September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “And, Rosemarie, I am not a mother superior even if sometimes I may sound like one.”

  “Yes, s’ter.”

  Margaret Mary Ward Keenan was a small pretty woman with long auburn hair and big gray eyes which seemed to burn with sympathy and warmth, a good fairy assigned to take care of me. Dr. Stone, who had been in charge of me when I had gone on the wagon, had betrayed me by taking an appointment at the Harvard Medical School.

  “I strongly recommend Dr. Ward,” she told me. “She is a psychologist and not a medical doctor. She is very unorthodox, but you, my dear, need someone very unorthodox.”

  I rebelled against this decision. Naturally. However, Dr. Ward’s maternal smile—though she was my age—melted me. I needed a mother to take care of me.

  Unorthodox she was. Somehow or the other we had agreed that I was regularly underweight because of low self-esteem. Some women hide their low self-valuation by putting on weight. Determined to be different from everyone, I did it by not being heavy enough. I would therefore put on weight, even if it meant a daily visit to Petersen’s ice-cream parlor, a luxury of which I had often dreamed.

  She and her husband Jerry Keenan lived in the parish just west of us. So I encounter her at various social occasions. She’s not embarrassed by such meetings, but I am. Once I introduced her to Chucky.

  “Dr. Ward, this is my husband Chuck O’Malley.”

  “All the good things she says about me are true,” he said, “and all the bad things are false.”

  “Why, Mr. O‘Malley … or to be proper, Dr. O’Malley, what would ever make you think we talk about you?”

  My husband turned purple and laughed, “Touché!”

  Later he whispered to me, “I hope that child doesn’t have any male patients.”

  “What do you mean?” I turned on my thunder-and-lightning frown.

  “Most men wouldn’t be able to keep their hands off her … I would, of course, because I have such long practice at self-restraint, but …”

  I shoved him with my elbow.

  “Regardless! You have the dirtiest mind in the world,” I told him.

  “I don’t know who keeps the list.”

  “I do and you be quiet!”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He giggled, content with himself.

  In her office that day after Selma, I was trying to find an excuse for avoiding Petersen’s.

  “Well, I’ve been terribly busy …”

  “Do we not have here,” Maggie Ward (her real name), “Rosemarie, the perfect metaphor for your complex? I have given you license to indulge in your passion for malted milks, and you reject the license.”

  “I enjoy sex,” I said defensively.

  “Not as much as you might.”

  That hit home. I had admitted to her that there were times when Chucky and I were making love that I resisted the ecstasy that I might have enjoyed. I was afraid of what might happen. Moreover, I didn’t deserve that much pleasure.

  “Now,” Dr. Maggie Ward said to me, “let us talk about your trip to Alabama.”

  She was silent for a moment, as was I. That meant I was supposed to say something.

  “Well … It was a crazy risk … Wasn’t it?”

  “I thought we expected such behavior from the crazy O’Malleys.”

  “We could have all been killed.”

  “You weren’t.”

  “I was responsible for Peg and Vince.”

  “Surely they have minds of their own. Indeed as you describe your sister-in-law to me she is a paladin of common sense.”

  “Well …”

  “You would, of course, do it again, wouldn’t you?”

  Unfair question.

  “I might not take so many chances …”

  “One would hope not.”

  “I loved the excitement, the adventure, the adrenaline rush …”

  “Which is to say that you are Rosemarie Helen Clancy O’Malley.”

  “I could have died …”

  “We all die someday, Rosmarie.”

  “I know that.”

  Maybe after I was dead the demons racing around in my skull would leave me alone.

  “All your life you have been taking risks, high risks, in defense of your selfhood. Have they not paid off?”

  “We’ve been through this before, haven’t we?”

  “I believe so. Does it not seem possible to you that wise, if high risks, are your grace?”

  “Like my karma?”

  She grinned. “If you wish.”

  I didn’t like this crazy Clancy broad who was good at taking wise if high risks.

  “You’d probably be dead now, Rosemarie, if you hadn’t taken a lot of risks when you were younger.”

  Maybe.

  “What about April Rosemary?”

  “What about her?”

  “Am I going to lose her because I’m just a little crazy? Or maybe a lot crazy?”

  “Do you expect your daughter to be just like you even if she looks like a clone?”

  “Well …”

  “Should she be fighting with the nuns and the other young women the way you did?”

  “No …”

  “Has she not grown up in a home where her parents loved one another and her?”

  “So?”

  “You tell me, Rosemarie.”

  “You always say that!”

  She nodded and waited for my answer.

  “She’ll have different mountains to climb?”

  “A nice metaphor.”

  “Actually a little trite, but it makes the point … Maybe I should say she’ll have to swim across different bays with different sharks to avoid.”

  “Another nice metaphor, quite revealing actually.”

  “Will I lose her?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Maybe … I know what I’m supposed to say next. I’m supposed to say that I have to give her enough freedom so I might lose her if we’re ever going to be adult friends.”

  “No one has ever questioned your intelligence, Rosemarie. Loss is always a risk with our children.”

  “Will I lose her?”

  “No promises, Rosemarie.”

  Those luminous gray eyes turned sad. There were hints of some great loss in her own past. On one corner of the shelf behind her desk there was a frame with two pictures, one of a pathetically young sailor in World War II uniform and the other of a cute little girl baby.

  “There can’t be any promises, can there?”

  “Time, Rosemarie. Stop at Petersen’s on the way home.”

  I did. I discovered that a single malt was not nearly enough.

  After supper, the boys were down in the basement blowing their horns. I found April Rosemary huddled over papers with her sister.

  “I’m helping April Rosemary with her homework,” the little redhead informed me proudly.

  Big sister looked up at me and winked. Apparently we were friends again.

  “Daddy and I are going over to Petersen’s. Can you keep an eye on April Rosemary for me?”

  “Yes, Mommy.”

  Big sister made a face as if she really didn’t approve of such romantic nonsense from her parents, but she winked again.

  “Don’t worry about the boys,” she said. “You know what they’re like when they’re making noise.”

  I pulled Chucky out of his darkroom. “Leave Selma alone for an hour and take your date over to Petersen’s.”

  He put aside his magnifying glass and a stack of negatives and bounded out of his chair.

  “Can I neck and pet with her like I used to?”

  “Act your age, Charles Cronin O’Malley!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And put on your Fenwick jacket. It’s still April.”

  “Just like I was eighteen again!”

  “I haven’t noticed much change in you since 1946.”

  “I hope not.”

  Despite my warning that he act his age, he held my hand as we walked over to Ch
icago Avenue.

  We were always welcome at the ice-cream parlor, the best on the West Side of Chicago as Chucky always said. Then he would add, “Nothing on the South Side even makes the cut.”

  The manager rushed to the door to shake hands as we entered. He reminisced about the good old days when we were teens and the Clancy/O’Malley duet used to burst into song like the ice-cream parlor was the set for a musical comedy.

  So he prevailed upon us to do a bit of our old act, which meant singing songs from South Pacific. Actually it didn’t take much persuasion. I wondered if some of the teenagers, the real ones that is, who stopped eating their ice cream long enough to stare at us, might be classmates or friends of April Rosemary. We were embarrassing her again. However, the applause was still favorable.

  “Are you really April O’Malley’s parents?” a wide-eyed blond kid asked us.

  “No way,” Chucky said. “Do we look old enough to have a daughter that’s almost fifteen? My date is her big sister.”

  General laughter.

  “Bitchin’,” said the blond.

  “Is that good?” Chucky asked, his hand sneaking up under my skirt.

  “Charles Cronin O’Malley,” I protested insincerely “And yes, it’s a compliment.”

  “You must have had a good interview with your gorgeous little shrink today,” he suggested.

  “I’m in trouble. I haven’t put on the ten pounds she wants me to put on. So I have to come here more often.”

  “With me?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  His fingers were approaching an area where, in my present horny state, I might react inappropriately

  “With who?”

  “Whom.”

  “Regardless.” He waved his hand, imitating me.

  However, his fingers had stopped their exploration.

  “With anyone I want. Usually by myself, if there’s no one around the house who can fit me into his schedule.”

  I gulped down the last sip of my malted milk.

  “Charles Cronin O’Malley, finish your malt and take me home and make frenzied love to me.”

  “Really?” he said, faking surprise.

  “Now.”

  So we went home. I checked on the children. Moire was in bed, the boys, dark-haired kids who looked like they might in a couple of years ride the Shenandoah Valley with Phil Sheridan, were still blasting away on their horns, April Rosemary was puzzling over an algebra problem. Despite my high level of sexual excitement, I said to her, “Some of your friends were over there.”

  “Hmm … Did you sing for them?”

  “A little.”

  “They liked it?” She didn’t look up from her algebra.

  “They seemed too.”

  “Bitchin’ …”

  You never can tell.

  As I entered the door of the master bedroom (which Chuck insisted on calling the mistress bedroom) I shed my blouse and reached for the hooks on my bra.

  I would show that witch Maggie Ward that I could, sometimes, give myself over completely to pleasure.

  Which I did. Up to a point.

  5

  That summer all our hopes for the political future were obliterated. The casualties in Vietnam were increasing, but they were still low, just as they had been in the early days of Korea. Each death of a boy from our neighborhood caused a stir of unease. We did not, could not, comprehend that such deaths would soon become routine. However, Chuck and I found some reassurance in the rapid progress of the Civil Rights Movement.

  The Voting Rights Act passed on August 10 in 1965. My husband was exultant. “The race problem in America,” he told me confidently, “will be solved. The Negroes will come to political power, the Democratic majority in the South will be stronger, racial peace and justice will emerge at a steady, gradual pace. Selma was the turning point.”

  Chucky Ducky was rarely so pontifical. However, he was telling me and especially himself that the bright promise of the Kennedy years had not ended with the rifle bullet that had crashed into the President’s brain in Dallas, Texas, two years before.

  The very next day, Chuck’s predictions about the solution of the Negro problem were proved wrong.

  We were at our House on the Lake, which I had missed desperately in Bonn and which had become my favorite place in all the world, a place of peace and serenity and rebirth. I love it there, warm, drowsy days and cool, moist nights which soak the tensions out of my body and make me sink into a glowing pond of peace. And love.

  “Rosie,” my father-in-law had said, “I have the perfect house for you. It’s a higgledy-piggledy, topsy-turvy place. You’ll love it.”

  He knew that I wouldn’t permit any external modifications on our house on New England Avenue in Oak Park because I insisted that its middle western copy of Dutch Colonial should not be violated. He also knew that I wanted to have a place I could do interesting things to.

  “It’s just down the Lake from us,” he continued. “It needs a lot of work …”

  Which was music to my ears.

  “I don’t know, Vangie. Will Chuck like it?”

  “Who?”

  “Your son, my husband.”

  “He doesn’t get to vote.”

  The house was perfect. Once it had been a simple beach house, the outlines of which were dimly visible within the now sprawling and disorderly collection of additions, bedrooms, bathrooms, screen porches which had been incorporated into the house and new screen porches and galleries, and frequently improved electrical and water connections. And a cupola on the roof.

  “Perfect,” I had said to Chuck. “We can do wonderful things with the place.”

  “I’ll get lost in there,” he had said dyspeptically.

  “You don’t get to vote.”

  “I understand.”

  “You can advise, however. No consent permitted. You’ll love it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I knew he’d love it because he loved me.

  Anyway, I was buying the house. I had inherited money from both parental families. My father’s money was dirty, so I gave it all to the Church. Mom’s grandfather had owned about half of what is now the South Side. Wisely invested, it had survived the Crash and was now all my responsibility. I had set up some foundations and established trust funds for my kids which would provide for their education—even to graduate school—and their first home. I suppose I’m rich. I would have traded in all the money for a different family life when I was growing up. However, I never had that choice. I feel guilty about the money. I’m not an aristocrat. We live comfortably. I could live like an aristocrat (and that makes me feel guilty) but I don’t and won’t.

  Chuck claimed that he had grown to love the place. “There’s so many dead ends and alcoves in which I can trap you for my lascivious purposes,” he argued.

  He had learned that a little bit of tickling sent my body chemicals rampaging. Clever little imp that he is, he sensed when the chemicals were ready to rampage anyway.

  The House at the Lake had become for me a place of new beginnings of second chances.

  John Raven argues that our God is a God of infinite second chances. We always have the opportunity to start over again. At the Lake I could pause and reflect on my second chances. The O’Malleys had accepted a rich waif into their family. Chuck had married me despite my warnings that I was bad news. He made me stop drinking. That was a lot of second chances for one woman. How many more would I get?

  So at the Lake I was more peaceful, more grateful, and more vulnerable.

  The cupola had become Mom’s Tower. Like Mom’s Study at home, the door was always ajar, which meant that anyone in the family with a good reason (their call) could come in. This included at the Lake Moire, who burst in several times a day to hug me and tell me how much she loved me and then dashed out at full speed.

  Often that love made me cry. I didn’t deserve it.

  Mom’s Tower was also a place where I could indulge in my secret vice.
It was not sexual, at least not explicitly so.

  I write. Stories. Lots of them. I have not shown them to anyone. Not Chuck, not Peg, not Maggie Ward. Not anyone. I never will. Nonetheless, I love writing them.

  It was one of those sleepy humid days in August when everyone was pretending that summer would never end. The boys were blowing their horns down on the beach. As usual they had attracted a crowd of local urchins, some teenagers who liked their beat, and a few curious adults who thought they might be hearing a new sound. Also as usual April Rosemary was sulking. Her brothers were embarrassing her with her friends. They were decidedly not cool. In fact they were “space cadets.”

  “Complain to your father,” I said, now weary of April Rosemary’s endless embarrassment. “He turned them on to Louis Armstrong.”

  Chucky didn’t like rock and roll. Believing, more or less, in letting his children develop their own tastes, he did not try to forbid them to listen to the “jungle music” as he called it. Rather he lurked silently in the background and awaited his opportunity to play the jazz card.

  The opportunity came while we were still in Germany. The Louis Armstrong recording of “Hello, Dolly!” swept the Beatles temporarily out of first place on the charts. April Rosemary thought it was “totally gross.”

  “Dad,” asked Kevin, then twelve years old, “who is this Satchmo person?”

  “Actually his friends call him Pops,” Chucky replied, not even opening his eyes on the couch.

  “You know him?” James, age eleven, demanded. “He’s famous!”

  “Gramps and he are great friends from the time that Pops was playing early Chicago jazz in speakeasies in Chicago during the nineteen twenties.”

  “What’s a speakeasy?” ten-year-old Sean asked.

  Somehow I had never worried about my sons until the Vietnam War started. Even as kids they seemed sensible and stable. They treated me with grave respect, the way Chuck did. He was simply the oldest of the kids and hence one of them. All of them were or promised to be rangy, Black Irish young men, with deep, dark blue eyes, low hairlines, and bright smiles. They all looked like one another and like Colonel Brian O’Brien, my mother’s grandfather who rode with Phil Sheridan during the Civil War, a giant bearded man with long black hair, a wicked smile, and hypnotic eyes. Despite his good looks and his trim cavalry uniform, he had managed to keep out of trouble during the war and after, though legends about his success in love and politics swirled around him.