“She won’t talk to me.… I thought you might be able to persuade her to give me another chance.”
“What makes you think Nora will listen to me?”
Paul seemed surprised at the question. “You’re a priest, aren’t you? Of course she’ll listen to you. Aren’t priests supposed to help people put their marriages back together again?”
Sean sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”
* * *
It was a crisp, sunny August morning in the middle 70s, with a light breeze blowing off the lake and a faint touch of autumn in the air. Mary and Eileen were playing on the beach. Nora and Noreen were building sand castles. Sean watched them silently for some time from the bottom of the stairs. There was no doubt that Noreen was the foreman on this construction job.
“Uncle!” She gestured with her small shovel.
Nora, a sweat shirt over her bikini, glanced up. “I suppose I should have expected you.”
Sean joined her by the sand castle. “Run along and play with Mary and Eileen,” Nora instructed Noreen. “Uncle Sean is going to preach me a sermon.”
Sean sat next to her on the beach towel. She drew her long, elegant legs up beneath her chin and said calmly, “Okay, let’s have it.”
“I’m not going to preach a sermon, Nora. You have every right to be furious.”
“Your brother is a spoiled, self-indulgent little boy. The fool can’t even understand why I’m angry.” Her voice was flat and hard.
“There are times in every marriage when things are difficult—”
“Now comes the part in the sermon about the importance of commitment. You always were very good, Sean, in lecturing about commitments.”
“I believe in them,” said Sean. “Human life is impossible unless we keep our commitments. Paul needs you. He says he’ll fall apart without you, and I’m sure that’s true.”
“Of course it’s true,” she snapped. “Right now I’d like to see him fall apart.”
“Don’t you love him?”
Nora dug at the sand with a tiny twig. “Love him? What’s love? I’ve produced three children that are his. I have some feelings of affection for him. I suppose I’ll take him back when I calm down. You’re the expert on love, Sean. Does all that add up to love? Or does it merely add up to making the best of a bad bargain?”
Sean felt enormous tenderness for her. He wanted to put his arm around her shoulder and reassure her. Instead, he said, “That’s just the way it appears now, Nora. It will get better.”
“The hell it will.”
“Paul says there won’t be any more—”
“He probably means that promise. Maybe he’ll even keep it for a few weeks.”
Sean took a deep breath. “Nora, there’s no way I can say this delicately, so I’m not going to try. Is the relationship sexually fulfilling to you?”
Her eyes turned hard. “None of your goddamn business.”
“I know it’s none of my business, but I’m making it my business.”
“You want me to turn into a sex kitten and compete with his women?”
“You’re a passionate woman, Nora. Your life will be desperately unfulfilling if you don’t find an outlet for those passions.”
“Listen to the priest turn sex expert.” Her words dripped with sarcasm. “Do you want me to use Paul for sexual kicks the way he uses me? Is that what you want? Very smart of you, because then I’ll be cemented to him so strongly that the Cronin family won’t have to worry about a scandal. Sex as cement, that’s what you have in mind, isn’t it?”
“Sex as love,” said Sean hesitantly.
“Love doesn’t enter into it at all,” she said sadly. “Go away, Sean. You preached your sermon. You invaded my privacy, undressed me, and made me look at myself so that I don’t like what I see. I hope your brother and your father are happy with the results.”
Sean stood up and brushed the sand off his slacks. “I didn’t do it for them, Nora.”
“Go away,” she said. “I’ll take him back when I calm down. Maybe she’d be better for him than I am. I don’t know. Anyway, I made a commitment, and I’ll stand by it till he walks out on me. Now go away and leave me alone.”
* * *
That night, Sean found in the bottom of the drawer in his desk in the cathedral rectory a battered brown notebook that had once been his spiritual diary. It was a long time since he had made an entry.
In the middle course of life, as Dante said—well, maybe not quite the middle course yet—I do not like what I see. My father is becoming a difficult old man, demanding, unpredictable. My brother, whom I worshiped most of my life, has been well described by his wife as a spoiled, self-indulgent little boy. Nora is locked into a life of unhappiness and frustration, and I’m making a mess out of my job. I’m no more confident that you’re out there listening than I’ve ever been, probably a little less confident. Not believing in you, I tried to believe in the Church; and now the Church I believed in is collapsing all around me. Not able to make a commitment to you, I made a commitment to the priesthood; and the priesthood is crumbling. I wonder if I ought not to leave like everyone else? I wonder if commitments—any commitment and every commitment—are not tragic mistakes.
During a lull on the Sunday of the Labor Day weekend, while Nora was on the golf course and his daughters were firmly supervised by Maggie and Tom Shields on the beach, Paul managed to sneak a phone call to Chris Waverly at her Martha’s Vineyard holiday retreat.
“Hi,” she said. “Where have you been hiding?”
Paul started making excuses, but Chris cut him off. “Which of us is it going to be?” she said. “You’ve got to choose.”
“She’s my wife and the mother of my children, Chris. I can’t leave her.”
“You will sooner or later,” Chris said. “We’re two of a kind, Paul. You can’t do without me, and I can’t do without you.”
As Paul talked to Chris on the phone, there was a strong pull in her direction. He knew that when the phone conversation was over, however, the opposite tug would be irresistible again. “She’ll never let me go,” he said defensively.
“You mean you’re too much of a coward to try to break away.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Chris.” He tried to sound reasonable and adult.
“Have it your own way, Paul, but don’t think you’re going to get away from me so easily.”
“What do you mean?” Paul sensed the Chinese bayonet in his gut once again.
“I mean that you can’t discard me like yesterday’s news. Sooner or later, I’m going to make you sorry for what you’ve done to me.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
1965
In August, Sean received a phone call from Elizabeth Hanover, who wanted to talk with him. He proposed lunch or the cathedral rectory. She responded by suggesting that they meet on neutral ground—the Lincoln Park lagoon.
She wore dark brown slacks and a beige silk shirt. She showed faint signs of nervousness, unusual in such a normally cool woman.
They sat down on an old bench at the edge of a small green meadow. A few yards from them toddlers were playing under the careful eyes of young mothers in shorts and halters. “Are you on my side, or are you against me?” she asked bluntly.
“I’m on your side, of course. And priests don’t bite, Elizabeth.”
She laughed and relaxed. “Sorry. I’ve never talked to a priest before.”
“What happens when you have one for a stepson?”
A faint tinge of color appeared in her cheeks. “I’m committed to your father, Sean. Does that offend you, a mistress committed to a man?”
“I want Dad to be happy. I’ve never seen him as happy as he is with you.”
“Does it offend you that I’m your father’s mistress?” She was testing him, poking at him to make sure he was human.
“You couldn’t possibly offend me, Elizabeth.”
“I think I’d like to have you for a stepson. If only I could get Ja
ne out of the way.”
“You think she’s an obstacle?” Sean was surprised.
Elizabeth frowned. “I don’t know how or why, but she has a strange hold on Michael.”
“Perhaps we Cronins are more trouble than we’re worth.”
“No. From the first moment Michael came into that committee meeting, he owned me. Chemistry? Love at first sight? I don’t know and I don’t care.”
Lucky Dad, Sean thought with a touch of envy. “He’s mellowing, it seems to me.”
“I met him at the right time. He doesn’t have to dominate women any more, and I think he’s giving up trying to run his sons’ careers. He’s letting go of things that are good to let go of. So he can live longer.”
“With you to love him,” Sean agreed.
Elizabeth Hanover’s tears were like everything else about her—direct and straightforward. Sean put his arm around her until the tears were over.
“I’ve never been hugged by a priest before.” She wiped away the last traces of her weeping.
“If you have a priest stepson, you’d better get used to it.”
That night Sean dreamed about Mary Eileen. He awoke and groggily wondered if he had had this same dream every night. No, this one was different. His mother was still alive, but now his mother was Elizabeth. Then his father took her away from him, just as he had taken away Mary Eileen.
That couldn’t have been in the dream before.
Sean did not go back to sleep.
* * *
Jane Cronin was buried at the time the Watts riots were taking place in Los Angeles and there was concern that the same sort of thing might occur on the South Side of Chicago.
At her instructions, the Mass was said at St. Ann’s Church on Garfield Boulevard, now renamed after St. Charles Luwanga, an African martyr, a fact of which Jane was probably unaware or she would have changed her will.
There was some unease as the little group of mourners filed into the old church, even though the young pastor insisted that the neighborhood would never be another Watts. Nora wondered how the dilapidated old building could possibly ever have been an elegant church for the well-to-do lace-curtain Irish of the turn of the century. According to Sean, one of the pastors was quite mad and had not opened the parish hall to parishioners for twenty years. Now the black members of the parish were enjoying it immensely. God’s ways were sometimes ironic.
Paul, Marty Hoffman, Ed Connaire, and Tom Shields were pallbearers. A badly shaken Mike Cronin leaned on Nora for support as they walked down the aisle of the church, with Eileen and Mary trailing behind them.
Sean’s face was an unreadable mask, as though he were trying to find some meaning in his aunt’s long, unhappy life.
To the bitter end, Jane had persisted in her animosity toward Nora, despite Nora’s daily visits to Little Company of Mary Hospital. Nora was certain that Aunt Jane knew a secret from the family past, something that could hurt Sean badly. There were angry and knowing hints the last days in the hospital. In fact, a few hours before she died, Jane emerged from her half coma and said, “Things are never what they seem, Nora, never what they seem. Don’t forget that. You’ll all die like I’m dying, lonely and afraid.” It sounded like a curse.
“What do you mean, Aunt Jane?” Nora felt a hand of ice momentarily touch her heart.
“I’m the only one who knows everything. Ed Connaire thinks he knows, but he doesn’t know everything. It will all come out some day, and then we’ll see how proud and mighty your priest really is.”
Recalling the words, Nora shuddered as the body of Jane Cronin was committed to the earth from which she came. She resolved that she would corner Ed and find out what he was holding back.
After the final prayer, she told the two girls to talk to Uncle Sean and darted back into the group of mourners to find Ed Connaire. She had hesitated at first because of the occasion, but then she steeled herself and drew him away from the open grave.
“There were a lot of mysterious remarks in the last few days at the hospital,” she began without preliminaries. “I know you haven’t told us everything. I want to hear it all now.”
The stocky contractor’s hair was white, but his eyes were lively and his face almost unlined. “I’ve told you almost everything, Nora,” he said.
“I want to know what’s not covered by the ‘almost.’ I’ve got to know.”
“Let sleeping dogs lie.”
She shook her head. “If she’s said those terrible things to me, she’s said them to Sean. You know he won’t let sleeping dogs lie. I should be prepared.”
Connaire nodded. “You’re right, I suppose. It was such a long time ago. No one meant anything bad.”
“Ed,” she said. There was a warning note in her voice.
“All right, Nora. There never was saying ‘no’ to you.… You see, Mary Eileen was a very sick woman after Paul was born. Always misty and vague. Well, one of the priests from New Albany stopped in often to see her at Oakland Beach when your father was away. They become good friends, very close. Too close, to hear Jane tell it. Then Mary Eileen became pregnant with Sean. No one was ever sure—”
“My God,” Nora said in dismay.
“Personally, I think he’s Mike’s son, and Mike would never tolerate any other suggestion. Anyway, Mike had the young priest transferred to the other end of the state of Michigan.”
“There couldn’t have been anything.” Nora leaned against a large burial monument.
Connaire cracked his massive knuckles. “Poor Mary Eileen thought there was. She was even more—er—depressed after Sean’s birth. She tried to smother him in his crib one night. Mike stopped her just in time. She said Sean was a child of sin and God wanted him destroyed.… Nora, I swear that’s all there is. She died in the car crash not long after that. I hope you won’t tell Sean.”
“Of course not.” She was numb. “I hope he never finds out. I’ll be ready if he does, though. Thanks, Ed.”
Her daughters bounced over to her then, fascinated by the dramas written out on the headstones. Absently Nora listened to their babble, while she studied the inscription on a discreetly expensive monument at the edge of the Cronin plot:
Mary Eileen Morrisey Cronin
1908–1934
Beloved Wife and Mother
She Left Us Too Soon
Twenty-six years old, four years younger than I am, Nora thought. She would be only in her middle fifties today.
Elizabeth Hanover’s elegant dark head disappeared into one of the limousines. Nora thought, What would Mary Eileen think of you?
And of me?
* * *
Mike Cronin poured his second drink. Elizabeth would not approve, but she was not around tonight to approve or disapprove. He had told her he wanted to be alone with his grief, and she had quietly agreed. The two years with her had been the best since Mary Eileen. No, the best since his mother died. So much peace and warmth. Now he was free to marry her. Jane was dead and no one else would stop him. Tomorrow he would ask her. Sean would do the honors. Sean and Elizabeth got along famously.
Deep down in the darkest corner of his soul was a voice that told him that, Jane or not, he could never marry Elizabeth. He groaned aloud. Goddamn it, it wasn’t fair.
Still, it was the way things were. He would call her tomorrow and tell her that they had better not see each other for a few weeks. Ease out gradually.
Maybe it had all been a mistake. Maybe he should have never listened to Jane. God, how can a man know what to do? At the time it had seemed the right thing to do, the only thing to do. Now he was no longer certain of anything.
BOOK V
Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God still, and trust in me. There are many rooms in my Father’s house; if there were not, I would not have told you. I’m going now to prepare a place for you; after I’ve gone and prepared your place, I shall return to take you with me, so that where I am you may be too.
—John 14:1–3
CH
APTER NINETEEN
1966
Nora Cronin celebrated her tenth wedding anniversary with her three daughters at Oakland Beach. She played golf in the morning, and in the afternoon, keeping one eye on the three little girls frolicking on the beach, she read Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response. She decided with some dissatisfaction that her own responses were distinctly below normal.
The thought was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone which she had installed on the sundeck. It was Sean, calling to wish her a happy anniversary from O’Hare Airport.
“Well, thanks for remembering,” she said.
“Has Paul called?” he asked.
“Oh, sure. He called from London. London doesn’t count on your tenth anniversary. Everybody’s deserted me. You’re going to Rome. Tom’s already over there with Maggie. And my husband is on a junket in London. I’m relegated to the backwaters of southern Michigan. Serves me right, I guess.”
“You don’t sound brokenhearted,” Sean said.
“Of course not. Anyway, thanks for calling. I’ll be looking forward to seeing you in Rome week after next.”
“I wanted to ask you about that. I’m not so sure that dragging me along is a good idea. Maybe you and Paul can use the time alone—”
“Don’t be silly, Sean. You’ll make a good tour guide, and Paul has his heart set on the old threesome being together again.”
The truth was, Nora thought as she hung up, she was as ambivalent as Sean about the trip to Europe. She wanted to see Italy. Uncle Mike had forbidden her to tour Europe when she was in college: “too dangerous for a young girl.” Then she had not wanted to leave the children alone when they were young. But Paul’s desire for the “old threesome” to travel through Italy together worried her. As she and Paul drifted further and further apart, the outside walls of the tightly sealed house in her brain labeled “Sean Cronin” had started crumbling. She was not so much afraid of Sean as she was afraid of herself with him. Perhaps it was the result of having passed her thirtieth birthday.
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