Golden Years Page 17

  “Poor kid.”

  “Yeah … Do you think our clan and their clan have a chance of ever being friends?”

  “Father Raven says that forgiveness is what Christianity is all about.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Rosemarie

  “She doesn’t know what we are doing, does she?” Chuck said to me as we fell into each other’s arms as soon as he had closed the door in our room in the Hay-Adams Hotel.

  “Certainly she knows what we’re doing. She’s a very perceptive young woman. She doesn’t quite understand what happens that makes two people our age fall in love again simultaneously. But she approves.”

  We pawed one another, crazy with desire. Since we had boarded the plane at O’Hare I wanted nothing more than to be naked with him. I told myself that I was too old for such feelings and that even when I was younger they would have been inappropriate. I was a grandmother almost fifty years old. I was past the time in life when sexual abandon was suitable. My obsession with my husband was undignified. We were in DC on serious business—a portrait of a president. I knew we could defer romance just like we could defer a forest fire. I was a sheanimal in heat. I should be ashamed of myself. That thought enflamed me even more.

  As we kissed and caressed, I unbuttoned the top of my beige knit autumn dress and pushed my bra straps off my shoulders. Chuck finished the process of stripping me to the waist. I cried out with joy, not loudly enough, I hoped, to be heard in the next room, much less down the corridor where our curious daughter was doubtless reading a book. And wondering …

  The week had not been easy. The Good April seemed more ethereal every day. Mary Margaret’s nights were troubled by angry dreams. I had to tell her that she should be furious at Crazy Aunt Jane. Her anger did not mean that she did not forgive her. I also brought her over to see Dr. Kennedy about the trip to DC, despite her angry protests that she felt “fine.” He approved the trip and asked her about sleeping at night.

  “Fine.”

  “No bad dreams?”

  “Only a couple …”

  “Mary Margaret Anne O’Malley!” I warned her.

  “All RIGHT, Ro-SIE … Terrible dreams, Dr. Mike, all confused and angry and violent … I don’t sleep much …”

  “You might perhaps want a couple of counseling sessions with someone,” he said tentatively.

  “I’m FINE!”

  Mike Kennedy, who had teens of his own, did not make an issue out of it. Mary Margaret was not a teen anymore but sometimes she regressed.

  She sulked as we drove home.

  As we pulled up in front of the house, she said sadly, “Trees are beginning to change colors.”

  “It happens, hon.”

  We made no move to leave the car.

  “I don’t suppose that your friend Dr. Ward would see me once or twice.”

  “It’s probably against the rules, but Maggie doesn’t always keep the rules.”

  “Could you call her and ask?”

  “It would be better if you did.”

  “Will you sit in your office with me while I call her?”

  “Sure … That’s what mothers are for.”

  “Okay. Let’s do it now before I change my mind.”

  We went into my office—The CEO’s office as Chuck called it. I gave her the number and she dialed it.

  “Lo, Dr. Ward. I’m Mary Margaret O’Malley. Rosie’s daughter. I wonder if I might come over and see you a couple of times … My crazy Aunt Jane tried to kill me with a lamp … Chucky and Rosie and I have to go to DC to take the president’s picture this week … Next Monday afternoon? Good, I don’t have class then. Thank you.”

  “That wasn’t hard, was it?”

  “She’s a nice lady … I am SO mad at Crazy Aunt Jane!”

  “She could have killed you, hon.”

  “She could have made me a vegetable for the next fifty years.”

  I shivered. I’d never thought of that. I hope that Vince could keep that crazy woman locked up forever. I didn’t think she was so crazy that she didn’t know what she was doing.

  “Well,” my daughter perked up, “back to the dungeon. April Rosemary is coming over, probably with her kids. You can play grandma.”

  My children think they can waltz into my house with their kids anytime they want to and I won’t object. They’re right of course. April Rosemary has trained Johnny and April Nettleton to adore their grandmother. I have no resistance to them at all, at all.

  That evening Chuck and I went through the proof sheets, this time just glancing through them hastily and marking some of the more promising shots. We viewed them on a huge magnifying screen. We did it together in the darkroom because we had learned that our tastes in such matters were similar. We distracted ourselves in the process with remote but delectable foreplay.

  “Charles Cronin O’Malley! We are here to work! You’re distracting me! … Ouch! Stop it! Mary Margaret is upstairs. What if she walks down to see what we’re doing?”

  “The door is locked and she knows better than to do that!”

  “We have to finish these proof sheets!”

  “We’ll finish them,” he said innocently. “A little petting does not interfere with my artistic judgment.”

  “It does interfere with mine.”

  “That’s because you women are more easily distracted by pleasure than us men.”

  “Stop it!”

  “Do you really mean that?”

  I considered for a moment.

  “Certainly not!”

  “I figure,” he went on, “that this is an important turning point in our life and we must make the most of it.”

  “Entering our golden years and losing Dad?”

  “Falling in love all over again seems a wise response, though I don’t think either of us planned it.”

  I didn’t disagree. There was too much sweetness between us not to seize it, cling to it, revel in it whenever we could.

  We did manage to go through the proof sheets and choose more shots than we could ever use. My thoughts about the text were shaping up.

  “I think we should make your remarks at the embassy one of our major themes, implicitly, indirectly, so the reader will decide for herself that this is a society which is falling apart.”

  “Despite the obvious fact that the ordinary people are wonderful?”

  “Right!”

  “Maybe I’ll say something like that to the president when we see him.”

  “He might not like to hear it.”

  “We’ll see … Do you want to go upstairs or shall we continue the game down here?”

  “Why should we have to choose?”

  By then I had become pretty wanton. In fact, I seemed to be pretty wanton all day, every day. Chucky had started it. The abandon in my response astonished me. We were both fighting age and death. The pain of death and the threat of more death didn’t go away but somehow we trumped it.

  “Woman, you’ll be the death of me!”

  “Charles Cronin O’Malley, I’ll be the life of you!”

  Our concerns about Crazy Aunt Jane, as everyone called her, and about poor April continued. Ted had told Vince that Jane was not responding well to treatment. She fought off all medication, refused to talk to the psychiatrist, and cursed Ted when he came to see her.

  The Good April, we all agreed, was “failing.” We set up a system by which various members of the family with their children would keep her occupied over the weekend. No one was quite sure what we could do for her. The truth I feared was that we could do nothing for the present except be around.

  Our baby was displeased that we were going away again without her and this time we were taking her “big sister” with us. We promised her we’d be back by Saturday morning and immediately drive down to the Lake for the rest of the weekend. She would stay with Peg, who would spoil her rotten.

  On Thursday morning, Chucky appeared in the parlor with his luggage, the photographic equipment, and the tickets—al
l ready to drive up to O’Hare three hours before plane time.

  “Give me the tickets,” I demanded. “You’ll lose them.”

  He didn’t say, because he had learned better, that if my daughter and I didn’t hurry with our preparations, the tickets would be worthless. He simply smiled smugly and continued to read a biography of the film star turned president. Judging from the expression on his face, he didn’t like what he was reading.

  He should not have worried about our catching the plane. We were on board with ten minutes to spare.

  On the trip to DC Chuck continued to read the book about Reagan, making all sorts of guttural sounds. Mary Margaret struggled with a calculus problem. I read the first two files about Bride Mary O’Brien, which I found somehow disturbing. We were getting into dark and deep waters with this one.

  At supper that night, in the ornate and old-fashioned restaurant of the Hay-Adams, Chuck became expansive for Mary Margaret’s benefit.

  “Ike was the first president whose picture I took. It was a kind of candid-camera thing of him at the top of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. He was on his way to Korea in fulfillment of a campaign promise that he would go to Korea. The implication was that he would go there and end the war, but it was much more difficult than that to end the war. It’s interesting how many times the Republicans have won an election because the Democrats got themselves into an overseas mess. In 1952 it was Korea, in 1968 it was Vietnam, and this time around it was the Iranians taking our embassy staff hostage. We’re not very good at getting out of messes we should never have gotten into in the first place.

  “Anyway, I was over there for Look and was exhausted and airsick and worried about my pregnant young wife. I didn’t like Ike, mostly because I don’t like generals—with the exception of Radford Mead who was top CO in Bamberg—but also because he seemed a mean, authoritarian human being. My picture was on the cover of the magazine and my first child was born without me …”

  “And his young wife,” I interjected, “did very well without him.”

  “Ro-SIE,” Mary Margaret said, “let him finish the story.”

  “Anyway, the picture was controversial. I thought it caught him as a nasty CO. A lot of people liked it, including Ike himself, for some strange reason. Some Republicans said I was probably a Communist. I was a smart-ass and said that at the present time I was not a member of the party. Then my colleagues in the media wanted to know whether I ever was. I said that I had been a Cook County Democrat since I was conceived.”

  “He has always had this ability,” I informed our daughter, “for getting in trouble with his clever little mouth.”

  “So then Jack Kennedy wanted us to go to Bonn as an ambassador because he liked my work on Germany and my dissertation on the Marshall Plan, so I asked him if I could do a formal portrait before I left. I managed to get one of Lyndon Johnson in the little room in the Senate Office Building, where he preyed on every young woman he could lure into the room. It’s a good thing I did because he was so angry at me when I resigned from Bonn and refused to go to New York for the UN that he didn’t talk to me for years … I still can’t figure out why anyone thought I would be a good diplomat.”

  “Very effective wife,” I commented. “That’s what all the news magazines said, usually with a picture of me in a swimsuit.”

  “I caught Jack Kennedy perfectly, a tall, handsome man, with probing eyes and a sense of vision. I didn’t get what we didn’t know about then. His terrible health and his obsessive pursuit of women, a habit that he had inherited from his father and grandfather. For all of that, however, he saved us from nuclear war at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I don’t think any other president in our time could have done.”

  “I was three years old then, wasn’t I?” Mary Margaret asked. “Little brat babbling in German. I think maybe I vaguely remember all the excitement.”

  “I’m glad you kept up your German,” the proud mother said, “but you never were a little brat.”

  “My shot of Lyndon Johnson showed a shrewd man from whom you wouldn’t want to buy a used car or a used war. Tricky Dicky Nixon was tough, because I didn’t want to present him as the truly odd man he was. I don’t think I was successful. He came through looking like a crook. Gerry Ford was a great subject—a handsome ex—football player who was never elected president—but a nice man if not very bright who inherited the Nixon mess. Jimmy Carter was in a way the opposite. A nice and very bright man who should never have been elected president. He thought he could cope with Washington the way he coped with Atlanta and handle Congress the way he handled the Georgia state legislature. Then he got caught up in problems that he had inherited—inflation, unemployment, Iran. When we visited him to take the picture, he already seemed to know that he was sinking beneath the waves. Bonzo buried him. So there we are—the United States since 1952. I have a hunch it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

  “What’s he like, Chucky?” Mary Margaret asked, a leading question because she loved to hear him talk, an inherited trait, I fear.

  “He was a sports reporter and a second-rate movie actor. He played George Gipp in Knute Rockne: All American and Bedtime for Bonzo. He was born in Tampico, Illinois, and went to Eureka College. He was baptized a Catholic and married the movie actress Jane Wyman in a Catholic church. He dumped her after eight years and married the present Mrs. Reagan when she was six months pregnant. He became active in the Screen Actors Guild and cleaned out the Communists. About then he converted to the Republicans. Then he ran for governor and was elected. He had a couple of tries at the presidential nomination and finally won it. He wasn’t a very good governor but Jimmy Carter wasn’t a very good president. Reagan is the ‘Great Communicator’—the first movie actor to become president of the United States. He’s mostly style, but it’s very good style. In presidential politics from here on in, style will be important. No more Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson or Dwight Eisenhower.”

  “You’re a little too hard on him, Chucky. He wasn’t raised Catholic, so he’s really not fallen away.”

  “He’s a fallen away Democrat,” he complained.

  “Our generation,” I explained to Mary Margaret, “will never get over the death of Jack Kennedy. There seemed to be so much hope, so much promise.”

  “Maybe you expect too much from presidents,” Mary Margaret said. “They have not been all that great historically, have they?”

  Chucky stopped eating his chocolate ice cream dessert.

  “You are entirely too young, Mary Margaret, to have acquired that kind of wisdom.”

  We all laughed. After supper we walked around Lafayette Park and down Pennsylvania Avenue. Then we put in a call to Shovie at Peg’s house.

  “They’re spoiling me rotten, Mom,” the child assured me, “like they always do.”

  I felt a twinge of sadness for my sister. I had four grandchildren and two more coming. She didn’t have any yet, though it was possible that Charley, her daughter, was expecting. It didn’t seem fair.

  Then we went to our rooms and Chucky and I began our dance again.

  When we had finished we lay side by side on the couch in the parlor of our suite, exhausted from our efforts and complacent and holding hands.

  “I hope I didn’t hurt you?” Chucky said.

  “Not at all, my darling. You’d never hurt me … It was strenuous exercise.”

  Such interludes in a marriage could not go on forever, no matter how much a couple might enjoy them. Eventually marriage relations would settle back to an ordinary routine, which in our case was certainly satisfying. A man and a woman cannot spend all their time in making love and preparing for it. They cannot live indefinitely in a condition of semitumescence. However, they must, I assured myself, make the most of the situation while they could in the hope that it would enhance the routines to which they must return.

  Right?

  “What do you think God would say about us?” I asked.

  “Who?”r />
  “GOD!”

  “Oh, Him … or Her as the case may be … I think God would be pleased because we are trying to love each other without restraint for a little while just as He loves us all the time. One of the advantages of being God is that passionate love never tires God out.”

  I sighed.

  “It must be fun to be God.”

  “My problem, Rosemarie, is that you are so beautiful. You’re irresistible with your clothes on, awesome when you’re naked, and overwhelming when you’re at the height of pleasure.”

  “That was a very nice compliment,” I admitted. “Chucky we’re both all sweaty and sticky. I think we need a shower.”

  So I led him off to the shower.

  There is little autobiographical information about Bride Mary O’Brien from her years at the University College Galway. She no longer wrote letters back to Ballinasloe because there was no one there to whom she owed letters. Nor is there any trace of her ever returning to that town. She did write a paper for one of her classes on the annual horse fair in Ballinasloe but she may have been describing it from memory. It was later published in a small Galway paper under the pen name of Kathleen Ni Houlihan, a figure from Celtic mythology who represents the Irish people. Galway had become her home. When she pedaled her bicycle out of town she apparently chose to ride north along Loch Corrib or west into the Gaeltach around Spidal and Carraroe. Such are the reports from her college friends and classmates.

  Jean Lawton, who shared a room with her through the college years, tells us that Bride Mary was fun-loving, a natural leader, and a sensitive friend. Jean is a Protestant from Ballina in County Mayo, one of the few such by her own admission. Bride Mary was fascinated because she had never met a Protestant before but also very kind to a young woman who was not sure that she’d be accepted by her fellow students. Bride Mary studied very hard and played at least as hard. Her crowd had the reputation of being wild and may have on occasion too much of the creature taken. However, they harmed no one and whatever sex they indulged in was very discreet. It was still Ireland in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Bride Mary had many boyfriends, but as far as Jean could tell us she was intimate with none of them.