Second Spring

by Andrew M. Greeley

“Esther Stern.”

  “Her family is Orthodox too?”

  “No, that’s why this letter”—she gestured at the note from Diana Robbins that lay on her desk—“reminded me of her. Her family is completely secular. They called themselves Starr, Edward and Eloise Starr. Esther was named Eileen. She didn’t go to Jewish school, never had a bas mitzvah, indeed had nothing to do with Judaism till she went to Loyola to study biochemistry before going to medical school. She loves computing too. She met our son in a programming class. She chose Loyola because she wanted to be near her family. She’s an only child. Now she won’t talk to them because they’ve betrayed their heritage. They have a Christmas tree every year, for heaven’s sake. Now she’s discovering her Jewish identity … Or so Seano tells me with great respect in his ideas for the poor child’s honesty and integrity … Oh, yes, she wants to migrate to Israel and live in an Orthodox kibbutz.”

  “Wow!”

  “She is sweet, Chuck. She so much wanted me to like her.”

  “Her family is not opposed to their romance?”

  “I gather from Seano that they are not exactly enthused because they think Catholics are religious fanatics. On the other hand they hope that Seano will win her away from her hyperorthodoxy.”

  “Will he?”

  “I don’t think so. He has too much respect for her religious identity to even try.”

  “Why didn’t he tell me about it?”

  “He’s afraid you won’t understand.”

  “Me!”

  “He’s wrong of course.” She reached over and touched my hand. “Since that incident at the college out in the boondocks, he’s a very confused young man who thinks everything is clear in his head … I’m telling you because he wants to bring her to the family birthday party.”

  “What family?”

  “Don’t be a dolt, Charles Cronin O’Malley. The party that the family is having for you at your parents’ house. That’s the small party.”

  “Small party!”

  “An intimate gathering of the family and a few friends—the Boylans, the Murrays, the Mayor, people like that.”

  “How many people?”

  “That’s not clear yet. We’re still working on it. The other party—”

  “What other party!”

  “The public party at the Drake.”

  “I won’t be there.”

  “Yes you will, Charles Cronin O’Malley. Don’t worry about it. We’ll tell you what to do.”

  “I’m sure you will … What does all this have to do with what’s-her-name?”

  “Esther.”

  “Yeah, Esther.”

  “Well, Sean goes like she’s practically a member of the family So he wants to invite her to both parties. So we said yes, though Moire Meg says it’s silly. She doesn’t even know you.”

  “So you’re warning me that I should not be surprised when this waiflike creature appears, clinging to my youngest son’s arm?”

  “How did you know she’s a clinger?”

  “Figures.”

  “You will be nice to her, won’t you?”

  “I may be turning senile, but I’m not turning uncivil … The poor child will feel terribly out of place, won’t she?”

  “Yes, Chuck, she will. I didn’t even suggest that to Seano. He thinks everything will work out just fine.”

  I felt like I was turning not seventy but eighty.

  Could this child, raised in a completely secular environment, really turn to Orthodox Judaism? Or was she swept up in a late-adolescent identity crisis, like the one my wife argued I had never worked through?

  What the hell did I know?

  However, she had never been to an O’Malley family party. The music, the singing, the dancing, the storytelling would scare away a lot of Irish people I know. Not for nothing are we still called “the Crazy O’Malleys.”

  Well, there was nothing I could do about it except leave it all to heaven, who perhaps knew what would be best.

  I was dispatched for a “complete physical checkup by a specialist.” This activity was depicted to me as an exercise in high virtue, almost like a plenary indulgence, as though the checkup would prevent future illness while all it would in fact do would be to give me more things to worry about.

  The internist at Northwestern Hospital who had been assigned to my case was a dyspeptic fellow who probably had not smiled since his first bowel movement. He was also profoundly skeptical when I told him that I had never smoked, I drank only an occasional glass of wine, exercised regularly, and normally eschewed sex as an exercise in temperance.

  I actually said that, since one of my demons had taken over.

  He hesitated, pen poised over his sheet of questions.

  “Really, Dr. O’Malley?”

  I had insisted that I wanted to be called “Doctor” because I had a degree in economics from The University. He looked at me like I had stolen something precious from him.

  “I am an artist, Dr. Hoffman. I find that sexual activity weakens the creativity that drives my work.”

  As I recount my interaction with him, I am ashamed of myself. I was taking out my displeasure with the monster regiment by hazing this pathetically sincere man.

  I was in that kind of mood. Running away from aging.

  “Could you be a little bit more specific about your frequency of sexual relations?”

  “With my wife or my mistress?”

  I was confident that at some point he would realize that I was pulling his leg and smile.

  Like, no way.

  “Well, both.”

  “I don’t have a mistress right now. So it would only be with my wife. We don’t do it very often, only four or five times a week. We did it more frequently when we were younger.”

  He wrote down my answer thoughtfully.

  “Your relationship with your wife is satisfactory?”

  “It sure is. As long as I do what she tells me to do, we get along fine.”

  He wrote that down too.

  Actually that wasn’t the truth. Most of the time I did what Rosemarie wanted me to do because I trusted her judgment and her love. When I disagreed—like once a year—I always won the brief argument.

  I then went through one of those stress tests in which you run on a board with an uphill grade while they monitor the behavior of your heart. Then you lie down on a table and they monitor the course of the radioactive stuff they have injected into your bloodstream.

  “The photography doesn’t have very good composition, Dr. Hoffman,” I observed.

  “Perhaps God would have designed the heart better if he had taken that matter into account, Dr. O’Malley.”

  I began to wonder then who was pulling whose leg.

  The final verdict about Dr. Charles Cronin O’Malley at fifty and counting was delivered in a tone which I chose to interpret as disappointment.

  “Your health is quite good, Dr. O’Malley, for a man of your age.”

  I felt like I was eighty.

  “I am concerned only about your weight.”

  “I’m not overweight!” I protested.

  “Most men your age are overweight, Dr. O’Malley, even obese. You’re a tad underweight. That might reduce your resistance to serious infection.”

  “Not for lack of trying,” I said. “Maybe I should eat more ice cream, though I can’t stand the stuff.”

  “It might be good for you.”

  “Well, I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Life expectancy?” I asked at the end.

  “Both your parents are still alive?”

  “Yes. Dad has just turned eighty. Mom is seventy-six.”

  “Thirty more years, plus or minus five.”

  That was not unreasonable. I would die eventually, but not, in the ordinary course of events, soon. The issue was what I would do with thirty years plus or minus five. That was my problem.

  “Better check my pension investments.”

  “That would be a good idea,” he sa
id soberly.

  When I finally escaped my “complete physical,” I called my good wife.

  “How did it go?” she demanded anxiously.

  “There’s good news and bad news.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “The bad news is that I am in good health for a man of my age.”

  Sigh of relief.

  “And the good news?”

  “Doctor says I must have sex more often!”

  “Chucky!”

  “I told him we did it only four or five times a week and he said that wasn’t enough for someone as healthy as I am.”

  “Chucky!”

  “He also said I should eat more ice cream because I was too skinny!”

  “He did NOT!”

  “Well, he said I was underweight and I told him how I hated ice cream and he said that I should force myself to eat more of it. So we’ll have to go to Petersen’s tonight before we work on increasing my sexual outlets per week.”

  “You’re impossible!”

  “You always say that.”

  “I’m so glad you’re all right.”

  Now the poor woman was crying.

  “Except for not having enough sex.”

  Now she was laughing and crying at the same time.

  “I love you, Rosemarie.”

  The laughing and crying increased. I started to cry too.

  “And I love you too.”

  I then went to the University Club for lunch with Max Berman, my old friend from darkroom days in Bamberg when we used to have Talmudic arguments about human guilt while we produced our respective photo prints.

  Max had not changed much through the years, a little less hair, a little more haggard, but the same sadness in his eyes and same melancholy in his voice, even when he was being very funny. He was everyone’s favorite rabbi, even if he was a psychiatrist.

  “So, Chuck, you had your ‘complete physical’ today? So what did the good Dr. Ernest Hoffman have to say? Doubtless he was very earnest?”

  “He said I would live a while longer.”

  “Ah, and how much longer?”

  “Thirty years plus or minus five.”

  “It is a mistake to teach doctors statistics, no?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have told him that I wanted him to call me Dr. O’Malley.”

  He chuckled softly and rubbed his hands together.

  “You must tell me the whole story.”

  Over my lobster bisque, I recounted in full detail my experience with the earnest Dr. Ernest. Max gave up on his clear consommé and contented himself with laughter. While no story that I have ever told in all my life has lost anything in the telling, it didn’t seem to me to be quite as funny as Max thought it was.

  “It was not wise to send you to a doctor who was German and not even German Jewish,” he said, dabbing at his lips with his napkin.

  “Huh?”

  “He did not realize of course that the Irish way with death is to laugh at it, indeed to laugh obscenely. You were laughing at death, of course, to cover up your fears of mortality—which medical examinations always create—but because it is Irish to stare death in the face and laugh at her.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But of course”—he waved his hand—“is not that the way of Irish wakes? Is that not why in the wakes in Ireland before your Church stepped in and ruined them, people made love in the fields around the house where the wake was happening? Your culture even in America says ‘Fuck you, death.’ No?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did you not tell him those outrageous stories about your sexual life to assert the Irish way of things? Why else would you have done that?”

  “You guys know too much.”

  “A physician who was Irish or one who knows them all too well, as I do, would have continued with the joke, knowing that it was but a harmless form of denial.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes, Chuck, definitely.”

  I thought about it.

  “I guess so,” I admitted. “It sure was fun.”

  “Naturally … So now we come to the core of our little problem: what are you going to do with those thirty more years?”

  “Plus or minus five.”

  “Naturally.”

  The previous winter I called Max and told him that I ought to see him occasionally to discuss my problem.

  “What problem?”

  “Fiftieth birthday.”

  “Naturally. We must have lunch.”

  We alternated between the Standard Club and the University Club.

  “Shouldn’t I be on a couch or something?” I asked at the first session.

  “Naturally not. We are not trying to take your personality apart, Chuck. It would probably be impossible and in any case a mistake. No, no. We merely want to help you to discover a new direction or perhaps only a renewed direction for your life. It will be a very benign experience for you.”

  What the hell did I know?

  “So,” Max asked, “was that comment you made earnestly to Dr. Ernest about a mistress perhaps a form of wish fulfillment? Do you perhaps want a mistress?”

  “I have one, Max. She also acts as my wife.”

  “So … you are never tempted?”

  “I couldn’t possibly be unfaithful to Rosemarie. It would break her heart. Besides, no mistress could possibly be as good a lover as she is.”

  “You really believe that?”

  I thought about it.

  “Yeah, I really believe it. We probably don’t make love as often as we used to, but that’s because I’m tired at night, probably from worrying about what to with the rest of my life. However, our lovemaking is a lot more, uh, imaginative than it used to be.”

  I described for him in expurgated form our tryst that began in the papal apartments.

  “I agree that the interlude sounds imaginative. You have become skilled at, as they say, turning her on?”

  “It’s mostly knowing the signs that she’s ready.”

  “Ah … and she can turn you on?”

  “All she has to do is open a button or a zipper and I become a ravager—or something like that.”

  We dug into our Wiener schnitzel. Outside the Lake was calm and turquoise under a pale blue sky. My imagination was playing with the idea of opening a button when I returned home.

  “Sure, I encounter women that I’d like to take to bed. Who doesn’t? But I don’t and I won’t. Rosemarie is too much for me as it is.”

  “So then you have an ideal sex life?”

  “No one, Max, as you well know, has an ideal sex life. I think we’re getting better at it as we both become more reckless.”

  I had not thought of it that way before. So now I would have to be more reckless. Maybe today. If there were signs that I could. Or, even better, signs that I should.

  “Just the same,” I continued after a moment’s thought, “I worry about it.”

  “Aha!”

  “What if as I grow older, the glow goes away? What if as her career progresses mine languishes? What if she grows tired of me? What if she’s entering her time of full sexual maturity and I’m exiting mine? What if she wants more love than I’m capable of giving?”

  “You are faithful but you fear that she is not?”

  “I’m sure she is.”

  “But may not always be if you do not measure up to the demands of her own emotional growth?”

  I had not thought about these things, yet they must have been hiding just beneath the surface of consciousness or I would not be talking about them so easily. “She’s three years younger than I am,” I said foolishly.

  “You will have your usual chocolate ice cream?” Max said.

  “It’s not as good as thinking about my wife,” I said. “However, for the moment, it will do.”

  I ordered two dishes of chocolate with hot fudge sauce.

  “Naturally you have told her about our conversations.”

  “She knows that I have lunch with you e
very week. I assume that she guesses what we’re talking about.”

  “You haven’t told her, however.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “She does not tell me about her conversations with your winsome little colleague Maggie Ward.”

  Maggie was one of the more delightful subjects for my errant fantasies.

  “Ah, yes, the ingenious Dr. Ward. I would think it would be hard for a man to be her patient …”

  “Or very rewarding.”

  We started in on our ice cream. His cappuccino and my iced tea were brought to the table.

  “You feel competitive with your wife’s career.”

  It was a flat statement.

  “If I feel anything, it is the wish that mine was only just starting as hers is.”

  “You realize that the same theme runs through our conversations. Your problem is not sex, not your wife, not your health, but the conviction that your career as a photographer is over.”

  “And that it never was very much to begin with,” I added.

  “Chuck”—he sighed—“you must realize that is nonsense.”

  “That is very directive and judgmental, Dr. Berman.”

  “Naturally.”

  I pondered and pushed away the remnants of the chocolate ice cream, very unusual behavior for me. We always encountered this problem as our conversations wound down.

  “Look, Max, I admit that by any sensible calculation I have had an extraordinarily successful career. I could rest on my laurels for the rest of my life. Maybe I’d like to do that. Maybe it would be a good thing.”

  “Only you don’t feel like you’re a success. And your Church and your country have disillusioned you. You’d put away your camera tomorrow if you could find something more challenging, only you can’t and know you probably won’t.”

  “Something like that.”

  Max sighed loudly. He’s from Brooklyn, yet there were times in our conversations he sounded Viennese. Deliberately.

  “Ya! You Catholics believe in the Holy Spirit, don’t you?”

  “We have to.”

  “Isn’t there a line, in St. John I believe, about the Divine Wind blowing where He will?”

  “Or She.”

  “Yet you are unwilling as you approach the critical day of September seventeenth to wait for the Spirit.”

  It was my turn to sigh loudly.

  “You win!”

  By which I had meant that he had won the argument. In principle I had to wait for the Holy Spirit.