In later years such serious thoughts about a woman going into her first year of college would have seemed absurd. But it was the late nineteen forties, the postwar world. Young men and young women seized almost brutally the first chance for happiness that came along.
On the porch I opened my textbook on the business cycle, a course I was taking at DePaul. Why go to night school for a course that Notre Dame would never accept—DePaul was viewed at the Golden Dome as little better than a high school? Because I liked school when I was able to pick my own courses and because I was curious. About everything. Perhaps I would always be taking night-school classes.
The book explained why the Depression had not returned. Demand for goods and services had been pent up during the Depression and the war—fifteen long years. At the end of the war, Americans had a lot of money available because of wartime full employment. They wanted cars, homes, radios, fridges, washing machines. They married quickly and immediately began to have children. The result was a strong surge of prosperity. The author of the book refused to predict an end to the postwar expansion.
So I had been wrong, dead wrong. America would need architects for a long time. I felt good about that. I was glad I had been wrong.
But what did that mean for me?
I was still baffled by the contrast between my boring job, which I had come to hate, and my propensity to reckless adventure. The incident with the cops who had been haunting Monica Sullivan proved that my behavior in the First Constab was not the result of the long distance from home. I was a little crazy after all, worse even than the rest of the crazy O’Malleys. Not quite as bad as my foster sister.
Something would have to change soon.
At supper Mom, all innocence, asked, “Have you seen that little girl from Lake Forest lately, Chuck?”
Aha, the monstrous regiment of women was conspiring again.
“Not for a while. I’ll look her up when we get back to Notre Dame.”
“Would I like her?”
“Sure. She’s the kind people bring home to mother.”
In fact, the good April, come to think of it, would insist that Cordelia was “lovely” but “maybe a little too serious.”
“Doesn’t it depend a lot on who mother is?” Dad asked with equal innocence.
So! Peg had told them that Cordelia and I were no longer an item, but had not revealed the details. It was just as well that my failure in love was out in the open.
“Maybe,” I replied.
I did not want to dim the family joy over the news that Jane was pregnant, so I elected to play down the whole matter. Chucky Ducky with a broken heart? Don’t be ridiculous.
“I’ve never told you about supper at the rectory in Lake Forest, have I? You won’t believe it!”
So I recounted my adventures with David Redmond and the Lennons in rich and perhaps somewhat exaggerated detail. My audience laughed and laughed and laughed.
“Chucky, you never said that!” the good April protested several times.
“I did too.”
I left out the dialogue about love.
“She does seem kind of sweet,” Rosemarie said gently. “I imagine her heart is broken.”
“Sweet she is. Whose heart isn’t broken when a romance comes to an end? But her heart would be more broken if she gave up a chance at a concert career.”
“Once you’ve found him, never let him go,” Peg insisted.
“You’re certain the young woman has no great musical talent?” Dad asked cautiously.
“My idea of young talent is my obnoxious little sister on the fiddle. Poor Cordelia, for all her training and dedication, is not in the same league.”
“Violin,” Peg corrected me.
“She has to find that out for herself, doesn’t she, dear?”
“Exactly, Mom,” I replied.
“She does sound sweet, but maybe a little too serious,” Mom said, bringing that episode in my life to a close.
I had not admitted, had I, that I too had suffered a bit of a broken heart? Chucky Ducky conceding the pangs of unrequited love?
Nonsense.
But then why did I feel so sorry for myself?
15
My second year at Notre Dame, such as it was, changed my life.
I sought out Christopher the first day of class and demanded that he teach me to play tennis the way he had taught me to play handball. “I break even with you now in the pits, so the challenge has gone out of it.”
“You don’t break even the way I count,” he grumbled.
“You count wrong.”
So, the first set I lost 6–love. In the second I worked myself up to 6–2.
“Closing in on you,” I insisted, as I sunk into the grass outside the court, wondering if I was really too young to have a heart attack.
“You’re becoming a regular jock, Charles,” he laughed.
“You forget I was a quarterback on the city champs. Just wait, I’ll be good enough soon to beat you and my sister.”
“Five years if ever to beat me. Never to beat Peg.”
That’s right, he knew Peg now.
“How are you and Rosemarie coming along these days?”
“Rosemarie? We haven’t dated for the last month. Don’t they tell you anything around your house?”
“Not a thing.”
He could wait till Judgment Day for me to ask why he and Rosemarie had broken up.
“She’s a wonderful girl”—he broke the silence—“absolutely spectacular—beautiful, bright, funny, everything a man could want with one exception.”
“And that is?”
“She wasn’t ready to fall in love with me.”
“A shame.”
“Or anyone else.”
“Oh?”
“There is only one man in her life, I’m afraid.”
All right, I rose to the bait.
“Who?”
“Who?” He feigned great surprise. “Why, darling Chucky, who else? I entertained her for a time this summer because we could talk about him…. Chucky said this, Chucky did that, Chucky said the funniest thing, isn’t Chucky amazing…et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Damn her! She has no right—”
“Ah, but Charles, my boy, she does, you see. That’s the wonderful irony of it all. You have the right to ignore her adoration, but you have no right to demand that she stop it.”
“Shit.”
He raised his right shoulder, a little higher than usual. “Mind you, I have no objection to hearing your praises sung. After all, I have been known to engage in such melodies myself on occasion. I won’t argue that the young woman is in error, even if her portrait is essentially one-sided. Still—”
“Shut up, damn it. I don’t want to hear about the little bitch.”
He laughed genially. “I fear that you will hear about her, one way or another, for a long time to come.”
The last time I had seen Rosemarie was the Thursday before the Labor Day weekend. Mom was not ready to trust her daughter and her favorite foster daughter to my care at the wheel of a car. Despite my adventures on the autobahn, I was, by my own admission, something less than the world’s greatest driver.
About my adventures on the autobahn—carrying Trudi and her family to Stuttgart, breaking up the black market ring, needless to say, I had told no one, except John Raven and Christopher.
So, we drove together from Oak Park to Lake Geneva to collect Rosemarie and Peg from the former’s house, the scene of my prom triumph. Rosemarie, whose car was being repaired for reasons that were not explained to me, had spent a few days with her father, “poor dear man.”
I tried to argue that they were both adults, were they not, going to college, and could ride the Northwestern and the South Shore. In those days before the expressways it was a day-long venture to Lake Geneva and then all the way down to the Dunes.
“They’re only children, dear.”
“Rosemarie is enough of an adult to rent an apartm
ent in Hyde Park and attend an immoral, pagan, Communist university, isn’t she?”
“That’s next month, dear.”
I should have known better than to argue.
It was late morning when we arrived at the Clancy house at Lake Geneva. It had been repainted since I was there last. The landscaping had changed too. Even the pier that had been the scene of my heroics had been extended.
The girls, in slacks and blouses, were waiting for us, both quiet and withdrawn. Jim Clancy, in yachting jacket and white flannels and a captain’s cap, seemed less evil this time and more pathetic—a lonely man desperately seeking love.
“Didn’t see you in the pits this summer, Chuck.” He rubbed his little hands together disconsolately, as if he missed me.
“I work at O’Hanlon and O’Halloran this summer.”
“First-rate firm, you won’t go wrong if you stay with them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What do you think about the Cubs this summer?”
“I don’t think they’ll ever win the pennant again.”
“As bad as your White Sox, huh?”
“Maybe worse.”
“Bad times for Chicago teams, eh?” He sounded like the deterioration of Chicago sports was breaking his heart.
“The Big Red will be back,” I insisted, still believing that the Chicago Cardinals’ triumph a few years back had not been a fluke.
“I sure hope so. Any winner would be fine now.”
Dear God, his eyes were sad.
“Business good, April?” he asked as I piled the six suitcases necessary for three days at Lake Geneva into the trunk of the Buick.
“Too busy, Jim, but Vangie loves it. And the house at Grand Beach is just wonderful. You must come and see it sometime soon.”
Over my dead body.
“That’ll be nice, like the old days”—he grinned despondently—“when the four of us were together, huh?”
“Thank you, Daddy.” Rosemarie pecked his cheek. “We had a lovely time.”
“Thank you, Mr. Clancy,” Peg echoed her, with what seemed to be notable lack of conviction. “It was very nice.”
“Sure you can’t stay for lunch?” Jim Clancy’s eyes brightened as though the idea had just occurred to him. “I have some wonderful steaks. I could throw them on the grill.” He glanced nervously at his watch. “Have you on the road inside the hour.”
“How wonderful, Jim dear,” Mom said. “It would be so nice, but I do have to keep our schedule. You know what the Labor Day traffic is like.”
“Sure, sure.” His face fell. “I understand. Maybe next time…. Have a great Labor Day, kids!”
I felt sorry for him, a wretched, lonely little man. But I didn’t want my sister staying at his house. Somehow, he was even more sinister when he was sad.
Peg took over at the wheel. Rosie slipped in quietly next to me.
“Did Chucky flunk your driving test, Mom?” Peg asked as she steered the Buick out of the Clancy grounds.
“He’s doing very well, dear. He needs a little more practice, that’s all. Maybe we’ll let him drive a little on the way to the Dunes.”
“I’ll walk.”
“I had a Buick of my very own in Bamberg,” I said, my masculine ego offended by the suggestion that I was not a competent driver. “I drove it all over the autobahns, day and night, and never had a single accident. Except when I banged up my knee by bumping into it in the dark.”
Peg and Rosemarie laughed, feebly, I thought.
“If you want, dear, we’ll buy you your own little Buick.”
“Only if it has four holes.”
“There’s the pier, Chucky,” Peg tried again. “Remember?”
“What pier?”
The one I vomited on.
“Did you have a nice time, darlings?” Mom interjected. “The weather was so nice for a change.”
“Good tennis,” Rosemarie murmured.
“Neat boys in Geneva town?” I asked.
“Creeps,” they replied together.
“Drips,” Peg added for emphasis.
We were on the outskirts of Gary, shrouded in steel-mill smoke, before their spirits returned.
Yeah, they had a hell of a good time at Jim Clancy’s.
On the side of the tennis courts at Notre Dame, Christopher interrupted my reverie.
“Are you sure you don’t love her, Charles? I know she’s kind of strange at times…”
“Absolutely certain.”
Christopher was too much of a gentleman to challenge my savage reply.
“How about Cordelia?”
“I guess I don’t miss her as much as I thought I would.” I pondered this truth, acknowledged for the first time. “Out of sight, out of mind. I guess I wasn’t that much in love after all.”
“It comes and goes at our age, doesn’t it?”
“Sure does.”
“Are you going to look her up?”
“I suppose I should.”
“Soon?”
“Right.”
“Today?”
“All right, Mom!”
So I showered and hiked over to Sorin Hall. Nothing had changed in the offices of Compact. It was still a scene of disorder and confusion presided over by the strong-willed little editor, who today was wearing a light gray skirt and blouse, very professional.
“Charles!” She jumped from her swivel chair and extended her hand.
I took the hand and kissed her lips, briefly, very briefly.
She was flustered and not displeased.
“Sit down, sit down,” she urged me. “Tell me about your summer.”
I made it as funny as I could, which, considering the summer, was not all that funny.
Her parents were at Harbor Springs still. Alf was back at West Baden, the Jesuit seminary. She had performed successfully at a junior contest at Ravinia Park. Her mother thought that she ought to go to Florence next year to study there. She did want to graduate first, however.
She was pretty enough and pleasant enough. Yet I could hardly believe that we had embraced so passionately in the same room a few months before.
She didn’t ask me to work on the magazine and I didn’t volunteer. We promised to stay in touch.
The fires were banked, the embers were cold, the flames were out. That was that.
Yet, her lips had told the truth when I touched them with my own. If I wanted, I could pour a little gasoline on the coals and we would have a conflagration again.
Why bother?
No good reason occurred to me.
Why did the mating drive have to be so powerful? Why could not man and woman do nicely without one another? It would be a much more sedate world.
I had not given up on Cordelia. Now wasn’t the time. Moreover, let her make the first move.
Ah, Chucky, weren’t you the clever lover?
I was still living in Farley Hall, still under the ministrations of the manic Father Pius, still in a room by myself. The reason given—which I did not question—was that my status was still unclear.
Later I suspected that Father Pius was setting me up.
My new adviser told me that I had been reclassified as a “provisional junior” and that my DePaul and Maryland philosophy courses had been accepted. If I took two extra philosophy or theology courses, I would be reclassified yet again as a second-semester junior in the spring semester. I would be only a year behind Ed and Vince. With summer school, I might even be able to graduate a year from January.
I was delighted. My advanced economics courses were more interesting than anything I had taken the year before. I intended to concentrate on business-cycle theory. Much later I would read an article by Norman Rider about the Depression that sustained my thesis in a way about which I had not thought. His data showed that one quarter of the women who had reached puberty during the worst year of the Depression were infertile, so great had been the impact of poor nutrition on their reproductive systems.
Bodies were af
fected by economic disasters in ways we didn’t imagine then. Souls too, mine included.
Christopher and I also signed up for another fiction course (American Fiction) with the prof we had the year before. Astonishingly he did not remember either of us.
It looked like an exciting year.
Vince was waiting for me in my room when I returned from my brief encounter with Cordelia.
“How you doing, guy? Are we gonna win this year?”
“I guess,” he sighed. “Practice sure does wear you out. How you doing?”
We had drifted apart in the year I had been at Notre Dame. No, it would be more accurate to say that we had been separated when I went to the service and had never renewed our friendship. I hung around sometimes with him and Ed Murray, relatively sober and relatively intelligent members of the football subculture. But my interests and their interests were not the same anymore. Christopher who could get along with anyone had actually become a closer friend to Vince than I was.
I kind of assumed that he and Peg would marry eventually and that we’d be brothers-in-law for the rest of our lives, so I didn’t worry about the hiatus in our friendship.
“I’m good,” I replied to his question. “Liking it here more this year than last.”
“You washed up with that gorgeous little blonde?”
So, she is gorgeous after all? Vince would know.
“Let’s say the romance is suspended for the moment. Neither of us ready yet, you know the line. What about you and…what’s that girl’s name again?”
“Peg.” He grinned. “You so and so!”
“Yes, I do see her occasionally. On the tennis courts mostly.”
“Where she beats you?”
“Calumny.”
“It’s, uh, kind of, well, I uh…want to talk about Peg.”
A warning siren went off in my head. I’d better be a little more serious than usual.
“Talk.”
“Well, I think I love her.”
“Think! Vincent, don’t think about it long. As a man of the world in these matters, let me assure you that you do love her and that you thereby demonstrate very good taste.”
He slumped down on the edge of my bed, his head sunk in his hands, not the posture of someone in love.
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