A Midwinter's Tale Read online

  “Well”—Mom would smile sweetly—“we did have some lace in our house, but no pretensions.” The sweetness would acquire a sly tinge: “Not like the West Side Irish.”

  And they’d both laugh together, often ending with an affectionate kiss.

  My mother’s snobbery, like everything else about her, was amiable and kindly. Foreigners was a term applied to anyone who was not Irish, with the sometime exception of the Germans. (Protestants did not figure in the calculus because they were not important folks in the lives of the Chicago Irish at that time.) They were not bad people; you would never treat them unkindly and certainly never exclude them from your house. Given enough time, they would become as American as anyone else—meaning as American as we were. Indeed Mom found “foreigners” fascinating, puzzled as she was by the fact that anyone would choose to be a foreigner.

  “They really are,” she would assure us with a benign smile, “very nice people.”

  When I was in fourth grade, 1938, I came home from school one night during the week before Halloween and announced proudly, “We waxed that dirty kike Fineman’s windows for him. He’ll never get them clean. Serves the hebe right.”

  Later I would learn to my dismay that I had become a bigot at about the same time of Kristallnacht, the night of the first major Nazi anti-Semitic outburst in Germany.

  “Don’t ever say those words again in this house.” My mother took off her glasses and stared at me. “I won’t tolerate them, Charles Cronin O’Malley. I am not raising any bigots, do you understand?”

  “I’m not a bigot,” I pleaded, near tears because Mom never shouted at me.

  “Yes, you are. Now you go right back to that little dry-goods store and apologize to Mr. Fineman and clean every last bit of wax off his window.”

  “Why?” I wailed.

  “Because Jews are every bit as good as us, aren’t they, Vangie?”

  “A little better, maybe. They work harder.” No help from my father, that was obvious.

  “Jesus was Jewish.” Mom was still angry at me.

  “So was his mother,” I said brightly.

  “The Finemans are his relatives. Now go clean their window.”

  Mr. Fineman, a little man with a gray face and dark, dark brown eyes, accepted my apology graciously. “So”—he waved his hands—“boys will be boys. You’re a good boy, you apologize. Why should you clean it up?”

  “I didn’t know those were bad words,” I said honestly enough.

  “You’re a sweet child,” said his plump little wife, “such cute red hair. You go home and tell your mother that I said so.”

  “Mom won’t let me back in the house unless I clean the window.” I was beginning to understand what we later called ethnic diversity. “You know what Irish mothers are like.”

  They both thought that remark was much funnier than I did. So they let me clean the windows.

  So they gave me chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce and chocolate cookies and a chocolate candy bar.

  “Eat them,” Mrs. Fineman said, “chocolate is good for you. It gives you energy.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I slurped up my reward. “May I wax your windows tomorrow?”

  “Such a cute little boy. Isn’t he a darling?”

  “Your mother”—Mr. Fineman pointed his finger at me—“is the classiest lady in the neighborhood.”

  “Yes, sir,” I agreed. “She says you’re God’s relatives.”

  They both laughed joyously at that.

  “So we have clout?”

  “You sure must.”

  I went back often to their store after that to volunteer to run errands for them. They wanted to pay me, but I would accept only one Hershey’s bar.

  Well, sometimes, maybe two.

  Mom had attended St. Xavier’s Academy and then Normal School (later Chicago Teachers College and still later Chicago State University) in Englewood, even though the position of a teacher (like that of a nurse) was a bit beneath her social level. But her justification for that loss of caste was that she wanted to be a music teacher, even if that meant sitting in classrooms at the three-year college with foreigners.

  “They really enjoyed my harp.” She would pause in her darning. “Sometimes”—another soft smile, suggesting enormous understanding and tolerance—“I think foreigners appreciate music and the arts more than we do.”

  “Especially your Polacks!” My father would fill up his port again.

  “Dear, the children!”

  “Please call them Poles, Daddy.” My older sister, Jane, would frown with mock primness. “You don’t want us children to pick up bad habits, do you?”

  Then they’d all laugh.

  Jane, going on fourteen, astonished and delighted by the womanly body that had suddenly become hers, knew the lines in our improvised family comedy. It was her role to feed them to the principal actors while I played straight man and Peg and Rosie Clancy watched from the box seats with wide eyes and ready laughter.

  April Cronin was really not designed for this world. She was most content when her long, graceful fingers were moving across the strings of her beloved harp. She should have gone to the Chicago Conservatory as Margaret Mary, her younger daughter, would do after the Second War, playing the violin in that august institution on Saturday mornings even when she was a pregnant college student. But such a choice was even more beyond the ken of the Canaryville Irish after the First War as was attendance at the University of Chicago—a choice exercised by her contemporary James T. Farrell.

  “Oh, I knew Mr. Farrell,” she would tell us after playing the harp at the end of the day. “Not well. And I knew the poor boy on whom Studs Lonigan was based; his father repainted our house once.”

  “What I want to know”—Dad would lean back in his springless easy chair and examine Morn through the ruby colors of his port—“is whether you know the real Lucy Scanlan.”

  “Of course I did.” She would pick out a cord on the harp that sounded like love or maybe an invitation to love. “She is a dear, sweet woman, a few years older than us. Even nicer than Mr. Farrell makes her in the book”

  “Has she read the book?” my father would demand, turning the port glass in his fingers.

  “Do you know, dear”—with a sigh Mom would put the harp in its sacred place against the “parlor” wall—“I’ve never had the courage to ask her? I guess I didn’t want to spoil the story.”

  “Well”—he grinned like Mephistopheles, a puckish demon with egg-bald head and vast red eyebrows—“maybe, dear, we shouldn’t be discussing a dirty book in the presence of the kids.”

  “It’s not a dirty book—yes, just a tiny sip of port; oh, that’s too much”—but she didn’t pour it back into the chipped Waterford decanter—“not nearly so dirty as those terrible books you read by Mr. Joyce and M. Proust.”

  “Mother,” Jane, bursting with her old wit and her new full-figured sexual energy, came in right on cue, “how do you know that the books are terrible, unless you’ve read them too?”

  “Your mother”—Dad refilled his Waterford goblet (designed for claret, not port)—“particularly likes Molly Bloom’s fade-out in Mr. Joyce’s book.”

  “Vangie . . .” Mom blushed and shook her head with the despair a mother might display over a cute but mischievous boy child.

  Dad’s name was John the Evangelist O’Malley, John the Evangelist Mark Luke O’Malley—a three-of-a-kind label that for some reason discriminated against St. Matthew. Mom called him Vangie only occasionally and almost always with a blush. Dad was always faintly disconcerted when she used the nickname, but, mysteriously to me in those days, pleasurably so. In later years I would realize that it was a pet name in which there were strong overtones of sexual invitation.

  Born in 1900, Dad was five years older than Mom, just old enough to be accepted as a volunteer (lying about his age) in the Army in the spring of 1918 after he had graduated from St. Ignatius College, as the good Jesuit high school was known in those days (wit
h two extra years added on so that many young men went straight to law school or medical school after graduation). He was sent to Camp Leavenworth, Kansas, where in the autumn as the war in Europe ended, men would collapse and die on the parade ground every morning from the “plague of the Spanish lady” as the 1918 flu was called.

  “I used to worry a lot, just like you do now, Chucky,” he would say to me with his expansive grin, one hand resting on his rather large belly. “Then it was my turn to collapse on the parade ground, November twelfth, 1918, the day after the war ended. I remember thinking that it was a nice irony to die from a bug after the shooting was over.”

  “Why didn’t you die, Daddy?” Jane, the most lighthearted and merry of the family, could be counted on to have her lines letter-perfect, even if she had to work at being properly serious on the subject of our father’s escape from death.

  Dad would laugh loudly, swallow another sip of sherry or port, and say, “ ’Cause God didn’t want your mother, who was then an innocent little freshman at the Academy, to go through life as a spinster.”

  Laughter from everyone but Chucky.

  “You flatter yourself, dear,” Mom would giggle. “I had lots of suitors.”

  Dad would wave his massive paw, dismissing them as inconsequential. “They were in no rush to carry me off the parade ground to the base hospital. They figured I was dead already and the hospital was overcrowded anyway. I remember one medical orderly saying to another, ‘This kid is dead already.’ I tried to explain to him that I wasn’t, but, tell the truth, I thought I might be. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t talk, I felt like I was going to bed on Christmas Day for a long nap. Some people”—he would shrug his big shoulders—“made it and some didn’t. That’s when I made up my mind that my worrying days were over. Isn’t that right, dear?”

  Mom would smile affectionately. “You certainly haven’t worried for more than five minutes since the morning you proposed to me.”

  More laughter.

  “Will the Spanish lady ever come back?” I would ask somberly, ready even then to take the grim view.

  “Oh, Chucky, you’re so silly,” Rosemarie Clancy, who was even then hanging around our house, would protest because I had spoiled the story. Rosie loved stories and I loved facts.

  “Let’s hope not, dear,” Mom would say, also a bit disappointed in me. “And pray to God.”

  Dad left the Army in the spring of. 1919, his red hair already vanishing from the top of his head. He enrolled in the Illinois National Guard and in Armor Institute, one of the forerunners of Illinois Institute of Technology. The National Guard was an excuse to ride in the Black Horse Troop during Chicago parades. Armor Institute was an excuse to be a painter. His father’s family had come to Chicago before the Civil War and, unlike most Irish immigrants, had made common cause with “Mr. Lincoln”—as Grandpa O’Malley called him, much as if he were a next-door neighbor—and the Republican Party. Grandpa, once a Republican county commissioner, had become a federal judge, an old man with a white beard like Chief Justice Hughes, and a stern, almost Protestant, instinct for sobriety and decorum. He dismissed his son’s inclination to scrawl cartoons as harmless and insisted that if he wanted to be “artistic,” he ought to study architecture. Dad, like running water, followed the path of least resistance, and enrolled in the Institute. His mother, an immigrant Irish maid who had done a reasonably good job of educating herself after her marriage, surreptitiously encouraged her son to continue his painting.

  As long as Dad had his paintbrush and Mom her harp, there were no insurmountable problems in the world. The cranky old Philco console that occupied a large part of our living room in the flat on the ten hundred block of Menard played all day long, normally blaring the current hit tunes such as “Jeepers Creepers,” “September Song,” and the memorable “Flat Foot Floogie (with the Floy Floy).” But I was the only one who heard the newscasts about the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. (Like The New World, the Catholic paper in Chicago, I was, at the age of ten, a supporter of the Spanish Republic.)

  The war between the right and left in Spain caused the deaths of half a million people, mostly civilians. Both Germany and Italy on the one hand and Russia on the other became involved, tried out tactics, and struggled for control of Spain. The left (the Spanish Republic) murdered priests and nuns by the thousands; the right (the Rebels or the Nationalists) bombed cities and killed civilians. The right won the war. Its leader, General Franco, cleverly stayed out of World War II, though his sympathies were certainly with Germany and Italy.

  The rest of the family hardly noticed the deal with Hitler at Munich. In 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain made a deal with Hitler at Munich that turned over substantial parts of Czechoslovakia to Germany in return for a guarantee from Hitler of “peace in our times.” Hitler didn’t keep his promise, and the Munich agreement has ever since been a symbol of the folly of appeasement.

  The rest of the family was too busy singing and dancing, storytelling and drinking, painting and playing the harp, to pay much attention to the invasion of Poland, the German blitzkrieg into the Low Countries in the spring of 1940, the fall of Paris, the collapse of France. The day Paris fell—I heard a cop say to the local druggist, “It makes you wonder whether there is a God”—the Philco was firmly turned off in the middle of H. V. Kaltenborn’s funereal newscast so that the evening harp session could begin.

  “Forget your silly old war,” Rosie Clancy snapped at me.

  In 1940, Rosie was a diminutive, black-haired banshee with a pinched face, flashing eyes, and a furious temper—an angry Gypsy princess from a musical film. Her family lived in the most elaborate home on the block—the only two-story house on a street of bungalows and two-flats—a yellow-brick fortress with casements and turrets from which, in my imagination, guns were trained on all of us who walked by en route to St. Ursula’s school. I suppose I should add, in yet another effort at candor, that in my romantic dreams, I was the brave knight who rescued the Princess Rosa Maria from the evil warlock who had imprisoned her in a tower.

  Rosie’s mother drank, not the way my parents did, not several drinks before and after supper every night, but all day, starting at breakfast.

  “The poor little thing,” my mother would again sigh, “is going to be a real beauty too, like her mother was. She’ll break a lot of hearts.” When she was ten years old, you did not argue with the Princess Rosa Maria, whom I thought of as a spoiled little brat, not even when she interrupted Kaltenborn’s obsequies for Paris.

  The only times the Philco wasn’t blaring during the daylight hours was when one of its tubes blew out. Then it would remain sullenly silent for days—until I pointed out that it wasn’t working.

  “Mustn’t cut you off from Bob Elson and the White Sox,” Dad would mumble, searching among the bits of paper stuffed into his pockets, some of them from many years before, for money with which I could run off to Division Street to buy a new tube. He was a Cubs fan and could not comprehend why I would support a team that hadn’t won since 1919.

  After I began working my newspaper route, I bought the tubes myself.

  My parents’ wedding must have seemed a match with great prospects indeed. The bride and groom were the handsome and gifted offspring of two distinguished Chicago Irish families. Good history was behind them and good promises were in front of them.

  During the Depression and the war I don’t think either of them felt their prospects were at all blighted. Mom did her own washing and ironing, mended our clothes on her pedal-operated Singer, and strove cautiously if without too much skill to make ends meet. The journey from the forty-five hundred block on Emerald to the ten hundred block on Menard was from genteel affluence to genteel poverty. Mom and Dad hardly noticed.

  She always thought we lived in the eleven hundred block on Menard. If Augusta was ten hundred north, she would argue, then the houses north of it ought to be eleven hundreds.

  That’s the way it was on the South S
ide, anyway.

  In 1940, Dad was a big, husky, bald man with a large belly that did not seem so much fat as strong. He looked like pictures I had seen of Irish rural horse-traders. Later, during the war, he would lose weight.

  “Vanity,” he would chuckle. “I don’t want to look like Major Blimp.”

  “Colonel Blimp,” I would correct him, to the amusement of everyone but Rosie Clancy.

  “I think you look wonderful, Mr. O’Malley,” she would thunder, “no matter what Chucky says. He’s just angry because he’s so short.”

  Still later Dad would grow a fierce red beard, which eventually turned white. Then he looked like the abbot of a Trappist monastery.

  He had worked on the plans for the Chicago Century of Progress World’s Fair (the fourth star in the city flag, if you hadn’t realized it) and supervised repairs on the fair during the summers of 1933 and 1944. “Broke my heart when they tore it down,” he would say, shaking his head sadly. “We beat that man Nice or whatever his name is to modern architecture.”

  Dad was not exactly a fan of the Bauhaus, to put it mildly, and despised Mies and all his works, except the Lake Shore Drive apartments: “Well, they look pretty, April dear, but you wouldn’t want to live in them.”

  At the end of the fair he found himself out of work with four children in the midst of the Great Depression. All our grandparents were dead, their resources wiped out in the Crash, as the stock market collapse was called. The house by Town Hall was sold and we moved into our crowded, chilly flat on Menard.

  Fortunately for Dad he had converted to the Democratic Party, secretly, to vote for Al Smith in 1928, and openly, after the death of his parents, in 1932 to vote for FDR, as he was always called at our house, and the repeal of the prohibition amendment.

  “It wasn’t economics, to tell the truth,” he would chortle later, “nor the hope of a job, if you take my meaning. It was the drink, don’t you see? It cost too much, even if I did meet your mother in a speakeasy in Walworth, Wisconsin.”

  “That’s not true, darling,” Mom would say, blushing. “You’ll have the children thinking I was a loose young woman.”