Second Spring Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chuck - 1978

  Rosemarie - 1978

  Chuck - 1978

  Rosemarie - 1978

  Chuck - 1978

  Rosemarie - 1978

  Rosemarie - 1973-1976

  Chuck - 1976

  Chuck - 1976

  Chuck - 1977

  Chuck - 1978

  Rosemarie - 1978

  Chuck - 1978

  Rosemarie - 1978

  Chuck - 1978

  Rosemarie - 1978

  Chucky - 1978

  Rosemarie - 1978

  Chuck - 1978

  Rosemarie - 1978

  Chuck - 1978

  Rosemarie - 1978

  Chuck - 1978-1979

  Rosemarie - 1979

  Chuck - 1979

  Rosemarie - 1979

  Chuck - 1979

  Rosemarie - 1979

  Chuck - 1979

  Chuck - 1979

  Chuck - 1979

  EPILOGUE - Chuck

  DESCENDANTS OF JOHN E. O’MALLEY

  Also by

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Copyright Page

  In memory of

  Roger Brown,

  St. Angela, 1942

  Chuck

  1978

  “You might,” the naked woman said to me, “make model airplanes.”

  “Ah,” I said, as I caressed her firm, sweaty belly, an essential of afterplay as I had learned long ago.

  “You always wanted to make them when you were a kid.”

  The full moon illumined the dome of St. Peter’s in the distance and bathed us in its glow, as though it were doing us a favor. Over there the cardinals were doubtless spending a restless night in the uncomfortable beds in their stuffy rooms. None of them had a bedmate like Rosemarie with whom to play, worse luck for them and for the Church.

  “You said … Don’t stop, Chucky Ducky, I like that … You said that you were too poor to buy the kits.”

  “I did not!” I insisted, as I kissed her tenderly.

  “You did.” She sighed. “You don’t have to stop that either.”

  My lips roamed her flesh, not demanding now, but reassuring, praising, celebrating.

  “I did not!”

  There had been a time, long years ago, when I would have tried a second romp of lovemaking in a situation like the present one.

  “Or you could take up collecting sports cards. You told all of us that you couldn’t afford that either.”

  “I never said that!”

  “You did too!” She giggled as I tickled her.

  “I guess I’m in my midlife identity crisis,” I admitted.

  “You can’t be, Chucky Ducky darling.” She snuggled close to me. “You haven’t got beyond your late adolescent identity crisis.”

  One of the valiant Rosemarie’s favorite themes was that I was still a charming little boy, like the little redhead in the stories she wrote.

  “Mind you,” she whispered, “I like you as an adolescent boy.”

  “Oh?”

  “Only an adolescent boy would be so nicely obsessed with every part of a woman’s anatomy.”

  That would be a line in her next story. I wondered how the New Yorker would handle the spectacular lovemaking that preceded the line.

  “A man could become impotent at the possibility that his bedtime amusements would become public knowledge.”

  “Ha! … I don’t know about you, Chucky Ducky, but I’m going to sleep now.”

  She pillowed her head on my stomach.

  “Chucky love,” she sighed, now well across the border into the land of Nod, “you’re wonderful. We really defied death this time, didn’t we?”

  That would be in the story too. I had become a character in a series of New Yorker stories—a little red-haired punk as an occasional satyr.

  Rosemarie Helen Clancy O’Malley had found her midlife identity as a writer. Her poor husband had found his identity as a character in fiction. On that happy note I reprised in my imagination some of the more pleasurable moments of our romp and sank into peace and satisfied sleep.

  Rosemarie

  1978

  I stirred my second cup of tea in the Hassler breakfast room, on the top of the hotel, and watched the Dome steam in the morning sun.

  Instead of wondering about the outcome of the conclave, I worried about my poor husband.

  In bed he was indeed the delightful adolescent who had learned a lot of tricks and a lot more of wisdom in pleasuring a woman. Our sex life wasn’t always great, no one’s is. But it was mostly good and often great, sometimes almost transcendent.

  Our romp of the night before had left me in a state of pleasurable and self-satisfied complacency. It had started off routinely enough and then suddenly we both warmed to the task and it expanded to the edge of the transcendent, perhaps because the future of our Church was at stake in the conclave, a Church to which we were irrevocably committed despite its flaws.

  I rejoiced in my condition as a woman animal, rational indeed to some extent, like a self-satisfied lioness lounging on her back in the sands of the Kalahari. Someone had rolled my nightgown into a ball and thrown it across the room. I refused to leave before we found it. Both of us blamed the other, but I was fibbing as Chuck knew very well.

  Out of bed he was a mope, a sad sack, an old man long before his time.

  He rarely touched his cameras. I had to insist that he bring the Nikon along for our trip to Lucerne and Vienna. He had not wanted to fly to Rome when we heard of the Pope’s death. He had lost interest in recording great events and saw no reason to produce a portrait of the next Pope. I insisted again. He agreed, as he always does when I insist.

  “You can quote me in a story,” he said with a laugh, “that I had learned long ago that it was bootless to resist the orders of the monster regiment of women.”

  I had given up long ago any effort to convince him that he was not only quoting John Knox out of context but actually misquoting him.

  He had stopped reading his beloved economic journals. He did not enjoy his children, not even the darling little Siobhan, currently being spoiled rotten by her Grandma April. He was not especially interested in his three grandchildren, two of them redheads like himself and Siobhan. Adoration from the next couple of generations did not much interest him. He is clever enough to cover that up, so the kids and grandkids adore him all the more.

  He has stopped reading the papers since our unfortunate expedition to the White House to photograph Jimmy Carter. Nor did he vote for Gerry Ford. “It is not fair, my beloved, to say that he cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. However, you add the obligation to talk while he walks and chews gum and you befuddle him.”

  When President Ford assured everyone that the people of Poland were able to choose their own government, Chuck writhed. “Thomas Jefferson, where are you when we really need you!”

  Yet when we went to the White House to do a portrait of Ford, we couldn’t help but like the man. We spoke of Michigan and New Buffalo and Grand Beach and the Tabor Hill wines which we drank and which he served at state dinners. He was a genuinely nice man.

  “You would like to spend time with him,” I said on the plane back to Chicago. “Unlike Johnson or Nixon.”

  “And Jack Kennedy?”

  I considered that.

  “Sometimes those Boston guys, God be good to both of them, were like chalk scratching against the blackboard. They were fun, but you weren’t altogether sure they were human. Gerry Ford you know is human.”

  Poor dear man.

  Chuck tried to give up on exercise, but I wouldn’t stand for that. However, he made little effort to beat me at tennis and gave up on his efforts to learn windsurfi
ng. “Ridiculous for someone as old as I am,” he protested.

  That was the problem. On the coming September 17, my darling little redhead punk would turn fifty. The strands of white in his wire-brush red hair were increasing. He would not cover them as I promptly did when any gray appeared in my hair. Chuck was getting old, he thought. Life was slipping away and was pointless anyway.

  He still made love with me, but I was almost always the aggressor. He was very good at the art of ravishing me, better than ever perhaps. It made him happy for a little while.

  As I sipped my tea and worried about him, his lips touched the back of my neck, sending a shiver down my spine and causing my nipples to firm. No man should have that much power over a woman, right?

  Wrong!

  “You weren’t the woman in my bed last night, were you?”

  “Certainly not!”

  “I didn’t think so. Whoever she was, she had no modesty at all.”

  “Couldn’t have been me. I’m Irish.”

  “Right.”

  “You were straightening up the room for the housekeeper?”

  “I couldn’t leave it a mess for the poor Giovanina.”

  “You made the bed?”

  “Well …”

  “Chucky, this is a high-class hotel. She’ll remake the bed anyway.”

  “Yeah, well …”

  My husband is, to put it mildly, fastidious. I’m a pretty good housekeeper—for someone whose origins are Irish. Chuck makes Missus, our Polish defender of order in the house, seem slovenly.

  Also he keeps obsessively neat files, each one carefully labeled in his neat, precise printing. On the other hand he dresses like a slob—this morning in tattered jeans and a Notre Dame tee shirt which had seen better days thirty years ago. Out of place in the breakfast room of the Hassler? My poor Chucky looked like someone who came in every morning to walk the dog.

  “Per favore, cornflakes?” he asked the pretty waitress with a pathos that would have been appropriate for an orphan in a Dickens novel.

  “Certainly, signor,” she said with a big smile.

  The little bitch thinks he’s cute.

  When she returned with the cereal and a big pitcher of cream, Chuck murmured, “Mille grazie, Paola.”

  Of course, he knew her name. For a couple of days the Hassler was his precinct. Like a good precinct captain, he had to know the names of everyone. Some traits are so ingrained that even a midlife identity crisis couldn’t demolish them.

  “You notice the major change in Catholic doctrine the last couple of days?” he asked.

  I poured him a refill of his tea.

  “How can they change doctrine when the Pope, poor dear man, is dead?”

  “They did just the same. They wouldn’t let women in slacks or shorts into the wake in San Pietro. Then they permitted slacks, then even shorts if they were not too short, then they gave up on that judgment call. Bare shoulders and spaghetti straps are still sinful, however. Nonetheless, I think there has been a real corruption of Catholic truth.”

  “It’s because everyone is on vacation. Even the poor Pope was on vacation when he died.”

  “Did him a world of good, didn’t it?”

  “Chucky, that is a very old joke.”

  “I am a very old man … Paola, ancora una volta?”

  “Si, signor.” Paola rushed away.

  “The little bitch thinks you’re adorable.”

  “Women do. Cute little old guy.”

  It was not just the advent of his fiftieth birthday which bothered my Chuck. His real problem had been caused by John Kennedy and Pope John XXIII almost twenty years ago. Both men had believed that change in our country and our Church were possible and necessary. Jack Kennedy had invited Chuck to be part of his project when he sent us to Germany as ambassador. Pope John had launched an Ecumenical Council that had created great hope among the parish clergy and the laity for change in the Church.

  John Kennedy had died. Chuck served under Lyndon Johnson till it became clear that Kennedy’s successor had decided to escalate the war in Vietnam. He turned down an appointment as UN representative and walked out of the Oval Office, to return in 1968 as one of the “Senior Advisers to the President” who had gathered together to tell Johnson that it was time to get out of the war.

  (He had called former Secretary of State Dean Acheson “Dean” and that frosty man had called him “Charles.”)

  One of our children disappeared into the dropout underground during the war and another had his foot blown off by an American mine. Richard Nixon became President and Chuck, who had marched at Selma (because I had insisted), dropped out of politics.

  Paul VI had appointed us to the commission which was supposed to find grounds for changing the birth control teaching. Then when we recommended a change and the reasons for it, he ignored us and caved in to the curial reactionaries. Chuck gave up his hope that the Church could really reform itself—though he continued to be a practicing Catholic and even a lector at Mass. Chucky navigating the syntax of St. Paul was a comic delight.

  If Kennedy and the Pope had left things alone, my husband would be a distinguished photographer with a worldwide reputation and no sense that he had failed. You can only experience disillusion when someone sets you up with illusions. At our silver anniversary celebration a couple of years ago, he had smiled brightly and seemed to enjoy every moment of it. I cried all day because I knew that I had never deserved a husband like Chuck. He had prevented me from becoming an incurable drunk. Now he was in trouble and there was nothing I could do to help him.

  The young radicals of the late sixties had fallen all over each other in “selling out.” The blacks, or African-Americans as some of them insisted that they be called, had retreated into self-segregation. Disco music became popular as a retreat from rock and roll but not from drugs. Black musicians hated it. I love to dance. Chucky hates it, but he’s learned to be presentable on the dance floor to please me (which is very generous). I dragged him off to a disco dance hall one night. We lasted maybe ten minutes. We were too old and I couldn’t stand the smell—a mix, I thought, of sweat, urine, and pot. He wanted to go back to take pictures. I said that he might be beat up by some pothead.

  Besides, disco wasn’t radical and didn’t represent anything except maybe the survival of the psychedelic drug culture (though without rock and roll), which was maybe what the sixties were all about anyway.

  We liberals had rid the country of Nixon and defeated Ford by less than one percentage point, so inept was our candidate. There were no causes around. Why bother if all your hopes were to turn to dust?

  “What did you think of our supper with Msgr. Adolfo last night?” I asked him when Paola had delivered the third helping of cornflakes, rolling her eyes at me.

  I rolled my eyes back.

  “Trastevere is a nice place,” he said as he spilled a spoonful of cornflakes on his tee shirt. “Great old church, nifty restaurant. You can take me there anytime you want.”

  I paid the bills on these trips with my credit cards because my husband, as obsessive as he was about neatness, has never been able to cope with finances. He would have put us in a pensione somewhere instead of the most expensive hotel in Rome and would have worried for days if he knew how much our suite in the Hassler cost. Deep down in the murky subbasements of his character, he was still afraid that the Great Depression would return.

  “And his opinions on what your friends over there are going to do?”

  The cardinals were no friends of ours, but that’s the way we Chicagoans talk.

  “I wonder if it matters.” Chuck sighed. He considered another dish of cornflakes and reluctantly decided against it.

  “Ancora, signor?” Paola asked.

  “Basta.” Chuck grinned at her.

  “Si, signor.” She grinned back. “More toast, signora?”

  I shook my head and smiled, just to let her know I didn’t think she was flirting with my cute little husband.

&nbs
p; Msgr. Raimundo “Rae” Adolfo was like a character from a Fellini film, sleek and handsome with thick, jet-black hair, a neatly chiseled face, even white teeth, flashing black eyes, and just the faintest hint of cynicism in his quick smile. He did something for the Secretary of State who was kind of the Vatican prime minister. He had adopted us for some reason and insisted that Chuck must do a portrait of the new Pope.

  “Well, that depends on who it is,” Chuck had said as he was gulping down his pasta.

  Adolfo shrugged, as he often did, a sign of a man who had seen everything and would be surprised by nothing.

  “It will be very close,” he sighed. “The whole project of the Vatican Council is at stake. My former boss, Cardinal Benelli, in his intervention just before the conclave said that collegiality is the most important issue, whether the Pope is willing to share power with the other bishops. You could see the tight jaws of his old enemies in the Curia.”

  “They really think they can repeal the Council?” I asked, deftly turning over my wineglass.

  I’m quite good at that. I’ve had enough practice.

  “Not explicitly. However, they can ignore it and return to governing the Church the way they did before 1960. They forced the long delay between the Pope’s burial and the opening of the conclave so they would rally around a candidate. Pericle Felici, who opposes everything, has been on the phone every day. They will all vote for Siri of Genoa, who is very conservative and also authoritarian. They are saying that the last Pope was weak and we need a strong man now. Siri is very tough.”

  “And the good guys don’t fight back?” Chucky said as he looked in dismay at his empty pasta dish. I shook my head as a sign that he’d had enough.

  “For once,” Adolfo sighed again, “they organize themselves. Leo Suenens does not go back to Brussels as he pretends but rather remains in northern Italy. He too knows how to use the phone, as does Benelli. They are ready, I think.”

  “Pope Paul ended the Council when he issued the birth control encyclical,” Chuck insisted, his voice bitter.

  Only two events made my poor husband bitter, the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965 and the birth control encyclical in 1968.

  Adolfo would not permit himself to discuss that subject.