Golden Years Read online

“I usually do, dear,” my wife said, “but thanks for the warning. I may take some of them when we get home.”

  We turned away from our Jane problem and engaged in bittersweet reminiscences about Dad combined with reflections on how much he must have liked the various aspects of the obsequies, most notably the homily, the eulogy, and the concert at the graveside. Vince reported that the Catholic cemeteries people warned our funeral director that they would ban him if he tolerated anything like that ever again.

  “I’ll make a phone call on Monday,” he said, “and change their minds.”

  “I think I’d better take you home, Chucky,” my wife said from a great distance.

  I must have agreed because I soon found myself in bed. I was supposed to be falling in love with someone, but I didn’t quite remember who it was.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Mary Margaret

  I didn’t really want to go down to Rush Street with my Rosary College classmates. They insisted that I should get away from the family for a couple of hours. I decided that those hours would spare me more agonizing over poor Aunt Jane. The woman was a bitch, a sick bitch indeed, but still a bitch.

  I don’t much like the Rush Street scene. It’s what we sociologists call anomic, that is normless. A large number of young adults mill around and try to impress one another, without much success. Men pretend they’re tough. Women pretend they’re silly. Everyone seems to be looking for sex of one sort or another and some are looking also for a spouse, a few with success despite the unpropitious ambience of the scene. They are, it seems to me, extremely fortunate. God presumably can work with any circumstances, especially when the hormones are sizzling.

  I am too young to be looking for a spouse and my instincts tell me that Rush Street sex is hardly worth the effort. I figure that when I decide to look for a husband, I’ll do it in other, and as yet unspecified, circumstances. So I sip my Bushmill’s straight up (only one glass) and reflect on the horror of the scene.

  Good dissertation material maybe. Someone has probably beat me to it.

  I usually ignore come-ons. Sometimes I dismiss them with a withering stare. Occasionally I dismiss them with a wave of a hand. Rarely some thoughtful guy, somehow persuaded that a woman with red hair can be intelligent, initiates a sensible conversation.

  Which can be a come-on too.

  I would never come down to Rush Street with this boy Joey Moran, who stands around, as Chuck says, looking bemused and amused. He might fit in the scene and I might fit there, but not together. We’d be appropriate at a place like Petersen’s ice cream store, where Rosie and Chuck used to hang out when they were kids and where they still hang out sometimes thirty years later. Rosie was already married and a mother when she was my age; but, like she says, times change. You’d better believe it.

  They’re both basket cases today, wiped out. I told them they were so tired that they didn’t have to go to Mass. They were shocked, poor dears. They’re so cute, they love each other so much. I hope that, if I marry, my husband and I will love the same way when we’re that old.

  Aunt Peg and Uncle Vince were the same age when they were married and he went off to Vietnam and was a prisoner of war. He doesn’t talk about that much.

  I’ll be fifty someday and I may lose them. I don’t want that to happen.

  What if Joey Moran should ask me to marry him? Like now. What would I say?

  I give the impression that I have all the answers. Ms. Take Charge. Good act.

  So this guy comes up to me while I’m thinking about all these things, thirty or so, hair thinning, the hard eyes of an accomplished predator, bored smile.

  Ted McCormack, Ted Junior as Aunt Jane always calls him.

  “I didn’t know I had such a pretty cousin,” he begins.

  “We missed you at the funeral,” I snap.

  “I heard you played jazz at the cemetery.”

  “Yeah?”

  I am making it clear that this is not going to be a friendly conversation.

  “Mother told us only at the last minute. We figured that she would make a fool out of herself again. We’ve seen that too often. Father has her on pills and sometimes she refuses to take them.”

  “Oh?”

  “Did she misbehave?”

  “Ask her.”

  His smooth manner disappeared.

  “We never see much of you people … I don’t quite know why … Michele and Jennifer are about your age, aren’t they?”

  “I’m in between them … I graduate in the spring.”

  “They both dropped out of college. Didn’t like it. They have an apartment up in Wrigleyville. Close to where I live. Don’t see them much. They have small temp jobs. Haven’t settled down yet.”

  He seemed to be looking for sympathy. Wrong shoulder to cry on. Sean lived up there too, as do all the yuppies in the world. Halsted Street is a yuppie bar outdoors.

  “Had to get away from Mother?”

  His pale blue eyes flashed for a moment. This pretty little cousin had the occasional insight.

  “I guess. Something went wrong, Mother has found it difficult to win acceptance in Kenilworth. It’s mostly in her imagination. Maybe we should have stayed on the West Side. Oak Brook something like that.”

  “I would not be caught dead living in Oak Brook,” I said.

  “Chris is still at home, poor guy. He’s finally getting married, a Polish woman who’s in the same law firm. Nice girl, bright. Mother hates her.”

  This was family talk, not barroom chatter. I felt sorry for him.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” he went on.

  “Not exactly. A guy hangs around. I went to grammar school with him.”

  “Your parents like him?”

  I shrugged.

  “If it’s a choice between me or him, they might take him.”

  He thought that was very funny Poor dolt.

  “Whatever went wrong between our families must have happened when you moved to Germany. Mother is still terribly upset about that. She doesn’t like your father’s photographs.”

  “She didn’t like Grandpa’s painting book either.”

  “She said it was terribly embarrassing … You’re pretty quick on the uptake aren’t you?”

  “I learned that in the diplomatic service.”

  He laughed again.

  I sipped a little of my closely held Bushmill’s Green. It’s okay if you’re going to sip whiskey all night. Sure clears the sinuses. When you walk up to a bar and say, “Bushmill’s Green straight up,” you create a certain impact.

  “I should warn you,” he said hesitantly. “Mother thinks her life will straighten out if she brings our grandmother up to live in Faith, Hope … That’s our parish, you know.”

  “Faith, Hope, and Cadillac.”

  “Benz or BMW more likely these days,” he admitted with a wry smile. “I hate it. When I go to Mass, I usually go down to Old St. Pat’s.”

  So he was still a Catholic, if a predator.

  “Nice place.”

  “Mother is trying to arrange to go over to Grandmother’s house and bring her up to our house. She has two nurses, Big Bertha types, that will go with her.”

  “I don’t think Grams wants to go.”

  “When Mother makes up her mind, she makes up her mind.”

  We chatted a few more moments and he drifted away, a confused and troubled young man. Dear God, why do You let parents do these things to their children?

  I slipped outside and waited till the half-drunk jerk at the public phone finished his call.

  “Hi, gorgeous!” he said to me.

  “I hope she had enough sense to turn you down,” I said, brushing by him. I half hoped that he would try something. He would be good black belt practice material.

  “Chuck O’Malley,” Chucky said on the phone.

  “Your intermediate daughter. I’m in a public phone on Rush Street and don’t worry I haven’t knocked out any drunks yet. I had an interesting conversation with
our cousin Ted Junior in the bar. He tells me that his mother is collecting a couple of tough nurses and some one of these days she’s going to descend on Oak Park as the Wicked Witch of the North Shore. They will kidnap Grams and carry her off to a real neighborhood.”

  “What!”

  “You’d better assemble some of the troops. Call Uncle Vince. Ask that nice Mr. Casey to put some off-duty Oak Park cops in front of the house. Alert everyone. She’s obviously manic-depressive in a manic stage. She could be dangerous.”

  “Are you sure, Moire Meg?”

  He’s the only one who can use that outdated name—and only occasionally.

  “If I wasn’t sure, I wouldn’t call you at this hour of the night. I’m going to sleep at Grams’s tonight. I want to see a car with cops out in front when I get there.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Chuck

  When Mary Margaret called, my wife and I were cuddled on the love seat in our parlor. I had removed her blouse and was playing the games a love-struck teen might play with his compliant sweetheart. I would take off all her clothes very slowly, behavior for a cautious and timid, but still determined, lover.

  “Her name,” Rosemarie muttered, “is Mary Margaret, not Moire Meg. It’s a Catholic name. And she’s a fanatical Catholic”—she giggled—“like you are, even if you’ve been fixated on my boobs since before I got them.”

  “God,” I said, “in the interest of continuing the species made women’s bodies attractive to men. We are genetically programmed to delight in your breasts and if you’re honest about it you delight in our delight.”

  “Hmm … What did the intermediate daughter want? She wasn’t in trouble was she?”

  “Not hardly.”

  I told her Mary Margaret’s message. She sat up and disengaged herself from me.

  “Charles Cronin O’Malley! Do something about it!”

  I eased her back into my arms.

  “Woman, I will! Now be quiet for a few moments.”

  I called Mike Casey, the head of Reliable Security. He promised he would have a couple of off-duty Oak Park cops across the street from the house on New England Avenue within the hour, hopefully one of the cops would be a woman.

  Then I called Vince. Peg came on the line at once. Were they playing hanky-panky at the same time by some kind of prearrangement? I would not put it past them.

  “She’s crazy,” Vince snorted.

  “Manic-depressive in a manic stage,” I said, quoting Mary Margaret, “and she’s not taking her lithium.”

  “Ted should lock her up someplace,” Peg demanded.

  “We can’t get a restraining order against her until she actually does something,” Vince said. “Then of course it will be easy.”

  “There will be two Oak Park cops outside and the rest of the department on call,” I added. “Those two Irish furies will protect her. Mary Margaret will be there tonight and when she’s not at Rosary tomorrow. We should take turns stopping in.”

  The Irish furies were Madge the cook and Theresa the housekeeper, women in their late sixties who together with the Good April were kind of a local branch of the Irish warrior goddess society.

  While we were talking, my hand, as uncontrollable as ever, slipped back under Rosemarie’s black skirt. The nylon was long gone so I encountered only delicious woman flesh, firm and disciplined by tennis and other forms of exercise, and sweetly responsive to my affection.

  “Is Mary Margaret staying there tonight?” Peg asked. “I could ask Rita to go over and keep her company.”

  I thought about that.

  “Let’s hold off on that for tonight. We don’t want to stir up worry for April.”

  “Right.”

  “Sorry to interrupt.”

  “Were they doing hanky-panky?” Rosemarie asked.

  “Why should we be the only ones?”

  It had been a difficult day at our house. We were both grouchy and groggy when we woke up. I was filled with drugs and Rosemarie’s sleep was deep and troubling, filled with obscure dreams about her father. I vaguely remembered that it was Sunday morning and that we had to go to church. We had to hurry to make the twelve o’clock Mass. We showered and dressed quickly. It was only when we were hurrying into our clothes that I remembered that I was falling in love with my stately wife, now donning a svelte black suit.

  There was no time to do anything about it. Moreover, I needed my morning cup of tea, maybe two cups before I did anything about anything.

  We stumbled down the stairs and discovered our two daughters, in their Sunday best, reading the papers, Shovie concentrating on the comics and Mary Margaret frowning over the “Week in Review” in The New York Times.

  “What are you two doing up so soon?” Mary Margaret asked, not bothering to look up from the paper. “You should have slept in. You’re both totally whupped.”

  “We have to go to Mass.” Rosemarie said sternly. “You should have awakened us.

  “Chill out, Rosie, you went to Mass yesterday. You’re both a shambles; Chucky looks like a man in drug rehab. God doesn’t expect you to drag yourself over to church today.”

  “Since when have you become God’s special messenger?”

  Mary Margaret ignored her.

  As we were about to leave the house and she was searching in her purse for the keys to our old Benz, Rosemarie stopped, shook her head in disgust, and returned to the parlor.

  “Sorry, Mary Margaret.” She kissed her daughter. “You’re right as always. We old folks are just religious fanatics.”

  Our intermediate daughter brightened.

  “Say a prayer for me.”

  “Me too.” Shovie rushed over to hug her mother.

  “That was gracious,” I said as I lurched toward the car.

  “Makes up for being graceless.”

  “Maybe I should apologize?”

  “Don’t be silly. You didn’t say anything.”

  In front of St. Agedius, Packy Keenan renewed Mary Margaret’s argument.

  “You guys didn’t have to come to Mass this morning!”

  “We’re religious fanatics,” Rosemarie said.

  “We’ll compromise and not put any money in the basket,” I said.

  “My poor husband is finally awake.”

  She took my arm and guided me into church and down the aisle toward the front. The Crazy O’Malleys always sit in the front of the church, like they own it. Peg and Vince were already there.

  “Family of religious fanatics,” I murmured.

  I thought about Rosemarie all through Mass, darting an occasional glance at her. I had lucked out. I knew nothing about what a wife should be when I married her—not that I had that much to say about it. She was elegant, graceful, gifted, a great mother, and exciting in bed. Poor Ted must have thought the same thing when he came home from the War to his beloved Jane. Why had I been so fortunate? I didn’t deserve it. I sighed loudly. She glanced at me to warn me to behave in church.

  How could I not fall in love with her again and again and again, even if she displayed the Irish womanly proclivity to be bossy.

  The four of us stopped by Mom’s house for a cup of tea. The starch had gone out of her. She had begun to understand that she would spend the rest of her life without her lover. She was stooped, lifeless, suddenly old. Yet she perked up when we came and insisted that she had made scones when she came home after the seven o’clock Mass because she knew we would want some with our tea.

  So we drank the tea and ate the scones, I a vast number of scones.

  “You’re disgusting, Chucky,” my sister said. “No one should eat as much as you do and not put on weight.”

  “He’s just a pig,” my wife agreed.

  “Poor dear Chucky,” my mother said with her usual sympathy, “he always burned off the weight because he was so intense and so active.”

  My sister and my foster sister, also my wife, ridiculed that theory.

  “I’m pretty active,” Vince, my longtime unindicted c
oconspirator, said. “I guess I’m just not as intense as Chuck.”

  “His real secret,” my wife said in an irrelevant argument, “is that when some worry arises, he goes to sleep.”

  “Would someone please pass me the raspberry jam,” I asked, dismissing their barbs.

  When we entered our own house on Euclid, Shovie, Erin, and Mary Margaret were sitting on the porch in their swimsuits. Our pool—an extravagance that I had stoutly resisted—was scheduled to remain open by Rosemarie’s fiat till October 1, then perhaps all year long.

  “You guys should swim,” Mary Margaret instructed us. “The water’s great and you’ll relax a little. Oh, by the way, a courier brought that big package in the parlor from the State Department.”

  We both dashed into the front room. We paused to look at the box on the floor. It looked battered.

  “We should open it now,” my wife insisted.

  “What if all the films are wrecked?”

  “We’d better find out now so we can stop worrying about the possibility.”

  She dashed into her regal office off the parlor and reappeared with a knife, a scissors, and a box cutter, all part of an expensive, inlaid, designed desk set. Nothing too good for Ms. Clancy.

  She placed the box on a table, deftly opened it, and remove an X-ray-resistant bag.

  “That’s number five,” I said. “Number one is at the other end. We should open them in the proper order.”

  “Why?” she asked, glancing up at me with some exasperation.

  “Because, like you tell us all the time, Chucky is a neatness freak.”

  Our daughters had gathered behind us, both in robes so they wouldn’t track water in the house.

  I reached in the box and pulled out the bag on which I had placed the label #1.

  “I am not a neatness freak,” I argued. “I am an order freak.”

  They laughed.

  I opened the bag with great care and removed the first roll. It was labeled 1-1, which seemed sensible enough. My women thought it was hilariously funny.

  “I should go downstairs and see if it can be developed.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  I wanted to do it myself, but Rosemarie had signed on as my photographic assistant at the beginning of our marriage. “Our” darkroom was right next to “our” gym.