Golden Years
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
CHAPTER ONE - Rosemarie
CHAPTER TWO - Chuck
CHAPTER THREE - Rosemarie
CHAPTER FOUR - Chuck
CHAPTER FIVE - Chuck
CHAPTER SIX - Rosemarie
CHAPTER SEVEN - Chuck
CHAPTER EIGHT - Mary Margaret
CHAPTER NINE - Chuck
CHAPTER TEN - Rosemarie
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Chuck
CHAPTER TWELVE - Chuck
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Mary Margaret
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Rosemarie
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Chuck
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Mary Margaret
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Chuck
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Rosemarie
CHAPTER NINETEEN - Mary Margaret
CHAPTER TWENTY - Chuck
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Chuck
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Mary Margaret
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Rosemarie
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Chuck
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Chuck
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - Rosemarie
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - Chuck
CONCLUSION - Mary Margaret
DESCENDANTS OF JOHN E. O’MALLEY
Also by
Praise for Andrew M. Greeley and the O’Malley Clan
NOTE
The Bishop in the Old Neighborhood
Notes
Copyright Page
In memory of Monsignor John M. Hayes,
the counterpart of John Raven in this story
and indeed a man of gold and silver,
on my own golden year in the priesthood
to which he first attracted me
CHAPTER ONE
Rosemarie
“This country,” the ambassador said in his most ambassadorial tone, “will implode in ten years.”
“On what grounds do you make that prediction, sir?”
The lean, hungry man with thin black hair who had been introduced to us as the second secretary of the US embassy in Moscow was obviously the CIA resident.
At that very moment we would soon learn, back home in Chicago where we should have been, tragedy was stalking our family.
“It should be obvious to all of you,” Ambassador O‘Malley said, with serene confidence. “It’s falling apart. When it does collapse, most—probably all—of the constituent republics will depart quickly. The satellite countries—which our presently gloriously reigning president has deigned to characterize as an ‘evil empire’ will also leave. After six decades the Bolshevik revolution will reside in the ash can of history.”
My husband is a man of many different personae. He can slide back and forth among them with considerable ease, not to say delight. Usually he is Chucky Ducky, my adorable and funny little redhead lover, about whom I write an occasional story for The New Yorker. However, tonight at the formal embassy dinner (myself the only woman present), he had become Charles Cronin O’Malley, ambassador of the United States of America with all the rights, privileges, and solemnity pertaining thereto. In fact, his term as ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany had ended in 1964, seventeen years ago. Yet, as he explained to me, “once an ambassador, always an ambassador, just like being West Side Irish.”
He was also known as one of the “wise men” who had advised a hapless Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from Vietnam in 1968. In the world of the Foreign Service he was therefore by definition wise, even if he doesn’t look like it. He was treated with enormous respect, the kind of which the family never accorded him. So when a young member of the embassy staff encountered us on the Moscow subway the day after we returned from Siberia, it became mandatory that the embassy invite us to dinner.
They were disappointed and a little miffed that we had not announced our arrival at the beginning of the trip. They could have given us some warnings. Surely the KGB knew who we were and would shadow us during our month of wandering the Soviet outback. They did not trust people with cameras. They were not eager to have the impoverishment of the Soviet Union revealed to the media of the world.
Chucky replied with ambassadorial aplomb that the secret police agents who were our guides had been very friendly and offered no objections to the pictures of ordinary Soviet people that he had snapped. “Snapped” was his word. My husband’s persona as a photographer required that he create the image of a little kid with a Kodak box camera, such as the one he had used to take my picture when I was ten years old, a photograph which still shocks me. He saw too much.
“The Russians,” he said, “are a friendly, gregarious people. They love to have their pictures taken.”
This was much less than the truth. However, the Russians were as likely as anyone else to succumb to West Side Irish charm. Our guides could see no harm to the Soviet image in what we were doing. All we did was “snap” pictures of families, and kids, and elderly people. We put the camera away when we were near factories or military installations. Only if the secret police had a chance to see all our pictures or to read the notes I had taken would they realize what an indictment of Soviet society our work really was.
We arrived at the embassy with all my notebooks and nearly a hundred rolls of film Chucky had used, the latter in three X-ray-proof bags. The ambassador, a handsome WASP with silver hair and a red face, was only too willing to agree to put them in the diplomatic pouch.
“You may have trouble at the airport,” he said. “They’ll want to know where all your photos are.”
“I’ll tell them that they went home in the diplomatic pouch.”
He nodded.
“They won’t like it but that’s just too bad.”
Everyone around the dinner table seemed hostile to the Soviet Union. The Cold War was still on. They didn’t quite call it the “evil empire,” yet their attitude was that the struggle with the Kremlin could go on for decades. Then my dear husband dropped his bomb. He was telling them in effect that all the intelligence on Russia the State Department and the CIA had labored so diligently to assemble was dead wrong.
“I don’t quite see it that way, Mr. Ambassador,” the DCM (Deputy Chief of Mission) replied after a couple of moments of awkward silence. “I admit that nothing is very efficient here, but I can’t imagine people turning out in the streets as they did in 1917.”
“They won’t have to, Tony.” Chuck smiled serenely. “The revolution will come from within the party, some of the middle-level apparatchiks will come into power in the next ten years and replace such senile Neanderthals as Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Andropov. They’ll try to change the system to solve some immediate problems, and it will all fall apart.”
“The party won’t let that happen,” the resident said dismissively.
“The party has made the same mistake that the Catholic Church made. It educated its technicians and middle management. They have begun to think for themselves. Such people become revolutionaries.”
“I have never met any revolutionaries in the nomenklatura,” the DCM said sternly. “They don’t promote men with any tendency to think for themselves.”
“How much of their gold reserve do they spend e
ach year to buy foreign grain?” Chuck fired back.
“Billions.”
“In a country which has some of the best farmland in the world?”
“They keep trying,” a younger staff member observed. “When they succeed in making their agriculture work, they’ll become a forbidding adversary.”
“We’ve been threatening ourselves with that possibility for a couple of decades … And when they run out of gold reserves?”
More silence around the table.
“Socialism doesn’t work,” my husband continued. “Never has. Never will. The workers have no motivation to work. Stalin is no longer around to put a gun to their heads. So they don’t work. The regime is both incompetent and corrupt. Male life expectancy is down to fifty-seven years, less than many third world countries. A quarter of the men are chronic alcoholics. Highway deaths are higher than in the United States, and they have a tenth of the cars. They make the best ice cream in the world, however.”
“Many countries are both corrupt and incompetent,” the ambassador, all diplomatic charm, said. “All of Africa, for example.”
“The African countries have not promised their people a dream of the good life for seven decades and they are not industrial giants with an educated population. The evidence is all around: one of the great industrial powers in the world is grinding to a halt, good ice cream or not.”
“We don’t quite see it that way, sir,” the resident said. “And our experience is much longer and has more depth than your month of wandering about with a camera.”
“The lens of a camera has no ideological filters,” Chuck replied. “It sees the results of a collapsing social structure which you don’t see.”
That was an insult. My husband was arguing that he was more of an expert on the Soviet Union than men who had spent much of their lives studying it, precisely because he was free of their Cold War ideological blinders.
I had warned him as the embassy limousine had delivered us to the door that he should not start a fight and insult our hosts.
“We both agree about what we saw, Chuck,” I said. “But we look at this country from the perspective of the West Side of Chicago. The people we saw out there in Sverdlovsk might see it differently.”
“They all call it Yekaterinburg,” he replied and kissed me gently. “They know that this regime is only temporary, even if it has lasted seventy years.”
I knew then we were in for a fight.
The ambassador deftly intervened to change the subject. Chuck, knowing that he had made his point, just as deftly backed off.
“Well, you creamed them,” I said as the limo took us back to the Cosmos Hotel.
“Yeah, I won’t say the same thing to the president when I take his picture next week.”
“The heck you won’t!”
There is a tradition dating back to Ike that my husband “take a picture” as he calls his work of every president. He was not looking forward to the trip to the White House to “snap” a man he called “a washed-up actor.”
“Idiots who try to build a Hilton and end up with a dump like this,” he said as we climbed out of the limo, “can’t stay in power much longer.”
The tile was peeling off the tub in our bathroom, the curtains hung at half-mast, the TV worked intermittently. The staff were indifferent, but not unfriendly, especially when Chuck tipped them with Yankee dollars.
He had slept most of the way to the hotel. My husband travels very badly. I was astonished that he had survived the Trans-Siberian Railway, the endless rides on very bad roads, and the crazy pilots on Aeroflot’s domestic routes who seem to feel that they had to prove they were totally unafraid of death. Indeed he kept muttering that we were pushing our respective guardian angels too far. It would take him a-couple of weeks to recoup once we were home. My role on these trips, besides that of a film provider and an occasional lover, was to take care of him. This time I was worn-out too. We were a long way from home.
It is probably clear already that I love him deeply, passionately, permanently. He is not much to look at, unless you happen to like pint-size altar boys with red hair like a wire brush, gentle blue eyes, and a grin that would melt your heart. His exact height is classified information but at five-eight I tower over him, even when I don’t wear heels, which I usually do. He doesn’t mind that because he is slow to anger except when pushed. Then it’s not Clancy who lowers the boom as in the song which I say is about my ancestors, it’s Chucky lowers the boom.
His strongest appeal is that he is a sweet, gentle, passionate man. The first time he kissed me at Lake Geneva when I was, I think, ten years old, he persuaded me that a man might love me someday, which had always seemed impossible. Then the first time he held me in his arms, the day I tried to drown myself after a Fenwick prom, the whole world seemed kind and good. Neither of us knew much about sexual love when we were married, but he was a confident and tender partner and I learned from him.
I have never made love with another man and never will, so I don’t have any comparative data. But from listening to conversations among women—at which I usually remain silent—I think he’s a pretty spectacular lover. He knows me completely. I cannot hide from him. His tenderness and sweetness completely overwhelm me. All he has to do is to look at me with desire, much less touch me, and I surrender. Indeed I abandon myself completely to him.
I shivered and not from the cold when we left the limo after our trip to the embassy.
“It already feels like winter,” I said. “And it’s only September.”
“I’m glad we took the film over to the embassy today,” he said sleepily. “Doubtless they’ve searched our hotel room while we were gone, since they know we’re leaving tomorrow.”
“Shouldn’t they have done it last night?”
“Like I said, they’re incompetent.”
Back in our room, Chuck noted that the search of our clothes had been inept.
“Clumsy oafs. James Bond wouldn’t have left any traces at all. Now they’re trying to figure out what we did with the film.”
“They’ll search us at the airport.”
“But they won’t try to prevent us from leaving. They don’t need an incident just now.”
“I hope you’re right.”
I wanted to be flying over Lake Michigan on our way home, more than my husband did.
I found a plain envelope in one corner of the room. Inside was a cable.
“Chucky, listen to this: ‘Joe Raftery wants to talk to you. Urgent. Vince.’”
Vincent Antonelli, attorney-at-law, was married to our sister Peg. He was, as they say in Chicago, clout heavy.
“Joe Raftery, you remember him of course, Rosemarie?”
“Fenwick football team?”
“He was the unfortunate end to whom Vince’s pass was intended when the evil Ed Murray blocked it and the equally evil Mount Carmel went to the city championships.”
Ed and his wife Delia, one of Chuck’s sometime sweethearts, lived just down the street from us. They are anything but evil.
“Chucky Ducky,” I said with some impatience, “you know damn well that’s not the way the game ended. You caught the blocked pass and stumbled into the end zone. We beat Carmel.”
“Pure legend.”
“Then you saved my life when I tried to drown myself in Lake Geneva after the prom.”
“I have no recollection of that event either. Perhaps you tricked me into pulling off your prom dress.”
He was hopeless. He was also a mystery. I had yet to understand him completely and never would. He knew damn well that he had beaten Carmel and saved my life. Why did he deny these events? Part of the game no doubt, a game in which I was a player, but I didn’t know the rules.
I grew warm at the thought of our subsequent embrace that afternoon. So I changed the subject back to Joe Raftery.
“Wasn’t he a tall, slender boy with sad brown eyes and the mystical glow?”
“He was quiet, perhaps because he d
idn’t have anything to say.”
“What happened to him?”
“He ignored the blandishments of the Golden Dome and went off to Leland Stanford, Junior, Memorial University where he was an all-conference end. Then he played for the Los Angeles Rams, even though he failed to catch Vince’s pass. I believe he married a starlet, then passed into the obscurity of La La Land twilight.”
“What do you think he wants?”
“What we all want at one time or another—help.”
“Will we help him?”
“I fear, Rosemarie my darling, now that we are in our golden years, we are too long in the tooth for these adventures.”
“Speak for yourself, Chucky Ducky, I’m not in my golden years yet.”
“In another month …”
“The world might come to an end first.”
“Speaking of removing gowns.” His fingers touched the zipper of my dress. I knew I was doomed. He played idly with the top of the zipper, knowing that such actions turn me on. After forty years or so of watching me closely, my husband senses my every mood, my every need, my every reaction. I’m putty in his hands, so to speak, not that I mind it.
“Chucky!” I protested for the record. I am not quite his sex slave, not exactly.
“Hero has routed bad knights,” he whispered as he kissed my neck, “now he must ravish the defenseless matron.”
I sighed, again in insincere protest. It is by no means a bad thing to have a husband who understands you so completely.
He undressed me slowly and delicately, sweeping aside the remnants of my womanly modesty. I shivered in momentary embarrassment as I always do. Then I felt my body and soul swell with great longing. He played with me gently, teased me with his fingers and his lips, nibbled on me with his teeth and then, after I had begged repeatedly that I could no longer endure his depredations, he entered me and carried me off into a firestorm of ecstasy.
“Not all that long in the tooth,” I laughed weakly when my breath returned. We both laughed together and gathered each other in our arms and fell into satisfied sleep.
The phone rang from a great distance. I ignored it. Where was I anyway? Why was I sleeping in a sloping bed? What was wrong? Why didn’t Chuck answer the phone? Anyway it was a dream, wasn’t it?