Second Spring Page 5

  “What would you be doing?” I asked.

  Fr. Ed, dressed in a clerical shirt and wearing a dark green sweater I’d given him for Christmas just after Chuck and I were married, leaned forward in the easy chair his dad used to talk to clients.

  “I’d be his secretary and vice chancellor. I’d live with him in the mansion on North State. Advise him at every step of the way. He knows he has problems and needs help. He’s my bishop. A priest can’t turn down a request for help from his bishop.”

  He raised his hands as if appealing for our help. He was a good guy and I loved him, but when it comes to religion he gets a bit wimpy.

  “What happened to the man you’d be replacing?” I continued.

  “He’s resigned.” Fr. Ed waved his right hand in nervous dismissal.

  “From the priesthood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there a prior predecessor?”

  Fr. Ed hesitated and lowered his eyes.

  “He left too … So did his vicar for religious. Married a nun.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m not going to quit the priesthood, Rosie, you know that.”

  “Isn’t he a little bit, uh, crazy, Edward?”

  “Not really, Chuck.” He looked up again. “He’s often misunderstood. He’s not from Chicago, you know. It takes a long time to understand this city. He wants me to help him because he says I come from a family that really knows Chicago.”

  “Even if they live in Oak Park …”

  “Will you guys support me? I’ll take a lot of heat from my priest friends. They’ll say I’ve sold out.”

  “Then they were never really friends, bro. We’ll stand behind you.”

  “Count on us,” I echoed my husband.

  “Great!”

  He gripped Chuck’s hand, hugged me, and bounded out of the studio to rejoin the party.

  “Well done, husband mine.”

  “Same to you … We’re going to have to blot up the pieces eventually.”

  “One more victim.”

  He thought for a moment.

  “I was wrong.”

  “I reject that possibility.”

  “I said the ‘I’ on Edward’s forehead stands for idealist. Actually it stands for innocent …”

  Chuck put his arm around my shoulders and led me back to the party. His fist was clenched. The poor dear man is not vengeful at all, save when one of his is endangered. Heaven help the Cardinal if he hurt Fr. Ed.

  Chuck didn’t mean it when he threatened to kill my father if he touched me again. He was just trying to scare him. He wept with me at the wake after the Outfit had blown him into tiny pieces. Then he told me the story about his parents’ courtship at Twin Lakes and the gypsy woman’s prophecy about me and how terribly sorry he felt for my own father.

  Chuck’s hate vanishes quickly. Still, Cardinal O‘Neill had better be careful. Charles Cronin O’Malley is not the kind of man that you push around. Or his family.

  I don’t believe in gypsy prophecies, by the way.

  April and Vangie pretended to be delighted at the appointment.

  “I always thought that Michael would be a fine bishop,” the good April said, donning her Pangloss glasses. “And the poor, dear Cardinal really needs someone to help him stop doing so many stupid things.”

  “I’m glad I’m not building churches anymore,” Vangie said. “He’s a very difficult man. Always comes out swinging until you stand up to him.”

  A couple days later, when I was struggling to figure out how the new Radio Shack computer with a word processor worked, John Raven called.

  “Rosie,” he said in that magical voice which had brought peace in my times of trouble, “is it true?”

  “Yes, John. It’s true. My foster kid brother will become secretary for that psychopathic paranoid who is ruining our Archdiocese.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he believes that a priest should help his bishop when the bishop asks for help.”

  “Does he want to be a bishop himself?”

  “Ed? Gimme a break!”

  “Sorry, Rosie … The man is mad. He’s destroyed all the power structures in the Archdiocese. He controls everything, which means that he controls nothing. We have terrible problems and nothing gets done. No one knows what happens to the money. He hires private detectives to shadow priests. One has been following me for weeks in search of my mistress …”

  I couldn’t help myself. I laughed.

  John relaxed and laughed with me.

  “All right, Rosie, all right. He destroys the people who work closely with him. The smart ones get out. One guy got himself a job in Rome because he realized that his chances of becoming a bishop would go up in smoke if he stayed around the Cardinal for long.”

  “If he’s so bad, John, why don’t the priests get together and do something about him?”

  “Like take out a contract?”

  “Like complain to the Pope.”

  “You can’t dump a Cardinal, Rosie.”

  “You could go to the local media.”

  “They know some of it. They’re afraid of the story.”

  “I can’t believe that the Pope wouldn’t listen to priests.”

  John sighed.

  “The truth is that there is not enough courage in the clergy to really take him on. We gripe and complain and talk about nothing else. But we’re afraid to fight.”

  “No balls?”

  “I won’t argue with that … You and Chuck keep an eye on Ed.”

  “We plan to.”

  “His parents?”

  “They’re concerned too, they just pretend not to be.”

  “Poor dear Cardinal needs someone to help him?”

  “Almost verbatim.”

  I found Chuck in his obsessively neat darkroom working on the portrait of a beautiful woman of about my age whose husband wanted an erotic pose—the usual stuff, arms folded over her boobs, and very pretty boobs at that. She obviously wouldn’t have minded if they weren’t covered, but the poor dolt husband was afraid of her.

  “Stop staring at her,” I ordered him, as a print appeared in the magic of the chemical tray.

  “I’m admiring the artist’s skill.”

  What her husband didn’t realize was that Chuck sees the erotic appeal in all women, no matter how old they are. Moreover, he has the weird ability to catch them at the moment when they reveal who and what they are. No sexual exploitation there. The woman in the chemical bath was sweet, like I say, and lovely and impish and very determined. Her husband had never seen that combination in her. The picture would scare the living daylights out of him. Serve him right.

  Incidentally, Chuck sometimes sees them wrong. I am not the Irish warrior goddess his camera thinks I am. Well, not always.

  “I bet the idiot never saw her that way,” I said. “The picture will surprise him and scare him. She’s a lot more than a pretty body.”

  Chuck thought about that.

  “God gave us lovers, I think, because he thought it would be a good thing that there would be someone in our lives who could surprise us and scare us out of our daily monotony.”

  “Oh, Chucky.” I began to weep as I always do when he turns mystical and says something profound.

  “You can use that quote in your next story if you want.”

  I pounded his arm in mock protest.

  Then I told him about my conversation with John Raven.

  He stirred the chemical bath on the woman’s bare shoulders.

  “Why do priests put up with a guy like the Cardinal?” he asked.

  Obviously a rhetorical question.

  “Maybe if you take sex out of a man’s life, he becomes passive aggressive. You suppress your hormones long enough, you don’t have any masculine reaction.”

  I touched his hand, maneuvering it away from the bitch’s shoulders.

  “I don’t think most Protestant clergy would behave differently. It must be that men of God are reluctant to
take on someone who claims to be God’s representative.”

  “Maybe we’ll have to do something about it, husband mine … No one would accuse you of suppressing your hormonal instincts.”

  “What could we do about it?”

  The idea appealed to him.

  “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  As winter reluctantly retreated temporarily and spring dubiously poked its tiny nose into our world, Chuck and I returned to our tennis and golf. He wasn’t doing much of anything. When he wasn’t working on a formal portrait, he devoted himself to unsystematic reading of Victorian novels, the people in which seemed to be more interesting than the people of late-twentieth-century real life.

  “The men were such courteous gentlemen,” he informed me with the tone of an academic expert, “even when they were cads, which most of them were.”

  He didn’t lose interest in me, but in truth he didn’t seem as interested as he used to be.

  He and Moire Meg had long and complicated arguments about gender in the Victorian era, with my daughter arguing the apparently reactionary position that women ran things then too despite their economic dependency.

  We saw little of Father Ed during the winter. He spent a few hours with us on Christmas Day. The rest of the time he was busy “helping the Cardinal.”

  Even the good April went so far as to comment, “I don’t believe that job is really good for Edward’s health.”

  He was able to preside over the wedding of Kevin and Maria Elena Lopez at St. Francis Church, but he had to miss the dinner because the Cardinal needed him. The bride and her family were much too polite to notice. Kevin was too much in love to care.

  “What the hell is the matter with Uncle Ed?” Jimmy, a sophomore at St. John’s up in Minnesota, asked me with his usual blunt clarity. “The Cardinal is more important than we are.”

  “Uncle Ed is an idealist,” I replied, waving off the question.

  “Oh, yeah.” Jimmy nodded as if he understood. “Priests have to be idealists.”

  As I watched my three handsome, Black Irish sons on the altar at Mass, I felt very proud of them and very old. Too bad that the old Black Horse Troop in which Chuck’s father had ridden with its silver uniform and red plumes did not exist anymore.

  As for the groom’s father, he wore his precinct captain mask. All the Mexican-Americans doted on him. He learned the names of all the uncles and aunts and would never forget them.

  “Real Irish,” one of the aunts said to me admiringly.

  “You got that right,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  It was a great night—two musical families merging in a jazz mode with dazzling variations. Chuck and I actually sang a substantial part of our repertory to a mariachi background. They loved us.

  “Mariachi music,” my husband assured me, “is actually wedding music from the state of Jalisco.”

  “I needed to know that.”

  “And my brother is a stupid son of a bitch!”

  “CHUCKY!”

  Even the good April said to me, shaking her head in bemusement, “Father Edward Michael should have stayed longer.”

  I had the feeling that the whole family wanted me to do something about my youngest foster sibling.

  Anyway, on a bright day in early May of 1974 we played golf at Butterfield Country Club, which Chuck preferred to Oak Park because, as he put it, “At Butterfield the drunks are all Catholic drunks.”

  He is a terrible golfer. He plays because his father likes to beat him. Also because his wife likes to beat him.

  “Can’t say I’m not a good sport,” he would grumble.

  We encountered that gorgeous little witch who reads my soul, Maggie Ward, and her husband Jerry Keenan in the dining room. Msgr. Packy Keenan, Jerry’s brother, was with them. Packy was with us at St. Crispin’s Day when we gave Paul VI a way out on the birth control encyclical which he decided he didn’t want.

  Maggie always pretends that she hasn’t seen me in ages.

  “Spring agrees with you, Rosemarie,” she said. “You look wonderful!”

  For a moment I fill up with affection for Maggie. Along with my husband she’s saved my life. And still does.

  “Thank you, Dr. Ward. Someday soon you’ll have to teach me how to look even more beautiful when I’m a grandmother.”

  “You can tell she writes for the New Yorker,” Chuck said.

  “More likely old-fashioned Irish blarney,” Maggie said.

  “We have a little of that in our family too,” Jerry Keenan admitted.

  Shrinks are not supposed to interact with their clients, especially in country club dining rooms. The little witch breaks all the rules.

  We talked about Richard Nixon for a while. Chuck assured all of us that Tricky Dicky would be out of office by the end of the summer.

  “Not quite a Greek tragedy. He doesn’t have the stature for that,” Maggie mused. “But still a tragedy.”

  “Lyndon would have been all right,” Chuck informed us, “if he hadn’t gone to West Texas State and Nixon would have made it if he hadn’t gone to Whittier College.”

  “Men destroyed by their own feelings of inferiority?” Maggie asked, fascinated as always by how smart my husband could be when he wanted to.

  “The real issue before the house,” Chuck went on, “is whether Leo Kelly and Jane Devlin will get together again, now that he’s back in Chicago as provost at the University.”

  “It’s been twenty years,” Msgr. Packy said sadly.

  I had suspected for a long time that Msgr. Packy had a very soft spot in his heart for Jane.

  Jane and Leo were classmates of Chuck’s. They dated in the forties and would surely have married if he hadn’t been killed in action in Korea. By the time the Marines had admitted their mistake and he returned a prisoner of war without a couple of his fingers, Jane had already married Phil Clare, a lout who had been unfaithful to her on their honeymoon.

  If Chucky Ducky had ever done that to me, I would have killed him.

  When Jane finally had sense enough to sue for divorce, I made Chuck call Leo, whose dippy-hippy wife had shed him years ago, leaving him with an adorable little girl child, and tell him that he should look for a job at the University of Chicago. Leo had laughed it off, but we knew he’d be back.

  “Some one of these summers,” Chuck told the Keenans, “he’s going to show up at Lake Geneva with that diffident smile. I leave it to you, Dr. Ward, and the various other matriarchs involved to see that matters arrange themselves.”

  “You can count on me, Dr. O’Malley.”

  “Now, then,” Chuck continued in his professorial mode, “the next order of business, Monsignor, is a detailed report on what is to be done about our paranoid sociopath Cardinal.”

  Packy Keenan, a big athletic man with a red face and snow-white hair like his brother and his father, laughed, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  “He’s a strange one, Chuck. Some nights he consumes a gallon of ice cream and a bottle of bourbon and gets on the phone to bishops all over the country, complaining about us. Then he calls one of us and complains about the other bishops. That woman who he claims is a relative but really isn’t hangs around all the time. No one knows what happens to the money. Then he goes off to places like the Royal Hawaiian or the Athens Hilton and holes up in a room. His staff sends him a mail pouch every day.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “How’s Ed doing, Chuck?”

  My husband paused.

  “You guys gotta get rid of him,” he said.

  “Ed?”

  “No, Cardinal O’Neill. A bunch of you have to go to Rome and tell the Pope to fire him. Tell His Holiness that his behavior is bizarre, that there’s a big scandal brewing, and that the priests and people hate him.”

  “That would be impossible, Chuck.”

  “That’s what John Raven says too,” I said.

  Chuck continued to destroy his large T-bone steak.

  “I’ll come with you,” my hus
band declared, turning to his mashed potatoes. I positively hate him when he devours food that way and doesn’t put on any weight.

  “Nervous energy,” he tells me.

  “They wouldn’t listen. He’s a Cardinal.”

  “Tell them that if they don’t get rid of him, the media will eventually break the story.”

  “They won’t risk offending the Catholics of Chicago.”

  “Eventually they will.”

  The next day I was in the darkroom shuffling, carefully so as not to disturb his order, through a file labeled “MENARD AVENUE.”

  Am I free to disrupt his sacred precincts? As I told him long ago, as long as I sleep in the same bed as he does, I can poke around whenever and wherever I want. The rules, however, are different when I’m working on a story. He may not look at it, even think about it, until I’m finished with my first revision.

  Who makes these rules? I make them. I make all the rules.

  Chuck shuffled into the darkroom.

  “Looking at my Menard Avenue files?” he said plaintively, hinting that would I please put them back in proper order.

  “Look at this one.”

  It was a shot, released by remote control, of the whole family at Twin Lakes.

  “Sure were a lot of us … Dad and the good April are so young.”

  “Younger than we are now … Jane is exuberant about becoming a woman, you are pretending to look like a sullen French painter, those two she-tigers next to you are a frightening pair …”

  “Conspiring about something, probably against me.”

  “And poor little Ed …”

  Chuck took the picture from my hand and studied it closely. Then he looked at it with his magnifying glass.

  “If I took the picture, that’s the way he had to look in those days, kind of left out.”

  “Bullshit! You couldn’t even see him when the shutter went off … How would you describe him?”

  “Sad,” Chuck replied, frowning. “Trying to catch up. Youngest child?”

  “Moire Meg is our youngest and she’s never tried to play catchup. Depression child, maybe.”

  Chuck nodded.

  “Maybe … He was always kind of quiet. I never felt he was competing with us. I guess he might have been.”

  “Competing with YOU!”

  “That should have been easy, Rosemarie.”