A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  The sailboat was the problem. Now I remembered why I didn’t want to visit the Clancys at Lake Geneva. The last time I had barely escaped the sailboat with my dignity. I didn’t want to risk it again.

  Peg and Rosie jumped out of the Higgins, deftly secured the lines, and stood side by side, staring at me still in the front cockpit. I was healthy, mind you, but daunted by the prospect of the sailboat.

  Maybe it would rain.

  Alas, not a cloud in the sky.

  Rosie extended a hand. She was wearing, I remember, a white blouse and light blue shorts.

  I climbed out by myself.

  “Great fun.”

  The two she-demons had the gall to giggle.

  Mrs. Clancy had disappeared, for the day it later developed. My parents were sitting under a beach umbrella, towels around their shoulders. My mother looked pretty, I thought, in her imitation-sharkskin swimming suit—“old and out of fashion, I’m afraid, but I still fit in it.”

  “Had a swim while we were running over to Geneva,” Jim Clancy shouted exuberantly. “Ready for a bite of lunch?”

  He looked around for his wife.

  “I’ll get the stuff, Daddy.” Rosemarie was already running toward the house. The pier shook under her thundering feet.

  “I’ll help.” Peg raced after her.

  “Don’t forget the chocolate ice cream,” I shouted after them.

  I devoured three ham-and-cheese sandwiches and two slices of chocolate cake drenched in chocolate ice cream and covered with chocolate sauce.

  “You’ll be real fat someday if you keep eating like that.” Rosemarie shook her long black hair.

  I almost said, “Not as fat as your fat and ugly father,” remembered my manners, laughed, and returned to my lecture about the Chicago Bruins, the Halas family’s pro basketball franchise in those long-forgotten days.

  As best as I can remember, I was against them on the general principle that their name and their owners if nothing else suggested a link with the Bears and the Cubs.

  I considered asking for a third slice of chocolate cake. I had been told by someone that motion sickness was less likely if your stomach was full. On the other hand if it was too full, it might turn against me even without the motion of the sailboat.

  Moreover, a cruel heaven had not only not sent rain; it had arranged for the wind to increase—“freshen up” as Mr. Clancy said.

  At no point did it ever occur to me to say that I did not want to join them in the sailboat or that I would probably become ill on the sailboat. The thought of such reasonable responses did not even occur to me.

  “Rosie”—Mr. Clancy stood up as if he were the skipper of the Titanic—“let’s have a little run under sail. Why don’t you load some ice cream bars on the boat. We can have more dessert on the way.”

  I had paid no particular attention to his intake of food during lunch, but it had certainly exceeded mine.

  The sailboat was a small craft of a variety I haven’t seen since after the war. She was made of wood (in those days, what else?), perhaps fourteen feet long, shallow draft, lightweight, little more than a skiff with a wooden mast and a sail. Something like a dory or perhaps an undersized lightning class. She was fast and agile and easy to steer.

  Also easy to capsize.

  We were instructed to put on swimming suits. I was embarrassed because, unlike my trim fellow crew members, I felt I was scrawny.

  But I wasn’t funny like Mr. Clancy in his red-and-white one-piece suit, which made even my charitable mother smile.

  The sails were canvas and had to be packed and unpacked in precise fashion. Mr. Clancy barked orders to Rosemarie about rigging the sails. Usually, I noted, she had anticipated the orders. She seemed proud that she knew how to play the crew game, a full-fledged partner in her father’s sailboat adventure.

  At going on twelve you begin to notice the quality of relationships between your friends and their parents. Rosie liked her father, or so it seemed, and desperately wanted his approval for her skill with the boat. Yet some of the time she also seemed to detest him.

  He did not notice either the skill or the look in her eyes that pleaded with him for a word of praise.

  “Okay,” he shouted, “Rose, you man the mainsheet and I’ll take the tiller. Peg and Chuck, you sit athwart and duck your head whenever we turn so you don’t get hit by the boom.” He laughed, I thought maliciously, and patted the thick wood boom. “It’s pretty hard on heads. And everyone put on life jackets.”

  He shoved us away from the pier, yelled, “Hoist the mains’il,” and shoved the tiller around sharply.

  We almost capsized on the spot. Only Rosie’s quick movements with the sails kept us from going over.

  Mr. Clancy, I now remembered from the previous summer’s adventure, didn’t know much about sailing. It had been a calm day last summer too.

  My stomach was already queasy.

  The first run across the lake and back was easy enough. I began to relax.

  “You take the tiller, Rosie,” he shouted. “Let’s see how you can do in this wind.”

  Without a change of expression, she shifted into the helmsman’s place in the stern.

  Mr. Clancy opened the freezer box, helped himself to an ice cream bar, and offered one to Peg.

  Peg never turned down free food.

  He turned to me. “How about you, Chuck? Stomach okay?”

  I was sure that he had leered at me.

  “It’s fine, but no thanks.”

  “He ate too much at lunch,” Peg explained.

  Rosie did quite well at the tiller, especially for a ten-year-old, better than her father I thought.

  The boat had heeled over pretty far and was running with its edge only a few inches above the wake.

  “This is really living!” Mr. Clancy exclaimed.

  Peg calmly dispatched her ice cream bar. Rosie kept her eyes on the edge of the sail.

  Chucky began to get sick. Alas, real sick.

  As motion sickness sufferers know, the first feeling is a kind of generalized unease, then tenseness, then a foolish conviction that you are not sick, then the desire to die immediately a peaceful and a happy death. At the end of Rosie’s run across the lake I had reached that point. Peg was watching me carefully; not sure whether to call the game on account of darkness.

  “One more time across the lake and we’ll be finished,” Mr. Clancy sang out. “Let me take the helm, honey, I think the breeze is too much for you.”

  “Yes, Daddy.” She clambered back to her station at the sheet, ready to release and draw in the sail when it was time to turn.

  I almost made it on the first leg of the run. Only when Mr. Clancy shouted, “Ready about,” and Rosie released the sail, did my lunch begin to demand its proper freedom.

  “Hard alee!” he bellowed, and shoved the tiller.

  Rosie pulled in the sail and I threw out my lunch.

  “Chuck!” Peg’s arm was around me immediately. “Are you all right?”

  “Never been better,” I said bravely as I retched again.

  “Can’t take the wind, eh, Chucky?” Mr. Clancy crowed.

  I don’t think he had intended to make me sick. But now that I was sick, he was enjoying it.

  Rosie watched me grim faced.

  By the time we had returned to the Clancy pier I had lost all my lunch. But my intestines were still protesting.

  “Ready about!” Mr. Clancy bellowed in front of the pier.

  “No!” Rosie screamed at him.

  “Hard alee!”

  Automatically Rosie hauled in the sheet. If she had tried to stop us, I suppose we would have capsized and I would have drowned.

  A blessing it would have seemed.

  The final run across and back was one long episode of nausea, much worse than the worst purgatorial images of the nuns at St. Ursula. This is what God must do to the damned that he particularly did not like. Peg’s arm was my only link to the world of the living.

  Fin
ally, the sails were lowered and we drifted to the pier.

  The worst was over. My stomach had, not unreasonably, given up on me. I was exhausted, drained, despairing—but over the worst.

  “Here, Chucky, have one of these.” Mr. Clancy shoved an ice cream bar under my nose. “It will help settle your stomach.”

  I was in hell and the devil was laughing at me.

  I retched again, discovered some residue of breakfast deep in my gut, and covered myself, the ice cream bar, and Peg with my sickness.

  Not, alas, Mr. Clancy.

  That was when Rosie hit her father.

  Sobbing hysterically, she beat his back with her tough little fists. “You did it, you did it, you did it,” she wailed.

  Then she leaped out of the boat and, still crying, ran up the walk to the house.

  Peg started after her, hesitated, and then returned to me. She and Mom and Dad lifted me out of the boat and dragged me to a chaise lounge under a big oak tree. Peg covered me with a beach blanket.

  “Just go to sleep, dear,” Mom murmured. “You’ll be fine after a nice little nap.”

  “I’ll never eat chocolate again,” I whimpered. “Never again.”

  Well, not till the next day.

  Later, maybe an hour or so, I woke up. Peg was sitting on the grass next to me, watching me intently.

  “You okay?”

  “Is this Mount Calvary Cemetery?” I asked.

  “You’re okay,” she sighed with relief. “Chucky, I felt so sorry for you.”

  “Where’s everyone?”

  “Mrs. Clancy is in her room.” Peg wrinkled her nose. “Mr. Clancy left in his car. Mom and Dad went for a walk. Rosie’s somewhere crying still. I leave her alone when she gets that way.”

  I didn’t know that she got that way.

  “I’m all right,” I lied.

  “I’ll go look for Rosie, if you’re sure you’re all right.”

  “I said I was all right.”

  So poor Peg went in search of her other charge.

  That was the first time that I can remember that I felt that I would very much like to kill Jim Clancy. I remembered that day vividly when I learned years later that he had been blown into thousands of pieces by a car bomb and I experienced not the slightest grief.

  After a few moments I decided that maybe I ought to find out whether I would ever walk again. I stood up, wobbled slightly, and ambled uncertainly along the lakeshore into a stand of trees between the Clancy property and the house next door. I thought I might find Mom and Dad there, holding hands as they often did when they thought no one was looking.

  Instead I found Rosie, leaning against a tree, still crying.

  I felt sorry for her.

  “It’s okay, Rosie.” I put my arm around her as Peg had put hers around me. “Don’t cry. It wasn’t your fault.”

  It seemed perfectly natural to put my arm around the poor little kid. So too it seemed perfectly natural for her to lean her head against my chest and begin sobbing again.

  “It’s all right, I’m not mad at you,” I repeated, and held her until finally the sobs stopped and her heartbeat slowed.

  It also seemed perfectly natural to kiss her then, first her cheek and then her lips—a light, childish touch of my lips against hers.

  Not clumsy though. I was astonished that I was not clumsy at all.

  Much later in my life a psychiatrist (not treating me, incidentally) would explain that I had learned from my father and had practiced in my own “very intense” relationship with my mother the art of being gentle with women. It would be hard for me, the shrink said, to behave spontaneously in any other way with a vulnerable woman.

  “That makes you a very dangerous man.”

  “Who, me?”

  “Women tend to be pushovers for men who know how to be tender at the right times.”

  I guess.

  Anyway, Rosie turned crimson, beamed happily, and said, “Thank you, Chucky.”

  That was that.

  Anyway, kissing a girl cures nausea. Well, it did that day.

  We walked back to the house and found the rest of my family. Peg begged her to join us for dinner; after some hesitation, Rosie rushed up to her mother’s room, obtained permission, and jumped in her mother’s car for the chauffeured ride back to Twin Lakes.

  “I think Chucky still looks a little peaked.” Mom considered my face anxiously.

  “Chucky is so nice when he’s sick,” Rosie chuckled. “Maybe he should be sick all the time.”

  She was still glowing and her eyes were filled with stars.

  4

  When I was growing up, the sobriety about which I wrote in my Fenwick retreat resolutions was not the result of the good example of my parents. They represented two decaying, not to say decadent, Chicago lace-curtain Irish families. They firmly believed that, if one had to slide down the social ladder, one ought to do it with style. Noisy style.

  My mother was a Cronin, a niece of the Dr. Cronin who was killed in an Irish-nationalist fight during the 1880s. Her father was also a doctor, who lived in the Canaryville section of the South Side, a pillar of St. Gabriel’s parish and a great friend, in his youth, of the legendary Father Maurice Dorney, the founder of the parish, a great friend of organized labor, and the man responsible for building a Burnham church in the shadow of the Yards.

  “The smell of the Yards,” she would say, laughing, “is what puts the color in our cheeks in Canaryville.”

  (The name, by the way, referred originally to swarms of noisy sparrows that settled each year just east of the Yards, and somewhat north of St. Gabriel’s at Forty-fifth and Wallace. Only later did the term extend to the whole neighborhood and especially to the Irish who lived in it.)

  “Canaryville,” she would continue, groping around her littered worktable for her glasses, “is not to be confused with Back of the Yards, which is west of the Yards, or New City, which is south of the Yards, or Bridgeport, which is north of the Yards.”

  She would then find her glasses and examine the sock she was darning, astonished that the sock was gray and the thread brown.

  “New City is German, Bridgeport has a lower class of Irish, and there are foreigners in Back of the Yards.”

  In 1940, when I imagine this paradigmatic scene taking place, my mother was thirty-four years old, tall, brown-haired, thin but not quite gaunt, with the cheekbones, jaw, and elegant manners and the slightly dotty approach to life one might have expected from an exiled White Russian countess, not that I would have known in those days what a White Russian countess was. Her habitual clothes were long skirts and sweaters whose colors never matched. She must have realized that the two-bedroom, third-floor apartment in the ten hundred block of North Menard was a big step down from the sprawling, Victorian, three-story home at 4502 Emerald (her father had purchased it from Gustavus Swift when the packinghouse barons migrated from the “Village of Lake” to Kenwood) in which she was raised in Canaryville. Nor could it be compared to the magnificent Doric-revival brick home on the park behind the Austin Town Hall to which she had brought Jane and me home from West Suburban Hospital, only a few blocks away.

  Our flat was small and cramped. Before 1938, our ice was delivered through a hatch on the back porch. We kids hated the day our secondhand Serval refrigerator appeared because we knew we would miss the “iceman.” He lugged blocks of ice up the stairs on his back and dumped them through the “ice door” into the “icebox” inside, a metal-lined wooden cabinet that anticipated the modern refrigerator. He always had a kind word and a joke for us, poor man, too old for such hard work but knowing no other way to earn his living.

  For Mom the fridge was a welcome relief from some of the worries and strains of housework—an ironing board in the kitchen, walks up and down four flights of stairs to the basement to a primitive washer with a hand-operated “wringer” through whose rollers clothes were passed after they were washed, heavy clothes baskets to drag out into the concrete backyard, laundry hung
by wooden clothespins on lines that had to be put up after each washing, hot-water heat in noisy radiators fed by a coal furnace that left a fine layer of dark dust on everything in the house.

  We were better off than many. We had inside plumbing and our dark apartment was lit by enough electric lights (some fixed to the now unused gas jets) that one could read after dark. But Mom had never lifted a finger at housework until the “Crash.”

  I may have minded more than she did. I suppose my passion for money and order must have resulted from being very young but conscious enough when this dramatic change occurred in her life. As a little boy I must have been furious at what had happened to her. I wanted money so that I could restore her to those happy days in the house behind the Town Hall.

  If the setbacks bothered her, she never let anyone else know about her discouragement. “Refinement,” she told us often, “has nothing to do with how much money you have or where you live. It’s part of your character.”

  Even in those days I wanted to marry a woman like my mother, only one who was better organized and less absentminded. A wife like April Mae Cronin but one who would keep the house neat as well as herself and her children.

  The coal furnace in the basement had to be fed by hand, a task that the other members of our family routinely forgot. So it was quite possible that they would wake up on a near-zero morning shivering with the cold: no coal in the furnace.

  And even worse, no coal in the coal room because we had forgotten to call the coal man (on our wall-mounted four-party-line phone).

  When I was old enough to assume responsibility for a morning paper route, I would go first to the basement and shovel coal into the furnace. And if the coal supply was running low, I would make a note in my notebook (carried even then) to call the coal man later in the day.

  “And Englewood?” My father would look up from his Shakespeare and sip on his glass of port.

  Mother would make a gentle face of displeasure, skin tightening over her high cheekbones.

  “Lace-curtain, people with pretensions.”

  Dad would howl with laughter and drain the port. “Which the Cronins were not.”