Younger Than Springtime
Page 14
“Next time you see me, I might just have something on this finger.”
“High time.”
“That’s what I say too.”
“James will probably go to Princeton Law School in the fall. After he gets settled down there he will come back and we will be married.”
“Good news…Probably go to Princeton?”
“He has not turned down his uncle’s offer of managing a chain of restaurants. He could always get his law degree at night. It takes only another year.”
“You get along with his family?”
“Of course. They’re sweet, lovely people. Even Uncle Sal seems to like me.”
“You both should get out of town, Monica.”
“I know that.”
“So slam the door on that too.”
“Not quite yet.”
Before we could continue the discussion, our side had retired the St. Lucy guys, one, two, three. Jimmy and Tim joined us on the running board.
“Flirting with my girl, Sarge?” Jimmy asked.
“She’s much too old for me,” I said. “Besides, I don’t see any ring that proclaims that she’s anyone’s girl.”
The guys laughed, Monica blushed happily.
“I’m his girl all right, but I am much too mature for you, Chucky. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to have Rosemarie angry at me.”
More laughter. I had given up trying to persuade people that Rosemarie had not staked a claim on me. Or vice versa.
“Keep an eye on that finger for a while,” Jimmy said enthusiastically.
“I hope you get it wholesale. I know a good place where you can get it wholesale.”
I didn’t, but that’s what they expected me to say.
“Sorry to edge you out of right field, Charles C.,” Tim said with a wicked grin. “It’s your fault for sending me to that Jewish friend of yours.”
The neighborhood was celebrating the return of the old Tim Boylan. It was even said that he was dating, more or less, a nice young woman from St. Catherine’s, a certain Jenny Collins.
“No good deed goes unpunished.”
“What about Rosie Clancy?” Tim continued. “Are you dating her or are you not?”
“Rosemarie,” I said evenly, “is kind of like a foster sister in our family. It would be incestuous to date her.”
“She sure is pretty,” Jimmy protested.
“Have you noticed that too?”
“You’re up, James,” Monica informed him.
“Try to get on base for a change,” Tim warned him. “First base will do; I’ll drive you in…. You’ve noticed his hitting slump, Charles C.?”
“Slump?” I said in feigned disbelief. “Love should make people hit better, shouldn’t it?”
“Brat!” Monica slapped my arm very lightly.
“Who, me?”
“So you’re not really dating anyone?” Tim persisted.
“As a matter of fact, I am,” I said, knowing full well that the story would be all over the parish the next morning. “A girl from St. Mary’s named Cordelia Lennon.”
Dead silence.
Jim beat out a ground to get on first base. Tim went to bat.
“Can’t we get rid of those spies?” I asked Monica, mostly to deflect conversation about Cordelia. “Call the cops or something?”
“They are cops, Chuck, off-duty cops earning a few extra dollars. I’m very nice to them and that makes them ashamed. I don’t mind…. And tell me more about this Cordelia.”
“Not much to tell. She’s blond like you, though pale, almost ice blond. She’s a musician and her father is an architect. So we have a lot in common. She’s very intelligent and fun to be with.”
“What parish?”
“I don’t know. They live in Lake Forest.”
“Lake Forest? Isn’t that pretty rich?”
“I guess so.”
“And poor Rosie?”
“We’re friends. We’ve never dated.”
“Does she know about Cordelia?”
“Sure, everyone in the family knows.”
“How does she react?”
“She doesn’t seem to mind.”
That was true and not true. Rosemarie did not complain. Indeed, she admired my white dinner jacket and told me she hoped I had a good time. Our timber wolf was polite, correct, restrained. I would have felt better if she had screamed at me.
“Don’t you like her, Chuck?”
“Cordelia?”
“No, silly, Rosie.”
“She drinks too much, Monica. It scares me.”
“People can stop drinking.”
“She hasn’t.”
The guys came back. We were now nine runs ahead of St. Lucy. Before the inning was over we had stretched our lead to thirteen runs. Jimmy and Tim did a little act in which the latter begged him to let me play and the former reluctantly gave in.
I took my Leica out to right field with me.
The seraphs were watching over me again, because no fly ball came anywhere near me.
When the inning was over, I detoured to the red Ford.
“Good evening, gentlemen, would you smile for me, please?”
I leaned through the window of the car and snapped away.
The two off-duty cops no way wanted to smile.
“What the hell are you up to, punk?”
“I’m taking pictures of you for my records.”
“You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve.”
“The commissioner might be interested in these someday,” I said as I strolled away.
Why did I do that?
There’s a demon inside me that makes me do such crazy things. I figured it would be a good idea to have a record of the creepy cops who were working for Big Tom Sullivan.
I didn’t expect them to like it.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Jimmy demanded.
“Intelligence work, Captain, sir.”
“They’ll come after you.”
“Not twice.”
Whence such bravado?
I would ask Jimmy to drive me home immediately after the game. I would develop the pictures and put them in Dad’s safe. The cops could seize the film, but I’d warn them that I had the pictures and would use them if they didn’t leave me alone.
The next morning, prints in the safe, film in my pocket, I discovered my rejected Rosemarie in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee and looking under the weather.
“I didn’t know you were in the house,” I said.
“Lucky for me, huh?” She grinned wickedly. “I came home from the lake because I have to take some tests out at the University. I worried about it all last night and I didn’t sleep so well.”
That was her way of telling me that she did not have a hangover. Poor dear woman. She looked so lovely.
“Rosemarie, even after a bad night you look gorgeous in a robe and nightgown.”
She beamed.
“You are the sweetest boy in the world, Chuck.”
“I know.”
My wicked idea suddenly expanded.
I went to the front of the house. Sure enough, the red Ford. I loaded my Kodak, the one Rosemarie had given me when I went to Germany.
I returned to the kitchen. Rosemarie was eating a piece of dry toast. I told her what had happened.
“Chuck,” she said admiringly, “you are absolutely crazy.”
“You want to help?”
“Sure.”
I told her what to do.
“I’ll open the safe. Be sure you spin the lock when you close it.”
“Absolutely.”
She was grinning broadly, loving every minute of our conspiracy.
I thought for a moment. One more precaution. I dialed the Oak Park Police Department.
“I’m Charles C. O’Malley at 1012 Fair Oaks. There is an unmarked Chicago police car parked in front of my house. Illinois license 405–216. I wonder if one of your cars could come over and find out what they want. Thank you.”
A brilliant idea. Why hadn’t I thought of it?
She was back in a couple of minutes, a serious student in a gray summer suit, though a student carrying a foot and a half length of pipe she must have found in the basement.
I gave her the camera.
“Just point and shoot as fast as you can, especially when they’re trying to push me around.”
“If they hurt you, Chuck, I’ll bash their heads.”
“Rosemarie Helen Clancy, put that pipe down.”
“Okay,” she said meekly.
“Unless they get really rough.”
“Right.”
So I strolled down the stairs and onto our charming oak-lined street.
The two cops were on me at once. I kept my back to the house so Rosemarie could get pictures of their faces.
The fat one grabbed my arms. The thin one hit me a couple of times.
“We want that film, punk, or we’ll beat the shit out of you.”
“Sure,” I said, keeping my rage under control. “Let me go and I’ll give you the film.”
Reluctantly the fat one let me go.
I tossed the film on the ground.
“It’s all yours, Officers.”
“We don’t want no more fucking trouble out of you, punk.”
“No promises, Officer. My wife has shot a whole roll of film of you assaulting me. Right now she is putting the camera in the safe with the prints I made from that film. Moreover, there’s an Oak Park police car on the way. You know what they think of your kind. They’ve got your license number so they’ll make sure you go back to Chicago where you belong. I don’t think you should come back. But if you do I’ll bring charges against you. Lots of charges.”
“You fucking punk,” the thin one said furiously.
“You try to break into the house it won’t do you any good because you can’t get into the safe. Before the day is over all the prints will be in our lawyer’s office. You’d better be on your good behavior from now on.”
“Let’s beat the fuck out of him,” the fat one said.
That would bring on Rosemarie with her pipe.
“That would be most unwise.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” the thin one said to his partner. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“Thank your lucky stars that I’m not bringing charges against you now. Like I say, the Oak Park police don’t like your kind messing around.”
“Fuck you,” the fat one said.
“I think I see an Oak Park police car…. And you can tell Big Tom Sullivan that there’s a veteran of the First Constabulary Regiment who is tougher than he is.”
They scurried into the car and drove off just as the OPPD turned the corner. I pointed at the red Ford. I’d talk to them later in the day and tell them about these guys, so they would have a record.
Rosemarie, her eyes glowing with excitement, came down the stairs, key to the convertible in her hand.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said, as if she were a character in a mystery movie. “That sure was fun.”
“It’s lucky for them they stopped hitting me,” I said.
“I was halfway out the door.”
“I figured.”
“What was the point of it, Chucky?”
The answer that sprung to my lips was that I was bored. It was a dangerous answer so I suppressed it.
“I figured it was a good chance to get a little leverage against Big Tom.”
Only then did I start to tremble.
“Charles Cronin O’Malley,” she said as we approached the Marrion Street El station. “You’re crazy.”
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
“Stable accountant indeed!”
“Rosemarie,” I said fervently as I climbed out of the convertible. “You’re a good one to have around in a crisis.”
She grinned.
“I always told you that.”
12
Cordelia dropped me.
I didn’t quite understand why then and I still don’t.
It was the end of June. I was working at O’Hanlon and O’Halloran Certified Public Accountants and attending night school at DePaul. I ate lunch twice a week with Christopher at Berghoff’s (he was working at his father’s law office) and played handball with him once a week in the late afternoon—winning occasionally now.
He gently suggested that perhaps Cordelia and I might triple with him and Vince and their two dates. I said I would ask her whether she wanted to.
I never did ask her.
She and I talked on the phone every day and went to Orson Welles’s Macbeth at the Studio Theater downtown.
It was hard in those days to sustain a romance at opposite ends of the city when neither you nor your beloved drove a car.
I considered asking Peg to teach me how to change a tire and asking Mom if, in exchange for yielding to her by now persistent request to invite Delia for dinner, I might borrow her car on weekends for my pilgrimage to the North Shore.
I knew I was deeply in love with Cordelia and she with me. My triumph at the rectory dinner table, of which I was now inordinately proud, had swept away the last imaginable obstacle.
Our kissing in the Northwestern station the night we watched Orson’s magnificently hammy performance was as violent as the public circumstances permitted. I thought that she was even more passionate than I.
Then, in the middle of the next week, when I came home from DePaul to our house in Oak Park—I could not quite come to terms with the fact that we no longer lived in the tiny apartment on Menard Avenue—there was a letter on my desk, pink, scented letter-size stationery, thick vellum paper. The return address in fine Gothic script said “Cordelia Elizabeth Mary Lennon, Lake Forest, Illinois.”
No one else was in the house as I opened the envelope with fingers that ought not to have been trembling but were.
The letter is beside my computer now as I write this chapter. The colors have faded from the paper and from the neat, Convent-of-the-Sacred-Heart script.
Dear Charles,
I know you would want me to be direct.
I think that we ought not to see each other during the summer. I suggest this not because I don’t love you. I do love you, very much, perhaps too much for my age and my plans.
I do not say that we should break up. The words are too harsh and besides it is inaccurate. I want us to be friends and perhaps even lovers again. When we’re both back at Notre Dame in the autumn, I would very much like that we sit down and with clearer heads talk about the future, about our future.
This decision of mine—it’s really a request because it would be unjust for me to make the decision alone—is not the result of your visit to our home before the end of school. You were wonderful then. My parents and brother adore you. Alf says I’m lucky to have found someone like you at Notre Dame of all places!
(Notre Dame isn’t Jesuit, you see!)
Nor have I stopped loving you. Please believe that I love you as much as ever. You revealed my womanliness to me for the first time. I will always remember with a thrill of excitement the touch of your lips, tender yet insistent, on my flesh. You are the most important person in my life. With God’s help, I hope you always will be.
But—there always seems to be a “but,” doesn’t there, my darling?—I am only nineteen and in the summer between my sophomore and junior years I have to finish college, do my graduate work, at Juilliard if they’ll have me, and begin my concert career before I think about marriage and family. I know you too have long-range plans.
Neither of us is ready for marriage yet, Charles. I know we have not discussed it, but our passion for each other will certainly lead to marriage sooner rather than later. We both know that, even if neither of us has so far had the courage to say it. I do not want to ruin your dreams and I know you don’t want to ruin my dreams. That’s why, for the summer,
just for the summer, I think we should pause, relax, and examine ourselves and our futures with a little better perspective than we have now.
I said to you once that the woman who shared your marriage bed with you would be fortunate indeed. I still believe that, with even more conviction now than on that memorable day in the basement of Sorin. I don’t want to hurt you. If you disagree with this request of mine, please, please, let’s talk about it now.
Remember that no matter what happens, I’ll always love you.
Cordelia
Among the many emotions that churned through my head when I put the letter down and sat on the edge of my bed was relief. I resolved that I would examine that later.
The next day in the crowded, noisy Berghoff’s, with its tart smell of sauerkraut, I read parts of the letter to Christopher.
“What do you think?”
“The question, Charles, is what do you think?”
“Yeah.” I put the letter aside and dug into my potato pancake. “I guess that is the question. I don’t know what I think. I love her of course…”
“Enough to dismiss that letter as nonsense and continue relentless pursuit of the fair lady?”
“What will happen if I do that?”
“I think it is a fair bet that she’ll stop running. Even now she’s not running very hard.”
“A little more pursuit is all that is needed?”
“I should think so.”
He held a glass of root beer in his right hand and watched me carefully. Damn him, he saw too much.
“Funny thing…I felt relief when I read this.” I pointed my fork, on which was impaled a large hunk of potato pancake, at her letter. “I’m not heartbroken like I ought to be.”
“Not yet totally possessed by the other?”
“No, Christopher. Decidedly not. What if she’s right?”
His face was impassive. “Yes, what if she is?”
“You think I’m a fool?”
“I think you’re on the spot. She’s yours if you want her. She’s also absolutely correct: you’re headed for the altar, not right away, maybe. A year or two, no more. Do you want that?”
“I don’t think…I’m not sure.”
“This is an honorable way out”—he tilted his glass toward the pink vellum—“and an easy one at that.”
“We could always get back together later on.”