Golden Years Page 6

  He is survived by his wife of fifty-five years, April Mae Cronin, four children, in addition to Charles: Jane McCormack, Margaret Mary Antonelli, and the Rev. Edward Michael, fourteen grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, all of Chicago.

  A funeral Eucharist will be celebrated at St. Ursula Church in Chicago on Saturday morning.

  I passed the Times over to my good wife. We were riding over to St. Agedius Church for the eight o’clock Mass in Mary Margaret’s Chevy Impala, which did not look at all like an African antelope. My daughter and my mother were in the front seat.

  The aforementioned good wife had awakened me not fifteen minutes earlier to inform me that Mary Margaret would soon arrive to pick us up for the eight o’clock Mass.

  I felt like a 747 had rolled over me. I opened my eyes to see my wife climbing into jeans and pulling on a red sweatshirt with a drawing of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Cyrillic script. It was always pleasant to watch her dress.

  “Your child is a religious fanatic,” I complained and closed my eyes.

  “Her red hair suggests she is your child too.”

  “Maybe you had a lover with red hair.”

  My comment earned a derisive snort.

  “Mary Margaret is an enthusiastic Catholic, as you well know … Now get up and get dressed. Your mother will be with us. Don’t disappoint her.”

  “She’s a religious fanatic too.”

  I struggled out of bed and kissed the back of her neck.

  “Chucky! Take a quick shower and brush your teeth! Now hurry up! If Father Keenan sees us coming in late, it will embarrass your mother.”

  Hardly likely. However, as someone who did not expect to live the rest of the day, I was in no shape to consider lovemaking even as a theoretical possibility. The shower didn’t help.

  “Where’s the kid?”

  “Erin has already brought her over to school.”

  Erin was our shy, pretty Irish babysitter, close to being even a foster child.

  I was dragged downstairs and out the door just as the Impala pulled up. I grabbed the Times on the run.

  “Good obit,” Rosemarie said. “I notice that this Charles O’Malley person receives considerable attention.”

  “They don’t talk about any of my awards.”

  “Would you ever read it to me, Rosie dear?”

  “Well, it doesn’t say that he claimed to see my face when he was dead,” Mom said. “I’m thankful for that.”

  “That would have been too spooky for The New York Times,” I replied. “But we all know it was true.”

  “‘Chaste eroticism,’” Rosemarie said.

  “Well, I suppose that’s one way of describing that awful painting. Thank goodness no one thinks it was me. I was never a flapper.”

  She knew that everyone said it was she.

  “It was just the way everyone wore their hair in those days, wasn’t it?” Mary Margaret said.

  “That’s right, dear.”

  Phonies all of them.

  I decided to stir the pot, just a little.

  “I don’t know how chaste it is. The woman seems to enjoy modeling with most of her clothes off.”

  “You’ve never been a woman, Chucky darling.”

  I was saved from responding because we had pulled up to St. Agedius. Msgr. Packy Keenan, a fellow warrior in the birth control commission and a contemporary from the neighborhood was waiting for us.

  We live inside the boundaries of St. Agedius, but St. Ursula was always our parish because we had grown up there and Dad had designed the church. However, when Packy became pastor of St. Agedius we yielded to canon law.

  He embraced all of us and congratulated me on the obit in the NYT.

  “I didn’t write it,” I pleaded.

  “No one will believe it.”

  Probably not. In fact, I had merely suggested a few additions. Including the lead. That would be my response: all I was responsible for was the lead. The headline was a grabber all right. All the anti-Catholic bigots who read The New York Times every morning would be furious at the suggestion of near-death experiences. That delightful thought made me forget about my cold for perhaps thirty seconds.

  Packy said a few nice words about Dad in his homily after the Gospel. He asked the congregation to pray for him, though he was sure that whatever purgatory Dad might have deserved was long since expiated by putting up with his son the photographer. The congregation sniggered and look around at me. I waved a weak hand in acknowledgment of the attention.

  “I get no respect,” I complained to Packy after Mass.

  “More than you will on Saturday from that idiot over at Ursula.”

  “He seems to have been warned.”

  “By the new archbishop … Yet he’s pretty much a cement head. I’ll be there to take care of him if he misbehaves.”

  “You will have to beat me to it.”

  “That’s a nasty cold you have, Chucky.”

  “My wife dragged me around Russia for a month, small wonder that I’m sick.”

  “And I’m going to drag you over to Oak Park Hospital to have your chest x-rayed.”

  “No, you’re not!”

  “Yes, I am. I’m not going to have you laid up with pneumonia again.”

  I knew that I was suffering from an allergy picked up in Russia and not a cold, because a person of some importance and influence had assured me that I would never suffer a cold or pneumonia again. The promise had been kept, as one might expect that it would.

  Anyway, before my wife permitted me any breakfast save for a cup of tea, I was forced into the confines of Oak Park Hospital where I had come into the world and whence I had expected not long ago to depart from it. The chest X-ray was negative of course.

  “Just a minor allergy,” the doctor told Rosemarie.

  Doctors never communicate with me.

  “Are you sure?” she demanded.

  “The allergy medicine will clear it up in a couple of days or a frost will take care of it.”

  I had never told the good Rosemarie about the woman who had visited me in my hospital room and given me instructions about the rest of my life. I sensed that it was a personal exchange and one I should not share with others. Moreover, better an occasional unnecessary chest X-ray than facing off with one of her psychiatric friends.

  We stopped at the bakery on the way home and bought a dozen sweet rolls. In my weakened condition I was able to consume only three of them.

  “I’m going back to bed,” I insisted.

  “You’re on jet lag. You won’t be able to sleep.”

  “Just watch me.”

  “We have practice at April’s with the family choir at twothirty and the jazz group at three-thirty.”

  “Who ever had those crazy ideas?”

  “I’ll wake you up.”

  “I’ll count on it.”

  I tumbled into bed. I should have eaten two more sweet rolls.

  Then I thought about my dad and felt a stab of pain in my gut. Tears rolled down my cheeks. No sobs, just restrained mourning, which is what we Irish tend to do.

  I remembered the story of his life as he had written it out. He was fond of bragging that he was conceived out of wedlock in a rectory bedroom on a hot summer afternoon. Whether his father, a very proper Republican politician on the make, had seduced the immigrant Irish maid or she had seduced him was not clear. Mostly, I have observed, people seduce one another. They were both in their thirties and, if one is to judge by their wedding pictures, quite handsome. Hormones may abate a little between the age of fifteen and the age of thirty-five—though that has not been my experience. Nonetheless, you put a lonely young woman and a lonely young man, both of them with what we could call today sex appeal, in a hot rectory on a hot afternoon with the pastor (uncle of the young man) away and something is likely to happen.

  It was a happy union, my father said, and they certainly looked happy in subsequent pictures. He was their only child and he had remembered them fondly. Th
e woman, I should remark, had red hair. My mother had also been fond of them, which meant that they liked the outspoken little flapper.

  “Well, you have him back with you finally,” I said to the couple who I assumed would be listening closely to my comments. “I hope you’re as pleased with him as we are. Help us to learn to live with losing him. And, you redhead woman, look kindly on those who have the same gene. I mean me especially. And all the little kids too. I wish I had a chance to know both of you. April said you were ‘cool.’ Well, she said ‘swell.’”

  Then my incoherent prayer faded away into incoherent dreams.

  Then I was awakened by a phone call from Vince. Would I please have lunch with Joe Raftery at Filander’s on Marion Street at twelve-thirty. It was kind of urgent.

  I said that I would and went into a spasm of sneezing.

  Joe Raftery seemed perfectly sane and normal across the table from me at the restaurant. The same easy smile, the same glittering blue eyes, the same curly hair parted in the middle, now silver instead of black, the same almost preternatural calm. He hadn’t changed much, tall, slender, dreamy brown eyes, a man you’ve known very well.

  Joe and I ate our spaghetti Bolognese with gusto and reflected on the good old days and the changes.

  “No trouble recognizing the neighborhood,” he said. “Your wife is a permanent beauty as is your sister Peg.”

  “They conspire,” I said, slurping down some of the pasta. “What’s happening in your life? I know you played safety at Stanford and made all-American …”

  “Fourth string … then like Vince and most of our cohort I went to Korea. I was a supply clerk in Seoul for a year, then came home. Nothing like what Vince went through … Is he over it?”

  “Pretty much, still some bad dreams; but he’s tough, as is my sister Peg.”

  “Lots of clout in Cook County, I hear.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “The Niners had drafted me in the sixth round, so I decided to give it a try. I was free safety for nine years till 1961, about when you were one of the PT boat boys over in Germany. Sounded like interesting duty.”

  “It was till JFK died, then the whole world fell apart. No one has put it back together since.”

  “I went native, became a real La La Land cowboy. I married a young actress, beautiful but not very bright. She went on to bigger things.”

  I nodded, as if I understood, but I didn’t.

  “When I retired from the Niners I went to work for a real estate developer over in the East Bay. We made a lot of money, some of it honest. I fell in love again with another real estate person, younger than I was, but like me she read books. Irishborn, thick brogue. We had a daughter.”

  He showed me the picture of a lovely young woman with soft brown hair and a baby that looked like she might become a clone.

  “I quit the big company and opened my own winery, would you believe. It was a lot of fun. Then one day two years ago I drove back to our vineyard and they were both gone. There was no sign that they had left. Bride and Samantha had disappeared. Her car was still there, Sam’s toys, everything.”

  Tears formed in the deep blue wells of his eyes.

  “How awful,” I said.

  “At first I couldn’t believe it … I still can’t as far as that goes. I was confident that they would turn up or that the police would find them. Nothing. They went on a missing persons list and are still there. The cops aren’t looking anymore. I can’t blame them.”

  “No credit card traces, no bank accounts?”

  “She had her own account and we had a joint account. No money taken from either.”

  “I’m sure that the cops asked you all these questions. No known enemies?”

  “Not to my knowledge. I didn’t know much about her background. As I said, she was from Ireland, Cork I think. If she had relatives over there, she never mentioned them. The people she had worked with didn’t know anything either. That’s California. Not like this neighborhood, where everyone knows everyone else and everyone else’s relatives. I’ve had private investigators searching for two years. They haven’t found a trace. No one saw them leave the house or the winery. They simply vanished from the face of the earth.”

  “So there’s no closure?”

  He shook his head sadly.

  “The cops found lots of bodies. None of them match her dental records. Realistically I have to assume they’re dead, but I still have hope. I guess I always will.”

  “Was she involved in Irish politics?”

  “She was totally uninterested. Said they were all a bunch of phonies. She didn’t want to go back to Ireland either. I had offered to take her there, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”

  That was a little strange. Most Micks always wanted to return to the Holy Ground if only to be thankful that they had migrated. I nodded, though I didn’t see what this had to do with me.

  “Did you travel much?”

  “Hardly at all. Over to San Francisco for the opera and concerts—she was a great one, as she herself had said, for classical music. Sometimes up and down the wine country to learn tricks of the trade. She seemed utterly happy with our life and our daughter … I’m still rocked by it, Chuck. I guess I always will be.”

  “Let’s suppose she’s still alive. Would you not expect her in some fashion to contact you, if she possibly could?”

  “Unless for one reason or another she does not want to.”

  “What would that reason be?”

  “Perhaps it might put my life in danger—or Sam’s.”

  “I’m not clear on the ages. How old would they be now?”

  “Bride was thirty when I married her. She’d be forty now. Sam was born when her mother was thirty-three. She’d be seven now.”

  I finished up my pasta and ordered iced tea and a dish of chocolate ice cream.

  “Same old Chucky, eats ice cream and doesn’t put on weight.”

  “A special grace from God which I will not reject.”

  “Chuck, I know they’re both dead. I will never find out why they died or who killed them. I feel foolish bothering you at this difficult time in your life. Yet Bride keeps telling me to see you.”

  “She does!”

  A chill started at the base of my spine and crept up into my head. I did not like the uncanny because it made me feel uncanny.

  “How did she know I exist!”

  “I bragged about my famous classmate who was a photographer. She likes photography herself. So I bought her a bunch of your books. She was very impressed.”

  “And she’s been in contact with you?”

  I thought of my own wife on whose breasts at that moment I wanted to bury my head in search of protection from ghosts and fairie and creatures that go bump in the night.

  “In dreams and sometimes in waking hours I hear her voice. She always says, ‘See Charles O‘Malley.’ I ask her why and she simply repeats the instructions.”

  When she had hugged me before I left for lunch, Rosemarie, in a black silk robe and not much else, had pressed herself fervently against me. One woman haunting my imagination was more than enough.

  “This has been going on for a long time?”

  “Actually, it has not. I had plenty of dreams after they disappeared, but they tapered off. About five months ago these very vivid dreams returned. At first she smiled and told me that she still loved me and always would. Sometimes Sam was with her, a big girl now. She looked just like her mother. Then the words came, especially for the last month or two.”

  “‘See Charles O‘Malley’?”

  My hands were clammy.

  “Yeah … You must think I’m crazy, Chuck. I told my shrink about these dreams. He said they were wish fulfillment. I guess maybe they are. Still your books keep falling off the shelves …”

  I shivered. Joe didn’t seem to notice.

  “What did the shrink say about that?”

  “He thought it was some kind of telekinesis that I had unleashed.”
>
  Rosemarie! Come hold my hand! I’m scared!

  “How did the worthy doctor explain her choice of me?”

  “He asked me about you. I told him about the Carmel game. He said you had become a symbol of someone who wins against impossible odds. It was natural that I think of you … Maybe he’s right.”

  “Patron saint of lost causes,” I said.

  “St Anthony of Padua.”

  I did not believe in St. Anthony of Padua, even if Rosemarie’s prayers to him almost always found us a parking place.

  “You’ve talked to a priest?”

  “Sure. An old Irish fellow who is pastor of our tiny parish. He says I should pray for the grace of peace for myself and for Bride and Sam. He offered to say Mass in the house, a kind of exorcism.”

  “It didn’t work?”

  “No way.”

  “She shows up now outside of dreams?”

  He hesitated.

  “You’ll think I’m out of my mind.”

  “I don’t think that at all.”

  In fact, I did suspect that, yet Joe was so calm and reasonable that I wasn’t ready to write him off as a kook. Not just yet.

  “I think I hear her voice when I’m working around the winery, advising me what to do with our different vintages, like she used to do. Then she says something like ‘Are you ever going to see Charles O’Malley?’ It’s always a sweet, pleasant voice, the way she used to talk. It’s urgent that I see you, yet she seems patient too.”

  “And you ask her what I’m supposed to do?”

  “Sure. She doesn’t answer that.”

  “They never do.”

  “You don’t see her physically?”

  “Sometimes I think I catch a glimpse of her—like in a blink of an eye. I’m not sure. To tell you the truth, Chuck, I’m not sure of anything anymore. I won’t blame you if you tell me the same things that my priest and my shrink did.”