Thy Brother's Wife

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Aunt Jane was silent for a moment. Then, as though admitting defeat, she said, “The child has bad teeth. We’ll have to get her to an orthodontist at once.”

  Paul Cronin, a sixteen-year-old football star at St. Ignatius for whom Nora instantly developed a worshipful crush, hardly acknowledged her existence. His younger brother, Sean, a freshman at Quigley Seminary, who had the kindest smile Nora had ever seen, took her under his wing and explained to her who all the servants were and how to behave with them. He introduced her to the neighbors. He even walked her over to St. Titus and talked about her to the Mother Superior, a cheerful woman in black and white Dominican habit.

  “Thank you, Sean,” Nora said when they walked back down the drive, lined with enormous oak trees turning red and gold in the autumn sunlight. “Are you my brother now?” A little bit of warmth had slipped through the tundra in Nora Riley’s young soul.

  “Kind of half brother, half friend. Is that all right?”

  “Great,” she assented. “Perfect.”

  * * *

  The war between Aunt Jane and Nora raged on whenever Mike was not present. It reached fever pitch by Christmas. Sean’s attempts at making peace were ignored by both combatants. Aunt Jane harassed Nora about everything from the hem length on her school uniform to her table manners. Nora responded with stubborn silence. If she cried over the persecution, it was in the privacy of her room.

  Christmas-tree decoration time brought the contest to a head. Normally, Sean decorated the tree with the assistance of Pansy and Erithea, the cook and the maid. It was always a huge tree, filling the front of their parlor, because his father remembered the days “before the war”—he meant the first war—when his family could afford only a tabletop tree.

  After Aunt Jane discovered that Nora was going to help with the decorations, she insisted on participating for the first time that Sean could remember. Despite the Christmas music playing on their large console Philco radio, Aunt Jane had little of the Christmas spirit. Every ornament that Nora put on the tree, every string of tinsel she draped across a branch had to be changed, usually with a protest about clumsiness that must have been inherited from her parents.

  Sean was fascinated by the bony little waif who had transformed their house by her slow smile and piercing blue eyes. He had learned her moods as he learned the moods of everyone he was close to, instinctively and without paying conscious attention to the process. He saw the thunderclouds building up in her eyes. Nervously, he suggested, “Maybe we ought to stop for the day. I have to go over to Titus for Midnight Mass practice. Father—”

  Jane was not listening. “Can’t you see that’s the wrong place for the angel?” She pulled the ornament out of Nora’s hand. “Put it here.” The angel, a prize Michael Cronin had brought home from France, fell from Jane’s hand and crashed on the floor. “You clumsy little fool!” She slapped Nora’s face. “You’ve broken my brother’s angel!”

  Lightning leaped from Nora’s eyes, but she said nothing.

  “That’s enough, Aunt Jane.” Sean grabbed her wrist. He almost felt sorry for his poor lonely aunt and her silent drinking. He could smell the bourbon on her breath.

  “Neither one of you have any right to be in this house,” Jane hissed and fled from the parlor.

  Nora, her foot on the staircase, whirled. Hands on her thin little hips, she opened her mouth as if to say something. She hesitated, then ran up the stairs.

  Later, Sean knocked on the door of her room. She was huddled over the desk, weeping silently. “So you do cry.”

  She nodded but did not move from the desk.

  He sat beside her and touched her shoulder reassuringly. “It’s all right, Nora. Aunt Jane does that to everyone.”

  “What did she mean about neither one of us belonging here?”

  “I’m not sure. She says crazy things. It’s the drinking. Some sort of batty notion that I’m my mother’s son and Paul is my father’s son.”

  “That is odd.” Nora’s tearstained face turned toward him. “Whatever could she mean by that?”

  “Probably that I look so much like my mother. It doesn’t matter.” Yet it did matter. Deep down inside, Jane’s mysterious comment troubled Sean greatly.

  * * *

  After Michael Cronin returned from the war in 1945 with a Distinguished Service Cross, two Purple Hearts, and a matching pair of Silver Stars, he had hurled himself back into Cronin Enterprises as though he were trying to make up for the lost years. His office continued to be located in a small suite in the Field Building, with four associates and a handful of clerks and secretaries providing all the staff needed for his mysterious local, national, and international deals.

  Over the next few years his sons saw him only a little more than they had when he was in the Philippines, sometimes at Oakland Beach in the company of one of the beautifully turned-out women friends who still visited him there, and sometimes at the house on Glenwood Drive, where the friends were never admitted.

  One evening, when Sean had finished his third year at Quigley Seminary and Paul his freshman year at Notre Dame, the family was gathered in the parlor at Glendore. The French windows were opened and the curtains stirred in the light breeze that came off the lake. Sean was reading and Paul was shocking Aunt Jane with his description of the movie The Lost Weekend, which he had seen the night before with his current girl friend, a certain Caroline Flaherty, whom his father had dismissed as “not being from a good family.”

  Mike, hands jammed in the pockets of his white flannel trousers, paced the balcony like a captain on the bridge of his ship. He seemed tired and older than his forty-eight years. There were lines in his face that had not been there the year before, and his eyes had lost some of their vitality.

  “Where’s Nora?” he asked, as though only then realizing she was not at home.

  “Taking a golf lesson,” Sean said. “The pro at Long Beach Country Club says she may break a hundred before the summer is over.”

  “The kid has good blood, but she’s a mess. Too tall, too thin. In a couple of years I’ll have to send her to modeling school. Maybe they can teach her to stand up straight. You can’t marry a girl with bad posture, can you, Paul?”

  Sean was startled. This was the first he had heard of a marriage between Nora and Paul. Like all his father’s other decisions, it was proclaimed as something that had already been discussed and settled.

  “Certainly not,” said Paul, with his customary good humor. “Make her stand up straight.”

  Paul didn’t think his father was serious. Sean was not so sure. “She has pretty eyes,” he commented.

  “You’re supposed to be a seminarian. You shouldn’t be looking at girls’ eyes.” Mike, who adored his foster child, chuckled at the compliment.

  “I don’t think they’re pretty at all.” Aunt Jane entered the discussion with a predictably unflattering remark, but Mike paid no attention to it. Indeed, it often seemed he had not heard anything that Aunt Jane said in the last five years.

  In the background there was the sound of a slamming door and footsteps running up the stairs.

  “Hi!” Nora Riley, the subject of their conversation, entered the parlor. She was still tall and skinny, but she had deep penetrating blue eyes that demanded your attention and the beginnings of what might one day be a pretty face.

  “What did you shoot, punk?” Sean asked her.

  “Ninety-eight,” she said. “Next summer I’ll beat you.” There was a faint trace of a grin.

  “No more golf lessons for you, young lady. It’s not dignified. I don’t want to see you with those clubs again.” The command was harsh but the tone was affectionate, almost caressing.

  “My mother played golf, Uncle Mike,” Nora said softly.

  Michael Cronin grunted in disapproval. Nonetheless, the golf lessons continued.

  * * *

  The summer of 1948 was the best summer yet for Sean Cronin. His relationship with Paul had changed. The rivalry and competitiv
eness were there, but now Paul viewed him as an ally and even as a friend. They were tennis and golf partners and an enthusiastic, if as yet inexperienced, sailing crew. Paul was generous in his praise of Sean’s skills, though usually the praise cast Sean in the role of the dutiful second-in-command.

  Being second-in-command on the Mary Eileen or the tennis court didn’t bother Sean. To be respected by his handsome, popular brother, and to be admitted to his circle of friends, was more than enough.

  One day Sean returned in the early afternoon to the house overlooking the lake. He had been thoroughly drubbed by Nora in their eighteen-hole golf match and, after a six and five defeat, he was not ready to risk himself in another eighteen holes.

  He moved to the deck chair on the balcony, nodding over a copy of A Bell for Adano. It was one of those humid summer days on the shores of Lake Michigan, with big thunderheads building up in the sky.

  He was stirred from his sleeplike reverie by the sound of a woman pleading. “No. Please don’t. Oh, no … don’t!”

  Who was the woman? he asked himself. Aunt Jane had gone to Chicago on one of her shopping expeditions. Nora was still at the club. The Packard was in the driveway, which meant that his father was in the house—alone, Sean had thought. He stirred in his chair. The French window next to him led into his father’s study. The window was open and the drapes were not completely drawn. The scent of the roses that decorated the study teased his nostrils. Still in his reverie, Sean glanced lazily into the study.

  His father was in the den with Mrs. Conway, a friend from Baltimore who had come to visit him frequently that summer. Mike was none too gently pulling off her clothing, despite what seemed to Sean to be her adamant resistance.

  Sean watched, fascinated. He knew he shouldn’t be there, but he couldn’t drag himself away. Anyway, if he attempted to move, his father might hear him and that would be even worse.

  “Take off your slip, woman,” his father ordered, though in a pleasant tone of voice. “I can’t do everything myself.”

  Mrs. Conway quickly obeyed. A pretty platinum blonde in her late thirties, she was breathtaking with her clothes off. Mike took off his own clothes. Then he pulled her to him and bent her over backward. He assaulted the front of her body with lingering, hungry kisses.

  Mike seemed harsh, even brutal with her, but at the same time delicate and gentle. Her cries and moans turned from protest to pleasure. She pleaded with him at first to stop, then to continue, and finally to finish.

  To Sean’s transfixed eyes, the scene was horrifying, frightening, compelling, and beautiful. So that’s what it was like.…

  Most beautiful of all was the tenderness with which his father and Mrs. Conway caressed each other after their passions had found fulfillment.

  At dinner that night, Mrs. Conway glowed with pleasure. No wonder she comes to Oakland Beach so often, thought Sean. His father seemed both self-satisfied and sad.

  * * *

  “There’s a different set of rules for men like Dad,” Paul said. He was floating on his back above the sandbar, fifty yards off the beach. “If he needs a woman after he’s worked himself into exhaustion for a month to bring off a deal, why shouldn’t he have one? He’s discreet about it and tasteful in his choice of women. What’s wrong with it?”

  “How important do you have to be to get a dispensation from the moral law?”

  “That stuff’s fine for the seminary”—Paul sniffed contemptuously—“but it doesn’t apply in the real world.”

  “He seems so straitlaced about everything else.” Sean’s toes just barely touched the sandbar six feet beneath the placid surface of the lake.

  “Women are meant to be enjoyed,” Paul said confidently. “Unless, of course, you’re going to be a priest. Besides, you take him too seriously. He’s a great man, but half of what he says is bullshit.… Come on, let’s swim back to the beach. That mist drifting down the shore will fog everything in.”

  Paul rarely worried about danger and certainly not about ground fog on the beach. He obviously didn’t want to discuss the subject.

  They swam ashore; Sean with ease and Paul heavily, at the end, because of too much beer and too many cigarettes. As they were drying themselves, shivering in the chill mist, Sean pushed the point. “What do you mean, not take Dad seriously?”

  “Oh, hell, Sean.” Paul was impatient. “I don’t pay attention to ninety percent of what he says. Nora doesn’t take him seriously either. Even Aunt Jane doesn’t, half the time. You’re the only one who believes all his bullshit. Hell, I bet you really expect to be archbishop of Chicago.” There was an edge of contempt in Paul’s voice.

  Sean felt his face grow warm. “It wouldn’t be right to deliberately seek it,” he said firmly. “But the Church needs good leadership, and I’ll try to do the best job I can. I’m probably never going to be a cardinal, but I wouldn’t turn it down.”

  “Come on, little brother, let’s get back to the house; I need a beer.” Paul patted him patronizingly on the head. “You should be the favorite, not me. You’re the only one in the family who’s like him. I wouldn’t be surprised if you become a cardinal long before I’m even a United States senator.” Now Paul’s laughter was self-mocking. “Can you imagine that—Senator Paul Martin Cronin!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  1951

  Sean Cronin slumped over the wheel of his car, too weak for the moment to drag himself out of the battered 1948 Chevy and then climb the stairs to Glendore. Working at the Maryville Orphanage for most of the summer had been a disaster. Nagging worry about Paul was never far from his mind. The pressure from his father to leave the seminary weighed heavily on him. And he did not look forward to spending two weeks on the shores of Lake Michigan. During the past week Aunt Jane had been even more frequently “under the weather,” and Nora’s giddy teenage crowd rasped on his nerves.

  His father’s business trips to the Middle East produced mixed feelings in Sean. For all his peculiarities Sean missed Mike Cronin. On the other hand, the Fourth of July weekend this year had been a disaster. Not only was there tension between his father and Mrs. Conway, a tension that his father never before permitted in his friendships, but the strain of long hours of work, compulsive business travel, and reckless living were taking their toll, though he was only fifty-one years old. When he was in full flush of energy and enthusiasm, he seemed ten years younger; yet on the few occasions when he was in temporary repose, he looked ten years older.

  If Mary Eileen Cronin had lived, perhaps she could have warned her husband that the martinis and the Scotch were exacting a terrible toll. For a moment, Sean thought of his mother. He could only picture her as a young woman a few years older than he now was. He still had dreams in which she was alive, dreams which were so powerful that it took him several minutes of wakefulness to dismiss them as a childhood wish. He had read somewhere in a psychology book that such dreams about a dead parent could last all one’s life. He hoped they would; they were wonderful dreams.

  With a sigh, Sean pushed open the car door and walked up the steps to the main level of the house.

  Nora was in the parlor with Maggie Martin, watching Milton Berle on the television set. Both were dressed in their summer uniforms, Bermuda shorts and cotton shirts. Nora’s shirt was her usual unspectacular white, Maggie’s an eye-stopping pink. A half foot shorter than Nora, Maggie was a pretty sixteen-year-old with long blond hair and a tendency to giggle.

  “Hi, Sean,” she said. “Nice to see you again.” She fluttered her eyelids.

  “Good evening, Maggie,” he replied flatly and retreated to a corner of the room, far from the two teenagers. He turned on the reading light and buried himself in a chair with Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. Over the top edge of the book he saw a brief wry smile from Nora.

  Berle’s string of witticisms eventually ended and, even more blessedly, Maggie bounced out of the house in a crescendo of giggles.

  “She’s really okay,” Nora said in defense of
her friend. “She just doesn’t know how to act when you’re around.”

  “Hmmmmm.”

  “Mind if I sit down and read with you?”

  “If you want,” said Sean, thinking how improbable was the “affair” about which Graham Greene was writing. Nora curled up on the sofa opposite him and took a book off the coffee table. From Here to Eternity. Aunt Jane certainly was slipping if Nora was permitted to read such “trash.”

  “How’s Aunt Jane?”

  Nora did not look up. “Very much under the weather.”

  Nora’s auburn hair was tied behind her head in a long ponytail, revealing the flawless bones of her face and head. Her eyes caught his watching her and he quickly turned away.

  “And when will Dad be home again?” Sean asked after a pause.

  “Labor Day weekend, if he finishes his business with the sheikhs.”

  “And Mrs. Conway?”

  “That’s over. They had a terrible row. She wanted marriage. Uncle Mike is only buying oil this year, not wives.”

  “She seemed like a nice woman. Too bad.”

  Nora closed her book, a finger between the pages, and regarded him coolly, almost dispassionately. “You look gray, Sean.”

  “The orphanage was a bad experience,” he said, feeling the emotion seeping out of him. “They’re not really orphans, of course, mostly kids from broken homes. Lonely, desperate for attention and love. They cling to you almost as though they’re afraid you’re going to let them down the way their parents did.” He sighed in frustration. “I worked so hard with those kids that I was too tired to sleep at night, and none of it did a damn bit of good. In the end, I had to leave them the way everyone always has.”

  “Are we all that different, Sean?” she asked. “We’re as hungry for love as they are, maybe more so. The only reason we don’t cling is—well, how do you cling to people like Uncle Mike or Aunt Jane? When Mrs. Conway was here, I wanted to be with her all the time. That’s the same thing as clinging.”