A Midwinter's Tale Read online

  All our children will attend Catholic schools, hopefully Fenwick and Trinity.

  I hope to lead a decent, sober, productive, and respectable life and to live to see my grandchildren and perhaps a great-grandchild or two.

  As I look over that nicely thought-out and carefully expressed statement, I feel a profound admiration for the steady mind and clear eyes of the young man who wrote it. He was sensible and wise beyond his years.

  My kids did go to Catholic schools, even to Fenwick and Trinity. I don’t smoke; never did, thank God. I avoid gambling unless it is a sure thing, like betting on the Chicago Bulls. I take only a small sip of the creature now and then. And I did join the Army when I graduated from high school in 1946.

  All my other resolutions went up in smoke.

  In this memoir I will try to explain what happened, though I’m not sure I will be able to do that, even to myself.

  I must make clear to the reader that I am not without faults that go a long way toward explaining my bizarre life.

  I have a quick mouth, far too quick for my own good. I talk without thinking. Some find this fault charming. I, however, find it dangerous.

  I have a bad habit of intervening in other people’s problems, again without thinking. Rarely do I bother to wonder whether they might not want my help. In fact I tend to act on occasion like a romantic, a man on a horse with a lance jousting with the bad guys while protecting the good guys—and the good gals, of course. John Wayne in armor. Patently such fantasies are utterly incompatible with my basic identity as an accountant.

  Women overwhelm me. For their part they find me “cute” and want to run my life. Rarely, in my perhaps obsessive fascination with them, am I able to resist their plans.

  A woman of some importance in this story once remarked to me, “Chuck, you take everything away from a woman—her clothes, her defenses, her modesty, her secrets, her hiding places, her inhibitions, her shame, her will to resist you. She is naked in every sense of that word.”

  I doubted and still doubt that description.

  “So then,” I replied to her, “she takes charge of my life and runs it for me.”

  “Naturally,” the woman replied, as though that conclusion followed from her previous remarks with unassailable logic.

  Much of my professional career has been devoted to the celebration of women. However, and despite the comments cited above, they remain a mystery to me. Which is as it should be.

  The recent article in the New York Times Magazine reported to the world that I look like Bob Newhart, a somewhat older contemporary on the West Side of Chicago. Should this comment be accurate—I am not the one to judge—then the similarity is appropriate: like the Newhart persona I am the kind of man to whom things happen, a man whose most sober and grave intentions are swept away by events.

  My serious goals, in other words, were swept into comedy by the women in my life, usually in concert with one another.

  I never had a chance.

  3

  When we were at Twin Lakes that summer, I did not want to visit the Clancy house at Lake Geneva. I resisted the lure of a ride in their big Packard convertible, the enticement of a spin on their Chris-Craft, and a run down the lake in their sailboat. I hated Mr. Clancy. He was, in my moderate judgment, rich and crooked. I lost my protest as I always did.

  Rosie certainly had everything a girl could want, every material thing anyway; but she shared her possessions with others generously, compulsively.

  “If she wants to give you her dolly, Peg,” Mom would say cautiously, “you should accept the gift graciously.”

  I refused to accept anything from her, not even the model airplane that must have been bought especially for me.

  I think I did take a ship model once.

  Nor did she insist on her own way. She had strong ideas about what we ought to do next (“Ask Daddy to give us a ride in his speedboat”), but would almost always yield to Peg’s suggestions and sometimes to mine.

  Even at nine, my sister and my foster sister, as she would become, were young women with robust wills. Instead of fighting, they arrived at quick consensus—often against me. In time I would realize that of the two dominant personalities, Peg was the more dominant.

  Later I came to understand that Peg’s judgments were essential for Rosie, almost for her life itself.

  I always protested, for the record, a visit from Rosie to Twin Lakes or a venture of ours to the Clancys’ at Lake Geneva.

  Until 1940 my objections were not too vigorous, however. I liked to ride in speedboats too.

  In 1940 my objections were more forceful than usual. I really did not want to leave Twin Lakes, speedboat or not. I cannot remember the reason for my resistance. Perhaps something had happened the year before. Moreover it was definitely not fair that Jane and Michael would be dispensed from the trip to the Clancy cottage and I would be constrained to go.

  “Rosie expects you, dear,” Mom tried to cut short my protests.

  “She’s a spoiled brat,” I insisted.

  My memory of that day is vague, perhaps because I know that my behavior was somehow less than heroic.

  It was a clear day, rather cool, and with brisk winds. The Battle of Britain had begun. The Republicans had nominated Wendel Wilkie for president, in part because Wilkie’s campaign managers had filled the galleries with their own people. We did them one better in Chicago: an employee of the sewer department gained control of the public address system and began to chant “We want Roosevelt!” immediately after the president’s message “releasing my delegates.” Some of the early polls showed Wilkie winning, although no one in our cottage at Twin Lakes, including the only one who read the papers, thought that he had a chance of winning. None of us thought that the United States would get into the war, though we had fun mocking Roosevelt’s accent when he said, “Ah hate wah!”

  We didn’t mock Winston Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” and “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

  Churchill came to power as the Germans were overrunning Holland, Belgium, France, Denmark, and Norway and driving the English Army out of Europe. Though the Brits would escape in an astonishing evacuation from the French port of Dunkirk, they were in no shape to fight an invasion. In August of 1940, the Germans began a campaign to destroy the Royal Air Force to prepare the way for an invasion. To everyone’s surprise the RAF won the Battle of Britain and occasioned another Churchillian outburst: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

  “The man is a fraud,” my father said, “but he’s got guts.”

  “They’ll have to fight them with shovels,” I observed. “They don’t have any guns left.”

  I had laughed at Road to Singapore with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby and delighted at Dorothy Lamour in a sarong before we came to Twin Lakes and had been unamused by Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.

  “The man is not funny,” Dad said, closing the book of pictures of the New York World’s Fair he had been studying. “Not at all.”

  I knew he wanted to visit the fair. The papers were telling us that the Trylon and Perisphere—a pointed tower and a globe that were the symbols of the fair—also pointed to the future of architecture. He couldn’t afford to bring the family to New York. And he would not go by himself.

  “I’m not sure that architecture has a future,” he said, laughing. “Anyway Twin Lakes is better than New York.”

  “So long as we don’t have to visit Lake Geneva,” I added.

  No one listened to me.

  So that morning we went to Lake Geneva. “I’d much rather see the Trylon and the Perisphere,” I said brightly, “than Mr. and Mrs. Clancy.”

  “Hush, dear,” Mom said in a tone that meant I had better keep my big mouth shut.

  “Mom,” Peg demanded. “Don’t let him embarrass Rosie!”


  “She’s a spoiled brat.”

  “You heard what your mother said,” Dad remarked mildly as we entered Geneva town.

  “Everyone is against me,” I sighed, relishing the final word.

  We skirted the south side of the lake, turned at Fontana, which was still mostly swamp and beach in those days, and drove up to the Clancy “cottage” on the north shore of the lake.

  It was maybe fifteen times bigger than our cottage at Twin Lakes. My resentment increased.

  Why were they rich and we poor? It wasn’t fair. I didn’t want money for myself. I wanted it for Mom and Dad.

  And Peg.

  Mrs. Clancy met us at the door. She was dressed in pink lounging pajamas and looked beautiful in a vague, uncertain way. She welcomed us much like a grand duchess would welcome poor but virtuous peasants. That metaphor reads back into the situation a later judgment. Then I felt more angry than humiliated, angry because somehow it seemed that she had insulted my parents. Especially my mother.

  “I’ll find Jim,” she murmured, suppressing a yawn. “He’s probably down by the boats. Margaret Mary, why don’t you run along and find Rosie.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Peg dashed across the lawn at the only speed she knew in those days—all engines forward.

  “Still a striking woman, isn’t she?” Dad remarked while we waited at the door.

  “I thought you’d noticed that,” Mom chuckled. “She uses too much makeup and she doesn’t have to.”

  “Meow,” Dad imitated a cat.

  Mom laughed again. “Only a very mild kitten, dear. She was my best friend once. I wish she still was.”

  “How can a woman like her stand to . . .”

  “With a man like that? I don’t know, but there are big ears around here.” Mom nodded at me.

  “Sleep in the same bed with a toad like Mr. Clancy,” I finished the thought for them, beaming brightly, I’m sure.

  “Chucky,” they said together.

  “Don’t ever say that again,” Mom warned.

  “It’s not nice,” Dad agreed.

  “It’s true,” I insisted.

  I’m sure they both wondered whether I knew the full implications of the phrase “sleep in the same bed with.”

  I didn’t, not really. But in the next exchange I worried them even more.

  “There are some things, dear”—Mom patted my head—“that we don’t say even if they’re true.”

  “Maybe they have separate bedrooms. This house is big enough, isn’t it? So is their house at Thomas and Menard. Should I try to find out?”

  “No!” they both said together.

  “Maybe,” I said philosophically, “it’s better for a husband and wife to have separate bedrooms—if their house is big enough, I mean.”

  “Maybe it is.” Mom couldn’t stop laughing now.

  “It certainly is not,” Dad insisted vigorously.

  He was laughing too, sharing some joke that I didn’t quite understand—although I wanted to in the worst way.

  Further conversation on the subject of the sleeping patterns of the Clancys was halted by the appearance of Jim Clancy, wearing white flannels, a navy blue yachting blazer, and a captain’s cap. He looked like a character from Popeye.

  Or a fat, balding, ugly circus clown.

  I’m sure I laughed.

  He shook hands vigorously with Dad, kissed Mom on the cheek, and tried to ruffle my wire-brush hair.

  I cannot say for certain whether Mom winced when his lips touched her. Kissing friends was less common then than it is now. I know I wanted to punch his fat belly for daring to kiss her. We were invited into the house “for a few moments. Then I’ll give the kids the boat rides they’re expecting. You are expecting a boat ride, aren’t you, Chucky?”

  “I don’t care.”

  He patted my head. “Sure you care. You like boats.”

  I pulled my head away.

  “He likes them,” Mom said gently, “but he gets sick on streetcars sometimes. I think you looked a little green on the car ride over here, dear. Are you feeling all right?”

  “I feel fine.”

  Would Mom and Dad like a drink? Maybe some sherry? Couldn’t buy this brand here in America, but he knew someone in England. Great stuff. Costs an arm and leg, but worth it, don’t you think?

  But then what’s money for, unless you enjoy it? Easy come, easy go, huh? Let me tell you, John, about a funny thing that happened at the exchange the other day.

  I don’t remember the story, except that it didn’t seem very funny and that Mom and Dad didn’t laugh much. Someone had tried to cheat Jim Clancy, and instead he cheated them.

  Then he turned to me. “What’s the matter with our Cubs this year?”

  Whenever Mr. Clancy turned to sports, he became a different person. I couldn’t hate him anymore. Instead I felt sorry for him. I understood that he wanted to be friends and didn’t know how. As much as I disliked him, I had to help him to be friends for at least a few moments.

  “The trades they made after the 1938 season ruined them,” I explained. “Dumb trades. They always make dumb trades. I don’t think they’ll ever win a pennant again. They won in ’32, ’35, and ’38, and we won’t win again ever.”

  I was wrong. They won, mostly by mistake, in 1945. Since then they have been on a fifty-year rebuilding program.

  “How come?” He seemed really worried, almost as though his heart were breaking.

  Jim Clancy was a little kid who had never grown up. I think I realized that even then. So I probably adopted the didactic tone I used with other kids when I explained the complexity of Chicago sports.

  “Sounds like Bob Elson with a Ph.D.,” Dad would often say.

  Bob Elson was a perennial Chicago sports announcer who always managed to sound as if he were about to fall asleep.

  I pointed out to Mr. Clancy the “front office” problems of the Cubs. I told him that his Lake Geneva neighbor Mr. Wrigley should make gum instead of trying to run a baseball team. I insisted that the Cubs would never hire adequate people to turn the team around because Mr. Wrigley felt he had to know more about baseball than anyone else since he had inherited the team from his father.

  “And anyway”—I glared at my smiling father—“I’m a Sox fan.”

  “What about the Bears?” Mr. Clancy seemed about to cry.

  “They should have won last year,” I asserted. “They were unbeaten till the play-offs with Washington. Then they got overconfident. This year they’re going to get even with the Redskins and everyone else. They have the best players, and no one has figured out how to stop the T formation. They may even,” I admitted reluctantly, “beat the Cardinals.”

  That was in the time when the Cardinals were a Chicago team, long before they went off to St. Louis, for which God forgive them says I. And then to Phoenix, which is welcome to them.

  “Gee, I hope you’re right,” he said wistfully.

  “I’m right. Here, let me show you, Mr. Clancy.” I grabbed a paper napkin from the table on which the expensive sherry bottle had been placed. “The quarterback—that’s Sid Luckman from Columbia—takes the ball. The halfback goes in motion this way, the defense tries to cover him. Either the quarterback gives the ball to the fullback, who goes through here, or if they try to plug up the center, then he throws a pass to the halfback. You can’t stop it.”

  “The quarterback is Jewish, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, like Marshal Goldberg on the Cardinals. They’re very smart people.”

  “They work hard, but you can’t always trust them.”

  I saw my mother’s lips tighten.

  “You can’t always trust the Irish either.” I folded up the napkin.

  Mom smiled proudly. Dad winked.

  “Well, hey,” Mr. Clancy pounded me on the shoulder, “let’s go for a boat ride. Speedboat first, huh? Let’s find the dames, they’re probably afraid anyway, huh?”

  “I don’t think,” I said reverently, “that those two hellions ar
e afraid of anything.”

  “Chucky!” Mom did her best to be serious. “Such terrible language!”

  “Well,” I insisted stubbornly, “it’s true.”

  Jim Clancy, even in those days, struck me as a strange, complicated little man. I despised him and still felt sorry for him. I didn’t like the way he looked at Mom, though I couldn’t say exactly what I didn’t like about it. I didn’t like his crass display of wealth. I didn’t like the feel of his clublike hand on my head. Yet I also understood, dimly maybe, how sad and unhappy he was and tried to go along with his little game of being a kid just like me.

  Only he was a mean kid.

  His boat was a brand-new Higgins, an enormous twenty-two-foot speedboat with an eight-cylinder Chrysler inboard marine engine and three cockpits. Mom and Dad begged off and sat on the pier to watch us. Mrs. Clancy drifted to the pier, uncertainly, it seemed to me, followed by a black lady with a couple of trays of little sandwiches.

  “Girls in the backseat, boys in the front seat,” Mr. Clancy ordered.

  Rosie frowned at that order, but jumped in the rear cockpit anyway—gracefully and noisily. Peg followed with a little bit more delicacy. Jim Clancy unraveled the bow line with considerable difficulty.

  “Cast off the stern line, Rosie,” he ordered.

  “I already have,” she replied.

  He jammed the throttle into reverse and backed away from the pier with a vigor like that which, I imagined, the Queen Mary would have displayed.

  Or like a teenager a few years later, peeling rubber in front of his girlfriend’s house.

  My head jerked back. I felt a touch of the motion sickness that had bothered me during the ride from Twin Lakes to Lake Geneva.

  However, the small waves of Lake Geneva were no match for the two hundred and fifty horses inside the Chrysler. We roared from the Fontana end to the Geneva end of the lake and back in less than ten minutes.

  I didn’t have the nerve to turn around and see how the girls were reacting. I hung on for dear life and loved every second of it.

  Weak stomach or, as I know now, weak inner ear or not, I reveled in the power of the engine, the rush of the wind, the boiling wake cutting out on either side, the sense that I was almost flying over the water.