neighborhood, as well as hordes of Mike’s business associates, had been invited. They all came, no matter what they thought of “Tail Gunner Joe,” because they did not want to risk offending Michael Cronin. The only exceptions were a few local Democratic politicians, who did not know whether it was safe to risk the disapproval of their new chairman, County Clerk Richard J. Daley, an unknown factor thus far in Chicago political life.
Sean was introduced to the Senator, whom he instantly sized up as a lush who needed a shave. How could his father see political greatness in the man? Paul, who was sticking like glue to the Senator, seemed unperturbed by the guest of honor’s bleary eyes and slurred voice.
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