All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Three full price,” I said, mustering as much urbanity as I could with two thirteen-year-old girls guffawing behind me.

  It was Saturday afternoon in September of 1945. The war was over and quickly forgotten. Around the world the armed forces were demobilizing themselves with demands to return home which were close to mutiny. The Cubs were lumbering toward a World Series with two pitchers named Claude Passau and Hank Borowy and a bunch of minor leaguers and 4-Fs, the last World Series they would see—forever, as I would hold. The Fenwick football team was sweeping all before it in a drive for the city title.

  On the day before a crucial game with our old rivals from St. Philip’s (a high school, now lamentably defunct, behind Our Lady of Sorrows Church, where the Sorrowful Mother Novena had begun), Charles E. O’Malley, crucially important to a Fenwick victory, had been constrained to escort his sister and his foster sister on their premier solo trip to the Loop.

  At first they both opposed this plan. “If Chucky goes with us, then we won’t go by ourselves, so it doesn’t count.”

  “Right,” I agreed on Friday afternoon when this adventure was being planned.

  But they changed their tune when it was clear that if I didn’t chaperon their transition, they wouldn’t go at all.

  “Okay.” Peg sighed noisily. “If that’s the only way we can see State Fair, I suppose he can come with us.”

  “I won’t have you two riding into the Loop without someone to take care of you,” Mom repeated her relevant principle, “especially not on Saturday.”

  “Much good Chucky would do,” Rosie sniffed.

  “I have a game Sunday.”

  “Your practice is on Saturday morning, dear.”

  “Yeah, but I have to prepare mentally.”

  “Fourth-string quarterback,” Peg sneered.

  “Holds kickoffs, big deal!” Rosie added contemptuously.

  “Won’t even look at the big palooka when he kicks the ball.”

  It was an astute observation. I could hold the pigskin against the turf with my forefinger until Vince booted it only if I closed my eyes.

  Then I had to struggle to my feet and rush down the field toward the receiving team as though I intended to tackle the ballcarrier. Fortunately, no one ever broke through the charging Fenwick line and made me the only player standing between the opposition and a touchdown.

  Nonetheless I had nightmares about such an eventuality. My plan was to do all I could under such circumstances to make it look like I was attempting to tackle the runner without actually making physical contact.

  At practices I was required to tackle only the tackling dummy, a pretty strong dummy, I might add.

  “You can prepare mentally on Saturday night, can’t you?”

  “Especially since you won’t have a date,” Peg taunted me.

  “I could find one.…”

  “Besides,” Rosie pleaded, “you like Rodgers and Hammerstein.”

  “I don’t think I’ll like this one.”

  Mom began to strum chords on her harp for Oklahoma!

  “‘Where the wind comes sweeping down the plain…’” A soprano and an alto joined her.

  My fate was sealed.

  My family’s love for music was not limited to the classical. Our tastes were catholic—classical, jazz, big band, show tunes. We could do Mozart or Handel and then turn immediately to Romberg or Kern. Rodgers and Hammerstein were made for our propensity to belt out tunes at the top of our lungs.

  Once my sister and my unofficial foster sister had made up their minds that we were to see the first Rodgers and Hammerstein film, all I could possibly accomplish was a brave rearguard action.

  Late Saturday morning when I came back from practice, on a windless Indian-summer day with the air a golden haze that smelled of burning leaves, Dad was working on plans in the dining room. “Twelve years without a commission,” he murmured, “and now more than I can handle … April, where is that letter again?”

  “Here it is, dear. You really need larger working space.”

  “We may be able to rent an office soon if the money keeps flooding in.”

  Flood?

  “Speaking of that,” I interrupted, “I have been shanghaied into taking the two brats to a movie downtown. Do I have to pay for it?”

  “Certainly not, dear.” Mom reached in her purse and removed two five-dollar bills. “Now I expect what is left over to come back in change. You may not retain any surplus for your bank account.”

  “Me?”

  “And you go down on the bus and the L.” Dad peered over his glasses at me. “Don’t take the streetcar just to save a few pennies.”

  “Eighteen!”

  The streetcar was seven cents; the motor coach and L would cost ten cents. Back and forth for three people times two was twenty-four cents.

  “Dear,” my mother said patiently. “We can afford two dimes.”

  “I know that. It’s the principle.”

  “What principle?”

  I couldn’t quite remember.

  I must add, in defense of my younger self, that I was joking.

  Four dimes and I might have been serious.

  As I made clear when the ticket woman returned two dollars and three tickets in exchange for my five-dollar bill.

  “Isn’t there more?” I said, shocked and dismayed.

  She gestured at the price list affixed to the glass. Full price was a dollar? So that was what they meant by inflation?

  “You’re embarrassing us, Chucky,” Peg hissed as I tumbled into the lobby of the State and Lake, still traumatized.

  I compensated for their embarrassment by spending another dollar on three large bags of popcorn and three cherry Cokes.

  They had overdressed for the event as high-school freshwomen do—fall knit dresses (maroon for Rosie, gold for Peg), precious nylons, spiked heels, makeup suitable for a formal dance, military purses slung over their shoulders. They managed to carry off the pose except when they wobbled on their heels.

  In my grubby black Fenwick jacket I was partly proud of my attractive companions and partly ashamed of the possibility that those who turned their heads to look at them would think I was the perhaps handicapped little brother of these two autumn Dianas.

  State Fair was the first of the three surprises that day.

  The war was over. This was the first of the great postwar musicals made as if the war had never been. It was produced in vastly improved Technicolor and directed with imagination, verve, and skill. Moreover, it hit us with its most powerful weapons at the very beginning.

  Play your videotape again, if you have one, and imagine that you had never seen Jeanne Crain and never heard “It Might As Well Be Spring.” The opening song, “Our State Fair,” is a lively bit of nonsense set against a makebelieve Iowa backdrop. Then, almost at once, Margey leans out of the second floor window in response to her mother’s call.

  “Oh my God!” Peg exclaimed.

  “Wow!” Rosie agreed.

  Before I could close my mouth and attempt comment, Ms. Crain began “It Might As Well Be Spring.”

  “I haven’t seen a crocus or a rosebud,

  Or a robin on the wing,

  But I feel so gay

  In a melancholy way,

  That it might as well be spring.”

  Jeanne Crain singing “It Might As Well Be Spring” was a knockout punch from which none of us recovered. Although the movie did not and could not live up to its opening moments, it was still pure delight.

  Whispers flew back and forth.

  “Look at that maroon dress! I want it!”

  “She looks like you, Rosie.”

  “She does not!”

  Actually she did.

  “Why don’t you say something, Chucky?”

  “I’m eating my popcorn.”

  “You haven’t eaten a bite since that girl came on the screen.”

  “Nice music.”

  I tried to nibble on the popcorn.

&nb
sp; By the time the story progressed to its second song that was destined to become a “standard,” I had given up on my popcorn.

  “It’s a grand night for singing

  The stars are bright up above

  The earth is aglow

  And to add to the show

  I think I am falling in love!”

  I had fallen in love completely.

  Jeanne Crain would have become an important component of my fantasy life even if the other two surprises of that Indian-summer day in 1945 had not happened.

  If you play your videocassette, you’ll note that Ms. Crain, who was just twenty at the time, could not act at that early stage of her career. It didn’t matter.

  Even then I must have realized that her eye movements were abrupt, her facial makeup was too obvious, and her breasts could point as sharply as they did only if they were imprisoned by a rigidly constructed and oppressive cylindrical bra. None of these reservations mattered. She was a stunning promise—she had to be to make me stop eating popcorn.

  A promise of what?

  Love, passion, life, beauty, goodness … whatever a young man seeks in a young woman. That she became my Indian-summer virginal Venus probably shows a lot about my tastes. No Rita Hayworth for Charles E. O’Malley’s libido.

  And, as we all agreed later, it was not unimportant that she was indisputably Irish.

  “Isn’t she beautiful, Chucky?”

  “Too fat!”

  “Chucky!”

  “Look at that rear end!”

  “You’re the one that’s staring at her, Chucky Ducky! Doesn’t she look like Rosie?”

  “No. Hey, give me my popcorn back!”

  “You’re not eating it!”

  While I reacted to the movie by not eating, my charges reacted by devouring everything. They tried to make me return to the lobby to buy more popcorn. Naturally I refused.

  When the movie ended, they whimpered in satisfaction at the happy ending, in which romantic love was rewarded; I, still keeping my licentious emotions to myself, withdrew to buy popcorn.

  We had missed the “selected short subjects” at the beginning (because my two young women were tardy in their last-minute rearrangement of their faces in our apartment), so we stayed for the cartoon and the March of Time. I returned with the popcorn and more cherry Coke halfway through the cartoon, of which I have no recollection at all, and settled down to make up for lost popcorn.

  Then Westbrook von Vorhees, in a voice appropriate for Gabriel announcing the Final Judgment, shouted, “The March of Time!”

  It was a Final Judgment edition of the March of Time—a film about the Nazi death camps.

  My second surprise.

  I had seen pictures of the camps when they were liberated on the back page of the Daily News, but they had made little impression on me. My two charges did not read the papers, so they were completely unaware of Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz.

  The film, perhaps made to stir up support for the Nuremberg war trials, showed the camps with exquisite attention to their horror—gas chambers, crematoria, mass graves with bodies stacked like cordwood, haggard faces of survivors, pictures of little children who had died, lamp shades made out of human skin, bars of soap made from human flesh.

  Need I say the three of us stopped eating our popcorn?

  If we had seen the twenty-minute documentary before State Fair, it would not have affected us the way it did. But after so much life, we now saw so much death.

  Why did the film distributors combine the two in one package? Probably they did not even think about the combination. If they did, they must have assumed that the romance of the feature would quickly erase the images of the grimly realistic documentary.

  A single stark question branded itself on my brain to remain there until this very moment: which was real—the magically beautiful young woman or the mass graves?

  One had to be an illusion, either the delectable autumnal virgin or the gas chambers.

  We left the State and Lake, climbed slowly up the steps to the L tracks, crossed to the north side, and boarded the lumbering old wooden Lake Street local in total silence.

  On the ride downtown, I had sat in a seat by myself behind the two girls. There was only room on this train, leaving the Loop late on Saturday afternoon at a time when many businesses worked all day, for the three of us to sit together on one of the lengthwise seats.

  Then came the third surprise.

  “Dear God, how terrible!” Peg, tears in her eyes, broke the silence. “Those poor people!”

  “They were only Jews,” Rosie said grimly, almost automatically.

  “Rosie.” Peg’s eyes were wide in horror. “What a terrible thing to say!”

  “They’re as good as we are.” I blew up and quoted my mother, “Maybe better. Do you think they didn’t suffer just because they were Jews?”

  Then, carried away by my own rhetoric and my own personal horror at the film, I launched into a fierce diatribe. “Are they less human than we are? Why didn’t the same thing happen to us? What about Joanie Fineman? Would you want someone making a bar of soap out of Mr. and Mrs. Fineman’s cute little granddaughter?”

  “He’s right, Rosie.” Peg nodded slowly.

  She looked from one to the other of us, astonished, shattered, frightened.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I really am.… Chucky is right. I don’t know why I said that. It was terribly dumb.”

  “Evil,” I added.

  She bowed her head solemnly. “Yes, it is. I’m an evil person.”

  Her face froze in a somber, withdrawn scowl. Her blue eyes turned hard, as if she were looking at herself through a microscope and was disgusted at what she saw.

  Peg and I remained voiceless, not knowing what to say.

  “I should have died in one of those gas chambers instead of them. I wish God would permit me to exchange my life for one of those poor girls.…”

  I now understand that her reaction to our complaints was exaggerated, inappropriate, perhaps even dangerous. Her words were stupid, but only the repetition of a vile and hateful expression of bigotry she had heard from a parent (then, I thought her father; now, I suspect her mother), a mechanical attempt to respond to the horror of what we had seen.

  When we had protested, she had become conscious of the meaning of her words and realized instantly that they were damnable. She retracted them and the sentiment behind them.

  Shame and regret were appropriate. Even then, however, I comprehended that there was something wrong with her reaction.

  What was going on inside her lovely head?

  What was I supposed to do now?

  Since I didn’t know the answer, I did nothing. Not a word was said on the rest of our trip to Austin Boulevard.

  “Who can I apologize to?” she asked as we waited at the corner of Austin and Lake, across from the Chateau Hotel, for the bus. Appropriately the golden Indian-summer haze had been replaced by a cheerless gray overcast. “They’re dead. You are both too easy on me. And God must hate me.”

  “God doesn’t hate anyone,” Peg said promptly, sounding exactly like her mother.

  “You really didn’t mean it, Rosie.” I groped for the right phrase. “It just kind of slipped out.”

  “Only a monster would let words like that ‘just slip out,’ Chucky. I don’t deserve to live.”

  “Don’t say that, Rose,” Peg pleaded. “Don’t ever say that!”

  The green bus huffed up to us; we did not speak until we had boarded it and walked to the back, where high-school kids always sit.

  “Shall we get off at Division and have something to eat at the Rose Bowl?” I asked fatuously.

  The Rose Bowl was an ice-cream emporium on Division Street, an institution second in importance in my life only to another Division Street establishment, Fred’s Pool Hall. It was owned by a Greek family—which proved, according to my reasoned opinion, that Greeks made the best ice cream and bred the most sensuous-looking
young women in Chicago, if, as I explained to Vince, you like your sensuous young women dusky.

  “Chucky!” Peg reprimanded me. “How can you think of food at a time like this?”

  I did not reply that I could think of food, especially ice cream, at almost any time.

  We left the bus at Thomas and walked the four short blocks to Rosie’s house at the corner of Thomas and Menard.

  “Why doesn’t God destroy me now and get it over with?” Rosie shattered the stillness as we stopped in front of her house.

  “Rosie…” Peg pleaded.

  “I’m damned, Peg, I really am.”

  “Maybe you ought to go over to St. Ursula”—I glanced at my watch—“and talk to Father Raven. I think he’s probably still in the confessional.”

  Her bitter eyes swiveled toward me. “That’s a very good idea, Chucky,” she said as though she were surprised that I were capable of such. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Take a raincoat,” Peg suggested. “You don’t want to ruin your dress if it rains.”

  “It’s not important.… Thank you for the movie, too, Chucky.”

  “What was that all about?” I asked as Rosie almost ran down the street toward the church.

  “I don’t know.” Peg was disconsolate. “Sometimes she’s awfully mean to herself.”

  I walked home with Peg and then slipped away to return to the Rose Bowl. It seemed legitimate to charge Mom for my chocolate malt, part of my payment for my efforts of the day. I studied very carefully the slim outline of the young Greek woman behind the counter and concluded that (a) I had a slight preference for Irish over Near Eastern loveliness, and (b) I was entitled to a second malt.

  Why couldn’t one eat and agonize at the same time?

  How come, you ask, that I was such a paragon of religious understanding at that still early age of my life?

  It was no merit of my own. My mother had made up her mind that I would not be a bigot. That was that.

  My mother’s snobbery, like everything else about her, was amiable and kindly. “Foreigners” was a term applied to anyone who was not Irish, with the sometime exception of the Germans. (Protestants did not figure in the calculus because they were not important folks in the lives of the Chicago Irish at that time.) They were not bad people; you would never treat them unkindly and certainly never exclude them from your house. Given enough time, they would become as American as anyone else—meaning as American as we were. Indeed, Mom found “foreigners” fascinating, puzzled as she was by the fact that anyone would choose to be a foreigner.