Second Spring

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Not bad.

  The doors opened and the first rush of viewers poured into the five rooms, each with twenty portraits. A gasp of awe and surprise trailed the first crowd and then was repeated frequently as though they were entering a fairyland of magic and wonder.

  The design, which Chuck had planned with the curator, was dazzling. The lights, the stark black and white of the prints, the off-white walls, the glow which seemed to flow from the faces of the subjects created a slight and subtle impression that they were a group of live humans waiting for the viewers. I wanted to take the image of my Siobhan Marie grinning impishly at all of us into my arms and tell her not to be afraid of all the people.

  “See why I didn’t want you to view this stuff till opening night?”

  “Hi, Mr. President,” I whispered to Jack Kennedy, who seemed prepared to wink at me.

  “That was a nice talk,” I said to my husband.

  “Yeah, well it was short.”

  He turned on all his very considerable charm for the folks who swarmed up to congratulate him, the creepy limp-hand holders as well as those who knew what they were talking about. I have never been able to make up my mind whether that charm is authentic or whether it covers up other and darker emotions. As best as I can figure out, the act becomes real after a while.

  His opening remarks were a giveaway. My poor dear Chucky wasn’t sure he belonged at this show. He suspected that he was a punk kid from the West Side who had perpetrated a fraud and would someday, like maybe today, be found out. His work was so instinctive, so easy, that it really could not be great photography, could it? Tonight was the night perhaps when someone would shout out the truth: he was nothing but a taker of snapshots!

  I drifted around from room to room and tried to absorb the people, both those in the portraits and those staring at them. I avoided my own portrait, especially because there was always a large cluster of people ogling it.

  “Voyeurs,” I murmured to myself.

  I encountered Joey Moran, his arm cautiously linked with that of his date.

  “Who’s the redhead, Joey Moran?”

  “A brat who went to school when I did … You look beautiful, Mrs. O’Malley.”

  “In real life or in the picture?”

  “Both,” he replied with an unfazed grin.

  “He’s kind of cool, Moire Meg,” I informed my daughter.

  “He has possibilities,” she replied.

  “I may survive,” Joey Moran said. “I’m not sure, but I think there’s a good chance.”

  Had she found a guy who was something like her father?

  I felt old for a moment. My teenage buddy would be leaving home soon, if not with Joey then with some similar Irish blarney artist.

  The crowd had thinned around the picture, which was labeled in the catalogue simply as wife. (And described in the following words: “She claims that this portrait doesn’t look at all like her. She’s wrong.”)

  There were only two people looking at it, the blond monster from the New York Times and a familiar woman in a gray gown and a cute figure.

  “It’s an incredible portrait,” the Times person said. “Perhaps a turning point in the history of portraits of women in the twentieth century. She’s not an object at all. She’s a very attractive woman who engages the artist and us with a defiant self-confidence, somehow erotic and chaste and still erotic.”

  “The artist doesn’t turn her into a fetish at all,” Maggie Ward observed.

  “I don’t think he’d dare to,” the Times said.

  “I’d throw the brush at him,” I said.

  The Times person turned around in surprise.

  “Ms. O’Malley! The portrait obviously does not lie!”

  “That’s the point we debate,” I said, as my face turned very warm.

  “I’m Christina Freeman. I’m with the New York Times. Do you know Dr. Margaret Keenan?”

  “She tells me that she’s from the neighborhood.”

  “The whole show is special,” the critic went on, “though I shouldn’t be saying it before I write the review. This portrait, however, is very special.”

  “Very special woman,” the good witch of the East said with the ever-so-slight smirk which on rare occasions she permitted herself in her office.

  “I won’t tell my husband you like the show until he reads it tomorrow.”

  We all laughed and I drifted on, a huge burden of worry lifted from my shoulders. Chuck always said that nothing was ever officially true till it appeared in the New York Times. A good review in the Times would cancel all the bad reviews. It would not, however, deflect the fear of death which was eating at him.

  Had Maggie spotted this woman and filled her head with our propaganda?

  I wouldn’t put it past her.

  The crowd eventually thinned out.

  “You doing all right, Mrs. O’Malley?” Chuck asked me.

  “They accepted my revised manuscript this morning,” I said. “So I’m doing fine.”

  “I didn’t get a chance to read it!”

  “You had enough on your mind.”

  “Can I read it tomorrow?”

  “After the reviews.”

  “Fair enough … Do you think, Mrs. O’Malley, that we might quietly drift out of here now?”

  “It’s your show.”

  “I’ve had enough compliments for a couple of years. Besides, there is an important sexual ritual we seemed to have overlooked a couple of weeks ago.”

  “It’s too late and we’re both too tired,” I said, as desire stirred within me.

  “The warrior routs the forces of disorder and chaos”—he grinned—“then he revels in the prize.”

  “Prize,” I said, “is a fetish term.”

  “No it’s not,” he said, taking my hand.

  So we said good-bye to the few people that still remained and shook hands with the curator of the exhibit and her staff and went home.

  In our bedroom, he made me undress and then began his finger’s slow and delicate journey across the responsive geography of my body.

  I woke up once later in the night and realized with brilliant clarity that Chuck’s denial of his artistic insight and my denial of my womanly appeal were similar escapes from reality.

  Chuck

  1978

  The day after our carnival at the Art Institute, Rosemarie read me excerpts from the reviews. As always the Chicago papers were able to control their enthusiasm. I was not part of the Chicago literary world’s artistic establishment but irredeemably neighborhood Irish and that meant my success was depriving one of their own of the success to which they were entitled.

  “Listen to this ditzy dame, Chucky:

  “‘No one would ever accuse local photographer Charles C. O’Malley of being a member of the avant-garde. His venue has always been sentimental domesticity. Hence one did not expect and did not encounter anything particularly new or exciting in his current exhibition at the Art Institute. One would rather wonder why the Art Institute would turn over a substantial amount of its space for a show which is mostly an exercise in self-congratulation. The answer, one suspects, is money. Mr. O’Malley’s photographs of the famous and the near famous, the pretty and the inspirational will attract large crowds of Chicago viewers who confuse his unquestioned technical skills with great photographic art. They will not even be repelled by sympathetic portraits of Richard Nixon and the late Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen. Mr. O’Malley, who was one of the many court photographers who traveled in the train of the Kennedy family, will not disappoint his Chicago fans, who are incapable of seeing through the flattery of court photography.’”

  “They don’t like me over there,” I said complacently.

  “How can anyone be so intellectually dishonest?” my loyal Rosemarie exclaimed.

  “They know that their friends will praise them. What more do we need but the praise of our friends?”

  “Listen to this headline: ‘O’Malley suffers from limitation
s of Being Irish.’”

  “‘It is not a secret that Charles C. O’Malley is Chicago Irish. It is perhaps a sufficient summary of his new show at the Art Institute to say that he still sees the world through the lens of Chicago Irish Catholicism. A lavishly, one might want to say tastelessly, mounted exhibition of his portrait work, it will surely please Christmas-season visitors with its ‘too-good-to-be-true’ depictions of popes and presidents, priests and pretty children. Only one portrait, displaying the now-familiar sexual attributes of Mr. O’Malley’s aging wife, seriously exceeds the limits of good taste. One wonders what kind of woman, with no career of her own, would tolerate such exploitation. Yet there is no denying the quick eye and the skillful technique of Mr. O’Malley. It is a shame that he does not realize that there is a world beyond the neighborhoods of the West Side of Chicago.’”

  “Son of a bitch,” Rosemarie shouted, the light of battle in her lovely blue eyes.

  “He must have missed my portrait of Conrad Adenauer,” I said.

  “They’re so ignorant,” my good wife insisted, “they don’t know anything.”

  “They see what they want to see … I note you have the Wall Street Journal in your hands. Surely they have not covered the show.”

  “Yes, they have. Dig the headline: ‘Kennedy Staffer Turns to the Right.’”

  “I don’t think I want them to praise me.”

  “Well they do, so you’ll have to live with it.

  “‘Charles C. O’Malley, Kennedy ambassador to West Germany and one of the architects of American defeat in Vietnam, has never heard a liberal cliché that he hasn’t liked. However, when he turns to his well-publicized photographic art, he rejects the fashionable and politically approved style and subject matter of the left and celebrates the traditional values of the American middle class. In his new exhibition of portraits at Chicago’s Art Institute, he reveals himself as a man with a sharp eye and a sensitive heart. It is hard to believe that a left liberal like Mr. O’Malley could produce such a sympathetic portrait of President Nixon or such an intense celebration of family life. Perhaps that is what one would expect in Chicago, a city which has never been troubled by political consistency. His work would doubtless be greatly improved if he could match his left liberal political perspective with his deeply conservative artistic instincts.’”

  She looked up from the paper to consider my reaction.

  “I feel like an inkblot,” I said.

  “Or the blind men with their elephant … Here’s the one from the monster woman.”

  “I’m not sure I want to hear it.”

  “Well, I’ll give you the headline anyway: ‘O’Malley Portraits Dazzle.’”

  “I think I can suffer through it.”

  “‘Chicago.

  “‘The last time we saw an exhibition of the photograph work of Charles Cronin O’Malley was in his brilliant photojournalism essay Year of Violence about 1968. While Mr. O’Malley still practices that craft, as in his recent striking photographs of the conclaves in Rome, he has turned his major efforts in the last decade to portraits. A new show in Chicago, called People, shows that his quick, practiced eye has, if anything, improved. Indeed the exhibition, brilliantly mounted at this city’s Art Institute, is dazzling. The various subjects, as different as John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon, and Maureen O’Hara, seemed to leap out of their frames and join the crowds of viewers who came to the opening-night show. In the excellent catalogue Mr. O’Malley explains that he seeks to capture his subjects as they are at their very best, to challenge them rather than flatter them. He writes,”I am happiest when a subject says something like, I wish I were really like that, and his friends and family say, but you really are.”

  “‘A youthful-looking and self-effacing man, Mr. O’Malley said to a reporter,”I’m just a fast-talking punk from the West Side of Chicago who takes pictures.” Well, yes, but that’s precisely his secret. Solidly rooted in his own environment, Mr. O’Malley is able to empathize with those from other environments. He uses modern cameras, but claims he still sees the world through the fuzzy eye of a box camera. His work demonstrates, however, that it is not the eye of the camera which matters but the eye of the photographer.

  “‘The most successful portrait in the exhibition is of a woman identified in the catalogue only as wife. It may well be a turning point in twentieth-century gender portraiture. Ms. O’Malley appears as a radiantly and yet chastely erotic woman in the middle years of life who is neither a fetish nor an object. Quite the contrary, her dangerous eyes and her intimidating smile suggest that she is challenging not only the photographer but all those who look at his work. She is a woman to admire, but also one you had better respect or you may be in serious trouble.’”

  “It’s just like the article they did about me in the magazine when we were in Germany,” I said. “More about my family than about me!”

  “Charles Cronin O’Malley! You are impossible!”

  “Well, I can live with it,” I said.

  “You didn’t tell me you spoke with her!”

  “I didn’t know what she was looking for in her questions … I don’t suppose she talked to you …”

  “As a matter of fact she did. I had to promise her I wouldn’t tell you about her review till it appeared.”

  “You charmed her,” I grumbled.

  “Only as you saw me.”

  “Well, that was the idea wasn’t it? … Any pictures in the article?”

  “One of you.”

  “I’m surprised.”

  I had been hoping that they would reprint my shot of Rosemarie. The review was right, it could become a very important picture.

  The review was an unexpected blessing. I could relax and begin to work on the conclave book. However, it did not, could not, heal whatever the ache was in the center of my soul.

  “Maybe I put my finger on it to the woman at the Times,” I said to Dr. Berman in our weekly lunch, this time at the Standard Club. “Maybe I’m afraid that I’m a kind of fraud, not the genius that even my poor wife insists that I am. I’m in way over my head. Someday they’ll catch on to me. So this time I escaped.”

  “Fast-talking fraud, as you implied to the Times woman.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “So.”

  He can say that word with more implications than anyone I know. Goes with being Jewish, I think. I’d have to see if I could repeat it with Esther.

  “So what if you’re wrong?”

  “I’ve lived with that image for a long time.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “Not from my parents, Lord knows. Maybe from my experience in the early years in school, little troublemaker covering up with S’ter.”

  “Or poor kid from a family who pretended they were rich?”

  “I hadn’t thought about that. Actually I was the only one in the family that thought we were poor. So I guess I covered up …”

  “So were you poor?”

  “Not compared to many people I’ve seen around the world. Not compared to a lot of people in the parish in those days.”

  “So?”

  “So I was the only one who knew we were living above our means. Or maybe the only one who cared.”

  “So.”

  “So?”

  “So perhaps it was some small incident, like your mother crying when they had to sell your big home?”

  “Something like that, which I don’t remember, could haunt me after all these years?”

  “So it has hardly incapacitated you. You are a success. You have won the woman you always wanted …”

  “She always wanted me.”

  “Chucky, this is not a therapy session. It is a friendly lunch. I will not, however, put up with such nonsense.”

  “Okay. I wanted to take off her clothes when she was in third grade. I finally did. I still do. I like it. So does she, I think.”

  “So.”

  I was silent for a moment. To win Rosemarie, the
n to save her from the wicked dragon, and finally to celebrate her—were not these enough achievements for one lifetime?

  “So,” I said, “Rosemarie might be enough justification for anyone’s life.”

  “However, this sense of being a fraud, a game—which let’s be honest about it, you always enjoyed—comes back to haunt you as you face the prospect of death, a death from which even Rosemarie cannot protect you.”

  “All right, that makes sense. How do I get over it?”

  “You don’t get over it. You shouldn’t get over it. It is part of who you are. It is functional most of the time, especially when you know it really isn’t true. You go beyond it more than you have already.”

  “So,” I agreed.

  He was right, I thought as I rode home on the Lake Street L. I had to accept the worth of my work just as Rosemarie had to accept her beauty. Maybe I should continue to take my pictures. Maybe of refugees around the world as I had planned. In the meantime I would continue the pleasurable activity of taking off Rosemarie’s clothes.

  Why not?

  Rosemarie

  1978

  Maggie Ward leafed slowly through the photo album.

  “This is an epiphany experience for you, isn’t it, Rosie?”

  “It is,” I said meekly.

  “Can you sort out for me why it is so?”

  “Lots of different reasons … It brings me back into contact with my poor mother. I realize how I have ignored her. I have to correct that.”

  “Which you will do by hanging her painting in your house and discreetly explaining to them, especially that very dangerous adolescent. Moreover you will eventually share this album with them as a sign of her love for this very special woman.”

  “Maybe write a story about the original Rosemarie too.”

  “Ah, that could be a best-seller, couldn’t it?”

  “I don’t need a best-seller.”

  “You wouldn’t reject one, however?”

  I felt a grin forming on my face.

  “Certainly not … I want perhaps, I’m not sure yet, to imagine from the pictures what she was like and her life.”

  “You feel a special kinship with her?”

  “I do, Maggie, I really do. Is that crazy, I wonder?”