A Midwinter's Tale Read online

  Dad and I stared at one another silently. Some units of the Illinois National Guard had already been called up and were freezing in tents at Camp Forrest in Tennessee (named after Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, who depending on your source, said either, “Git thar fustest with the mostest” or “Because I was able to take a shortcut and ride very rapidly, I arrived first on the field of battle and with the most men”). Dad had promised Mom many times that he would resign from the 131st Cavalry, as the Black Horse Troop was officially called. “A forty-year-old cavalry captain would not be much use in modern mechanized war, as I myself am the first to admit.”

  But he always postponed the resignation until after “next year’s parade.” Michael, he reasoned, should be given one more chance to see his father ride down Michigan Avenue in shining armor on a big black horse. The Troop was supposed to be an elite cavalry unit of the Illinois National Guard. In fact, it was useless militarily but great at parades.

  We had all enjoyed the spectacle; and now we were about to pay the price for it.

  I was an eighth grader at St. Ursula’s, and I read the papers every day—all of them: the Trib, the Herald-Examiner, the American, the Daily News, and Marshall Field’s new left-wing Sun. I had switched my thirteen-year-old support from the isolationists of Col. Charles Lindbergh and America First to the “interventionists” of William Allen White and the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, mostly to give my father someone with whom to argue. To my dismay, that summer he had begun to agree with me. (I note in passing that in a neat historical irony the descendants of the latter became Vietnam “doves” while the political offspring of the isolationists were transmuted into “hawks.”)

  “It won’t be just Camp Leavenworth this time,” he sighed.

  “Will it be a long war?”

  “Probably. I suppose I could get out—too old, family, all that. I couldn’t live with myself if I did that.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We’d better go tell your mother.”

  “Yes, we’d better.”

  Mom pretended to be brave. “Certainly you’ll have to go, no question about it,” she said, her eyes wet with tears. “You couldn’t live with yourself if you didn’t do your duty as a citizen.”

  My sisters and little brother wept fiercely, but Dad and Mom cheered them up with the falsehood that he would only be away a few months.

  He left before Christmas. So desperate was the rush to get troops to the Pacific that there wasn’t even Christmas leave. Dad’s letters said that the rumor was that units of the Thirty-third Division would be sent to Australia in March and that he might have a short furlough before he left. He also insisted that he was in good health, despite the cold weather, had lost weight, and was as spry as kids twenty years younger.

  We all kept a stiff upper lip. Mom began to teach full-time at St. Ursula’s to “tide us over” until Dad’s family allotment checks came through. The girls and Mike stopped crying and our harp concerts and songfests resumed the week before Christmas, with Peg working her soaring enchantments on the violin. I was the only eighth grader with a father in the service. That bestowed on me a certain status that I would quite happily have done without.

  The pastor’s sermon at midnight mass about our “brave boys in the service” bothered the hell out of me. It wasn’t our boy; it was our father, who had no business running through obstacle courses and crawling under barbed wire while live ammunition crackled above his head. Nor was there any sense in him diving into foxholes while enemy artillery shells fell all around him.

  I read the newspapers, you see. Thank God Mom and the kids didn’t read them, or they would have fallen apart completely.

  And what good would a forty-year-old horseman, without his lance, be in combat? An intelligence officer somewhere, maybe. But a combat commander? He’d be a threat to his own men.

  Or so I argued. And so I told Fr. John Raven, the young priest at our parish. He didn’t disagree.

  The day after Christmas, as American troops fell back from Manila to the Bataan peninsula, I asked Mom why we didn’t use our political connections to get Dad out of Camp Forrest and away from combat.

  “He’s not going to win the war in some jungle, is he?”

  “Hush, darling, your father would never want to be known as a slacker.”

  “If you care so much, Mr. Smarty,” Rosie snarled at me, “why don’t you do something about it? You read the newspapers, you ought to know how to get him transferred.”

  “Why don’t you mind your own business? He’s not your father.”

  “I don’t care. I’m still right.”

  “You are not.”

  Anyway, I thought about her suggestion and then on New Year’s Eve did the sensible thing. After hearing on the news that the Japanese had refused to consider Manila an open city and that someone named Chester Nimitz had assumed command of the Pacific Fleet, I shut the Philco off, cutting short perhaps the hundredth rendition that day of “White Christmas.”

  I thought a few more minutes, put on my jacket, and slipped out of the apartment.

  I walked five blocks in subzero weather to see our congressman, who was home for his Christmas vacation. I rang the doorbell at his quite ordinary bungalow at Mason and Hirsh in the north end of the parish and waited, shivering and scared.

  “I want to see the congressman about my father, who is in the Black Horse Troop,” I told his silver-haired wife.

  “Dear, there’s a cute little boy with red hair out here to talk to you about his father, who is in the Army.”

  The congressman was a tall, lean man with thin salt-and-pepper hair and a politician’s easy smile.

  The new Sun tucked under his arm, he walked to the door, shook hands with me gravely, and bowed me into their living room.

  “I’m Charles Cronin O’Malley and my dad is John E. O’Malley and he almost died of the flu at Fort Leavenworth in 1918 and he’s forty years old and has four children and is down at Camp Forrest and will probably go to New Guinea and there’s no reason why he would be a good combat officer because he’s a painter and an architect and he worked for the Sanitary District.”

  “Sure, your mother was a Cronin and your grandfather was a Republican judge and you’ve been good Democrats since 1928 because you hated Prohibition. . . . What’s he doing down at Camp Forrest?”

  “He used to like to ride in the parades and make us all laugh.”

  “Dear God in heaven . . .” The congressman sighed. “We’re not in such trouble that we need idealistic dreamers . . .”

  “Who doesn’t even know how to fire a Garand rifle.”

  “You know what a Garand is?”

  “Sure.”

  “How old are you.”

  “Almost fourteen.”

  “Hmn . . . you look three years younger. Okay, I’m sure we can work something out. You can tell your mother—”

  “She’d be awful mad if she knew I did this. Please don’t tell her.”

  “All right.” He grinned. “It’s our secret. Would you take off your coat and have some eggnog?”

  “Thank you.”

  I was embarrassed and ashamed of my ill-fitting clothes and did not want the eggnog. But I took off my coat and drank two glasses. The congressman and I talked about the war.

  “I think you should be the combat officer instead of your father,” he said, smiling, when I put on my brown leather jacket with its dried-up imitation fur to leave.

  “I would be better than my father,” I said fervently.

  We both laughed. I guess he knew Dad pretty well.

  “You’re in eighth grade, are you?”

  “Yes, sir.” I could be very respectful to adults when it was appropriate.

  “Where are you going to high school?”

  I hesitated. Dad wanted me to go to St. Ignatius, so naturally I couldn’t go there. I wanted Fenwick because that was where everyone in my class was going. My mother, worried about high school t
uition for four children, hoped I would go to St. Mel’s, which cost only fifty dollars a year instead of the hundred and fifty at Fenwick and the hundred at Trinity, to which Jane was already riding off on the bus every morning, her head filled with daydreams about Navy fliers she might date someday.

  “Fenwick,” I answered truthfully enough, “if I can earn enough money for tuition.”

  “That’s a good school,” he said, beaming. “The Dominicans are fine priests. Excellent preparation for college. The best.”

  Exactly what Dad had said about the Jesuits.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You play any football? Too short?”

  “Pretty short, sir, but I do play. Not first string much.”

  All perfectly true. They let me hold the ball for kickoffs as was the custom in the days before kicking tees. Not for points after, however, because I had a difficult time catching the pass from center.

  “What position? Quarterback?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Again it was the absolute truth. Third-string quarterback. But hadn’t I told him that I didn’t play first string? Was it necessary to say that I was a kind of team mascot?

  Not in the service of truth, surely. I had made no false claims, had I?

  But that final snatch of conversation would change my life and point me down the path to follies that would not end.

  I didn’t tell anyone about my visit. Especially that miserable little spoiled brat, Rosie Clancy.

  But when Dad came home at the end of February with a transfer to Fort Sheridan in his hand, Rosie tossed her long black hair defiantly, as if to say that she was responsible for what I had done. I worried that she would not keep her big, loud mouth shut. She did. Not that her unusual discretion earned her any credit from me, the spoiled little brat.

  Well, actually I admired her caution, but I couldn’t admit that then, could I?

  Later, when we met in the corridor as I was heading for the only bathroom in the apartment, she winked and grinned at me. It is unthinkable that I did not grin back.

  Dad was assigned to the Signal Corps training center at Fort Sheridan to design buildings for battlefield communication centers. I guess he was pretty good at it. “More fun than the Sanitary District,” he told us.

  The routine of our lives slipped back into familiar patterns. Dad commuted to Fort Sheridan on the el and the North Shore, clad in his tailor-made major’s uniform. By summer when the marines were preparing to land on Guadalcanal, he was expected at the Fort only three days a week, so long as his designs were done correctly and on time, an easy enough task for him because he would usually do the next batch of work on the trains coming home. The harp sing-alongs (we didn’t know the word then) continued as always.

  We had a little more money. Dad’s salary as a major and our family allotment and his living allowance for a dwelling off base and his PX privileges made our poverty a little more genteel. We wore better clothes and slept under warmer blankets. Some old furniture was replaced. Mom bought a new coat. I hosted a graduation party, against my wishes, when I graduated from St. Ursula—in the gym turned basement church since the long-awaited “new” church would not be started till after the war.

  Actually we probably had more money than we realized because Mom continued to teach at St. Ursula’s. The extra funds sat in checking accounts, not even earning the interest that, I observed, we would receive if we invested in war bonds.

  I decided that my parents were actually comfortable in our Depression lifestyle (as we would call it now) and couldn’t be bothered to find ways to spend their extra money during wartime when many of the things we might buy were unavailable.

  Like a new Philco.

  Or a car.

  No matter how much money they had, their financial affairs would always be a mess. They would only regain their past affluence if there was so much money around that you couldn’t help buying a couple of homes and a couple of cars and a couple of fur coats.

  No one expected that kind of a ship would ever come in.

  Which just goes to show you.

  If Dad had left the National Guard a year or two before the war, he would have earned much more as an architect planning defense factories around the fringes of the city. Some of his friends did just that and ended the war with a head start.

  But he was happy with his contribution to the “war effort,” a contribution that was not very great, I suppose, but notably more constructive than being shot in the first day of combat in New Guinea, which would certainly have happened if our republic had sent him off to the jungles.

  Mom probably made a bigger contribution in 1943 and 1944 when she worked at the Douglas plant at Orchard Field making B24s—painting the tail assemblies to be precise. She believed the Rosie the Riveter propaganda and, looking attractive in worker’s slacks and dark blue turban (essential for women at that time, even if they weren’t working in defense factories), rode the Central bus to Foster Avenue and then out to Manheim Road to change for a third bus to the plant. The little kids—Peg and Michael—were at first unhappy that they had to eat lunch at school; but the job seemed to make Mom happier than ever, so they were quickly won over.

  The long fingers that plucked the strings of the harp were now stained with camouflage paint, but the woman who moved the fingers was happier than she had been for many years. Not that she was ever particularly unhappy. But, to tell the truth, I think she was glad to get away from the kids and talk to adults, especially since Dad was not around the flat as much as he had been before the war.

  So there was enough money and more than enough to pay my Fenwick tuition by the time I was a sophomore. There was enough to buy an old jalopy so Mom wouldn’t have to ride the Central Avenue trolley bus too, a car that I could use in the evenings in the summer and on the weekends. But Mom claimed that she liked the bus ride and that the women in the babushkas who rode with her were “interesting.” Some of them were “very well informed musically too.”

  So no car until 1944.

  And no worry about the Fenwick tuition either because I had a scholarship. Theoretically it was an academic scholarship, and one to which my grades might have entitled me. In fact it was an athletic scholarship offered—nay, imposed—because of the congressman’s conviction, on the basis of a single conversation, that I had the makings of a great quarterback, a conviction that I can say with no false humility was totally without factual foundation.

  I was momentarily overjoyed to be told about my scholarship when I tried to give my fifteen dollars to the old Dominican who was collecting tuition on registration day.

  “Can’t take your money, O’Malley. You’re down here as a scholarship student, young man.”

  The next day Coach Angelo Smith (always called Coach Angelo), the kind of colorfully outspoken coach out of whom legends are made, cornered me as I came out of class.

  “I hear you have the makings of a great quarterback.” He contemplated me the way a man might regard the Brooklyn Bridge just after he had purchased it.

  “No, sir,” I said with perfect sincerity. “Ask my classmates. They’ll tell you.”

  “The congressman says you’re smart and brave.” He scratched his jaw, skepticism increasing.

  “And clumsy, sir. Very clumsy.”

  I didn’t add that I was also a physical coward and had played on the grammar school team only because my friends thought it was a joke to have a specialist in holding for kickoffs.

  “If the congressman says you’re a football player, then in this district you’re a football player. For the next four years. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was not worth a hundred and fifty dollars a year to suffer through the agonies of football practice for the next four years, to be taunted—as I perceived an absolutely certain event—by Peg and Rosie because I never started, indeed never played. Except on kickoffs.

  I had not the slightest choice.

  Fortunately my grammar school friends ra
llied round and I became the team joke again, the little redhead guy in the black Friars uniform who knew all the plays and held the ball on the kickoff.

  I would like to say that just once I made a tackle that prevented a touchdown. In fact—until our senior game with Mount Carmel—the opportunity came only twice in my career, and both times I did not catch the streaking kickoff return man. I have no idea what I would have done if by some miracle I had caught him.

  Already I was a figure of fun. Things had begun to happen to me. All because of a slight lack of precision in my conversation with the congressman.

  The mask was already fitted to my face.

  The congressman I’m sure had long since forgotten about me and could not have cared less whether I donned my black jersey every Sunday (when high school games were played in the Catholic League in the old days).

  “You won’t even win a letter,” Rosie Clancy sneered.

  “They’ll give him one for endurance,” Peg said, laughing.

  “Maybe”—I could go along with the joke because I had to go along with it—“for survival.”

  Yet, my absurd career as a football nonplayer would make me a hero twice in my senior year, phenomena that would change my life and begin to make me part of a legend, a legend of which, I assume you will believe, I didn’t want any part.

  6

  When the war was raging, my mother often took me to the Sorrowful Mother novena services. I was late getting there for the services one harsh winter night because of late football practice. So, I knelt down for a few moments of prayer. In those days, the churches were always open so that people who paid for them could pray in them, a profoundly radical idea as far as the clergy of the present are concerned.

  In the darkened church, a woman was sobbing. I remember the date precisely—January 3, 1945. It was just after the Battle of the Bulge. I remember the cry and the nervous flicker of the red sanctuary light as though it too was startled by the sudden sound.

  Another grieving woman who had lost a man she loved in the war! I thought.