Golden Years

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Would you be thinking I’m an ignorant Yank and meself one of the Tipperary Ryans.”

  “And yourself not looking like a rogue at all, at all!”

  We were alluding to the Irish saying that in the County Tip all the Ryans were rogues, but not all the rogues were Ryans.

  “Have a good nap on the way home, Chuck,” Rosemarie instructed me. “It will be a busy time.”

  “Organizing things.”

  She had the good grace not to tell me that Mary Margaret already had them organized.

  I sipped at the Jameson’s Special Reserve, then remembered Seamus.

  “Ma’am!”

  The young woman who had only us to worry about on the trip across came quickly.

  “Yes, Ambassador?”

  “Where’s Seamus?”

  “Coming up the steps, sir. I am Kathleen, by the way.”

  “Your bags are loaded, Ambassador. Here’s the checks.”

  I almost asked him if he were sure. Rosemarie, however, would be upset if I did that.

  “Thank you much, Seamus,” she said.

  “Come back!”

  “Count on it!”

  I returned to my Jameson’s, much of which seemed to have evaporated.

  “I’ve got all their names, Chuck. “We’ll write nice letters about them on the way back.”

  “And send them copies of the book.”

  “Autographed.”

  The woman thought of everything.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to take your drink, Ambassador,” Kathleen said to me.

  “’Tis no problem”—I emptied the tumbler—“at all, at all.”

  “’Tis yourself that has the strong stomach.”

  “Don’t count on it,” my wife warned her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Rosemarie

  The second tumbler of a double Jameson’s, straight up, because he wasn’t an ignorant Yank, went far beyond my husband’s usual quota. However, he needed a long nap to prepare for what we’d encounter when we arrived at the Georgian house on New England Avenue. Mary Margaret had certainly imposed some order on the chaos, but Chuck would be expected to whip everything into final shape, no matter how tired he was. And all the while his poor heart was breaking, just like everyone else’s, of course, but his relationship with his father was special in a way that no one could quite describe.

  I knew for sure that his skills as a lover were absorbed from Vangie, not that anything had ever been said. Chuck had grasped the passion between his mother and father in the ordinary matters of life and modeled himself after his father’s style. My sons, tall black Irish—who looked like Union raiders riding under Phil Sheridan (as had one of their ancestors) had told me separately about the chocolate ice cream metaphor.

  “Do you like being chocolate ice cream?” each asked.

  “Well, it’s only a metaphor and I’m a lot more than chocolate ice cream, but, it’s not a bad metaphor.”

  “What kind of ice cream is Dad?” Kevin Patrick had asked.

  “An endless malted milk with whipped cream.” I replied promptly. Only later did I realize the possible oral connotations the metaphor implied. Well it was good for young men to realize that their parents had an active sex life.

  The myth that Chucky was a hapless little urchin protected by a beautiful mother was part of the game he played when we were traveling. It was true that he was a poor traveler. It was also true that I was more efficient and quick-thinking when we were on the road. Finally, it was true that I didn’t trust him not to lose himself on a trip, or so I said. He argued that I was afraid that he would be unfaithful. I laughed and said he wouldn’t dare. He admitted that. The real reason I went along on the trip and took care of him was that I missed him when he was gone. Also he was fun even when he could barely keep his eyes open. Witness his performance at the US embassy. Chucky was a great act. I loved him, even when he was exhausted.

  Both Tanya and Kathleen whispered that he was adorable, which of course he was, but he was mine and the bitches shouldn’t have sized him up. Well, they were nice young women actually and I should feel flattered that they admire my cute little husband.

  Also when I traveled with him there was more romance than I would have experienced if I had stayed home while he wandered about the world. Sometimes, like the night before in the Cosmos Hotel, it was quite spectacular. Malted milk with whipped cream—and two butter cookies.

  Sometimes even dark chocolate as I described (to myself) the pleasure when he brought me orgasm by highly creative play with my boobs.

  I chased away erotic fantasies and thought about his father, poor dear man, as the Good April called him—and everyone else. My own father was a psychopath who had molested me. I hated him with all my heart and soul, though now I think I finally have the grace of forgiveness. Usually. So John the Evangelist O’Malley had become my foster father and delighted in me as much as he did in my inseparable friend, his real daughter Peg, née Margaret Mary.

  “I don’t want to take your father away from you, Peg.”

  “You know me well enough, Rosie, to know that I’m not the jealous kind.”

  “Sure?

  “Sure!”

  So, however belatedly, I had a paternal role model. Maggie Ward, my permanent shrink, had told me early on that he was the most important one in the family, more than Peg and more even than Chucky. “You needed a father figure and you moved in with a family that had the most attractive father on the block, a good and gentle and tender man, a man of whom you’d never be afraid. That was your salvation.”

  “No accident that I married his son?”

  “What do you think?”

  I had never thought of it that way, but I told her that she was probably right.

  I had never thanked him properly. Or the Good April either. I just moved in. Indeed when after the war they bought the big old house on New England Avenue in Oak Park, there was a room designated as “Rosie’s room” where I could stay all night if I wanted. I had wanted very often. My father had learned by then not to try to control my life.

  “It’s too bad a night, Rosie dear,” April would say, “for you to drive home.” It mattered not in the least that it be a lovely early June or mid-October evening.

  I would pretend to myself that it made no difference that when Chuck came home from Bamberg, he slept in the same house. He was at the far end of the corridor and we hardly ever ran into each other. At that time I loved him, but I did not want to sleep with him or anyone else. Or so I said to myself. By that time my hormones were active enough that I should have been thinking of sleeping with someone.

  Well, one night after a dance at the parish sponsored by the Catholic war vets, Chuck actually came into my room after only a token knock. I was wearing the black corset with which I had punished myself at the dance (as we did in those longforgotten days). I was brushing my hair and trying to make up my mind whether I really was in love with Charles Cronin O’Malley. Was it only an adolescent crush? Or …

  He came in, kissed me, touched my bare shoulder gently, assured me that everything would be all right, and departed. Talk about marriage and then an engagement ring would come much later. But that night I knew I would belong to him forever.

  So far so good.

  Maggie Ward insists that I was almost preternaturally wise to choose the O‘Malleys, indeed the Crazy O’Malleys.

  “I certainly didn’t do it consciously,” I said.

  “We know that doesn’t matter, don’t we?”

  Good taste in a foster father, good taste in a lover? Or just plain dumb luck? Didn’t matter.

  Yet when I had all these insights I was a married woman with children. How could I explain to Vangie and April what I had done? They had known it all for a long time. So I had never really thanked them. And now it was too late to thank them both.

  I put down my copy of Confederacy of Dunces and wept. Silently and calmly for a long time.

  And prayed.

>   Dear God, I don’t know why You’ve ever bothered with me. I was a spoiled, obnoxious brat, the kind of young woman who was barred from the eighth-grade May Crowning, until April went to see Monsignor Branigan. I was a troublemaker then and probably still am. Maggie Ward, bless her please, says I chose the Crazy O’Malleys. But You chose them for me too. I didn’t deserve them. I still don’t. They saved my life as You well know. I could say “thank you” every minute for however many years You still intend for me and still not adequately express my gratitude. I am sorry I never really told John the Evangelist O’Malley how much I loved him. Now it is too late. I hope You give me a chance in whatever world awaits us. Forgive me for my negligence.

  This will be a difficult time for my husband and the whole clan. The joy with which they have lived meant that they didn’t think about death very much. They knew it would happen. They knew they wouldn’t be ready for it and they’re not. These will be tough days for them. Please help them all. Please help me too. Help me even to see them all through their terrible grief, especially this mysterious and wonderful little guy to whom You have entrusted me.

  Have I covered everything? If I haven’t, please forgive me.

  The O’Malleys even taught me how to forgive when they forgave me for being the fall-down drunk I had become. So right now and permanently I forgive my mother and father. You forgave them, I know. It’s my job to forgive too, so that I can reflect Your forgiveness.

  Excuse me. I have to cry some more before I can keep praying.

  I’m back now.

  The odd thing is that my parents and the O‘Malleys were great friends in the days before they were married and when John E. O’Malley was helping to design the lower level of Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago and riding in silver armor with the Black Horse Troop, there were scores of pictures of them wearing old-fashioned swimsuits at the Commodore Barry “country club” at Twin Lakes. They were so young and happy, their whole lives stretching out in front of them with a future promising peace and happiness. Even my father, even then a little guy losing his hair, seemed happy. I could not see him as the same evil man who almost ruined my life.

  My mother and April were younger than Mary Margaret is now, both of them knockouts. April really did look like a flapper, though I wasn’t sure what a flapper was. A harmless hairstyle mostly. I wondered why Helen, my mom, had ever married my father. Maybe her home life, a subject about which April would never go into detail, was hellish. I pray for them all, the three dead and the one still clinging to life. When we went through Vangie’s paintings in the basement, neatly organized and cataloged by my husband, we were astonished at how many of them were of Helen and April. They were luminous canvases, copied from pictures with colors filled in, the same sort of work that he had done in his famous Rom Women.

  Vangie had far more talent than he had realized then—or even than he realized at the end of his life. It was too bad he had to wait so long for recognition. Better late than never, I guess.

  “Poor dear man,” his wife had said when the catalogue of his retrospective appeared. “He was really obsessed with the bodies of girls when he was young.”

  “Fortunately,” my husband commented, “the subsequent generation did not inherit that flaw.”

  There will be hard days ahead. The O’Malleys will bury their dead, dry their tears, and go on with life. That’s the Irish Catholic thing to do. However, the mourning will go on, more painfully perhaps because it is suppressed. They’ll need help. Especially April and Peg and my beloved Chucky. They’ve taken care of me all my life. Now I must take care of them. And gently. Not easy. Please help me.

  I looked at my peacefully sleeping husband. Poor dear man.

  I nodded over, closed Confederacy of Dunces, removed my reading glasses, and slipped into sleep. My last thought was to wonder what Joe Raftery wanted, poor dear man.

  I woke up over Ontario as the 747 glided toward Chicago. Clear sky, bright autumn sun, trees changing color beneath us. Nature was dying too.

  “Would you ever like a drop of tea and a bun and maybe a sweet?”

  She pronounced “bun” the Irish way as in “boon.”

  “Thank you, Kathleen. Give my sweet to himself.”

  She was so young and fresh and I was groggy and blearyeyed. And almost fifty.

  I leaned over Chuck and shook him. He turned his back to me and grumbled, “Go ’way.”

  “Time to wake up!” I said brightly.

  He opened his eyes and glared at me.

  “Are we there yet, Mommy?”

  “Half hour out of Chicago. Have a nice nap?”

  “Drunken dreams.” He closed his eyes firmly.

  “Your friend Kathleen is preparing a snack for us. You can have my sweet.”

  “What kind of sweet?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see. I told her that she should give mine to you.”

  He sat up and rubbed his eyes.

  “I’m a wreck, Rosemarie.”

  “So am I.”

  “I dread the days ahead of us.”

  He sneezed. Bad sign.

  The “bun” was an English muffin slathered with strawberry jam and clotted cream.

  “Is this the sweet?” Chucky demanded as if he were the victim of a shell game.

  “No,” Kathleen said. “It’s the bun. But you have to eat it first before I bring on the sweet.”

  I ate half of my bun and sipped my tea while Chucky wolfed down his. Then Kathleen produced a chocolate sundae with whipped cream and nuts. Chucky not so much ate it as inhaled it.

  “A dish of ice cream,” I remarked, “should be consumed with the same delicacy as the body of a woman.”

  He stopped and glared at me.

  “I should have sworn those bozos to secrecy. Besides, I was talking about chocolate ice cream. Besides a second time, as you well know, there are other and more vehement ways of consuming a woman.”

  “Besides a third time there’s another one coming.”

  “Another woman?”

  “Another chocolate sundae.”

  “Be thankful for small favors.”

  “One voracious woman is more than enough.”

  The plane slipped over Lake Michigan and the Chicago skyline, pastel in the sunlight, materialized on the horizon. Even though Chicago wasn’t its home, the plane seemed happy to be home just as we were.

  “Most beautiful city in the world,” Chucky murmured as we crossed the shoreline. “Somehow I don’t want to come back to it just now.”

  “It’s not going to be easy, especially April and Peg.”

  “Sad times, Rosemarie, sad times.”

  “I’ll be with you, Chuck.”

  “Thank God for that,” he said, leaning over to kiss me and smearing my lips with chocolate sauce.

  Our luggage appeared immediately and we dragged it through the doors of the arrival lounge. A girl child of five years with curly red hair jumped up and down and screamed, “Mommy! Daddy!”

  Behind her a dazzling young Celtic goddess in a fawncolored autumn shift waited, a half smile on her face. I caught my breath as I always did when I saw my “intermediate” daughter.

  Chucky picked up Shovie, spun her around, and kissed her.

  “Don’t ever go away again, Daddy!”

  I hugged Mary Margaret.

  “You look wonderful, Rosie,” she said. “Chucky looks like someone the cat wouldn’t drag in.”

  “He has one of his colds!”

  “Oh, that!”

  “And you, Mary Margaret, look like a luminous Celtic goddess.”

  “That’s what Joe Moran says.”

  “He still hanging around?”

  “Now and then.”

  Joey Moran was a nice Fenwick boy whom Mary Margaret described as her “occasional beau.” Chuck and I both approved of him. Noisily so.

  Then Shovie embraced me and warned me that I was never to leave home again. “Momeg was so lonesome for you.”

  Shovie was t
he only one in the family who could still use her sister’s teenage name.

  Chuck embraced Mary Margaret.

  “Chucky, you look like something the cat refused to drag in. Rosie wear you out?”

  “She’s an absolutely ruthless tour guide. No respect for a worn-out old man.”

  “That’s because she’s not fifty yet.”

  “She tells me that.”

  Mary Margaret lifted one of her mother’s heavy bags.

  “Uncle Vince is driving around outside and will pick us up.”

  Ms. Take Charge was still in charge, even if the big tuna had come home. I gave Shovie my purse so she could help.

  In Mary Margaret’s world, everyone was assigned a proper title—Uncle Vince, Grandpa, Grandma, Father Ed—but with us she was on a first-name basis. Her big sister, April Rosemary had once protested this in her days of righteousness.

  “That’s all right when you’re a little kid, but you should show more respect now.”

  “She uses our names respectfully, dear. Don’t we call April and Vangie by their names?”

  “That’s different.”

  Our two older daughters were reconciled now, more or less. Yet Mary Margaret thought her sister had been a creep for slipping away into the drug-and-rock-music underground and causing so much worry. April Rosemary in her heart thought that her sister was a selfish brat.

  “How’s Aunt Peg?” I asked as we walked out into soft September sunset.

  “Pretty numb, worst of them all. She just sits next to Grandma, like she’s clinging to her. That’s the way daughters are when their fathers die. Which means, Chucky, that you must get over your cold and not die for another fifty years.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You too, Rosie. I don’t like it that parents have to die.”

  “Even kids have to die sometime,” I said. “They get old too.”

  “I know,” my daughter said solemnly.

  Uncle Vince’s Cadillac rolled up as we dodged taxis that seemed bent on running us over and crossed the street. Vince is a great big, dark lineman, all-American from Notre Dame who by enormous effort and under orders from Peg has just managed to stay in condition. He was a behind-the-scenes operative in the late Mayor’s government and now that Jane Byrne is the mayor, a successful LaSalle Street lawyer. The papers describe him as “clout heavy” even though his wing of the party is currently out of office. He is in fact a sweetheart, though it has taken some effort from Peg to persuade him that she didn’t think him inferior because he was a Sicilian.