September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Call us when you get back.”

  “I will, Mom.”

  Dear God, I prayed, we’re wrestling for her soul and the match seems fixed against us.

  I knocked on the door to the darkroom.

  “Come in, Rosemarie,” my husband shouted.

  “Hey, look what I got,” he exulted.

  When his prints come up, Chucky is still the little boy with the Brownie, reveling in the magic he has worked. I love him specially at those times.

  Isolated from the televised crowds, even the Yippies looked forlorn and pathetic.

  “So sad,” I said with a sigh.

  “Aren’t they? This is the other side of what’s happening here now. Some of those poor kids are zonked out on drugs, others are just homesick … I must say you look fetching as usual in those rather skimpy exercise clothes.”

  “Missus says too much sweat is too much.”

  “I have a different perspective.”

  He rested his hand on my rear end. For a moment I relaxed in his admiration. Then I delivered my message.

  “April Rosemary wants to join the march on Bridgeport tonight.”

  “Figures … What did you tell her?”

  “I followed your strategy. I argued with her respectfully. She said she had to do something because boys her age were dying right now in Vietnam, which God knows is true. I told her to be careful and to call us when she got back to the hotel.”

  “I’d better go down there and take some shots.”

  “No,” I said firmly.

  “What?” He seemed surprised, not that I would prevent him from doing something stupid. Like most wives, I do that all the time. Rather he was surprised because I had given him a flat order.

  “You’re telling me,” he feigned bemusement, “that you didn’t forbid your daughter to march on Bridgeport, but you’re forbidding me to go down there and take a few shots?”

  “That’s right,” I said firmly.

  “Why the discrimination?”

  “Because I can’t control her and I can control you.”

  “Oh, that …”

  “I’m not about to risk the two of you down there tonight.”

  His fingers moved to tickle my belly, a gesture which he well knew would begin arousal in key regions of my body.

  “No, Chucky”—I backed away—“not now.”

  A few more such tickles and I would be putty for him to mold. He would ravish me on the darkroom couch as he had done many times before. Including the night I had conceived April Rosemary.

  Back on the bicycle, I told myself I was an idiot for missing the opportunity. Defy death.

  Later the boys tripped in from pickup basketball games at Skelton Park. The exciting news today was that Seano was really hustling for rebounds. They fell on chairs around the kitchen table and demanded ice cream

  They could have served it up themselves, but I loved them too much to tell them that. (I had, by the way, put a sweat suit on over my minimal exercise clothes.) Besides I wanted some myself.

  “What’s happening downtown?” Jimmy asked casually.

  “Nothing good. I’m afraid that there will be a confrontation between the hippies and the cops and some people will be killed.”

  “Why?” Kevin asked, a vast scoop of chocolate ice cream suspended at his mouth.

  “The hippies because they have to do something about the war and the cops because they resent these spoiled rich kids invading their city and throwing piles of shit at them.”

  “And this is supposed to end the war?”

  “Don’t expect me to disagree, Kev.”

  “What’s Sis doing?” Jimmy inquired. “Not throwing shit, is she? I can’t imagine that. She’d get her hands dirty that way.”

  Yucking male laughter around the table.

  “She’s marching in a candlelight procession to the Mayor’s house tonight.”

  “Why?” Jimmy frowned.

  “Because she has to do something,” Kevin replied.

  “Well”—Jimmy sighed—“Sis is Sis. She has to do what she has to do.”

  “Your father wanted to take pictures of the procession.”

  Instant outrage from the group.

  “I hope you told him he couldn’t.”

  “You did stop him, didn’t you?”

  “Dad’s crazy.”

  “He ought to act his age.”

  They shared amused tolerance for their sister and fury at their dad.

  “He’s not going to do it,” I said calmly.

  “Some one of these days his luck is going to run out.”

  Sisters are immortal. Dads are not.

  The talk turned to the jazz band they were organizing for the coming school year. It seemed that there was “this girl” who wanted to sing with them.

  Aha.

  “Is she any good?”

  The boys laughed.

  “You mean as a singer?” Kev said.

  “What else could I possibly mean?”

  More laughter.

  “Well, yeah,” he said, “she is very good. I don’t know where she learned how to sing the blues. Sometimes she sounds like Billie Holiday.”

  “That I doubt,” I said.

  “She’s also gorgeous,” Jimmy said, “which is what you want to know, Mom. Sophomore at Providence.”

  “Only fifteen?”

  “Well almost.”

  “Name?”

  “Maria Elena Cortez,” Jimmy said promptly.

  “Lopez,” Kevin corrected him.

  “Latina?”

  “Huh?”

  “Uh, Mexican?”

  “Yeah, probably,” Kevin said as though ethnicity didn’t matter when a young woman could sing like Billie Holiday. “You’ll like her, Mom.”

  “What makes you think her parents will let their lovely young daughter sing with you pack of Irish ruffians?”

  “Well …”

  “We kind of thought …”

  “Maybe you could talk to her parents …”

  “And tell her that we’re all right, you know …”

  “I will tell her that you’re a pack of hormone-filled adolescent males whose heads are constantly filled with dirty thoughts.”

  They thought that was hilariously funny.

  When they stopped laughing, Kevin said seriously, “She’s not that kind of a girl, Mom.”

  “What kind of girl is she?”

  “The kind guys like us,” Jimmy argued, “want to respect and protect.”

  “Not that she can’t take care of herself,” Seano added.

  “Kevin stares at her tits all the time,” Jimmy said with a sly wink at me.

  “Breasts,” I insisted.

  “All right!”

  “I do not,” said Kevin. “Besides there’s nothing wrong with that, is there Mom?”

  “Depends on how you do it.”

  “Adoringly?”

  I didn’t like that.

  “Too young.”

  “We won’t always be … Anyway we invited her up to Long Beach for a few days so we could practice. Her mother said absolutely not … Would you ever …”

  “I would not.”

  I would have to meet the young woman first.

  Music and youthful romance were a pleasant escape from the confrontations in downtown Chicago.

  The boys went out to find Gianni Antonelli. I went back to my exercises. I thought about young romance. I had been fourteen once and in love with a boy a couple years older than me. He was a jerk a lot of the time, not the mature, poised young man that my son was. He was always respectful, however. Still was.

  I stopped my work. I had stirred him up an hour ago and then backed out. Shame on me, shame, shame on me. I ought to have been delighted that after all these years he wanted me virtually on sight.

  Dr. Ward would have disapproved strongly of my behavior.

  That was a rationalization.

  I stopped the exercise machine and put on the pants of my swea
t suit. Give him a little more to contend with.

  I went back to the darkroom with the excuse that I had to tell him about this Maria Elena Lopez girl.

  I did. He shook his head.

  “Here we go again.”

  “I’ll check her out first,” I assured him.

  “I wouldn’t worry about Kevin.”

  “Just the same. The boys tell me she has gorgeous breasts.”

  “They said that to you?”

  “We’re buddies.”

  “I’d never have said that to April about you,” he muttered.

  “You didn’t have to … What are you working on there?”

  I leaned over the tray.

  “Cops!”

  “Chuck! They’re terrible!”

  “Yeah, they are … you’re not, however.”

  He tickled me again, this time seriously. I gasped for breath as my body chemistry went crazy.

  “Why did you change your mind?” he asked.

  “Because I love you so much.”

  A spasm of almost unbearable delight spread across his face. So easy to make him happy.

  The march on Bridgeport was peaceful. The local cops doubtless had been given strict orders on how to behave. My daughter was at the head of the march. She chatted amiably with the cops. Smart politician my girl. Some of the time, anyway.

  The spokesman, perhaps self-anointed, for the crowd was Michael Novak, a “Catholic philosopher” in beads and a beard with a high-pitched voice.

  “We let the Mayor and his community know,” he said pompously, “that the young people of America are demanding peace.”

  Later, beads and beard shed, he worked for Sarge Shriver in the disastrous 1972 campaign and then, sensing which way the political wind was blowing, became a conservative Republican defender of capitalism.

  A Catholic Sammy Glick, my husband had dubbed him.

  April Rosemary called long after midnight from the Hilton.

  “I didn’t want to wake you, Mom,” she said, “but I promised I would call. I’m at the Hilton and fine. I’m going to bed now. In a room with girls!”

  “I know that April Rosemary.”

  “I know you do, but I thought”—she giggled—“I’d say it for the record … Did you watch us on television?”

  “I saw you chatting with your good friends from the Chicago Police Department.”

  “Was that on television?” she said in horror. “Oh, Mom, I didn’t know that! I’m so sorry! Actually they were very nice men.”

  “We don’t have anything to worry about,” my husband assured me. “She’s one of us.”

  For a moment I thought he was right.

  The next day came to be known as the battle of Chicago. Or maybe the police riot of Chicago.

  22

  “They’ve gone crazy!” I shouted at Chuck as a group of cops in hard hats seized a young couple who had been strolling along Michigan Avenue, shoved them up against the window of a Conrad Hilton Café, beat them with clubs, and then shoved them through a plate-glass window. They were quite oblivious to my husband’s clicking power-drive Nikon.

  It was a thick, airless night, the kind on which you have to fight your way through curtains of humidity, the sort on which you want to fight or have sex. Both urges were playing on Michigan Avenue.

  Later I learned from one of the Red Cross people that the broken glass had cut an artery in the young woman’s leg. Some of the Red Cross volunteers were also beaten, including one who had served as a corpsman with the Marines in Korea.

  Cops were everywhere, smashing heads, cracking ribs, kicking people on the ground—old people, young people, passersby, protesters, anyone they could grab. Reporters, or anyone who looked like a reporter, were a specially favored target.

  Vince had provided Chuck and me with City of Chicago badges which protected us, though only just barely from the rampaging cops.

  Some idiot had ordered the cops to fire tear gas into the crowd across the street from the Hilton. This provided the TV cameras with wonderful shots of clouds of smoke and kids running away from the tear gas.

  There would be much debate afterward about who started the battle, the cops lined up in front of the Conrad Hilton or the howling kids across the street. Chuck and I thought that a group of kids had stormed across the street and thrown feces at the cops before the cops went berserk. The issue patently was irrelevant. The cops lost their cool on national television and gave the city of Chicago a bad name which perhaps it deserved.

  It was August 28, the presidential voting was taking place at the Amphitheater. The networks ingeniously would cut back and forth from tapes of the riot to the proceedings on the convention floor. Senator Ribicoff, playing to his Connecticut supporters watching TV, insulted the Mayor from the podium. Daley shouted something at him, faker, fucker, or kike depending on whom you believed. Vince, who was furious at the Mayor for letting the police get out of control, has always insisted that the Mayor would never use the last two words because they weren’t part of his vocabulary. I figured he was right. Even furiously angry, he was too smart a politician to lose his cool that completely. Not all the police rioted. Probably only a minority. It takes only a handful of angry cops to create a riot, especially on television. That’s no excuse. The police leadership lost control.

  The cops were tired, hungry, disgusted by the obscene taunts of the protesters, the sense that they were spoiled rich kids, and the filth which the kids threw at them. That’s no excuse either. It does help to understand what went wrong. Chuck’s pictures show a look of orgasmic satisfaction on the faces of some cops as they beat kids into the ground.

  The Chicago Police Department never let that happen again. However, the harm was done. The “Battle of Chicago” lasted no longer than forty-five minutes, maybe only a half hour. Yet magnified by the media it became a lasting icon of those years. When Hubert Humphrey was finally nominated early the next morning, the media people told those who were still listening that the nomination was not worth having because of the brutality of Mayor Daley’s police to peaceful protesters.

  The next night two hundred Illinois National Guardsmen lined up in front of the Conrad Hilton across the street from the jeering crowds, triumphant over their “victory” of the previous night. Whether the Guard was there to protect police from the protesters or the protesters from the police was not clear. They carried rifles with bayonets but without ammunition. Moreover, unlike the cops, they were the same age as the protesters. There was not much chance of them using their bayonets, especially as a Guardsman said to me, “we’ve never had any practice with these things.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Chuck muttered to me when things on Michigan Avenue had settled down.

  The whiff of tear gas had made me slightly sick.

  “I have enough nightmares of my own,” I replied. “I don’t need this one.”

  As we turned on to Wabash Avenue and walked toward the garage where our car was parked, the world became quiet again. A peaceful night a block away from Michigan Avenue with maybe some kind of festival in Grant Park. It was an eerie experience, like we had stepped into another planet. Suddenly the silence was violated by the piercing cry of a woman under assault. A girl rushed around the corner only a few yards ahead of us with a club-wielding cop right behind her. As we watched he caught up with and slashed at her shoulder with his club. She collapsed on the sidewalk, still screaming.

  Chuck pulled out his camera and began to fire away, as the cop hit her on the head. I charged in and waved my badge at him.

  “You’d better stop, Officer, if you want to keep your job.”

  “Who the fuck are you?” he demanded as he pondered whether to hit me. “Some fucking rich liberal bitch?”

  “Take a good look at my badge, Officer.”

  He swung his club back as though he were about to swat me. I braced for the blow. He hesitated, his face reveling in the possible joy of clubbing a rich bitch.

  Chuck stepped betwe
en us.

  “Do that, Officer, and you’re dead.”

  I had no idea how Chuck would kill him. However, he sounded so ominous, so dangerous that the cop walked away muttering curses.

  We helped the young woman to her feet. She smelled of marijuana. She was surely no older than April Rosemary.

  “Fucking pig,” she shouted after the cop.

  Then she turned on us, and sneered, “I don’t need help from fucking capitalists like you.”

  “You don’t have to curse at us,” I replied. “We’re not your parents.”

  It hit home. She gasped, then ran in the other direction.

  “You scared the shit out of that cop, Chucky,” I said.

  “That was the face and command presence of Staff Sergeant Charles C. Cronin, First Constabulary Regiment, Army of the United States, at your service, ma’am.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “He was fat and slow. My first move would have been to smash my camera into his genitals.”

  I had no doubt that he would have done just that.

  “Did you get any good shots?”

  “Fast film … I think got a good one of his face.”

  The next night we became part of the Battle of Chicago.

  The beginning of that night was splendid: Walter Cronkite took on the Mayor on the Evening news. The Mayor creamed him. Poor Walter believed his own lies—the Mayor was a throwback, a cheap party hack who couldn’t speak good English, an inarticulate and brutal goon given to hilarious malapropisms (such as “the police don’t cause disorder, they preserve disorder.”) It would be easy to make him look like an idiot. Instead Walter hardly got a word in edgewise as the Mayor rolled over him with waves of soft-spoken complaints about how Walter came into the Daley family home every night and how much his family and the people of Chicago respected him and how disappointed in him they were because he had misled his viewers about the great city of Chicago and how difficult it was to maintain order when outsiders were trying to tear the great city apart. The Mayor appeared as the man he really was, quick-witted, hurt by what the media were saying, doing his best to stay calm under enormous pressure, but normally in complete control of his temper.

  Around our supper table we whooped and hollered. Chicago had been taking it on the chin all week. Now we were giving some of it back.