Thy Brother's Wife

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Sean sensed that he was on the spot, as he frequently was in such discussions. It seemed to him that he was being tested every night. “In an age when sex has become a pleasure unto itself, Eminence, we have to remind our people that sex is basically for procreation.”

  Jimmy, who had remained Sean’s closest friend despite their theological differences, spoke up abruptly. “Most married men and women will tell you that that’s not why they sleep with one another at night.”

  “The pill doesn’t change anything, Jimmy,” Sean said. He knew from previous arguments that Jimmy thought the pill might be a legitimate Catholic form of birth control. “And I’m sure the bishops of the world have no intention of making exceptions for the pill.”

  “Oh, Father Cronin, are you sure of that?” The Cardinal smiled his quick little smile. “If there were a secret ballot, and if it was clear that the Pope had not prescribed beforehand the outcome of that ballot, I tell you this, Father Cronin: the bishops of the world for reasons of the pastoral good of our married people would vote for a change on birth control.”

  “I can’t believe that, your Eminence,” Sean said.

  “Ah, come now, Father Cronin. You are such an idealist. A bishop, much less a cardinal archbishop, cannot afford to be that kind of an idealist. We may not understand the theology, we may not have insight into history, but if we are listening to our priests and to our people we know that something has to be done on the birth-control question.”

  “If you say so, it must be true,” Sean conceded.

  “Oh, it’s true all right, Father,” the Cardinal said quietly. “A number of us are going to try to see the Pope next week and persuade him to open up the Council for discussion of the problem. I suppose”—he sighed—“he will not listen to us.”

  “And what will that mean, Eminence?”

  “That will mean, my dear Father Cronin,” the Cardinal said in his gentle voice, “that sometime before this decade is over the Church will be confronted by disaster.”

  * * *

  Paul Cronin realized that he was not going to eliminate organized crime in Chicago. The proper strategy was some fast and easy victories, a lot of public acclaim, and then an escape from the quicksand. He had already been successful in putting a number of small-time hoods behind bars, and he was now gearing up to uncover mob infiltration of a local labor union. Tony Swartz, who had joined him as his assistant, believed in what they were doing, with an idealism born of the Kennedy years. He seemed unaware that Paul cared little about the effects of the Chicago Strike Force, except as a stepping-stone for his own ambitions for political office and as an excuse to go to Washington frequently to see Chris Waverly.

  She was now waiting for him in the Sans Souci restaurant, a block away from the White House. Paul had selected the Sans Souci because it was no longer an “in” restaurant, and there was less chance that he would run into anyone who knew Nora. A year ago, all the bright young men from the White House had gone there for lunch, usually to sit admiringly at the feet of the tall, black-haired Pat Moynihan, who was the closest thing to a house intellectual that the Kennedys had. Then the second-raters discovered that the Sans Souci was the place to be, and the White House staff found other places to eat.

  Chris lit a cigarette and sampled her martini. Paul would be late. The Kennedys cared about no one’s time but their own. Yet, still riding the crest of their Cuban missile crisis triumph, they were the toast of the nation. It would not last, of that Chris was sure.

  Paul would be filled with his most recent triumphs in Chicago—putting some cheap hood behind bars. He might have illusions as to why he had been sent to Chicago; she had none. The Kennedys had decided he was dangerous to have around. He had been shipped out.

  Chris had not made up her mind about Paul. He was fine in bed, if perhaps not the great lover he imagined himself to be. He was pleasant, attractive, and charming, and he was filthy rich. He was the kind of man Chris wanted—a nice sort with some conscience but not too much. The news business was becoming tiresome. She had never intended to stay in it after thirty, and she had been searching for a man who would be tolerable as a mate and whom she could mold into a major political power. Paul seemed to fill the bill. He had natural political skills and instincts. He was ambitious but not excessively so. Above all, he had the knack of saying exactly the right thing in exactly the right way when the red light of the television camera blinked on.

  For all her cynicism, Chris felt a knot in her throat when Paul finally burst into the Sans Souci, brimming with energy and enthusiasm. Watch it, she told herself, you may be turning into a romantic.

  His greeting, as he slid into the booth next to her, was a quick peck on the cheek. Chris guided his chin toward her mouth and responded with a long, lingering kiss. “When are you going to come back to Washington and make an honest woman of me?” she purred, releasing him only after she was sure that he had been thoroughly shaken.

  “What do you mean?” His broad smile was briefly hesitant.

  “You and I are a lot alike. Both of us want to see you go places in Washington. And both of us were behind the door when consciences were passed out.… Your Nora probably needs a man with a very stern conscience.”

  “Someone like my brother Sean?”

  “A priest?”

  He signaled the waiter for his drink order. “I’m only joking. Sean hardly knows that women exist.”

  * * *

  Nora Cronin could not concentrate on the book she was reading. Her husband was in Washington at a meeting concerning the Chicago Strike Force. He would be coming home soon. Nora missed him more than she usually did when he was away. Although she had waited for Tom Shields to give her the go-ahead to become pregnant, this pregnancy was much more difficult than the other two had been.

  She closed the book and rested it on what was left of her lap. Three more weeks. It was absurd to think that she would die, yet the thought kept stealing into her mind. She was only twenty-eight years old and the picture of health, save for a womb that didn’t seem to want to function properly, particularly when a child was leaving it. She had learned from her mother and from the nuns at school that everything was part of God’s plan. Perhaps God was punishing her. But she didn’t know why.

  She yearned to be at Oakland Beach, basking in the sunlight in the morning, swinging a golf club in the afternoon, and chatting with the neighbors over cocktails in the evening. Glendore seemed so far away, and she had almost forgotten what a golf club felt like.

  She grabbed the edge of the table to help keep her balance as she stood. If she got much bigger, she thought, they would have to devise a pulley system to raise and lower her from a sitting position.

  The first pain came. It was not like the pains of her previous labor; rather it felt as if the baby inside her was trying to tear her apart.

  Luckily, Mary and Eileen, who were utterly delighted at the prospect of having a baby brother, were asleep upstairs. Somehow they had all gotten into the habit of thinking of this new baby as a boy. Undoubtedly, Mike Cronin’s influence at work.

  Another even more stabbing pain ripped through her. She screamed for the housekeeper. “Anna, come quickly. Something is terribly wrong!”

  I’m going to die after all, she thought, as she fell to the floor, unconscious.

  * * *

  Sean stared in stunned disbelief at the cablegram. He was as numb as he had been when Father McCabe told him that his brother was missing in action in Korea. NORA CRITICAL. RETURN IF YOU CAN. PAUL.

  Oh, God. No. Don’t take her, please don’t.

  He went down the steps from his attic room in Chicago House to the floor below where the Cardinal lived. Eamon McCarthy was sitting at his desk in suspenders and a white collarless shirt. The new red robes of his cardinalship were hanging behind him. He was poring over a stack of papers, the flimsy sheets that came from the typis polygattis vaticanis.

  “Your Eminence.…” Sean hesitated in the doorway.

&
nbsp; The kindly man peered over his glasses. “Yes, Sean? You look troubled.” It was the first time he had called Sean anything but Father Cronin.

  Hardly able to speak, Sean showed him the cablegram.

  “Of course you must go home at once,” said the Cardinal. “Your family needs you more than I do just now.”

  “Thank you, Your Eminence. I’m sure Nora will be all right—”

  “It’s all in God’s hands. In any event, catch the first plane in the morning and stay as long as necessary.”

  “I’ll return as soon as Nora is out of danger.”

  “I will pray for her, Father Cronin. I shall pray very hard indeed. I’m sure that she will recover.”

  Sean’s stomach was twisted with fear. “It’s all in God’s hands.” Sean echoed the Cardinal’s words, searching in the depths of his being for enough faith in God to believe what he was saying. He found nothing.

  * * *

  Nora knew that death had retreated when the hospital smells began to bother her again: the antiseptic odor at first, then overcooked food, and then human sickness. The terrible, terrible cold leaked slowly out of her veins and she found herself yearning for the warmth of the sunlight.

  She had just finished giving her yet unnamed daughter her bottle. The little girl was lying next to her on the bed, tiny but alert, intrigued, it seemed, by the world into which she had been plunged so abruptly and unceremoniously. Tears of sadness flowed down Nora’s cheeks.

  “Why so many tears?” It was Sean. Had he been there all along? She had fallen into the habit of drifting in and out of sleep, as much a result of the depression that had taken control of her as of the medication or any actual physical exhaustion.

  “She’s a perfectly presentable little girl, isn’t she?” she said after a long while.

  “More than presentable,” he said, poking his finger at his niece, who poked back with her own tiny finger. “I don’t know much about babies, but this one is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. The spitting image of her mother.”

  “No one wants her.” Nora began sobbing. “Not her grandfather, or her father, or her mother. We’re all angry at her because she’s not a little boy.”

  “I’ve just watched you with her. I don’t think you’re angry at her any more,” Sean said. “You just haven’t had a chance to get used to the idea of another little Cronin girl. What’s her name, by the way?”

  “She doesn’t have a name. We didn’t have any girls’ names ready, we were so sure it would be a boy. I’ve thought about Michele—”

  “No,” Sean said, “she’s not a Michele. I know what she is. She’s a Noreen. A little Nora.”

  Despite her weakness and her pain, Nora Riley Cronin sat up in bed and smiled. “You’re right. She is a Noreen.”

  * * *

  Sean baptized his new niece in the grim nondenominational chapel of the hospital on the morning of November 22.

  “Noreen Marie Cronin”—Sean poured liberal amounts of water on her tiny bald head—“I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

  Noreen Marie Cronin marked her entry among God’s people not by wailing in protest at the cold water cascading over her face but rather by gurgling happily and trying to swallow some of the water.

  On the way to the airport that afternoon, Sean studied his brother carefully. They had spent little time together in the last ten years. Who was Paul Cronin now? As far as appearances went, he was a tall, handsome New Frontiersman, his dark wavy hair cut in the Kennedy style, his PT-boat tie clip a discreet but impressive badge. A very successful and very important young politician.

  “It doesn’t make Dad happy now that we’re both doing what he wanted us to do, does it, Paul?”

  Paul glanced at him quickly. “Did you call him yesterday?”

  “All I got was a stream of orders to pass on to the Pope, who Dad thinks is a weak-kneed sniveler.”

  “Probably like the orders I get to pass on to the President, who Dad calls a lightweight poseur.”

  They laughed together, and Sean felt a brief sensation of the old comradery that had been greatest in the past when they won a tennis match or a sailboat race together.

  “He was disappointed, I suppose, that Noreen isn’t a boy?” Sean said tentatively.

  “Furious. Chewed Nora out, I’m afraid, while she was still having blood pumped into her. As though it were her fault. And then he invented some ‘urgent business’ so that he could miss the baptism.”

  “Sounds like Dad. Won’t even give in to genetics,” Sean said.

  “God, I was so frightened that we were going to lose Nora. I don’t know what I’d do without her, Sean. My life would fall apart.”

  A niggling voice in the back of Sean’s brain told him that, while he ought not to doubt Paul’s sincerity, the sentiment of his little speech sounded disturbingly artificial. Sean realized that he knew little about the man who was his brother, and even less about the quality of his marriage.

  Paul drove the Mercedes into the parking lot at O’Hare. “I’ll park here and walk with you. The Strike Force can spare me for another hour or so, I’m sure.”

  Something seemed to be amiss as they walked through the parking lot under the gray November sky. Little knots of people were gathered in intense conversation, and there seemed to be no one waiting for taxis or racing to the terminal building.

  Paul’s words echoed Sean’s thoughts. “Something strange is going on here. Do you feel it too?”

  At the edge of the parking lot, just across from the terminal, a stewardess in a United Airlines uniform was crying into a fragile lace handkerchief.

  “Excuse me, miss.” Paul turned on his considerable charm. “Can you tell me what has happened?”

  The girl looked up from her handkerchief, her face red and puffy. “They’ve shot the President!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  1963–1964

  Paul Cronin waited nervously in the Mayor’s outer office. The interview was important, and he needed all his cool to carry it off. At least three very important friends had interceded with the Mayor for him. He had all the right credentials: Notre Dame graduate, war hero, Kennedy aide, the Strike Force, good family. He would make an ideal “blue ribbon” candidate for state senator. He also had his father’s money behind him for the campaign. If the Cook County Committee would slate him at their meeting in December, there would be no primary contest; the only other announced candidates were obvious hacks.

  “I know your father well; we grew up together,” the short red-faced Mayor said, pumping his hand. “And your poor mother, God rest her soul. A great Chicago family, the Cronins. And you’ve got a great future in politics in this city. And in the country, with your wonderful work for President Kennedy, God be good to him.…”

  The nonstop monologue continued, with Paul being permitted only an occasional word. Finally the Mayor came to the point. “I’m glad to see you’re thinking of elective office in this county. We need more fine young men like you in politics. It’s a great vocation—like your brother’s, though not as holy. I’m sure the slating committee will be very interested in your presentation.”

  It sounded like an endorsement to Paul. “Your support will be very important, Your Honor.”

  “The slating committee’s gotta make its own decisions.” The Mayor rushed on. “They have to consider all the candidates and choose the one they think has the best chance of being the best senator from your district. And, of course, the man who has the best chance of winning.”

  “I hope that I win their support, Mr. Mayor, because I’m in the race till Election Day.”

  “That’s the kind of spunk I admire. This city of Chicago needs your kind of young man in politics,” the Mayor said. He stood and held out his hand.

  Paul knew when he walked out of the office that he had the nomination in the bag. It didn’t have to be a very big bag, because state senator was not an important job. Springfield was dullsville,
and members of the Illinois General Assembly had very little clout unless they were willing to stay in Springfield for a lot longer than he intended. But in four years the veteran Congressman from the third district would probably retire. A presentable record in Springfield would be the first step to Congress, then to the Senate, then to … well, any place.

  Paul wondered whether Dick Daley was baffled by such a forceful application for such a small job. Probably not. The Mayor had a reputation for being able to read the cards before they were dealt.

  * * *

  Elizabeth Hanover, the woman who was serving as chairman of the Gallery Committee, was not Mike’s kind of woman. She was tall and slender and black-haired. Moreover, she displayed none of the shy modesty that Mike usually found appealing.

  Mike had been persuaded to lend his name to a civic group that would fund an impressionist gallery on the North Side. He meant to attend the first meeting and then quietly disappear. If it were not for his hope that Paul would be slated to run for the State Senate, he might not have even bothered to show up at the first meeting.

  However, his kind of woman or not, Elizabeth was stunning: about ten years younger than he, smoldering black eyes, a throaty voice, and a figure that stirred welcome feelings in Mike. He wasn’t over the hill yet.

  Elizabeth accepted his invitation to lunch at the Mid-America Club on the top floor of the new Prudential Building. As they watched the snowflakes gently cover the brown squares of Grant Park and the ugly railroad tracks that bisected it, they talked first of Monet, then of Mike’s plans for Paul’s election campaign.

  By the time they were finished with lunch, there was no one left in the dining room save the two of them and the always polite waiters. There was a brief silence. Elizabeth ground out her cigarette.

  “Isn’t your apartment on Outer Drive East?” She gestured toward the lake, now hidden by the snow.