A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  As a critic wrote, “The ambiguity of this photograph haunts and troubles. Is it a parable of perversity or a comment on the power of hope? O’Malley sternly refuses to spare us the uneasy implications of our attraction and revulsion.”

  I’ve been asked often to explain the picture, which I can’t do. I’ve also been called on to defend it, which seems to be an illegitimate demand.

  “By what possible standard of morality,” I am quoted in the New York Times Magazine profile, “can we deny to this young woman the right to hope? Is not hope, after all, a biological necessity?”

  When I am asked whether I love or hate the young woman, I always say I have no justification for hating anyone.

  In truth I loved her then and love her now, but my love, like all love, is problematic and equivocal. My unease, even today, is more with myself than with her.

  The next day, the sergeant who was my counterpart at CID phoned to say that the three orderlies had been picked up and that they had “spilled the beans” about a big black-market operation in stolen American drugs.

  “What will they get?”

  “A few months in the disciplinary barracks, maybe a general discharge.”

  We were not hard on our own in those days. But down in Nürnberg we were prosecuting others as war criminals.

  After class that night, I sat in my room in the Vinehaus and stared at the starry sky through the slanted little window above my head. The sounds of “South America Take It Away” on the armed forces network was coming through the walls from other rooms. My elementary-accounting text on my lap, I pondered the fact that the world underneath those stars was far more complex a place than the world of double-entry ledgers.

  The other two noncoms quartered with me were out at one of their drinking haunts where they were every night. I was lonely, confused, far from home.

  Perhaps I should visit the room above the bakery on the Untersandstrasse again and see if Erika was continuing to recover. Would they know how to reach me if they needed more medicine? I had tried to explain to Frau Strauss how she could find me. But had she understood my pidgin German?

  Had I not done enough for them? Should I not disengage from them? Or at least leave the next step, if any, to them?

  I closed the text, stood up from my desk, reached for my jacket, and changed my mind. No, damn it, I did not want to become more involved.

  And the next night too I resisted the temptation, which had now acquired explicitly sexual overtones. The gratitude and admiration in Trudi’s eyes left little doubt that she would give herself to me. My virginity, a burden whose heaviness I had not noticed until I had put my arms around her in the jeep, would finally be given up.

  Was it not time, anyway?

  It was raining that night. Warmth had begun to slip across the Eurasian landmass from the Gulf Stream, bringing torrents of rain as a false promise of a still distant spring. The beat of the raindrops on the tiny window out of which I looked from my room in the Vinehaus at the Schönleinsplatz seemed a melody of foolish loneliness, an absurd and melancholy cry of despair.

  I was homesick, desperately lonely, and depressed. The rest of the cosmos was racing by, unaware of me, not caring about me, utterly indifferent to my fate. I felt like a kid lost on a wide and desolate beach, a rainstorm moving in over the water, who hasn’t seen another human for hours and fears that he will be alone for the rest of his life.

  I put on my jacket and left the room.

  In the lobby of the Vinehaus I wondered whether I should pick up a couple of cartons of cigarettes and a dozen packs of nylons from our supply in the back of the Vinehaus (probably liberated by my colleagues from the PX), pure gold for my impoverished friends. I decided that such a gift might be too obvious; it might impose on Trudi an obligation I did not want to impose.

  I wanted her to love me for myself, not for my tobacco. Besides, Trudi might not be in the tiny apartment. Or she might not be alone.

  I walked through the rain across the town, hunkered in my jacket, down the Langstrasse, across the bridge through the arches of the Rathaus (without looking at St. Cunnegunda, who might remind me again of Mom), and into the Kasernstrasse. Somehow, my pilgrimage seemed more justified if it was uncomfortable.

  The Untersandstrasse was deserted. And bitter cold. Even the crowned Madonna, above the shop, holding a feisty little crowned kid, seemed cold.

  “Ja?” Trudi’s voice. Sleepy.

  “Karl.”

  Wrapped in a blanket, she opened the door and let me in. No one else in the room.

  “I am so glad you came. We wanted to tell you that Erika was well, but we did not want to embarrass you.”

  She had been sleeping, in her underwear to judge by the straps peeking above the blanket.

  “I would not have been embarrassed. Where is Erika?”

  Trudi huddled on the little bed, under the light of the single bulb hanging from the ceiling. “She is at work. She insisted. She feels so much better. All of us”—Trudi waved her hand to encompass the room and the three women who lived in it—“are grateful to you.”

  “The men who took your money have been arrested. They were part of a gang. They probably had the medicine you needed, but they saw no point in giving it to you when they could have both the penicillin and your money.”

  “Do they know that I . . . ?” She frowned anxiously.

  “No. And they will be sent home. You need not fear them.”

  “Do sit down.” She gestured again with the barest hint of Middle European hauteur—a well-bred woman impatient with the rough manners of an Ausländer—toward a battered old lounge that would not have made it into the O’Malley family living room during the Depression.

  “Thank you.”

  The rain was pounding on the slate roof above us even more mournfully than it had on my window at the Vinehaus Messerschmitt. The room was damp and chilly; the smell of bread from the store below teased me with its sweetness. I wanted her as badly as I had ever wanted anything in my short life. In a distant corner of my brain I thought, quite abstractly, that the bigger they come the harder they fall.

  “You have been very good to us. I will always remember how I knew I was about to suffer terribly and then die, slowly and painfully,” she raced on. “I thought how foolish all our walking and working and worrying had been. It would have been better that the Russians had killed me. I tried to pray, but God does not listen to Nazis. Then I heard your voice . . .”

  “Maybe God did listen to you.”

  “Ja.”

  She read the desire in my eyes. How could she not have read it?

  She walked slowly to the couch, sat next to me, and folded her blanket around me.

  “You don’t have to do this, Trudi.” I wrapped my arms around her warm body. “I know you’re grateful.”

  She began to kiss me, slowly, gently, lovingly. “I want to do it, Karl, I want to do it so very much.”

  Enchanted by sweetness and wonder, I forgot who I was and where I came from and abandoned everything in which I ever believed.

  15

  The next day a letter from home reminded me of a life that I now wanted to forget. I had awakened immensely proud of myself. I had given pleasure to a woman and received it from her. I was now a man. What more could one ask?

  What I did not want was a puzzling letter from the good April, especially not one about Rosemarie. My mother’s letter was obscure. The good April was often obscure. The problem was separating the ordinarily obscure from the deliberately obscure. Even today, I know the two lines by heart:

  Poor Rosie has been so upset ever since her mother’s death. It would be so sweet if you wrote her a nice sympathy note.

  The letter assumed that I knew all about Clarice Clancy’s death. It was strange, I reflected, given my mother’s reverence for the details of wakes and funerals, that she had not recounted any of the facts about Rosemarie’s mother’s death. Clarice was a young woman. However unhappy her marriage had been and howev
er much she might have failed as a mother, the death of a woman who was not yet forty years old was a terrible tragedy. The good April should have spilt tears on her letter to me.

  It was a momentary question. I was preoccupied with Trudi. I figured one of Mom’s letters had not made it and that was the one with the tears and the details.

  I did write a note to Rosemarie, however. That very day. Despite Trudi. It was a most uncharacteristic act of humanity on my part. Refusing to reflect on what I was saying, I sat down at my typewriter and banged out a letter.

  Dear Rosemarie,

  I received a letter today from the good April alluding to the tragedy of your mother’s death. I don’t know how long ago this happened—perhaps an earlier letter was lost in the APO. So, if this note is late, I apologize.

  The thought of losing a parent is pure terror. I have had that thought and fear often enough to have some remote idea of how much pain you must feel. I know nothing I can say will diminish that pain, but I wish at least to say that I am sorry for your loss and your pain.

  I know that your mother loved you deeply, that indeed you were the most important part of her life. I know too how proud she was of the prediction of that Gypsy woman long ago at Twin Lakes that she would have a daughter who would be a great woman.

  You’re already that, Rosemarie, and you’ll become even more that as the years go on. And your mother will look down from heaven proudly because she brought you into the world.

  The rest of us will say that we are proud to have known both of you.

  God bless,

  Chuck

  PS. I apologize for being a complete heel and not thanking you for your wonderful going-away present. I use it almost every day. When I come home, I’ll have lots of pictures to show you.

  Then I dismissed Rosemarie from my mind. Trudi was now the love of my life, the only love I would ever have. Naturally, the “little Clancy tyke” would not stay where she was put.

  A month or maybe six weeks later, she pushed her way back into the forefront of my consciousness.

  I read Rosemarie’s response in the beer garden in the park next to the Schloss Geyersworth on a warm early-spring evening while I was waiting for Trudi and another night of magical romping. I was drinking coffee, a concession of the Germans to the peculiarity of American tastes, eating sausage, listening to a band playing polka music, savoring the soft night breezes.

  “Dear Chuck,” the letter began, “I figured if I started out ‘Dear Chucky Ducky,’ you’d tear this up and throw it away in your silly old beer garden where you’re probably reading it.”

  I stirred uneasily. How did she know about the beer garden?

  Leave it to Rosemarie to make a good guess.

  I had picked up my mail as I left the office long after it had closed and jammed the letters into my pocket. I had finished studying for my exam in German lit the next night and, feeling hunger pangs, decided that my mouth was watering for a sausage. I treated myself to a stiff shot of self-pity, consumed two monumental sausages, and then remembered my mail. I read Mom’s letter first—filled with bright and cheery family gossip—and then pulled the second one out of my pocket. The envelope edged in red and blue had no return address. My name and APO number were written in a clear and elegant hand, a woman’s probably. I was sure I’d never seen the handwriting before.

  My fingers trembled as I neatly slit the envelope. I always neatly slit envelopes. I quickly glanced at the signature at the bottom of the final crisp page: “Fondly, RHC.”

  RHC? Who the hell?

  Only after the Chucky Ducky comment did I know who my correspondent was. The rest of my body joined my fingers in trembling. I imagined I heard birds singing and violin music instead of the vulgar tuba.

  She had written after all.

  Dear Chuck,

  I figured if I started out “Dear Chucky Ducky,” you’d tear this up and throw it away in your silly old beer garden where you’re probably reading it. I’ve torn up about a million and a half previous versions. In fact, I’ve done nothing this week except work on drafts of this letter.

  And read Trollope. That’s not a woman of ill-fame but an English novelist who wrote the longest stories in the history of the human race.

  I won’t say that this is the best of the drafts. It is merely the last. I said to myself when I sat down to write it that no matter how bad it is, it’s going in the mail.

  With that heartrending preliminary, you obviously wonder what important message I have to deliver.

  Funny thing! I can’t quite remember!

  Oh, I know!

  I want to thank you for your very sensitive letter of sympathy last month. It was typical of the kindness and sensitivity which lurks just beneath the surface of your comedian mask.

  I had never heard about the Gypsy’s prediction before. I am torn between hoping it was accurate and hoping that it wasn’t.

  I did love my mother very much and I know she loved me. For reasons you know as well as I do, we were not able to love each other enough. Her death was a terrible shock. I mean I never knew someone who died before and it made me realize that I’m going to die someday too, probably having wasted my life and the talents God gave me. And He did give me talents, Chuck, I don’t know why, but He did.

  The one hope I have is that growing up with the crazy O’Malleys and with a foster brother like you who is more than just a brother will give me a long-shot chance in life.

  My face is warm as I write these words. I don’t want this to be a love letter. Only a letter in which I say thanks and tell you, as a kind of foster sister, how proud I am of you.

  I’d better stop now.

  God bless.

  Fondly,

  RHC

  Oh, boy!

  She had enclosed two clippings that only increased the mystery of Clarice’s death.

  The first clipping was a standard death notice:

  CLANCY (Powers), Clarice Marie. Beloved wife of james Patrick, Mother of Rosemarie, Daughter of the late Helen (McArdle) and Joseph Powers, MD. Suddenly. Visitation Wednesday and Thursday at Conroy’s Funeral Home, 420 North Austin. Funeral mass at 9:30 Friday to St. Ursula’s. Internment at Mount Carmel Cemetery. Please omit flowers.

  The second was a news story:

  WOMAN’S DEATH RULED AN ACCIDENT

  The Cook County coroner’s office ruled late yesterday that the death of Clarice Powers Clancy, 40, last Tuesday was an accident. Mrs. Clancy, wife of investor James Clancy, died as a result of injuries incurred in a fall at her home at 1005 North Menard. Assistant Coroner Joel Stone said that Mrs. Clancy apparently tripped on the hem of her dressing gown and fell down the steps, hitting her head on the concrete floor of the basement. Death resulted from a fractured skull and brain injuries. “There is no evidence of any foul play,” Mr. Stone said.

  Police are known to have questioned Mr. Clancy and the couple’s daughter, Rosemarie Helen Clancy, 16. Rosemarie, a student at Trinity High School in River Forest, and a friend discovered Mrs. Clancy’s body.

  “It was a tragic and unnecessary accident,” Stone told the Tribune.

  Then Trudi, glorious in a new spring dress I had bought for her, arrived. I put Rosemarie’s envelope in the pocket of my jacket and concentrated on Trudi’s beauty and my plans for the evening.

  Yet later I went back to my quarters—the other noncoms were never in at night these days—and composed a heedless and impassioned reply to Rosemarie.

  Dear Rosemarie,

  It was good to receive your letter. I can walk around HQ with it sticking out of my pocket and thus proudly proclaim to my buddies that I too receive mail from a girl at home—even if it took me almost a year to find one who would write to me.

  I do know who Anthony Trollope is, Rosemarie, my love. I am not a total idiot. I have even read part of one of his books. I’m sure I’m behind you on the subject, as I suspect I am on everything else.

  Which ought to humiliate me but doesn’t. Rather, I’m pr
oud of my foster sister, who is smart as well as beautiful.

  I don’t know whether I’ve changed much this year away from home. I kind of doubt it. I’m the sort of character who doesn’t change. But your letter was written by a young woman who is almost a stranger, more intelligent than the girl I fished out of Lake Geneva, more thoughtful, and I’m sure much more beautiful.

  I can hardly wait to meet her again. Or maybe meet her for the first time.

  All my love,

  Chuck

  The next week she replied, this time by U.S. airmail.

  Dear Chucky,

  You are SO sweet. Thank you.

  I have to rush off to Trinity and have another fight with the nuns. I’ll write in a couple of days.

  Love,

  Rosie