Golden Years

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Finally, to shut it up, I picked up the receiver and turned on the almost useless bed lamp.

  “Rosemarie Clancy,” I said hoarsely.

  “Hi, Rosie, it’s your intermediate daughter.”

  Bad connection. Dammit, we were still in Russia where all connections are bad.

  “What’s wrong!” I screamed.

  “Gramps died this afternoon. Massive heart attack. Grams said that there are worse ways to die.”

  I covered my breasts with the sheet. You shouldn’t talk to your daughter naked, especially on a bad connection.

  “Moire Meg, he can’t be dead!”

  She had metamorphosed recently into “Mary Margaret,” her baptismal name because she liked the “Catholic sound of it.” Now was no time for that stuff.

  “Grams found him reading in his favorite chair. She thought he’d fallen asleep.”

  “How is she!”

  “You know Grams, Rosie,” my totally gorgeous red-haired child’s voice was calm and even. It would be. “She’s Irish like the rest of us. No hysteria. Quiet tears. The usual kind of comment.”

  “Which was?”

  “I’m not going to pray for the repose of his soul. Fifty-six years married to me is enough purgatory for the poor man. Then everyone laughed. Still the Crazy O’Malleys.”

  I laughed too.

  “Who’s in charge?”

  I knew it was all a dream. People die, but not my foster father.

  “Aunt Peg is still numb. Everyone is. So I guess I’m in charge.”

  Naturally. People said that she had Chuck’s red hair and my figure and her grandfather’s cool. But he had died the first time in 1918 so he could afford to be cool.

  “Rosie, are you still there?”

  “I guess I’m numb too, dear.”

  “That’s all right, Rosie … are you coming home tomorrow?”

  “Today … No, yesterday your time … No, that’s wrong … Wednesday afternoon on Aer Lingus if we can make the change in Shannon …”

  “Uncle Vince and I will meet you.”

  “Is the wake tonight?”

  “Thursday and Friday, funeral at St. Ursula, of course, on Saturday. Father Ed will say the Mass, Father Raven will preach, Father Keenan will concelebrate, and Jimmy will be the deacon. One eulogy. Chuck will give it.”

  “You decided all of these things?”

  “Someone had to. So I was Ms. Take Charge again … Father Ed is a totally cool priest. More quiet than the rest of you, but a wonderful priest.”

  “How’s Shovie?”

  Siobhan Marie, my youngest daughter.

  “Like the rest of us … You know Grandpa doted on her … She wants you to come home right now.”

  “Tell her we’re on our way.”

  “It will be good to see you again, Rosie.”

  “We’ve been away too long.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  I couldn’t cope with her. Never could. She could, however, cope with me, so it was all right.

  “Hug everyone for me, especially the Good April.”

  “I will … You’ll tell Chucky?”

  “Of course, I don’t know how he’ll react.”

  “He’s Irish, Rosie, like the rest of us.”

  “Yes.”

  The tears were unaccountably falling down my cheeks.

  “Rosie …”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “I love you very much, both of you.”

  “Now I’m really going to cry.”

  “Me too.”

  Mary Margaret O’Malley at twenty-one was cool and self-possessed, the woman who would take charge when “Rosie” was away and Aunt Peg was out of action, and “Chuck” was sleeping off a sexual romp in a broken bed in Moscow. Yet beneath the cool were the combined fires of her two passionate parents.

  I must say something about Peg, my sister-in-law, sister, confidante, mother confessor, and best friend for almost all of my life. We’re so close that the Good April claimed that we had our first periods on the same day. Actually mine was the day before hers.

  I will always remember the day in first grade, feeling lonely because no one seemed to want to talk to me and I was afraid to talk to them. I was walking home on Menard Avenue and this little girl, pretty with brown hair and intense brown eyes caught up with me.

  “I’m Peg,” she said.

  “I’m Rosemarie.”

  “What a pretty name … Can we be friends?”

  “I’d like that very much.”

  Later, I can’t remember exactly how old we were, she took me over to her house, a small, disorderly second story of a two flat near Menard and Augusta. It was a house full of love and laughter and I wished I could stay because there was none of either in my house. We had bonded, as the kids say now, instantly. Slowly and without quite realizing it I became part of the Crazy O’Malleys. My shrink says that relationship has been my salvation.

  She had this funny big brother with red hair and kind eyes and a smile which was also a grin that lighted the whole room and I fell in love with him too because he was so nice. I had to fight with him and he with me, because that’s what little kids do when they fall in love. Peg and I have seen one another through good times and bad and always talk to each other on the phone every day, except when I’m in some dumb place like Russia. We push each other about exercise and diet and that sort of stuff and are very competitive in a good way. I’d be dead if it were not for Peg.

  When the O’Malleys made a lot of money after the war—he was a successful architect—and moved into their big home on New England Avenue in north Oak Park—there was a bedroom that was permanently designated as “Rosie’s room.”

  When we were teens, Chucky compared us to two jungle cats, lithe, handsome, and extremely dangerous. I think he said tiger and leopard, but he insists that he did not because tigers and leopards don’t live in the same places. We pretended to be deeply offended, but in fact we were flattered. Brats!

  I would have to wake Chuck, now the titular head of the clan, as if that mattered with all the Irishwomen who surrounded him.

  I shook him gently. He grumbled and turned away, burying his head in a thin pillow, the best the Russians could do.

  “Chucky,” I shook him, “wake up!”

  He rolled over and glared at me. Then seeing my tears, he sat up.

  “Who’s dead, Rosemarie?”

  I had known and worshipped the man for more than forty years, slept with him for thirty years, and bossed him all the time, except when he saved me from alcoholism. Yet he was a mystery to me. How many men would have reveled in his role as the funny little redhead in my stories? There were depths beneath depths in him, fascinating depths indeed, but so far in our lives impenetrable.

  “Your dad. April found him asleep in his reading chair, his last afternoon nap. Massive heart attack.”

  He lay back in the bed, folded his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes.

  “There are worse ways to die.”

  “That’s what the Good April said.”

  He smiled.

  “She would … Who called?”

  “Ms. Take Charge, who else?”

  He smiled again.

  “What are her plans?”

  “Wake Thursday and Friday. Mass at St. Ursula. Father Ed says it. John Raven preaches … .”

  “And I give the eulogy?”

  He opened his eyes. Tears had appeared in the deep blue depths. They broke my heart. I touched his bare chest gently.

  “Titular head of the family.”

  “Emphasis on the first word.”

  “Naturally!”

  “Mary Margaret and Siobhan send their love.”

  I moved my fingers across his chest.

  “I knew that this would happen, sooner indeed rather than later. Yet parents are not supposed to die, especially when one is in Moscow.”

  More tears, quiet tears.

  “Rips you apart?” I said as I continued
to caress him. He knew what I was up to. His eyes shifted to my breasts after which, I had often told him, he had lusted even before I grew them.

  “The door slams shut, Rosemarie. I’m alone, an orphan.”

  “April is still alive.”

  “Not for long. Without him she won’t want to stay here on earth.”

  My parents had died long ago, my mother in a drunken fall down the basement stairs, my father in a Mafia explosion. Neither had loved me very much, not that they were to blame for that. Yet I still missed them. In my dreams I often imagined them still alive (the preconscious, Maggie Ward, my shrink, had told me rejects death) and begging that I help them, which of course I could not do. What would Chuck’s dreams be like? What would the regrets be in his dreams?

  “Now we’re the parents about whose death our children will look forward to in denial and fear,” I said.

  “The cycle of life …”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Chuck

  Our escape from Moscow was a nightmare. We were tired from the trip, heavy with grief, drugged from our romps of love, and desperate to get home. We had a roll and a cup of tea that the staff of the coffee shop seemed reluctant to provide. It took forty minutes to collect our passports and check out. No porters were willing to bring down our luggage. I stopped our limo to Sheremetyevo just as the driver tried to abandon us. Twenty American dollars was enough to persuade him to wait a little longer. I smelled conspiracy. The secret police wanted us to miss our plane so they could question us further about our film. My good wife insisted that as someone who had preached to the embassy staff about the inefficiency of Russia I should recognize incompetence and indifference when I saw them. I was not convinced.

  Because we had made the terrible mistake of flying Aeroflot, we had to leave on our return ticket if we wanted to get out of Moscow. Hence we had to depart from Sheremetyevo, a depressing barn, instead of the new international airport Domodedovo, which was supposed to be more efficient. Ms. Take Charge had arranged with Aer Lingus that when we arrived at Shannon, they would rescue us from the Ruskies and put us on their plane to Chicago. The layover was an hour and a half. If we missed the connection, we would have to take a flight to Boston in late afternoon or wait till the next day.

  Rosemarie had convinced me that we should take Aeroflot because we would have the opportunity to take snapshots of our fellow passengers. However, they were mostly drunk when the plane took off from Chicago. We had huddled in our broken seats save for occasional cautious trips to the bathroom. The “fasten seat belt” signs were apparently only advisory, perhaps because they were in Russian as was the pilot’s advice that we should return to our seats. The cabin attendants were rude and bossy. The food was terrible. One could obtain a vodka quickly enough, but a cup of tea did not seem possible. The flight over was rough. We bounced around all the way to Shannon and our Tupelov shook like it might tear itself apart. Our singing, drinking fellow passengers did not seem worried about the turbulence. However, they were too drunk to notice the rough ride. I wanted to get off at Shannon and take pictures of the Irish instead of the Russians. My wife, however, insisted that we had a commitment to visit Russia and we had to honor it. As always I agreed with her.

  “Besides, she said, these people are so wiped out that they will sleep all the way to Sheremetyevo.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Moscow airport.”

  “Do they have a gulag there?”

  How can I describe my Rosemarie? The most notable quality is her enormous willpower. She was an alcoholic in her early teens. Yet when I threatened to end our marriage, she stopped drinking—with the help of a couple of first-class psychiatrists. She had a terrible childhood—an abusive father and a drunk mother. Yet she determined to be a good mother and manages our large brood with great skill and affection. Though she was raped by her father, she decided that she would be good in bed and surely is—a languorous and creative lover. Despite six pregnancies she ruled that she was not about to lose her glorious figure and by rigorous exercise and dieting, she has not. She wanted to be a writer and now she writes for The New Yorker, mostly about an inept little redhead who in the end is always maddeningly right about the big things in life. She is Ms. Take Charge. When she enters a room, she radiates authority and competence, a trait she has passed on to Mary Margaret. In our ordinary public relationship she certainly runs the show. Yet privately and especially in the bedroom she is helpless and vulnerable, though sometimes very aggressive in a vulnerable way. When we walk into a restaurant, every eye turns to her, and herself a few weeks short of fifty. I won’t tell you what she looks like with her clothes off. It’s none of your business.

  She is, in short, a whole lot of wife. Mind you, I’m not complaining.

  She was right about the Moscow airport when we had first arrived, as she usually was about such things. Moreover, the smiling teenager who glanced at our passports and waved us through immigration did not seem like a gatekeeper at the entrance to a police state. One smile from the pretty lady with whom I sleep seemed to have melted his socialist heart. The battered taxi which was our “limo” to the Cosmos Hotel was waiting for us in the dark and, save for a detour to fill up his gas tank, the cabbie took us directly to the Cosmos. Eventually, after many delays at registration, apparently over our passports and visas, we finally stumbled into our room, which occasioned a scream of horror from my fastidious wife.

  We had studied Russian before the trip. I knew a few words which caused many of the people we met to laugh when I tried to pronounce them. Rosemarie, however, is a good mimic and a quick study at languages. She was hardly a fluent Russian speaker but her mature beauty went a long way. People smiled at her and laughed at me. So it always has been.

  However, she agreed with me that we would try to dump Aeroflot at Shannon and hitch a ride back to Chicago on Aer Lingus. Enough of Russia already, all right.

  On the ride back to Sheremetyevo when we were going home, I despaired of our ever leaving Russia. There were traffic jams all along the dubious superhighway. Our driver probably had a couple of drinks before he picked us up. We would miss the plane, the secret police would arrest us slam us into the jail. Rosemarie on the other hand chatted with our driver in broken English and Russian and admitted that she had never met his sister who lived in Detroit.

  She gave him an exorbitant tip but we had to drag our luggage into the vast barn by ourselves. We stumbled around seeking the check-in for our flight. Finally, we found what looked like the right desk. Scores of shouting, pushing Russians were crowded around it. We would never fight our way through them. We’d miss the plane but so would most of them.

  Rosemarie, who wonders why our intermediate daughter is Ms. Take Charge, always takes care of getting me on and off planes. She waved down a young Russian woman, blond hair, round face, in an Aeroflot uniform, who was wandering about looking both officious and useless.

  The woman, Tanya it turned out, smiled brightly in response to the pretty lady in the dark blue business suit with a short skirt. She must have felt sorry for her when she looked at the ridiculous little guy in jeans and a University of Chicago sweatshirt who bumbled after her. She looked at our tickets, our luggage, and the useless little redhead the pretty lady had in tow. She conducted us to a vacant check-in counter, gave us boarding passes, ticketed our luggage for Shannon, and conducted us to passport control. I tagged along between the two women now jabbering like old friends in pigeon English and pigeon Russian. Clearly worthless little redhead was good only for hauling luggage.

  The woman proudly displayed a blurred picture of a solemn infant, also blond and round-faced. My wife produced a picture of our brood, children and grandchildren who disproportionately display the hair color of the luggage toter. Tanya threw up her hands in astonishment and hugged my wife. They parted with tears. Typical Russian scene—rude people and friendly people randomly juxtaposed.

  “I still don’t think we’ll make it,” I said. “They
’ll never get our luggage on the plane.”

  “Hush, Chucky dear. We’re in Russia. Nothing ever happens on time.”

  “Are we there yet, Mommy?” I whined, earning a small chuckle for my efforts.

  The rude took over again during the agonizingly long wait in passport control. If they were going to search for our film, this would seem to be the ideal place, especially since the virtuous Tanya had cleared our luggage without examining it. The man who paged through our tickets and our documents was, I thought, big enough to wrestle bears. Probably he dispatched an ursine every evening before consuming a bottle of vodka. He frowned at us, fingered our documents suspiciously, permitted himself an astonished glare when he saw the diplomatic stamp on the passport and pointed at me dubiously. Patently I was too insignificant to be a CIA agent. I nodded, confessing that the idiotically grinning redhead was indeed me. He shook his head in dismay. Finally, five minutes by my watch before departure time, he wielded his stamp like it was a dangerous weapon and imposed large red stars on everything. Then with a jerk of his head, he waved us on to security.

  This last hurdle before we got to our Tupelov was perfunctory. They did not even examine Rosemarie’s purse or my bruised and easily lost briefcase. Did they not know that we were American spies?

  Then as we began the long walk to the boarding gate, the giant from passport control came after us, not running exactly but moving with ponderous speed, a linebacker exiting the field. We were in deep trouble. The KGB or whatever was on to us.

  “Here comes trouble,” I whispered to my wife.

  The bear killer caught up to us, bowed solemnly to me, handed me our passports, and shook his finger as if to warn me that we should not leave without them. Rosemarie said appropriate words of deep gratitude while I stood there staring at the passports like a useless little child.

  Which, of course, was what I was.

  Rosemarie has long since given up reprimanding me for my sorry performance as a traveler.

  “You should have reminded me,” I grumbled.

  She merely laughed.