Golden Years Page 5

  And a few tough words from myself.

  Chuck sat in the front with Vince, the three womenfolk in the back. Mary Margaret warned both of us to put on our seat belts.

  “Rosie,” Mary Margaret said as we pulled out of the airport, “they want you to sing the Ave Maria at the Communion of Mass.”

  “Sure, Schubert or Gounod?”

  “Father McNally doesn’t want either. He says they’re too operatic.”

  “Uncle Father Ed,” Siobhan Marie announced, “says that Father McNally is an asshole!”

  My intermediate daughter and I both blew up.

  “Siobhan Marie O’Malley! You shouldn’t use that word, not ever!”

  “Uncle Father Ed did!”

  “He’s a grown-up!” I insisted.

  “But he’s a priest!”

  Clever little witch.

  “And you’re a little girl!”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  She would use it often again, I was sure. If parents don’t want you to speak a certain word, you will certainly do it, right?

  “We had a lot of trouble with him,” Mary Margaret said. “He told me that he would be the principal concelebrant and he would preach and there would be no eulogy and that his singers would provide the music, not the deacons that Jimmy is bringing in from the seminary! These were all rules for his parish and he could not change them.”

  I decided Father Ed was absolutely right.

  “So you said?”

  “I said that the laity who paid the bills in the parish would not accept those rules and we would appeal. I was a real brat!”

  “Poor dear man.” Chuck sighed.

  “So when she told me,” Vince said, “I made a few calls to some friends downtown. The good father was told to keep his mouth shut and not to interfere. He was also told that he could not impose himself as concelebrant.”

  “We’re going to have more trouble with him,” Mary Margaret warned. “He’s a narcissist.”

  “Is that a bad word, Mommy?”

  “Ask your father.”

  “Is that a bad word, Daddy?”

  “No, dear, it isn’t. But it’s not a good idea to use it.”

  “Unless you’re angry like Momeg was? She never uses bad words.”

  “Well, hardly ever,” I said.

  Like her mother, Mary Margaret has an extensive vocabulary of obscenity and scatology, which she can on rare occasion use with considerable skill.

  “Rosemarie,” Chuck said, “don’t you still have that multipart arrangement of the Gregorian Ave Maria you and April put together for Kevin and Maria Elena’s wedding?”

  “Sure, it’s in the files you make me keep.”

  The accountant in Chuck makes him a paper saver. He has files for everything. I tend to pile things up. He insists that I be orderly and for the sake of marital bliss I go along with him. I’m not as obsessive as he is.

  “After we receive Communion, why don’t we all walk over to the Blessed Mother’s altar and sing it, April conducting of course. You could practice it tomorrow and Friday.”

  “He might try to stop us,” Mary Margaret said.

  “He won’t try a second time,” my Chucky said firmly. “Besides, practicing it will give us something to do. Aunt Peg can accompany us on the violin.”

  We stopped at our house to unload our baggage and to pick up the score for the multipart Gregorian chant Ave Maria. Vince, Chuck, and Mary Margaret carried in the bags and Shovie took charge of my purse.

  The arrangement was in the cabinet in my office where Chuck insisted that it would be. The file was neatly labeled in his small, precise writing, Ave Maria, underlined to indicate that the words were Latin.

  “It was where I said it would be?” he said as he sneezed again.

  “NO! I had to search for it!”

  He laughed because he knew I was fibbing.

  A long line of cars were parked outside of the house of the elder O’Malleys, the big old home into which they had moved after the war thirty-five years ago. It had been an empty nest for a long time, even more empty after Vangie had finally sold his architecture business and Chuck converted the workrooms in the back to a studio where his father could paint the watercolors that finally brought him the fame as an artist to which he was entitled. They refused bluntly to sell the house and move downtown or even to a new condo over on South Boulevard near the L tracks. Too many memorable events had happened; weddings, Baptism, a first Mass, family recitals, the birth of the jazz orchestra in the third generation with my three boys, Gianni Antonelli, a young Latina named Maria Elena Lopez (now my beloved daughter-in-law) and the Good April on the piano. It would be a very empty nest until Mary Margaret moved in.

  “It’s kind of unstable in there,” Vince said. “Like the Mayor’s family when he died. I don’t quite understand the Irish … I kind of wish you’d go a little bit hysterical instead of holding it all in.”

  “You tell Peg that?” I asked.

  “Yeah. She laughed and said I was probably right, but the Irish have been around too long to change … By the way, Chuck, the obituary editor of The New York Times wants you to call him right away.”

  He handed Chuck a note which I took while my poor husband struggled with a sneezing fit.

  The big parlor of the home of the elder O’Malleys was a bubbling cauldron of kinetic energy—tension, laugher, grief, anger, all mixed together in random patterns. Nerves were frayed, emotions raw—an Irish prewake wake. With a lot of little kids, mostly with red hair, hence my grandchildren, running around frantically. Someone had to take charge. Only my sniffling, hacking husband would do.

  There was a moment of silence as we stood at the door of the room. “It’s about time,” someone said.

  April Mae Cronin O’Malley rushed to her son.

  “Chucky, darling, I’m so sorry for your sadness. I know how much he meant to you and how much you will miss him.”

  This was quintessential Crazy O’Malley—the widow consoling her son.

  All my weary, mourning, sick husband could do was to return her embrace.

  Peg, who had been sitting with April, hugged me silently.

  Peg, my best friend for more than forty years, sleek, vibrant, dazzling, now seemed worn and, God forbid, old. She was two weeks younger than I was and suddenly she was an old woman. She would recover surely, yet … Was I old too?

  My daughter-in-law, Maria Elena, hugged me after Peg. She was pregnant with the third child, probably another red-haired Latino, like the two who were running around.

  “I too have lost a father,” she murmured.

  “Chucky,” said Jane McCormack, the oldest of the O’Malley children, “tell Edward that it is all right for Mother to come home with me after the funeral. It won’t be good for her to stay in this old house and this dull neighborhood.”

  Jane is and has always been clueless. A bubbling enthusiast, she was behind the door when sensitivity was passed out. Ted McCormack, a navy pilot whom she married after the war despite the objections of his family, is a successful psychiatrist up on the North Shore. They moved up there after their honeymoon because “Doctor” as his surgeon father was always called, wanted him near his family. Poor Jane went native and became almost a stereotype of a North Shore matron and also put on a lot of pounds, so that she was just barely under the obesity level, poor woman.

  She kind of passed out of the family then. The ride from Kenilworth down to Oak Park was just too much for her, she told us often. She praised the wonders of the Country Day School, New Trier High School, Faith, Hope parish (as in SS Faith, Hope, and Charity AKA Faith, Hope, and Cadillac), and the civilized lifestyle of Kenilworth. She urged all of us to move up there before Oak Park “went completely black.” Her siblings were not impressed, but charitably didn’t argue because they knew it would be a waste of time. None of her four children were with her, the only grandchildren who hadn’t been interested in Grandpa’s death. They were all products of the Day School, New Trier,
DePaw, and Kendal College. “Creeps,” the usually charitable Mary Margaret had dismissed them. “No fire, no hormones, no nothing.”

  Jane was happy up there, what the hell. Father Ed, however, social activist priest that he was, sometimes lost his temper with her.

  “Jane,” he fired back at her, “April is not a snob. She couldn’t stand living up there. And Oak Park is a fascinating neighborhood, even more now that it’s racially integrated.”

  My sons were hugging me as though I had been on Mars instead of only in Siberia and never expected to see me again, Kevin Patrick who was finishing his doctorate in musicology at THE University (as one must call my own alma mater) and was Maria Elena’s husband; Jimmy, who will become a priest in the spring; and Sean Seamus, a commodity trader whose love for a young Jewish woman was shattered when she married an officer in the Israeli Air Force.

  “Ed! Jane!” My husband did finally take charge. “Chill out!

  “But …” Jane began.

  “I said chill out. The matter doesn’t have to be settled now …”

  He was interrupted by another spasm of sneezing.

  “It can wait a couple of weeks till things settle down. In the meantime April will want to stay here.”

  “Well, yes,” his mother said, still holding him. “That’s a good idea, Chucky dear. I’d like to stay here till things settle down.”

  Her tone suggested that the idea had just occurred to her.

  April Rosemary Nettleton, my oldest child, was last in the hugging line. Chuck had wanted to call her “Rosemary” after me and I wanted to call her “April” after her grandmother. We compromised on the combination, but I won because “April” was her first name. That’s what we call an Irishwoman’s compromise.

  “As if,” April Rosemary, whispered to me, “you could get April out of here with a forklift.”

  “Especially,” her grandmother and namesake continued, “if poor sweet little Mary Margaret will come visit me some of the time.”

  Poor sweet little Mary Margaret leaped into action.

  “Grandma, I’ll move into Rosie’s old bedroom and commute back and forth between Rosie and Chucky’s house.”

  A commute of all of two blocks.

  She gently eased her dad away from Grandma and embraced her.

  “Only on one condition, Grams, you totally gotta teach me how to do the jazz piano.”

  Over in the background at the edge of the group, Joe Moran grinned proudly.

  “Well, dear, I’m sure you don’t need much teaching.”

  “I’ll move in tonight.”

  That settled that and that settled the group down.

  “She is really something,” April Rosemary murmured.

  Mary Margaret turned and winked. April Rosemary gave the pointing sign with which black basketball players praise one another. Mary Margaret winked again. Had those two finally made peace?

  I glanced at Peg back on the couch next to April. She looked so tired.

  April Rosemary was pregnant again, her third child. She was becoming a successful photographer of children. Both her toddlers, Johnny and April Anne had been afflicted by the red hair gene. I could see myself confusing the redheads as they grew older. Peg’s oldest, Charley (Charlotte named after my husband) McGrath was also expecting. Life was asserting its latest victory in the ongoing battle with death. Poor dear Charley—I’m sounding like April—a lawyer like her father and a dark shapely Mediterranean beauty, thought she would never marry until she met Cletus McGrath.

  “Now listen up,” Chucky ordered. “I hear that the pastor over at our church won’t let my wife sing either the Bach-Gounod or the Schubert Ave Maria. So I propose that she sing the Gregorian chant version. Then we reprise with the arrangement we did at Charley’s wedding!”

  “Great idea!” that Mediterranean mother-to-be shouted.

  “It just so happens,” Chuck continued, “that I have here a stack of the arrangement, though I doubt that this crowd will need it. The church will be filled, so we must do it perfectly, which means the Good April will have to direct.”

  A bright smile lit up the face of April Mae Cronin O’Malley.

  “That is very sweet of you, Chucky dear.”

  “Peg can accompany on the violin.”

  “Whatever you say, Chucky Ducky!”

  The extra twenty years on Peg’s face vanished.

  “Now here’s the drill: after we receive Communion and the priests are distributing Communion to the rest of the church—and it will be filled—I’ll click my fingers like the nuns used to do and we’ll go to the Blessed Mother’s altar. Ed, if the pastor tries to move in our way, block him.”

  “With the greatest of pleasure!”

  “Now I suggest we practice it tonight, then tomorrow and Friday too. April Mae? I have to return a call from the New York Times newspaper.”

  More coughing spasms.

  The O’Malley chorus fell into place as it often had. There were more of us than there had been before.

  Chuck went off to talk to the Times.

  We went through the piece a couple of times. It was ragged, in part because the small fry were a bit too enthusiastic. Still everyone in the church, with the possible exception of the pastor, would love it.

  People began to drift away. Jane and Ted went off to the paradisal North Shore. I wondered if their kids would show up for the wake. By the time Chuck came back from the phone only Peg and Vince were still there. I was ready to sleep till the day after the last judgment. Poor dear Chucky could hardly breathe. Ms. Take Charge took charge.

  “Aunt Peg, I’ll drive Chuck and Rosie home, grab some clothes, and come back to stay with Grams.”

  “Thank you, Mary Margaret,” Peg said.

  We kissed April good-bye. When I first elbowed my way into the O’Malleys in 1939, she was in her middle thirties. I imagined that with her height, her lovely face, her graceful movements, and her long skirts, she was some kind of princess. Chucky later said grand duchess. She still looked and acted like a grand duchess. Tears stung at my eyes again.

  “Now,” my intermediate daughter said, as we pulled up to our house, “you guys will wake up early, so I’ll come by about a quarter to eight and pick you up for the eight o’clock Mass. Naturally I’ll bring Grams along too.”

  I did not want to get up and get dressed for Mass. Yet I’d better do it.

  “Mary Margaret,” my husband said as we entered the house, “I will doubtless be in the intensive care unit at Oak Park Hospital tomorrow. So I want you to call Kevin Patrick and ask him if he thinks we can reassemble the jazz group to perform ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ at Queen of Heaven.”

  “Good idea, Chuck. We’ll want to practice it, won’t we?”

  “Certainly.”

  Chuck and I stumbled into our bedroom. I gave him several different kinds of medicine, none of which would do any good.

  “Did you notice anything about Jane?” he asked.

  “No, not really. A little hyper maybe.”

  “I’d say a lot hyper … That crazy stuff about moving April to the North Shore.”

  “You know Jane.”

  “Yeah, I know her, Rosemarie my love. I think we’d better watch her.”

  “If you say so.”

  Then, changing the subject, I said, “Jazz at the cemetery, Charles Cronin O’Malley?”

  “Why not?”

  “You are the craziest of all the Crazy O’Malleys.”

  “I have had to work at it.”

  We both collapsed into bed, far too tired to think about sex. Some other time, I promised myself.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Chuck

  ARCHITECT AND ARTIST

  —FOR THE SECOND TIME

  John E. O‘Malley, nationally known architect and artist died at his home in Oak Park, Illinois—a Chicago suburb—on Wednesday. The cause of death according to his son, Charles C. O’Malley, was a massive heart attack. It was, Charles O‘Malley said, his father�
��s second death. The first was on the parade ground at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on November 11, 1918. The O’Malley family still has the telegram from the War Department reporting John E. O‘Malley’s death from influenza. Charles O’Malley said that his father’s body was in a casket when he began to pound on it. Mr. O’Malley declined to speculate on whether it was a classic near-death experience, but said that after that experience his father never worried about anything, Depression, war, children, the acceptance of his work, taxes.

  John E. O‘Malley was born in 1900, son of a prominent Republican politician and an Irish immigrant, Jane Curtin. He attended St. Ignatius College and Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology) and worked on the design of the Wacker Drive expressway in Chicago. He also designed many churches, including St. Ursula in Chicago, for which he won a national architectural award. During the Great Depression he was Architect for the Metropolitan Sanitary District and served in the Black Horse Troop, a reconnaissance unit of the Illinois National Guard. After Pearl Harbor the Troop was mobilized into the regular army. John O’Malley served as an architect for the US Army Signal Corps at Fort Sheridan and designed several different buildings for Signal Corps use.

  After the war he designed many suburban developments in Chicago and elsewhere which he described as “suburbs for human beings.” These projects earned him more than a dozen architectural awards and a citation of “Special Merit” from the Association of American Architects.

  Throughout his life he also painted, both in oils and watercolor; however, this work was not well-known. Charles O‘Malley said that his father always defined himself as an artist. In the last ten years his work has received considerable attention. The Worcester Gallery created a retrospective around his painting Rom Women which hung in its American Artists Gallery. The New York Times review of that exhibit said that Rom Women must be recognized “as perhaps the most solid example of American Realism in the first half of the twentieth century.” It also said that his painting Nude Flapper is “a delightful insight into the chaste eroticism of the 1920s.” The exhibit traveled to many museums, including Chicago’s Art Institute and the published catalogue “John E. O’Malley—an Artist for His Time” was a success. Mr. O’Malley continued to paint during his retirement, especially in watercolors.