“I miss you too, Chucky Ducky.”
Husband gets sympathy, feels much better.
“Fine world traveler I am.”
“Well-married husband you are … I can hardly wait till you come back.”
“Me too.”
Mission accomplished.
I slept the sleep of the just man.
So the next morning I waited at the café and ate the gelato—Italian ice cream, the best in the world—and thought about my wife.
After our quarter century together, she still overwhelmed me, more indeed than she ever had. I melted whenever I saw her. Even after a couple of hours’ separation. She hadn’t changed much. She was still contentious, strong-minded, bossy, opinionated, funny, demanding, patient, tender, sweet, and loving.
That sounds vaguely like a text somewhere in the Book of Wisdom, though I don’t think she knits fine fabrics like the woman in that passage. Fair enough.
She is also incredibly fragile despite all her talk, more vulnerable in her own way than poor little Siobhan Marie, the adjectives being required in any discussion of our sixth (and presumably our last) child—who may be little but is certainly not poor.
She has not escaped and never will from her harrowing childhood and young adulthood. She is always on the edge of falling apart. She never has and never will, but those experiences remain always with her. She cannot forget her last binge, which almost led to her expulsion from the family. Yet she blames me (usually half fun and full earnest as the good April says) for not making the threat years before. She’s not at all sure that her binges had no effect on April Rosemary or the younger children, no matter how often Maggie Ward tells her not to worry about it. I tread on eggshells with her, lest I open the old wounds. Such caution became habitual years ago and requires little effort. Yet I worry that in our constant banter I might say the wrong thing.
She worries constantly, kind of like a second track on a two-track tape which provides background for her consciousness. She worries about the kids, each one in their own special category of worry, about my parents, who are growing older, about my sisters Peg and Jane and their families, about Edward, about the Church, about the country, about the whole world.
Mothers, she tells me, exist to worry. Fair enough, but, as we say in my economics trade, she is a couple of standard deviations above the mean on the maternal worry index.
She worries especially about me.
I really don’t deserve such loving worry, though, being a man, I consume it like a sponge.
She has shaped my life. She knew from the beginning that God destined me to be a roving adventurer and that my camera was both the weapon and the pretext for that wandering. She rushed off to Little Rock when the locals worked me over—and correctly blamed President Ike. She clawed the overweight bums who tried to savage me in Marquette Park. She fought off the violence-crazed cops at the Conrad Hilton. Only her prayers could have sent the Black Huey to snatch me out of the South China Sea as the North Vietnamese fishing boat was about to pick me up. Don’t you dare mess with my Chucky.
Chucky Ducky, that is.
Now she worries, mostly in silence, because I seem to have lost interest in the camera. What, she must be thinking, if I seduced him into this vocation and then he leaves? Edward must not leave the priesthood, no never. What if Chucky discards the camera?
I won’t really ever leave it. It’s not as much fun as it used to be. Too much has happened. I haven’t done any major work since 1968—Year of Violence. Okay, my portraits are pretty good and they’ll make a nice book one of these days, much to the delight of my subjects.
Will I include the Cardinal against whom I’m conspiring at this minute?
I don’t think so.
The romance is gone, however. It’s not the camera. My eye is if anything better than it used to be. It’s me. I’m getting old.
Or something.
I’m in a phase, as my sister Peg tells me. I’ll grow out of it.
Maybe she’s right. She usually is, as she would be the first to tell me.
In the meantime, my Rosemarie has found her own career as a writer. She is very, very good. She’s no longer Charles Cronin O’Malley’s wife. I’m Helen Clancy’s husband, perhaps even the prototype of the little redhead punk who appears all too frequently in the stories. She supported me in my career when it started. Should I not support her in hers as it starts?
Except she doesn’t need my support. She wrote her first several stories without my knowing about it.
So there’s no way to pay her back. She would be offended to know that I was thinking that way.
I’m getting old, that’s the problem. I’m burning out before my time.
I miss my wife.
The whole country is in a bad mood, maybe that’s what’s bugging me. All the radical kids are rushing for cover, grabbing for the good life while they can. The conservatives are crowing, though I don’t know why. Everyone is blaming the Vietnam vets, who happen to be a handy scapegoat. The turncoat liberals are repudiating their heritage. The Catholic radicals are repeating the clichés of last year. They arrive everywhere too little and too late. The blacks have retreated from the old integration ideal and replaced it with separatism.
The economy is in bad shape and will get worse. I don’t read the economic journals anymore because they seemed archaic as well as arcane. Everyone knows that the problems began with Lyndon’s decision to fight the war on the cuff. You don’t raise taxes, you keep the regular economy going, and you cause inflation. Then Tricky Dicky tries price controls and takes us out of the Bretton Woods Agreement. That doesn’t work and inflation continues. The Arabs cut off the oil spigot and we try a new form of price control—“allocation.” That means that everyone waits in line. Time is money.
Anyone who has had an introductory course in economics knows that the only way to deal with a shortage is to let the law of supply and demand set the prices. Is this hard on the poor and on others? Then provide them with some form of tax rebate. The same course also teaches that if you want to curtail the use of a product, you put a tax on it. That’s the way they do it in Europe. In this country we launch moral crusades in favor of “conservation.” Put a dollar a gallon tax on gas? That would take money away from the Saudis and put it in American research projects. It would also be hard on the poor? Again give them rebates. However, the politics of the country don’t permit such rational behavior. Most of the members of Congress are economically illiterate.
So we have inflation and unemployment and no economic growth. We have leaders who can’t lead either because they don’t know what to do or do know what to do but lack the courage.
All of this in the midst of the Vietnam hangover.
No wonder I don’t read the economics literature anymore.
And I’m almost fifty, which is probably the real reason I’ve lost all my energy.
When Dad was my age in 1948, he was riding the exciting postwar economic wave, making more money than he thought he ever would, and building some of the best postwar subdivisions and churches. He was my age and he was young. I’m his age and I’m old.
I want my wife.
My three unindicted coconspirators appeared down the street. From a distance they seemed content.
I signaled the waiter.
“Signor, ancora quatro, per favore!”
He rolled his eyes but brought the ice cream in time for their arrival. They didn’t seem at all surprised but promptly dug into it.
“It went well enough,” John Raven, the oldest, summed up the meeting. “He’s a nice man, very sympathetic. Says it’s all terrible. Should never have happened. Promised us that something would be done in a few months …”
“Do you believe him?”
“I think his sense of urgency,” Packy observed, “is not very great. One senses that he thinks it’s a shame and something should be done about it. However, the Church has been around a long time. It’s seen worse and it has survived. Rom
e is timeless …”
“And we are not,” Edward said sadly.
“The Pope is the problem?”
“Sure,” Packy agreed. “He doesn’t want to hurt Cardinal O’Neill’s feelings. He’s not quite persuaded that the situation in Chicago is as terrible as we say. He knows there’s a problem, but he operates on the Roman premise that if you wait long enough, every problem goes away. Though Cardinal Sergio told us that we could expect something in a couple of months, the Pope will agonize over it, vacillate, hesitate, agree and then disagree, and it will more likely take a couple of years. The atmosphere here sees little difference between months and years.”
“Hell of a way to run a Church, huh, Chuck?” John Raven said.
“I was just reflecting on how the way we’ve been running the country since 1965 is a hell of a way to run a country.”
“Cheer up, Chuck,” my brother said brightly, “things are not all that bad.”
I did tell Rosemarie that comment when I reported to her after our debriefing with Rae Adolfo, who thought the session with Cardinal Sergio had gone very well.
“Well,” she said, “Father Ed has always been less melancholy than you. He’s more like Jane. You’re more like Peg.”
“Huh? We had to struggle to keep that guy sane and in the priesthood and now he ends up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and I’m the melancholy one.”
“You and Peg,” she said, with a woman’s passion for the precise repetition of what she had said.
Oh.
“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon, if the plane isn’t late.”
“I’ll meet you and bring the kid.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I do, Chucky Ducky.”
Chuck
1976
So we won back the White House in November, not that it was worth all that much or that the man who won it would know what to do with it. We also suffered a great sorrow in Chicago (where we were of course still registered voters because of our two flats on the Chicago side of Austin Boulevard). Despite the implicit conviction of most of us that he would never die, Mayor Daley went to heaven in December of that year, a reward which he deserved, if for no other reason than his put-down of that pompous phony Walter Cronkite during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
Late in the afternoon, Vince called.
“The Mayor died this afternoon,” he said, “in the doctor’s office in that old building at 900 North Michigan. He was pronounced dead at Northwestern Hospital. Some of his family were trapped in the rickety elevator at 900 North. It should be on the news in a few moments. I’ll stay in touch.”
The Chicago journalists, whatever East Coast ideology they might have brought with them, were sufficiently acclimated to the city to play the news straight. “A city mourns” was their theme. The people they interviewed on the streets were clearly stricken, many of them in tears.
The national programs returned to the convention and the Martin Luther King campaign in Chicago and repeated their old clichés. They still didn’t get it. They never would. That pompous phony Walter Cronkite admitted grudgingly that he had always been a popular mayor but added that his legacy had been tainted by the convention disorders.
As though the Mayor was in the street throwing feces at the rioters.
I could never figure out why there was so much East Coast hatred for the Mayor. He was Irish, he was Catholic, he talked funny in public (but not in private), and, most of all, I think, he was in Chicago, a city which, if you lived in New York, it was all right to hate.
Prejudice against women or blacks or Hispanics (and more recently gays) was wrong. Prejudice against Chicago was all right, indeed it was high virtue. None seem to have noticed that he had won two elections after 1968 by overwhelming margins—the last one with a 70 percent majority, including a 70 percent black majority. I guess the reason you didn’t have to pay any attention to that was that you could assume that Chicagoans by definition were victims of false consciousness.
“We should say some prayers for him,” Moire Meg reminded us.
We gathered around the little shrine in our small room in the back of the house and said the rosary. What else could we do?
The baby slept peacefully.
Vince called later with details.
“Tomorrow before he’s brought to the church to lie in state, there will be a small private wake at the funeral parlor. The family would like you both to come. I’ll stop by later with a sticker for your car, so the cops will let you pass. They also will have tickets for you for the funeral.”
“Vince doesn’t still work for the Mayor?” Rosemarie asked.
“Vince, as you well know, is in a very successful private practice.”
“Then what was their relationship?”
“He had lots of clout.”
“Why?”
“Because the Mayor liked him, which we will both agree shows his good taste, because he knew when to show up and when not to, because his instincts are good, because the Mayor trusted him completely.”
“Did the family call Vince today or did he call them?”
“Vince was around. Maybe he went to the hospital when he heard the Mayor was being brought over there. Maybe he waited in the background. Maybe the family saw him and called him in. Maybe. Whatever happened, you can count on it, your brother-in-law’s behavior was impeccable.”
“I almost said, Chucky, that he’s come a long way. But the truth is that, like you, he’s always been what he is.”
“Except when he came home from Vietnam and you had to straighten him out.”
“I get a lot more credit than I deserve.”
This was absurd. However, my wife could not admit even to herself how many marriages survived because of her intervention. Including maybe our own.
The funeral home was right across the street from Nativity Church, just down Lowe Avenue from the Daley family bungalow. The Mayor used to say when he walked down to the church for daily Mass that it would be easy at his wake to get his body to the church.
“They’ll just have to carry it across the street.”
The prewake to which we were invited was early in the afternoon before the crowds would gather later for the lying-in-state in the church.
Rosemarie was driving my Chevy because, as she said, her Benz would be out of place in Bridgeport. She has little confidence in my abilities at the wheel. Vince had told us to turn west on Thirty-seventh Street and park a quarter block down from the funeral home. That part of the street was mostly clear of cars. A cop waved us on. Rosemarie rolled down the window—letting in a frigid blast of winter air—favored the cop with her best smile and showed him our pass. His expression changed from one of stern warning to one of infinite courtesy.
“Park right here, ma’am. Nice to see you.”
I doubt that he knew who she was, much less that she wrote stories for the New Yorker, stories featuring a hopeless but cute little redhead. He knew she was a friend of the family and beautiful, either one of which characteristics was sufficient.
We shivered as we walked the short distance to the funeral home. It was the coldest day of the year so far, though worse was clearly yet to come. Somehow in our city the first cold days seem far worse than the routine ones that came later. Rosemarie clung to my arm, huddling against me for protection against the wind and the cold and death. Under her cloth coat—my wife does not believe in expensive furs—she was wearing her black dress from the time of our visit with Pope Paul. She would be especially striking, which was the general idea.
Inside the funeral parlor the atmosphere was of the typical Irish wake with one major exception. The Daley men wept intermittently. I didn’t use to be able to do that myself, though in a marital union with my wife, one learned to cry if only in self-defense.
Vince and Peg were already there. Vince was if not quite in charge—no one really was—seemed to be directing some of the flow of mourners. There were maybe thirty pe
ople milling around.
“Smashing,” my sister whispered to her constant partner in crime.
“And the same to you,” Rosemarie replied.
When the two of them were together, even in this unusual setting, I always felt that they were conspiring. Against me.
Vince introduced us to Mrs. Daley, whom we’d met a couple of times before.
“Oh, yes, Chuck. I remember you. Dick loved your pictures. He said you were a genius. Your sister is Vincent’s wife, isn’t she?”
“She got all the beauty in the family, I’m afraid, ma’am.”
“You have all the sympathy of which we’re capable, Mrs. Daley,” said my better half, remembering that it was a wake.
“Thank you much, dear. Pray for us. We’re all alone now.” Then she made the connection.
“You’re the one who writes those funny stories, aren’t you? We all love them, especially those of us who are married to Irishmen.”
Ground open up and swallow Chucky, please.
Then tears rose in her eyes.
“I miss him so much.”
A priest swept in and began to intone in a chantlike voice a decade of the rosary.
Rosemarie made a face, not at the prayer but at the clerical singsong.
“Why can’t they pray in their natural voices?” she whispered to me.
“After years of boring people from the pulpit, they don’t have natural voices.”
After the prayer, we approached the casket to pay our respects. The man inside didn’t look like the “mare” at all. Which of us does look like ourself when life leaves the body behind?
My wife was weeping, not sobbing (that would show no class) just lamenting to herself the loss of a man she hardly knew but who was one of us.
We shook hands with the children and their spouses, handsome people whose hearts were broken.
We then did what the Irish do at wakes, we went to the back of the funeral home and sat on the card chairs which had been lined up like the pews in a small church.
“What are we doing here?” I asked my wife as she dabbed at her eyes.
“Your sister is married to that nice Italian boy Vincent and the Mayor thought you were a genius.”
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