Irish Tiger Page 3

  My three daughters were loyal to me at the wake and funeral, protecting me as best they could from the family and easing me into the head of the procession into church.

  Evie even whispered into my ear as I drove her and Tony, her husband, home from the final explosive night of the wake, “The next time you marry, Dad, choose a different kind of family.” Given what subsequently happened that was a strange comment indeed.

  “I’m sure I’ll never marry again, hon.”

  Marriage seemed so easy in the early nineteen seventies. One went to Notre Dame to study economics, met young women either there or from St. Mary’s across the road or from Barat in Lake Forest, danced with them, fooled around with them (the meaning of which was expanding even then but not nearly so far as it has now), fell in love with them, decided to marry while we were still in graduate school (MBA at Loyola for both of us because it was right around the corner), and settled down for a life of happiness together. Faith was a lovely, affectionate young woman, brimming with energy and enthusiasm. Her family was a little strange, but most families are. At least they knew how to have fun, which is more than I could say for my own careful, responsible parents.

  Neither of my parents drank. They were both only children born late in the lives of their own parents. I had no experience of drunks when I was growing up save at teenage beer bashes. I was not sensitive to the signals that a person had moved from jollity to intoxication. I did not realize that Faith’s parents and grandparents as well as her older sisters were “tuned” at the end of almost every day. They were, after all, capable of getting up the next morning and going off to work in their offices in the city or county bureaucracy. Faith hardly drank at all when we were dating and then courting during our last years at Notre Dame and Barat. Yet she became an alcoholic and they were merely lushes. I could have protected her from her fate. I should have protected her. Ignorance is not an excuse. Or maybe it is. I don’t know. She seemed a cheerful, charming, and pretty young woman. Her family were all vulgar. She was not and I was marrying her, not them. We didn’t have to live with them.

  Again in my ignorance and inexperience I didn’t know that very few young people are able to exclude their families from their lives.

  Nor did I have any knowledge about what we would later call postpartum depression and what it can do to a woman’s body and soul, especially if a woman has three children and an interlude of PPD—postpartum depression—after each birth. I didn’t realize that the other women in her family would close in on her like a swarm of worker bees around an ill queen and exclude me as for all practical purposes a drone. Nor did I understand that they would try to “cheer her up” with a steady diet of booze.

  Finally I didn’t understand how different women are from men. I still can’t claim any comprehension of that matter. One autumn evening while my daughters and I were having supper at an Italian restaurant on Walton Street after we had witnessed a disastrous defeat of Notre Dame by Michigan I tentatively raised the question. “Daddy,” one of them said, “how can you be so totally chauvinist? Women and men are basically the same. The argument that we are different is just an excuse for patriarchy.”

  “When it comes to enjoying sex, there is no difference between us and guys. We both want all we can get.”

  Mary Fran, who usually avoids arguments with her sisters, blew up. “You guys are full of shit. That stuff is just hardcore feminist propaganda. In our profession we know that men and women have endocrine systems that are radically different. Men don’t go into postpartum depression after a baby is born.”

  The argument turned into an attack on Mary Fran because it was alleged that all doctors, even women doctors, were ideological chauvinists. Mary Fran won easily because she had the facts. She explained why the hormone oxytocin made young women easy targets for predatory males.

  I phoned her the next day and asked about postpartum depression. She explained it clearly and concisely. I was silent.

  “Mom have it?” she asked softly.

  “Three times.”

  “Dear God! The poor woman! . . . Is that why . . .?”

  “She became an alcoholic? Her family tried to cheer her up with booze. It seemed to work. . . . Perhaps I should have stopped them.”

  “No way, Daddy, no way. Stop blaming yourself.”

  “This oxytocin stuff . . .”

  “I call it the crush hormone. Gets activated when we form a crush on someone and reinforces the crush. It’s a bonding chemical in most vertebrates. Generates desire and trust, sometimes dangerous.”

  “Disappears after marriage?”

  “Stimulates mother’s milk too, ingenious and untrustworthy. Probably helps in renewal of married love in humans, like you and Mom often did.”

  If Faith’s family had only left her alone. . . .

  “I knew so little then. . . .”

  “Nobody knows anything much when they’re young.”

  Mary Fran wanted to be a psychiatrist and apparently was already working on it.

  “I’m surprised that you noticed.”

  “I was probably the only one that did. . . . Daddy, stop blaming yourself. They were determined to get her. She was the only one of the three that was beautiful. The other two put on weight to take them out of the mating game. Mom broke the rules, she broke ranks, she didn’t care what she was doing to her older sisters, damn them all.”

  “That’s too simple, hon.”

  My daughter was not a certified psychiatrist yet. She shouldn’t even be thinking such thoughts about her family.

  “Sometimes, Daddy, reality is simple, tragically simple. . . . You’re not getting any oxytocin jolts are you?”

  “I’m too old for a crush, Mary Fran.”

  “No one is ever too old to fall in love.”

  I went back to a report from one of my researchers on a new stock. They thought it might be a good bet. Oxytocin would surely distract me from making investment decisions for my clients. I did not want to fall in love again. It was too dangerous. Marriage was dangerous too. I’m good at calculating odds and hence a good gambler and a good asset manager (as we call investment managers these days—I would not even consider the title “wealth manager”). I was not going to gamble on marriage again. I would go through life alone from now on. That would mean a certain amount of loneliness and also a freedom from the problem of sharing my life intimately again with a woman. Even in the best possible circumstances that was a risky business. One had to negotiate personal differences, learn to read the other’s mind (not what she said, but what she meant), strive to be sensitive to her moods, read the complexities of her sexual needs, and the anxieties and fears which plague her life. Then if one had been modestly successful at acquiring these intricate skills, one could still fail miserably at the crucial times in her life.

  There was no reason in the world to think I would not fail miserably again. I had made my contribution to the continuation of the species. I had fallen into the tender trap once. I need not do it again.

  There were costs to this monastic style, especially loneliness at the end of the day when there was no one to talk to. Maybe I should be a monk. Or join the Jesuits . . . I’d be eighty before they ordained me. . . .

  Nor could I pretend that I was so disillusioned with marriage that I did not find women attractive. That was the wound that might be original sin. With all my wisdom and all my determination, I would have to maintain an iron discipline against their appeal, especially because my money and power might make me attractive to them.

  Faith and I began to work immediately after our honeymoon, which was fun, but somehow disappointing. Neither of us knew much about sex, to say nothing of marital sex; nobody does, it turned out. I went to work for my father, who had just changed from an investment broker to an investment adviser.

  “Whatever we call it, Jackie, it’s the same game. We bet and our clients bet with us that over the years we will keep their profits anywhere between five and ten percent over the
Dow.”

  “And their losses,” I said.

  He laughed that quiet little laugh that meant I had made the point.

  “We won’t talk about those, Jackie, no gambler does. But there’s not going to be another Great Depression, not for a long time.”

  Dad was an interesting man. His own father had been a Pullman conductor on the Chicago-to-New Orleans line. Dad had been born in 1914 and went to St. Ignatius College as it was called in those days to study accounting. He began to work as a messenger on the Chicago Board of Trade when he was eighteen, in the depths of the Depression. He joined the Army on December 8, 1941, and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He never talked about the war or explained why he had won the Distinguished service Cross at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, the last desperate charge of the German army in about the same place that the Kaiser’s army had launched its final attack in 1918.

  He came back to Chicago with his secrets and the money he had made in poker games and opened his broker’s office in the old Conway building across the street from what is now the Daley Plaza. He never bothered to get a seat on any of the exchanges but would call his orders into brokers on the floor.

  “You didn’t have to be very smart in those days to know that all the money people made during the war would flood into the economy like a levee break in the Ole Miss.”

  A lot of returning GIs, having money to invest for the first time in their lives, heard rumors about the brilliant poker player colonel. He made a lot of money for them and for himself.

  He also went tonight school at Loyola up at Lewis Towers and got himself an AB in accounting and then a law degree.

  “When you have enough money you can buy your own lawyer, Jackie,” he told me. “Until then a man has to do it himself.”

  Did I seduce Faith or did she seduce me? We used to argue about that and laugh at the rituals of the springtime of love. Those were sweet times, nonetheless. Almost thirty years of marriage. If we had another thirty years . . . Even twenty . . . Even ten . . . We might have made something out of it.

  But that was nonsense.

  I was adjusting to being alone. Indeed I had been alone much of the time when she was still alive. Lust would diminish through the years, would it not? I compared my own marriage with my father’s. In 1950, when the war in Korea had just begun, he married an Army nurse whom he’d met in Germany after the war. I would learn later that they had written daily letters to one another for six years. I was born three years later, right in the middle of the Baby Boom, the only child they were able to have. They were quiet, gentle people. In their own undemonstrative way they were deeply in love with one another and that love spilled over to absorb me. Nothing in our big house on Balmoral Street prepared me for the conflicts and the agonies and the failures of my own marriage. I presume they had to adjust to each other as every husband and wife must, though maybe not. For them simple goodness and affection might have been enough. Were they just lucky? Or did they learn somewhere wisdom that I had never acquired?

  While I was finishing my MBA, I worked in my father’s office, studying companies in what we would now call research. He nodded in appreciation at my summaries. “You have the green thumb, Jackie. Good instincts. Beware of them. They’ll usually be right, but when they turn wrong, you can get yourself into real trouble. Never trust an instinct completely.”

  I didn’t know what he meant then. Now I do.

  My parents met her family only at the rehearsal dinner at the Lakeshore Athletic Club. They were too polite to say anything, but I could tell by their eyes that they were horrified.

  “Faith doesn’t drink at all,” I said.

  “And she is not in the least vulgar,” my mom said.

  They lived long enough to know and adore all three of their grandchildren. They never left our neighborhood for Florida and did not buy a summer home in the Dunes, much less Door County, like many of our neighbors.

  “We’re a half a block from the Lake,” my father explained to their friends, “and we have all our books and records here in the house.”

  He drove a Chevy all his life and rode the Howard Street L down to his LaSalle Street office every morning. I was pretty much in charge of the office when Mary Fran—my mother’s name—was born. (My in-laws were furious at the choice and whispered loudly about their displeasure.) Dad would read the papers, glance at the ticker (which he called the screen), mutter a few suggestions, and then ride back home to spend the day with Mom, maybe to go to the “movies.”

  “Old gambler knows when to back down,” he said with a laugh. “Let the young gunslingers take the chances.”

  He died in 1986 of a stroke. Mom died five months later of a heart attack. They died as they lived, quietly, gracefully.

  I was on my own with three daughters and an alcoholic wife who had been fired by Lilly, Smith because of her drinking. Her increasingly eccentric sisters blamed me. If I had not forced her to work and if I had left her alone (by which they meant not slept with her) she would never have become a heavy drinker.

  When she began to work Faith was hired at a much larger brokerage—Lilly, Smith—doing the same thing I was doing.

  “They’re pretty high over there on your young woman,” Dad said to me one day. “They tell me she’s as bright as they come and they generally don’t like women around their shop.”

  It was the middle nineteen seventies, however, and even a stuffed shirt firm like Lilly, Smith had to hire some women. When she told them that she was pregnant, they took counsel with one another and decided to tell her that they wanted her back after the baby was born. I was proud of her but uneasy. Yet she was one of the generation of young women who believed they could have everything and I had enough sense not to argue against her choice. I would have lost anyway.

  Faith’s first pregnancy was a nightmare, sickness almost every day. Childbirth was long and agonizing, then depression and a long struggle back to health afterward. Her family blamed me for making her go back to work, though I had done my best to talk her out of it. I wanted to move out to a suburb like Hubbard Woods or even River Forest to escape from them, but she argued that she had to live near them to prevent them from killing themselves.

  “I’m the only sane one in the family,” she insisted. “I can take care of them and watch poor little Evie at the same time.”

  “And hold down a job too?”

  “I’m supermom,” she laughed. “I can do anything.”

  In principle she could have done a lot of things easily, but the PPD, as we would call it now, came back after her next two pregnancies. She wanted a son the worst way. Her doctors were skeptical, but she insisted.

  “God is playing tricks on me,” she insisted. “I have to produce a son. I grew up in a house with two sisters and it was hell on earth. Women are mean to one another.”

  She began to drink heavily during the depression after Irene’s birth. Stubbornly she went back to work before she felt better. They fired her after the first month.

  “She needs help,” the senior partner at Lilly, Smith confided to me in the pompous tones which are essential to a man in his position. “A long vacation, a good therapist, and maybe some AA.”

  She did go to a psychiatrist and we did take a vacation. She came back from the Caymans pregnant with Mary Fran. Same scenario—depression and alcohol. She fired her therapist, quit AA, and sank into an emotional swamp. I persuaded her to try a mental hospital in Evanston where they helped women out of such messes which were not their own fault, as I put it. Invariably she followed my advice, indeed enthusiastically, and praised my patience and kindness. I was such a wonderful man. She didn’t deserve a husband like me.

  Her family turned to obscene phone calls when they found out that I had barred them from visiting her. Looking back on those days in the early eighties when the Reagan Revolution was transforming American life and repudiating us Boomers and we ourselves were buying the gospel of greed, I realized that the country was in
revolt against the intensity of the sixties radicals. It was also turning to a vision of human life which preached that happiness came from wealth and possessions. My daughters laughed at all the funny clothes and the stupid demonstrations of my era (even though I never wore funky garments or protested against anything). But their laughs were affectionate. They were convinced that their mother and I were “cool.” And were on their side. Their bonding with Faith was intense and inviolable. They were the ones who talked me into suggesting the Betty Ford Center.

  Why not?

  By then she had slipped into what the doctors had been calling a “manic depressive syndrome” and later would be called “a bipolar disorder.” She spent six months at Betty Ford. I would leave my office at noon on Friday and fly to California to visit her and return on the Sunday night red-eye. I did my best to be both mom and dad to the kids and they tolerated that, but none of us fooled ourselves, I was no mom, at least not a mom like their mom. But I was still “cute” and “cool” and sometimes even “adorable.”

  She came home a “new woman” as she proclaimed herself. She went to AA every week and begged me to permit her to revive her old work skills. She also went to all the kids’ activities at Sacred Heart parish.

  “You don’t have to hire me,” she explained. “I’ll just sit in my office here at home and explore companies for you.”

  “Fine,” I said. It seemed like a good idea. She soon proved herself as good a researcher as her bosses at Lilly, Smith claimed she was. It was the era of the dot-com bubble and a legion of madcap start-ups. Faith thought it was all nonsense.