She had seemed relaxed and peaceful as she filled up the glasses and passed the potato chips to her guests; whatever demons had possessed her the night before had been temporarily exorcised.
“I’m sorry,” she had whispered in my ear earlier in the evening as we left Calvert House, the University Catholic center, to walk through the blizzard to her apartment on Kenwood just south of Fifty-fifth Street. “I goofed up again. Thank you for dragging me home.”
A kid who was in my econ class had phoned me the night before. “O’Malley? I knew you lived in Oak Park. Hey, that woman with the gorgeous teats you study with in Harper? Well, I was in Knight’s bar until a few minutes ago. She’s drinking a lot. Shouting and arguing with people. That’s not safe for a woman in that bar, know what I mean?”
“Thanks, Howard, I’ll be right out.”
There were no expressways in Chicago in those days, so the ride from Oak Park to Hyde Park required forty-five minutes.
Rosemarie, sound asleep and smelling like a brewery, was behind the bar. Her clothes were disheveled.
“I didn’t know what to do with her,” the soft-spoken bartender told me. “A guy said he was going to call her boyfriend, a tough little redhead, he said. That you?”
“My twin brother.”
He paused and then laughed. “She’s a real looker. You shouldn’t let her come in this place alone.”
“Ever try to argue with an Irishwoman?”
He laughed again.
I woke her up, found her coat, pushed her arms into it, and dragged her back to her apartment. I helped her to remove her dress, dumped her into bed, and pulled the blanket over her.
“Chucky, you’re an asshole,” she murmured as I turned out the lights.
“At least you know who it was that took off your dress.”
“A real asshole.” Her voice was slurred. “Why didn’t you leave me in the bar?”
“That’s a very good question.”
When she thanked me the following night, she was properly contrite. I’m sure she didn’t remember the use of language that was strictly forbidden in the O’Malley house.
“I’m glad I was there,” I said fervently. If I hadn’t found her in the bar on Fifty-fifth, she might have been there all night or collapsed in the snow on the way home. Rosemarie needed a keeper all right, only it shouldn’t be me.
“You didn’t take my slip off this time.” She nudged my arm.
It was the first reference she had ever made to the incident at Lake Geneva when I had pulled her in her prom dress out of the water.
“Dress and shoes seemed to be enough for the occasion. I’ll admit that the possibility of a more thorough investigation did occur to me.”
“You’re wonderful, Chucky.” This time she squeezed my arm. “Simply wonderful.”
“Why, Rosemarie?”
“Why do I do things like last night?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure. I become discouraged and I don’t care … but I won’t do it again. I promise.”
I didn’t quite believe her, but I didn’t know what to say.
So the next night I tried to focus my imagination away from the delightful difficulties of trying to unzip and remove a dress from an inebriated young woman and to concentrate on Father Jean Danielou, of the Institut Catholique de Paris, and the question of the relationship between Jesus and Buddha. On the whole, the former images were much more appealing.
Jesus and Buddha, the priest seemed to be saying, were both allies and enemies. The reconciliation between the two could never be pursued so long as the Catholic tradition was tied to the Thomistic paradigm. But in the study of ancient Church fathers, there could be found much material for conversation with Buddhists. The New Theology, La Théologie Nouvelle, which had emerged in Europe since the war, would make possible conversation not only with Buddhism but with all the world religions and the non-religions like Marxism too.
He referred to one of his papers, “La Theologie Nouvelle, où vat elle?”
I remembered one of the members of the Greenwood Community telling me earlier in the evening that Père Danielou’s brother René Danielou was a convert from Catholicism to Buddhism. All this was very heady stuff for a reject of the University of Notre Dame who had left the Catholic Church—to hear him tell it anyway.
Ironically, Père Danielou was teaching at Notre Dame—where I had never heard of him. (My buddy, Christopher Kurtz, insisted that he had mentioned him often but that I did not listen because I was prejudiced against anyone without an Irish name.)
Catholic intellectual ferment had exploded at the University of Chicago after the war, as the first generation of post war Catholic graduate students had appeared—indeed the first generation of Catholics to seek academic careers in substantial numbers. The Church was not ready for an intelligentsia where there had hitherto been none. But the Catholic chaplains at the University were clever enough to give the young intellectuals and would-be intellectuals enough room to do what would later be called “their own thing.”
And occasionally to invite one of their heroes to lecture.
Père Danielou didn’t look like a hero, but he wasn’t gratuitously rude and insulting to Americans, as a matter of principle, as some of the French “religious sociologists” of that era were—men profoundly shocked and affronted by the religious devotion of American Catholics. “Sacrilege!” one had exploded after describing the hordes of men receiving Communion at Holy Souls parish just south of the University on Holy Name Sunday. In the presence of such men, I shut up and indulged myself in snide thoughts, which Rosemarie had briskly dismissed: “Irish Catholic anti-intellectualism, Charles. You know better than that.”
“But I am an Irish Catholic anti-intellectual!”
“No, you’re not! You’re the smartest one in the group. You just have to pretend that you’re a dumb accountant.”
I hung around the intellectuals and their arrogant French friends because Rosemarie did, and because I thought their pretensions were funny. I also objected—though to myself—that they seemed immune to her beauty.
Père Danielou, however, even smiled at Rosemarie, having noticed, unlike the religious sociologists, that she was a) a woman, and b) a beautiful woman. He could not, I figured, be all bad.
Our concerns in the gatherings, either at the apartment of the Greenwood Community (on Greenwood, of course) or at Rosemarie’s apartment, were vague, intense, disorganized, and, from the viewpoint of later years, shallow. We had written to Cardinal Stritch asking for Mass on Saturday afternoon so that “workers” could attend. The workers’ cause was our cause, whoever the workers might be—in this case policemen, firemen, hospital workers, public transportation employees. The Cardinal had replied, somewhat haughtily, that since the time of Pliny the Younger mass had taken place in the morning. The response, my angry friends had sputtered, was both inaccurate and irrelevant.
We worried about evolution: not whether it had occurred, but how the Church’s teaching on original sin could be reconciled with the conviction of archaeologists that the race could not have descended from a single pair.
We damned Thomism on the grounds that Aristotelian philosophy was not compatible with modern science.
We were furious that Monsignor Fulton Sheen had denounced Freud. I kind of liked the good Monsignor, who had preached at St. Ursula’s once.
We feared that many young people would be lost to the Church unless Catholic scripture teaching was modified to take into account what Bultmann had taught about the process of “demythologizing.” I didn’t know from either Bultmann or “demythologizing” but they both sounded dreadful.
We quoted the great men like Tillich and Barth as though they were personal friends, though I doubt that any of us had read them—or Bultmann either, for that matter.
We were all profoundly concerned, so concerned in fact, that we forgot to comb our hair or do the dishes or take out the garbage. We were all vehemently anticlerical but m
ost of us went to Mass every week and some every day.
(I didn’t go at all. Our hostess, on the other hand, still not sure about God, was to be found in the Calvert House chapel every morning. Still, as she told me with her contagious laugh, “to whom it may concern.”)
We denied the importance of authority and did our best to win the local priests, the Cardinal, and the Vatican to our point of view.
We were all committed Catholics; we had made the decision that our Catholic heritage was compatible with our intellectual concerns. (I exclude myself from “we” because I was still furious at the Catholic Church. Some of the most wide-eyed of the intellectual radicals urged me to forget about my hurt feelings and “join the team.”)
There were lots of ironies in the fire.
Driving back and forth between Oak Park and Hyde Park every day in my 1942 Ford, I would never have stumbled on this group of intense young intellectuals if it had not been for Rosemarie, who during our first quarter at Chicago had dragged me off to the Calvert House lectures.
The lectures were a brief respite from study. I had never studied so hard in all my life and never been so pushed to the limits of my capabilities. I was also working part-time downtown in the accounting office of O’Hanlon and O’Halloran at the Conway Building across from City Hall.
“Have you ever just not done anything?” Rosemarie demanded. She was offended by my midafternoon rush to the Loop on the Illinois Central (a ten-minute trip from Fifty-ninth Street).
“I wouldn’t know how.”
“You ought to.”
There were many other “ought tos.” I ought to work more with my camera. I ought to go to church again, because I would do that eventually anyway. I ought to join her at her voice lessons. I ought to rent an apartment instead of commuting in my “funny little car” or, on days I worked, riding on the L and the I.C.
I paid no attention. Indeed, if Rosemarie said I ought to do something, her suggestion in itself seemed enough reason not to do it.
How did she become involved with the young Catholic intellectuals? It was a most improbable alliance. She was a well-groomed, flawlessly dressed rich girl among a group who resented wealth and tried to affect a Bohemian style of life.
She’d met them at the Calvert Club and simply hung around. Her good looks probably would not have made much difference to the Greenwood Group, and they would have been reluctant to use her apartment and her money, but she was also very smart, so bright in fact that many people on the fringes of the group thought she was a graduate student in “the humanities.”
You couldn’t quite figure out where she stood politically, or religiously, or intellectually by her questions, but you could tell that she had a first-class mind.
“Père Danielou, what do you think the Church in Europe might learn from the Church in America?”
It was a heretical question. We were to learn from Europe, especially from France, instead of vice versa.
The Jesuit smiled gently. “A number of important things. But what, mademoiselle, would you suggest we might learn?”
“Enthusiasm, maybe, and pragmatism, and closeness between priests and people?”
“Excellent,” he applauded her. “And your wonderful openness and hope for the future.”
Rosemarie blushed happily. Some of the others in the room beamed. They thought she was special, obviously, and were proud of her.
Just like my mother.
“She is such a darling, sweet little thing, Chucky. You’re a perfect match. She’s so simple and you’re so complicated.”
Me, complicated? Nonsense!
There was a final question for Père Danielou: What will happen if Rome condemns La Théologie Nouvelle?
“We must have the integrity to continue to do our work no matter what happens,” he said with a grim little smile, “otherwise nothing will ever change in the Church.”
In 1950 the Vatican condemned the New Theology. Although no names were mentioned, Père Danielou and several others were transferred and forced out of the classroom. Later the New Theologians were rehabilitated and became influential at the Second Vatican Council. Danielou, however, learned the lesson of ecclesiastical politics and managed to ally himself with the conservatives in the Church. He ended up a cardinal, though a conservative, not to say reactionary one. He died outside a disorderly house, and rumors said he had actually been inside. His friends argued that he preached to the poor unfortunate prostitutes of Paris. Yet I could not forget that cold winter night in 1950 when he had smiled at Rosemarie.
About eleven-thirty, the session ended. The French Jesuit was escorted back to Calvert House, and the members of the Greenwood Community trudged off in the falling snow toward their apartment building.
No one offered to help Rosemarie clean up. As usual, I stayed after the others to help remove the glasses and the empty bags of potato chips, and to vacuum the carpet. Her apartment was small and frequently chaotic, but it was expensively furnished and carpeted. I knew that if I didn’t designate myself as the clean-up brigade, Rosemarie would let the job go till the morning and possibly the morning after that.
“Chucky,” she would say to me, “unlike you, I can sleep at night if the apartment is a mess. I’ll clean it up eventually.”
“I learned my housekeeping habits from the good April.”
We would both laugh because my mother was, to put it mildly, relaxed in her approach to housekeeping.
We were perhaps potential lovers, though both of us would vigorously deny it. We were friends, a much more relaxed and, I told myself, safer alliance. Rosemarie dated others, often Ed Murray, my old-time football rival from Mount Carmel, and I of course dated no one.
Sometimes Rosemarie dragged me back to her apartment for hamburgers or sandwiches and an occasional fruit salad. “You’ll die if you eat that University food or Jimmy’s hamburgers all the time.”
“It’s no worse than what they fed us at the Dome.”
“And look what happen to you there, storing beer under the bed, of all things.”
I had been thrown out on that charge, though I didn’t drink beer or anything else, and had been framed.
Sometimes we were very serious, even personal. She more than I.
“Daddy put all that property and money in Mommy’s name so that if he was ever in trouble at the Exchange they wouldn’t be able to take it away from him.”
“Unable to meet his margin calls.”
“Whatever. Anyway, she hated him so much before she died that she made a will and left it all to me in such a way that he couldn’t touch any of the property. Or the bank accounts. He’s furious. Mr. O’Laughlin, Daddy’s lawyer, is after me all the time about it.”
Since shortly before the Flood, I think, Joe O’Laughlin had enjoyed the reputation of being the most dishonest lawyer on the West Side, a perfect legal adviser for Jim Clancy.
“Will you sign it all over to him, then?” We were talking in whispers since we were in a library reading room. I couldn’t remember how we had entered this strange conversation.
“I’m not sure. What do you think I ought to do? Mommy wanted me to have it all.”
“Was it hers to give? I mean, he really owned all those buildings, didn’t he? It was just a legal fiction.”
“Was it, Chuck?” she tapped a pencil against her lips. “Dad used her money to begin his investments at the Exchange after his mother died. She said that was the only reason he married her.”
Small wonder that the young woman was a little crazy.
“Do you hate your father?”
She stared up at the ceiling of Harper Library. “He’s so lonely and unhappy.”
“You don’t live at home because of the fight over your mother’s will?”
“It’s not a fight exactly. I mean, we’re not enemies because of it. I think he did love her and didn’t know how to express it. Wouldn’t that be terrible?”
I agreed that it would. And hoped that she would change the subje
ct. I did, however, manage to touch her hand sympathetically.
“Stop distracting me,” she said, grinning, “and get back to your Pascal.”
I hated Jim Clancy. When I was a kid, he took me out in a sailboat on Lake Geneva and deliberately got me seasick. Then, after I had vomited over the side of the boat at the Clancy pier, he shoved a chocolate ice-cream bar at my face. I vomited again, unfortunately missing him.
“He has always liked his little practical jokes,” my mom sighed, “poor man. First one, then, your guard is down, another.”
“Once, at Twin Lakes,” my father added, “he set off the fire alarm. Then when the firemen had gone back to Walworth, he threw stink bombs into two of the wash-rooms and started real fires.”
“Very funny,” I commented.
I had hated him because he was rich. Now I had another reason to hate him.
I returned to the agonized, contorted, ecstatic reflections of that great, God-haunted man. Out of the corner of my eye I noted that Rosemarie was still staring at the ceiling. Still wrestling with a puzzle, I thought.
And I don’t want to know what it is.
I was troubled by the mystery surrounding her mother’s death when I was away in the Army, in Europe. My parents and sisters, normally immune to secrecy, refused to discuss the matter when I asked direct questions, and they avoided any hints when I tried to approach it indirectly.
“Mrs. Clancy’s death must have been a terrible shock to Rosemarie?”
“Rosie is a pretty tough young woman,” my dad would answer, not even looking up from his copy of the Chicago Sun.
There had been, I learned from press clippings, a police investigation and a coroner’s report that Mrs. Clancy had died an “accidental” death from an unfortunate fall down the stairs into the basement of the Clancy home at 1105 North Menard.
Pushed down the stairs? By her husband? By Rosemarie? Drunk?
It was none of my business. Yet I remembered hearing her sob in St. Ursula’s late one night. Life in that family would drive anyone to drink.
Whatever had happened, she was still admired—no, adored—in the O’Malley family. Yet despite my mother’s blunt if clichéd comment about felines and curiosity, I wanted more details. I never asked Rosemarie about the accident. That would have been gratuitously cruel.
A Christmas Wedding Page 2