“Gimme a break!”
“Anyway, this is the past. We have to do something in the present. Or the immediate future.”
“Get him out of that job.”
Chuck nodded solemnly and removed the file from my hand. He paused to carefully check the pictures.
“It would be interesting,” he said, deep in reflection, “if we could measure what those kids expected of life then and how it compares with the present.”
“The amazing thing to me,” I replied, “is not that the O’Malley family was willing to acquire another daughter without any fuss and bother, but that I had the nerve to push my way in.”
“I would have vetoed the project,” he said, extending his arm around my waist, “except that I thought there might be a chance to see you with your clothes off, not that I would have known what to do in such circumstances.”
“Or do now.”
Several days later Ed called and told us in an edgy voice that the Cardinal would like us to do a portrait he could send around to the rectories of the Archdiocese. I accepted before my husband could decline.
That’s another rule we keep.
The man was fat and short and ugly, but genial in an ingratiating way. He wore a carefully tailored cassock with a short cape, red buttons, and red trim, no cummerbund or zucchetto, however.
“Well, Mr. O’Malley,” he said, “you’ll have a real challenge to make something out of me. I don’t want any fancy stuff. Just a picture of me as I am, all of me!”
He brought us drinks, diet cola for me, red wine for Chuck. Father Ed hovered uneasily in the background. He was so thin and haggard that I had hardly recognized him.
Chuck likes to say that the camera always lies. It never takes a picture of someone as they are, but rather as the camera and the photographer want to see him.
“Once a person realizes that we are mountebanks and charlatans, the rest is easy.”
His principle, uttered casually but adhered to implacably, is he wants us to see the subject as he is but in the best possible light. A two-year-old boy child might be an outstandingly ugly little brat, but we must see him in the light of his parents’ love and with the possibility of life stretching out before him.
His task that afternoon was to find something good in an ugly paranoid psychopath who was a prince of the Holy Roman Church. I don’t think he did a very good job of it. Chuck’s lens saw Cardinal O‘Neill as a sawed-off, overweight Mephistopheles with a genial Irish grin. However, the Cardinal praised the results and eagerly sent copies to all the rectories in the Archdiocese. I had seen this reaction frequently in the last couple of years. If O’Malley had done it, then it had to be good.
“He’s not making them pay for it,” Chuck sighed. “Unlike those TV antennae on every Catholic school in Cook and Lake Counties which no one ever uses.”
Actually there was some stuff that they used in the schools, most of which could have been purchased or leased on videotape.
Afterward we went into supper in the dining room of the Cardinal’s mansion. It was one of the strangest evenings in my life. He asked us what Jack Kennedy was like. Before we could answer, he told us stories about Kennedy’s love affairs, some of which could not have been true. Then he talked about conversations he had with Eisenhower and Nixon and Ford.
“What about LBJ?” Chuck squeezed a question into the ongoing babble.
“We didn’t get along too well,” the Cardinal said, wolfing down a huge scoop of potatoes. “He was offended when I told him he should get us out of Vietnam.”
“Back in 1965?” Chuck asked innocently.
“Let me see, yeah, it must have been then.”
I had the uncanny feeling that he was about to recycle Chuck’s life story back as his own. Father Ed said very little, stared glumly at his plate, and barely touched his food.
“Of course, I’ve been over there several times. In-country. The Holy Father wanted to ordain some bishops in the North that the Communists wouldn’t know about. It was scary stuff at first, then you get used to it. One time it looked like I was sure to be caught, then a black Marine helicopter picked me up in the nick of time. Believe you me, I was glad to see those Marines.”
“I can believe that,” Chucky said pleasantly.
Chuck would know because a Black Huey had yanked him out of the South China Sea just before a North Vietnamese fishing boat had beat them to it.
“I’ve had to do a lot of things like that, especially when I was a young bishop. In and out of Russia and China to ordain bishops for the Underground. The Holy Father said to me, ‘Eminence, we can no longer ask you to risk your life for us.’”
“That was very considerate of him.” Chuck nodded in approval.
The bastard was enjoying the show.
“I could tell you stories that would blow your minds,” the Cardinal rushed on, as a nun removed his plate, the last one on the table. “I shouldn’t talk about most of them. The CIA wants me to keep my mouth shut. They warn me that someone on the other side may have put out a contract on me.”
“I’m sure the local boys on the West Side would stop that,” Chuck said with an absolutely straight face. “They’re all good Catholics.”
“They’ve promised me they would. I trust them to keep their word.”
“Men of respect, Your Eminence.”
This can’t be happening, I thought. This is a dream. This crazy man cannot be a Cardinal Archbishop. The nun brought in the biggest dishes of chocolate ice cream I’ve ever seen in my life. I gently eased mine away. Father Ed ignored his. The Cardinal and my husband dug in.
“Now tell me what you think of this Congressman Boylan. I hear he’s a bit of a pinko, alcoholic too.”
Father Ed cringed.
“Timmy?” Chuck said. “Oh, I don’t think so. When he came home from the war he tried to destroy the beer supply on the West Side in a place on Division Street called the Magic Tap because the proprietor has a pretty good magician. We’d sit there hours on end talking about Joyce and Proust, while he drank beer and I sipped on Coca-Cola. No Diet Coke in those days. He hasn’t drunk anything since then. He’s a real credit to our neighborhood and to the Church.”
The Cardinal turned immediately to the question of Mayor Daley’s health.
“I hear he’s got only a couple of months to live.”
The Mayor and the Cardinal were barely on speaking terms.
“He seemed healthy the last time we discussed the situation in Northern Ireland,” Chuck said blandly. “He has some strong views on that as I’m sure you know.”
The Cardinal consumed his ice cream before Chuck had finished his. Both of them had rings of chocolate around their mouths.
“Well,” said the Cardinal, “I have to run. I have to sign twenty-five hundred celebret cards before morning. You’ll have to excuse me. I’ll be looking forward to your proofs, Chuck.”
He bounded up the stairs. Father Ed, a ghostly presence, showed us to the door.
“What’s a celebret card?” I asked.
“It says that the bearer of the card is a priest in good standing and asks that he be permitted to say Mass. We’re supposed to carry one with us when we travel.”
Father Ed spoke in a whisper.
“Does anyone use them anymore?”
“No.”
Chuck and I were silent until we turned on to the Congress Expressway (as we Democrats still call it) and raced toward the safety of Oak Park.
“One flew over the cuckoo’s nest,” I said.
“Bedlam, Donnybrook Farm … And he’s our Cardinal.”
“It shouldn’t have surprised us, Chuck. It’s what Fathers Raven and Keenan have been telling us. He’s round the bend.”
“Monsignors … the Vatican can’t know how bad it is.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that. We’ve got to get Father Ed out of there.”
“Did you have fun?” Moire Meg asked when we were back at the house. She was poring over an algebra problem.<
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“Not exactly,” I said.
She looked up, her green eyes flashing.
“Like the monkey island at Brookfield Zoo?”
“That’s a fair analysis.” My husband sank into an easy chair.
“Poor Uncle Ed.”
Indeed poor Uncle Ed.
Summer at Grand Beach was delightful. It’s hard to worry about anything during summer at the Lake. Yet being a mother, I worried, especially when I retreated to the tower which was my workroom. (I could pull up the ladder and be isolated from all the world.) I worried more about Moire Meg than I did about Father Ed. I remembered how crazy I was at that age (drinking at Lake Delavan).
“That one is not to worry about,” my husband contended. “She has more common sense than we did at that age.”
Too true. But that is not enough to stop a mother from worrying about her daughter, especially since she’s lost one already. April Rosemary, I knew, was lost to us forever.
Father Ed didn’t come to the Lake once that summer, not even to baptize my first granddaughter, Maria Rosa O’Malley, a red-haired Latina of almost intolerable beauty. He was scheduled to do the ceremony, but called at the last minute to say he couldn’t make it.
Msgr. Raven, who was on vacation in Long Beach at a houseful of priests and was coming anyway, did the honors. He didn’t say anything about Father Ed’s absence. The little hellion screamed through the ceremony and went ballistic when John poured the water on her head.
Her two grandmothers passed the baby back and forth, each of us claiming with total dishonesty that this new grandchild looked like the other’s family.
“The red hair,” Lupe Lopez argued, “it is just like your husband’s.”
“Look at everything else and she looks just like you, Lupe, and your daughter.”
In fact the howling little brat was patently an O’Malley.
No one said much about Father Ed’s absence.
“I really believe that the poor boy needs a long rest,” the good April observed.
“We have to get him out of there,” her husband agreed.
They were simply too nice to figure out how to do that.
Chuck and I plowed along, he with his darkroom and I with my stories. Neither of us made much progress. It was as though our lives were on hold and still slipping through our fingers.
Then surprise and wonder returned.
On a day in September when Moire Meg and I had been shopping, we returned to the house to learn that April Rosemary had phoned to say that she was coming to visit us and with a young man and would not be sleeping in the same bedroom with him.
Our daughter had clawed her way out of the world of drugs and sex and rock and roll, recovered her health, and found herself a fiancé who was a medical school graduate and the son of Chuck’s commanding officer in Germany after the war. They would be married shortly after our silver wedding anniversary and live in Chicago, indeed in Oak Park. She had not called us until she was sure that she was in full control of her life, the sort of thing that a daughter of mine might well do.
The Crazy O’Malley celebrations went on for a week. Father Ed did not come to any of them.
My daughter was still fragile and vulnerable, still feeling terribly guilty because she had let us down. We were so happy to have her back that our forgiveness was easy and automatic. However, she could not forgive herself.
“Give her time,” Maggie Ward insisted. “She’ll be all right … I presume you don’t fight?”
“Certainly not!”
“Nor does she fight with the cute red-haired genius?”
“Poor Moire Meg walks on eggshells.”
“And her father?”
“She never fought with him. Now she talks photography since she intends to follow in his footsteps.”
“You’ll know she’s all right when she begins to fight with you. It’s not healthy for mothers and daughters not to fight. Don’t worry, it will come.”
Naturally I worried. That’s what mothers are for.
“Where’s Uncle Ed?” she asked me one day as she helped Missus and me prepare dinner. Missus, our Polish housekeeper, humored us, though she considered us a nuisance in the kitchen.
We really didn’t need a housekeeper anymore. However, it would have broken Missus’s heart if we told her that.
“He’s working on the monkey island at the zoo,” Moire Meg informed us, dashing into the house in her Trinity High School uniform and hugging all three of us.
“Monkey island?”
“She means he’s the Cardinal’s secretary.”
“A real loony bin,” Moire Meg said. “You guys should get him out of there.”
“We know that, dear,” I said, realizing how much I sounded like the good April.
“Maybe we should all just go down and liberate him,” April Rosemary suggested, then bit her lip at the word from her hippy past.
“We thought of that, darling, but Uncle Ed has to make his own decisions.”
That was certainly true. Nonetheless, we could have taken him aside and told him what we thought. Only he was never around to be taken aside.
Still, we had our daughter and son back and the Vietnam mess was over. Chuck and I were approaching our silver anniversary with great joy. Our sex life was the best ever. We enjoyed each other. We didn’t fight, mainly, he said, because he had learned to keep all the rules.
Well, he didn’t keep all the rules. He often broke the one about pawing me only in the bedroom. I had, however, lost interest in enforcing that rule. I did enforce, however, the rule about his undressing me in the darkroom or in my office or in the exercise room downstairs. Usually.
My daughters insisted that I try on my wedding dress because they said I would still fit in it. They were wrong; we had to let it out in a few places.
“Only a little bit,” Moire Meg told me. “You’re some cool broad, Rosie.”
I was embarrassed by this stuff. I had been such a little nitwit in 1950. I actually tried to talk Chuck out of the marriage after the rehearsal the night before because I insisted that I was spoiled goods.
Thank God he would have none of that.
Anything else in the years to come—all the rules he broke—had already earned forgiveness.
Not that you can earn forgiveness. It has to be done freely.
I thanked God a lot.
Chuck fit into his wedding formal with perhaps a few more adjustments.
“See!” I crowed. “It’s a good thing I forced you to exercise.”
“I still look funny in it.”
“Cute,” I said. “Not funny. Really cute. You’re skinny anyway.”
“Slender,” he said with a wicked grin.
“No, I’m slender because of lots of hard work. You’re skinny naturally. It’s all right. I like you that way.”
So then, since we were in our bedroom, I began to undress him.
Then on the first Sunday in Advent, the day of the first blizzard of the year, Father Ed showed up at our door, wearing black trousers, a knit shirt, and a white summer windbreaker.
“I’m quitting.” He shivered.
He must have lost at least thirty pounds.
We dragged him inside, pulled him to the fireplace, wrapped him in a blanket, and gave him a strong shot of bourbon.
“The man is evil incarnate. If I had stayed there any longer, I would have killed him.”
He continued to shiver.
A psychotic interlude?
We called Jane’s husband Ted McCormack and Msgr. Keenan.
“I’m leaving the priesthood, Packy,” Father Ed told the Monsignor. “I’ve lost my faith.”
“You have not lost your faith and you’re not leaving the priesthood,” someone said. “I told you once you couldn’t leave without my permission. I haven’t given my permission yet and I won’t!”
I recognized that the voice was mine. Father Ed leaned his head in my lap and sobbed.
“Well, that’s settled.”
I looked up at the four men in the room. They were smiling at me. I had done their work for them.
“Okay,” I went on. “The man is a nutcake, an escapee from the monkey island over at Brookfield, a psychopathic paranoid. The Vatican has to get rid of him. However, Ed, you’re out of there now. And we’ll worry about him. Like the good April has been saying all summer, you need a long rest.”
“At the parish down in Tucson,” Chuck suggested, “where you used to go in the winter.”
“When you come back,” Msgr. Packy said, “you can come live with us. We need another priest at the rectory.”
“Okay.” Father Ed sighed.
He sat up straight and touched my arm.
“Thanks, Rosie.”
“Be my guest.”
“I know a good doctor you can talk to down there,” Ted added, “if you want to.”
“Post-traumatic stress syndrome,” Chucky said.
Somehow that made all of us laugh.
“I’ll fly down there with you,” he added. “I need to escape from all this anniversary lunacy for a day or two.”
Monsignor Packy took him back to the St. Agedius Rectory.
“Keep him in a priestly atmosphere,” he said.
Ted lingered to talk with us.
“Why did he stay there so long?” he asked.
“He’s a churchman,” Chuck explained. “He was trained for years to believe in loyalty to his bishop.”
“Infantile, isn’t it?”
“To say the least.”
“Rosie,” Ted said to me, “I tell Jane all the time that her sister is an astonishing woman. If I said that of anyone else, she’d quite properly be jealous. But when you’re the subject, she nods and agrees, as though it’s a self-evident truth. Now I have more evidence. You saved that poor man. He’ll have a hard time in the weeks and months ahead, but he’ll be all right.”
I sat on the couch, my head bent over my clasped hands. I was drained, empty, exhausted. After he’d shown Ted to the door, my husband sat next to me and extended his arm around my shoulder.
“Never try to tell me again, woman of the house, that you’re not a Celtic warrior goddess.”
I sobbed in his arms.
Moire Meg stumbled into the house, covered with snow.
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