Golden Years

by Andrew M. Greeley

  She flipped on the exhaust fan which drew any foul air out of both rooms.

  I remember the day I told April Rosemary, after her marriage to Jamie, that she had been conceived in the darkroom. She laughed in great delight.

  “Brilliant, Dad, brilliant!”

  “I kind of thought so too.”

  She turned on the red light outside the darkroom and locked the door inside. I was cradling the precious role of film in nervous fingers of both hands. She turned out the lights in the darkroom and turned on the red safety lamp.

  “You do it,” I said, handing her the roll of tri x. “You’re cooler than I am. Way cooler.”

  She didn’t argue. In a few moments she removed the film from the developing tank and held it up to the red light.

  I sat down on the easy chair she had provided for “our” darkroom and exhaled loudly.

  “I’m too old for this aggravation,” I admitted.

  “You reacted the same way thirty years ago, Chucky Ducky.” She planted a hasty kiss on my lips … “These shots look great. Let’s go upstairs and have a swim.”

  Our red-haired daughters were waiting for us anxiously.

  “Another Charles Cronin O’Malley miracle!” Rosemarie announced. “The lens cap was off the camera!”

  Applause from my carrot-top daughters. I bowed modestly.

  “April Rosemary and I will develop all the rolls for you, if you want,” Mary Margaret said casually, too casually.

  “When did she make the offer?” I said, playing for time. I knew that I didn’t trust them to do this delicate work. I knew I couldn’t turn down their offer. I knew finally that they would do a better job than I would …

  “When I called her to tell her that the package had come from the State Department.”

  “A new alliance?”

  “She finally decided that I am a totally cool little sister,” Mary Margaret said with studied indifference. “Which of course I am, huh, Shovie, a totally cool big sister?”

  “Totally,” Shovie said with her usual woman leprechaun grin.

  I saw a time, not too many years in the future, when these three wicked witches would take complete control of their parents’ lives. This was but their first tentative grasp for power.

  “Won’t the chemical smell bother April Rosemary?” my wife intervened to help me form an answer.

  “She says she’s over being sick … We’ll make three sets of proofs—one for each of you and one for ourselves to circle our favorite shots. We’ll show you them only after you’ve made your own choices.”

  “Will one of you draft a text for your mother?”

  “Well, I might try my hand at it.” Her aquamarine eyes glinted with mischief. “We’ll let you make the prints, Chucky. This time anyway.”

  “Well …” I pretended to weigh the decision.

  “Tell him, Rosie, that he doesn’t have any choice.”

  “He knows that, dear.”

  “Well, if you ruin any of them, I’ll ground you till the day before the apocalypse!”

  Many hugs and kisses for the new but already fast-aging paterfamilias. One provocative kiss from his wife. Whereupon he began to sneeze again.

  “And I reserve the right to peek in,” he gasped between sneezes, “while you’re working to make sure you’re doing it right.”

  Much laughter.

  “You better take your allergy medicine, Chucky.”

  After I had swallowed my Bentyl I sought out my wife in her office. She was sitting behind her ornate mahogany desk poring over her notebooks from the Russian trip. I collapsed in the easy chair which was reserved for the dutiful consort.

  “I think I can tease out three or four themes, kind of tentative till we make the print selections.”

  “Who’s this ‘we’?”

  “I mean April Rosemary and Mary Margaret and myself.”

  “I don’t get a vote?”

  “You lost the franchise long ago.”

  “I have the feeling that there’s generational change going on here. I have been eased into Grandpa-in-the-wheelchair role several years before I should be.”

  She looked up from her notebook and took off her glasses.

  “You still get to take the pictures, don’t you?”

  “You’re encouraging those brats in their coup d’etat.”

  “I’m part of it, Chucky dear. We have to take care of you in your golden years.”

  I was drowsy again. Jet lag still catching up. I must have yawned.

  “Chucky, go take a nap. It will be good for you.”

  I was being dismissed from the empress’s presence so she could do her work. As I fell asleep, I began to worry about all the responsibilities. There would be the thank-you notes to those who came to the wake, to everyone who had helped with the services, legal matters regarding probate, the trip to DC to take pictures of the Gipper, Joe Raftery, and, what else, oh, yes, Jane.

  When I woke up I realized that I had forgotten about Maria Anastasia. Perhaps, however, she would not be a problem. We had red-haired Latino grandchildren, we could cope with red-haired Luong grandchildren. Still I needed a long rest, maybe a year or so devoted entirely to malted milks and falling in love with my wife. For supper I would take her over to Petersen’s to begin the fun.

  Later, after we’d returned from the ice-cream parlor, given the appropriate cautions to Mary Margaret for her venture to Rush Street, and put an exhausted Shovie to bed, I took my wife’s hand and led her to the love seat in our parlor.

  “In here?” she said dubiously.

  “More room.”

  She sighed in mock resignation.

  “Well, it took you long enough to get to this falling in love business.”

  “I needed the two malts to revert to my teen perspective.”

  We joked that falling in love again was a regression to teenage fantasy. In a way it was. The person falling in love is certainly caught up in an infatuation. However, he is also a more or less experienced adult. He has a clear idea of what’s happening and some confidence that he can carry it off. He also has useful insights about how to respect his beloved so that she doesn’t become a fetish—nor a surrogate Playboy Bunny. Hopefully he no longer feels it is necessary to prove his masculinity. Above all, he knows that his wife likes to play the game, in her own fashion.

  We were making good progress in the game when Mary Margaret phoned us. I made the right calls before I returned to the game, though in a dark attic somewhere in my brain I realized that Jane was going to be a big problem. Now, however, my focus was on my wife.

  She giggled as I unzipped her skirt and, oh, so slowly slid it down off her hips.

  “Got the woman down to her skivvies?” she said with a long slow sigh. “I don’t remember you ever did that as a teenager …”

  “Thought about it often.”

  “Why, Chucky?” She snuggled closer to me.

  She shifted her position on the love seat so that she lay supine against my chest. What more could a man ask for from his wife?

  “Why what?”

  “Not why do you love me. I know that you do and I take you at your word about the reasons. Not why you enjoy sex with me. I’m a good lay. Not even why you fall in love with me over and over again. The logistics are easier if you fall in love with your wife. But why now? Is it because we lost Vangie?”

  I drew my fingers across her belly. She gasped with pleasure. I did it again even more slowly.

  “Let’s say a man works in an office. They, whoever the evil ‘they’ are assign a new woman to his staff. She’s pretty and bright and fun. Suddenly he’s head over heels with her. He doesn’t understand why. She’s attractive, appealing, seems to like him. He doesn’t want to fall in love with her. He’s happily married. He knows the dangers and takes no chances. Why does this particular woman knock him over at that particular time? He doesn’t know and he doesn’t want to find out. If he’s like me, he’s not sure he’s up to it with any other women b
ut his wife. That’s that, right?”

  “I should hope so.”

  “So I’m sitting next to my wife in a car. She’s driving, of course, since she is convinced she is a better driver than I am. I notice how beautiful she is, how poised, how intelligent, how funny. I think to myself that she’s an irresistible woman. I bet she would be good in bed. I bet she’d be fun to neck and pet as we used to say. It would be really great to feel her up and to take off her clothes. She’d be wondrous, mysterious, challenging. I want her the worst way. I’m infatuated.”

  My fingers crept up toward her black bra, lavishly decorated with lace. That would have to go soon.

  “But, Chucky Ducky, you’ve already had her hundreds, thousands of times for almost thirty years.”

  “It’s different. She’s suddenly mysterious again … I think that’s a perfectly reasonable reaction. Only an idiot thinks he knows all there is to know about a spouse, no matter how many years he’s known her. I rediscover you again to discover you for the first time. Okay?”

  “Sure it’s okay. Have I ever said it isn’t? But does it have something to do with Vangie’s death?”

  I slipped a finger under one of the straps.

  “Probably because I was knocked over by the grace with which you cope with loss.”

  She rolled over and lifted herself to my lips. She then pressed her breasts against my chest and devoured me with passionate kisses. I may not survive this, I thought to myself.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Rosemarie

  The trouble with revolutions, they used to say back in the 1960s, is that even revolutionaries have to sleep. So it is with young love, even superannuated young love, lovers have to sleep.

  Chuck and I ended up in our pool, quite naked, at a not-sosmall hour in the morning. We collapsed into our marriage bed, destroyed altogether as the Irish would say. Ecstasy lasts just so long, then you must sleep. And you wake up the next day feeling like you’d played a tennis match for twenty hours. Poor Chuck is still deep in sleep. What started out as his infatuation became my infatuation. The pleasure was so strong that I cannot concentrate on my Russian notebooks or even think about the rest of the day. I should be making plans for our shoot at the White House at the end of the week.

  Our combined misbehavior is likely go on for a long time, all winter I hope.

  In public my husband seems—and actually is—a talented, befuddled little boy, appealing, adorable, and clueless. As a lover, he is a powerful, challenging, and electrifying adult man whose passion calls forth from me all my resources as an adult women. When that happens it’s Katie bar the door!

  After years of marriage, many women are furious at their husbands if they get into playful moods. That’s over with, they say. We’re too old for it. I suspect they never learned to like sex all that much. I learned early with Chuck’s patient help to delight in my husband as a lover. I was always a risk taker. I listen to other women when they complain and feel sorry for them. I discuss such matters only with Peg who, as in all things, agrees with me completely.

  “What other point is there in having a man around the house?” she says with only some exaggeration.

  Mary Margaret called from April’s house when she arrived to assure us that the car with two cops in it was already outside. Chuck and I were in an advanced stage of the game and my answers to her must have been strained. She didn’t seem to notice. Or if she did she didn’t say anything.

  There are many advantages of mutual infatuation at our stage in life: no fear of pregnancy, no guilt, and no danger of failure to satisfy.

  Thank God for it.

  Yes indeed. If I can still be infatuated with my husband and he with me then that is a great grace from God which I don’t deserve but I will cheerfully accept.

  But I have to get on with my work. April Rosemary will be here in early afternoon to begin work on the proof sheets. I have to call the White House. Now I’d better wake up Chucky. I think I wore him out, poor dear man.

  Chuck went back to work in the darkroom and I began to prepare the Irish stew we would have for dinner. Except for the day when she had a late-afternoon class, Erin would kind of drift into the kitchen to help me with dinner.

  Erin was a thin waif of an Irish child, with lustrous blue eyes and jet-black hair—quiet, gentle, and inoffensive. She was studying for an ME in education at Rosary College. Our daughter had found her there, took her under her wing, and brought her home to be our “Shovie Sitter.” The situation was very different, but I remember how Peg had brought the obnoxious little Clancy brat home.

  “It’s not part of your job description, Erin,” I said gently when this process began.

  “Sure, am I not being selfish now? Don’t I want to learn to be a good cook like yourself?”

  I didn’t doubt that explanation. I also suspected that she felt obligated to demonstrate something more in gratitude for what she felt we had done for her.

  “Well, I’m sure you don’t need any instructions on how to make Irish stew … What did you think of the wake and funeral?”

  “Your family is ded friggin’ bril. You were all wonderful. I has happy to be here with you. I learned a lot about how to react to death.”

  She kept her eyes on the carrots she was cutting.

  “You were a big help to us,” I said, somewhat embarrassed by the strength of her reaction. “You’re a grand addition to our family altogether.”

  “I was the youngest of twelve,” she said, revealing just a little about herself. “They all loved me, but I kind of got lost in the shuffled deck, if you take me meaning. I don’t know why you’re so good to me …”

  Tears slipped down her flawless complexion.

  “In my case,” I said, “as I’m sure you know, I was taken in too.”

  “Doesn’t herself tell me that? I think they were lucky you came along. Herself says so too.”

  “After you get your degree in spring, will you go home?”

  “I think I’ll stay here in America for a while, find meself a decent teaching job, and save meself a bit of money.”

  “Well, I hope you won’t move out on us!”

  “I couldn’t impose on you anymore …”

  “Would you ever listen to me, young woman? Won’t our feelings be hurt if you move out?”

  She threw her arms around me and hugged me as the tears poured out of her luminous blue eyes.

  Well that settled that.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Chuck

  I didn’t think Rosemarie’s swimming pool was the answer to our wintertime in Chicago. She has tons of money she inherited from her mother and which grew huge with investments (about which I did not want to know) since 1946. If she wanted a yearround swimming pool in our backyard, that was all right with me, especially since it was her house too. She had asked me what I thought, as she always does, and I said it was a crazy idea and that our house would smell like a high school locker room. So she had it built anyway—sliding glass panels and all.

  Nonetheless, it might serve some useful purposes as I had discovered the previous night.

  She was not home when I entered the house. A note on the table said she had gone shopping. April Rosemary was downstairs, working on the proof sheets and I must not disturb her.

  Rosemarie shouldn’t have gone off to the store. She should have been home waiting for her lover. I sighed and slipped into my chair in her office and drifted off to sleep. She may have been in my dreams, but she was not a scary presence.

  The phone rang from a great distance.

  I fumbled for it.

  “Chuck O’Malley.”

  “Dad, come quick, the crows have landed.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  I staggered to my feet, scribbled a note for Rosemarie, ran down the steps, jumped into my car, and raced over to New England Avenue.

  I arrived at the same time as four Oak Park squad cars, lights twirling. A bunch of cops piled out, including the chief of police hi
mself, and followed me into the house through the open door and into bedlam. The two young off-duty cops had cornered Jane’s nurse/thugs—one of whom was a nun—in a corner of the room and was keeping them at bay. Jane, screaming curses like a she-demon from hell, was struggling to tear April out of the protective arms of Madge and Theresa. Mary Margaret, in jeans and her red University of Moscow sweatshirt was on the floor groaning.

  “Get that crazy bitch off my mother!” I yelled at the cops and knelt over my daughter.

  “I’m all right, Dad,” she said in a woozy voice. “Help Grams!”

  Four cops pulled Jane off April with considerable effort. I embraced the Good April, who was shaking like a palm tree in a hurricane.

  “It’s all right, April, it’s all right.”

  “Poor dear Jane,” she confided to me as though it were a secret, “is nuttier than a fruitcake. I will never leave this house. Never.”

  “She won’t try again, I promise you that.”

  “Take these witches downtown and book them!” I screamed, holding April as tight as I could. “Charge them with illegal entry, disorderly conduct, assault and battery, attempted kidnapping, and whatever else you can think of. Get them out of here. My father was buried on Friday. My mom should not have to put up with this.”

  Cops were milling around, shouting orders, barking into their walkie-talkies, and generally increasing the chaos. A young woman cop knelt next to Mary Margaret and murmured something.

  “That’s my daughter! Be careful of her!”

  The woman looked up at me and grinned. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Ambassador,” the chief asked me, “who is this perpetrator?”

  I almost looked around to see who the ambassador in question was.

  “Jane O’Malley McCormack, my sister. I’m afraid that she has not been taking her medication recently. You may need a sedative to calm her down. I’ll phone her husband in a minute.”

  “I think your daughter might have a concussion, Ambassador,” the young cop said to me. “I’ll call for an ambulance. She should be under observation for twenty-four hours.”