Younger Than Springtime Page 3

  “Once.”

  “Who?”

  “An officer in a black market bunch we’d cornered.”

  “What did you do?”

  He seemed genuinely interested in my story.

  “Kept shooting at him,” I said, pointing at my camera.

  He laughed.

  “You’d win a medal for that…Then what?”

  “A shavetail just out of West Point took the gun away from him. They used my shots as evidence in his trial.”

  “What did he get?”

  I decided that I really liked this Jimmy Rizzo.

  “General discharge.”

  “Figures…Hey, you’re up!”

  Our third batter had dribbled a bounder at the shortstop of the Help of Christians’ Vets team. That worthy had heaved the ball into the street. One out, men on second and third and the mighty Casey comes to.

  “Hold my weapon till I come back.” I gave Jimmy Rizzo my camera. “If I come back.”

  I had exaggerated when I argued that I did not play softball. In fact, I played it badly, very badly. I understood the game and its strategies—such as they are—but I was innocent of the strength and coordination to apply my theories in practice.

  I did know that if I managed to tap a high pitch with my bat, it would fly over the shortstop’s head and into left center field. The shortstop would rush for the ball, as would the third baseman, the short center fielder (right shortstop in the real indoor days—if you can imagine a right shortstop), and the left fielder. Given the apparent lack of skill of these paragons and the advanced state of inebriation of some of them, it was not unreasonable to expect that they would mess the play up badly enough for me to struggle down to first base.

  The first pitch was high and outside, so I poked at it ineffectually and missed. Deliberately. The pitcher did the obvious. He threw the ball in the same place. I tapped a pathetically weak drive over the shortstop’s head as planned and took off at my top speed, which was very slow, for first base. Upon arrival, I heard Jimmy Rizzo shouting frantically that I should try for second. As I engaged in this folly, I realized that the four fielders who had converged on the ball were still trying to capture it. One of them finally picked it up and fired it for home plate where our second runner might have been tagged out had not the throw sailed into Massassoit Avenue. I could have walked to third. So I did. Jimmy had miraculously become third-base coach. He urged me to hold at third, which I was only too happy to do.

  He thereupon came to bat and hit the ball over the left fielder’s head to drive—if that’s the word—me home with the winning run. Somehow I had not realized it was the last of the seventh and that we had been down two runs.

  Mudville wins tonight.

  “Got a couple of good shots of you sliding into third!” he said, handing me the camera back. “Join me for a beer?”

  Naturally I had not slid into third base.

  “I don’t drink,” I replied.

  “Bottle of Coke?”

  “Only if that pretty little blonde who never takes her eyes off you joins us.”

  “You mean Monica Sullivan?…You don’t miss much, do you, Charles Cronin O’Malley?”

  “We cops don’t.”

  Those were strange times. It was not unusual during the Depression for unemployed young men with nothing else to do to hang around street corners, play softball on playground lots and parish yards, and soak up beer like Prohibition was coming back. The difference now was that most of the young men had fought—or at least served—in a war. Moreover, the government was paying them to go to college, something that would never have occurred to poor kids like Jimmy Rizzo a few years before. The vets sensed that college would make the difference, that they could not only catch up with the time they had lost during the war, but win a share in the prosperity that was blossoming all around. Their lives now were pregnant with promise and possibility, with urgency and confidence. They were wild and exuberant young men, not at all like their immediate predecessors, many of them running from memories of horror as much as toward hope for the future. John Raven had organized the Catholic vets in the hope of focusing some of their energy. Naturally, he had turned to Jimmy Rizzo to organize the group.

  The goals of those young men were modest: have a little fun, get a degree, buy a home of their own, marry and have kids, live a good and decent life—goals that would have seemed beyond reach in 1939. Most of them were able to achieve all the goals, some spectacularly so.

  Some of them had already married, which meant that they had already “settled down”—and put on weight. These were the sober ones at the softball games, some of them with their wives, baby in arms, watching—another innovation in the late nineteen forties.

  “Nice hit, Chucky,” Father Raven said to me as Jimmy and I walked toward Jimmy’s 1937 Chevy. “How’s Rosie?”

  “Rosie who?” I asked.

  The priest just laughed.

  Monica Sullivan had kind of materialized next to the Chevy. She handed me a beer bottle, which I passed on to Jimmy.

  “He drinks Coke,” Jimmy told her.

  “Aren’t you Jane O’Malley’s little brother?” she asked me, never taking her eyes off Jimmy.

  “Emphasis on little,” I replied.

  Monica was a lushly pretty little woman with long blond hair, a sweet smile, and perfect manners.

  Not so perfect that she didn’t laugh at me. Good. That meant she thought I was cute, though there was no good reason why that should matter.

  “Jane is very happy,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone from which she never deviated. “Have they set a date for the wedding?”

  “Her future father-in-law doesn’t think his son should marry until he is able to support a wife and family. That means he must finish med school and internship and residency if he intends to become a specialist. Five, six more years.”

  “Times have changed,” Monica said sadly. “A lot of parents don’t seem to realize that.”

  The rumors I had picked up from Jane reported that Monica was hopelessly in love with Jimmy Rizzo and that her father, Big Tom Sullivan, a pompous and successful banker, had forbidden her to see him. Indeed, Big Tom was supposed to have said that no daughter of his would marry a dirty Sicilian who was so dark that he must have Negro blood in him.

  I happened to think that Dr. McCormack was right in principle. I had no intention of marrying till I could support a wife and family. However, the rules did not apply when the bride who had to wait was my sister.

  “He’s a mean son of a bitch,” I said. “He wants to relive his own life in his son. No good parent does that.”

  Since my beloved Peg was in love with an Italian American boy (though Neopolitan rather than Sicilian), I was instantly on the side of Jimmy and Monica. Besides, I thought that Big Tom was the worst windbag ever to preside over the St. Ursula Holy Name Society.

  I had acquired in Germany the bad habit of becoming involved with people who seemed to need help, though there never had been any good reason to think that they needed my help. I realized that I was doing the same thing all over again.

  But I liked Jimmy Rizzo.

  Dusk was settling over the ball field and lights were coming on in the bungalows around the parish grounds, the reassuring routine lights of domestic order and peace. Or so I thought then.

  We watched as a couple of guys, between Jimmy and me in age, helped Timmy Boylan into a Pontiac as old as Jimmy’s Chevy.

  “What’s the matter with Timmy?” I asked.

  “ASTP,” Monica said dryly. “He’s my cousin, you know.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I really didn’t know. I could never figure out the network of relationships in the neighborhood. But I didn’t have to, I figured, because the women in my family had all done it for me.

  “You remember what the ASTP was?” Jimmy asked, his good humor vanishing.

  “Vaguely. Army came around to the high schools when we were sophomores. Really needed
bright young men. Give juniors and seniors special training. Get them out of school halfway through the year. Put them in important jobs. Intelligence, that sort of thing.”

  “By the summer of 1944,” Jimmy said grimly, “the Army didn’t need bright young men. It needed bodies. So all these kids who thought they were going to be intelligence officers found themselves combat infantry replacements. Cannon fodder.”

  “After six weeks of basic training,” Monica went on, “the Army sent them to replacement centers in France. Poor Timmy was in one of those places for another week. Then they assigned him to the First Infantry Division in the Hurtgen Forest. He wasn’t even eighteen years old.”

  “A replacement,” Jimmy continued, “replaces someone, usually a friend of the survivors in the outfit. They hated the replacement because somehow he was responsible for their friend’s death so often they did nothing to help him get ready for battle. Tim was in combat for four days before a shell from a German 88 tore him apart.”

  “Four days to ruin a life,” Monica added bitterly. “He was in the hospital for two years. His body is a mass of scars. He’s not the same cute, funny boy he was when he graduated from St. Ignatius. He hates everyone and everything.”

  “I’m not a great fan of the corps,” Jim Rizzo said, “but we never did anything like that to people. The kid’s life is over. He won’t go to school, he won’t work. All he wants to do is drink.”

  My two new friends were more morose than they should have been on our lovely summer evening after a victory over our enemies from the next parish. So I told them about my comic-opera exploits in the First Constabulary. Our encounter with “werewolves” in the Bohemianwald and with Russian smugglers on the road to Leipzig had been ludicrous but not particularly amusing in the actual experience. But in retrospect and with myself cast as a bumbling military cop, they were the material for high comedy. Later in life I would entertain with my stories whenever I had a chance. They never lost anything in the telling.

  I left out the more serious events in my hapless military career. They didn’t need to know about Brigitta, the faithful woman waiting at the railroad station for her husband who had fought at the battle of Kursk. Nor did I tell them or anyone else about my love affair with Trudi, the sometime member of the Hitler Jugend, or about how we broke the black market ring run by a group of our own officers.

  Jimmy and Monica found what I did tell them very funny. The stories grew more comic through the years. On rare occasions I told some people the tragedy as well as the comedy.

  John Raven joined us.

  “Chuck telling you how he lost the Third World War?” he asked.

  “Jane O’Malley says that Chuck earned a Legion of Merit,” Monica said solemnly, but then everything she said was solemn.

  “Really?” Father Raven was surprised.

  I didn’t have to tell my confessor everything, did I?

  “Pure rumor.” I dismissed the story with a wave of my hand.

  Jane was not supposed to tell anyone, indeed she wasn’t even supposed to know about it.

  “They don’t give those away for nothing,” Jimmy said, a puzzled frown appearing on his handsome face.

  “Everything is easy in an army of occupation,” I insisted.

  “Finally found a pinch hitter who could bring home the bacon, huh, Jimmy?” Father Raven asked.

  “One who deliberately fools the pitcher,” Monica observed.

  She saw too much.

  “I won’t be back.”

  “You’d better come back,” Jimmy Rizzo warned. “Understand, Corporal?”

  “Staff Sergeant, Captain, sir.”

  “Give you a ride home?”

  “No, thanks. Father Raven wants to talk to me.”

  And I’m not going to intrude on your privacy with the woman you love.

  Jimmy helped Monica into the car with attentive reverence. I yearned momentarily for a woman I could treat with similar reverence.

  “See you next week, Sergeant Chuck,” she said and turned and smiled at me.

  My heart turned to butter.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  As Jimmy’s Chevy turned the corner, Father Raven repeated his earlier question. “How’s Rosie?”

  “Rosemarie is the most beautiful woman I have ever met,” I replied. “And doomed!”

  “You have a way with words, Chuck.”

  “You disagree, Father?”

  “She has a lot of residual strength and solid instincts, especially in her choice of her foster family.”

  “We can’t stop her from drinking, can we?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not sure. I hope we can. I hope we can.”

  Silence for a moment.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” he said, resuming the conversation. “Around the neighborhood.”

  “Okay.”

  Darkness had settled in on the neighborhood and with it a sense that peace was slipping down the streets with the steeds of night. A gentle summer breeze stirred the leaves. Eternity and time seemed to have temporarily joined forces to bless our cozy, optimistic little postwar neighborhood.

  The optimism was of the sort that makes you cross your fingers, however. The Great Depression was still a vivid memory. A lot of women would pray that night that the Depression would never come back, especially young women like Monica and my sister Jane.

  “What did you think of those two?”

  “Jimmy and Monica?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So much in love it’s painful…Beautiful too.”

  “What chance do you give them?”

  “Hey, I’m not even twenty yet.”

  “That’s irrelevant, given your performance in Bamberg.”

  I was not, as John Raven had often insisted, a born precinct captain. I’d argue that some other time.

  “Not all that good. Different backgrounds. Uncle Sal the Pal. Big Tom…Even if they get married, they’ll have a hard time.”

  “Love doesn’t conquer all?”

  “Not a chance. I’m no romantic.”

  “Most romantic person I know,” he said with a snort. “Sometimes, though, love does conquer all.”

  “Bad bet.”

  “Maybe…The problem isn’t Sal the Pal. Jimmy is family. That means you support him. He wants to go a hundred percent legitimate and marry a pretty Irish girl, hey, he’s family, know what I mean?”

  “Her old man is the problem?”

  “He’s a pious phony, Chuck, with his manicured fingernails and his wavy white hair and his expensive cologne and his Knight of St. Gregory cape. He’s a worse crook than Sal the Pal…and more dangerous.”

  I filed this information away for future use.

  “What’s he done?”

  “Bribery, embezzlement, arson, assault, maybe even murder. Jimmy is on thin ice.”

  Not if I could help it.

  Yeah, I actually thought that on a late August night in 1948. Chucky Ducky the messiah. Bamberg had corrupted me. No, that’s not true. I got my poor father out of duty in the jungles of New Guinea when I was still in eighth grade.

  “This isn’t your world, is it, Chuck—Catholic War Vets?”

  “I’m not a war vet.”

  “Even if you were, this scene is too simple, too optimistic for you.”

  “I wish it were true, Father. I’ll feel terribly sorry for all those good kids when the hard times return.”

  “Even if you knew the hard times wouldn’t return, it still wouldn’t be your scene, would it? Always the crazy O’Malley.”

  “Only sane one.”

  “These young men and women want love, Chuck. It’s a simple enough desire but messy and complicated in practice. They sense that it will be a bit easier because they’ll have secure jobs and will be able to afford a decent home, quality education for their kids, a car, and a few conveniences around the house.”

  “Not all that ambitious.”

  “No, not at all. It may not make love all that mu
ch easier, but it will change the context of love. This is the turning point for them, Chuck.”

  “Love is never easy, Father,” I said somewhat pompously, “not even for people like the Colonel and the good April Mae.”

  “Precisely my point.”

  Uh-huh.

  We stopped in front of St. Ursula’s rectory.

  “But”—Father Raven broke the silence—“God is love.”

  “So you tell me…But not like human love, not erotic or anything like that?”

  I was baiting him, because I knew he did mean something like that.

  “That bond between Jimmy and Monica that impressed you?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s what God is like.”

  I let that sink in. Not a bad metaphor, come to think of it.

  “I do a lot of weddings these days, Chuck. Young people very much in love. Vet weddings, mostly. The link between those two is unique. A sacrament even before they’re married.”

  “If other people don’t ruin it for them.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Take good care of Rosie,” were his last words to me.

  “I’ll do what I can for Rosemarie,” I replied.

  He chuckled and walked into the rectory.

  Three thoughts struggled for my attention as I trudged back to our home in Oak Park under the warm glow of the moon through the leaf-heavy trees.

  I was not and never would be part of the formative experience of men of my generation. I might play Softball with them. They might find me amusing. Still, I was an outsider. I didn’t know quite why I was an outsider, but I was. Mostly I liked that, but it also made me feel a little sad.

  John Raven expected me to save Rosemarie. He loved her too and knew he couldn’t save her. Therefore I should…

  I had made up my mind that I would take charge of the lives of Jimmy Rizzo and Monica Sullivan.

  And for good measure I’d try to straighten out Timmy Boylan too.

  3

  The last six weeks of summer I worked as a runner at the Board of Trade. It was a madhouse, a terrifying bazaar in which grown men shouted furiously at one another and gestured savagely over tiny fractions of the dollar as if the barbarians were at the gates and their lives and the bodies of their wives and children were at stake in every deal. As a runner, my job was to pick up slips of paper recording-sales from the floor of the pit and see that they were transmitted to the record keepers on the sidelines of the arena.