A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “I thought that’s what you were doing.” I tightened my grip around her. Why not enjoy it?

  She smelled of spring flowers and, alas, of whiskey. Drinking already.

  “That’s much better. You might grow up someday to be a really good date.”

  Then she smiled up at me, a warm, generous smile that turned her face into a radiant oval of invitation. It was the first of many surprises in that prom.

  Surprises, always surprises.

  “Don’t wait,” I gulped, and drew her as close to me as I could.

  “I won’t,” she sighed contentedly.

  My leering and half-drunk friend had spoken only the truth: wonderful tits indeed, round, firm hints of glory.

  I was in trouble.

  So, I escaped from the dance floor as quickly as I could.

  And came back for the last dance, the moth to the candlelight, the lemming to the sea, the fly to the spider’s parlor, Studs Lonigan to the arms of Lucy Scanlan. This time the orchestra was playing “Doing What Comes Natur’lly,” which was indeed what I was doing.

  “I thought you’d gone home.”

  “I almost did.”

  She leaned into my tight embrace, already dizzy from too much drink. “You don’t seem afraid of me this time around.”

  “I wasn’t afraid of Ed Murray the second time.”

  “Do I get knocked out?”

  “Only if you try to fight.”

  She raised her head from my shoulder and looked up. “Really?”

  “Course not. I was joking.”

  Mostly.

  “There are times, Chucky, when . . .”

  “When, what?”

  “When I think you’re something a little better than an insect.”

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  And that was the end of the last dance and of our romantic love dialogue. Indeed, it was virtually the last conversation until the next day.

  My verdict on the Charles Cronin O’Malley of that night?

  What a jerk!

  10

  When the final dance was over that night, we adjourned to the Chez Paree on Sinclair Court, behind Michigan Avenue. The decision was made by the usual mysterious process by which mobs make their decisions—citywide mobs in this case because there must have been six or seven other proms that night. The club was filled with young women on heels that were too high for them and dresses that were either too tight or too revealing, and young men, many still sober, who looked awkward and uncomfortable in rented summer formals that were generally speaking designed for men with wider shoulders.

  The Chez must have warned its usual patrons to stay away, because adolescents were almost the only patrons that night. I suspect that they also curtailed the review featuring the Chez Paree adorables, wisely suspecting that the inebriated adolescent males might be moved to catcalls by the sight of too much womanly flesh.

  The shoulders and chests of their dates didn’t count.

  There was no prospect of drinking at this ritual because no male at a school prom could persuade the house that he was twenty-one. Some of the girls were eighteen and hence legal (in a curious reversal of male chauvinism that marked the State of Illinois in those confusing days), but the waiters were not taking any chances of having the club’s dram-shop insurance revoked if they were proven to have served dram, or anything else, to a young woman who later piled up her daddy’s car somewhere in northern Illinois or southern Wisconsin.

  They also kept a wary eye for flasks, though they would have needed a guard at every table to prevent the extracurricular tippling.

  Ours was a Catholic school prom, so naturally the intoxication rates were high. The North Side Protestants from Kelly and the South Side Calvinists from Chicago Christian Reformed looked on us with consternation and dismay, as though we were creatures from another planet.

  “You’re not from Fenwick, are you?” demanded a stern-visaged young woman whose white blond hair labeled her as probably Dutch Reform.

  “With red hair and a face like mine, where else would I be from?”

  “But you’re not drunk!”

  “I don’t drink,” I replied virtuously. She was not altogether unattractive if you like icy blondes, which I have been known to.

  “But I thought Irish Catholics had to drink on their prom nights.”

  “Only a venial sin not to,” I said, escaping from her before our theological discussion became more serious.

  The management knew it would not be a night when it made money. They only hoped to sell enough steaks to keep the losses down. I suspect they also prayed that the natives did not destroy the premises.

  Vince and I concentrated on devouring our steaks and most of the steaks of our dates. Peg dreamily watched Vince’s every move. My date chain-smoked and, when she was not flitting from table to table, offered her friends a swallow at the “Glenlivet” in her “hand-tooled Florentine-leather” flask, which she had secreted in her large purse.

  It seemed to have no bottom.

  Ugh.

  In the interludes when she deigned to sit with us, she blew smoke in my direction.

  “You don’t like girls to smoke, do you, Chucky Ducky? You’re so old-fashioned you smell.”

  “Not of cigarette smoke,” I replied, turning away.

  She leaned over and, when I turned around, exhaled in my face. I was too busy coughing and snorting to fully enjoy the brief view of her breasts that this exercise provided me. Spectacular I told myself, but not worth the smoke.

  “Rosemarie!” Peg exclaimed.

  “Sorry,” Rosie said without much conviction, “but he is such a stuck-up little sawed-off pig.”

  “I know, but you shouldn’t sink to his level.”

  That’s what I call sisterly support.

  Vince found it all amusing. But then Peg could have read the stock market report that night and he would have laughed at her.

  I slept fitfully during the ride to Lake Geneva. Rosie continued to sip from her flask and ridiculed most of the other girls at the prom. She had a sharp eye for the frailties of others and especially their poor taste in clothes. It was a nasty, mean-spirited harangue, delivered as though her existence depended on belittling others.

  “That girl with Delvecchio, you’d think she’d have sense enough not to wear red. A fat person like her looks terrible in red. Why does he date her anyway?”

  “Shut up, Rose,” Peg snapped at her. “We’ve heard enough.”

  Never had I heard Peg draw the line on her friend. Apparently it was normal procedure. Rosie did shut up. She devoted the rest of the ride to sipping on her flask. Small sips, to tell the truth. Vince, who drank but apparently not on a date with Peg, drove carefully. When we arrived at the sprawling, old, late-nineteenth-century Clancy “cottage” (“Took it away from a Protestant trader who couldn’t meet his margin calls, poor dummy!”), I sought an empty room as far away from the singing and drinking as I could get, pulled off my ill-fitting formal, and fell into bed.

  I had glanced into the parlor for one quick look around. It was not exactly a revel appropriate for the fall of the Roman Empire. Or even for The Great Gatsby—some drinking, some hugging, some groping, not much else. Not even the “bundling” of which Puritan New England was tolerant, although some couples were approaching that amusement. From a long distance.

  Mom would not have approved, though I would have been surprised if the same kind of behavior didn’t happen in her day too. Or any day since we evolved into creatures who couldn’t get sex off their minds.

  But Mom wasn’t there. And neither was Mrs. Clancy, who was the technical chaperone. She had already vanished into an alcoholic haze in the master bedroom, also far away.

  Peg and Vince were wandering about outside looking at the stars. What else was there for me to do but sleep?

  What indeed?

  There is a prom custom of watching the sun come up with your date, a custom that survives even to this day, though it was deemed irre
levant by many in the late sixties and the early seventies.

  I seemed to have missed it that day. When I woke up, the sun was, if not high in the sky, at least obviously present. Eight o’clock according to my new-graduation-present Bulova. I struggled into the slacks and sweater that I had been instructed to bring for the frolics of the day and began the search for food. I encountered Vince in the kitchen in the same virtuous activity. Peg was asleep, he informed me while he gobbled down coffee cake and doughnuts, but she was furious at me for abandoning “poor Rosie.”

  “I didn’t want to date poor Rosie in the first place.”

  “She’s a nice girl, Chucky, really she is. You just never give her a chance.”

  “The voice is the voice of Vince, but the words are the words of Margaret Mary O’Malley.”

  He grinned sheepishly, poor lout. “I guess you’re right, but I agree with her.”

  “Naturally.”

  I swallowed a modest breakfast, half a bottle of grapefruit juice and four doughnuts, dug my camera out of the old World War I duffel bag Dad had brought home from Fort Leavenworth, and went out to record the appearance of spring at Lake Geneva—still insisting to myself that my goals were archival, not interpretive.

  I was glad I had brought the sweater. The sky was clear, the sun bright, the deep blue waters of the melted glacier inviting, but the weather had changed overnight and the day was as cold as early April. I touched the surface of the lake with my hand . . . ugh. No swimming in that for Charles C. O’Malley today.

  The water temperature was probably about fifty-five, a remedy for concupiscence as one of our retreat masters would have said. I found little to demand the attention of my Argus. I stumbled back to the vast gray house, wondering if there might be a possibility of striking a deal that would prevent a report to the good April of my behavior.

  The house I noted needed a fresh coat of paint. Moreover, with its gables and turrets and battlements, it looked as if it might be haunted—perhaps by the ghosts of the Protestants from whom Jim Clancy had swindled it.

  As I pushed open the heavy oak door—which needed a coat of varnish—I saw out of the corner of my eye a splash of color on the windblown surface of the lake that did not belong there. It was the same peach color as Rosie’s prom dress.

  I paused. That blur ought not to be there.

  It was probably an illusion, a trick of the sun on the water. My conscious self prepared to dismiss it. Then my superego—or some such—forced the image from the periphery of my consciousness to the center. I turned around and raced toward the pier as instinctively as I had raced out of the church eighteen months before.

  Sometimes we don’t get to choose our improvisations.

  Sure enough, there was the prom dress, maybe thirty feet off the end of the pier, mostly underwater with a frail hand rising tentatively above the surface.

  Looking back on the event, I note with some surprise that I had the presence of mind to kick off my shoes and lay the Argus on the pier before I jumped in.

  I lacked, however, the presence of mind to consider two facts: I was a rotten swimmer and I had no idea what I would do when I got to the waterlogged prom gown with a perhaps dead young woman inside it.

  The water was so cold I thought I would die too—it was like jumping out of a warm shower into a meat freezer.

  Somehow I managed to plow my way out to her, though my plowing seemed to consume an eternity or two. I grabbed the pathetically small hand just as it sank in abject resignation beneath the surface of the lake.

  I pulled with all my limited strength. Rosie ascended to the surface and I slipped under. Gagging and gasping, I shoved my head up again. She was choking too, just barely, as though her last breath was expiring, but still alive.

  And mean.

  She had enough life left to kick and tug and pull and drag me under.

  Now what did I do? Given half a chance she would drown us both.

  In the movies the hero swats the heroine when she is hysterical. Moreover I remembered from my swimming course at Fenwick that at times a lifeguard must “immobilize” the person he is saving.

  So I immobilized her with a solid blow to her pretty little jaw. It worked—too well, because now I had an unconscious girl on my hands in a huge, water-soaked prom dress that would, if I didn’t think of a remedy quickly, pull us both under the icy water.

  I must report that despite my antipathy toward the young woman, I took no pleasure in socking her. Nor was there any joy in ripping off her dress, an activity that, under other circumstances, might have had its rewards.

  The remedy worked more or less; stripped of her dress and slip, Rosie Clancy was a buoyant child (in a massive, white, strapless corset) who could easily be dragged to the pier.

  Especially since after maybe five feet of trying to draw her through the water, I discovered I was standing on the muddy bottom, the frigid water barely up to my chest. Perhaps she had been in no danger at all. Perhaps the water where I had grabbed her was not over her head. Perhaps my absurd gesture—my teeth were chattering now—had been unnecessary.

  Typical.

  One can drown in a bathtub. And if one has had too much to drink and is weighed down by a prom dress, one can all too easily drown in five feet of water.

  Later no one would accept my contention that she was in no danger. Humankind must have its heroes.

  I had to figure a way to lift my unconscious burden out of the water to the pier. Slim five feet five inches of girl-becoming-woman that she was, she must still have weighed a hundred pounds, substantially more than I could lift even at my best, which by then I wasn’t.

  So I pushed and shoved and pulled and yanked and finally landed her like a beached Moby Dick, this season’s great white whale of Lake Geneva.

  She woke up just as I put all my weight into a final shove, waved her hand as if taking a bow, and knocked my camera into the lake.

  I was too tired and too cold to care.

  The next problem was to pull myself up on the pier. I tried three times and after each effort fell back into the water. Had I saved the foolish little girl’s life only to lose my own?

  Walk up to the shore?

  Chew gum and think?

  I made it, barely, on the fourth try, just in time for a horde of promsters to appear and watch the proceedings with astonishment.

  I was lying on the pier, fully clad, quaking and inhaling desperately. Rosie, in her erratically attached armored undergarment, was vomiting and crying hysterically.

  Peg broke the stunned silence. “Chucky saved her life!”

  “She ruined my camera while I was doing it.”

  A churlish comment?

  Yeah, but she did ruin it. Maybe if it were summer, I could have salvaged my beloved Argus from the muck at the bottom of Geneva, but not in the middle of winter—which is what, shivering uncontrollably on the pier and gasping for breath, I was convinced that it was.

  I thought that I should throw her back in as a trade with the lake for my camera.

  I wasn’t the only person who had brought a camera to the after-prom celebration. I heard shutters clicking as I struggled to my knees. Probably none of them had enough sense of composition to frame the shot right.

  “She’s suffering from shock and exposure.” Peg took charge as was her wont. “One of you idiots get blankets for her. And call a doctor.” And to me: “Why didn’t you pull her up onto the shore?”

  An excellent question and one to which I had no answer.

  “Weeds,” I muttered incoherently. On the spur of the moment it was not a bad excuse.

  I tried to stand up and stride off the pier the way Buck Jones would have done in the old western films. Or more recently John Wayne. Instead, I fell on my face, assuming a position not unlike that I had occupied in Hansen Park Stadium after Ed Murray had crunched me.

  They laughed.

  Hero as fall guy.

  They wrapped me in blankets too.

  Rosie refused t
o be taken to a hospital or to see a doctor. She did not want to worry her mother. So she was bundled in blankets and fed with hot chocolate and eventually, it was reported to me by Peg, helped into a hot bath and a warm bed.

  I crawled back to my room, hung my clothes by the heat register, a great improvement on our noisy radiators at home, and collapsed into the bed.

  “Are you all right, Chucky? We’ve been looking for you.”

  I rolled over, opened my eyes, and peered at my sister and the unfamiliar room. “Sure I’m all right.”

  The only questions are Where am I? and Why am I here?

  “She was drunk of course.” Peg watched me somberly.

  “Naturally.”

  “And she fell off the pier, she didn’t jump in.”

  “Fell off the pier?” The idea that she had jumped in seemed absurd. Why would anyone do that?

  “At least she claims she fell in. I’m not sure she’s telling the truth.”

  “Why would anyone jump in Lake Geneva in this kind of weather in a prom dress?”

  “I don’t think she knows herself.” Peg sat on the side of my bed, more interested in her own problem than in her heroic brother. “I hope she doesn’t do it again.”

  “At least not before I have another camera for her to ruin.”

  “You are all right.” She hugged me fiercely. “I’m so proud of you. You were so brave. That little bitch isn’t worth risking your life.”

  “I can’t call her that.”

  “That’s different.” She hugged me again.

  “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go back to sleep.”

  “Okay. Vinny and I will drive you home whenever you want. Take your time.”

  I had every intention of doing so.

  When I woke up again, I reached for my wrist. The Bulova wasn’t there. I had not put it on. So it had not suffered the same fate as my camera.

  It was on the table next to the bed. Four o’clock. Enough sleep. If my lungs would stop aching, everything would be fine.

  As I walked to the bathroom, I amended my evaluation. If I could also walk without wobbling, everything would be fine.

  My clothes were dry, so I put them back on. My wrinkled shirt and my unshaven face made me look like the kind of person who would routinely be routed to the back door of the Clancy “cottage.”