Praise for Andrew M. Greeley
“Greeley is his usual skillful self at handling words.”
—Arizona Daily Star on Younger than Springtime
“The immensely prolific Fr. Greeley brings back the crazy O’Malley family for a post-WWII romance about the perils of coming of age…. Greeley clearly likes to jump into a plot and row steadily, just to see what’s up for a whole batch of characters.”
—Kirkus Reviews on Younger than Springtime
“In this deft addition to his shelf of novels, Greeley once again shows his knack for combining solid characterizations, folksy prose, a bantamweight sense of history, and understated Catholic morality to make highly entertaining fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly on A Midwinter’s Tale
“A richly plotted, entertaining…tale.”
—Kirkus Reviews on A Midwinter’s Tale
“Sentimentality and nostalgia for bygone days underlie this coming-of-age story from Greeley…. Fans will love it.”
—Library Journal on A Midwinter’s Tale
“Fans of Greeley’s trademarked light touch will enjoy yet another tale of the trials and turmoils of Chicago’s own.”
—The Irish American Post on A Midwinter’s Tale
“A witty and delightful inside-out Faust with angelic choirs, a variety of loving, and an ending with a special twist. Greeley has fashioned a novel about learning to love and doing it well.”
—San Antonio Express News on Contract with an Angel
“Sit back and enjoy novel-writing Catholic priest Andrew M. Greeley’s little fantasy about a wealthy and powerful businessman who turns his life around—none too soon—after a visit from a Seraph.”
—Dallas Morning News on Contract with an Angel
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In memory of Kurt Keisling
Contents
Charles’s Love Story
Prelude
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
John’s Love Story
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Charles’s Love Story
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Note
Charles’s Love Story
1948–1949
Prelude
“O’Malley,” Father Pius, my hall rector, shouted at me, “that picture is evil. I forbid you to display it in this hall.”
“It’s not evil, Father,” I said firmly. “It’s no more evil than the picture of Eve in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.”
I was in no mood for another fight with Father Pius. I had other problems on my mind. I had been thinking about what was I to do to help my friends Rizzo and Boland.
Farley Hall, late February of 1949. Father Pius was staring at the print with a mixture of fascination and horror, his face twisted into caricature by perhaps an inch and a half of naked womanly breast.
Lovely, graceful womanly breast.
“You’re not a great artist!”
“She’s a beautiful woman, however, just as the model for Eve was.”
“She’s naked!”
“No she’s not,” I insisted. “Look, down here in the corner you can see a bit of her swimsuit!”
“Swimsuit!”
“I admit that it’s a two-piece ensemble, Father Pius, but it’s really quite modest. So is she.”
I was deliberately making trouble, as alas for me I had always done. Just as tacking her on the wall had been a deliberate exercise in baiting both Father Pius and everyone else in the hall.
However, Rosemarie was indeed really quite modest.
“Only whores wear two-piece swimsuits,” he bellowed, falling into the trap I had laid for him.
“My mother wears a two-piece swimsuit, Father.”
He tore the print from the wall. “I’ll not tolerate it in this hall.”
“That’s my property you’re destroying, Father.”
“Remember”—he spun on me—“that you’re on probation. One more violation and you’re out and I mean out.”
I was on probation because of the charge of drinking. But you don’t drink, you say?
Right. But at Notre Dame in those days you could be threatened with expulsion for drinking even if you didn’t drink.
“Be that as it may, Father, you have no right to destroy my property. I’ll protest to the president.”
He ripped the print into little pieces and threw them on the floor.
That picture of Rosemarie sealed my fate at Notre Dame. It also sent my life in a direction I had never intended, which I thought then I did not want, and which even now, all these years later, I don’t fully understand. It won me my first prize as a photographer and bound me to Rosemarie in an intimacy that I’ll never understand.
I have the picture in front of me today. It brings back a mix of bitter and sweet memories that I still cannot sort out. Pornographic it certainly is not. Next to the picture is the one I snapped when we were children at Lake Geneva. Same girl, a little younger, I tell myself—beautiful, mysterious, haunting. And haunted.
But I read that into the second picture. In fact, I consider the picture of Rosemarie now, a five-by-nine enlargement like that which had offended Father Pius. Completely different from the other shots I took that morning, it is framed just under the tops of her breasts, so that her bare shoulders, and wet black hair, could be that of a naked woman on the beach in early morning. She is no longer merely a pretty but ordinary girl. She is rather the Rosemarie of my imagination in those days, save in one important respect: while she is indeed mysterious and alluring, a fresh promise of abundant life, there is really no hint of doom in her wondrously erotic pose, as there had been in some of my earlier pictures of her. Rather, fresh from the water, excited by the touch of my fingers exhilarated by her swim and flattered by the camera’s eye, Rosemarie is happy. More than happy, she is indestructible. Vulnerable, yes. Fragile, yes. But also indestructible.
I whistle to myself “Younger Than Springtime,” which I also associate with the picture. She does look as young as early spring (in English poetry, not in Middle Western American reality).
1
That first summer after I came home
from Germany was one of the worst times in my life. At first, I could not find a summer job, not even at O’Hanlon and O’Halloran, the accounting firm that had promised me work next summer. I was no longer the sergeant who knew how to get things done at the HQ of the First Constabulary Regiment in Bamberg. Rather I was an unemployed veteran, uneasy about the prospect of college. I still felt guilt about my German lover who had introduced me to passion and then disappeared after I had saved her and her mother and sister from the fate of women “war criminals” turned over to the Russians. I also longed for the pleasures of our love. Or lust. Or whatever it was. She still haunted my dreams, sometimes confused with my mother and my sister Peg and Rosie, my kind of foster sister.
Moreover, I had wasted my time in Bamberg, a picture-postcard medieval city out near the Bohemian Alps, only forty kilometers from the Red Army. Bamberg had eaten up two precious years of my life. I had joined the army to earn the right to a college education under the GI Bill because I had assumed that after the war the Depression (now called the Great Depression) would return and that my parents would not be able to afford college tuition for me.
I had been spectacularly wrong. When I was discharged, honorably enough, in the spring of 1948, America was in the midst of early phases of the greatest economic boom in its history, one that, despite some fits and starts, has continued for almost a half century. My father’s architectural skills had made our family wealthy again. For him and my mother, the Depression was merely an unpleasant interlude that had ended. For me it had been the matrix of my life. I had been in a rush to finish my education and find a safe and secure job before the Depression would return. Now my parents could afford to send me to college (though I would not accept their money). I had wasted two precious years and committed more mortal sins than I could count.
And everyone said that I had grown up!
Even my priest, John Raven, who should have known me better, insisted that I had been a hero in Bamberg and that women adored me.
Dad had decided to build our house in Grand Beach. I thought that the idea was the worst familial folly yet. We couldn’t afford it, I was sure. And when the Depression came back?
“Oh, we can afford it all right, son,” he laughed. “No doubt about that, although I can’t give you the precise figures. That’s your mother’s department.”
Which was like saying that a drug addict was responsible for controlling the flow of drugs.
“And if the Depression comes back, well, all that can happen is that we’ll lose it. When you’ve been through that once, you don’t worry about it the second time.”
While the house was being built that summer, we rented a house across the street from the site to supervise construction and enjoy the beach. Dad had designed one of the first “modern” homes in that section of the Dunes, a redwood house that might have fit just as well in Marin County, with sweeping porches and vast windows letting in the sun and the wind. Many of our neighbors lived in homes that seemed to react to the beauties of summer on the lake by enclosing their inhabitants in cramped darkness.
I was quickly converted to the South End of Lake Michigan, one of the best vacation sites in all the world—though not so spectacular that I improved my swimming, that summer or subsequently.
Dad drove back and forth to Michigan City from the site of the new St. Ursula every day. Mom and Michael and the girls spent the whole summer there, looking brown and fit and happy.
Dear God, how much difference a little bit of money makes.
And yet how little real difference it made.
My children and nieces and nephews, who weren’t there, regard the late forties and the fifties as “Dullsville.” Ozzie and Harriet and tail fins, and “togetherness.” They cannot understand the excitement of those times because they weren’t there when tens of millions of American families climbed out of poverty for the first time and many millions more slowly became convinced that they would never see hard times again.
Before I got my job at the Board of Trade that summer, as I impatiently walked the beaches and the dunes, I believed the conventual wisdom still: there had to be another depression. All the cars and washing machines and dryers and dishwashers and cameras and new homes and television sets, whose screens were little bigger than the holes at peep shows, were a trick. The bottom would drop out soon. It had to. There was always a depression after a war. Everyone knew that.
A few people didn’t know that and they amassed vast wealth because they perceived that the pent-up demand of fifteen years of depression and war combined with the money saved during the war had changed economic history. I learned to be skeptical about what everyone knew to be true.
In 1948, however, I did not share the exuberant confidence of my contemporaries that a new era was dawning, an era when the good life would be available for almost everyone.
One late afternoon as I ambled down the beach, my Leica (a present from Trudi, my former Hitler Jugend lover) in my pocket, feeling very sorry for myself, I heard women laughing on the porch in front of our rented house, no doubt at me, at poor sad Chucky Ducky. I climbed the steps wearily.
That summer all the women in the family had taken to wearing two-piece swimsuits. I hasten to add that they were not the sort of garb you might see on Baywatch, indeed the amount of fabric involved might exceed that of the contemporary bikini (against which I personally have no objections) by a factor of ten. They were more like the structured, padded bras and corsets that women were required to wear under their clothes. However, underneath and out in the open were two different matters; and the extra couple of inches of womanly flesh now laid bare to sunshine and male eyes were, I thought, legitimate matters for attention.
“Here comes the sergeant,” warned my sister Peg (née Margaret Mary), “we’d better clean up our conversation.”
Peg was a sonatina in brown, hair curled around her face, snapping brown eyes, an elegant mobile face, dark skin with a string of small freckles across her nose, a tall, elegant Irish countess whose intense affection for me had sometimes kept me out of trouble and sometimes got me into worse trouble. I returned that affection in kind. Neither of us were prevented by our mutual affection from constant verbal conflict.
“He’s just out archiving the rubble,” Rosie Clancy observed. “So people will know what Grand Beach was like before the Irish moved in.”
“I don’t think we ought to ask him to join us in Michigan City tonight,” Peg replied. “We’d be accused of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”
Rosie—or Rosemarie as I now insisted on calling her—was only a foster sister. Three years younger than me and the same age as Peg, she had drifted down the street as a small child and adopted our family, because her father was a rich jerk and her mother a drunk—or so I saw it then. She and Peg had become inseparable allies, usually against me, except when someone was picking on me. I often thought that Peg was a cougar slinking through a forest while Rosie was a timber wolf charging at prey.
That wasn’t exactly fair because they were both lovely young women and not forest animals. Well, not exactly.
Rosemarie was an inch or two shorter than my sister and more slender. Her skin was buttermilk white, her hair midnight black, her eyes as blue as Lake Michigan on a whitecap day. She had been a pretty child. Now she was the most beautiful young woman I had ever seen.
“He does look like he’s fourteen,” my sister Jane added.
Jane, two years older than I, was a graduate of Rosary College and a teacher at our parish Catholic school. She wore a diamond ring garnered from Ted McCormack, a former Navy pilot who was now in medical school. More voluptuous than Peg and Rosie, she was also more exuberant and infinitely less complicated. Or so I thought then.
“Now, my dears,” my mother, April Mae Cronin O’Malley, reproved them gently. “Don’t pick on poor Chuck. He’s adjusting to civilian life.”
My mother, one of the great Dr. Panglossas of the modern world, could see the good side of eve
ryone, including her pint-sized son with the wire-brush red hair. She was also a stunning beauty in her very early forties and the only one of the four who was wearing a strapless two-piece swimsuit.
I finally realized when I had returned from Germany that she and my father—a once impoverished and now very successful architect—made love often. At first, that shocked me. Parents weren’t supposed to engage in such dirty behavior. On reflection I was delighted. How could anyone sleep in the same bedroom with such an elegant woman and not make love to her? I had not shared this insight with Peg or Rosie and probably wouldn’t.
“I am shocked,” I announced solemnly, as I sank into a vacant chaise and liberated a bottle of Coke from a cooler, “at the deterioration of the morals of American women in the postwar world. Prosperity and immorality, I have always said, go hand in hand.”
“What are you talking about?” Peg demanded, her nose wrinkling. “We’re not immoral!”
“He means our swimsuits.” Rosemarie’s pale skin flushed the attractive light pink that it acquired at the slightest hint of embarrassment.
The incest taboo—or whatever—forbade erotic fantasies about the other three women. However, foster sister or not, Rosemarie was an appropriate target for such desires, especially when she blushed.
“But darling,” my mother argued, “they wear these two-piece suits even at Miss America pageants.”
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