Golden Years Read online

  She planned to leave Ireland as soon as she could. There was no future for young people in Ireland. If she could arrange it, she would migrate to America and stay there. She thought that perhaps she could enroll in an American university and earn a degree that would enable her to teach in a higher educational institution. She didn’t care whether the school at which she would teach would be Catholic or not, distinguished or not. She simply had to teach people who were at the same age she was now. That way, she told Jean with one of her huge laughs, she’d never become old.

  Her friends did not take these plans seriously. They could not imagine Bride Mary anywhere else but in Galway. The city and its life absorbed her. She particularly enjoyed the Galway races and the dances out in Salt Hill on the nights of the races. America was all talk, they thought. Many of their classmates would strive to emigrate to America and succeed. Somehow it didn’t seem to be the kind of thing Bride Mary would do.

  She was very frugal. She spent little on clothes, though she always managed to look chic. With a figure like hers that was easy, Jean told us. She saved most of the money she earned as a waitress in a restaurant on High Street, where her good spirits charmed especially American visitors. The money from the restaurant and her tiny legacy from the sale of her farm and from the canon’s estate were destined to pay for her trip to America.

  Though she was exuberant, there was always a part of her, Jean would tell us, that she kept hidden. Probably the penury of her early life. Certainly she did not want to talk about the “gang” to which she claimed to have belonged.

  In the last year and a half of school, she grew increasingly rebellious, though more in words than in deeds. UCG was not yet a center for the student unrest that came to Galway in the late 1960s. In the pubs late in the day, Bride Mary would argue that there were two things wrong with Ireland—the Catholic Church and the ruling class. The Church not only wanted to keep the Irish people poor so it could control its parishioners, it also wanted to prevent them from having any fun. The Church and the ruling class conspired to exploit the ordinary Irish people. It might take a revolution to change that. The young people of Ireland should lead the revolution.

  Then they would order another round of Guinness.

  She was serious, Sean Cailaigh, part of Bride Mary’s crowd, told us. She was a deep one. If she had stayed in Ireland, she might have become involved in radical action. And not the kind of action that the lads up in the North were doing. She might throw a bomb someday, but it would be at a church or a millionaire’s house, if she could find one. She was still a Catholic of course and went to Mass every Sunday, every day in Lent. But she hated priests and especially Michael Brown, the bishop of Galway, who was building his big cathedral then on the site of the old jail.

  Was she free with men? Well, only up to a point if you take me meaning. I don’t know whether she was a virgin or not. I never had the opportunity to find out, as much as I would have liked to. But she lived a virginal life, for whatever that’s worth. Now that I’m a little older and with daughters of my own, I’m inclined to respect her for that. I never did think she’d leave Ireland. She talked about America, but she wouldn’t even get on a train for Dublin. Galway was big enough for her. I saw her teaching in a secondary school, maybe one run by nuns. She’d marry only in her late twenties and still produce a large brood of kids for whom she would be a wonderful mother. I was destroyed altogether when I heard she had flown off to San Francisco from Shannon with hardly a word of good-bye to anyone.

  An t’ather Tomas O’Callaigh, a priest with whom Bride Mary debated often at the Irish-speaking town of Spidal, told us that she was a grand one for the arguments, especially in the Irish language, which is especially shaped for arguing. She blamed the frigging Brits, as she called them, though herself using a word that’s a might stronger, for crushing the Irish language and the Irish culture out here in the West. She blamed the Church for accommodating itself to the Brits. I can’t say I disagreed with her at all, at all, and herself knowing that, but we still had great arguments. I wish she had stayed here. She could have done great work in Galway, particularly here in the Gaeltach.

  Professor Liam O’Haydin, who taught her philosophy, had a much less benign picture of Bride Mary. She was an uncivilized and contemptuous young woman, typical of the kind of crude child we enroll here at the present time. She was bog Irish from the River Suck, a group which has created nothing but trouble for four hundred years. They are too lazy and indifferent to improve themselves, which is fortunate, because if one of them does obtain a bit of education, their undisciplined minds and rude manners greatly disrupt the peace of a classroom. It is a good thing for Galway that she apparently emigrated to America.

  Eoin O’Leary claimed that Bride Mary and he were in love and had discussed marriage. We were not lovers, he said, though it would have been very nice. I still miss her though I am happily married. I was sorry to hear of her death.

  All our Galway contacts found it very hard to believe that such a vivacious and ebullient young woman could simply disappear from the face of the earth. Save for a letter or two after she flew to San Francisco, no one ever heard from her again.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Chuck

  Dressed in raincoats and carrying umbrellas we lugged our equipment through Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue, and around the corner to the entrance of the West Wing, a driveway protected by National Park Service Police in a guardhouse. These folks were very considerate of those who were on their list and quickly dismissive of those who were not We waited patiently in line for some time, then were quickly dismissed. Our names were not on the list. No one had ever heard of an Ambassador O’Malley who was to take a picture of the president.

  “Ambassadors,” the guard sneered at me, “don’t take pictures. I don’t suppose you have any evidence that you are an ambassador?”

  I just happened to have the diplomatic passport that the State Department issues me for auld lang syne or some similar reason. I just happened to have it because, as I tell my priestly brother and my soon-to-be priestly son, it confers almost as much clout as does a driver’s license displaying a Roman collar in Chicago.

  The redneck cop was not impressed.

  “I don’t care who you are. You’re still not getting into the West Wing unless your name is on my list. And it’s not on my list.”

  I felt like someone who had made reservations at a restaurant and then is told by the maître d’ that his name is not on the list I suspected that if I could see the list I would find my name.

  “We spoke to Mr. Deming earlier this morning. He said we should come right over. I’m sure if you would call him …”

  “We do not call West Wing personnel unless they call us, sir. Would you please give way for those who are next in line.”

  “Come on, Chucky,” my wife said, “let’s not argue with this Republican.”

  So, we lugged our stuff back across the park as the rain beat down. I wanted to go to the airport and release our story to the Chicago media. Rosemarie insisted I call Mr. Deming. The expression on our daughter’s face suggested our ancestor Grace O’Malley about to launch a raid against the hated O’Flahertys.

  “Chuck, where are you?” Tom Deming demanded.

  He had been one of my junior staff in Bonn a long time ago.

  “In the Hay-Adams.”

  “Too much rain to carry your equipment across the park? You should have called me before.”

  I had adjusted the tone of my voice to suggest scarcely controlled rage.

  “We have carried the equipment over and back. One of your cops would not let us in because our names are not on the list.”

  “You are certainly on the list. I’ll get a Secret Service car and pick you up.”

  “We’re going back to Chicago,” I said, a sullen little boy.

  “Don’t do that. The president will be terribly disappointed. He wants to meet you.”

  I was not impressed. I had
been in the White House and indeed the Oval Office often enough. It was no big deal.

  “I’ll be right over,” Tom Deming said, and hung up.

  “Chucky,” my daughter informed me, “you can be a real hard-ass.”

  “Only when dealing with one of the same persuasion.”

  I had begun the morning in an excellent mood, the reaction of every man to high quality sex, especially since, after thirty years, I had made a little progress in understanding a woman’s perspective on the matter. I was, not to put too fine an edge on it, proud of myself. The glow in Rosemarie’s eyes was enough to confirm my suspicion that I might be now a somewhat more than adequate lover. I tried to temper my elation with the caution that I had a long way to go.

  My wife was so unbearably lovely.

  Then the rain and the wind and the mud of Lafayette Park and the falling leaves and the redneck cop had ruined my day. Why, with all the troubles back home, had I come to Washington? To take a picture of a Republican? Charles Cronin O’Malley, you gotta be out of your mind! After every high, there comes a low. Better to avoid the high? Not when the high was my Rosemarie.

  We waited in the lobby of the Hay-Adams until a nondescript black Ford with a radio antenna appeared. The doorman saluted, waved the car up to the doorway, and held up his hand to block the cars that might pull in behind us. These nondescript Fords apparently had a certain cachet of their own.

  Tom Deming, with more weight and less hair than when we had known him in Bonn fifteen years before, popped out.

  “Mr. Ambassador!” He pumped my hand. “You never change! And Mrs. O’Malley, you’re more beautiful than ever! And this young woman must be Moire, the redhead, Germanspeaking tot who won all our hearts at the embassy. We all said that you would grow up to be a stunning woman. We underestimated the truth.”

  Mary Margaret was so pleased with his grace that she did not correct him by insisting on her “real” name.

  “I assume that our name was on the list and the redneck cop just didn’t like our looks?”

  Tom was loading our equipment into the trunk of the Ford. He looked up and smiled again.

  “That man has been transferred to other duty.”

  “I hope in one of the Park Service’s glaciers.”

  “How is the rest of your family, Ms. O’Malley … Or should I say Ms. Clancy.”

  “Rosemarie, Tom … Kevin Patrick and April Rosemary both have two children and soon both will have three. Jimmy will be ordained in the spring. Sean is considering his options, though Mary Margaret here says they have narrowed to one lovely young woman. We also have a five-year-old redhead who is pure delight.”

  Tom and the Secret Service driver loaded our stuff into the trunk. I ensconced myself in the middle of the backseat between my wife and daughter.

  “And you write stories and the ambassador takes pictures,” he continued. “ … The delay is fortunate because the first lady has an appointment this afternoon and she won’t be able to be present.”

  “Oh?” I said. “She involves herself in such matters?”

  “She does indeed.”

  “She would attempt to tell me which poses to take?”

  “She would indeed.”

  “So.”

  Should that happen, we would pack our things and decamp. No one tells Chuck O’Malley which shots he can take, not twice. My Rosemarie was smiling her “such-a-cute-little-boy” smile. Witch.

  Beautiful though.

  The Secret Service car went around the East Wing and pulled up to the back gate.

  “Car seven with Ambassador O’Malley and family,” the driver said into his mike.

  The gate opened. We drove through it and stopped. An officer peered in the backseat and smiled at the two lovely ladies, more than the idiot at the gate to the West Wing had done.

  “They’re the family,” I said, pointing cross-armed at my wife and daughter.

  “Welcome, Mr. Ambassador, it’s good to have you back.”

  That’s better. We pulled up under the steps to the low-slung diplomat’s door which would bring us to the ground floor. A flock of White House ushers swarmed out of the door, some with umbrellas, some to carry our bags. We were whisked through the rooms to an elevator.

  “We’ll take a closer look when we leave, hon,” Rosemarie assured our daughter.

  They led us along the portico to the West Wing, into a waiting room outside the Oval Office.

  “You can go right in, Mr. Ambassador,” said the woman at the desk next to the door of the Oval Office. “The president is waiting for you.”

  We walked right into Ronald Reagan’s tidal wave of geniality.

  “Chuck O’Malley, I’m glad to meet you! What wonderful photos.” He held up a copy of my portrait book. “You have to make an old actor look as good as these people do … I don’t think the Oval Office has ever had two such beautiful Irishwomen in it at the same time. I recognize you both from your pictures. Wonderful! Come in! Let’s relax and have a cup of tea before we go to work!”

  My first reaction was that “the Gipper” and “Bonzo” had aged, as we all do. He didn’t look his seventy years but he was not nearly as young as he seemed on television. His hair could not possibly be as black as it was unless it had been touched up. Everywhere.

  He was wearing a dark blue business suit, white shirt, and red-and-blue tie—actor and athlete as CEO.

  “They tell me you’re just back from Russia. What was it like? Did you bring any of your photos along?” he asked as an usher poured our tea. There were exactly three cookies on the White House china plate, something like the ration you’d receive at St. Ursula’s convent in the old days when the Good April and I went over to do battle with Sister Mary Admirabilis, AKA Sister War Admiral.

  “As a matter of fact, I did. Would you like to see them?”

  I reached in my film bag and pulled out half a dozen pictures that I had secretly printed up the night before. My wife and my daughter gasped. Good! I’d fooled them.

  “I’d love to see them.”

  His geniality and charm were authentic, not just an act for television. He was not a mean man hiding behind a smile as Ike had been.

  I spread the pictures on his desk, images of peasants in front of log houses, workers coming out of factories, kids playing in the mud, an orthodox priest.

  The president became serious.

  “Good people,” he said. “You can tell by looking at them, but so poor.”

  “Only a step above a third world country. In Moscow you see better clothes but still they’re poor … I hardly need tell you, Mr. President. Socialism doesn’t work. The man who said he’d seen the future and it worked was dead wrong. Nothing works—airplanes, rockets, steel mills, health care, collective farms. They’re spending their gold reserves to buy grain to feed their people.”

  “As I have said, it’s an evil empire. Very dangerous.”

  I gathered up the pictures.

  “It will implode within the decade,” I said. “The middle-level apparatchiks who are going to replace the present gerontocracy will cancel out the Bolshevik revolution, the non-Russian republics will break away, and the occupied countries in Eastern Europe will free themselves.”

  I gathered up the pictures, surreptitiously confiscated one of the three cookies, and began to unpack my equipment.

  The president sat at his desk, his face furrowed.

  “That’s an original perspective, Chuck. No one has suggested it to me.”

  “Not so original, Mr. President Willard Mathias of the Office of National Estimates wrote in 1954 that Communism’s inability to produce sufficient consumer goods and resistance to sharing power with a growing class of professionals and technocrats will ultimately destroy the party’s power.”

  “1954! That was twenty years ago!”

  “Almost thirty.”

  My wife and daughter, dutiful and uncomplaining members of the team (for the moment) began to unpack the lights and the screens for t
he picture taking. I didn’t normally use such paraphernalia, but for a president of the United States you had to create the impression of a real professional photographer.

  “I’ve never heard that from any of our people. They think the empire will endure for decades, perhaps even centuries.”

  “Only if they can make it work. The new leadership, which will certainly emerge during your term of office, will try to make it work, but they won’t succeed.”

  He shook his head dubiously.

  “I hope you’re right. I’d like to believe you’re right. But it all seems too easy … The Cold War has gone on for a long time …”

  “By 1990 it will be over. You can claim victory.”

  “Have you told this theory to any of our people?”

  “As you said, Mr. President, the Cold War has gone on for a long time. A lot of folks wouldn’t know what to do if it ends.”

  We proceeded with the picture taking. He was an easy shot. There was not much difference between his public persona and his private self. He was the Gipper. His philosophy of administration was that he figured out what needed to be done, selected the-men to do it, then did not interfere with them. It made for a relaxed presidency and a relaxed president, one who could watch movies every night.

  My wife and daughter shuttled back and forth with the color and black-and-white cameras, reloading the one as I shot with the other. They were charming assistants and quiet and self-effacing—rare behavior for both of them.

  In the lens of my Hasselblads he emerged as a handsome, genial, elderly Irishman who did not like to worry about the small print. I wondered as I snapped away how much there was there. He was mildly interested in my scenario about the Soviet Union but would never question the CIA or the State Department to determine if there were men in either agency who agreed with me. Maybe our most genial president, perhaps even the most likeable, but far from the brightest. I wondered whether John Hinckley Jr.’s assassination attempt the previous March had slowed him down or whether he was at that age in life where we all want to slow down, if only just a little.