Golden Years

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “We patrons of lost causes never do that. We’re afraid we might be wrong.”

  I shivered again. What if, living or dead, Bride was trying to tell her husband something? I’d not want to meet her in the world to come and have to explain why I hadn’t listened.

  “Would you like an after-lunch drink?” I asked.

  “I stay away from the stuff these days, Chuck. I don’t trust myself much anymore.”

  The poor man, devastated by the loss of his family and tormented by voices surging up from his unconscious. I had to offer to help. If I didn’t, Rosemarie would be unhappy with me.

  I was the one who needed a drink, but I’d better not.

  “What do you want me to do, Joe?” I asked.

  “I don’t know … Her instructions are always vague. Perhaps I should say that she doesn’t seem tormented so much as insistent.”

  I was supposed to find a woman and child who were probably dead or who had disappeared into a misty world between life and death. All because people believed that I had actually won that game against Mount Carmel.

  “I brought along a file for you to look at,” Joe continued. “I don’t know why. I had to do something …”

  He removed a bulging accordion file from a large case, the kind of sample case that many men carry around and that make me glad that all I have to carry is rolls of film.

  “I asked a security analyst from the Rand Corporation to collect all the reports that we had and try to put them together in a single narrative. This contains his narrative and some of the supporting materials.”

  “Did she have any relationships before you?”

  “She was thirty and we lived in La La land. She lived with one man, another immigrant, for several years in her twenties. He didn’t want anything ‘permanent’ so she dropped him. We checked him out. Harmless intellectual. There were one or two others. Nothing serious, though as I’ve learned there is no such thing as sex which is not serious … It’s all in here.”

  He lifted the file tentatively. No way I could refuse.

  “I’ll read every word of it, Joe. So will Rosemarie. She’s much better at this kind of thing than I am.”

  Joe sighed with relief.

  “I can’t tell you how grateful I am, Chuck. This will be a tremendous burden off my shoulders. I won’t worry anymore that I’m not doing what Bride wants me to do. I don’t expect you will find her and Sam. Deep down I know they’re dead, as I guess I’ve said before. I hope I can find some peace and get on with my life.”

  “Any prospects?” I asked cautiously.

  “If there are, I haven’t been able to see them.”

  A curious way of putting it.

  As I drove up Harlem Avenue, the steady beat of rain warned that summer was taking her leave. I had never minded winter in Chicago till my parents had bought the house in Tucson. One did not have to shiver between Thanksgiving and Easter. Yet I was a Chicagoan, even if my son Jimmy called me a suburban parasite, and a few weeks away from it were more than enough.

  The gray chill day fit my mood. Too much death. Joe’s wife and daughter were certainly dead, probably brutalized and raped by California hippies. I didn’t want to study their death right after my father’s. Yet I had promised Joe.

  The truth is that I did score that touchdown against Carmel in the mud of Hansen Park Stadium on Central Avenue in 1945. It was a mistake, or pure dumb luck, as much of the rest of my life was. I don’t remember spearing Ed Murray on the following kickoff, however. Well, Ed has made the charge so often that I kind of remember it.

  So I had to study his files. But only after my father was buried.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Chuck

  The rehearsal of the Ave Maria was a success even if little April Anne Nettleton had a bit of a hard time staying on key. It began with Madame my wife singing the old Gregorian hymn a cappella. Then Peg struck a key on her violin and the whole group sang it through, then repeated it all in three-part harmony—men, women, and kids. The last were the two Nettletons, Johnny and April Anne and the two O’Malley-Lopezes, Maria Rosa and Juan Carlos. Our own Siobhan Marie, technically the aunt of these rug rats, added volume and the perfect pitch Rosemarie and I expect in our offspring. Rosemarie ended it.

  We did it several times and the Good April nodded her approval.

  “The little kids make the choir even better,” she said, perhaps with more love than accuracy.

  “There’ll still be people coming up to Communion.” Rosemarie glanced at her watch. Then we’ll try to sing Salve Regina as an encore. In Gregorian. The kids don’t know it, so they don’t have to sing.”

  The final Salve is, I think, the most poignant and beautiful prayer in the whole Catholic tradition.

  “Now,” Grandma said, “I yield to my grandson, soon-to-be Dr. Kevin Patrick O’Malley.”

  Back when they were preteens, “the boys,” as we called them collectively because they all seemed to have been stamped out of the same genetic mold, purchased secondhand horns, a sax, a trombone, and a trumpet. I had introduced them to Vangie’s old friend Louis Armstrong in Cologne when we were there for Jack Kennedy and, after listening to him, they became jazz enthusiasts. They signed up “Little Gianni” Antonelli, and later a teenage Latina vocalist called Maria Elena Lopez. Sometimes Rosemarie and I did background vocalizing with them and April accompanied them on the piano. The kids had taught themselves more or less and purchased slightly better instruments with Christmas and birthday presents. Kevin Patrick’s career as a musicologist began with the horn blowing (which drove our neighbors on Euclid Avenue and in Grand Beach crazy). The group folded when Kevin lost his foot to a land mine in Korea. However, they had “reunions” at our various family festivals. They weren’t good enough to go on the road, but they were good enough to have a lot of fun.

  “Now,” Father Edward said, “as I understand, Chuck, the idea is that we do this after the final obsequies at Queen of Heaven Cemetery. Monsignor Keenan says the last prayer and we begin to sing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ Does Packy know we’re going to do this?”

  “Certainly,” Mary Margaret said. “I told him.”

  Of course she had.

  “Then we all gather and march around the tomb three times, singing about the saints like the ancient Celts did, then back to the cars?”

  “Right! … Kevin, you do the opening bars on your trumpet, then bring us all in?”

  “With great pleasure!”

  “And Gianni, you pound the drums with your usual vigor?”

  “Absolutely! Uncle Chuck!”

  Gianni, at twenty-five, was no longer “Little Gianni.” He was bigger than his father and had also been a linebacker at the Golden Dome. His brother Vinny had joined the group with a very loud tuba.

  “Kids too, Chuck?” Maria Elena asked.

  At least I was no longer “Mr. O’Malley.”

  “Only those who are redheads.”

  So we gathered around in a circle, Kevin blew the first bars on his trumpet, Rosemarie and I came in immediately on key, then the whole crowd exulted about what would happen when the saints went marching in.

  “I wonder what the other people in the cemetery will think?” Edward asked, somewhat dubiously.

  “They’ll think the saints are marching in,” Peg said happily, “and Dad with them.”

  My sister looked a lot better than she had yesterday. The distractions were helping.

  “And everyone will know,” I added, “that it’s the Crazy O’Malleys.”

  “Hooray for the Crazy O’Malleys,” Rita Antonelli, Mary Margaret’s age peer, shouted, “and all their relatives too.”

  Afterward, as people were leaving the house to drive over to the wake, Peg and Rosemarie and I huddled.

  “Wonderful, Chuck! Pure genius! You don’t make the mourning go away, but you distract us from it and point to what our faith tells us death means. The saints really go marching in.”

  “Saturday morning,”
I said, “is about grief and healing. The music in the cemetery will defy death and begin healing.”

  That was a little pompous, but neither of the women, companions of my youth, seemed to notice.

  “She didn’t come,” Peg sighed, meaning our sister Jane.

  “And she’ll show up at the wake without her kids at suppertime and drive back to Kenilworth about eight-thirty,” my wife added.

  “It’s not Ted’s fault,” I said. “He loves her and he’s never been able to tell her how clueless she is—if he even notices.”

  “It’s hard to be oldest daughter and to be followed by two like us,” Peg said. “You’d feel you’re not in the same ballpark.”

  “Not even the same league,” Rosemarie added.

  “Its not the fault of either of you,” I said quickly.

  “We know that Chucky Ducky,” Rosemarie replied. “Yet you can’t help but wonder if she really wanted to leave the neighborhood to get away from us. She was pretty and would still be if she’d shed twenty pounds, and the life of the party, but …”

  “How do you compete with the tiger and the leopard?”

  “Chuck!” they both protested.

  I was right, however. In the middle 1940s how would a bright young woman without a whole lot of depth cope with the Peg/ Rosemarie. She might have become part of the crowd. They would not have excluded her … No, no, that would never have worked. What was, was.

  I remember April telling Vangie one night in our tiny apartment on Menard Avenue that Peg and Rosemarie had managed to have their first periods on the same day.

  Witches can do that sort of thing.

  Mums are beautiful flowers, white at weddings, gold on Halloween and All Saints, white again at Easter. Yet I hate their scent because they remind me of funeral parlors, the most melancholy places in the world. I used to hate wakes; but I now understand that they rally the community around to close ranks and rededicate themselves to the life that continues, for the deceased hopefully in the world to come, and for the rest of us temporarily in this life. They also keep the minds and the emotions of the immediate relatives active so they won’t slip into deep gloom.

  Yet the challenges on both sides of the receiving line, even at Irish wakes with their odd mix of sorrow and celebration, are almost intolerable. The immediate mourners have to combine pain, resignation, and hope in a blend that will enable the rest to say that they are bearing up well. The rest of the mourners have to offer consolation for what just then is inconsolable. There are few readily available phrases with which this can be done. “Sorry for your troubles,” was at one time perhaps an adequate comment, though I kind of doubt it. But most people who come to Irish wakes are incapable of saying it so that it doesn’t sound trite. It is, however, much better than the intolerably fatuous question, “Don’t he look natural?”

  I hope—which is what one does at a wake.

  I stood on one side of my mother, Peg on the other, Ed next to Peg, and Rosemarie and Vince in order. Then the children and the grandchildren filled up the line. Mary Margaret and Rita and Erin took turns watching the small fry in a room off the lobby, including Shovie, who wasn’t exactly sure where she belonged.

  All my womenfolk, from the Good April to Mary Margaret, looked sharp, simple black dresses, no jewelry, just the right amount of makeup. What a shame they had to stand next to an insignificant little redhead who provided no contrast at all for their elegance.

  I glanced sideways often at my wife. I was falling in love with her again. Why at a wake? Perhaps because she stood for life, perhaps because she was so lovely, perhaps because I was so lonely for my lost father. To be dizzy in love with her suddenly and all over again was, all things considered a sensible response to the situation.

  Or maybe it was only the allergy medicine and the jet lag.

  John E. O’Malley was an important man in Chicago. Crowds came to pay their respect—the new mayor with her large entourage of guards, the new archbishop, a quiet, gentle man who asked who was the daughter that called him about the Mass.

  News to me.

  “Joey,” I said to Joey Moran, who was lingering on the edges of the crowd, “would you get herself?”

  And then to the archbishop, “She’ll be the redhead at the end of the line. She’s watching the little children.”

  “She is an intelligent and direct young woman.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Later Mary Margaret reported that he had thanked her for calling and promised that we would have no trouble at Mass.

  “He’s a nice quiet man,” she said. “Better than the last one.”

  Father Ed had worked for the “last one,” who drove him into a mental health center.

  My sister Jane, accompanied by her husband but not by her children appeared about 7:30. She was wearing a navy blue dress which would have been attractive had she lost the twenty pounds of which Peg and Rosemarie had spoken. She was bedecked with several pounds of gold jewelry and her short skirt revealed not too much leg but legs which were, alas, too thick. I winced. She had once been a very pretty girl with impeccable taste. I heard gasps from farther down the line.

  She embraced the Good April and began to sob piteously—and loudly.

  “We will all miss him so much!”

  Another series of gasps down the line. The noises from Peg and my wife indicated their opinion that Jane did not miss him much when he was alive because she rarely came to our house for family celebrations. The McCormacks usually went off to gated developments in Florida with their rich friends from Kenilworth. I would have a hard time calming down the troops.

  Then she flopped on the kneeler in front of the casket and said, with perhaps better grammar, “Doesn’t he look natural, Chuck?” I said nothing in return. He didn’t look natural at all. He didn’t look a bit like my father. My faith, however tremulous it often is, forces me to insist that my father’s corpse is not my father at all, though it will be again one day when body and spirit are reunited.

  Then, dabbing her ruined makeup, she rose from the kneeler and elbowed her way between Peg and April. She also dragged poor Ted. He looked as if he felt foolish, but he had apparently long since given up trying to restrain his wife.

  I leaned behind Mom and found the eyes of Rosemarie and Peg already waiting for mine. The lionesses were ready to strike. I pointed at them with both hands and forbade them to do or say anything. They turned away, clearly displeased with my warning.

  Jane made herself the center of attention at the wake. She interceded between visitors and the Good April, intercepted people who wanted to shake hands with me, and blubbered often. She was, after all, the oldest in the family and she should be in charge.

  I was angry too, as angry as Peg and Rosemarie. Jane’s routine was tasteless and narcissistic. It was also unfair. She had opted out of the intimate family circle a long time ago. It was inappropriate that she should suddenly reinsert herself into it.

  However, what if you’re the first child, attractive indeed, but without any particular talent and you are followed by dangerously colorful characters like me and Peg and then Rosemarie. Then a jet pilot comes along and carries you off into a new and better world. You experience the turning point of the late forties and early fifties in a different context than the rest of the family. Your brother achieves some, arguably illusory, fame for his pictures, your sister directs the West Suburban Symphony, your foster sister writes occasional stories for The New Yorker, and your little brother becomes a priest who marches with Martin Luther King. It’s a world in which you feel distinctly out of place.

  Charles C. O’Malley, when did you begin to think like a Christian?

  This sudden conversation was aborted by the appearance of the pastor of St. Ursula. The custom at Catholic wakes is for a priest to do a “wake service” each night, if a priest is available. Ed said a few prayers when we arrived. Msgr. Raven would come about 8:00 tonight and Msgr. Keenan the next night. The presider at the wake would recit
e some preliminary prayers, read a passage from scripture, then preach a brief homily. John Raven, our family priest back in the thirties and forties when Monsignor Mugsy Branigan presided over St. Ursula was a man, as my father once said, of silver and gold. He had helped Rosemarie when she was agonizing about her father’s abuse and me when I was not sure it was wise to marry her. We both owed him a lot. So did all of the family.

  However, the new pastor at St. U’s beat him to it. He swept into the funeral home—in cassock, biretta, and black cape though it was a warm and humid evening—bounded up to the front of the line, turned to the crowd, and announced, “I am Father James Francis McNally, pastor of St. Ursula parish where the requiem Mass will be celebrated tomorrow. I will now lead in the recitation of the Rosary.”

  A plump man with a round face and a thick neck, he knelt heavily at the casket and recited all five mysteries of the Rosary in a nasal singsong voice, interrupted only by Jane’s loud sighs. His manner as he assaulted the deity with his prayers was officious and demanding. He controlled the whole funeral parlor. He was indeed, as Mary Margaret had said, a narcissist. Ed left the room so his temper, still on the hair trigger after his ordeal with the late cardinal, would not explode.

  When he had drained the last bit of boredom and torment from the phony piety of his prayers, he lumbered to his feet and quickly worked his way down the line of mourners, clasping each of our hands in a clammy grasp and muttering, with no eye contact, “Sorry for your trouble.”

  As he turned to leave, I decided to have my revenge.

  “Father McNally, the new archbishop was just here!”

  He wheeled on surprise, glared, then stomped out.

  “Chucky,” Peg said to me, “you’re absolutely incorrigible!”

  Yeah, and I was a Christian just a few minutes ago.

  “I think it was nice of Chuck to tell that poor priest that the archbishop was here.”

  “Chucky,” Jane protested, as she struggled off her knees. “why didn’t you get rid of that obnoxious priest? We would never tolerate a man like that in Faith, Hope.”