Save her, as John Raven had suggested?
An overpoweringly sweet temptation. She seemed to be in desperate need of a savior.
Not me. I had played that game once.
It was still almost impossible not to drink in her loveliness. Surely none of my friends at the Dome had a girlfriend like my friend who was a girl.
So we became quiet friends. We exchanged jokes instead of barbs, literary opinions instead of insults.
And Peg, herself now an equally stunning beauty, beamed happily that her brother and her best friend were civil to each other and seemed even to enjoy each other’s company.
I learned only from Vince about Rosemarie’s escapades at Trinity—she was suspended twice for drinking exploits at school dances and would have been expelled if Monsignor Mugsy, at the goading of my parents, had not intervened to earn her “one last chance.”
I learned, as I say, I don’t remember how, that her mother had died in an accident two years ago: she had fallen down the basement steps of their house at Menard and Thomas.
A voice whispered inside my brain, “I bet that bastard pushed her.”
It’s a theory I treasured for a long time.
Then Sunday evening would come and my spirits dragging, my heart heavy, I would put on my Ike jacket (worn even at the coldest times of the year) for the ride on the El and the dirty orange South Shore back to Notre Dame to make the eleven-thirty curfew deadline.
I am, as should be evident to the readers of these pages by now, neither a hero nor a rebel. I have usually been able to make my peace with whatever system in which I found myself. I make friends easily with my equals and win over my superiors. At Notre Dame I found no difficulty in making new friends in my own class and renewing friendships with old friends.
A tall, blond kid in a football letter jacket stopped me one day during the first semester. “You’re Chuck O’Malley, aren’t you?”
I had a sudden impulse to run, an impulse that was very hard to resist. Working up the remnants of my courage, I accepted his outstretched hand. “I deny all knowledge of the subject.”
“You look even smaller without a football helmet. I’m Ed Murray.”
I knew that. All too well.
“I think I have to find a goal line real quick.”
“If you do, remind me to down the kickoff in the end zone.”
In our laughter that damp November afternoon a friendship was born that would last a lifetime. My only regret is that he now believes the myth about the game at Hansen Park instead of supporting my version of the story.
So Ed and Vince Antonelli and I became a threesome. Some of the time. I didn’t join them on their drinking parties and I didn’t date with them.
The Holy Cross priests did not respond to my charms the way Coach Angelo Smith had at Fenwick or General Radford Meade in Bamberg. Somehow, I was written off early as a bad influence.
I think the reason was my refusal to go to mass every morning. A refusal that was both uncharacteristic and ostentatious.
There was no rule requiring daily mass attendance, though there had been one in the past (when the school was almost indistinguishable from a seminary). However, the practice was strongly encouraged. In fact, you were required to get out of bed and sign a register by the chapel door to indicate that you were in the dorm at the beginning of the day. You could then go back to sleep if you wanted to; but, as the hall rector would say, you might as well hit the rail.
It was acceptable for you to receive Communion, available before mass as well as during the service, and then bounce back into bed—a violation, as we would learn in later years, of the symbolism of the Eucharist, but at Notre Dame in 1948 we didn’t know from symbolism.
The rector kept a careful record in his notebook of those who turned their back on Jesus. He must have run out of pages putting checks after my name.
Whence this stubbornness, this refusal to go along, that doomed my efforts to win friends in the Holy Cross community?
I don’t know, not even forty years after.
“You are a revolutionary, O’Malley,” the rector screeched at me in January of 1949, “a troublemaker.”
“No, Father,” I said respectfully. “I don’t make trouble at all. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t date. I keep my part of the room neat. I study hard and get good grades…”
“And you swagger back to your bed in the morning as if you are proud to turn your back on Jesus.”
“It’s not a rule, Father.”
“And you encourage others to stay away from morning mass.”
“I never say a word about it, Father.”
“It’s your bad example that does the devil’s work.”
“I don’t think so, Father.”
“We’re keeping an eye on you.”
“Yes, Father.”
Even today I have a hard time comprehending why I was so stubborn, especially since I often went to daily mass with Mom at St. Ursula when I was home from school.
Looking back, I’m sure there were many sensitive and progressive Holy Cross priests in those days, intelligent teachers. There were even some literate students. It was partly my fault that I didn’t find any of them. Moreover, the school was in a minor crisis, adjusting to the shift in enrollment back to unruly and callow adolescents from the mature and responsible vets, many of whom lived in the Quonset-hut married-student housing. The “vet years” were described as a golden age for many years. Even today there is a memorial plaque on the campus to the “vetville” Quonsets.
If I had brought a wife along with me, I would have lived in one of the Quonsets and could have risen from bed whenever I wished. Somehow a wife dispensed you from the control of the Holy Cross Order.
I suspect that it had something to do with control of one’s passions. The married vets had an approved “outlet” for their sexual desires and hence did not need the discipline of campus life. Whereas the unmarried vets needed to receive Communion every morning lest they succumb to temptation.
Was my confusion and dissatisfaction caused by sexual frustration? Would I have been better off if I had a relationship with a girl like Vince had with Peg—affection, including heavy necking and petting, combined with respect and hope for the future?
Sure I would, but I distrusted women, or more precisely I distrusted myself with women. Based on my experiences in Bamberg, I lost self-control almost instantly.
I had never known the carefully contained dance of ordinary dating with its limitations and rituals, the fine drawing of invisible lines that separated foreplay from the main event.
Nor had I known the reassurance that for the time being someone did care about you.
Yes, dating probably would have helped, but my belated crises about the meaning of my life probably would have persisted.
5
Life was not all bad despite my disenchantment with the Golden Dome. I reveled in Truman’s election victory, defeating Time and Life and the little man with the mustache who should have been standing on a wedding cake instead of running for the presidency. I had been predicting this victory since I arrived at the school, much to the annoyance of my Republican hall mates. My prediction was based no more on sound political analysis than when I had made my bet at the soda joint in Michigan City. However, as the campaign wore on, my instincts began to tell me that Thomas E. Dewey was a loser. I rubbed it in on Wednesday morning at Notre Dame, putting my physical well-being at some risk. The local conservatives seemed to think that the Devil had won a victory over God.
That weekend I collected my three malted milks and consumed them at one sitting in Pedersen’s Ice Cream Parlor at Chicago and Harlem. “Double whipped cream and don’t forget the butter cookies.” My friends also gave me a framed copy of the famous headline from the Tribune: “Dewey Defeats Truman!”
“You were brilliant, Chucky,” my sister informed me.
“Incredible!” Rosemarie agreed, her eyes glowing.
“Lucky,” V
ince sniffed.
He, as the Irish would say, had the right of it.
That evening I wandered over to the Magic Pub, searching for my softball friends from summertime. I had appeared there a couple of times on earlier weekends, only to find that they all had disappeared into the serious life of the post-Labor Day world. I had heard, however, from John Raven that Monica and Jimmy had broken up—thus for eternal bonds—and Timmy was drunk half the time and had stopped going to his shrink.
When Big Tom had ordered Monica to drop Jimmy or move out of the house, Jimmy, true romantic that he was, suggested some time off so that Monica could think about what she was doing before she moved out. Monica, a realist like most women, wanted no part of it. Take me now or never. Let’s give it time. It doesn’t need time.
So they parted, temporarily, Jimmy had said. Permanently, Monica had asserted.
“Idiots!” I had exploded to Father Raven. “They didn’t ask me!”
That was going a bit too far. Who the hell did I think I was?
“Oddly enough, they didn’t ask me either.”
The only familiar face in the Magic Pub was Timmy, sitting over in a corner by himself.
“I was wondering where you were, Charles C. I thought you might have become so enamored of the Dome that you spent all your time there.”
Enamored, huh? Literate guy, if a drunk. But so, I would learn as my life went on, were a lot of Irish drunks.
“Hardly,” I said as I sat next to him.
“Seen through it already, huh?”
“I liked the Army better.”
“You were in it at a relatively good time.”
“Can I tell you a story about Bamberg?”
“Sure, I got nothing else to do but listen.”
“What do you think of this picture?”
He took it in his big hands and pondered it carefully.
“Who’s the woman?” he asked slowly.
“The wife of a German Panzer officer who was in the Battle of Krusk. Big tank fight. Missing in action. She’s at the railroad station waiting for him.”
“Much chance of his coming back?”
He handed the picture back to me with a shudder.
“Hardly any. Good old Uncle Joe killed most of the prisoners off, one way or another.”
“Yet she’s at the station waiting for him?”
“Everyday.”
“What do you call the picture?”
“Fidelity.”
He took it from my hands and inspected it again.
“Good title…. Well, our deal is off. You’re going to be a photographer whether you want to or not.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Yeah, I suppose not…. Never came back, did he?”
“He did come back.”
“Really? Was she there?”
“Oddly enough, she wasn’t. She was working for us by then as a translator. There was an important meeting with this fellow Adenauer who is the new head of the German government. They needed her.”
“So who did meet him?”
“She sent me over to cover for her.”
Timmy Boylan laughed loudly, the second time he had done that.
“Who else? So you saluted him and called him ‘Captain, sir,’ and brought him back to your headquarters and a tearful reunion?”
That was too close for comfort.
“Something like that…. The point is that he was barely alive after those years in Uncle Joe’s prison camp. Still jaunty, but mostly dead. Since she worked for us, he was an American dependent of a sort. So we took him off to our base hospital and fixed him up.”
“Lucky guy…. I suppose they all lived happily ever after?”
“You know better than that, Timmy.”
“Even with a woman like this, he did an imitation of me?”
“Something like that.”
“And?”
“And one of our shrinks straightened him out.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I see what you’re getting at. No way. I got rid of my shrink a couple of weeks ago.”
“Our guy in Bamberg was a friend of mine. We both did a lot of work in the USO darkroom.”
“But you’re not a photographer, right?”
“Right…. Anyway, he’s out of the Army now and has just opened up an office here in Chicago. He was on the phone the other day to make sure I hadn’t been arrested for impersonating a veteran.”
I gave him Dr. Berman’s name, address, and phone number, written neatly, as is everything I write, on a three-by-five card.
Timmy looked at it, cocked his eye at me, and put it in his pocket.
“No promises, Charles C.”
“No promises.”
As I left the Magic Pub with my fingers crossed, on both hands, Timmy ordered another beer.
Was it not brilliant of me to link up Tim and Dr. Berman?
It was indeed. I’m proud of the idea. I would be even more proud if Rosemarie had not suggested it to me when I told her about Dr. Berman and Kurt.
That Sunday I went to the eleven o’clock mass at St. Ursula’s. Our old softball field was now a vast hole in the ground. The work had at last begun on the “new church” that Dad had designed for the parish (for free) back during the Depression. I prayed during mass that it be finished before the Depression returned. John Raven said the mass and preached about commitment and opportunity, though I don’t remember the exact words he said. This was standard stuff for John. It usually made a lot of people frown thoughtfully, as though it was something they knew they should hear but really didn’t want to hear.
Cynically I suspected that the scene in front of the church after mass rather than the sermons was what drew everyone from fifteen to thirty to church—or in our case to the gym that served as a church till Dad finished his new building. The vestibule, the steps, the sidewalk, even the street, became like the plaza in front of the cathedral in some European countries. It was a place to see and be seen, to find out what was happening, where everyone was going, what the latest gossip was. Adolescent girls huddled together, giggling and pretending not to notice anything or anyone else as they chattered. They did not, however, miss a thing. Their male counterparts stood listlessly as far away as possible exchanging animal noises. The sexes were more likely to mix among my generation than among the vets, especially the unmarried ones. Our local politicians wandered about shaking hands and celebrating Truman’s victory. The clergy, especially Msgr. Mugsy Branigan, the pastor, made sure that they said hello to everyone. Monsignor Mugsy celebrated not only Truman’s victory but, more important from his viewpoint, the triumph of the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame the day before.
“Your friend Vince is really good, Chuck,” he informed me.
“For an Italian,” I replied.
“You weren’t at the game?”
“I had to come home and settle some family disputes.”
The pastor knew me well enough to know that both of my comments were designed to pull his leg. He was a master of the art and had told my father once that I was the only one in the parish who could match him.
“How’s Rosie, Chucky?” John Raven asked me.
“She went to the nine o’clock mass with Peg.”
“I know that…”
He wandered away, as if he were disgusted with me.
“Chuck!”
Ah, someone was glad to see me—Monica Sullivan cautiously navigating the steps in high heels and a New Look coat. The New Look was Christian Dior’s return to femininity in the postwar world, rounded shoulders, a tucked-in waist, padded hips, and a long, pleated, flouncy skirt that fell to about ten inches from the floor. It was alleged that it was a revolution against the square, manlike, utilitarian fashions of the Depression and the war. It required many yards of fabric and determined cinching of the waist. The women in my family had signed on to it immediately.
“Thank goodness,” Mom said with a happy sigh, “we do
n’t have to pretend not to be women anymore.”
“I hadn’t noticed that pretense,” Dad said.
Then he quickly added, “The women in this family look beautiful no matter what they wear.”
“I like them in two-piece swimsuits.” I registered my opinion. “Maybe next summer they’ll wear those bikini things that the French are doing.”
There were loud protests that this would never happen.
“You look gorgeous, Monica,” I observed. “The New Look was designed for women like you.”
She blushed. “Thank you, Chuck. For a punk you are very thoughtful.”
Monica was indeed gorgeous, a well-tailored, nicely rounded little blond doll, fresh out of the pages of Harper’s Bazaar. It would take considerable effort, my lewd imagination suggested, to remove the various layers of expansive fabric and repressive lingerie, but it would certainly be worth the effort. Jimmy Rizzo was an idiot.
I almost said that.
Instead I said something almost as bad.
“I hear you dumped Captain Rizzo.”
“You heard correctly,” she said calmly, not fazed by my crude comment. That meant she wanted to talk about it.
Why to me?
Why do women trust me as a confidant?
I never could figure it out, but they do.
“Too bad,” I said.
She shrugged. “I was ready to move into an apartment,” she said, “to get away from my father. That would have torn our family apart. I wanted to do it because I love Jimmy…loved him. He wanted me to hold off for another year so I could be sure. He didn’t want me to have any regrets. What kind of a love is it that worries about regrets?”
“Maybe a very sensitive and caring love,” I said, having no idea where the words came from.
Younger Than Springtime Page 6