Golden Years Read online

  “Gotta go to DC and see the president,” Mary Margaret protested.

  The cop looked up at me.

  “That’s true, ma’am, but not tomorrow.”

  You never lose any points by treating a woman cop, no matter how young, with respect.

  “I’m all right, Chucky, really.”

  “For the first time in your twenty-one years you’ll do what you’re told.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  I grabbed a phone and called Peg.

  “Get over here to Mom’s. Jane has been on a rampage.”

  “Right there.”

  Then I called home. No answer.

  Madge and Theresa were calming April down. She had stopped sobbing.

  “I’m not leaving this house,” she insisted again and again. “No one is going to make me leave.”

  “No way, April, no way.”

  The reserves arrived just as the cops were dragging Jane out of the door—April Rosemary, Peg, and my good wife. Peg ran to Mom; my wife and daughter knelt next to Mary Margaret.

  “I have a concussion, Rosie. Your husband is making me go to the hospital.”

  “Who hit you on the head, M. M.?” her big sister asked.

  “Aunt Jane, with that table lamp by the door.”

  “That sick, crazy bitch.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Mary Margaret insisted.

  “She might have killed you!” my wife was crying now. “Chucky that crazy woman might have killed her!”

  “Chief,” I shouted, “add attempted murder to the charges against my sister. Bring that lamp on the floor along as evidence.”

  The cops were struggling with Jane’s co-witches.

  One protested, “We’re both nurses, you can’t arrest us!”

  The other shouted, “I’m a nun! Leave me alone.”

  “Poor little Moire,” my mom crooned sadly. “She’s such a sweet little thing. Jane should really be put away.”

  “I’ll be okay. I have to go to DC to see the president.”

  “Ambassador, the ambulance is here. Will you want to ride down to Oak Park Hospital with her?”

  “Her mother and sister will ride with her. You’d better go too.”

  “No way I wouldn’t, sir.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “Peg,” I shouted, “call Vince!”

  “I already did. He’s coming home. Rita will pick him up at the L.”

  Outside Jane was still screaming curses. Doubtless the whole neighborhood was watching. Even for the Crazy O’Malleys, this was quite a show.

  Two medics appeared with a stretcher.

  “Looks like a concussion to me,” said the woman cop, moving her hand in front of Mary Margaret’s eyes.

  “I’m fine,” she protested. “Gotta go to DC and check out the president.”

  “If you can’t come, we’ll cancel.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  They lifted her carefully onto the stretcher.

  “I have a test tomorrow,” she protested.

  “It will be all right, hon,” April Rosemary assured her. “Uncle Vince will sue them if they don’t let you take the test.”

  “Chucky,” she instructed me, “you stay here with Grams. I should have pushed Aunt Jane down the steps. I’ll see you at the hospital.”

  Rosemarie winked at me. Our daughter was coming out of it.

  I picked up the phone next to the Good April and called Dr. Kennedy at the hospital. Fortunately he was there.

  “Hit her over the head with a lamp? I’ll be at the emergency room when they get there.”

  The house was suddenly quiet. The crazy women were gone. The cop cars were leaving. The ambulance whirled away with its sirens blazing. A full-fledged Oak Park scandal. Only Peg and I and Madge and Theresa were still there, all hovering around Mom.

  “Well, Chucky dear,” she said, her Panglossa mode returning, “you certainly are good at working in a crisis. You must have learned that when you were working for poor dear Mr. Kennedy, God rest him.”

  “Have I forgotten anything, Peg?”

  “Call that moron Ted and tell him what happened.”

  I looked up Ted’s number and dialed it. The woman who answered the phone was not patient with my plea that it was an emergency and I had to talk to him immediately.

  “I’ll take your number and Doctor will call you back.”

  “Tell him that his wife is in jail at the Oak Park Police Station. That should get him to the phone.”

  Then Ted’s voice, anxious and guilty.

  “What happened, Chuck?”

  “Your wife and two aggressive women came to Mom’s house to kidnap her. She’s in jail under charges of disorderly conduct, assault and battery, and attempted murder.”

  “Murder?” his voice wavered. “Whom did she try to murder?”

  “My daughter Mary Margaret, whom she hit over the head with a lamp. She’s in the hospital now under observation.”

  “I will have to put Jane in a mental institution for treatment … I’m sorry, Chuck, more sorry than I can tell. Also for the show at the wake and funeral. I have no control over her. She swears she takes the lithium. I never know whether she’s done so. She seemed quite composed this morning.”

  “She was dragged out of here under restraints, shouting at the top of her voice. The street is filled with interested observers.”

  Peg went over to the window to investigate.

  “I’ve done everything I can, Chuck, though it seems that’s not enough. She has been fine for the last few months. She took her lithium every day. Your father’s death brought on mania, and typically manics will not take their drug at that phase. She came home from your house, no, your mom’s house, in a highly manic stage. I made her take the medicine, but she wouldn’t swallow. People like being manic.”

  He sounded so sad that I felt sorry for him. When he came home from the War to marry his sweetheart, he could not have anticipated that this lovely young woman whom he loved so much could become a raving loony.

  “Regardless, I have a traumatized mother and an injured daughter.”

  “I’ll pay whatever bills you have, Chuck.”

  “Damn it to hell, Ted, I don’t want your money. I just want your wife to leave us alone.”

  “I understand … I’ll promise that what happened today won’t ever happen again.”

  How could he keep such a promise?

  “I assume Vince will ask for a peace bond.”

  “Of course. I understand. I would even understand if you press charges …”

  “She’s at the Oak Park Police Station. Vince will be there shortly. You’d better bring a lawyer. I think the cops have sedated her for her own good.”

  “I understand … I never expected this to happen, Chuck. I have always admired your family. Whatever happened long ago is in her mind, not in the real world. I’m very sorry.”

  “So am I.”

  “You didn’t cut him much slack.” Peg had picked up the violin she keeps at Mom’s house and was tuning it.

  “I feel sorry for poor Ted. His heart is breaking, but we don’t give him slack till he tells us how he’s going to control her.”

  “What if he can’t?”

  “Then they have real trouble.”

  “Are you going to play some Mozart for me, Peg dear?”

  “A lot of Mozart, darling.”

  “I think I’d better see how my daughter is doing,” I said.

  “She’ll be fine, Chuck,” Peg said as she tightened the strings on her violin. “We all have pretty hard heads … Vince will take care of things one way or another and be in touch.”

  I stopped at Petersen’s on the way to the hospital and purchased four chocolate malts with whipped cream. They put them in a bag which did not identify the source. I ambled into the hospital, strolled up to the reception desk, and smiled broadly.

  “Ambassador O’Malley, you sure look better than the last time you were in here.”

&nb
sp; “My daughter is in for a bump on her head.”

  “Room 414. Mrs. O’Malley is up there with her.”

  I almost said, “Ms. Clancy.” But I decided not to try my luck.

  Various white-clad and blue-clad hospital staff smiled at me on the elevator in the corridor on the fourth floor. The secret of being a good smuggler is to act like you already have permission for whatever you’re carrying. Then I remembered that Room 414 was the place where I almost died of pneumonia and had a visitor from another dimension.

  I paused at the door of the room. Mary Margaret was lying on the bed, a large ice pack on her head, clad in an unappealing hospital gown. My wife and April Rosemary were sitting next to her, the former holding her hand.

  “Stop talking dirty,” Mary Margaret said wearily, “Ambassador Daddy’s here and he looks like he’s going to issue orders.”

  I said nothing for a moment because I’d been poleaxed by my wife’s beauty as she leaned over her injured child. The brew of chaos and hatred of the afternoon was swept away by my love for her.

  “I just brought good junks,” I said, removing the malts from their secret container.

  “Chucky, you’re so sweet!” Mary Margaret smiled. “Rosie, isn’t he sweet?”

  “He’s a wicked little boy who used to like to sneak candy into church and ice cream into the movies.”

  April Rosemary was the one to be responsible while I distributed the malts.

  “Dr. Kennedy did a brain scan. He says he thinks my kid sister is fine. He’ll be here in a few minutes, so we’d better dispose of our malts in a hurry.”

  “He’s had to cope with Chucky before,” my wife said, “and in this very room nothing will surprise him.”

  “How you doing, M. M?” I asked. “You look great.”

  “I do NOT look great,” she protested. “I look awful. I feel awful. I should have ducked when crazy Aunt Jane swung that lamp at me. I’ll never be the same again when I see a lamp. BUT I’m going to DC on Thursday, got it Chucky, Rosie? AND I’m getting out of this place in the morning … Are you going to give me one of those calorie machines, Chucky?”

  She was sufficiently feisty to convince me that she was all right. We proceeded to dispose of our contraband.

  “Rosie,” Mary Margaret asked, “I remember how you looked at Shovie when you brought the poor little squalling brat home from the hospital, kind of like adoring her the way the Madonna does in those pictures. Did you look at me that way?”

  “She sure did,” April Rosemary said, “only you weren’t wailing. You were a smug and contented little dickens.”

  “Hon, that’s the way all mothers are with their children. They do adore them and love them and hope they are happy and have wonderful lives. We can’t help ourselves.”

  “So Grams must have adored Aunt Jane when she was a baby?”

  Uh-oh, I thought to myself as I leaned against the hospital window that looked out on Harlem Avenue.

  “I’m sure she did.”

  “So what does it do to her when Aunt Jane breaks into her house and tries to kidnap her.”

  Silence.

  “Chucky?” she looked at me.

  Why me?

  “God gives us kids for only a little while. We feed them and love them and then take care of them. Then we have to let go of them and turn them over to God. We do all we can, maybe we make some mistakes, then they’re out of our hands and on their own. We laugh when they laugh and cry when they cry, but we can’t live their lives for them.”

  “We break their hearts like I did,” April Rosemary said sadly, “but they take us back when we come home. I say to myself that I would never do that if one of my kids freaked out. But I know I would.”

  “So,” my wife finished, “Aunt Jane has been breaking her mother’s heart these last few days and probably a lot longer. She’s mad at her. But she still loves her.”

  Mary Margaret sighed. “It’s hard being a mother.”

  “Parent,” I said.

  They all thought that emendation was very funny.

  Rosemarie took over.

  “Aunt Jane has an emotional disorder …”

  “She’s a manic-depressive. I know all about that. A couple of kids in my class take lithium every day and they’re fine.”

  “They’re very fortunate, hon, that they discovered the problem early. Parents and doctors weren’t so sophisticated when we were growing up. Aunt Jane seemed cheerful all the time. Maybe a little too cheerful. Anyway, she’s fine when she takes her medicine. Sometimes she doesn’t, especially when something terrible happens like her father’s death. That’s why she went kind of crazy. Uncle Ted will get her back on the medicine and she’ll be fine.”

  “She’ll still hate Oak Park.”

  “No one has to like Oak Park.”

  Fortunately for all of us, Mary Margaret didn’t ask why Jane hated Oak Park.

  “Well, her kids are creeps.”

  “Just a little different from us.”

  “A lot different … Speaking of different. There’s a person at the doorway, looking amused and bemused.”

  She pulled the sheet and light blanket up to her neck.

  It was the ineffable Joey Moran. Carrying a bouquet of flowers. No roses.

  “Street fight?” he said, slipping across the room to the edge of the bed, and handed her the flowers. “Mr. O’Malley, would you mind if I kissed your daughter very chastely?”

  “What do I know?”

  He did kiss her. It was not an excessively chaste kiss.

  “You gonna be all right?”

  “I just had a slight setback.”

  He kissed her again.

  “A mite better … And he’s Ambassador O’Malley.”

  “Here, dear,” Rosemarie handed her half-full malt to Joe. “Ambassador O’Malley likes to smuggle contraband into the hospital.”

  “Should I call you Ms. Ambassador, ma’am?”

  “Try Mom for size!”

  Before everyone could express proper outrage over my outrageous comment, Dr. Kennedy in his white jacket entered Room 414. I thought I smelled the roses that my mysterious friend had brought to me. No, she had brought the smell of roses.

  The women tried to hide their contraband. Poor Joe Moran continued to sip his.

  There was definitely a smell of roses. My visitor had always been a showoff.

  “Still breaking the rules, Chuck?”

  “I found them at the nurses’ station,” I pleaded.

  “And you, young woman, how do you feel?”

  “I want to go home and I want to go to DC on Thursday to scope out the new president.”

  “I don’t think there’ll be any problem about DC. There’s no hint of a crack on that fine skull of yours. But we want to keep you overnight, just to make sure there are no complications.”

  “I’m FINE!”

  “You do what Dr. Kennedy tells you, Mary Margaret O’Malley.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  The doctor felt her pulse, then took her blood pressure.

  “Vital signs all normal.”

  “Hmf …” She glared at poor Joey Moran.

  “We’ll see about things tomorrow morning. In the meantime, Ms. O’Malley, I would urge you while you are in the hospital to do what your father says and not what he does.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  Rosemarie gave the keys to her Bentley to our firstborn. “April Rosemary, you’d better pick up your car and get home to your kids and husband.”

  “Good idea, Mom. He’ll be interested in the details.”

  “I’m sure he will.”

  “I’ll leave too, Mrs. O’Malley,” Joe Moran said. “I don’t want to raise your daughter’s blood pressure.”

  “As if you could,” she said affectionately as he kissed her good-bye.

  I caught Rosemarie’s eye. She smiled faintly. Sure marriage.

  “Okay, you two can go home too,” our daughter informed us, after her young man had left.
“I need to get my sleep.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “You should get some supper and some sleep. There’s a lot of work to do.”

  “You’re babbling, Mary Margaret,” I said. “We have nothing to do tomorrow.”

  “You’re babbling, Chucky. You have your Russian book to do.”

  I had forgotten about that.

  “Come on, Chuck,” Rosemarie told me with a wink. “Let’s go down and get a bite to eat.”

  “I’ll call … and get some pasta.”

  While we were waiting in the lobby for the pasta to show up, we discussed the events of the day.

  “You know the shrink stuff,” I said. “What are Jane’s chances?”

  “Not too bad if she takes her meds,” Rosemarie replied. “She can lead an even if uneventful life. Maybe one of those creepy kids will marry and have a child she can adore. I’ll ask Maggie, but I think the combination of bipolar and resentment can be pretty potent, unless she sticks to her meds. I’m not sure what will happen to Ted. Poor guy has probably done his best. I don’t know what joy is left in his life.”

  “His father’s spirit continues to haunt him after all these years.”

  “I suspect he has grounds for an annulment,” she went on. “He’s probably too much a straight arrow to ask for one.”

  “Very grim … Can we do anything?”

  “Probably not, but, being who we are, we will probably try … What happened with Joe at lunch the other day?”

  “I forgot all about it … It seems like a long time ago.”

  “A crazy aunt does not bang your daughter on the head every Monday afternoon.”

  So I told her the story. Among my wife’s many virtues is that she listens silently to a story. Unlike other women, she saves her questions for the end. I fall more in love with her as the hours pass. Won’t do anything about it tonight.

  “I have to call Erin and tell her we won’t be home tonight and hold a conversation with Shovie. She’s entitled to an explanation.”

  The pasta came. I slipped into a small conference room that had sort of become a room reserved for the Crazy O’Malleys on their various visits to the hospital. I figured that if I were a gentleman, I’d wait for my wife. But I was hungry.

  She was so used to my gluttony that she did not even notice that I had started to eat without her.

  “Shovie is not happy with us. She should be at the hospital too to make sure that they take good care of her sister. I told her that Mary Margaret had thrown us out of her room so she could sleep. Shovie said that she must be all right. Erin said that they’d both pray for Mary Margaret. Poor Erin could not have been more concerned about her own sister.”