Younger Than Springtime

by Andrew M. Greeley

  She laughed recklessly.

  Doctor and Mrs. Doctor decamped before the wedding cake was cut.

  Then the dancing began. I was forced to dance with all the women in my family, each one of whom complimented me, doubtless a new policy of using the carrot instead of the stick.

  “Well,” Rosemarie murmured as she held me close. “At least Janey won’t have to sleep in a cold bed tonight.”

  “Rosemarie!”

  “Well, that’s what a wedding ceremony is about, isn’t it even if we pretend differently.”

  “I’ll be glad when this whole business is over,” I said, trying to change the subject.

  “Only for a while, Chucky Ducky. Before you know it, Peg and Vince will be walking down the middle aisle. Then, who knows, maybe your foster sister will find a man.”

  Rosemarie’s wedding! How dare she!

  “Like this music says, I’ll dance at your wedding,” I said, realizing that I was caught in a spasm of jealousy.

  “You bet your life you will,” she said with a giggle.

  Had Rosemarie made up her mind that I would be her husband? If she had, would I be able to resist? Would I even want to resist?

  Did I want her to marry someone else?

  Before I could wrap my mind around that question, the orchestra stopped playing and took its break. Promptly the O’Malley trio began its spontaneous and unrehearsed performance. We sang songs from Sigmund Romberg and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Rosemarie and I did a duet of love songs from The Desert Song, which we played for laughs. Then Peg won sustained applause for her interpretation of Paganini. Finally Rosemarie sang a hilarious version of “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair,” which strongly hinted that I was the man who was going to be washed. I had no choice but to play along as her straight man. Thunderous ovation. Then the orchestra reappeared and she scurried back to the head table to accept kisses from the new Mrs. McCormack and warm handshakes from her husband.

  “Not part of the program, was it?” Dad said with a sly grin.

  “A lot of things aren’t part of the program, Dad,” Peg said with a saucy shake of her brown curls.

  “So I noticed. I don’t want to know what you guys said to Doctor…. Not till tomorrow anyway.”

  Then the day’s second major event happened. The orchestra was playing “I’ll Dance at Your Wedding.” Rosemarie had nudged me with a sharp elbow. Before I could ponder what role I might play at her wedding and whether I would be there at all, Monica Sullivan and James Rizzo, by accident it seemed, encountered one another on the dance floor.

  He opened his arms in an invitation. She collapsed into them.

  Jane glanced at me and smiled. We’d won.

  They stayed together for the next dance.

  Then, from somewhere offstage, Big Tom Sullivan appeared, tall, distinguished if a bit fat, silver-haired, his face red in fury. He pulled Jimmy away from his daughter and shoved him. Then he tried to drag Monica back to their table.

  As one person, Peg, Rosemarie, and I leaped from our chairs and ran toward the confrontation. Dad, Monsignor Mugsy, and Father Raven were running too.

  Jimmy, his face grim, his fists clenched, did nothing. Monica tore herself out of her father’s grip. Just then the enforcers arrived. Dad and the monsignor led Big Tom out of the room. It all happened so quickly that most of the guests didn’t notice. However, it was the talk of the parish on Sunday.

  Father Raven turned and saw the three of us.

  “Guess we didn’t need the Seventh Cavalry this time, huh?”

  “How dare that man try to ruin Janey’s wedding!” Peggy said through clenched teeth.

  “Well, he didn’t…. And, by the way, I’d hate to have the three of you avenging angels angry at me!”

  All in all, it was a good day. I dealt with Rosemarie’s suggestive hints by ignoring them.

  7

  Chicago was locked into snowbanks and deep freeze at the beginning of January. My welcome back to the snow-blanketed Notre Dame campus was appropriate for the season. My roommates had been expelled and I had been put on warning.

  “We found beer and whiskey in your room during the vacation,” the rector crowed triumphantly. “Whiskey!”

  “I don’t drink, Father.” My stomach turned just as it had at the farmhouse in the Bohemian Alps when we captured the so-called Werewolves and in Trudi’s apartment when I found their identity papers. “You know that. Everyone knows that.”

  “You’ve been given a second chance.” He shook his fist at me. “Against my advice and recommendation. One more offense and you will be summarily expelled.”

  His lips lingered lovingly on the word “summarily,” almost as though it were a woman’s breast.

  “Fine,” I said, pushing by him into my now mostly empty room. “Will I have any roommates this semester?”

  “We don’t intend to expose anyone to your bad example.”

  Privacy, peace, and quiet to study and to read. I felt sorry for my buddies, but they were probably better off. How long, I wondered, would I survive before I did something stupid and got caught?

  Doing what?

  Something worse than drinking. Maybe caught with a girl in my room.

  All I needed to do was to find the girl. And that was a most unlikely occurrence.

  That night I dreamed about Trudi, the first dream in a long time.

  I survived the next month mostly by reading books on the photographic masters—Steiglitz, Cannon, Adams, Weston—that I had found in the library and by returning to my camera (Leica) to archive the Notre Dame campus at winter. As I look at the shots today I realize with a shock that they are some of the most stark and barren pictures I have ever made. I daresay they revealed the inexplicable emptiness in my soul, a depression that echoed the ultimate barrenness of Notre Dame’s locker-room Catholicism.

  I look at the pictures and ask myself what that poor, troubled young man needed.

  The answer is readily given. He needed love.

  Since many of the men in my hall had pictures of their girl (or girls) pinned to their walls or propped up against their desk, I deceived myself into thinking I should have a similar picture too, if only to assert my masculinity in this crude, smelly locker room.

  After considering this possibility for a time and wondering where I would find an appropriate picture of a young woman, I had a brilliant idea.

  The picture of Rosemarie!

  Well, why not? Give them something to talk about!

  The print of Rosemarie, five by nine, brightened the room and occasioned a good deal of comment from other young men who drifted into my room, after the news of it got around, explicitly to see the picture.

  “Great tits!”

  “Breasts.”

  One or two, more acute than I would have expected, said, “It’s not dirty, it’s beautiful! It’s not a pinup at all.”

  “It’s pinned up. Well, actually tacked up.”

  “You’re really good at picture-taking, O’Malley.”

  Father Pius did not agree.

  After he had lunged out of my room, I picked up the pieces, pondered the wreckage, searched through my negative files, found the right one, and walked over to the photographic lab.

  This time I made a sixteen-by-twenty print, bought a frame for it at the bookstore, and placed it prominently on my desk. Father Pius would think twice about smashing a picture frame.

  He would not hesitate, however, to smash a life. Or to try to smash it.

  The snow continued. The cold persisted. The South Shore became unreliable. I went home only one weekend in that terrible January. I learned that Monica had moved into an apartment on Austin Boulevard with another young teacher from St. Ursula and that her father had hired private detectives to shadow her.

  “There’s a rumor,” Peg reported, “that Jimmy is going to Princeton Law School next year and that Monica will go with him.”

  “Presumably after a marriage ceremony.”

 
“Of course,” my sibling said haughtily.

  “Good.”

  “And they say that Timmy Boylan is much better.”

  “That’s good.”

  “So what’s the next project, Chucky Ducky?”

  “Surviving the winter in South Bend.”

  8

  “It is infinitely better, Charles,” Christopher Kurtz said, smiling amiably at me over his glass of Coke, “to marry than to burn.”

  “I don’t plan to go to hell.” I sipped more of my malt. “Not at the moment at any rate. Could I have another malt, please?”

  As the last two total abstainers in the University of Notre Dame (or so it seemed), Christopher and I usually had our serious talks in the Huddle, Notre Dame’s soda parlor.

  “Chocolate is your substitute for sex.” Christopher shook his head in feigned dismay. “It’s not fair that you don’t put on weight.”

  “A lot less harmful than sex.”

  “Not as interesting.” He adjusted his conservative brown tie, on which, by some miracle, no drop of Coke ever fell.

  “I didn’t say that it was.”

  “You’ll never hear it from your religion teacher, Charles, but what Saint Paul meant was not that it was better to marry than to go to hell but that it was better to marry than to burn with passion.”

  “Who’s burning with passion?”

  “You are. For Cordelia Lennon. You devour her with your eyes whenever you’re with her.”

  “She’s eminently devourable.” Suiting my words to action, I set to work on my second malt.

  “You don’t have to be so obvious about it.” He smoothed his long, perfectly groomed auburn hair.

  “So obvious that she notices it?” I paused in my assault on my surrogate for sex.

  “Of course she notices it, Charles.” Christopher pointed a lawyer’s accusing finger at me, his gray eyes sparkling with delight. “The young woman is neither blind nor stupid.”

  “I don’t want to embarrass her.”

  “She’s flattered, not embarrassed. My point is that no useful purpose is served for you or for her by silent adoration.”

  “I don’t want to become involved again, unless I’m ready to marry.”

  Christopher and I had become such close friends that I had told him about Trudi.

  “When someone burns as fervently and as obviously as you do, Charles, he is ready to marry.”

  “I’m not persuaded.”

  “Men our age marry when they decide it is time to go to bed with the same woman more or less permanently. They usually marry the woman who seems the best choice of those available at the time. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Cordelia?”

  “You could do a lot worse.”

  Indeed I could. I pondered Christopher’s wisdom. He was the only man my age, indeed the only man besides my father, from whose wisdom I thought I might learn.

  “When I’m in my middle twenties and ready to support a family.”

  “She won’t wait that long. I don’t think you can wait that long either.”

  Cordelia was as stable a young woman as I could imagine, a small, delicate, pretty blonde with a fragile face and an astonishingly voluptuous body. She didn’t drink either and might meet us in the Huddle before the afternoon was over.

  I had not told Christopher about Rosemarie, although he and everyone else were fascinated by the perhaps naked girl whose picture was prominently displayed on my desk.

  Was I aware that it was strange that I had told my first close male friend about my mistress in Germany but not about my foster sister?

  You bet.

  “I can’t see the point in a marriage when you are not ready to support your wife and children.”

  “What about all the guys at Vetville?” He nodded his head in the direction of the Quonset-hut village where the married students were permitted to continue their family life, despite the fact that they were students at the quasi-seminary that was Notre Dame in March of 1949.

  I’m sure the administration hoped that they were not engaging in too much sex with their wives. Or at least not enjoying it too much.

  “I don’t happen to approve,” I said primly.

  “The world has changed, Charles.” He clasped his hands behind his head and grinned like a young high school teacher with a slow but appealing student. “They have calculated nicely the costs and the payoffs and find the venture into marriage and family while still in school to be profitable. Do they seem unhappy?”

  “They are taking terrible risks with the future.”

  “Don’t we all when we breathe?”

  Whence came my conviction that marriage was inappropriate until financial responsibilities had been secured? My father had certainly endorsed such a position when we were growing up, but only casually and without overwhelming conviction.

  “Love, Chuck, does not conquer all. Write that down in one of your notebooks.”

  “Does it help?”

  “It sure does!” Dad had grinned like a very contented canary after consuming a delectable cat. “Without it you can’t conquer much of anything.”

  Surely mild advice on which to build a whole life program. My strategy was to minimize the amount of hardship over which love had to triumph. It seemed a not unreasonable approach.

  The problem was that hormones don’t always agree with head. My deep-brain subbasement devoted to delightfully lascivious images was jammed now with various elaborately detailed effigies of Cordelia Lennon in the advanced stages of both undress and sexual arousal. Such pictures had not crowded out phantasms of Rosemarie, but did compete with them vigorously.

  “You’re telling me that I should marry Cordelia because she’s attractive and available and I want to go to bed with a woman. That does not, Christopher, sound much like love.”

  “A girl in hand,” he said, waving his own hand negligently, “is worth two in the thicket.”

  It was characteristic of Christopher Killian Kurtz that he would say “thicket” to avoid the possible double entendre of “bush.” If ever in my life I met a gentleman, he was the one.

  In him I had found the friend that I could cite to Rosemarie as my equivalent to her Peg—if I ever introduced Rosemarie to Christopher, a possibility that didn’t seem likely.

  Christopher and I were an odd pair. Christopher was a German Republican from the North Side of Chicago, God help us all. The West Side and the South Side Irish might poke fun at one another. They agreed, however, that for all practical purposes there was no North Side. And German Republicans? What are they?

  In fact, as Christopher explained to me with twinkling eyes, the Germans were once the largest and most influential nationality group in Chicago (“Because, Charles, we were the best educated and most cultured”) and possessed a strong religious tradition of their own (“more intelligent and reasoned than your Irish enthusiasm”).

  I would later discover that the Chicago Germans, like all American Germans, were subject to suspicion and prejudice during the First World War even though they were as loyal as anyone else. It was a trial from which they never recovered, as a group, their full confidence.

  He was serious, intellectual, rational. I pretended to be a comic and a cutup and, while I had read a lot of serious stuff, I didn’t wear my intellectual interest on my sleeve as he did. He was always immaculately dressed, either in his Navy ROTC uniform or a suit, vest, tie, and brightly polished shoes. I was a slob, often unshaven, whose shoes were always scuffed and whose ordinary dress was a mixture of military castoffs and Maxwell Street second-hands. I joked with the professors who permitted questions. He worried about serious issues. He had an almost unlimited friendship network and I was something of a loner, save for my occasional companionship with Vince and Ed Murray and their football-team friends.

  I met Christopher in a class on Catholic fiction taught by a layman from whom Vince had told me I’d learn more about religion than I would in any of the religion classes. The first book to
be studied was a depressing effort called The Woman Who Was Poor by a man named Léon Bloy (I pronounced his name Lee-on Blow). It ended with a statement that I was to learn was very popular with a certain kind of intellectual or would-be intellectual Catholic in those days: “There is but one tragedy and that is for us not to be saints.”

  “What do you think of that, gentlemen?” demanded the teacher. His voice was slurred and I would later discover that he was drunk most of the time, a phenomenon that did not prevent him from being the best teacher I ever encountered.

  There was silence in the classroom. Snow was falling again outside, as it always falls in the South Bend snowbelt during winter.

  “How about you, Mr. Redhead? What’s your name?”

  “O’Malley, sir. Charles C. O’Malley.”

  “Well, Mr. Charles C. O’Malley, what do you think of the ending of the book?…You have read it, haven’t you?”

  “Terribly depressing book, sir, much more so than The Heart of the Matter.”

  Was I showing off? Me? Charles C. O’Malley?

  “An interesting literary judgment…but the last sentence?”

  “He’s wrong, sir.” I slipped into my usual half-fun, full-earnest mode in which I could defend with deadly seriousness a position I had initially espoused as a joke.

  “Wrong, Mr. O’Malley?” The teacher arched his eyebrows, delighted that there was at least one character in his class.

  “The only tragedy is not to be happy. I believe that God made us to be happy not to be saints.”

  The auburn-haired young man with the long nose in the brown business suit who was sitting next to me glanced up with a curious eye.

  “Are not saints the most happy people in the world?” he asked mildly.

  “That’s what the sisters told us in grammar school, but the faces on holy cards don’t look happy.”

  There was a titter in the room.

  The professor positively beamed. “Anyone want to comment?”

  The fop, as I thought of him, next to me said gently, “I’m not sure that we should judge saints by holy cards. If you’re really a saint, you must be happy.”