Younger Than Springtime

by Andrew M. Greeley

Giving up on the uncertain long-distance phone network, they boarded the Santa Fe and rode down to the base. I had no idea till I met them in the corridor of the hospital that they had been told I was dead.

  “This should have an important effect on the rest of your life, John.” My mother was always one for deriving morals from events. “You’ll understand how important it is to be in the state of grace.”

  “Yes, Mom,” I said dutifully.

  “We would have missed you.” There were tears in my father’s eyes.

  “I would have missed you too.”

  “The Blessed in heaven do not miss anyone,” Mom said piously.

  I was too weak to argue.

  After they returned to Chicago, I tried to sketch the face of the woman who had kept me alive, as I already was thinking of her. It was surprisingly easy to capture her face. Later, back home, I filled in the colors.

  “That’s a very pretty girl, John.” My father rarely paid any attention to my paintings. “She looks like someone I know, but I can’t quite place her face. South Side, maybe?”

  “I don’t know any girls from the South Side.”

  “Someone you met in the service?”

  “I wasn’t in the service long enough to meet any girls…she’s just someone I imagined.”

  He warned me about the dangers of the temptation of Pygmalion and then, unnecessarily, given the classical education I had received at St. Ignatius, told me the Pygmalion story.

  “I don’t really think she’s so pretty, Dad.” I considered the young woman with brown eyes. “Interesting maybe. A bit of an imp. Lots of fun.”

  “Don’t let your mother see her.”

  “I won’t.”

  We laughed together, sharing the secret that no girl would ever, in my mother’s eyes, be good enough for me.

  I did not tell my father that there was strength and character in those brown eyes as well as merriment. She would not let me die.

  But she was not real and her face, I assumed, was one that I would never encounter in real life.

  Nonetheless, I fantasized about the body, a willing body, I told myself, that went with that face. However, I never did try to add the body to my painting. Or even to sketch it.

  Well, maybe a few lines on a sheet of paper during the duller classes at Armour Tech.

  Lovely, lovely lines.

  Did the experience of waking up in my own coffin during the flu epidemic really affect my life as the Army doctor and my parents suggested that it might?

  I had none of the medical ill effects of the infection that plagued so many people—cardiac problems and Bright’s disease and TB. Emotional effects?

  Once you’ve been practically dead, do you live a little more frantically because you are aware of your own mortality? Or do you approach life with a much more relaxed attitude?

  I’m not sure what my pattern is. I know that I’ve never been as ambitious as my parents or my kids. If I departed from Camp Leavenworth with any change in personality or character, it was with the conviction that life was meant to be enjoyed—a notion that made me pretty different from most of the Chicago Irish of my generation.

  Maybe it was the beginning of an outlook that would later win my family and me the name “crazy O’Malleys”—a name that was richly deserved and, despite my wife’s feeble protests, deeply enjoyed.

  I did not, however, learn to stay away from places I ought not to be in. Hence, I would die twice more. Once in Jim Clancy’s Duesenberg AA2 on a back road in Wisconsin during the summer of 1925. And later in the Black Horse Troop in December 1941.

  So, I died twice more.

  This memoir is about how I came back to life after the Duesy cracked up. I learned only many years later how I survived after Pearl Harbor and I still can’t quite believe it.

  But this story is, as I say, about the Duesy. And the girl with the brown eyes who brought me back to life.

  19

  1925

  I was listening to a jazz trio playing “Black Bottom Stomp” in a speakeasy at Twenty-sixth and Oakley when Jim Clancy came charging in, bright-eyed, charming, enthusiastic, and almost three quarters of a foot shorter than my six feet one.

  “You gotta see my new car,” he shouted, waving the keys at me. “A Duesy!”

  He was still my “Jim-in-the-box,” as I described him to my mother after my first day in first grade, a comic face, with a hint of sadness in it, that kept popping up, looking eagerly for attention and laughter, my closest friend, my boon companion, my jester and my master of the revels.

  I held up my hand, motioning for silence. I wanted to see the new car as much as anyone wanted to see a new car in those days, I more than others because it would be a frequent means of transportation for me. Jim would gladly loan it to me for a date—if I ever had a date. But the jazz group—horn, trombone, clarinet—was too good to interrupt.

  The Blue Note had opened in Chicago a few years before. New Orleans musicians had migrated to Chicago in big numbers so that Chicago had become the second jazz capital of the nation. Louis Armstrong, then in his middle twenties, had come to the Lincoln Garden’s Cafe over on East Thirty-first Street with the King Oliver Band and the “Dippermouth Blues.” Now, in 1925, even the neighborhood speaks were likely to feature a trio of competent Negro musicians—who would never have been admitted as patrons. The group who played at Twenty-sixth and Oakley, in the heart of Heart of Chicago (as that neighborhood, south of Pilsen and west of Bridgeport, was called), was better than just competent.

  Jim sat on the edge of the chair, impatiently jingling his keys, an overactive elf, while I signaled for a beer for him.

  He downed it in a single gulp. Then the power of the rhythms seemed to take possession of him. He put the beer mug on the ancient table in front of him and slipped into what seemed like a trance. The engine racing inside of him turned itself off and he became a little boy enchanted by something wonderful.

  If only, I thought, that enchanted little boy could escape more often.

  The speak was in a corner building on the first floor. The windows along the Twenty-sixth Street side were boarded up. In the front you entered a perfectly respectable little candy store. Behind the store, you walked into a narrow passage with a locked door on either end through which you were buzzed. Then you came into a large, dimly lit room that had once been quarters for the family of the storeowner.

  The speak was permeated by the faint smell not unlike that one could encounter in a rarely cleaned men’s washroom—possibly because the air had not been circulated since the passing of the Volstead Act.

  Everyone in the city knew it was a speak, including all the cops in the district. But the owners paid their “tax” to the local police and their cut to the Capone mob, which provided the booze. The narrow passage was mostly for atmosphere.

  As was the dark room, the rickety old tables and chairs, and the jazz group. Maybe even the smell.

  Jazz was an important part of my life, almost as important as painting—and far more important than architecture and engineering, which was how I earned my living. My musical tastes were catholic—I would spend a night a week during the season listening to the fading Chicago Opera Company at the Auditorium and another night at Orchestra Hall to listen to Theodore Thomas and the Chicago Symphony.

  My parents, tolerant of anything their only child did, were baffled by my interest in art and music.

  “There’s nothing like that in either of our families,” my mother would say, as if she were talking about a hereditary disease.

  “That’s all right, mother,” Dad would say reassuringly. “The boy is a very successful engineer.”

  Actually, I thought of myself as an architect. That word, however, my parents could not bring themselves to say. Architects were Protestants who lived on the North Shore. The firm for which I worked, Hurley and Considine, called itself an “engineering company,” even if its offices were in the Rookery, the first Chicago skyscraper (designed by Burnham and R
oot in 1886 and remodeled by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1905). They had hired me, however, because they wanted, first of all, someone to draw pictures of their projects and secondly someone to actually design them.

  So at twenty-five, the year of the big eclipse and the Scopes Trial, I had worked on both the new double-level Wacker Drive and the new Soldier Field—a fact about which my children are openly skeptical since they are convinced that both structures existed from the creation of the world.

  “I’m practically engaged,” Jimmy said in a stage whisper that was louder than the clarinet. The three other patrons of the speak turned and frowned at him.

  It was not the first time that Jim, a classmate at St. Catherine’s grammar school and St. Ignatius College (actually a six-year high school that later split into St. Ignatius High and Loyola University), was “practically engaged.” I sighed to myself. If my mother should hear about this relationship she would be even more concerned about my becoming “another stodgy old Irish bachelor.” Until the previous year, no girl was good enough for me, and Jim Clancy was a suspect companion because he “ran around with fast women.” Now I was being pushed to find myself a bride and to “meet some nice girls like the ones Jim Clancy knows.”

  Mom’s fears were not unjustified. My existence was comfortable enough. I had started to put on weight and, alas, to lose some of my red hair. But the weight was controlled by swimming a couple of days a week at the Illinois Athletic Club (whose star swimmer, a kid named Johnny Weissmuller, was setting world records) and the baldness, should it get worse as it probably would, by wearing caps (which along with plus four knickers were in style for men in those days). Women were interesting of course and I planned to marry one eventually and to raise some children.

  But I was in no hurry.

  And I was still looking for the brown-eyed girl who had called me back from the grave.

  I had painted her face many times, usually destroying the canvas afterward. I’d even experimented with sketches of her slender, graceful body—with marvelous long legs—but gave that project up as too dangerous.

  Did fantasies about my brown girl, as I called her although sometimes I painted her in blue clothes, impede my search for a bride?

  I suppose they did. I told myself often enough that it was impossible for a flesh-and-blood woman to compete with a fantasy.

  But I would still glance out of the El windows in the morning on the way to work, hoping that she might be standing on the platform.

  “You gotta meet her.” Jim leaned toward me, smelling of the beer he had consumed. “She’s tremendous. You’ll love her. Great musician. And she has a gorgeous friend.”

  I ordered him another beer with a wave of my hand and waited for the trio to wrap up its cadenza. They were, as I have said, only a little better than run-of-the-mill. But I’ve never heard records that were as good.

  When Mom would talk about “stodgy Irish bachelors,” Dad would chuckle because he had been a stodgy bachelor until he met her in St. Catherine’s rectory.

  After the famine the Irish turned to late marriages, a complete change from the very early marriages of the first half of the nineteenth century (I’m not much on history, but my older son is. So when I talk about history I’m quoting him. And God help me if the quotes aren’t accurate!). They brought the custom with them to this country. My father was forty-five when he married my mother, who herself was thirty-eight. “We just barely had time to produce you,” he would laugh.

  “Charles!” Mom would reprove him for his allusion to the facts of reproduction—which were always ignored in our family.

  His father, my grandfather, had been a famine immigrant who served in the Civil War and worked on the Northwestern railroad. Most of his family had been wiped out in the cholera epidemic of the eighteen eighties. Dad had gone to work at fifteen for the city, the protégé of a Republican alderman (Chicago had some of those in the old days) and fought his way up to the job of a commissioner on the Cook County Board. Only when he had reached that level of security did he begin to search for a wife. Mom’s family came after the Civil War, one at a time, each child of the eleven working to pay the passage of the next. Like so many women of her generation, Mom worked as domestic help for a wealthy family in South Oak Park, an occupation about which she never spoke. Then she became a housekeeper at St. Catherine’s rectory, a dignified and honorable, if perhaps not so well-paying, position.

  I suppose that she viewed it as a permanent job. Her younger sisters had already married and moved to Boston. She was probably resigned to lifelong spinsterhood. Then my father, the nephew of the pastor of St. Catherine’s, decided that it was at last time to marry, having barely survived the climb up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War, and she caught his eye.

  Now, years after their deaths, I wonder about that courtship, its hesitations and fears, its awkwardness and its sudden burst of passion that brought them to the altar—my mother, as I would later determine from the parish records, already two months pregnant.

  Well, maybe I was premature, but I kind of doubt it. They celebrated their wedding anniversary not on the date it is recorded in the parish books but four months earlier.

  I must say I was delighted with the discovery. John E. O’Malley, a love child.

  Each generation thinks it has discovered sex for the first time in history and that it was produced not by sexual love but by spontaneous combustion.

  Dear God, how strong the passion must have been between my parents to have overcome their fears and inhibitions so that they produced me.

  I have often wondered whether I was conceived in the old rectory at St. Catherine’s.

  I sure hope so.

  After their deaths I stood in the tiny room in the rectory in which she lived the summer she conceived me—a cubbyhole in the third-floor attic with a small window next to a great oak tree and the rose window of the church. On humid days before air-conditioning it must have been a steamy oven.

  All the better to stoke the fires of human passion.

  Without which I would not have come to be.

  In their wedding picture, they are a striking couple, my father tall and solid, my mother almost as tall and full-figured. They must have quite overwhelmed each other.

  Ignorance, inexperience, fear, guilt—all must have melted like candle wax.

  And right next to the church too.

  I suppose his uncle, the pastor, figured things out later when I arrived. I wonder if he ever admitted the rectory love affair to himself. What did he think, for example, when he poured the waters of baptism on me, not only a child conceived out of wedlock, but conceived in his rectory!

  It will be said that only a wild romantic would ponder such possibilities.

  A wild and crazy romantic.

  Later my own family would earn the name “the crazy O’Malleys,” a label in which we all exult, save for my would-be accountant older son who always aspired to be the white sheep of our clan.

  My parents were still a striking couple in 1925, both erect and vigorous with snowy white hair.

  Hints of their past would occasionally appear. When Mom would worry that I was a “stodgy Irish bachelor” in the making, Dad would chuckle, “Just like the man you married.”

  “You were never stodgy,” she’d fire back at him. Then coloring a little, she would add, “And you’re not stodgy now either.”

  And they both would chuckle.

  I was too young then to understand.

  That they loved one another, after their own fashion and with their own rhetoric, there was never any doubt. They were companions and friends, sharing the same prejudices and joys. They didn’t like “foreigners” or Democrats or “flappers” or “vulgar South Side Irish.”

  They did like the Catholic church, Republicans, and “respectable” people.

  As a Republican Dad thought Calvin Coolidge was one of the greatest leaders in all history, a truly honest president and a decent man (the highest compliment of all).
He did not say that Coolidge was a welcome relief to Republicans after the corruption of the Harding years. Nor did he comment on the Republican party’s commitment to Prohibition, a subject that was not discussed in our house. Ever.

  Like every other good Irish Catholic family we ignored the Noble Experiment.

  I resisted the temptation to observe that the Experiment was bringing wealth to many good Italian Republicans like Al Capone.

  Dad’s job brought them enough income so that they did not have to worry about money. Much of that income would be considered illegal today, but the rules were different in those days. Dad considered himself an “honest politician,” a rarity among Republicans and, according to him, an impossibility among Democrats.

  Like almost everyone with a few dollars in 1925, he invested in the stock market, though cautiously and conservatively.

  “There’s always our Union Carbide stock to fall back on,” he would say when Mom worried about the unpredictability of the market. “That’s our nest egg. If Union Carbide fails, the whole country will fail.”

  Which it did.

  Technically, I was a Republican too. But in the secret of the ballot box, I had already become a Democrat and for reasons of profound political conviction: I objected to Prohibition. It was, I told my father, an attempt by Protestants to deprive the Catholics of their inalienable right to consume the creature. They intended to force us to be virtuous for our own good. Dad would mumble but not disagree. Later when most Catholics ended up as Democrats, the reasons given were the appeal of FDR and the Great Depression. But those were after-the-fact excuses. Prohibition is what made Democrats out of us.

  Anyway, Dad earned a decent living as a Republican. We lived in a big old Victorian house on West End Avenue with a live-in (Negro) butler and maid. There was enough money to pay for my tuition at Armour and my trips to Europe each summer to paint, enough even to buy a car. However, we did not buy a car because Dad saw “no point in it.” He was correct, I suppose. The Washington bus (double-decker, open in the summer) was one block south of us and the Lake Street El two blocks north. We could take the Northwestern to Twin Lakes for summer vacation, the Aurora and Elgin to golf courses in the western suburbs, and the El to Wrigley Field to watch such stalwarts as Rogers Hornsby and Hack Wilson.