Rosemarie
The second tumbler of a double Jameson’s, straight up, because he wasn’t an ignorant Yank, went far beyond my husband’s usual quota. However, he needed a long nap to prepare for what we’d encounter when we arrived at the Georgian house on New England Avenue. Mary Margaret had certainly imposed some order on the chaos, but Chuck would be expected to whip everything into final shape, no matter how tired he was. And all the while his poor heart was breaking, just like everyone else’s, of course, but his relationship with his father was special in a way that no one could quite describe.
I knew for sure that his skills as a lover were absorbed from Vangie, not that anything had ever been said. Chuck had grasped the passion between his mother and father in the ordinary matters of life and modeled himself after his father’s style. My sons, tall black Irish—who looked like Union raiders riding under Phil Sheridan (as had one of their ancestors) had told me separately about the chocolate ice cream metaphor.
“Do you like being chocolate ice cream?” each asked.
“Well, it’s only a metaphor and I’m a lot more than chocolate ice cream, but, it’s not a bad metaphor.”
“What kind of ice cream is Dad?” Kevin Patrick had asked.
“An endless malted milk with whipped cream.” I replied promptly. Only later did I realize the possible oral connotations the metaphor implied. Well it was good for young men to realize that their parents had an active sex life.
The myth that Chucky was a hapless little urchin protected by a beautiful mother was part of the game he played when we were traveling. It was true that he was a poor traveler. It was also true that I was more efficient and quick-thinking when we were on the road. Finally, it was true that I didn’t trust him not to lose himself on a trip, or so I said. He argued that I was afraid that he would be unfaithful. I laughed and said he wouldn’t dare. He admitted that. The real reason I went along on the trip and took care of him was that I missed him when he was gone. Also he was fun even when he could barely keep his eyes open. Witness his performance at the US embassy. Chucky was a great act. I loved him, even when he was exhausted.
Both Tanya and Kathleen whispered that he was adorable, which of course he was, but he was mine and the bitches shouldn’t have sized him up. Well, they were nice young women actually and I should feel flattered that they admire my cute little husband.
Also when I traveled with him there was more romance than I would have experienced if I had stayed home while he wandered about the world. Sometimes, like the night before in the Cosmos Hotel, it was quite spectacular. Malted milk with whipped cream—and two butter cookies.
Sometimes even dark chocolate as I described (to myself) the pleasure when he brought me orgasm by highly creative play with my boobs.
I chased away erotic fantasies and thought about his father, poor dear man, as the Good April called him—and everyone else. My own father was a psychopath who had molested me. I hated him with all my heart and soul, though now I think I finally have the grace of forgiveness. Usually. So John the Evangelist O’Malley had become my foster father and delighted in me as much as he did in my inseparable friend, his real daughter Peg, née Margaret Mary.
“I don’t want to take your father away from you, Peg.”
“You know me well enough, Rosie, to know that I’m not the jealous kind.”
“Sure?
“Sure!”
So, however belatedly, I had a paternal role model. Maggie Ward, my permanent shrink, had told me early on that he was the most important one in the family, more than Peg and more even than Chucky. “You needed a father figure and you moved in with a family that had the most attractive father on the block, a good and gentle and tender man, a man of whom you’d never be afraid. That was your salvation.”
“No accident that I married his son?”
“What do you think?”
I had never thought of it that way, but I told her that she was probably right.
I had never thanked him properly. Or the Good April either. I just moved in. Indeed when after the war they bought the big old house on New England Avenue in Oak Park, there was a room designated as “Rosie’s room” where I could stay all night if I wanted. I had wanted very often. My father had learned by then not to try to control my life.
“It’s too bad a night, Rosie dear,” April would say, “for you to drive home.” It mattered not in the least that it be a lovely early June or mid-October evening.
I would pretend to myself that it made no difference that when Chuck came home from Bamberg, he slept in the same house. He was at the far end of the corridor and we hardly ever ran into each other. At that time I loved him, but I did not want to sleep with him or anyone else. Or so I said to myself. By that time my hormones were active enough that I should have been thinking of sleeping with someone.
Well, one night after a dance at the parish sponsored by the Catholic war vets, Chuck actually came into my room after only a token knock. I was wearing the black corset with which I had punished myself at the dance (as we did in those longforgotten days). I was brushing my hair and trying to make up my mind whether I really was in love with Charles Cronin O’Malley. Was it only an adolescent crush? Or …
He came in, kissed me, touched my bare shoulder gently, assured me that everything would be all right, and departed. Talk about marriage and then an engagement ring would come much later. But that night I knew I would belong to him forever.
So far so good.
Maggie Ward insists that I was almost preternaturally wise to choose the O‘Malleys, indeed the Crazy O’Malleys.
“I certainly didn’t do it consciously,” I said.
“We know that doesn’t matter, don’t we?”
Good taste in a foster father, good taste in a lover? Or just plain dumb luck? Didn’t matter.
Yet when I had all these insights I was a married woman with children. How could I explain to Vangie and April what I had done? They had known it all for a long time. So I had never really thanked them. And now it was too late to thank them both.
I put down my copy of Confederacy of Dunces and wept. Silently and calmly for a long time.
And prayed.
Dear God, I don’t know why You’ve ever bothered with me. I was a spoiled, obnoxious brat, the kind of young woman who was barred from the eighth-grade May Crowning, until April went to see Monsignor Branigan. I was a troublemaker then and probably still am. Maggie Ward, bless her please, says I chose the Crazy O’Malleys. But You chose them for me too. I didn’t deserve them. I still don’t. They saved my life as You well know. I could say “thank you” every minute for however many years You still intend for me and still not adequately express my gratitude. I am sorry I never really told John the Evangelist O’Malley how much I loved him. Now it is too late. I hope You give me a chance in whatever world awaits us. Forgive me for my negligence.
This will be a difficult time for my husband and the whole clan. The joy with which they have lived meant that they didn’t think about death very much. They knew it would happen. They knew they wouldn’t be ready for it and they’re not. These will be tough days for them. Please help them all. Please help me too. Help me even to see them all through their terrible grief, especially this mysterious and wonderful little guy to whom You have entrusted me.
Have I covered everything? If I haven’t, please forgive me.
The O’Malleys even taught me how to forgive when they forgave me for being the fall-down drunk I had become. So right
now and permanently I forgive my mother and father. You forgave them, I know. It’s my job to forgive too, so that I can reflect Your forgiveness.
Excuse me. I have to cry some more before I can keep praying.
I’m back now.
The odd thing is that my parents and the O‘Malleys were great friends in the days before they were married and when John E. O’Malley was helping to design the lower level of Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago and riding in silver armor with the Black Horse Troop, there were scores of pictures of them wearing old-fashioned swimsuits at the Commodore Barry “country club” at Twin Lakes. They were so young and happy, their whole lives stretching out in front of them with a future promising peace and happiness. Even my father, even then a little guy losing his hair, seemed happy. I could not see him as the same evil man who almost ruined my life.
My mother and April were younger than Mary Margaret is now, both of them knockouts. April really did look like a flapper, though I wasn’t sure what a flapper was. A harmless hairstyle mostly. I wondered why Helen, my mom, had ever married my father. Maybe her home life, a subject about which April would never go into detail, was hellish. I pray for them all, the three dead and the one still clinging to life. When we went through Vangie’s paintings in the basement, neatly organized and cataloged by my husband, we were astonished at how many of them were of Helen and April. They were luminous canvases, copied from pictures with colors filled in, the same sort of work that he had done in his famous Rom Women.
Vangie had far more talent than he had realized then—or even than he realized at the end of his life. It was too bad he had to wait so long for recognition. Better late than never, I guess.
“Poor dear man,” his wife had said when the catalogue of his retrospective appeared. “He was really obsessed with the bodies of girls when he was young.”
“Fortunately,” my husband commented, “the subsequent generation did not inherit that flaw.”
There will be hard days ahead. The O’Malleys will bury their dead, dry their tears, and go on with life. That’s the Irish
Catholic thing to do. However, the mourning will go on, more painfully perhaps because it is suppressed. They’ll need help. Especially April and Peg and my beloved Chucky. They’ve taken care of me all my life. Now I must take care of them. And gently. Not easy. Please help me.
I looked at my peacefully sleeping husband. Poor dear man.
I nodded over, closed Confederacy of Dunces, removed my reading glasses, and slipped into sleep. My last thought was to wonder what Joe Raftery wanted, poor dear man.
I woke up over Ontario as the 747 glided toward Chicago. Clear sky, bright autumn sun, trees changing color beneath us. Nature was dying too.
“Would you ever like a drop of tea and a bun and maybe a sweet?”
She pronounced “bun” the Irish way as in “boon.”
“Thank you, Kathleen. Give my sweet to himself.”
She was so young and fresh and I was groggy and blearyeyed. And almost fifty.
I leaned over Chuck and shook him. He turned his back to me and grumbled, “Go ’way.”
“Time to wake up!” I said brightly.
He opened his eyes and glared at me.
“Are we there yet, Mommy?”
“Half hour out of Chicago. Have a nice nap?”
“Drunken dreams.” He closed his eyes firmly.
“Your friend Kathleen is preparing a snack for us. You can have my sweet.”
“What kind of sweet?”
“We’ll have to wait and see. I told her that she should give mine to you.”
He sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“I’m a wreck, Rosemarie.”
“So am I.”
“I dread the days ahead of us.”
He sneezed. Bad sign.
The “bun” was an English muffin slathered with strawberry jam and clotted cream.
“Is this the sweet?” Chucky demanded as if he were the victim of a shell game.
“No,” Kathleen said. “It’s the bun. But you have to eat it first before I bring on the sweet.”
I ate half of my bun and sipped my tea while Chucky wolfed down his. Then Kathleen produced a chocolate sundae with whipped cream and nuts. Chucky not so much ate it as inhaled it.
“A dish of ice cream,” I remarked, “should be consumed with the same delicacy as the body of a woman.”
He stopped and glared at me.
“I should have sworn those bozos to secrecy. Besides, I was talking about chocolate ice cream. Besides a second time, as you well know, there are other and more vehement ways of consuming a woman.”
“Besides a third time there’s another one coming.”
“Another woman?”
“Another chocolate sundae.”
“Be thankful for small favors.”
“One voracious woman is more than enough.”
The plane slipped over Lake Michigan and the Chicago skyline, pastel in the sunlight, materialized on the horizon. Even though Chicago wasn’t its home, the plane seemed happy to be home just as we were.
“Most beautiful city in the world,” Chucky murmured as we crossed the shoreline. “Somehow I don’t want to come back to it just now.”
“It’s not going to be easy, especially April and Peg.”
“Sad times, Rosemarie, sad times.”
“I’ll be with you, Chuck.”
“Thank God for that,” he said, leaning over to kiss me and smearing my lips with chocolate sauce.
Our luggage appeared immediately and we dragged it through the doors of the arrival lounge. A girl child of five years with curly red hair jumped up and down and screamed, “Mommy! Daddy!”
Behind her a dazzling young Celtic goddess in a fawncolored autumn shift waited, a half smile on her face. I caught
my breath as I always did when I saw my “intermediate” daughter.
Chucky picked up Shovie, spun her around, and kissed her.
“Don’t ever go away again, Daddy!”
I hugged Mary Margaret.
“You look wonderful, Rosie,” she said. “Chucky looks like someone the cat wouldn’t drag in.”
“He has one of his colds!”
“Oh, that!”
“And you, Mary Margaret, look like a luminous Celtic goddess.”
“That’s what Joe Moran says.”
“He still hanging around?”
“Now and then.”
Joey Moran was a nice Fenwick boy whom Mary Margaret described as her “occasional beau.” Chuck and I both approved of him. Noisily so.
Then Shovie embraced me and warned me that I was never to leave home again. “Momeg was so lonesome for you.”
Shovie was the only one in the family who could still use her sister’s teenage name.
Chuck embraced Mary Margaret.
“Chucky, you look like something the cat refused to drag in. Rosie wear you out?”
“She’s an absolutely ruthless tour guide. No respect for a worn-out old man.”
“That’s because she’s not fifty yet.”
“She tells me that.”
Mary Margaret lifted one of her mother’s heavy bags.
“Uncle Vince is driving around outside and will pick us up.”
Ms. Take Charge was still in charge, even if the big tuna had come home. I gave Shovie my purse so she could help.
In Mary Margaret’s world, everyone was assigned a proper title—Uncle Vince, Grandpa, Grandma, Father Ed—but with us she was on a first-name basis. Her big sister, April Rosemary had once protested this in her days of righteousness.
“That’s all right when you’re a little kid, but you should show more respect now.”
“She uses our names respectfully, dear. Don’t we call April and Vangie by their names?”
“That’s different.”
Our two older daughters were reconciled now, more or less. Yet Mary Margaret thought her sister had been a creep for slipping away into the drug-and-rock-music underground and causing so much worry. April Rosemary in her heart thought that her sister was a selfish brat.
“How’s Aunt Peg?” I asked as we walked out into soft September sunset.
“Pretty numb, worst of them all. She just sits next to Grandma, like she’s clinging to her. That’s the way daughters are when their fathers die. Which means, Chucky, that you must get over your cold and not die for another fifty years.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You too, Rosie. I don’t like it that parents have to die.”
“Even kids have to die sometime,” I said. “They get old too.”
“I know,” my daughter said solemnly.
Uncle Vince’s Cadillac rolled up as we dodged taxis that seemed bent on running us over and crossed the street. Vince is a great big, dark lineman, all-American from Notre Dame who by enormous effort and under orders from Peg has just managed to stay in condition. He was a behind-the-scenes operative in the late Mayor’s government and now that Jane Byrne is the mayor, a successful LaSalle Street lawyer. The papers describe him as “clout heavy” even though his wing of the party is currently out of office. He is in fact a sweetheart, though it has taken some effort from Peg to persuade him that she didn’t think him inferior because he was a Sicilian.
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.