Chuck
When Mary Margaret called, my wife and I were cuddled on the love seat in our parlor. I had removed her blouse and was playing the games a love-struck teen might play with his compliant sweetheart. I would take off all her clothes very slowly, behavior for a cautious and timid, but still determined, lover.
“Her name,” Rosemarie muttered, “is Mary Margaret, not Moire Meg. It’s a Catholic name. And she’s a fanatical Catholic”—she giggled—“like you are, even if you’ve been fixated on my boobs since before I got them.”
“God,” I said, “in the interest of continuing the species made women’s bodies attractive to men. We are genetically programmed to delight in your breasts and if you’re honest about it you delight in our delight.”
“Hmm … What did the intermediate daughter want? She wasn’t in trouble was she?”
“Not hardly.”
I told her Mary Margaret’s message. She sat up and disengaged herself from me.
“Charles Cronin O’Malley! Do something about it!”
I eased her back into my arms.
“Woman, I will! Now be quiet for a few moments.”
I called Mike Casey, the head of Reliable Security. He promised he would have a couple of off-duty Oak Park cops across the street from the house on New England Avenue within the hour, hopefully one of the cops would be a woman.
Then I called Vince. Peg came on the line at once. Were they playing hanky-panky at the same time by some kind of prearrangement? I would not put it past them.
“She’s crazy,” Vince snorted.
“Manic-depressive in a manic stage,” I said, quoting Mary Margaret, “and she’s not taking her lithium.”
“Ted should lock her up someplace,” Peg demanded.
“We can’t get a restraining order against her until she actually does something,” Vince said. “Then of course it will be easy.”
“There will be two Oak Park cops outside and the rest of the department on call,” I added. “Those two Irish furies will protect her. Mary Margaret will be there tonight and when she’s not at Rosary tomorrow. We should take turns stopping in.”
The Irish furies were Madge the cook and Theresa the housekeeper, women in their late sixties who together with the Good April were kind of a local branch of the Irish warrior goddess society.
While we were talking, my hand, as uncontrollable as ever, slipped back under Rosemarie’s black skirt. The nylon was long gone so I encountered only delicious woman flesh, firm and disciplined by tennis and other forms of exercise, and sweetly responsive to my affection.
“Is Mary Margaret staying there tonight?” Peg asked. “I could ask Rita to go over and keep her company.”
I thought about that.
“Let’s hold off on that for tonight. We don’t want to stir up worry for April.”
“Right.”
“Sorry to interrupt.”
“Were they doing hanky-panky?” Rosemarie asked.
“Why should we be the only ones?”
It had been a difficult day at our house. We were both grouchy and groggy when we woke up. I was filled with drugs and Rosemarie’s sleep was deep and troubling, filled with obscure dreams about her father. I vaguely remembered that it was Sunday morning and that we had to go to church. We had to hurry to make the twelve o’clock Mass. We showered and
dressed quickly. It was only when we were hurrying into our clothes that I remembered that I was falling in love with my stately wife, now donning a svelte black suit.
There was no time to do anything about it. Moreover, I needed my morning cup of tea, maybe two cups before I did anything about anything.
We stumbled down the stairs and discovered our two daughters, in their Sunday best, reading the papers, Shovie concentrating on the comics and Mary Margaret frowning over the “Week in Review” in The New York Times.
“What are you two doing up so soon?” Mary Margaret asked, not bothering to look up from the paper. “You should have slept in. You’re both totally whupped.”
“We have to go to Mass.” Rosemarie said sternly. “You should have awakened us.
“Chill out, Rosie, you went to Mass yesterday. You’re both a shambles; Chucky looks like a man in drug rehab. God doesn’t expect you to drag yourself over to church today.”
“Since when have you become God’s special messenger?”
Mary Margaret ignored her.
As we were about to leave the house and she was searching in her purse for the keys to our old Benz, Rosemarie stopped, shook her head in disgust, and returned to the parlor.
“Sorry, Mary Margaret.” She kissed her daughter. “You’re right as always. We old folks are just religious fanatics.”
Our intermediate daughter brightened.
“Say a prayer for me.”
“Me too.” Shovie rushed over to hug her mother.
“That was gracious,” I said as I lurched toward the car.
“Makes up for being graceless.”
“Maybe I should apologize?”
“Don’t be silly. You didn’t say anything.”
In front of St. Agedius, Packy Keenan renewed Mary Margaret’s argument.
“You guys didn’t have to come to Mass this morning!”
“We’re religious fanatics,” Rosemarie said.
“We’ll compromise and not put any money in the basket,” I said.
“My poor husband is finally awake.”
She took my arm and guided me into church and down the aisle toward the front. The Crazy O’Malleys always sit in the front of the church, like they own it. Peg and Vince were already there.
“Family of religious fanatics,” I murmured.
I thought about Rosemarie all through Mass, darting an occasional glance at her. I had lucked out. I knew nothing about what a wife should be when I married her—not that I had that much to say about it. She was elegant, graceful, gifted, a great mother, and exciting in bed. Poor Ted must have thought the same thing when he came home from the War to his beloved Jane. Why had I been so fortunate? I didn’t deserve it. I sighed loudly. She glanced at me to warn me to behave in church.
How could I not fall in love with her again and again and again, even if she displayed the Irish womanly proclivity to be bossy.
The four of us stopped by Mom’s house for a cup of tea. The starch had gone out of her. She had begun to understand that she would spend the rest of her life without her lover. She was stooped, lifeless, suddenly old. Yet she perked up when we came and insisted that she had made scones when she came home after the seven o’clock Mass because she knew we would want some with our tea.
So we drank the tea and ate the scones, I a vast number of scones.
“You’re disgusting, Chucky,” my sister said. “No one should eat as much as you do and not put on weight.”
“He’s just a pig,” my wife agreed.
“Poor dear Chucky,” my mother said with her usual sympathy, “he always burned off the weight because he was so intense and so active.”
My sister and my foster sister, also my wife, ridiculed that theory.
“I’m pretty active,” Vince, my longtime unindicted coconspirator, said. “I guess I’m just not as intense as Chuck.”
“His real secret,” my wife said in an irrelevant argument, “is that when some worry arises, he goes to sleep.”
“Would someone please pass me the raspberry jam,” I asked, dismissing their barbs.
When we entered our own house on Euclid, Shovie, Erin, and Mary Margaret were sitting on the porch in their swimsuits. Our pool—an extravagance that I had stoutly resisted—was scheduled to remain open by Rosemarie’s fiat till October 1, then perhaps all year long.
“You guys should swim,” Mary Margaret instructed us. “The water’s great and you’ll relax a little. Oh, by the way, a courier brought that big package in the parlor from the State Department.”
We both dashed into the front room. We paused to look at the box on the floor. It looked battered.
“We should open it now,” my wife insisted.
“What if all the films are wrecked?”
“We’d better find out now so we can stop worrying about the possibility.”
She dashed into her regal office off the parlor and reappeared with a knife, a scissors, and a box cutter, all part of an expensive, inlaid, designed desk set. Nothing too good for Ms. Clancy.
She placed the box on a table, deftly opened it, and remove an X-ray-resistant bag.
“That’s number five,” I said. “Number one is at the other end. We should open them in the proper order.”
“Why?” she asked, glancing up at me with some exasperation.
“Because, like you tell us all the time, Chucky is a neatness freak.”
Our daughters had gathered behind us, both in robes so they wouldn’t track water in the house.
I reached in the box and pulled out the bag on which I had placed the label #1.
“I am not a neatness freak,” I argued. “I am an order freak.”
They laughed.
I opened the bag with great care and removed the first roll. It was labeled 1-1, which seemed sensible enough. My women thought it was hilariously funny.
“I should go downstairs and see if it can be developed.”
“I’ll come with you.”
I wanted to do it myself, but Rosemarie had signed on as my photographic assistant at the beginning of our marriage. “Our” darkroom was right next to “our” gym.
She flipped on the exhaust fan which drew any foul air out of both rooms.
I remember the day I told April Rosemary, after her marriage to Jamie, that she had been conceived in the darkroom. She laughed in great delight.
“Brilliant, Dad, brilliant!”
“I kind of thought so too.”
She turned on the red light outside the darkroom and locked the door inside. I was cradling the precious role of film in nervous fingers of both hands. She turned out the lights in the darkroom and turned on the red safety lamp.
“You do it,” I said, handing her the roll of tri x. “You’re cooler than I am. Way cooler.”
She didn’t argue. In a few moments she removed the film from the developing tank and held it up to the red light.
I sat down on the easy chair she had provided for “our” darkroom and exhaled loudly.
“I’m too old for this aggravation,” I admitted.
“You reacted the same way thirty years ago, Chucky Ducky.” She planted a hasty kiss on my lips … “These shots look great. Let’s go upstairs and have a swim.”
Our red-haired daughters were waiting for us anxiously.
“Another Charles Cronin O’Malley miracle!” Rosemarie announced. “The lens cap was off the camera!”
Applause from my carrot-top daughters. I bowed modestly.
“April Rosemary and I will develop all the rolls for you, if you want,” Mary Margaret said casually, too casually.
“When did she make the offer?” I said, playing for time. I knew that I didn’t trust them to do this delicate work. I knew I couldn’t turn down their offer. I knew finally that they would do a better job than I would …
“When I called her to tell her that the package had come from the State Department.”
“A new alliance?”
“She finally decided that I am a totally cool little sister,” Mary Margaret said with studied indifference. “Which of course I am, huh, Shovie, a totally cool big sister?”
“Totally,” Shovie said with her usual woman leprechaun grin.
I saw a time, not too many years in the future, when these three wicked witches would take complete control of their parents’ lives. This was but their first tentative grasp for power.
“Won’t the chemical smell bother April Rosemary?” my wife intervened to help me form an answer.
“She says she’s over being sick … We’ll make three sets of proofs—one for each of you and one for ourselves to circle our favorite shots. We’ll show you them only after you’ve made your own choices.”
“Will one of you draft a text for your mother?”
“Well, I might try my hand at it.” Her aquamarine eyes glinted with mischief. “We’ll let you make the prints, Chucky. This time anyway.”
“Well …” I pretended to weigh the decision.
“Tell him, Rosie, that he doesn’t have any choice.”
“He knows that, dear.”
“Well, if you ruin any of them, I’ll ground you till the day before the apocalypse!”
Many hugs and kisses for the new but already fast-aging paterfamilias. One provocative kiss from his wife. Whereupon he began to sneeze again.
“And I reserve the right to peek in,” he gasped between sneezes, “while you’re working to make sure you’re doing it right.”
Much laughter.
“You better take your allergy medicine, Chucky.”
After I had swallowed my Bentyl I sought out my wife in her office. She was sitting behind her ornate mahogany desk poring over her notebooks from the Russian trip. I collapsed in the easy chair which was reserved for the dutiful consort.
“I think I can tease out three or four themes, kind of tentative till we make the print selections.”
“Who’s this ‘we’?”
“I mean April Rosemary and Mary Margaret and myself.”
“I don’t get a vote?”
“You lost the franchise long ago.”
“I have the feeling that there’s generational change going on here. I have been eased into Grandpa-in-the-wheelchair role several years before I should be.”
She looked up from her notebook and took off her glasses.
“You still get to take the pictures, don’t you?”
“You’re encouraging those brats in their coup d’etat.”
“I’m part of it, Chucky dear. We have to take care of you in your golden years.”
I was drowsy again. Jet lag still catching up. I must have yawned.
“Chucky, go take a nap. It will be good for you.”
I was being dismissed from the empress’s presence so she could do her work. As I fell asleep, I began to worry about all the responsibilities. There would be the thank-you notes to those who came to the wake, to everyone who had helped with the services, legal matters regarding probate, the trip to DC to take pictures of the Gipper, Joe Raftery, and, what else, oh, yes, Jane.
When I woke up I realized that I had forgotten about Maria Anastasia. Perhaps, however, she would not be a problem. We had red-haired Latino grandchildren, we could cope with red-haired Luong grandchildren. Still I needed a long rest, maybe a year or so devoted entirely to malted milks and falling in love with my wife. For supper I would take her over to Petersen’s to begin the fun.
Later, after we’d returned from the ice-cream parlor, given the appropriate cautions to Mary Margaret for her venture to Rush Street, and put an exhausted Shovie to bed, I took my wife’s hand and led her to the love seat in our parlor.
“In here?” she said dubiously.
“More room.”
She sighed in mock resignation.
“Well, it took you long enough to get to this falling in love business.”
“I needed the two malts to revert to my teen perspective.”
We joked that falling in love again was a regression to teenage fantasy. In a way it was. The person falling in love is certainly caught up in an infatuation. However, he is also a more or less experienced adult. He has a clear idea of what’s happening and some confidence that he can carry it off. He also has useful insights about how to respect his beloved so that she doesn’t become a fetish—nor a surrogate Playboy Bunny. Hopefully he no longer feels it is necessary to prove his masculinity. Above all, he knows that his wife likes to play the game, in her own fashion.
We were making good progress in the game when Mary Margaret phoned us. I made the right calls before I returned to the game, though in a dark attic somewhere in my brain I realized that Jane was going to be a big problem. Now, however, my focus was on my wife.
She giggled as I unzipped her skirt and, oh, so slowly slid it down off her hips.
“Got the woman down to her skivvies?” she said with a long slow sigh. “I don’t remember you ever did that as a teenager …”
“Thought about it often.”
“Why, Chucky?” She snuggled closer to me.
She shifted her position on the love seat so that she lay supine against my chest. What more could a man ask for from his wife?
“Why what?”
“Not why do you love me. I know that you do and I take you at your word about the reasons. Not why you enjoy sex with me. I’m a good lay. Not even why you fall in love with me over and over again. The logistics are easier if you fall in love with your wife. But why now? Is it because we lost Vangie?”
I drew my fingers across her belly. She gasped with pleasure. I did it again even more slowly.
“Let’s say a man works in an office. They, whoever the evil ‘they’ are assign a new woman to his staff. She’s pretty and bright and fun. Suddenly he’s head over heels with her. He doesn’t understand why. She’s attractive, appealing, seems to like him. He doesn’t want to fall in love with her. He’s happily
married. He knows the dangers and takes no chances. Why does this particular woman knock him over at that particular time? He doesn’t know and he doesn’t want to find out. If he’s like me, he’s not sure he’s up to it with any other women but his wife. That’s that, right?”
“I should hope so.”
“So I’m sitting next to my wife in a car. She’s driving, of course, since she is convinced she is a better driver than I am. I notice how beautiful she is, how poised, how intelligent, how funny. I think to myself that she’s an irresistible woman. I bet she would be good in bed. I bet she’d be fun to neck and pet as we used to say. It would be really great to feel her up and to take off her clothes. She’d be wondrous, mysterious, challenging. I want her the worst way. I’m infatuated.”
My fingers crept up toward her black bra, lavishly decorated with lace. That would have to go soon.
“But, Chucky Ducky, you’ve already had her hundreds, thousands of times for almost thirty years.”
“It’s different. She’s suddenly mysterious again … I think that’s a perfectly reasonable reaction. Only an idiot thinks he knows all there is to know about a spouse, no matter how many years he’s known her. I rediscover you again to discover you for the first time. Okay?”
“Sure it’s okay. Have I ever said it isn’t? But does it have something to do with Vangie’s death?”
I slipped a finger under one of the straps.
“Probably because I was knocked over by the grace with which you cope with loss.”
She rolled over and lifted herself to my lips. She then pressed her breasts against my chest and devoured me with passionate kisses. I may not survive this, I thought to myself.