September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

I was afraid that Chuck would repeat his line about LBJ being a corrupt and vulgar redneck.

  “The administration,” he said somberly, “is bungling into another land war in Asia. I want no part of that policy.”

  No longer Mr. Life of the Party.

  “Surely we have to stand up to the Communists in Southeast Asia if we are to maintain our credibility,” another journalist said as if that were as certain as a statement of papal infallibility. Later this jerk became a leading critic of the war. They all did.

  “Our credibility to whom?”

  “Well … World public opinion.”

  “There is no such thing.”

  “Our allies will say that we can’t be counted on.”

  “Maybe our allies should learn to take care of themselves.”

  Gasp around the room. Even the second-string members of the “best and the brightest” shouldn’t talk that way.

  “We have to stand up to the Communists.” One of the least intelligent women at the table repeated the line.

  “We stood up to them in Greece and Turkey,” my pint-sized lover replied. “And with the Marshall Plan and in Iran and in the Berlin airlift and in Korea and during the missile crisis. Isn’t there a statute of limitations?”

  “You sound like an isolationist!” she cried in alarm. “Didn’t we stop them in Korea?”

  “It cost us forty thousand lives! That’s a small number compared to what we will lose in a guerrilla war in a jungle! And we won’t win it either.”

  Someone changed the subject. Ambassador O’Malley was clearly wrong. The United States of America could do anything it wanted to do.

  In the car returning to the Hay-Adams that night, he sighed loudly, and said, “I don’t belong at a party like that, Rosemarie. You do, because you’re a bright elegant woman. I’m a little punk from the West Side of Chicago who stumbled in by mistake.”

  When he’s very discouraged, Chuck puts on that West-Side-punk-stumbling-in-by-mistake persona. The worst part of the act is that he half believes it, sometimes more than half.

  A light snow was dusting the narrow streets of Georgetown. It fell on the living and the dead and covered the graves of our hopes.

  “Don’t be silly,” I reply, as the scenario demanded. “You’re a very distinguished American diplomat.”

  “Yeah, and I was an all-state quarterback too.”

  He was not all-state. In fact, he was fourth-string on a team that had only three strings. By a fluke he scored the touchdown which beat Carmel and enabled us to go on to take city. Chuck became a legend. He was never able to understand that myths transcend facts.

  “Even the New York Times thinks you did a good job over there.”

  “The professional foreign service people didn’t.”

  “What do they know.”

  He had said to me once that for someone like him, who had to rely on wit and charm to get by, being an Ambassador was easier than being a precinct captain for the Dick Daley organization.

  Regardless, that was no reason to doubt his obvious intelligence—obvious to everyone but himself.

  “I’m not the only one who has his doubts about Vietnam. Dean Rusk is the only one who has no questions. McNamara goes along because he thinks it’s what the president wants. Mac Bundy tries to play a mediating game. The generals naturally want another war.”

  “That doesn’t sound like an analysis that a stumbling punk would make.”

  He ignored my point.

  “There’s lots of doubt at the next level down—George Ball, John McNaughton. We’re going to have half a million men in there for a five-year war before the American people even know that there’s a war going on.”

  “No!”

  “I think we’ll be lucky to be out in ten years—1975.”

  “Chucky!”

  “Yeah, I know, Rosemarie. It’s all hard to believe. LBJ has heard those estimates. He doesn’t believe them. He thinks he can control the military once they have a big army in the country. He’s wrong …”

  “You have no choice but to quit if that’s what’s going to happen.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t give me bullshit that you don’t belong here, not if you can predict exactly what will happen.”

  “No points for being right five years early, Rosemarie my love …”

  He put his arm around me and began to hum the music from Rosemarie as we turned off Connecticut Avenue. I knew what would happen to me when we were back in the fading opulence of the Hay-Adams. My husband is a very shrewd observer of people. As a red-haired runt he’s had to be. There is nothing about me he doesn’t know. When I stop to think about that, I feel totally naked. That’s so embarrassing that I try not to think about it. Some of the time.

  There is nothing in my sexuality that he hasn’t figured out. Since the first time he kissed me at Lake Geneva when I was ten I have been mush in his hands. He knows when to leave me alone and when to seduce me and what kind of seductions to use at which times. He insists that all lovemaking is a kind of seduction, which I suppose it is. The result is that he can do to me whatever he wants whenever he wants—that is, if I’m ready for it.

  I don’t like that. Well, I don’t dislike it either. However, I resent his confidence that he knows all the things to say and all the buttons to push and all the places to kiss and caress. It should be difficult for him, should it not? What is left of my dignity and independence when I act like a pushover? I tell myself that someday I must have it out with him. I must insist that I’m not a pushover.

  Then I see the glint in his eye and the confident smile on his face and feel his fingers as they unzip and unhook me and his lips as they explore me. He has no right, no right at all to take everything away from me, all my secrets, all my defenses, all my modesty, and turn me into a pile of pliant mush.

  Except that I like being pliant mush.

  In the early stages of his assault I want him to go away and leave me alone. I am a drunk. I am an addictive personality. I am a neurotic. My father abused me sexually. My mother beat me, almost killed me with a poker. I am a terrible mother and an inadequate wife. I have had five children and am no longer beautiful. I have no right to sexual pleasure. I am a lousy lover. I don’t say any of these things because I am incapable of saying anything. I need him, I want him, I must have him. I’ve wanted him to make love since he came back from the White House. I’d been aroused ever since. No time for night prayers today. Love is a prayer, Chucky argued long ago. Oh, take me, Chucky Ducky. Please love me, even if I am not worth loving. Push into me, fill me, drive me out of my mind, let me be love, nothing but love, love exploding in and around me, all over me, love tearing me apart.

  Love.

  Love for this man who is everything for me. I want to give myself completely to him. I reach for the gift. Suddenly it’s there. We both shout for joy.

  Then peace.

  He’s always very satisfied with himself after he’s made love to me. He knows that he’s done a good job and that I have been conquered again and loved it. That upsets me a little, but not very much because I am so complacent, so satisfied, so happy.

  This time he says, “You’re sensational, Rosemarie, more so every time.”

  I almost give a smart-ass Rosie answer, “You’d better say that.”

  Instead God makes me say, “You make me better, Chucky,” and burst into tears.

  He nurses me gently back to solid earth and sings to me. I lay my head on his chest and, undone again, pleasured completely, and filled with love, fall off to sleep.

  Damn it, he should go to sleep first, but he never does.

  For a few minutes of unbearably sweet ecstasy, I do not doubt myself.

  2

  “President Kennedy was always very fond of you two,” the ethereal woman in black whispered as though we were at the gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery instead of in her flawlessly furnished drawing room in the Maryland hunt country. “He said that you Chicago Irish we
re different from the Boston Irish.”

  “Better,” Chucky said with his most charming grin.

  She laughed softly, something she didn’t do often these days.

  “He was very proud of your work in Bonn,” she said, the mask of sadness slipping over her face again. “He said you were in the top ten of his appointments.”

  “Five,” Chuck insisted.

  She laughed again.

  “Of course … I know he would understand the reason you’re leaving government service. I merely wanted to tell you that.”

  I had never been able to understand her relationship with the President. I had figured she liked being first lady and tolerated his infidelities as a necessary price for her role. Now I did not doubt that she had loved him and that her grief was real. Maybe in the world in which she grew up Jack Kennedy’s screwing around was accepted as the sort of thing husbands do. I had warned Chuck that if he tried that sort of thing, I’d kill him. He had replied that probably that was the reason he became impotent every time he was tempted.

  “Lyndon,” Chuck said, “will do a lot for the civil rights movement. I support that, not that my support matters very much.”

  “It’s the war,” I said with a sigh.

  “Yes, I understand. President Kennedy often said to me that he would pull our troops out after the 1964 election.”

  Now he was dead and we were sending more troops in. I hoped that God knew what He was doing.

  Both of us were silent.

  “I want to thank you both for your friendship and loyalty,” she said, rising from her couch, like a queen from a throne. “I hope we will meet again sometime during better days.”

  Her eyes flooded with tears as she led us to the door.

  “Life,” my husband said, his voiced choked with sadness, “is too important ever to be anything but life.”

  “Oh, yes,” she agreed.

  We drove back to the Hay-Adams in driving rain. I was at the wheel because, as I had established, I was a better driver than he was. I think he let me win that argument because he found it easier not to drive. I turned on the local station that specialized in rock music, the Beach Boys singing “I Get Around” and the Beatles doing “I Feel Fine” and “Love Me, Do.”

  “Well,” my Chuck murmured, “a little touch of royalty is nice in our society, isn’t it?”

  “We’ll not see her like again,” I countered, usurping one of his lines.

  “I guess not.” He sighed. “Rosemarie, do we have to listen to that noise?”

  “You know the rules. The one who drives the car gets to pick the station.”

  “I can’t remember voting on that rule.”

  “You didn’t.”

  Chuck, like his father who knew Louis Armstrong and the other jazz greats of Chicago forty years before, was a jazz aficionado. Rock and roll music he told me was an effort at musical orgasm and I liked it because I was oversexed. That made me a little nervous because April Rosemary was in love with the Beatles.

  “I know as well as you do what the word ‘jazz’ means.”

  “It’s different.”

  “Why?”

  “It just is.”

  Then, shifting emotional gears, I said, “I worry about A.R.’s obsession with the Beatles.”

  The three boys, growing into tall, rangy Black Irishmen who could be a junior unit in the Irish Republican Army, ignored rock and roll completely and concentrated on their horns, which they blew on every possible occasion, thus making our residence in Bonn sound like a school for retarded musicians. Moire, as in all things, strove to imitate her big sister.

  “Music never ruined anyone,” Chuck said, his mind elsewhere. “Not unless people use drugs with it.”

  That sent a chill through me. I was an addictive personality. What if my older daughter were too?

  “I could have stayed in Bonn for Lyndon,” he continued, “if it wasn’t for this damn war.”

  The impulse to public service of the Kennedy years does not die easily. Perhaps that’s why so many of his people stayed on with LBJ.

  “Are you sure you have to quit?”

  “Yep.”

  He sank deeper into his seat in the car and closed his eyes, as if to blot out the Beatles, the rain, and the sad lines on a widow’s face.

  I didn’t fully understand his opposition to the war. Everyone in Washington was saying that we had to take a stand in Southeast Asia to stop the spread of Communism. You’d think from the hindsight history written later that the people who wrote the history had been wiser than Lyndon and his staff and opposed it from the beginning. That’s bullshit. People who thought like Chuck and George Ball were few and far between. Mostly they kept their mouths shut.

  The O‘Malleys had a long history of military service. His father had collapsed on the parade ground at Fort Leavenworth the day the war in Europe ended, a victim of the Spanish Influenza, and was almost buried alive. His grandfather had enlisted for the Spanish-American War, though he was, thank God, too old to be sent off to Cuba to die of malaria. His great-grandfather, the original Charles O’Malley had joined the Union Army as a raw immigrant boy at the age of eighteen. John Evangelist O’Malley (Chucky’s delightful father, aka “Vangie”), having survived the flu, served in the Black Horse Troop National Guard unit between the two wars. He was called up two weeks after Pearl Harbor and was destined for the jungles of New Guinea. Chuck, then fourteen, somehow managed to persuade our local congressman to have him sent to Fort Sheridan. And Chuck himself had served in the Army of Occupation in Germany after the war, with considerable bravery as some of his friends from that era had whispered to me.

  “Military service, yeah,” Chuck said to me, “but none of us ever had a gun fired at them in anger.”

  “Except you in that black market roundup outside of Wurzburg.”

  “That doesn’t count … Too many people I know died in Korea.”

  One person in particular, I thought—Christopher Kurtz, the best male friend, maybe the only male friend, Chuck ever had was killed leading his platoon of Marines out of the trap Douglas Mac-Arthur had sent them into at the Chosin Reservoir. Chris was killed attacking a Chinese machine-gun nest. As usual, in that strange core of the real Chucky Ducky, the arguments were always personal and local, no matter how good he was at articulating more sophisticated arguments.

  “Not our kind of people,” Chuck said, breaking a long silence.

  “No,” I agreed.

  “Didn’t have a neighborhood.”

  “Neither of them ever did.”

  “Well,” my husband concluded the conversation, “we do and we’re going back to it. That’s where we belong. We’ll stay there.”

  That it was where we belonged I did not doubt. However, my husband was a restless soul. I did not take seriously his vow never to leave the neighborhood again.

  There were many layers beneath his quick-talking, pint-sized redhead persona, not that the top layer wasn’t authentic. Chuck was a gifted artist, deeply sensitive and compassionate, incorrigibly romantic (he’d freed the magic princess from the tower and then ravaged her much to their mutual delight), and tough as they come when he had to be (as he had to be with me). He was also shrewd enough politically to be a precinct captain in Cook County and intellectually smart enough to turn down an appointment at THE University as we called it. I can’t describe what the inner core of the man is because I don’t know. However, down there in the subbasement of his soul is the reason why I love him.

  Oversexed?

  Maybe. If he is, like I say, so am I. That’s why back in our suite at the Hay-Adams that terrible afternoon we buried ourselves in one another in yet another passionate obsequy for Camelot. The rain, driven across Lafayette Park by a fierce wind, beat mindlessly against the windows.

  It was also raining the first Sunday in March in our sprawling and comfortable Dutch Colonial house on New England Avenue in Oak Park, technically beyond the boundaries of St. Ursula parish, but still ou
r parish because Chuck’s father John Evangelist O’Malley had designed it.

  (We also maintained an official voting address in Chicago in the basement of an apartment building I owned on the east side of Austin Boulevard. We had no intention of working for the city, but we figured it was our legacy to vote in Chicago elections. The tiny basement apartment was furnished so that it could be used as an occasional getaway from the kids.)

  Moreover, the house was quiet in early evening, which it almost never is. Our daughters were over at the Antonellis’ house listening to the Beatles no doubt with Carlotta Antonelli. Carlotta’s mother Peg is my closest friend in all the world and incidentally Chuck’s sister. The boys were watching a basketball game upstairs on color television, something of an innovation in those days. Chuck was reading some dreary economics journal—he hadn’t picked up his camera or visited our darkroom since we came home. I had thrown aside Herzog in disgust at Saul Bellow’s narcissism and picked up William Golding’s The Spire. We were both obviously in a bad mood. I longed for summer and Long Beach.

  Earlier in the morning, after we came home from Mass and while Chuck was eating his usual breakfast of bacon, eggs, waffles, cereal, and what he called his “Sunday breakfast steak,” I had read the New York Times magazine article about him. We both knew it was coming. My husband pretended to be indifferent. I did not.

  “How is it?” he asked casually.

  “It’s okay,” I said, with equal aplomb. “They think you left the ship because of grief more than because of the war, but they have some good quotes about the war in there too. They also praise the work we did at Bonn and lament that perhaps principles that are a bit too lofty caused you to leave government service.”

  “Hmm,” he said, soaking his already soggy waffle with syrup. “Lemme see.”

  I pushed the magazine in his direction. He glanced at the pictures, scanned the text, and placed it carefully next to his plate while he inhaled the waffle.

  “Who was the Ambassador to the Federal Republic at that time?” he asked, his lips quivering with suppressed laughter.

  “You were, dear.”

  “Most of the pictures are of my ‘breathtaking’ wife and my ‘handsome’ children. It would appear that they were responsible for the success of my work.”