A Midwinter's Tale Read online

  “Not loose enough, then.” The emphasis on the last word would make Mom blush all the more. We would all laugh with them, though in 1940 only my precocious sister, Jane, understood.

  And maybe the ever-present Rosie Clancy.

  The Cronin Democratic connections and my father’s newfound Democratic faith, plus some residual Republican clout (there was some in Cook County in those days) landed him a job as “assistant architect” of the Chicago Sanitary District. The District was a treasure-house in which Chicago’s mayor after the murder of Anton Cermak in 1933, Edward J. “Sewer Pipe” Kelly, and many other Chicago politicians had become millionaires.

  The Sanitary District (later the Sanitary District of Metropolitan Chicago, with its own rather grotesque Magnificent Mile high-rise right outside my window as I type these words, and still later the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, with a fountain and a sundial at the mouth of the Chicago River) was locally hailed as one of the seven engineering wonders of the world. It was a wonder all right—it permanently reversed the flow of the Chicago River, solved Chicago’s sewage disposal problems, ended floods, and made possible navigation from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Even more wonderfully, it made possible jobs and income for legions of party faithful, often with no discernible inclination to work. In its combination of operational efficiency and monumental corruption, the Sanitary District, I tell my own kids, is a quintessential Chicago institution: a sewage system that works!

  The assistant architect had little work to do. No, that’s not accurate: he had no work at all. Dad would show up at the District offices on North Wabash a couple of mornings a week and reshuffle plans for the future—including, if I might say with some pride, his design for the Deep Tunnel, which is still under construction all these years after. Then he would come home to his palette and easel and draw great, sweeping skyscrapers for the days “when our ship comes in.”

  When the ship did come in, when the myth degenerated into reality, no one was more surprised than Dad.

  The salary of an assistant architect was not all that much—twenty-two hundred dollars a year (multiply it by twelve to get the mid-1980s value), but as my father would boisterously insist, “It’s a hell of a lot better than nothing, isn’t it, darling?” He would then wrap his arm around Mom’s waist.

  “It certainly is, darling,” she would reply with an attempt at being prim. But she never did escape his grasp.

  To have a job during the Depression was much better than not having one, especially since prices fell steadily in the middle 1930s. We should have been able to make ends meet with some frugality and prudence. But my parents were quite incapable of either. We bought good food and good drink—single-malt whiskey, the best Spanish sherry and port, the best cuts at Liska’s meat market—and good books. We did not worry about clothes or bills or furniture for the flat. We were always clean as were the frequently altered and repaired clothes we wore (April Cronin would not let dirty children leave her house), but the apartment was invariably a chaotic mess, despite Mom’s occasional burst of feverish ordering activity. The chaos in our home—newspapers, books (old and new; in 1940, Galsworthy juxtaposed with Eric Ambler, Richard Wright, and Upton Sinclair), magazines, laundry, unwashed dishes—seemed to me to represent the disorganization of all our life. With a little bit more planning, I thought, even in the later years of grammar school, we would not be in endless difficulty with bills, we would wear better clothes, and we would not be humiliated at the realization that we were poor.

  I’m sure I was the only one who thought we were poor.

  I was especially offended that we didn’t have a car. I didn’t expect us to be able to buy a new one. Only rich people like the Clancys could afford a new Packard every year. But there was no reason, I knew even then, why our ancient LaSalle, bought at the time of our parents’ wedding, should have died in 1938, no reason except that my mother and father were quite incapable of maintaining a car. Many of the old LaSalles (for the younger generation it was a GM car between the Olds and the Caddy on the prestige scale) lasted right through the war, but not the O’Malley car, which expired quietly of many afflictions, most notably the absence of an oil change for ten years.

  It didn’t matter, Mom and Dad agreed. No one used the car anyway. It was a nuisance and an unnecessary expense during “hard times.” Dad took the Lake Street el to work; when Mom did substitute teaching at St. Ursula’s grammar school, she had to walk only three blocks, “well, really only two.”

  “Two and three-quarters,” I would add, but no one ever heard me when I added precision to a discussion.

  “And the children won’t be driving for at least ten years anyway. Our ship will certainly come in by then. We’ll have money for a new car.”

  “Lots of them.”

  “Jane will be able to drive in five years,” I observed.

  No one paid any attention.

  “It would be different,” Mom would continue, with her extraordinary ability to rationalize every economic necessity, “if we had a garage. I always say that no one should have a car unless they have a garage to protect it during the winter.”

  “It would be nice to drive to Twin Lakes in summer,” I pointed out.

  The other three kids laughed at me, not meanly, because my siblings were incapable of meanness, but as though I were Fred Allen or Jack Benny on Sunday-night radio.

  “The train is more fun,” Dad would chortle, and pick me up and swing me in the air like a sack of new potatoes, which from his point of view might have been exactly what I was.

  The four O’Malley children arrived quickly after our parents’ marriage—Jane in 1927, Charles Cronin in 1928, Peg in 1932, and Michael in 1933. Mom was twenty-seven then when Michael was born. (Perversely, he was only called Michael, not Mike or Micky. Peg was always Peg, so it was hardly a nickname. Only Chucky was favored with a distortion of his actual name.) During the birth-control crisis in my own marriage, I wondered how Mom and Dad resolved the problem of avoiding more children in the dark days of the Great Depression. It is inconceivable to me that they did not sleep together. There were three bedrooms in the apartment, two occupied by children. And their affection was too physical—hugs, kisses, affectionate touches—not to seek consummation. Moreover, my memories of the muffled laughter from their room when they were “napping” on Saturday afternoons, or when we would come in from school on the days Dad would not go down to the District, leave little doubt about the passion between them.

  Years later I figured out that they probably crept back into the blankets of their unmade bed three days a week as soon as we went off to school after lunch. (We came home every day for a “hot” lunch—it was as important as vaccination in my mother’s health-protection efforts.) No wonder they were happy.

  I supposed they solved the birth-control challenge the way many other Catholics did then and in the years after: they simply ignored what the priests told them. Before the Vatican Council, such inattention to Church authority was private, rarely discussed even between husband and wife; and my parents were marvelously skilled in ignoring or reasoning away obstacles to their rose-colored life.

  I look at my snapshots taken at Twin Lakes in those years and marvel at how handsome Mom and Dad are and how complacent they are in their affection for one another. If ever there was a serene love match, theirs was it. I can’t remember them bickering about anything; it was impossible to argue with Mom anyway. And I wonder, as I ponder the faded pictures, how they managed to produce someone so totally unlike themselves as their son Charles.

  Money was rarely far from my mind. I resented those who were rich, or at least whom I perceived as rich. I hated those who owned summer homes when we had lost both of our homes—the Cronin house at Long Beach and the O’Malley “cottage” at Lake Geneva (purchased after the wedding, especially for their new grandchildren).

  I was not greedy in my envy. I did not want great wealth, as my Fenwick retreat resolution proves. I wanted on
ly a modestly good life, orderly and restrained. And precise. Moreover I was willing to work hard for such a life. I fully expected a life of long and demanding hours over double-entry ledgers to earn my Oak Park bungalow, six-cylinder Chevy, and well-organized wife.

  That was long before I came to terms with the reality that my life was to be a comedy of errors. You cannot escape the persona you are given. Rather you must improvise around it, skillfully if you are fortunate, ineptly if you are not.

  I have a shoe box jammed with Twin Lakes pictures. I bought my Kodak Brownie with my newspaper delivery money—profit earned on a job that worried my mother constantly because it was her fiction that my health was “delicate” (how else to explain the changeling in your midst?) and that I was literally endangering my life when I trudged forth with my yellow pushcart filled with the Chicago Herald-Examiner every morning.

  The Tribune was not tolerated: recent converts or not to the FDR faith, Mom and Dad wanted no part of “the Colonel” as the Roosevelt-hating editor of the Trib was called. Indeed the only time serious attention was paid to the Philco was when Col. Robert R. McCormick used the musical-comedy setting Chicago Theater of the Air—on WGN, owned then as now by the Trib—to blast away at Roosevelt.

  “Turn that damn fool off,” my father would bellow.

  I thought the Colonel was plausible enough. Had not FDR caused the 1937 recession, just when it looked as if the Depression might be over? Still, I turned him off. Obviously my life plan dictated that I would become a Republican, perhaps in time for the 1952 presidential election. But here too my plans went awry.

  I used my newspaper money for film and for seats at the Rockne theater’s Saturday-afternoon triple features—in 1940, for example, one “major” film like Gaslight or Rebecca or Ninotchka and two B films, often with Richard Arlen, so readily forgotten that I’m not sure they were ever made.

  (In those days I could not understand the fuss over Garbo. Having watched her again on tape more recently, I have no trouble understanding the fuss.)

  Tolerantly skeptical about my wasting time at the Rockne, the rest of my family viewed my addiction to the camera with good-natured amusement.

  “It shows the way things are,” I would insist, “not the way we would like them to be.”

  My argument was a criticism of Dad’s increasingly surrealistic paintings. He did not, however, so perceive it.

  “The camera,” he would say, rubbing his hands appreciatively at the prospect of a serious argument—I was the only one in the house who could satisfy that need—“has its uses as an archival tool, but it cannot express the insight of the artist nearly as well as the paintbrush.”

  “I don’t want to, uh, express any insight,” I said, “I just want to catch things the way they are.”

  “But”—Dad would favor me with a huge grin—“the way things are at any given moment is not the way they are the next moment. The photographer is exercising choice in angle, perspective, light, timing. He is interpreting despite himself. For example, take this picture of Rosie: you’ve caught her here on the beach in a very sad instant. Normally she is a vivacious child, bubbling with energy. It is an interpretive exercise to select out just the right second in which a pretty little girl is also sad. That’s art, inferior art compared to a canvas and paint I would contend, but art just the same. And, Chucky”—he would examine the picture critically—“not a bad portrait considering the limitation of your tools.”

  “It was the only time she’d stand still long enough for me to take a picture. My Brownie is too slow to take her picture most of the time. Now if I had a Leica . . .”

  Of all the things I wanted in the world, a Leica was what I wanted most.

  “It still is an insightful shot.” Dad ignored my greed.

  “Anyway,” Rosie protested, “I’m not a sad person.”

  Yes, she was, but I wasn’t going to argue. She was not only sad but an intolerable pest.

  “Don’t you think it is a lovely picture, Rosie?” Dad persisted. “Yes,” she said grudgingly. “Only it’s not me . . . would you print a copy for my mom, Chucky, please?”

  “Sure,” I would agree, with no intention of ever doing it. I had better things to do in my crude little darkroom, which I had fixed up in the basement—with the landlord’s permission—than print pictures of obnoxious pests.

  The shoe box of pictures of Twin Lakes—where we rented a tiny cottage for a couple of weeks every summer—wrench at my heart. It is a truism that youth slips away too quickly, yet when it’s your own youth, the experience of loss is absolutely unique.

  I hated the bumpy Northwestern train ride to Lake Zurich and Crystal Lake and Richmond and finally to Genoa City, Wisconsin, where we would be picked up in a bus and ferried over to Twin Lakes, but loved those precious weeks of summer fun—heat, water, tiny beach, thick humidity, boats on the lake, hot dog and wiener roasts. We romanticize our memories of youth, but in my shoe box of pictures there is still plenty of summer romance. Our clothes are funny and the cottages and the lake are incredibly small, but my mother is beautiful and my father is handsome and everyone seems to be excited and happy.

  One slips into the simmering wetlands of the past and finds them again warm and comfortable and sweet smelling, the true reality, while the steppes and the tundra of the present are mere illusion.

  One wants to stay.

  This one does anyhow.

  I’m not in any of the pictures, since I was taking them. And most of the time I was not with the family anyway. Camera in hand, I spent much of my vacation exploring the lakeshore and the woods and the nearby farms—and daydreaming.

  The snapshot of Rosie Clancy, in which my dad wanted to see so much meaning, was taken when I banished her from an exploration of birdhouses in the front yards on the lakeshore. Rosie spent most of her time during our two weeks at Twin Lakes visiting with us—chauffeured over every morning in her mother’s Buick. Neither of my two tormentors could tolerate a long separation from one another. Long was defined as anything more than a day. The shoe box still holds, within a tight and now fragile rubber band, my yellowed series on birdhouses. Pretty undistinguished stuff.

  The snap of Rosie has long since disappeared. I often wonder what she really looked like in that picture.

  Do I make myself seem to be an unattractive boy? Perhaps I was in fact quite unappealing as a child. Or maybe I only thought of myself as unattractive because I fit so poorly into the atmosphere of our family life. My grammar school classmates did not seem to dislike me. Short and red-haired, I was in fact selected as the class jokester. My outrageous comments, unnoticed at the family hearth, seemed to amuse classmates and teachers alike. Strangely, I cannot remember any of the school jokes while I can remember the remarks, decent and indecent, at home.

  When Paris fell and Rosie wondered what difference it made to anyone in America: “Your mother will have to buy her new clothes at Marshall Field’s.”

  Rosie didn’t get it; Mom and Dad both laughed in spite of themselves.

  My delivery must have been special that day, because in retrospect it was a crude and cruel crack.

  I justify it because I tried to convince myself that I hated Rosie and her money and Rosie’s mother and her expensive clothes, jewelry, and perfumes. And Rosie’s father and his new Packard every year.

  Better to hate her than to succumb to the impulse to adore her.

  Her mother’s furs too. While my mother had to wear a cloth coat that antedated the Depression.

  “If they are so rich, why can’t they keep her in her own house some of the time?”

  “Money doesn’t produce a happy family, dear,” Mom would reply, a touch wistfully.

  “Why not?”

  There was never any answer to that question.

  While I was dissatisfied with the way our family lived, I cannot say I was unhappy. Neither, however, could I agree with Mom years later when our family fortunes had changed that “those days in the flat in the eleven
hundred block on Menard were the happiest in our lives.”

  They were not, not by a long shot. Money doesn’t necessarily spoil happiness. Poverty doesn’t help it either. But Mom never could see the point in that position.

  Oddly enough, my brother and sisters, far less conventional than I was, have had quite ordinary and respectable lives: Jane the wife of an MD and an active civic volunteer; Peg the wife of a lawyer and commodity broker, busy with her concerts and her role as first violinist in the Chicago Symphony and a tenured professor at the Conservatory; Michael a rather stereotypical post-Conciliar pastor.

  (“Father Michael,” sighs my little priest, “speaks all the proper progressive dicta at all the proper times. I fear he finds my irreverence a trial, but I am”—he grins like the slightly kinky cherub that he is—“after all a monsignor!”)

  And Chucky, the family straight man, is the one whose life has been a comedy of errors.

  Which, as Mom would say years after, just goes to show you.

  What it just goes to show has always escaped me.

  The blissful confusion on North Menard came to an end on December 7, 1941.

  5

  When the news of the Pearl Harbor attack came on December 7, 1941 (“a date which will live in infamy,” FDR said), the Cardinals were ahead of the Bears, an upset that would have rocked the NFL (ten teams in two divisions) and knocked the Bears, who had previously lost only one game, to the Packers, 16–14, out of the two-team play-off.

  I was loving it; my father being a Bear fan, it was necessary that I be a Cardinal fan: necessary for me to oppose and necessary for him to have someone with whom to argue.

  In truth more the latter than the former.

  An announcer cut into the game: Japanese planes were bombing Pearl Harbor. The Oklahoma was on fire. The Japanese special envoy and ambassador were meeting with Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

  Then the game resumed; the Bears were ahead again: George “One Play” McAfee had scored the decisive touchdown.