Younger Than Springtime

by Andrew M. Greeley

  They also said, however, that the man tried to go as far as he could and the woman tried to draw the line as quickly as she could.

  But what if the girl wants to be kissed?

  Then, stupid, you kiss her.

  How do you kiss her? This was not Rosemarie at Lake Geneva or Trudi in Bamberg. This was a relationship that was altogether different.

  Well, I suppose you just kiss her and see how she reacts.

  We stopped under a leafless tree, the cold March wind cutting into our faces. I held her hand firmly with one hand and traced the contours of her face with the other. She caught her breath and sagged a little.

  I kissed her eyes and the tip of her nose, and her chin, and either cheek, and then, very delicately, her lips. They were soft and waiting for me. She leaned against me.

  Then my hormones took over and my delicate kiss became violent. Her response was equally violent. I locked my arms around her and held her as if I would never let her go. She clung to me fiercely.

  Still imprisoning her with one arm, I fumbled inside her coat and found a firm mound of breast rising to my hand. There were a lot of layers of protection—dress, slip, heavily armored bra; but there was also warmth and promise. I gripped the breast firmly and moved it back and forth, oh so carefully. She sighed contentedly and did not attempt to either escape or restrain me. I returned to my assault on her lips, this time with what I thought was devouring fury.

  We disengaged by implicit mutual consent.

  “Oh, my,” she gasped.

  “I’m sorry if I hurt you,” I said, ashamed of the outbreak of the animal in me.

  “You didn’t hurt me, Charles. That was very nice…very nice indeed.”

  “To tell the truth, I thought so too.”

  “You’re so sweet.”

  “And you beat chocolate malts.”

  We both laughed, relaxing because we had successfully cleared one of the obstacles that we knew we must face.

  “You…you must have had a lot of experience with women, Charles.”

  “No, not really.”

  “Sure?”

  “Honest.”

  “You’re not like any boy I’ve ever known.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Very good indeed. Other boys want to violate me; you want…” She searched for the explanatory word to categorize what had happened between us. “You cherish me.”

  The world melted me.

  “No other way to treat you…” The words stumbled on my tongue as they rushed out.

  “I think I’d better go in now. Thanks for…for a memorable evening.”

  She rushed for the door of the residence hall and then turned and whispered on the wind, “See you tomorrow.”

  I drifted back down the tree-lined drive toward the highway that separated the two schools in a blissful haze. For the first real date I ever had, I had not done badly at all. I told myself that I might very well love her and that there was a remote possibility that she loved me.

  My firm resolutions about waiting till I was twenty-five at least were gone and forgotten.

  So serenely satisfied was I with myself and life and the cosmos that I did not see the truck that almost ran me down on the highway.

  When I was safe on the other side, I reflected that if the truck had killed me and if I believed the retreat masters at Fenwick and here at Notre Dame, I would have gone straight to hell. I had committed one, maybe many serious mortal sins.

  I was not troubled by that thought either. When I had made my peace with God and church in Rome the Christmas before last, I had decided that “necking and petting” were not truly serious sins. They were, I had determined, too natural to the human condition to offend God all that much.

  I asked my priest recently if young people confessed “necking and petting” anymore. He rolled his nearsighted blue eyes behind his thick glasses and sighed. “They do not know that such words convey any meaning at all.”

  Our generation knew them well enough and confessed them often enough, but concluded for the most part that they were no worse than, let us say, a hockey penalty that took you off the ice for a minute or two.

  God, we felt instinctively, really did not mind, not as much as did our retreat masters.

  “Couldn’t one argue,” Christopher asked rhetorically, “that such actions are merely part of preparing remotely and then proximately for marital union? Does anyone seriously believe that a couple can jump from a quick peck on the lips to marital surrender overnight?”

  “My hall rector does.”

  “Do you think he ever dated?”

  “Impossible.”

  A lot of other priests and nuns, however, with or without dating experience, continued to warn us that we would go straight to hell.

  “How often did Jesus denounce necking and petting?” Christopher continued.

  “Not at all, I bet.”

  “Did you ever wonder how it became one of the most serious of sins?”

  To show my hall rector, I went to Communion the next morning and thanked Whoever might be involved for Cordelia.

  10

  Charles Cronin O’Malley in a white summer dinner jacket? At a rectory in Lake Forest?

  Someone surely must be joking.

  To make the joke on the future respected accountant even more serious, the dinner jacket fit him perfectly. Yet, his wire-brush hair, barely slicked into place, suggested that he belonged in a bar at Madison and Cicero on the west side and not in the aforementioned rectory in Lake Forest.

  It fit perfectly because his parents, convinced imprudently that the Great Depression was over, had insisted on purchasing for him a hastily and specially made white dinner jacket—without any prudent regard for cost.

  “We can’t have Denny Lennon”—my father was enjoying the purchase of the jacket entirely too much—“saying that an O’Malley looked impoverished.”

  “Especially since we’re not improverished anymore, dear,” Mom added.

  “I think he looks so cute,” Rosemarie clucked happily. “Don’t you, Peg?”

  My favorite sibling eyed me critically: “Unbelievably.”

  Rosemarie had been thrown out of Trinity the week before graduation because she had piled up her car and several others in the school’s parking lot the afternoon of the senior prom. No one in our family wanted to talk about it. Vince, fearful of Peg’s wrath, had whispered in my ear, “Drunk out of her mind.”

  Not only wouldn’t the nuns let her collect a diploma, they also had warned Manhattanville about her and her “background,” by which they meant Jim Clancy’s mob connection. Finally, despite warnings from my father’s lawyer, they had refused to forward her grades to other colleges. Somehow, she managed to get into the University of Chicago by passing an entrance exam.

  “Moscow Tech,” I had sniffed, though I knew full well that the university’s reputation as a Communist hotbed among the Chicago Irish was untrue, and indeed the opposite of the truth even in those days.

  “If the nuns didn’t drive her out of the church,” Peg had said bitterly, “the University of Chicago won’t either.”

  I had not said that I thought the problem was her bastard father and not the nuns.

  I should like to be able to contend that Charles C. O’Malley felt completely out of place in the Lake Forest environment, Muggins inside the dance instead of standing outside, nose pressed against the windowpane.

  That wouldn’t be accurate either. I felt perfectly at home as soon as I realized that most of the show was phony; when it came to playing phony games I was as good as the next man and probably better than most.

  My love, dressed in modest, long-sleeved black, as Monsignor Redmond insisted in imitation of the requirements for women’s dress at papal functions, was playing for us before dinner on a Pleyel piano, bought, as the monsignor assured us, with his own hands in Paris before the war.

  (Can’t risk the pope getting dirty thoughts from a hint of bosom or elbow, can we?)
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  The piano was all right, though nothing special. My love, whose admirable breasts could not be totally obscured even by a papal nobility gown, was not only all right but quite special.

  Alas, her version of the Moonlight sonata (the monsignor’s favorite, I was assured) was, God forgive me for it then and now, dreadfully dull. As always, she played with authority and mastery, both utterly innocent of fire.

  The poor dear woman (as the good April would have called her in the circumstances) did not lack fire, of that I was now certain. But her demons were not permitted to intervene in her playing and probably never would be, a sad but hardly tragic fact.

  However, the monsignor, his pathetic curates, Dennis and Marie Lennon, Alfred Lennon S. J., her brother, and two other Lake Forest couples present for the event not only pretended that they were listening to a womanly Ignaz Jan Paderewski, which would have been acceptable, but the reverential expressions on their faces testified that they actually believed it.

  Only the aged English Jesuit, whose first name was Martin and whose last name I learned only much later, and I knew better. He caught my eye once, shrewdly read my face, and then turned away with a ghost of a smile.

  You and I, Charles, he was saying, we are the only ones here who are not taken in by it, the only ones with real class.

  The old Jesuit was the guest of honor, a thin, haggard man with long, stringy gray hair, bad teeth, and the face of a concentration-camp survivor. He was an Oxford don in a clerical horse collar several sizes too large and a baggy suit that had been neither cleaned nor pressed since the end of the First World War.

  He was the close friend and guest of Msgr. David Redmond, the pope of Lake Forest, as Monsignor Branigan had described him with considerable lack of respect. I was told by the Lennons that the visitor was one of the world’s great Catholic thinkers, a man of towering intellect and insight, a visitor who shed blinding luster on the United States and Lake Forest and those lucky enough to dine with him.

  When I finally met the man in the “study”—two stories high with Gothic arches and stained-glass windows—of the rectory, I thought he was a caricature, a corpse fresh from the embalming room, snatched out of his casket, a bad practical joke played by a cruel humorist.

  Then I saw the light in his soft brown eyes and knew that I was in the presence of genius. I mentally kicked myself for riding up on the Northwestern without my camera.

  It was true, as Monsignor Mugsy had insisted despite my skepticism, that the Lake Forest pastor did make his curates wear dinner jackets at his “formal dinners”—two young South Side Micks fresh out of the seminary looking as uncomfortable as I was supposed to feel. The monsignor himself wore the full robes of his office—“papal valet” Dad had said with a laugh—red cape reaching to the floor, red cummerbund, red piping in every possible place on his cassock, red socks under shoes with silver buckles, and huge red cassock buttons.

  “He studied in Rome,” Monsignor Mugsy had observed, sipping a large glass of bourbon with Mom and Dad after a mid-May golf match, “and thinks he ought to have been a bishop. A little too ambitious for his own good, I’m afraid.”

  The church, I have since learned, honors ambition mightily, save when it is not denied and becomes too patent. The presence or absence of talent is immaterial.

  As a Jesuit, Alf Lennon was permitted his plain black cassock. I presumed that the elderly visitor from England had been granted some kind of special dispensation for his baggy suit. Or maybe it too was an ornament to Msgr. David Redmond’s elegance.

  The pastor’s suite—it included the “study,” a dining room, a “master bedroom” (his term), two guest bedrooms, and a “solarium”—had been put together by a designer whose instructions must been, “buy the best, the absolute best.”

  It didn’t work. While the size of the study would have been fit for a cardinal (and a rich one at that), the leather-bound books on the shelves that lined the walls were too perfect ever to have been read, the polished oak furniture too bright ever to have been occupied by more than a few people, the thick red carpet too smooth to have been violated by dirty human shoes, the vast desk too neat to have been the site of work.

  The Waterford crystal in the adjoining dining room, illuminated already by candlelight, was blinding but excessive by a factor of three or four, and I’m sure that the silver service would have been judged by eyes more practiced than mine to be faintly vulgar.

  Dave Redmond, as my father had noted, was “the son of a hod carrier from Bridgeport who didn’t have a pot to piss in. You can take the Irishman out of the shanty, but you can’t take the shanty out of the Irishman.”

  For once, the good April, having heard Monsignor’s horror stories about Lake Forest, did not protest. Not even at the vulgarity.

  Monsignor Redmond had been a seminarian in Rome before the First World War so that made him about sixty. He looked like an overweight and retired British army colonel from India, a balding man who had eaten too much beef, drunk too much port, and played too much polo.

  He spoke in the slow, ponderous voice of someone who had seen everything, done everything, and knew everything.

  Striving to be both discreet and enthusiastic, we all applauded when Cordelia, flushed and pleased with herself, finished embalming Beethoven.

  Would a husband, I wondered, have to tell her that hard work and training were no substitute for talent or for the demons or perhaps the ability to release demons?

  Insecure about her lovely body and secure about her dull playing—poor Cordelia.

  She was so lovely and so flattered by the congratulations she was receiving that it was hard to feel too sorry for her.

  I kissed her hand and she blushed joyfully. “Elegant as always, Charles!”

  Alf Lennon cornered the aged Jesuit over champagne (served in Waterford by a manservant who might have been bought with the monsignor’s own hands in Paris too) and began a discussion about his own dissertation, on mid-Renaissance English poets, I had been told.

  I joined them and tried to look like I understood what they were talking about. In fact there was very little conversation. Alf—“Rev. Mr. Alf” to the host—did most of the talking while his Jesuit confrere appeared to be asleep standing up. I sipped the champagne, which was so tasty as to be more than venially sinful. (I had dispensed myself from my drinking vows for the night.) I resolved that I would have no more than a few sips of all the drinks pressed upon me. I did not want to disgrace either my father or my black-clad love.

  “You come from a musical background, young fellow?” the Englishman said during one of the few pauses for breath in Rev. Mr. Alf’s lecture.

  It required a second or two to realize he was talking to me. No one else had bothered to notice the cute little redhead in the well-cut dinner jacket.

  “Fiddlers and horn-blowers, Father. I failed at the flute and try to sing with them sometimes.”

  He smiled, a generous smile despite his terrible teeth. “I thought so. I noted your rapt expression when you were listening to the young lady playing Beethoven.”

  “Watching her, Father.”

  “Quite.” He nodded.

  Father Alf impatiently resumed his thesis defense.

  I decided that the older Jeb was a good guy even if he was an Englishman.

  Father Alf, lean, balding, intense, was a bit of a bore. No, that’s not fair to the man. He was an enormous bore, but hard to dislike. I felt sure that when he was finished with his work he would know more on the subject than anyone in the world.

  It was impossible to dislike any of the Lennons. They were gentle folk who treated me without the slightest hint of the condescension that I had expected, almost hoped for. I also understood—or thought I understood—a lot more about my spring nymph.

  Her father must have been almost fifty years older than her, her mother perhaps forty-five years older. Theirs had been a late marriage and Alfred their first and presumably only offspring until the unexpected arrival of Corde
lia.

  Her parents were tall, distinguished-looking people, with white hair and an atmosphere of gentle abstraction, as though they had been lost in grave and dignified thought for a couple of decades, mystics maybe or great philosophers, profoundly earnest and serious. They loved their bright little daughter with obvious pride—when they noticed her. They were easily gracious to the rather amusing little fellow that she had brought home for the weekend, though I suspect they wondered, if they thought about him at all, whether he might be a leftover from her eleventh birthday party. A year or two ago, wasn’t it?

  “You’re most welcome, Charles. It’s so nice to have young people in the house again.”

  “You must think of it for the duration of your visit as your home as much as our home.”

  Cordelia could have kept me there all summer and they would not have minded.

  Perhaps they would not have noticed.

  My Cordelia was not starved for love so much as she was starved for laughter. If she was grimly determined to do great things for God and Church and Art, the reason was that her parents had already done great things—her father as an architect, her mother as a painter—and she wanted to be like them.

  Interpreting Dad’s evaluation of Dennis Lennon and extending it to Maude Kane Lennon, I suspected that Cordelia might be too much like them already—too much seriousness and not enough flair.

  Well, I could make up for the latter without much problem. Right?

  At the dinner table, I was seated between Maude Lennon and one of the hapless young priests—“monks” had been brought in to hear confessions, the monsignor explained, so that the curates might attend. The word “monks,” spoken in his solemn, sententious baritone, suggested men seized from the basement of a monastery or perhaps from a remote cloister in northern Wisconsin.

  Neither of my dinner companions required any small talk from me, though the priest glanced at me curiously now and then as if he wondered what kind of odd fish I was.

  Indeed no conversation was required of any of us. Monsignor Redmond presided over the table like an interlocutor over a minstrel show.