I responded with the cold silence with which I habitually deflected his efforts at friendship and penitence.
“I’d been in other tight spots,” he stumbled on, like a man trying to dig himself out of a ditch which is collapsing on him. “The Ebro River, Nanking, Henderson Field…”
I resolutely refused to ask how Omaha Beach in Normandy on D-Day was different, knowing that he would tell me anyway.
“I never doubted that I would survive those. That morning in Normandy, I was convinced I was going to die. So I made a promise to God.” He cocked an eye in my direction, a skilled raconteur expecting a response. “So far I’ve kept it.”
If he expected my approval, much less my praise, he’d come to the wrong person.
Mom had been aware that he was a heavy drinker when she married him. He was not quite an alcoholic then, but he knew the inside of all the speakeasies in the Twin Lakes/Lake Geneva area of southern Wisconsin, and there had been a lot of speaks in that part of the country.
He wasn’t the only drunk who hung around the Knights of Columbus Country Club at Twin Lakes, Mom had argued to Uncle Tom when Dad was in the Solomon Islands.
“He was the only one you married.”
She was twenty and movie-star beautiful, with a gorgeous figure, big blue eyes, and long brown hair. She was easily dazzled by his charm and courtesy, since her father and Uncle Tom were rough-hewn men who believed that women were simpleminded innocents whom one protected with stern discipline. Pat Casey sent her flowers every day, listened carefully to her opinions, praised her intelligence and taste, and respected her feelings. Even that Christmas Eve he’d brought a big poinsettia home from the Tribune, where he was working.
“It was bad enough,” Uncle Tom snapped at her, “to let him take you in once. Why make the same mistake again?”
“I went after him the first time because I wanted him,” Mom replied tersely. “I still want him.”
“He seduced you both times.” Uncle Tom paced the room like an angry grizzly bear.
“Please, Tom; not in front of Michael.”
Even at sixteen I was not so dumb as to think that I had been born three months prematurely. Like most kids, I could not believe that there was passion between my parents, ever, and certainly not when he was in his middle forties and she in her late thirties after a decade of separation.
Yet I found out after they were dead that she had written him every week while he was away pursuing wars and that he wrote back. You could not exactly call their correspondence love letters. They shared diaries of daily events. But why bother, unless they still felt something for one another, despite the pain and the anger?
“Your mother,” he said to me when he came home, “is the rare woman who is more beautiful at thirty-seven than at twenty. We are both blessed men.”
I had not particularly noticed that my mother was attractive. I could not, however, disagree with him. So I continued to say nothing. I was a tall, stringy, morose kid; strong but awkward. I had left the seminary because I liked girls too much to follow Uncle Tom’s path into the priesthood, much to his chagrin, but I rarely talked to girls. I had left the Church, or so I thought, because I didn’t believe in it anymore, but I was profoundly shocked and angered at the picture, portrayed vividly by Uncle Tom, of my mother and father having a love affair in a shabby hotel in Berlin.
“The Kepenski is not shabby,” Mom contended stubbornly.
“Everything in Berlin is shabby.” He tugged at his starched clerical cuffs. “Don’t you have more control over your baser emotions?”
“They’re not base.” She reached for her handkerchief.
Mom took a lot from Uncle Tom. Her parents were both dead, her brother Ned was married and away in the navy, Tom’s approval was important. She needed his acceptance of her decision.
“I love him, Tom. I always have,” she pleaded through her tears. “My government work was finished in Bonn. I flew to Berlin because I wanted to see him.”
“Lust, not love.” He reverently touched the swath of purple underneath his white collar, the discreet hint of monsignorial office.
“It was so cold in Berlin … and I was cold. I’d been cold ever since he left.”
“Then you should have turned up the heat in your hotel room.” He pulled on his overcoat in abrupt disgust. “The cardinal is waiting for me at St. Ferdinand’s. If you take that drunken bum back into your house, I will never set foot in it again.”
My uncle did not make such threats lightly. He did not speak to Mom after Dad came home. Uncle Ned’s reaction was the opposite. That Christmas Eve afternoon he and his wife Kate and their four little kids, the oldest a skinny eleven-year-old hoyden, traveled on the Rock Island and the L and the Austin Boulevard bus from their south-side home to visit us and bring presents. Dad was in his element. He and Uncle Ned talked about the war; he told stories to the kids and worked magic tricks which made their eyes bulge. Mom relaxed and smiled, rare enough reactions since Dad returned.
“Your mother and father are certainly happy together, aren’t they?” Uncle Ned said to me as I drove them in our old Packard to the L station. “Sometimes I think I ought to leave Aunt Kate for ten years or so, so she’ll love me that way.”
“If you leave again for ten days, I’ll break your neck,” Aunt Kate said cheerfully. “Right, kids?”
The kids were accompanying “How Are Things in Glocca Mora?” on the car radio. After the chorus, they echoed her enthusiastically, “Right!”
The loudest agreement came from the youngest kid, three-year-old Blackie, an elfin little creature already looking like one of Santa’s gnomes, who would later follow Uncle Tom to the priesthood, but become, God knows, a very different kind of priest.
I turned off the car radio as soon as I had left my relatives at the Lake Street L station. I had heard more than enough Finian’s Rainbow songs that year.
Returning home through the slowly falling snow, I wondered. I thought I knew what love was. I was in love with Ann Blyth in A Woman’s Vengeance. I was in love in a different way with Annie O’Brien (and still am, I suppose) but her terrible grief over the death of her boyfriend in the Hurtgen Forest and her parents in a bus accident outside Lourdes frightened me away from her. I didn’t see how these emotions applied to what Uncle Tom called an “illicit tryst” in a dirty hotel in Berlin.
Between my parents there was nervousness and tension and anger and resentment. Whatever had happened in Berlin last winter, and despite Uncle Tom’s denunciations, I exorcised from my imagination any pictures of it, and it did not survive the journey back to Chicago. On the contrary, their new life together seemed to confirm Uncle Tom’s parting shot: “You’ve sinned, Margaret.” He squared his broad, carefully tailored shoulders. “Sinned terribly. You have betrayed your family and your God. Now you have condemned yourself to even more suffering to expiate that sin.”
If it were love which bound them together, I wanted no part of that kind of love.
The tension had returned to our bungalow before I did. It exploded at supper.
“I don’t understand, Marge.” My father continued like a schoolteacher correcting a term paper. “Good fish, incidentally.”
“Thank you.” Mom was wearing a dark green “new look” dress with ruffles and a long skirt and looked, I must admit, both beautiful and fragile. “What is it you don’t understand?”
“Hmm? Oh yes … I don’t understand why you must take everything I say as a personal assault on you and your family.” He gestured with his fork, like the late FDR with his cigarette holder. “Can’t I have an opinion about the economic situation without being perceived as challenging your undeniable competence?”
“Sure.” Her eyes glinted fiercely. “You can have such opinions, but you don’t. You always have to think of yourself as smarter than we are.”
“That’s not true.” He rose from the table. “Your parents and your brothers treated me with contempt. I was not good enough for you. Despite t
he fact that my father was an educated man and your father did not graduate from high school.”
Same old fight.
“Sit down, please. Patrick. A bite of fruitcake doesn’t violate the Christmas fast, does it, Michael?”
I didn’t say anything because the script never called on me to say anything.
“Good cake. Very good. I don’t know how you run a major company and cook such wonderful meals.”
“Thank you. Hard work. Ned never treated you with contempt. He’s a conceited war hero just like you.”
“Your parents and your brother tried to destroy his marriage,” Dad crowed triumphantly. “Even before they were married. Because Kate was a communist. And I was a reporter. Both of us college graduates from well-educated families but neither one good enough for their children.”
“Leave my parents out of it.” Mom was crying. “They’re dead, poor people. Can’t you forgive the dead?”
So it went.
Dad did not throw on his overcoat and prepare to storm out of the house over the question of dead parents or the future of the economy.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was midnight Mass.
Cardinal Mundelein had forbidden the ancient custom, allegedly because there was too much drinking after Mass. Archbishop Stritch reinstated it. Dad wanted to go to midnight Mass to hear the sermon of our new pastor, Monsignor Mugsy Branigan, who had played for the Chicago White Sox in 1916. Out of loyalty to Mundelein, who was Uncle Tom’s patron, the Ryans had steadfastly avoided midnight Mass. “A pagan custom,” Uncle Tom dismissed it contemptuously.
Mom repeated his judgment over the fruitcake.
“I don’t understand why the hand of a dead cardinal should weigh so heavily on us,” Dad shouted.
“You never did respect the dead,” Mom shouted back. “First my parents and now the poor cardinal.”
“Jesus said let the dead bury the dead.” He rose from the table again, this time really angry.
He’s going to leave, I thought. At last he’s going to leave. He’ll tie one on. Christmas is a bad time for reformed drunks. He’ll have a lost weekend like in the film. Then we’ll be rid of him.
“I’m proud of my family. I won’t repudiate them.” She rose, too. “Not for you. Not for anyone.”
Behind her I saw the Christmas tree, which they had decorated the day before with much laughter and good spirits; its lights formed a kind of multicolored halo around her head and shoulders.
“Who wants you to repudiate them?”
“You do!” She began to sob. “You have since our first date. I thought you’d change or I would never have taken you back!”
She buried her face in her hands. A runty little angel on top of the tree, just over her head, watched blandly.
“Who took whom back? As I remember, you started the seduction, not me. Both times.”
“Get out of here,” she wailed. “I never want to see you again.”
“With pleasure!” He stomped out of the dining room toward the front hallway.
An electric candle, burning in the window next to the tree, welcomed the traveler to Bethlehem. Beyond it the snow was falling heavily. The light of the candle shone on the tinsel of the tree.
Oh hell. I would have to do something.
“Good-bye,” Dad yelled from the front door.
I bolted from the dining room, dashed to the doorway, and grabbed him.
“No.”
“Huh?” He paused, more astonished than offended by the determined lock on his arms.
“I said no. You’re not leaving. That doesn’t help. You tried it once and it didn’t work.”
“Let me go, Michael.” He tried to struggle free.
“No.”
“We seemed to have produced a son, Marge, who is stronger than he looks,” Dad observed ruefully, as if he was considering a lead for a story.
“Let him go, Michael.” Mom, her eyes red from her tears, stood at the other end of the front hall. It was a pretty weak order.
“No.”
“I said let him go.”
“He’s your husband. It’s your job to keep him here.”
She looked at me as though I had suddenly grown a second head.
“I suppose that’s true,” she agreed thoughtfully. “The boy did say no, Pat.” Her arms imprisoned him, too.
“I see.” His voice choked. “Should we let this young hellion decide which Mass the family will attend? Give him the swing vote, so to speak?” He stopped struggling.
“Why not?”
They were talking about me, but I might as well have been on Guadalcanal for all my presence mattered. I released my father. There were stronger bonds tying him to us than my arms. I understood for the first time as my parents clung to one another like a young couple on their first date, what love really is, an unruly, difficult, irresistible power binding and repelling, a storm, a fire, a flood. It scared me.
Was that what Christmas was supposed to be about? Then Christmas scared me, too.
“How does the swing vote decide?” My mother laughed, not at me but at him.
I tried to hate him and could not.
“I like Monsignor Mugsy.”
“Traitor.” She laughed again. “Serves me right for having a son.”
Actually she seemed rather proud of me.
Dad picked up a package of tinsel from the hallway table, an extra one which was supposed to be stored in the attic for next year. He began to arrange the strands of silver in Mom’s hair.
“Did you know, Mick”—the first time he called me by that name—“that your mother is really an Irish countess in disguise? A warrior queen like Grace O’Malley, of whom I’m sure you’ve heard?”
I had not.
“Countesses should have strands of jewels in their hair,” he continued. “Should they not, Mick? Alas, at the moment my supply of strands of jewels is a little on the low side. However, Christmas tinsel gives the same kind of effect, if you sort of squint your eyes and don’t look too closely.”
He laced the bits of foil through her hair like he was dressing a bride for her wedding day. Mom submissively accepted his efforts as if she were indeed a warrior countess, accustomed to such delicate service.
“You’re mad, Pat,” she said weakly. “And this big, good-looking kid, standing here grinning at us, is mad, too.”
“Our prison keeper, do you mean?” He rearranged a strip of tinsel. “Do you mind, Mick, if I borrow your mother for an hour or so of serious husband–wife conversation?”
“Pat…” She was flustered and blushing.
“She’s your wife,” I said. They were going to make love. I should have been shocked. Parents don’t do that sort of thing. But I wasn’t shocked. I understood them now. They couldn’t help themselves. He could borrow her as often as he wanted.
“Indeed she is,” he agreed.
They went off to the bedroom in the back of the house. I read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl by the light of the Christmas tree.
They both glowed at midnight Mass. Monsignor Branigan congratulated them on how happy they looked as we left church.
“Is that tinsel in your hair, Marge?” He peered through his thick glasses. “Decorate the tree just before you came over? That’s the way it ought to be. The light of the world should not be lit until the time of His coming.”
Mom blushed but she didn’t remove the strip of foil from her hair.
It was a turning point, I guess. They did stay together, and in fact became quite gentle with each other through the years. It was a long time before Dad and I became friends—after I returned from the Korean War, in fact.
They’re both gone now. As is my wife. I have three daughters and as many grandchildren. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, some of them terrible mistakes. Yet every time I put tinsel on the tree at Christmas time—and I always insist that it’s my part of the job—I think of the scene in our hallway.
At least I didn’t make a mist
ake that night.
To this day I don’t understand why I wouldn’t let him leave us again.
Rosemarie
“Half price?” The young woman, a rather hefty artificial blonde, looked at my five-dollar bill.
“Pardon?”
“I said”—she chomped harder on her gum—“are you over twelve?”
Behind me, my two charges chortled gleefully. “Hurry up, Chucky,” Peg badgered, “We’ve already missed the cartoon.”
It was a comic beginning for a day in which three surprises would provoke my first religious crisis, one which has not been resolved even now, four decades later.
I hesitated at the ticket booth. I was already humiliated. Could I turn defeat into victory by gaining admission to the State and Lake Theater for half price, and as the Irish would say, myself just turned seventeen?
The prohibition against lying was absolute in the O’Malley house. Mom was, as she put it, not raising a bunch of little fibbers. “If you don’t tell the truth just once, who will ever believe you again?” she would demand.
“An honest person chokes on a lie,” she would add, setting up a conditioned reflex in me from which I have never been able to escape.
The world, however, was complicated. There were situations in which grayness ruled. So I would run to Father John Raven for clarification and instruction in the principles of casuistry.
It was not a lie to give the streetcar conductor three cents or the woman in the ticket booth at movie houses ten cents. If they accepted such half-price offerings, then it was their decision. On the other hand, if they asked how old I was, I was under obligation to tell them the truth.
“There ought to be some compensation,” John had said, laughing, “for being as youthful looking as you are.”
He meant short.
I did not burden Mom’s conscience with these delicate matters.
But the situation was different today. I was five years older than the half-price barrier, if only just five years. Moreover, I was being humiliated. Finally, while I dearly desired revenge on the State Lake for humiliating me in the presence of the two brats, the achievement thereof would require a lie.
All About Women Page 28