September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

Several anxious and excited days later the three of us waited in the drab lounge of the Great Lakes Hospital, where families met with maimed young men. Maria Elena was already weeping. Indeed she had been weeping tears in which sadness and joy mingled in equal parts since I had called her that night. I was my usual, calm, self-possessed self that I always am under pressure. Chuck was grim-faced and angry, still seething at the mess the Army had made of Kevin’s story.

  “They did the same to you,” I had told him.

  “That was the Navy and I wasn’t really missing.”

  I was so happy that my son was still alive, I couldn’t be angry at anyone.

  “Will he still love me?” Maria Elena wondered. “After what he’s been through?”

  “Wanna bet?” I replied.

  She giggled.

  Then, after a long purgatory of waiting in which the medical profession seems to specialize, a nurse appeared helping a young man on crutches.

  “Kev,” I gasped.

  He looked awful—thin, worn, tired, as he hobbled toward us, in a medical gown and a dark blue robe. However, his cavalryman grin, appropriate now because he had been in the First Cavalry Division (which hadn’t seen horses in forty years), lit up the whole lounge.

  “Hi, Mom, Dad, who’s the mysterious woman you brought along?”

  The nurse arranged him on a chair.

  I motioned to Maria Elena that she had first claim on a kiss. She leaned over her lover and kissed him with sweet and gentle love to which he responded in kind. Now I was crying. There were even tears in the great photographer’s eyes.

  “Thank God you’re home,” I whispered as I kissed him.

  “You bet!” he said genially. “God really had to work on this one.”

  Chuck hugged him.

  “Well done, Lieutenant,” he said.

  “Carry on, Sergeant.” Kevin laughed.

  Our wounded son was in a better mood than we were.

  “What’s a foot?” he said. “I have another, don’t I? When they fix me up, I’ll be just fine. No basketball, but I can still shoot around and water-ski and maybe snow ski. I don’t think this gorgeous woman will mind my hobbling around a bit. I’m lucky to be alive.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” she said, kneeling on the floor next to him and pressing his hand to her lips.

  “Can you tell us what happened?” I asked.

  “Sure, I was dumb. Remember, Mom, how often you told me to look where I was going?”

  I didn’t remember saying that at all.

  “Well, this time I didn’t look but bumped up against a mine. Fortunately for me it was mostly a dud, so I’m still alive and all right.”

  “They reported that you were dead,” Chuck said, “and that they were sending your body home. We even had a memorial mass!”

  “A story to be told for the rest of my life! I hope the guys did a little New Orleans funeral music.”

  “They did indeed; it was all very sad.”

  “Did Sis show up for it?”

  “No, dear, but then she had no way of knowing …”

  “Well, she’ll be back eventually.”

  “And the DSC?” Chuck asked, still the military man, albeit a quirky and critical one.

  Kevin sobered up.

  “Well, there’s two versions of that. The first is that Captain O’Malley … yeah, Dad, they gave me a second bar, but Gramps still ranks me … took command of his augmented platoon when its commanding officer had been killed, repulsed a concentrated enemy attack, and then led his men through the jungle for two days to return to their base with no further casualties. Often he exposed himself to enemy fire to facilitate the orderly redeployment of his command.”

  “Sounds impressive,” Chuck nodded. “And the other version?”

  “I’m not sure how much of that the Army knows or wants to know. They gave me the medal, I think, in hopes I wouldn’t tell the whole story. There’s no point in doing that now anyway.”

  “Army foul-up?”

  “Incredible! Our platoons are understrength in country because we’re withdrawing now pretty quickly. Some of them are down to fifteen, twenty men. They combine them so they have enough guys to send out on combat patrols.”

  “Why dear?” I asked. “Aren’t we about to leave?”

  “Because some of the commanders still want to make a name for themselves. All they know is combat patrols. Anyway, this group of ours is a mixed bag of misfits and malcontents and guys hoping and praying that they get home alive. No one wants to fight. No one wants to find Charlie. No one wants to be a hero—except the Captain who is in command of the enhanced platoon. He’s jerk, a psychopath who believes we have to fight the enemy till the bitter end. That’s taking a chance out there these days because it can get a guy fragged—blown up by a hand grenade throw by one of his own men.

  “Anyway, we’re picking our way through the jungle on this hot, steamy day, hoping that Charlie has enough sense not to be looking for any action. Well, we’re wrong. Suddenly there’s small-arms fire in front of us and on our right. Charlie isn’t shooting very well, so he doesn’t hit any of us. Then he stops, leaving the next move to us, since he can see us and we can’t see him. Our Captain gets the bright idea that we should attack. Charge them, drive them out into the open, and kill them.

  “He gives the order to charge. There are two really bad guys in the unit. Spent time in the stockade outside of Saigon. They’ve been looking for trouble ever since they joined our outfit.

  “‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ one of them yells.

  “‘Kill the officers and run,’ the other shouts as he throws a grenade at the Captain. He dissolves in the blast, poor guy.

  “The first guy aims his weapon at me. I shoot him with my M-1 before he can fire. Pure instinct and luck because I’m not much of a shot. The other guy fires a round over my head. A big, black Master Sergeant, from my own outfit, kills him before he gets a chance to fire a second round.

  “‘Thank you, Sarge,’ I say.

  “‘Don’t mention it, sir,’ he says. ‘Now get us the hell out of here.’

  “You see with my guys I have this reputation for being the best redeployment officer in the Army. That Kevin, they say, he’s a real wily snake when it comes to retreating. Runs away quicker and slicker than anyone else.”

  Chuck interrupts, “Not an unimportant skill, Captain.”

  “Probably inherited,” Kevin says with a big laugh. “So we redeployed, slipped out even though we were apparently surrounded. Charlie is shooting at each other after a while.”

  Phil Sheridan didn’t retreat in the Shenandoah, but that’s all right. Different war.

  “Apparently we foiled a major ambush on a whole regiment from our division, which was retreating behind us. Maybe Charlie didn’t know the war was over. The rest of the story is true. I stepped on the mine outside our base, one of our own probably.”

  He told the story with professional ease. I wondered if the images would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  “Bad place,” Chuck said.

  “Terrible. Worse than I expected. Worse than most people know. Damn stupid war, Dad, just like you said. A lot of good men killed over nothing.”

  “No regrets?” I asked.

  “You mean about going? No, I figured it was the thing to do. I made it home alive, which is more than a lot of them did. I’m glad it’s over.”

  No foolish claim that the war had made a man out of him.

  Suddenly I laughed. “Runs away quicker and slicker than anyone else!”

  We all laughed.

  “I figure,” Kev said, serious for a moment, “that maybe I saved a couple of hundred guys’ lives because I was so good at getting the hell out of messes. Maybe that’s why God wanted me over there.”

  Damned idealist.

  “What’s next, Captain?” Chuck asked.

  “School, Sarge, doctorate in musicology, I think. Teach, compose, perform. I’ll get money from the governme
nt for the rest of my life. I guess Mom has taken pretty good care of me too. Do a little jazz too, maybe duo if I can find a woman who will do Latin blues with me on the trumpet. You know, Billy and Pops sort of thing?”

  “I don’t know where you can find someone like that,” Maria Elena said with a laugh.

  “Dear God,” he sighed with relief. “Am I glad to be home.”

  He was home with us for the Christmas of 1972, the best we had in a long time. The band played again, complete with Grams on the piano and Mom backing up the Latin blues with wordless improvs. God forgive me for it, but I hardly thought about April Rosemary.

  “Wedding before 1973 is over,” Chuck said that night as we were getting ready for bed.

  “I sure hope so,” I agreed.

  Maria Elena confided in me that Kev was talking to a psychiatrist because of his terrible dreams.

  “He’ll be all right, Rosie, won’t he?”

  “Sure he will … I’m glad to hear he is talking to someone.”

  The major political event of the year was the beginning of the Watergate revelations. At first it seemed unlikely that the President knew about the Watergate break-in, a minor and foolish dirty trick. Then as the story grew, it began to look like he had bungled the minor event into a major crime.

  In a way I felt sorry for him. He was not quite the kind you’d expect to find in a Greek tragedy. He had given the enemies he so feared the tools they needed to destroy him. Yet he had opened the door to China, signed the Environmental Protection Act, founded the National Endowment for the Humanities, forced integration on primary schools, and in many other ways followed the liberal agenda. Like LBJ he let his tragic flaw destroy him.

  Chuck and I continued our rituals of mutual surrender. Our love prospered through the year. He was much more relaxed with me, so much so that I finally noticed how careful and cautious he had been through twenty-three years of marriage. What a nebbish I had been.

  I felt guilty at that until Maggie said, “So, Rosemarie, now you have another guilt?”

  I was improving at shooting down the guilt raiders as they flew by.

  “Big change between you and Chuck?” Peg said at our usual lunch.

  “Oh?”

  “Everyone notices it.”

  “Oh?”

  “There’s some debate as to who has changed.”

  “You should be able to answer that one.”

  “It wasn’t Chuck.”

  I sighed.

  “Poor dear man, he has the patience of a saint.”

  Then I broke all the rules and told her about dark chocolate love.

  She actually blushed, something that Peg rarely does, and rolled her eyes.

  “We’ll have to try it.”

  Several weeks later, she ended a phone conversation with the comment, “I like dark chocolate too.”

  A veteran of the Vinceremos Brigade, a band of young American radicals who went off to Cuba to help Castro harvest his sugar crop reported in an article in The Nation that one of her co-workers was April O‘Malley, the estranged daughter of famous photographer Charles X O’Malley (sic).

  No more details.

  We tried to check the story, but could find no confirmation.

  Then she had been seen back in Boston working in a photography lab at Boston University. However, the university had never heard of her.

  The last American combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam that year and the prisoners of war came home, eight years after the war began and five years after Chuck and the other senior advisors told LBJ that the war could not be won. It dragged on two more years with the ARVN doing the fighting until the NVA overwhelmed them. The United States made an undignified exit from the roof of its Embassy, leaving thousands of its employees and allies behind. We had not preserved our credibility.

  The return of the prisoners was not much help to Richard Nixon during the long death agony of his administration, which would drag on to the summer of 1974.

  Chuck commuted back and forth to Washington to take pictures at the committee hearings of Nixon’s people—Dean, Mitchell, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Colson, Hunt, the whole scurvy crowd. It was frightening that such a group of incompetents could flood the West Wing, though our Ivy League friends were hardly more effective once they lost their President.

  Chuck portrayed Nixon’s cohorts compassionately—men frightened despite their bravado, vulnerable, hunted. He called the series Cornered.

  “They’re people like us,” he said. “Way out of their depth, caught in a quagmire of their own making and struggling hopelessly to get out. They’re entitled to some compassion.”

  “Like all crooks,” I said, thinking of my father.

  “It was hard with John Mitchell,” he said of the Attorney General. “Not much to sympathize with there.”

  “Except the meal the media are making of his poor alcoholic wife.”

  We celebrated our twenty-third wedding anniversary at St. Francis of Assisi Church on Roosevelt Road at the first wedding of our family. With John Raven and Luis Ramirez presiding, Kevin Clancy O‘Malley and Maria Elena Lopez were joined in Holy Matrimony. Kevin’s two brothers and his suddenly gorgeous sister and Maria Elena’s brother and two sisters joined in the wedding party. Moire Meg was content for the day to be beautiful and left her “Craziest of the O’Malleys” persona at home. Thank God. Kevin walked down the aisle without a trace of a limp.

  A Mexican mariachi band played at the reception in an American Legion Hall. The jazz group, however, did a few numbers. Without the good April, for whom there was no piano, but with Kevin’s mother.

  “They are so young,” Maria Gloria, the bride’s mother, whispered in my ear.

  “I was the same age when I married Chuck.”

  “My dear,” she replied with an impish grin, “I thought you were much younger.”

  “Things were different then,” I said lamely.

  “I think I like these Mexican weddings better than our Irish weddings,” my husband informed me.

  “How so?”

  “No drunks.”

  “I remember a guy who was drunk before he left the wedding dinner.”

  “No statute of limitations?”

  “Course not!”

  The rehearsal dinner the night before at the Country Club went off smoothly enough, despite the hostile glares from some of the locals. The Lopez family either did not notice the glares or were too classy to pay any attention. A jerk made a nasty comment to Chuck as we were leaving after dinner. My husband would have slugged him if I had not dragged him away.

  Chuck’s prediction of a wedding before the year was out had been right only by a few days.

  The summer of 1974 was the best in a long time. Our children went back and forth from the city to the Lake, except for Moire Meg, who refused to go into the city no matter what pretext was offered.

  “Rosie,” she said to me, “this commuting stuff is totally gross.”

  She also denounced my propensity to arrive at the house and then promptly drive over to the mall to shop as “vulgar.”

  Somehow we survived the energy crisis created by the Arabs to punish us for the victory of Israel in the Yom Kippur War the year before and aggravated by American government policy.

  Chuck and I devoured books and argued about them. He denounced David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest about the Vietnam War because Halberstam never acknowledged that he and most of the journalistic establishment had at first supported it. I told him that the author’s analysis was no different from his own. He thought that Gravity’s Rainbow was unintelligible and refused to finish it. I argued that Thomas Pynchon was one of the great novelists of our time, which I really didn’t believe.

  We both hated Last Tango in Paris because it made sex dull and loved Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, because it brought back memories of our own youthful summers at the Lake.

  Maria Elena told me that she was pregnant, which was hardly a surprise.

&n
bsp; “If the child is a boy, we will call him Kevin, of course. If we have a girl, she will be Maria Rosa after her wonderful grandmother, who has been so good to me since the first day we met.”

  We hugged and cried together, of course.

  I remember the awkward but very lovely fourteen-year-old who sang in our parlor only a few years ago. She looked the same but somehow had transformed herself into a poised and sophisticated wife and expectant mother. Not for nothing was I the daughter of a trader; I knew a good future when I saw it.

  “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” I sobbed to Maria Elena.

  We both cried some more.

  The family watched the endgame of the administration—the pained face of Peter Rodino as he called the roll for the impeachment vote in the House Committee and the pall of sadness with which the votes were cast. No one was happy that night, except for the fanatic Nixon haters around the country. We saw the anguished conversation between Alexander Haig and Mike Wallace the night before Nixon resigned. We marveled at the veneer of bluster with which the President protected his disgrace in his final talk.

  The media were already screaming for an apology, as though it would make any difference.

  His final departure on a helicopter from the White House was bizarre. He turned toward those who were bidding him farewell from the door of the helicopter and waved as he had so often before in his hands-over-the-head gesture of triumph, dissociated as it always was from his artificial smile.

  As much as I disliked the man, I felt that it was an ignominious end to twenty-two years of life in the center court of American politics.

  The talking heads on the screen debated whether the “system” had worked.

  “We survived ’Nam and Watergate,” I said. “Of course it worked.”

  “We would not have had to survive either,” Chuck replied, “if it had not been for two assassins.”

  That was as good a summary of the last fourteen years of American life as any. Years, I reflected, that found me in my late twenties and left me in my early forties.

  That was the summer that jeans became fashionable, especially for women. Chuck alleged that he disapproved. It deprived women, he contended, of their femininity.

  I laughed at him.