Younger Than Springtime

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Ah, we’re having a bathing beauty contest here at Grand Beach. Well.” I put my Coke aside and rose to my feet. “It’s easy to pick the winner.”

  I kissed my mother on the forehead.

  The younger women applauded—for the good April, not for me.

  “Chucky,” she said with notable lack of conviction, “you are simply impossible.”

  “No, just improbable,” Rosemarie commented. “He’s even worse than before he left for Germany…. A little cuter maybe, but worse.”

  Rosemarie and I had maintained the pose of bitter foes for much of our lives. I don’t think we fooled anyone, not even ourselves. However, we had begun a correspondence while I was away. I wrote her a note of sympathy for her mother’s death. The letters were remarkably gentle and affectionate. We had both sworn that we would abandon our conflict style when I came home and act like adult friends instead of quarreling siblings. We were now testing the limits of our new relationship.

  Rosemarie would be irresistibly appealing, I told myself often, if only she didn’t drink so much. I was also not quite sure I approved of the conspiracies of everyone in my family to match the two of us permanently. Everyone except my brother Michael, who was studying to be a priest and seemed to be unaware that there was such a thing as marriage.

  I ignored Rosemarie’s suggestion that I was cute.

  “For a moment I thought I had wandered into the foundation-garment section at Sears,” I observed.

  I almost said “Marshall-Field’s.” “Sears,” however, conveyed a slightly lower social class and hence was more effective as a troublemaking statement.

  “Chucky!” they all protested.

  “Mind you,” I continued blandly, “I wouldn’t mind wandering through the foundation-garment section of Sears. I think it would be great fun. But now one can find scandalously undressed women on a porch overlooking Lake Michigan.”

  General outraged laughter.

  “Chuck, darling,” my mother insisted, taking off her prescription sunglasses and glaring at me as she giggled. “You’re a prude!”

  “No, ma’am, good April Mae. My whole point is that I’m not a prude. I applaud, as any healthy male would, the decline of womanly virtue. I merely observe that you would never have dared to appear in public in the costumes your daughters affect when you were their age.”

  “If you think we’re so wonderful, Chucky,” Rosemarie said with an impish grin, “why don’t you take pictures of us instead of dead fish and driftwood on the beach?”

  Score one for the foster sister.

  “That would distract me from studying for my admission to Notre Dame,” I said lamely. “Which reminds me, I must beg back to my books.”

  They laughed again as I rose to enter the house.

  “Mind you,” I added, turning at the door, “my wondrous foster sister has suggested an attractive idea.”

  More laughter.

  Now I would have to take some pictures of them, especially of Rosemarie.

  At that time I was obsessed with the notion that I had wasted my time in Germany and that I had to make up for the years I had lost. I was twenty years old and I figured that I should at least enter Notre Dame as a second-semester sophomore. That would reduce my lost time to a semester.

  Early the next morning, I grabbed my Leica and started a sunrise patrol of the beach. My plans were to archive the debris washed up on the shore from the lake and left there by Friday-night parties.

  I walked all the way to New Buffalo and back. As I approached our construction site I saw a swimmer cleaving the quiet waters of the lake with a tough determined crawl. I paused to admire his stroke. I did not often wish I were athletic, but that particular morning with thunderheads already rising in the sky and curtains of humidity descending on the hot sands, I thought it would be refreshing to swim that well.

  The swimmer came ashore near where I was watching. He was a she, in an eye-catching black two-piece swimsuit. Still a long way from a bikini, it disclosed a good deal more of Rosemarie than the one she had worn yesterday.

  “Hi.” Rosemarie pulled off her swim cap. “What are you watching, watchman?”

  “Venus arising from the sea.”

  A blush suffused her face. I could cause that pretty easily, couldn’t I?

  “Silly! I have a lot more clothes on…do you think this suit is scandalous? I’m afraid that the good April does.”

  Scandal is in the eye of the beholder. My eye at that moment.

  “She’ll probably have one of her own before the summer is over.”

  We laughed together, the companionship ratified and restored instantly.

  My prediction was, needless to say, perfectly accurate.

  “Why don’t you take a picture of me with that cute little camera?” Rosemarie had noted immediately that I was not carrying her gift. “Is it German? And you never take pictures of me anymore. Why not?”

  “Afraid so much beauty would shatter the lens.”

  “Now you’re being really silly.” She walked toward me as I clicked away. “Do I make a good model?”

  “I think you know the answer to that question.”

  I look at the pictures today. Indeed she made a wonderful model—a very pretty young girl in a swimsuit from which the armor of the vast, heavy bras and extensive girdles had been removed. “Finished?” She smiled crookedly.

  “Almost…” I thought of a pose, banished it from my head, and then said, “Would you mind slipping the straps off your shoulders?”

  “Uhmm…glamour.” She complied instantly. “For your room at the Dome, I bet. To show off the wicked girl you know who will lose her faith and her soul at the University of Chicago. Lower? All right, but no lower than this, understand?”

  She was having the time of her life posing. My fingers were trembling uneasily as I fixed the telephoto attachment over the lens. In subsequent years I shot pictures of many unclad and underclad women. My fingers always tremble. You never get over some things.

  “Not quite right.” I walked over to her and pulled the top of her suit a little lower, exposing a hint of the tops of her breasts. She stood, quiet and passive, only the tightness in her jaw and her silence hinting that I was frightening her. I pulled the bra down a little bit more.

  “Chucky…” she exclaimed nervously.

  My fingers still trembling, I finished my arrangements with one more gentle tug.

  “Chuckie!”

  “Are you really afraid of me, Rosemarie?”

  “Well.” Her chin rested on her chest, her hands were clutched behind her back. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “I’m always a little afraid of you, but”—she grinned maliciously—“I don’t think you have the nerve to strip me right out here on the beach.”

  “No one around.”

  She glanced quickly up and down the beach.

  “Go ahead and try!”

  It would be delightful activity for any number of reasons. I lost my nerve, stepped away, and looked at my model through the viewfinder.

  “Not this time.”

  “Coward,” she sniffed.

  I began shooting as the morning mists drifted around her. Perfect. Better with the hint of bare breasts than the reality.

  I was dazzled by love for her at the moment I shot the best of the pictures.

  Since then I’ve come to understand that photography certainly and perhaps every form of art is sexual activity; the photographer wants to capture the reality whose image has enthralled him and to be captured by it. Moreover, there is no more lovely subject in the world than the human body, especially the body of a woman (even to another woman). Thus, a photo of a woman is necessarily an act of desire and love—a dangerous enterprise often and a delightful enterprise always.

  Whether a photograph is obscene or not is the result of the nature of the love that the photographer feels for the model when he snaps the shot. If he is using her, that is obvious in the picture. If he respects and admires her, th
at is obvious too. The difference between an erotic and an obscene picture, often small and always enormous, is simple to discover and hard to explain, especially to prudes. Like Father Pius.

  After a time you stop trying.

  (Let me note for the record that when Hugh Hefner, then a fellow Chicagoan, phoned me about working for Playboy in 1955, I turned him down flat. I don’t find the pictures in that journal particularly immoral, just unreal and dumb.)

  “Well”—she shrugged back into her straps—“I think I want a life-size copy to give to the good April for a Christmas present. Foster daughter as temptation. Do you think she’d like it?”

  “Yes, she’d like it. No, she wouldn’t think it was a temptation. And, yes, she’d want Dad to take a picture like that of her.”

  “Did he ever paint her in the nude?” She picked up a blue cotton robe from the beach. I helped her on with it, much to her surprise, and adjusted a strap that was not quite in place. My fingers trembled and she drew in her breath. I wanted desperately to kiss her shoulder, but naturally I did not.

  It was a shocking question that had never occurred to me before. “I’m sure I don’t know,” I said huffily.

  “I bet he did. I mean, if you’re a painter and you have a model like that…”

  “Did you have a good time last night?”

  “Changing the subject, eh? It was all right.”

  We walked down the beach together in companionable silence.

  “You really have changed, Chuck,” she said.

  “I deny it!”

  She ignored me.

  “You were always a sweet boy beneath that phony pose of yours. Now you’re the sweetest boy I’ve ever known.”

  My freckled face was undoubtedly flaming.

  “Thank you, Rosemarie,” I said awkwardly, striving for a more witty response and unable to find it.

  “Your camera was so reverent that for a moment I thought I was beautiful.”

  “You are beautiful, Rosemarie.”

  “No I’m not. But your camera, which means you, thinks I am. That’s wonderful.”

  “My camera has excellent taste in women,” I said.

  I did make a print for my mother and presented it to her, suitably framed, for Christmas.

  “Your foster daughter, Aunt April.” I handed it to her under the Christmas tree.

  She removed the wrapping paper with brisk curiosity. “A photo of Rosie, oh, how exciting.”

  Rosemarie rolled her eyes at me, saying in effect, you didn’t have the nerve, did you really?

  Filled with the Christmas spirit I winked at her.

  “Chucky, what a darling picture! It’s perfect. Rosie, you are so beautiful.”

  “Thank you, Aunt April.”

  “I told you she wouldn’t be shocked.”

  “Shocked, why should I be shocked, dear? It’s not obscene at all…look at the way you’ve caught the drops of water on her, er, breasts…it would take a lot more than this to shock me.”

  The rest of the family crowded around to admire my handiwork.

  “You made the frame too?” Jane exclaimed.

  “With my own little hands.”

  “It’s the best thing you’ve ever done, Chuck.” My father examined the print with a professional artist’s clinical eye. “At least the best thing we’ve seen yet.”

  “You could win a prize with it,” my mother continued to enthuse. “You should enter it into a contest.”

  A champagne toast was proposed and drunk to the picture, or as Mom said, “To the picture, the artist, and the model!”

  I drank it in Coca-Cola.

  “Especially to the model,” Peg shouted.

  “Especially to the photographer”—Rosemarie smiled at me—“who had the courage to tug the model’s swimsuit!”

  “To everyone!” the good April announced.

  “Rosemarie thinks you probably posed for Dad in the nude when you were younger.”

  Dad choked on his champagne. The rest of the gang paused in shocked silence.

  “Well, dear.” The good April was not in the least dismayed. “He would have been a pretty strange sort of painter, wouldn’t he, if he didn’t want to paint some pictures like that.”

  “I want to see them!” Peg screamed. “Today.”

  “Me too.” Jane and Rosemarie echoed the shout.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  My father was laughing now. “She’s delighted, Chuck.”

  “Well,” the good April mused, “I don’t know they’re all that special. But if you want…I’ll show them to the girls this afternoon. Chucky, you’ll have to wait till you’re married.”

  I really didn’t want to look at them at all. Ever.

  “I want it understood”—Mom raised a warning finger—“that I did not pose for those paintings, and they are rather good”—she colored—“because of the painter of course, until after we were married.”

  And then she added a line about which no one dared to ask an explanation. “Well, almost married.”

  After the private showing that afternoon, Rosemarie slipped up to me. “Don’t ask, Chucky Ducky, don’t ask.”

  “I wasn’t asking,” I said irritably.

  “They’re wonderful,” she said, “simply wonderful.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  The healthy attitude of my parents toward the human body, an attitude that had helped produce me, hardly belonged to the same religion as that of Father Pius, my rector in Farley Hall, or of the University of Notre Dame in that era. I never thought my parents’ religion would win. But it did. Kind of, anyway.

  2

  “Hey, kid,” Jimmy Rizzo shouted at me, “you want to get into the game?”

  I looked around behind me, hoping that there was some other person present who could answer to the name of “Kid.” Alas, there was not.

  “I don’t play softball,” I replied with as much dignity as I could.

  “Everyone plays softball,” Jimmy said with his warm and genial grin. “Take over in right field!”

  The St. Ursula team of the Catholic War Veterans was short one man because Tim Boylan was too drunk to walk up to the plate.

  “Yes, sir, Captain, sir,” I said respectfully.

  The vets laughed, Rizzo louder than the rest.

  Jimmy Rizzo was pure energy. About my height, maybe an inch taller (which wasn’t very tall), with dark skin, curly jet-black hair, a contagious smile that revealed perfect white teeth (of the sort no Irishman could claim), Jimmy was a charmer, a natural leader, an organizer, and a man with, as my father put it, a “great political future ahead of him if he doesn’t end up in jail.”

  The jail possibility arose because the Rizzos were “connected.” Though Jimmy’s father was a grocer with a small shop on Division Street, his mother’s brother Salvatore “Sal the Pal” Damico was a man of respect, which meant that it was very wise to treat him with respect. Sal the Pal felt that the “Outfit,” as we call it in Chicago, needed a new generation of young men who were “serious” and “respectful.” “Real war heroes,” Sal the Pal had argued in the higher councils of the Outfit, like his nephew Jimmy, should be invited into the organization.

  Especially since Jimmy had considerable experience killing people in battles from Guadalcanal to Iwo. Five years older than I was, he had enlisted in the Marines right after Pearl Harbor and won himself the Navy Cross a couple of times. A real war hero, he was. A professional killer for the Outfit? About that there was still some doubt, though the respectable Irish in St. Ursula thought that all Sicilians were criminals. Father John Raven, who always had a multiple agenda, had made Jimmy the organizer and president of the Catholic War Vets in part to keep him away from Sal the Pal and open up to him the possibility of more honorable and honest professions.

  Like politics.

  Well, moderately more honorable and honest.

  Anyway, would I argue with a war hero and a nephew of Sal the Pal? Camera in hand, I trotted
out into right field with a fervent prayer that the deity would protect me from pop flies.

  I had wandered back to St. Ursula because our new neighborhood one parish west was both too dull and too snobbish for my late-summer loneliness now that I had a job in the city. Naturally, I brought my Leica along to archive Catholic veterans at play. I saw no reason why my temporary duty as a right fielder should inhibit that mission. The Almighty protected me from pop flies that inning, as I recorded Chicago softball in the summer of 1948.

  One must note that the only true softball is sixteen-inch, slow-pitching softball like we play it in Chicago—called occasionally in our time “indoor” because it had originated in Knights of Columbus gyms.

  In those days before the Windy City League was born, we didn’t wear uniforms, just an old assortment of cast-off military fatigues and high school sweatshirts that no longer fit very well, either because our shoulders had become too broad or our bellies too large. I had no trouble wearing my Fenwick sweatshirts. They were still too loose.

  “What high school you go to, Red?” Jimmy demanded as he shook hands with me when I came in from right field.

  “Captain, sir,” I said, “you have just lost one vote when you’re up for reelection to be president of this outfit.”

  “Those fatigues really yours?…What’s your name?”

  “O’Malley, sir, Charles Cronin.”

  I almost rattled off my serial number. I thought better of it because most of these men were real vets, not phony vets like me.

  “Where were you?” he asked as our first batter, encumbered by a large and new beer belly, popped up.

  I was too young for someone Jimmy Rizzo’s age to know about my exploits at St. Ursula and Fenwick. That was just as well since most of my exploits were pure fiction.

  “Germany. Occupation. First Constabulary. State Police, kind of.”

  “Cushy duty?” he asked without the slightest hint of disrespect.

  “Corrupt duty.”

  “Yeah…Anyone ever fire a shot at you in anger—Hey, way to go, Micky!”

  Our next batter, a former B-17 tail gunner, had lined a single into left field.