He laughed and I caught part of it. That was the shot we’d use in the end.
“How long do such hangovers last, I wonder?”
“A couple more years maybe.”
Rosemarie frowned. Obviously it would take longer.
Some presidents are unlucky. Jimmy Carter didn’t get many breaks. On the other hand, presidents have to make some of their own luck.
He and Mrs. Carter were delighted with the final portrait we sent them.
“Can I have a private word with you, Charles, before you leave?” the President asked.
“Certainly,” I said.
Rosemarie, who was folding one of our lights, glared at me.
“You have given much of your life to government service of one sort or another, Charles,” he said as we sat at the massive oak table in the Roosevelt Room. “I hesitate to ask you for another commitment. Yet the government needs men like you. I realize that President Johnson offered you this job before and you declined. I wonder if I could persuade you to represent us in New York at the United Nations.”
“He didn’t quite offer it, Mr. President. He hinted at it, which was his way.”
For one terrible moment I was tempted to quote Rosemarie that he had bullshitted around about it.
“So I understand.” President Carter smiled.
“These are different times, Mr. President. I went to Bonn fifteen years ago. The world has changed and I’ve changed. I have new family obligations and responsibilities, this new daughter who has tried to charm you, a bunch of grandchildren. I’m afraid at this time I can’t really take on that task, as much as I would like to.”
That was a lame excuse. I could hardly have said to President Carter that I had a lot more confidence in Jack Kennedy than I had in him, even if that confidence might have been somewhat mistaken. I could not say I felt more comfortable with an Irish Catholic than a Southern Baptist. I could not say that I would take Secretary of State if it were offered. I could not say that I was certain his administration would foul up.
A spasm of disappointment flickered across his face—sadness and not anger. I wondered how many other men had turned him down for other jobs.
“I understand, Charles,” he said. “You really did not give your best reason for not wanting the job. You’re an artist with a wonderful talent. You should not let government service interfere with that. I almost hoped you would say no. I would have felt guilty interfering with your art.”
“I’m not really an artist, Mr. President.”
“I’m sure your wife would disagree with you.” He smiled broadly. “She’d be right too.”
In the Cabinet Room our youngest was doing her best to stand up with considerable help from her mother and sister. Soon she would be walking. Soon I would be the father of a contentious two-year-old, contentious and charming.
I had a few recollections as we left the Oval Office and trudged through Lafayette again, the first buds of the cherry blossoms peeking out as they tried to make up their minds whether this was a good idea or not—our first time in the Oval Office when Jack Kennedy (with Pat Moynihan in the room) offered me the Embassy in Bonn, an offer which my wife quickly accepted before I could decline, reporting to Jack later about Germany, turning down Lyndon’s request that I withdraw my resignation, and warning him about the dangers of escalation in Vietnam, our meeting with him when the “Senior Advisers to the President” told Lyndon that the time had come to get out of Vietnam.
Those were exciting moments in my life. I had turned my back on more such exciting moments.
“What did he say?” Rosemarie asked.
I told her.
“What a wonderful man!” she said, her voice catching.
“He was right, Chucky,” Moire Meg, sister in her arms, said. “Why would you want to work for the government anyway? All those media nerds chasing you around all the time.”
So I tried to explain to her what I’d been thinking as we crossed the park.
“You mean President Kennedy thought you could change the world?”
“That’s what he said, kid, and I think he meant it.”
“He did,” my wife said, “most of the time.”
“That was a long time ago, wasn’t it, Ma?”
“So long ago, hon, that you weren’t even with us.”
“Those must have been exciting times, Rosie.”
She understood. She knew that she did not live in exciting times. Yet she understood how it was to live in such times and perhaps to regret that she didn’t live in them.
“They were exciting, hon. Maybe we were only kidding ourselves.”
“I kind of think,” Moire Meg said hesitantly, “that doesn’t really matter.”
“Young woman,” I told her, “you’re wiser than the two of us put together.”
We all laughed happily. Not to be outdone, Siobhan Marie joined in.
Rosemarie and I went to a concert at the Kennedy Center that night. Moire Meg insisted that she had homework to do. The next morning we took the shuttle up to New York. I was to attend the Publisher’s Lunch at the New York Times. My uninvited wife came along.
Perhaps lunching with the Pope and his staff in the Vatican is a more solemn high event than the Publisher’s Lunch, but it may not be. Everyone is neatly dressed, simultaneously relaxed and intense, urbane and deadly serious. My Ph.D. examiners were less threatening than the examination board we were facing, for all their graciousness.
Well, I wasn’t threatened at all. It was another stage for the Chucky act, a truth which Rosemarie noted before we walked down from the Waldorf.
As in, “Chucky, please try to behave yourself. None of this West Side leprechaun game.”
“Who, me?”
I knew some of the men already from my time in Bonn and my brief adventures in Saigon.
First question: Ambassador, you’ve been out of public service since 1965. Have you ever thought of returning to it?
Answer: No, I am not planning to move permanently to an apartment at the Waldorf.
Question: You mean the one the UN Ambassador lives in?
Answer: It’s a nice place to visit.
Question: Do you lack confidence in the Carter administration’s human rights foreign policy?
Answer: I’d like to see what human rights mean in Northern Ireland.
(Respondent’s wife shuts her eyes because she knows what’s happening.)
Question: Do you think that the United States in fact has a foreign policy?
Answer: Sure it does. Woodrow Wilson enunciated it—Make the world safe for Democracy. That’s what we thought we were doing in Vietnam.
Question: We failed there, did we not?
Answer: Tell me about it. No formal policy, no matter how exquisitely moral, dictates its own limitations.
Question: So you think that a human rights foreign policy is fine so long as it is aware of its own limitations?
Answer: That the world is gray and murky and problematic is hard for our American Calvinist culture to comprehend.
I continued to eat their admittedly excellent food while I talked. The dessert was some wimpy fruit compote. I thought of asking for a second helping, but resisted the temptation so as not to embarrass my wife.
Question: You think we are Calvinist here?
Answer: Certainly, especially your editorial writers!
Question: You have a doctorate in economics, don’t you?
Answer: I think so.
Question: What do you think is the most important economic problem in America?
Answer: Other than too much poverty and discrimination against women, I’d say it’s all been caused by President Johnson’s decision to conduct a major war without increasing taxes. There’s been an inflationary bias in the economy ever since.
Question: And the cure for that is?
Answer: Tight money for a couple of years. That takes courage and at present there’s not enough of that around. Also we should stop talking about conse
rvation and impose heavy taxes on gasoline. Anyone who knows anything about economics knows that.
Question: You are apparently not ready to return to public service now. What about the future?
Answer: What did the man say, never say never because never is a hell of a long time.
Question: I’d like to pin you down …
Answer: Impossible!
Question: Could you tell us precisely why you turned down President Carter’s invitation to become America’s UN representative?
Answer: I’m not prepared to admit that there was such an offer.
Question: If there were, would you accept it?
Answer: I’m a photographer, not a diplomat.
Question: Mrs. O’Malley, are you really Helen Clancy the writer?
New respondent brightens considerably at the prospect of taking over show.
Answer: What would ever make you think that?
Question: The spouse in the story seems to bear a remarkable resemblance to Ambassador O’Malley.
Answer: Really! They both have red hair, but I can’t imagine why anyone would think the Ambassador is a little red-haired punk.
Question: One who is very sweet and wins all the arguments, however.
Answer: The Ambassador never wins the arguments, do you, Ambassador?
Answer: Not that I can remember.
Apparently I had passed the test. The conversation became genial and was dominated, as one might expect, by my wife. I told them about my new exhibition, which would be called People and would feature all my portraits. The publisher actually asked if I would do a portrait of him. Rosemarie agreed for me and jotted down a date. We’d have to return to New York.
“If I were a drinking man,” I said as we walked back to the Waldorf, “I’d need a stiff drink after that.”
We leaned our backs against a chill wind, which had arrived from somewhere.
“You did well, Chucky. You charmed them and flummoxed them. The crack about Calvinists will set them thinking for a long time.”
“Fortunately, you were able to ride to my rescue when that woman asked you whether you were Helen Clancy.”
“I wondered when they were going to get around to that.”
We struggled through rush-hour traffic to get out to La Guardia for our late-afternoon flight to O’Hare. Siobhan Marie did not like all the shifting around that had occurred and was irritable most of the way home. However, she did not disgrace us by screaming.
“Was I this good in planes when I was her age, Chucky?”
“Don’t ask!”
When we finally pulled up to our home in the dark, we were all exhausted. Too much, too much. I belong on the West Side of Chicago, nowhere else.
We were hardly in the door when Peg called to tell us that April Rosemary had a miscarriage.
My wife and my middle daughter both wept.
“I better go over there,” Rosemarie said through her tears.
“I’ll put what’s-her-name to bed,” Moire Meg said.
“Should I come?”
“No, Chucky, she doesn’t need to see any man except her husband and him for not very long.”
“It’s hard for her,” I said, trying to sound wise.
“It’s hard for every woman who has one, especially hard for her. She probably had just begun to think she was pregnant and to make plans.”
“There’ll be other chances.”
“Please God.”
I was weary but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I went down to the darkroom and began to work on the White House shoot. The shot of Jimmy Carter as he began to laugh looked like the best, as I thought it would. Indeed, it was the only good result of the afternoon’s work. It captured the President in his essential if somewhat tense goodness, a man who could indeed worry about lusting in his heart after a woman, who could laugh but not without a sense of guilt. Would the right-wing critics complain that I was too kind to him?
Probably.
Would the young left-wing critics complain that I was too kind to him?
Probably.
I had stopped worrying about both groups, though their nastiness always astonished me.
Carter had some remarkable accomplishments during his administration—the treaty to return the Canal to Panama and the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel. I didn’t think he should have refused to sell wheat to Russia because of their invasion of Afghanistan or pull out of the Moscow Olympics—and thus offend both the farmers and the sports fans in this country while having little impact on the Soviets. Finally, however, he was done in by inflation and Iran and his own well-meaning incompetence.
Someone knocked at the darkroom door.
“Pasta.”
Moire Meg.
“Just a minute.”
I secured everything that needed to be secured and opened the inner door. Then I closed that and went out to the exercise room.
“Bolognese,” she said, pointing to a dish on the table where I ate when I was working. “And iced tea.”
“The sister?”
“Glad to be home in her own little trundle bed and sound asleep … Pa, what’s a trundle bed?”
“Kind of a bed with wheels that can be stored under a higher bed.”
“You know everything, don’t you, Chuck?”
“A lot of useless facts … Good pasta. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome … The trip to the East doesn’t seem to have done you a world of good.”
“I belong on the prairie soil of Illinois, kid, the West Side of Chicago. I’m out of place everywhere else.”
“You did all right in Germany.”
“That’s because I was doing it for Jack Kennedy. Different time.”
She nodded solemnly.
“The thing is that I know I could do well enough in the world of the White House and the New York Times, only I don’t want to.”
“I’m glad … Gotta get to my homework … Bring the dish upstairs or Ma will be mad.”
“Can’t let that happen.”
Later, when I was closing up shop, Rosemarie appeared. I showed her the first crude print.
“Only good one I got.”
She hugged me.
“Like I always said, Chucky, you’re a genius.”
“Yeah, well it’s lucky this one turned out.”
“Food?”
“The redhead brought me a bowl of pasta.”
“So all’s right with the world.”
“She also warned me that I should bring the dirty plate upstairs or Ma would be mad.”
“Would I get mad over a thing like that?”
“How’s our oldest daughter?”
“Typical. Very brave. Very upbeat. Happy she knows she can get pregnant. Next time it will be all right. Nature’s way of ending a pregnancy that wasn’t going to work. Inside she’s terrified.”
“Jamie know?”
“I’m sure he does, poor dear man.”
Winter had come, so spring could not be far behind. The Brit poet who had written that did not have to live in middle western America.
Chuck
1978
My picture of the “Smiling Pope” was on the front pages of all the Italian papers. Indeed, the smile was probably on the front page of every paper in the Christian world. We had lucked out. Some idiot priest who was a sociologist had been appearing at press conferences around Rome with a job description for the new Pope—“A hopeful holy man who smiles.” If that were truly a description of the man we needed, then it was surely a prediction of the man we got. There were some complaints already—mostly from the French—that he was too simple, not very intelligent, not really bright enough for the job.
We went to his first General Audience in the Audience Hall that Paul VI had built, a big modernist monstrosity that kept the Pope a long distance from anyone who was not a bishop or who lacked clout. Since we still had clout in those days we were up close. Somehow they had provided an awkward English translat
ion of the Pope’s remarks on the paper the Vatican likes to use, which I suspect is recycled toilet paper. The talk was a tour de force, a simple little homily about God in which he advanced the radical notion that we must picture God as our strong father, but even more as our loving mother, a notion which Catholic feminists and Catholic antifeminists never seemed to learn about. I suspect that the Vatican establishment was horrified and did its best to cover it up.
I followed along in English. Rosemarie listened in Italian.
His mixture of diffidence and laughter absorbed the crowded hall. Oh, yes, we had lucked out with this man from northern Italy.
“The funnies are add-ons to the text,” Rosemarie whispered to me. “The man is really good.”
Her perfume was, as always, dazzling. She could lean over to me, her breasts almost touching me, whenever she wanted to.
Paul VI had died without acting on Cardinal O’Neill. He had characteristically vacillated. Finally, earlier in the summer, Benelli had persuaded him to accept the report of his commission and appoint a coadjutor with right to succession in Chicago—in effect an administrator who would have complete control. Cardinal Sergio had been dispatched to Chicago to impose the change. The new Archbishop already had his papers.
Then the Pope called Sergio at Fiumicino Airport and added the condition that the change was acceptable only if Cardinal O’Neill agreed. There was a noisy shouting match between Sergio and O’Neill at the Cardinal’s villa on the seminary grounds. But the Curial Cardinal went home with only the promise from Cardinal O’Neill to fight every inch of the way.
Then Paul VI died, leaving the problem for his successor.
News of the fight at the villa leaked around the city, but didn’t make the media. Most priests didn’t believe it. The laypeople we knew hoped it was true. Edward, now thoroughly recovered and deeply committed to his work with the young people on the Near North Side, was unperturbed.
“I never thought it would work.”
I did, however.
Somehow the story of our trip to Rome to request the Cardinal’s replacement did not become known for a long time. Most of the priests who had contributed to the dossier did not suffer for it. One man who had, many thought, a legitimate claim to be a bishop was blocked for the rest of his life.
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