September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “When will it ever stop?” I wondered.

  Neither my husband nor my sister-in-law answered. We drove back to the neighborhood as darkness fell, each of us with our morose thoughts.

  Martin died on Thursday. By Friday evening, the police had lost control of the West Side areas along Madison and parallel streets. Thousands of looters ravaged all the stores in the neighborhoods. The Mayor asked for the National Guard on Saturday. Thirty-six major fires were burning and the looting continued. Some black leaders proclaimed on television that the revolution had begun. They were going to burn Chicago down. However, they only burned one neighborhood, a black one at that.

  On Sunday, the federal troops arrived, five thousand of them from Fort Hood, Armored Division. Whether the tanks and bayonets of the soldiers frightened the rioters or whether they had taken everything that was available, an uneasy peace descended on Chicago.

  Despite his promise to avoid combat zones, Chuck spent most of Sunday photographing the ruins and the grim-looking Feds. He managed to discover an officer that had been with him in Bamberg.

  How did I know that?

  Well, I couldn’t let him drive into those neighborhoods by himself, could I?

  We watched the funeral on television. It was like the congregation and the watching country had briefly entered the world of the Negro spiritual—sadness, color, hope all blended into a seamless robe. Perhaps the seamless robe of Christ.

  “Greatest liturgy in the history of our country,” Chuck said.

  I had cried myself out and was now crying again. Vince and Peg and the band were there with us. The kids somehow knew that their music was in communion with the funeral music.

  “Will it ever get better, Dad?” Jimmy asked. “This race thing. The kids that rioted on Madison Street are our age. We play their music and they are too poor to know the music. Can we do anything?”

  I thanked the angels that he hadn’t asked me.

  “Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday were a lot poorer. Probably there are future great musicians on the West Side. Not everybody your age rioted, only a small proportion. It doesn’t take a lot of people to burn down a neighborhood … I’m not answering your question, am I?”

  The poor boys shook their heads solemnly.

  “I don’t know, guys. I just don’t know We tried to do something at Selma and it didn’t work. The man who preached nonviolence died violently. In his memory kids your age did violence. Maybe the anger has to run its course. Then maybe again we can work together on a better life for the blacks. Now is not the time when any white person is welcome. They feel they don’t need us. Please God that will change.”

  They nodded solemnly. We were four white Catholic liberals, three Irish and an Italian. We all grew up despising racism—which was not true of many of our contemporaries. We had tried and we had failed. Now we were irrelevant. We might be irrelevant for the rest of our lives. We had no answers to give to our children.

  20

  “He said that anyone who came into a room where you were wanted to undress you?” Maggie Ward raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  “Men, he said, and a lot of women too.”

  “My,” she said softly, “that is an outrageous statement. And he put it in the tape to you?”

  “Right!”

  I was strung out, really strung out.

  I needed help. We had worked hard on the Kennedy campaign in Indiana. All the kids except Moire were out there in the bitter cold and the spring snow every weekend, passing out leaflets, knocking on doors, telling people that we had to end the war and eliminate racial conflict. Northwest Indiana seemed to like what we were saying. When Bobby showed up in Gary, a huge crowd appeared to cheer him. He seemed genuinely moved. Suddenly he was a populist, a champion of ordinary folk, a man more sensitive and open to people than his brother could ever have been. His shy, boyish smile and his radiant eyes captivated everyone. He remembered Chuck and me and even the names of our kids.

  I was out there every weekend too, bringing Moire, who threatened to disown the family if she couldn’t come. It somehow seemed surrealistic, another dream, Camelot reborn. In my heart I wondered if it was not a pipe dream. Gene McCarthy, who had entered the race when it seemed there was no chance, felt he had a legitimate claim on the nomination. There was no divine right of the Kennedys. Bobby didn’t have a claim on the presidency.

  The truth was, as Chuck said, that McCarthy had no chance to win the nomination and Kennedy did. All McCarthy could do was deny it to Bobby and leave the nomination to Vice President Humphrey, who was Lyndon’s man and who would surely lose to Nixon. As far as one could tell Gene McCarthy was too vain to care about that.

  The Kennedy volunteers from Chicago bonded together with the happy expectation that they would be lifelong friends who would remember their own St. Crispin’s Day when they campaigned to end the war and to promote racial justice.

  Our family bonded too, especially the boys and their father. As we drove home in our station wagon, Kev engaged his father in a conversation about music.

  “Dad, why is that early jazz seems so pure compared to what came later?”

  “Pure?”

  “I like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, but somehow their music doesn’t have the fire and the energy of the early stuff, like Pops or Lady or Jelly Roll.”

  “Pops” was what the initiate called Louis Armstrong, “Lady” was Billie Holiday, and “Jelly Roll” was the fabled Jelly Roll Morton.

  Chuck took a deep breath and tried to reply

  “Early jazz as you know came up to Chicago directly from the poor neighborhoods of New Orleans. It wasn’t new to those who played it. It was new to us and the first hint any Northerners had of black culture. I wasn’t around then, but from what your grandfather said, it bowled people over. The next generation of black—and eventually white—musicians couldn’t simply repeat the first generation. In line with the jazz principle of improvisation, they developed their own styles of jazz. Necessarily I think jazz became more elaborate, but it was still jazz.”

  “Rock and roll is better,” April Rosemary said, looking for an argument.

  The males in the family ignored her.

  “They never should have left Chicago,” Jimmy complained. “Nothing good ever happens in New York. Look what they did to Billie Holiday.”

  So the conversation would go. My elder daughter sulked, my younger daughter fell asleep, as she would do with the slightest provocation. My husband did his best to maintain the fiction that he knew a little bit more about music than my sons.

  I was so strung out in those days that I wondered about whether I was losing my hold on reality. The monster didn’t come in my dreams anymore. Rather my dreams were quirky, faces and places I had never seen before. A city like Chicago except different. People like my friends and family, only not quite. There was nothing hostile about either the people or the city. Yet I was running constantly down strange streets, through homes of people I didn’t know, over fences, into alleys. I didn’t understand why I was running, yet I was always falling behind. Mostly I was trying to catch a bus, but it always pulled away just as I got there. Often, during these runs I had a baby in my arms.

  So I went to see Maggie Ward again and like an idiot complained about Chuck instead of telling her about my dreams.

  “Do you think he really said that to people or he put it in the tape to please you?”

  “Please me!”

  “I should think it is a rather strong if perhaps erotic compliment.”

  “I don’t!”

  “Come now, Rosemarie, of course you do!”

  “It embarrasses me.”

  “Sexual compliments tend to do that.”

  “I don’t think my husband should go around saying things like that about me.”

  “The woman doth protest too much.”

  My face was aflame.

  “Surely you notice that people find you sexually attractive?”

  “I do not!”r />
  “Come now, Rosemarie, you certainly do. And it pleases you too. Otherwise, you would not dress in such a way that emphasizes your erotic appeal.”

  “I do not!”

  “I wonder why you so vehemently deny that which is self-evident.”

  “Because I’m afraid that it’s all true,” I blurted.

  “Ah, now we come to the truth again, the same truth if you will, but the truth. What would follow if it is the truth?”

  “That I’m an important and powerful person … I don’t want to be that just because of my looks.”

  “Not a very good response to God’s generosity to you, is it?”

  “Stop raising religious issues!”

  “I am also intrigued by the fact that you have been through so much pain in your life recently and yet you mention this obiter dictum of your husband at the beginning of our conversation.”

  “It’s the most important thing,” I sulked.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s about the way I see myself … About who I am.”

  “As always, Rosemarie, we get around to the truth.”

  I was afraid she would ask me who I was. She didn’t, however, the little bitch. She’d made her point.

  Then I told her about my running dreams. As usual she zeroed in on the heart of the matter.

  “Who is the child you have in your arms during all your dashing about?”

  “April Rosemary I suppose. Maybe Moire, though she doesn’t have red hair.”

  “Could it be someone else?”

  “I don’t know … ?”

  “Are you protecting the child?”

  “Certainly!”

  “From whom?”

  “People who would hurt her.”

  “And what would happen if you caught the bus?”

  “She’d be safe.”

  “ash.”

  I knew where we were going. I didn’t want to go there. Yet I figured I might as well admit it.

  “I’m the baby,” I murmured.

  “Are you very good to her?”

  “I’m careful with her. I’m impatient with her because she slows me down … Sometimes she’s very heavy …”

  “So …”

  “So,” I said, “I should be very nice to that poor little kid because she’s really wonderful. Is that what you want me to say?”

  “The question is whether that is the truth.”

  My eyes filled up with tears.

  “Maybe … Probably … It’ll take time to accept that idea …”

  “I’m not holding a stopwatch, Rosemarie, except to say that it’s time.”

  “Do you image me naked during these conversations?” I said at the door.

  “What makes you think, Rosemarie, that you’re not!”

  Touché. The little bitch had nailed me again.

  So much happened that year. I can’t remember whether the dreams stopped right after that conversation. Nor do I know whether I was nicer to the child I was lugging around. I think I tried and then kind of dropped her.

  April Rosemary refused to go to the Trinity or the Fenwick proms with Bill Enright, a Fenwick basketball player and a nice if rather dull boy. He called me, baffled.

  “How will it help end the war?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Bill. I do know she won’t listen to me.”

  In part because I hadn’t gone to my own prom either because I hated the school and the nuns so much.

  “It would be a sin,” April Rosemary told me, “to go to a dance while boys my age are dying in that terrible war.”

  Somehow I couldn’t tell her that she was completely wrong. I didn’t add that some of the boys at the prom would be dead in another year.

  Bobby asked Chuck to photograph the Oregon and California campaigns. Since there were no Vietnamese fishing boats or women from the Royal Australian Air Force in either state, I urged him to go. I had to stay home to prepare for the family milestone of our first high school graduation.

  Oregon delivered a savage blow to the Kennedy campaign. McCarthy won 46 percent to 39 percent. A lot of Oregonians told the media that it was not fair for Bobby to enter the race after McCarthy did. First come, first served. It was a strange political philosophy. The media folks, who thought Bobby was an “opportunist,” pushed the theme hard. McCarthy had the right to the nomination, not Bobby. There was less excuse for them than for the Oregon voters. The media people, especially those from Washington, knew that McCarthy was vain and lazy and would be a terrible President.

  Senator Kennedy himself said that California would make or break his campaign. He had to win there to have a chance at the nomination.

  In Chicago, the Mayor had indicated his support for Bobby, which was a case of the leader following his followers.

  Chuck flew home for the graduation. It was a glorious spring day. He told me that Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby’s Press Secretary, was a mean man who hated Chicago and everyone from Chicago.

  April Rosemary looked lovely in her graduation dress. We beamed proudly at her academic awards. Alas, one of the younger nuns organized an antiwar demonstration in which a group of the graduates, our daughter included, broke out banners and chanted, “Hell no, we won’t go!” as if there were any chance of them going to Vietnam.

  The demonstration did not contribute to the eventual end of the war—none of the demonstrations ever did. Quite the contrary. During the Nixon administration support for the war as measured by the polls went up whenever there was a major demonstration. The one at Trinity affronted many of the parents, which was perhaps what the nun and the kids had in mind.

  “They ought to rescind their diplomas,” a fat, pompous, red-faced Irishman informed us after the ceremony.

  Chuck could not resist a response. Well, he never could resist a response.

  “It’s their brothers and their boyfriends that will die over there,” he informed the asshole.

  It shut him up. However, it made it impossible for us to remonstrate with our daughter, who, having heard her father rebuke the man who wanted to take away her diploma, hugged her father fiercely.

  Her cousin Carlotta shook her head sadly and whispered in my ear, “It’s just a phase, Aunt Rosie, she’ll get over it.”

  Chuck flew back to Los Angeles the next morning. I joined him the day before the June 5 election. We watched the returns anxiously as they appeared on the big blackboards in the hotel ballroom. A lot of people in California also seemed to think that McCarthy had a right to the nomination and that Kennedy was an opportunist.

  Finally, late in the evening, it became clear that Bobby had won 55 percent to 45 percent. We all cheered enthusiastically. Camelot was still moving forward.

  “I bet TV people are already calling it a squeaker,” Chuck whispered to me.

  The Senator, looking drained, made a weary victory speech in which he thanked everyone and promised that we would go on to the convention in Chicago and then to Washington in January.

  The crowd—young, dedicated, and enthusiastic—went wild. For us Catholic liberals of the Camelot generation it was our last hurrah.

  “We’re supposed to join the family in their suite for a smaller celebration,” Chuck took my arm. “The happy expressions on their faces should make great shots … We’re going out through the kitchen.”

  The Secret Service checked our passes and waved us into the kitchen. Other Secret Service people and the Senator’s own guards were rushing him rapidly toward the door.

  Then the shots rang out, like explosions from a Fourth of July cap pistol. Screams of rage and horror. I knew what happened without being told. I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. It had all been too wonderful to be true. We had enjoyed a few shimmering months of hope. It was all over now. Nixon would be elected and the war would go on. The screams of horror, the smell of the kitchen, the shouts of the Secret Service and the press were all pouring out of the mouth of hell. Dante Alighieri where are you when I really need you? I could feel
the flames, hear the shrieks of the damned, sense their despair.

  “Rosemarie.”

  I opened my eyes. My husband’s face was ashen. A rosary wrapped around his hand. Astonishingly, I was clutching my rosary.

  “Chuck … Did you get some pictures?”

  “Yeah, enough. The killer is some skinny little kid with dark skin … Let’s get out of here.”

  “I want to go home,” I agreed.

  So we went home, too numb even to grieve. We went to the funeral of course. The new English liturgy was so much better than the Latin liturgy at JFK’s funeral. We didn’t go to the burial. Days later we could not talk about it or indeed about anything else. The kids respected our grief with astonishing sensitivity.

  In July the Pope issued the long-feared birth control encyclical, locking the barn door as Peg had said, long after the stallion and the mare had run off. I wouldn’t even read the damn thing.

  We were at the Lake, trying to recover from the tragedies of 1968 without much success. I felt terribly old. Facing forty on September 17, Chuck could not work up enough energy for either tennis or golf. I had to go water-skiing with the kids.

  “Well,” Chuck said, “at least he cut the line about infallible authority.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference. People would ignore him. Married laypeople might be infallible about sex but no celibate pope is.”

  “He mentions all our reasons for change.”

  “And says by way of reply?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He dismisses them?” I felt my temper rising. “How can he do that?”

  “He appeals to the authority of the Church.”

  “Does he think that will work?”

  “Apparently … He has some stuff about the importance of the personal relationship in marriage and how artificial contraception interferes with it.”

  “How does he know?” I screamed.

  “Hey, don’t blame me. Am I the Pope?”

  “You’re a man!”

  “The very kind of person from whose unbridled lusts the Pope is trying to protect women?”