Younger Than Springtime

by Andrew M. Greeley

  I ignored him. “As to the first question, Miss April Mae Cronin”—I found myself grinning like a silly fool—“I think you in red and gold would stop traffic. And to the second, there was no one like you at any of the Italian beaches.”

  Except Siobahn, and she doesn’t count.

  “That’s nice, but I don’t think I believe you.”

  “You want to come for a ride later, Johnny?” Jim was tugging at my shirtsleeve. “Maybe I can get her up to ninety again.”

  “I don’t think so.” I shook him off.

  April scowled at me. Oh, oh, I had to be nice to Jim or I would be in trouble.

  “Come on,” Jim persisted. “Maybe before supper?”

  “If it doesn’t rain, sure.”

  April’s scowl disappeared. “Let’s get rid of our bags and run down to the beach.” She pulled her bag and her harp case out of the rumble seat of the Duesy. “I can feel the water already. Was it this hot in Italy, John E. O’Malley?”

  “It was even hotter.” I took the bag from one hand and the harp case from the other, knowing that Jim would never think of carrying someone else’s luggage. “Hey, you planning to stay for a week?”

  He’d bring candy and buy flowers before the day was over, but somehow no one had told him about luggage.

  “Only a big weekend. Just drop that at the door of the Drake, would you, Vangie? I’ll meet you at the beach.”

  “I’m staying at the Drake too!” Jim bristled with pride. “Private room. They’re really swell!”

  “Oh?” A brown eyebrow lifted in surprise. “Where did they put you, Vangie?”

  “In a cabinet at the back of the priests’ house. Mrs. Kennelly thought I might make a good priest.”

  Her eyes moved back and forth between me and Jim, probing us as a precinct captain might when sizing up two voters. “I’m sure you would,” she said, responding seriously to my jest. “Maybe if there’s no priest here this weekend, they might let you say mass.”

  “April!” Clarice protested.

  “I really don’t mean it.” April looked guilty. “I’m sure God isn’t mad at me.”

  “Not for long anyway,” I reassured her. “It’s probably the heat.”

  “Probably…anyway, see you all at the beach!” She danced ahead of us, her bright good humor recaptured. Almost.

  It would be a difficult weekend.

  “Isn’t she a swell girl, Johnny?” Jim beamed proudly as he watched her disappear beyond the dining hall. “You will help me this weekend?”

  Clarice listened intently.

  “As much as I can,” I said briskly. “See you both at the beach.”

  I dropped April’s bag and harp case with Mrs. Kennelly and rushed back to the priests’ house to change to my swim trunks. I wanted a few moments alone with April Cronin before I had to share her with Jim and Clarice.

  She was waiting alone on the pier, her feet dangling in the water. Her red swimsuit with a broad gold belt matched her discarded beach pajamas. The girl had expensive taste in clothes.

  That was all right, we’d never lack for money. My savings, like those of my father, were in Union Carbide.

  “You’re dazzling,” I said as I sat next to her.

  “Thank you, kind sir.” She blushed with pleasure. The flush spread from her face to her throat and chest. I wanted desperately to take her in my arms and kiss her. “Why are you and Jim in separate rooms?”

  Down to serious business right away.

  “I didn’t think I could get away this weekend. I’m designing another church—”

  “Besides All Souls?”

  I didn’t recall that I had told her the name of my Unitarian church in Evanston.

  “Right. Mike Hurley, my boss, is in a rush for the preliminary drawings. I managed to finish up enough of them to be able to catch the late afternoon train. The only room they had left was in the priests’ house. I kind of suspect that Mrs. Kennelly was saving it for me.”

  That seemed to satisfy her. “Is the room nice?”

  “Kind of small. Hardly space to breathe. My virtue is safe there this weekend.”

  I wondered if she’d be offended by my slightly risqué comment.

  She wasn’t. After all, she was a flapper.

  “I think virtue is safe everywhere in Barry.” She nudged me, very lightly, with her elbow. “That’s why Mommy and Daddy let me come up here.”

  “When I was unpacking I thought that it would be difficult even for married people on weekends up here. Pretty thin walls.”

  “If I ever marry,” she said firmly, “and I’m up here with my husband, I won’t let thin walls stop me.”

  “I’m sure it won’t stop him either…. And what do you mean ‘if’? No faith in Saint Anne?”

  She nudged me again. “You’re terrible.”

  I captured her hand and raised it to my lips. She gave it to me timidly. “Down payment,” I said, kissing each finger respectfully. “More when it’s dark. Much more.”

  “You really are terrible.” She glanced around to make sure that our exchange of affection was not stirring too much attention among the older folks on the beach chairs. “Remind me to avoid you in the dark.”

  But she didn’t pull her hand away.

  “I’m glad I’m not in too much trouble for not sending you my address.”

  “Oh,”—she withdrew her fingers from my lips but continued to hold my hand—“I know the address of the Pensione Elizabetta, number 24 Via Nuova, right off the Piazza Venezia where that terrible man shows off to the crowds and behind the Via Bottega Oscura.”

  “How did you know that?” I tried to pull my hand away from her.

  She held on firmly. “I won’t tell! I won’t tell. But it wasn’t your mother. And it wasn’t Jim either.”

  “He probably didn’t remember.”

  “Now,” she reproved me gently, “be nice to poor Jim.”

  “Yes, ma’am…I’m glad you’re not angry at me.”

  “Well….” She considered. “I was at first. Because I did want to write you. Then I was worried about you. And I prayed for you every night when I said my night prayers—”

  “On your knees?”

  “Where else? And don’t interrupt. Then I did become very angry and—”

  “What did you pray for?”

  “That no harm would befall you and that you would come safe and healthy…and I said don’t interrupt.”

  She finally pried her hand loose, but only to slap me lightly on the thigh, an action that sent a manic current of electricity through my body.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then I said to myself, well, if John the Evangelist isn’t writing, he must have a good reason for not writing and I shouldn’t be angry. People should trust their friends. And, anyway, his guardian angel will take care of him.” Her hand rested now on my thigh, as bold and as brazen an action as one might have imagined in those days.

  “So you stopped praying for me?”

  “ ’Course not.”

  “Clarice asked me last night if I met any girls while I was away.”

  It was a sanitized version of Clarice’s question, but it would do as a pretext for telling my side of the story first.

  “Typical Clarice, always direct. Well…” Her hand slipped away, fortunately for the remnants of my sanity. “Naturally you met girls. You weren’t living in a monastery, were you? Or even”—giggle—“a priests’ house. If I were in Europe this summer I certainly hope I would have met boys.”

  She was being tolerant, more tolerant than she probably felt.

  “They were all beautiful—”

  “Naturally.”

  “And intelligent—”

  “What else?”

  “Now who’s interrupting?” I slapped her thigh very gently.

  She jumped in surprise, but did not protest, not even when my hand somehow found its way to the same part of her body and rested there.

  “And charming and sweet and wond
erful,” she continued unsteadily.

  “And I didn’t lose my heart to any of them.” I removed my hand, with a final little pat.

  She laughed. “You get absolution at the priests’ house, not here.”

  “Someday maybe I’ll tell you why I didn’t write. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to.”

  “I wrote you.”

  “I didn’t receive any letters.”

  “I was afraid to send them.”

  “As I was to send the ones I wrote to you.”

  “You wrote me?” Her face became crafty. “I’ll show you my letters if you show me yours.”

  “Someday.”

  “Why not now?”

  “They’re love letters, April,” I whispered.

  “What else would they be?”

  Then Clarice and Jim appeared coming down the hill.

  “I think I’d better swim.” She stood up quickly and plunged into the water with a skillful shallow dive.

  Her rear end, I reflected, was not as shapely as Clarice’s but it would do.

  Oh yes, it would do nicely.

  28

  Jim was cheating.

  “How many strokes?” I asked wearily, scorecard in hand.

  “Five,” he chortled. “One over par, not bad, huh?

  “Are you sure?” I took a deep breath for patience.

  “Pretty sure.” He smiled innocently. “Let me see.” He counted strokes on his fingers. “One from the tee, one on the fairway, a chip shot, and you saw the two puts. Five, right?”

  “If you say so.”

  I had counted three fairway shots and two chips. He should have an eight.

  Jim always cheated at sports. It was, I had previously thought, a harmless eccentricity, made all the more innocent because he seemed to believe sincerely in his own version of what had happened.

  Now, after a long and trying day in which he had embarrassed both the two young women and me, his systematic dishonesty was preying on my nerves.

  He had indeed changed for the worse while I was away. The timing of his jack-in-the-box movements, once flawless, had been disrupted. The joy had gone out of his gift giving (beach towels for all of us in addition to the usual Fanny Mae’s). During the summer of 1925, Jim Clancy had somehow become a haunted man; and his haunts had turned him from a happy clown to a tormented pest.

  The rest of us had not wanted to play golf. The day was too hot, the water too inviting, the golf course too far away, especially for the complicated logistics of two trips in the Duesy and renting four sets of golf clubs.

  But Jim had bragged about his golf accomplishments to compensate for his inability to swim. I knew that Jim was a terrible golfer under the best of circumstances; desperately anxious to prove himself to April and Clarice, he would be even more manic on the course. I tried to veto the expedition but April insisted that if Jim wanted to play golf, then why certainly we should play with him.

  Jim had often seemed in the past to experience periods of need to be the center of any activity where there were more than two people—a result of the times when his mother had brought her clever little boy into the parlor to entertain her friends.

  There had been no malice in his intermittent need to attract attention. But, while I had been in Rome, the need changed from occasional to permanent. It was still not malicious, I told myself, but it was painful and embarrassing.

  I tried to persuade myself that there was not any sexual rivalry in his attempts to divert attention from me when Clarice and April were present. He would have behaved the same way if two men were with us at Twin Lakes.

  When he and Clarice joined us at the pier earlier in the day, I was challenged by the girls to render an account of my romantic conquests during my trip to Europe.

  I decided to tell the truth, not all the truth of course, but more than they expected me to tell. I gave a comic version of my relationships with Laura, Siobahn, and Paola. It wasn’t hard to make the stories sound funny, because they were pretty comic in reality.

  After each laugh, Jim, wearing an outlandish and ill-fitting one-piece swimsuit, blue on top and white trunks, would interrupt to tell a story about himself, usually about conversations with Negro women. He didn’t say they were disorderly house conversations, but the implication was pretty clear.

  Clarice and April listened in silent mortification and then turned back to me for the next chapter in my story.

  My comic theme was that I was the clown, not without some basis in fact. Jim’s theme was how he had made a fool out of some poor, stupid Negro woman.

  It was a strange conversation, three adults being periodically interrupted by an unruly child, patiently listening to the child, and then returning to their own conversation.

  Well, the two women tolerated him patiently. I kept my ire under control because I did not want to make matters worse by losing my temper. If April could be patient with him, I told myself, so could I. Even more patient.

  “So I said to the nigger, ‘Girl, you lose the bet because five nickels make a quarter and four quarters make a dollar.’ And she says, ‘Mr. Clancy, you sure are one smart white man.’”

  Jim guffawed at the end of the story, though it made no sense to the rest of us. Clarice stared at him blankly. April smiled faintly.

  “Maybe we have heard enough stories about the Negro woman, Jim.” I spoke the words very slowly.

  “Yeah, well, as you know, Johnny, I could go on all day with stories about how dumb they are. Poor people, I feel sorry for them. I give them lots of money, don’t I, Johnny? Well, anyway, let’s go play some golf! It’s a swell game.”

  So we played golf.

  None of us were very good. I played in the nineties, very high, without any practice, and with a whole lot of practice maybe on one or two occasions I would lower my score to the high eighties, again very high. Clarice rarely hit the ball off the ground. April had a lovely, graceful swing that suggested that she could be as successful on the links as on the tennis courts if she wanted to. But her sense of the absurd forced her to laugh at herself—and at the rest of us.

  “Vangie, you turn so red on your backswing. You’ll get high blood pressure if you play this game too often.”

  “Thank you,” I said grimly.

  “It was a wonderful drive, so high, so far…”

  “And?”

  “And with curves like your friend Paola.”

  “All right, let’s see what you can do.”

  She drove into the same area of rough into which I had sliced. Only her drive wasn’t a slice. She had deliberately aimed for the place I was, so we could talk in some kind of privacy while we went through the motions of searching for our golf balls.

  “See you guys on the green.” Jim, now wearing white plus fours, a white vest, and a white cap, waved cheerfully.

  When we were alone, however, trudging toward the rough, we were embarrassed and awkward, neither one of us willing to talk about Jim’s outrageous behavior.

  He was my friend, I told myself, and his performance was innocent. He was deeply troubled about something. And his problem was his mother’s fault anyway.

  “Are you sure I can’t carry your clubs?”

  “I’m not an invalid,” she laughed. “Besides, if you carried mine, you’d have to carry Clarice’s too.”

  Later, when the weekend ended in disaster, I regretted that I hadn’t risen to the bait in that comment.

  “What are your parents like?” I asked her. “They seem to trust you completely.”

  “They’re such dear sweet people, Vangie. I’m their youngest, I was born when Mama was forty-four—they’re older than your parents—and they’ve spoiled me rotten. I’m a pampered, self-indulgent youngest child who has never been denied anything all her life…. There’s your golf ball.”

  Her self-accusation had been delivered in a calm, matter-of-fact tone. It doubtless represented exactly how she saw herself.

  “You have been well loved, April.” I removed my fi
ve iron from the golf bag. “None of the rest of what you say is true.”

  She was silent while I used the iron to blast, not impressively, out of the rough.

  “Oh, there’s my ball. I drove farther than you did, Vangie dear.”

  It was the first time she had called me “dear.”

  “I said that you were not spoiled.”

  “I heard you.” She studied her clubs and selected a six iron.

  Her shot was much better than mine. Her ball lay at least fifty yards farther down the fairway, but on a direct line, so that we could walk together.

  “You really don’t think I’m a spoiled brat? The sisters at school said—”

  “They were wrong.”

  She nodded. “Sometimes I think so too. But, oh, Vangie, I love Mama and Daddy so much. And I know I won’t have them with me much longer. You understand what it’s like to feel that way, don’t you? I pray every night that the Blessed Mother protect them and give them long life. And that I don’t do anything to make their last years sad or painful.”

  I took her arm firmly in my right hand. She turned to face me, brown eyes troubled and uncertain.

  “How long anyone lives is up to God, April Cronin. But you’ll never make anyone who loves you sad.”

  Tears formed in her eyes, but she grinned at me.

  “Mama warned me that you West Side Irish have clever tongues.”

  Jim won the golf match with eighty-eight, eleven strokes ahead of me and fifteen ahead of April. Clarice pleaded that I not add up her score.

  “I won! I won!” he crowed. “Did I tell you I was a great golfer?”

  I’m sure he believed that he was.

  “You did very well, James dear,” April said in her judicious, King Solomon tone. “But Vangie did well too for someone who hasn’t played all summer.”

  She called him “dear” too.

  Traitor.

  “But I would win even if he had practiced,” Jim insisted, hurt at the hint that he might not be permanently the better.

  “Jim always beats me,” I said casually.

  April frowned, not liking my hint that Jim always cheated.

  We deposited the rented clubs in the red-painted barn that served as a clubhouse, drank a quick Coke, and then went out to the Duesy.