Younger Than Springtime

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “You never need much persuasion.” Clarice spoke her longest sentence.

  “See, Vangie?”

  “No one calls me that.”

  “Someone does now.”

  I didn’t like the nickname but I liked the tone in her voice when she said it. It somehow hinted at an invitation, the exact content of which was yet unspecified.

  She couldn’t, I told myself, be all that much engaged.

  Still, Jim was my friend. I had no right to poach on his territory. He had been generous to me all my life. Now it was my turn to be generous in return.

  Except boater hats and rhapsodies in blue are not quite comparable.

  I could, however, legitimately hope that his enthusiasm would wane, as it almost always did, couldn’t I?

  And in the meantime, I could at least keep my oar in the water, couldn’t I?

  Would it not be practically immoral to take my oar out of the water?

  She and Clarice—she was careful to do a joint autobiography—were both from St. Gabriel’s. Their fathers were doctors on the staff of Mercy Hospital. She was the youngest of five daughters, all married except herself. Clarice was an only child, just like me (she apparently had been fully informed on my background). They both had attended St. Xavier’s Academy. Clarice had spent some time in a finishing school in Switzerland (“as if you needed to be finished, Clarice, when you’re already perfectly beautiful,” praise without a touch of envy) while she had, at her father’s insistence, gone to Normal over on Sixty-seventh Street. (“Daddy thinks I should be able to teach music because he doesn’t think anyone can earn a living playing the harp.”)

  She’d been in Ireland last summer, learning about the Irish harp and enough of the language to sing some songs in Irish.

  “Gaelic?” I asked.

  “Irish,” she responded, ending that part of the discussion.

  She had finished at Normal only last week and would begin teaching at the academy (St. Xavier’s, was there any other?) in the fall.

  She would be twenty-one in August and had been warned by her mother and father to avoid West Side Irish men at all costs.

  “Poor dears, they’re so dull.”

  “Your parents or West Side men?”

  “My parents are not dull.”

  “Am I dull?”

  “I haven’t made up my mind yet…. You paint, don’t you, Vangie?”

  “Nothing so romantic, April Mae June Cronin; I’m an engineer, maybe you could even say an architect, though my parents think that is almost as bad as being an artist. I mess around with oils and watercolors in my spare time as a hobby.”

  “If I let you listen to my music, you have to let me see your paintings.”

  “That sounds like an ultimatum.”

  “It is,” she said firmly. “What do you paint?”

  “Landscapes, homes, women.”

  “With their clothes off?”

  “April!” Clarice protested piously.

  “The landscapes?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Oh, you mean the women? Not usually.”

  “But sometimes?”

  “Well, I had a course at the Art Institute…”

  “I’ve often wondered how an artist could concentrate on his work. Or if they do concentrate.”

  “Don’t you concentrate on your music when you’re singing a love song?”

  “I don’t sing to naked lovers.”

  “April!”

  “It’s a perfectly legitimate question.”

  April Cronin was a flapper, almost by definition. She wore a flapper dress (flapper clothes, according to a newsreel I had seen, weighed no more in aggregate than twenty-four ounces) and drove a car and probably smoked (as it turned out she didn’t and the suggestion that she might infuriated her). She was by the standards of 1925 a thoroughly modern young woman. But she was also an Irish Catholic flapper from Canaryville who had attended the academy and would soon teach there.

  The woman in my imagination on November 11, 1918, was mysterious, but she hadn’t given me any advance warning of the directions of her mystery.

  “I suppose it depends on who the model is. In the classroom, it’s titillating and awkward for about thirty seconds, then it’s just another assignment. If the model were a woman the artist loved and they were alone in his studio, it might be another matter.”

  “You’ve never done that?” she persisted, as she turned the car down the road at the outskirts of Twin Lakes.

  “Not yet. I’ll admit it’s an interesting possibility.”

  It was on the tip of my irresponsible tongue to ask her if she would like me to paint her. I’m still not sure that I could not have gotten away with it that morning.

  “Well, at least you’re honest about it.”

  “God made women’s bodies very beautiful.”

  “You’ve noticed?”

  We all laughed.

  It was a very hot morning for late May, but not yet hot enough to explain why my shirt was drenched with perspiration. April Mae June Cronin was a disconcerting young woman.

  She parked in the lot behind the Barry dining hall.

  “Are you tired from rising early and coming up on the train?” she demanded as she opened the door for me—very much the official driver.

  “I wouldn’t mind a little nap.”

  “Ten minutes.” She glanced at her watch. “Then we play tennis. The golf course is already too crowded and we want to spend the afternoon at the lake, don’t we?”

  “Yes, ma’am…. Ten minutes?”

  She grinned affectionately. “Fifteen, but don’t be late. We’ll meet you at the tennis court.”

  I lugged my bag up to my second-floor room in the Blackstone, as one of the wooden buildings with screened-in porches was wistfully called. It was nothing more than a resort cabin, painted white with green trim, that had been divided by clapboard partitions into small, Spartan rooms that smelled always of disinfectant.

  I was distracted in my unpacking by an image of a painting of a naked, no, a half-naked harpist—concealed and revealed behind the strings of her harp.

  I sternly reminded myself that Jim considered himself “practically engaged” to April Mae Cronin.

  21

  Fortunately for me there is no snapshot of us before or after the tennis match.

  In white blouse and long tennis skirt, April Cronin was a terror on the clay. She played to win, and win she did, but with disconcerting fairness and courtesy. Her calls were always in my favor and her praise for my successful volleys fulsome. I’m going to beat you, she was saying in effect, but I’m going to be sweet and gentle and ladylike in the process.

  Only don’t get in my way when I rush the net.

  Clarice watched from a bench. Was she bored or was she merely quiet?

  I debated that question through the whole Memorial Day weekend and finally concluded that she was simply a very quiet girl. If I had met her without her ebullient companion I might have been stunned by her beauty. But in the presence of the energetic April, one hardly had time to notice any other woman, no matter how attractive.

  I do have a snapshot, taken the next day, perhaps after mass, of the four of us. Two snapshots. Like my firstborn son, I am a paper saver. Unlike him I do not have my past neatly organized and catalogued. He helped me to organize my records for this exercise in trying to remember times past. On the back of the second picture, he has penciled in with his maddeningly neat block printing the accusing word “duplicate.”

  Clarice and April are both wearing flapper hats and dresses, short skirted, free flowing, and designed to pretend that woman did not have breasts. Jim and I are wearing boater hats, double-breasted dark coats, and wide white trousers, the kind that, for reasons that now escape me, were offensive to conservatives in 1925. My children laugh at the picture.

  Jim and I are rather stiff and formal. Clarice seems cool and at ease with the camera. April is grinning happily.

  I wince w
hen I look at her. She is surely pretty, perhaps beautiful, and very much alive. I remember the desire I felt for her that day and my guilt over my betrayal of Jimmy.

  I’m sure my mind was churning that morning. Had our embrace the night before been a violation of our friendship?

  Had it been sinful, a question about which I normally did not worry when I kissed women.

  But there had never been a kiss like that.

  I didn’t know what April thought. However, she had tripped up to Communion at the foot of the “pergola” on which mass was said on Sunday mornings.

  She picked her way through the crowd of people with the same balance and grace with which she drove me off the tennis court the day before. On the court her backhand was fair, but her forehand was murderous.

  “If you practiced,” she said after winning the second set 6–2, “you’d be a very good player.”

  “Good enough to beat you?” I slumped into the bench next to the silent Clarice.

  “I didn’t say that.” She wiped the sweat off her face with a towel. “I’ll go get us something to drink.”

  There weren’t handy Coke machines everywhere in 1925. April pulled three tin cups out of her tennis bag and sauntered off to the well behind the caretaker’s house.

  “She’s a remarkable girl, isn’t she?” In the absence of her friend, Clarice suddenly became articulate.

  “Breathtaking.” I continued to gasp for breath.

  “She is very talented and yet is a swell person.”

  “And delights in beating men on the tennis courts.”

  “Naturally.”

  I pondered Clarice’s languid form. She was interesting, no doubt about that, but definitely not the young woman who had haunted me back to life in the morgue at Camp Leavenworth.

  “How close is she to engagement?”

  “Engagement?” Clarice curled her lips. “To whom?”

  “Well, Jim, I suppose.”

  “Really!” She frowned. “I can’t imagine what would make you think that.”

  “She’s not contemplating marriage with Jim?”

  “Contemplating?” She shook her head in dismay at my ignorance. “Even if she wanted to marry Jim—and I’m quite sure she does not—he would never marry her. She scares him.”

  “I think she would scare most men.” I tried not to sound relieved.

  “She doesn’t scare you, however.”

  It was a statement of conviction, not a question.

  “Oh?” I confess I was uneasy.

  “You rather enjoy her.”

  Clarice was not only articulate, she was perceptive. And I was a little frightened. I didn’t want to be captured, not that easily.

  “Can’t someone be frightened and amused at the same time?”

  Clarice merely laughed. It was a nice, warm laugh that melted her icy beauty and made her human and appealing.

  I felt a trap closing in on me.

  “You made Clarice laugh.” April bounced up, her three tin cups in delicate balance. “You really are a charmer. Here, don’t spill it. I’m exhausted from pushing on the pump.”

  We sat side by side, with me in the middle, and silently sipped on the cool, tart well water.

  April could not long remain silent. She turned toward me and examined my face closely.

  “Have we met before, John the Evangelist O’Malley?”

  “I don’t think so.” I decided not to stare back into her astute brown eyes.

  “I guess not.” She relaxed against the bench once more. “But somehow you look familiar.”

  “Maybe you met me in a dream.”

  “I don’t dream about men…”

  The three of us laughed.

  “And you always tell the truth.”

  “You knew that wasn’t quite true…. Still, maybe you are someone I dreamed about…. How could I dream about someone I don’t know?”

  “Maybe this is a dream and you’ll wake up again.”

  “Indian philosophy,” she snapped impatiently.

  Impressing me again.

  She then decreed that, unless we wanted to eat lunch in the dining hall, it was now time to enjoy the beach.

  I dutifully agreed.

  Commodore Barry Country Club was named, like the Knights of Columbus Council that established it, after Commodore John Barry (1745–1803), the “founder of the American Navy.” His ship Lexington defeated the English ship Edward in the first sea battle of the War of Independence. Irish-born John Barry was thought to prove to those who doubted it that Catholics were as good Americans as anyone else—a fact widely questioned in those days.

  Barry, as the place was always called, was a country club only in name. The KC Council had purchased the summer estate of a Milwaukee beer baron and a nearby golf course. The baron’s home became the clubhouse and his servants quarters’ the Drake. Two other wooden “cabins” were crowded around the grounds—the Commodore and the Blackstone—and a guest house at the far end of the estate became a separate dwelling for priests, of whom there were always more than enough in the course of the season.

  The “beach” was an artificial spit of sand at the edge of a small lake that straddled the Illinois–Wisconsin border. Most sunbathing was done on a wooden pier that extended precariously into the lake at the foot of the “pergola,” a concrete platform with a stone roof over the boathouse. It was also the site for Saturday night romancing and Sunday morning mass.

  Across the road was a subdivision of small summer homes owned by members of the KC Council.

  It seems astonishing today that we could accept and take for granted summer living conditions that now would be intolerable.

  The clubhouse and the Drake were equipped with running water and an occasional tub and toilet bowl. The other buildings offered only nonpotable water in washbasins. Drinking water came from the outdoor pumps. One “bathed” in the shower house, appropriately divided by a thick wall into “gentlemen” and “ladies” sections, both of which were crowded all day in high summer.

  We made do with privies scattered conveniently around the grounds, “outhouses” in the term of the day. And we took them for granted. Some of the older people, my parents’ generation but not so fortunate, had known such sanitation mechanisms when they were growing up in Chicago. The memory of the outdoor toilet was sufficiently alive that one adjusted to its reality with little effort.

  The next generation, raised with inside plumbing, would not tolerate such arrangements even in the summer.

  It takes only a generation to undo all previous human history, at least when sanitation is the issue.

  After a weekend at Barry I would amuse myself at the drawing table on Monday mornings by designing vast and elaborate bathroom facilities for the resorts of the future. In retrospect, it seems that, if anything, my imagination was too restrained.

  Men were Obliged to wear ties in the dining room, no matter how hot it was. Some of them even wore ties on the golf course and tennis court.

  Officially there was nothing to drink on the grounds. The Volstead Act was still in force. What Herbert Hoover would call a few years later the “noble” experiment continued, its only effect the enrichment of bootleggers.

  Moreover, the police in southern Wisconsin were less tolerant of speaks than the Chicago cops—although there was a roadhouse off on a side road from the highway to Kenosha, an establishment filled with young people from Barry on Saturday nights.

  Since Barry was Catholic, there was always enough forbidden booze within its boundaries on a summer weekend to supply a speakeasy for a month. It was simply taken for granted that you would bring your own drinks up on the train or in your car.

  If the truth be told, I had arrived at Genoa City with two bottles of single-malt scotch, which, I was willing to wager, would be the best booze available to anyone at Barry all weekend.

  I wondered if April Mae June Cronin drank. I assumed that she did not.

  I was wrong again.

  She and
Clarice arrived at the pier in huge floppy hats and “beach pajamas,” a fashion innovation of the year. While heaven knows these garments were opaque enough, their loose fit and alluringly colored fabrics did convey a hint of the boudoir.

  The older generation contended, with some validity, that they were merely an excuse for flappers to wear trousers.

  Clarice carried two copies of Reader’s Digest. April was reading The Great Gatsby.

  They arranged themselves and their paraphernalia on two deck chairs near the pier and settled down to their reading.

  I strolled Over.

  “Good book?” I asked.

  She glanced up. Her eyes narrowed as she inspected me. I was wearing swim trunks instead of the one-piece body suit that was still expected from male swimmers if they did not want to cause unfavorable comment from their elders.

  “Poor dear man.” She tapped the book, apparently deciding that my chest and shoulders were acceptable.

  “Me?”

  “No, Mr. Gatsby. And I suppose Mr. Fitzgerald too…have you read it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “He’s a fine writer and I think what he’s writing about really exists. Even in Chicago.”

  “Are you like him?”

  “Fitzgerald or Gatsby? No, I don’t think so. I like to drink, but I don’t get drunk.”

  “Which reminds me, you did bring something to drink, didn’t you? Otherwise we will have to wait till poor Jimmy comes.”

  Another illusion down the drain.

  “Single malt.”

  “Yummy.”

  A towel draped over my shoulders, I sat on the grass next to her and opened my copy of Arrowsmith, I must confess that I didn’t pay too much attention to Sinclair Lewis. My mind was completely occupied by April Mae Cronin.

  It was distracted by fantasies about how she would look in the swimsuit beneath the beach pajamas, but not so distracted that I did not worry about Jim.

  I had Clarice’s testimony, undoubtedly accurate, that Jim’s suggestion that they were “practically engaged” was an overstatement. Moreover, I agreed that a woman like April would scare Jim half to death. Very likely she was a passing enthusiasm.