Second Spring Page 4

Somehow I wasn’t impressed anymore. How would this nice little country pastor cope with a worldwide Church of a billion or so people? How would he cope with the fat little psychopathic paranoid who was ruining our archdiocese?

  Rosemarie

  1978

  I knew the smoke would be white, I just knew it.

  Besides, Msgr. Adolfo said we’d have a Pope by day’s end and we did.

  The moon turned itself on for the celebration. The Italian Army band played happy music. The crowd which filled the Piazza was happy and relaxed, one more Italian Pope and a nice man at that.

  Chuck snapped a few available-light shots before it was too dark.

  “Let’s go have supper,” he said.

  “Let’s go back into the Stampa and watch his blessing on the big screen.”

  “I can’t take his picture in there.”

  “No, but you can take pictures of the people inside. Besides, I want to see what he looks like.”

  My poor husband was down again. I was unbearably complacent because of our lovemaking after lunch. He was so sweet, so gentle, so tender. I thought I would lose my mind. He seemed content too.

  He was happy when he made love to me, but such activity only occupied a limited amount of his time. Sex alone would not save my poor Chucky Ducky, but it might help. I certainly enjoyed it. How could a man who was such an accomplished lover think he was a failure in life?

  We waited in the crowded auditorium of the Sala Stampa for the first appearance of the new Pope to give his first blessing Urbi et Orbi. He emerged somewhat hesitantly from the balcony door and smiled at the cheering throng. The whole world lighted up.

  “Wow,” Chucky murmured. “I know what my portrait will focus on.”

  “Awesome smile,” I said. “Totally. Like Msgr. Mugsy or Msgr. Raven walking the streets of St. Ursula.”

  He was a little man with spectacles and salt-and-pepper hair. Nothing particularly impressive about him except his smile. Once you had seen the smile nothing else mattered.

  “He’ll win the world with that smile,” I told my husband.

  “He’ll have to do more than smile to solve the problem in Chicago,” he replied.

  Chuck seemed to believe that he personally was responsible for the Archdiocese of Chicago. Or perhaps only for avenging the terrible harm it had done to his brother.

  Rosemarie

  1973-1976

  Our new Archbishop, Thomas John O’Neill, had come in 1965. He brought with him a great reputation for supporting racial integration, one which he tried immediately to live down. He was a fat, ugly little man who could on occasion be very charming. However, priests did not like him much and neither, after a while, did the laypeople, save for the very wealthy and the very powerful, whom he cultivated assiduously, especially newspaper editors. “I could commit incest at solemn high Mass,” he once boasted, “and it would never make the papers.”

  This boast immediately echoed around the city and won him no friends.

  He tried to cultivate the Mayor and did not get to first base.

  Peg’s husband, Vince Antonelli, a great big gorgeous sometime linebacker at the Golden Dome, explained. “The Mayor and Mrs. Daley know frauds when they see one. That guy is a fraud. The Mayor has already had to cover up for a drunken driving ticket.”

  One of his early schemes was a fund-raising drive for the whole Archdiocese, Project Resurrection. It was not clear how or for what the money would be spent. However, its main purpose seemed to be to enhance his own image. The fund-raisers leaned hard and the parish clergy, some of them eager to please the new Archbishop, cooperated. Others did not.

  Since we were big fish (though Chuck didn’t believe that) one of the high-powered fund-raisers came to visit us, by appointment, though the appointment was made to fit his schedule. It was Monday night and the Bears were playing on Monday Night Football. My husband was aware that the Bears always lose on Monday Night Football, and most other times too. Yet he must torment himself by watching them.

  He was not eager to meet the man, who began by saying that the Cardinal had sent him personally to talk to us.

  “We know,” Jack Gaynor said, “that you will want to support the Cardinal just as everyone in Chicago does.”

  The question was addressed to Chuck, who, as man of the house, was presumed to have both the money and the purse strings. I was the good, dutiful wife and mother. It was shortly after Chuck’s return from Vietnam, the death of Bobby Kennedy, the birth control encyclical, and the Chicago convention riots. My husband was not in a particularly good mood.

  Jack Gaynor, slicked-down hair, a tailor-made double-breasted suit that wasn’t quite tailor-made, and shifty gray eyes, was apparently unaware of our participation in the birth control commission or of Chuck’s picaresque adventures “in-country.” The whole nation, I thought, knew about that.

  Chuck didn’t give me a chance to respond.

  “Certainly we want to support the Cardinal. However, we’d like to know how the money will be spent. We’re not the kind of people who are willing to buy a pig in a poke, even when the pig is wearing red buttons. Certainly it won’t cost much to remodel the Cathedral, which is all we’ve heard about.”

  “The Cardinal has many expenses, Mr. O’Malley,” Gaynor said easily. “Education, hospitals, seminary training, missionary work. He also wants to create a Catholic television network which will put him in instant communication with every parish in the Archdiocese.”

  “Why?”

  I relaxed. There was no need of my intervention.

  “Well, so he can coordinate instantly the work of all the priests. He can speak to them each morning about his plans for the Church in Chicago.”

  “Ah,” Chuck mused. “Wouldn’t the telephone do just as well?”

  “CNET, as we’re calling it, would enable the Cardinal to give direct instructions to every priest the first thing in the morning. It would use high channels on UHF.”

  “Would the laypeople participate?”

  “Eventually we would hope to have attachments for every Catholic television set in the Archdiocese. The Cardinal has great faith in the importance of technology for facilitating the work of the Church.”

  “Aha! And there would be the technology for the priests and eventually the people to respond to him?”

  “At the present time”—the fund-raiser was becoming uneasy—“we have no plans for that.”

  “So it’s one-way, high-tech communication?”

  Jack Gaynor was beginning to suspect that my pint-size, apparently harmless, husband was having him on.

  “I suppose you could call it that.”

  “How will the Cardinal know that all the priests are listening to him every morning?”

  “He feels confident that the priests will be eager to cooperate. We will have the best equipment that money can buy. There is no substitute for excellence in the work of the Church.”

  “And the software?”

  “I beg pardon?”

  “The programming which will appear on this network after the Cardinal’s daily plan of battle?”

  “We will purchase the best educational material that is available for use in the Catholic schools.”

  “But not create any of our own?”

  “Not at the present, no. We will make our facilities available to secular companies which are willing to rent them.”

  “At less than the going rate, I presume?”

  “I presume so … Can we put you down for a quarter-million-dollar pledge?”

  Jack Gaynor pulled a pledge card out of his expensive briefcase.

  “No,” my husband said flatly, without even a courtesy glance in my direction.

  Our flummoxed visitor asked, “How much then?”

  “Nothing until we have a clear statement of how the money is to be spent other than a silly television network.”

  “You are not willing to support the Cardinal and his work?” Gaynor seemed shocked, even scandalized.


  “At the present time we are not … Rosemarie, would you be so good as to show Mr. Gaynor to the door?”

  This was our me-Holmes-you-Watson act.

  “Certainly, Charles.”

  “By the way, Mr. Gaynor,” I asked, “will any of this money be used to pay off the Cardinal’s driving-under-the-influence tickets?”

  The poor man didn’t answer.

  “Wasn’t that a little too much, Rosemarie, my love?” he said in the tone of voice of a man who was very proud of his wife.

  “Not after your show … The poor man was only trying to do his job.”

  “He’s corrupt,” Chuck argued.

  “Even corrupt people have to earn a living.”

  “I’m calling John Raven,” he said, punching in the Monsignor’s number. I picked up another phone.

  The Bears fumbled again. Fortunately, Chuck didn’t notice.

  “John, Chuck O’Malley here. I’m delighted to learn that the Cardinal plans to wake all you clerical loafers up in the morning with his own personal TV network.”

  “One of his guys visited you, huh?”

  “A quarter million dollars for a megalomaniac TV network!”

  “My husband has a way with words, Monsignor,” I said gently.

  “Well, at least I didn’t ask him whether they would use some of the money to pay off his DUI tickets like a certain shameless Irishwoman I know did.”

  John Raven laughed in spite of himself.

  “Rosie, you didn’t?”

  “Would I say something like that?”

  “You certainly would … Look, Fatso had these same guys do a big fund-raiser on his last stop. Great success proved that he was a tough, effective executive. He didn’t realize it wouldn’t work in Chicago.”

  “We had an Ecumenical Council a few years ago, if I remember correctly. The Church was supposed to be updated. Then they send a crazy man to Chicago. What the hell is going on?”

  “He knows how to play the Roman game. During his many visits over there he gives important curial people a thousand-dollar bill and asks them to say Mass for his mother.”

  “That’s why they sent him to Chicago!”

  “Part of the reason anyway. As they say at City Hall, he picked up his markers.”

  “Hell of a way to run a Church.”

  “You won’t get any argument from me.”

  “What will happen to the fund-raising?”

  “He’ll get some money, especially from the rich conservatives who think a Cardinal can do no wrong. The pastors will drag their feet. The fund-raisers will announce that the drive is a big success, collect their fees and depart and we won’t hear another word about it.”

  I frowned. I had never heard John so bitter.

  “The birth control decision and a madcap Cardinal. Thank you very much, Pope Paul!”

  “Did you notice what your friend said about the birth control encyclical?”

  “No …”

  “Neither did anyone else. He prepared a nonstatement before it was announced and then went off to Alaska.”

  “That’s not a very conservative response,” I said.

  “Rosie, he’s not a conservative. He has no principles. He’s concerned only about power, his power. I don’t think he believes in God.”

  “John!” I protested.

  “I don’t mean that he denies the existence of God. Only that God is irrelevant to what he says and does. He’s embarrassed when anyone talks about religion.”

  “Oh,” I said meekly.

  “What are you guys going to do about him?” Chuck said, flipping off the TV after an interception.

  “Hunker down in the trenches until he goes away.”

  “You won’t be able to hide this from the laity, John,” I said.

  “We were not planning on hiding it from people like you, Rosie. Most Catholics will find out that he’s strange eventually. The more devout won’t even admit it to themselves. If anyone is going to get rid of him, it will have to be us and I don’t think we’re quite ready to do that yet.”

  We had a lot to worry about in those days. April Rosemary, unsure of herself and us, was going off to Harvard, kids were rioting in the streets, we were trying to elect Hubert Humphrey (and almost did), and Chuck was working on his exhibition 1968—Year of Violence. There was no time to worry about a crazy Cardinal. I did ask Maggie Ward, whose brother-in-law was a priest who had been on the birth control commission with us, what Monsignor Packy Keenan thought of the Cardinal.

  “He asks me how I would diagnose him, which is of course, Rosemarie, what you want to know. I am afraid that it is a rather straightforward case. He is what is generally called a psychopathic paranoid or sometimes a borderline personality.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a characterological syndrome about which we know very little, though such a man is very dangerous—Hitler and Stalin for example. The person does not have a conscience. No one else is a real person, save perhaps for a dominating woman. I am told there is one such woman in the Cardinal’s life. She replaces the dominating mother who may have caused the problem in the first place. The syndrome is marked by a deep fear of total destruction. One develops a vast array of defenses to protect the self. The protections are increasingly bizarre. Finally, as he grows older the whole structure of the personality breaks down. The Cardinal is a desperately frightened man. I tell Msgr. Packy to stay away from him. He won’t of course. Poor dear thinks he can save the church. You too, Rosemarie. I know that you and Chuck are reckless adventurers, witness his recent adventures in Vietnam. This one is not your cup of tea.”

  She didn’t know about Chuck’s taking on Lyndon Johnson earlier in the year. The Cardinal sounded a lot like Lyndon.

  “You mean he’s a mama’s boy?”

  “Precisely, Rosemarie. For all his bluster, the Cardinal is a weakling, utterly emasculated by his mother.”

  I told Chuck what she had said while we were working on the prints for his show—at the Metropolitan no less, but only because the Art Institute hesitated.

  “It does sound like LBJ,” he agreed, rubbing his eyes. “However, that lovely little woman is right as always. He’s not our cup of tea.”

  He became our cup of tea four years later. In the early autumn of 1972 our eldest son Kevin, a tall devilishly handsome Black Irishman whom I imagined riding with Phil Sheridan’s cavalry in the Shenandoah Valley, had returned from Vietnam with a Distinguished Service Cross and without a foot. The venue for our solemn high welcome-home party was, as such must always be, at the house of Chuck’s parents, John (as in John the Evangelist lest anyone think his patron saint was John the Baptist) and April Cronin O’Malley. The latter was never known as “Mom” but as “the good April.” My husband’s family earned their name the Crazy O’Malleys.

  Kevin was thin and pale and walked with a cane. However, his slow sweet smile was unchanged. Maria Elena, his gorgeous future wife, drank him in with her vast Latin brown eyes. We all would rather have had him back in one piece, but we were glad to have him back, especially since the idiots at the Pentagon had insisted for several weeks that he had been killed in action.

  I mourned permanently for our daughter April Rosemary, who had disappeared into the hippy underground. However, I had become good at covering up. As Maggie Ward had said, if I survived those days without returning to my drinking ways, I would never drink again. I hope she was right.

  So we had the usual musicale with the jazz band of my three sons on their horns, Gianni Antonelli pounding the drums, Maria Elena doing her Latin jazz vocals, and the good April backing it all up on the piano. I did a few wordless vocal variations around my future daughter-in-law’s songs.

  Then Father Ed drew me aside and whispered, “I’d like to talk to you and Chuck for a few minutes.”

  My heart jumped. Something evil was coming in the night. Darkness was already closing on Chicago, a late afternoon in autumn when winter was beginning to growl. Outsi
de, oblivious to our merriment, snowflakes were beginning to fall.

  Edward Michael, to give him his full name, was the gentlest of all the O’Malleys. Slim, handsome, sexy, he was six years younger than my husband, intense, and unbearably idealistic. “There should be a big ‘I’ on his forehead to warn people,” my husband argued. “He’s a true believer looking for a cause.”

  “The pot calling the kettle black,” I responded.

  He was, I had often told my husband, Chucky “lite”—his brother without the great talent, the acerbic wit, and the touch of divine, usually, madness.

  “No red hair either.”

  His slight form, his sandy hair, and his compassionate eyes cast him as the perennial “young priest” even though he was now nearly forty. He had marched at Selma and joined the war protests at the 1968 convention in Chicago, even though the Cardinal ordered him not to.

  “Fatso thinks he should have a monopoly on public attention,” John Raven had commented, with uncharacteristic nastiness.

  In his early years in the priesthood, I had become his confidante. The poor kid thought he was inadequate as a priest and should leave the ministry before he did more harm to the poor laypeople. Chuck claims that I kept him in the priesthood.

  “He doesn’t want to leave,” I reply. “He wants to be a priest.”

  “I feel sorry for women who marry priests,” Chuck would say. “They make creepy husbands.”

  I did not necessarily disagree with the general statement. Nonetheless I would reply, “Father Ed would make some woman a fine husband.”

  “So long as she was prepared to make all his decisions for him.”

  We were both therefore uneasy when we drifted into Chuck’s father’s architectural studio at the back of the rambling house on East Avenue. As usual blueprints and file folders were scattered about the studio. Outside the snow was getting thicker.

  “What craziness do you think it is this time?” Chuck whispered to me.

  “The Cardinal has asked me to help him out,” Ed began. He has the same pale blue eyes as my husband, but his are usually anguished while Chuck’s are vibrant, usually with mischief.

  “Well, Edward, he needs help,” Chuck said carefully.