MARY ROSE joined us the day after I took my bar exam. I was twenty-four years old. Markam, Kean and Howe agreed that I didn’t have to begin working till after Christmas. Tommy, who also passed the exam, started to work at the public defender’s office. Our future looked bright and complicated, but the complications didn’t seem insurmountable then. In fact, they were both brighter and far more complicated than we could imagine. Our tiny little redhead was bright and sweet and cute. We both adored her. She adored us. And, bless her little heart, she slept at night.
We were still deeply in love with one another, well matched and alert to the problems our two careers would cause. Or so we thought. Tommy was unfailingly patient with my enthusiasms and at the same time grateful for them. We were fine until his brother came around to hector and harass us. He had already become, so it seemed, an important person in his order, traveling back and forth from Rome and around the world to tend to its affairs. His parents had become reconciled to us when I announced my pregnancy and especially when they had their first peek at our little charmer. We postponed her Baptism until after the first of the year so that Father Tony could pour the water after his return from an “important inspection of the African mission.” He favored us—or more precisely me—with a sermon about risking an eternity in limbo for the little girl because I didn’t love her enough to bring her over to Church.
“Do you really believe in limbo, Father Anthony?” I asked. “St. Augustine cheerfully assigned unbaptized babies to hell.”
This was a quote from my priestly brother Ed, who warned
me that the Clementines were a particularly old-fashioned order.
“You shouldn’t take chances, Mary,” he insisted.
“I can’t believe that God’s love would be constrained by my irresponsibility.”
I was now in a mode where I argued with him all the time. It wouldn’t change his mind because, as my husband said, he was basically clueless. But it made me feel good.
“You shouldn’t take chances,” he replied, “not with people’s immortal souls.”
“Next time we won’t wait till you return from Africa.”
He ignored me but lectured us for fifteen minutes about the terrible conditions in Africa, utterly unaware that Rosie and Chuck had produced a book of photographs and essays about Africa.
He then insisted that Rose was not a “saint’s name.”
“Don’t we call Mary ‘Mystical Rose’ in the litany?” I asked.
Our little darling smiled happily as he drenched her with the Baptismal water. He addressed her as Mary, just as he did me on our wedding day. Nonetheless the Baptismal records at St. Agedius tell posterity that she is Mary Rose.
“I’ll send you a book that my mother and father wrote about Africa, Father,” I said when the ceremony was over and I was nestling my adored child in my arms.
He ignored me. I sent him the book. He never acknowledged it. Naturally.
“I wish you wouldn’t argue with my brother, Mary Margaret,” Tommy said to me later after we had put the wonder child down for the night. “I know he’s all wrong but he means well.”
“He still has a stranglehold on you, Tommy dear.”
“Only when he’s around.”
That was true enough. Tommy continued to live his own life and loved me far more than he loved his brother. Yet he suffered terribly during incidents like the one that afternoon. I realized that his brother would be with us for the rest of our lives and that was part of the package into which I had bought.
“I shouldn’t have taken him on. I’ll try not to do it again. But he is such an asshole.”
I do not use such language. Never. I have banned it, along with fuck, shit, screw, and other inappropriate words, from our home. Yet I had said it.
Tommy laughed, delighted that I had fallen from grace.
Our two more clones—Mary Ann and Mary Therese—arrived when I was twenty-six and twenty-eight. They were sweethearts too, though somewhat more rambunctious than their big sister. I promptly plunged into a spectacular postpartum depression after Marytre.
Markam, Kean had decided early on that I was a gold mine for income-producing billable hours, which is why law firms exist. Even though I was young and pregnant and allegedly sexy, I was very good at appellate work in both the state and federal courts. In such a context I did not have to convince juries but only judges. The arguments were with very smart lawyers, though as one of my senior colleagues said, “Few are as smart as you are, Mary Margaret, and none as charming.”
I was very excited when I told Tommy that in the evening.
“Haven’t I been telling you that all along?”
In the early stages of my pregnancy with Mary Therese I pleaded before the United States Supreme court—mostly an unimpressive group of narcissists, it seemed to me—and actually won a partial victory.
“Not bad for a peasant kid from the West Side of Chicago,” Tommy said, as he hugged me. Struggling with the impossible job of public defender at Twenty-sixth and California, he wasn’t getting much emotional satisfaction. Yet it was his vocation as much as his brother’s to the priesthood. At least for a time. Yet he was a rock of stability for our marriage.
It was his idea that we accept the loan my parents offered for us to buy a home in River Forest, which we could pay off at little more cost than the rent for our now crowded apartment in Rogers Park.
“I know you have this principle about being independent,” he said. “But you also have one about keeping your parents happy. Besides, we want our kids to go to the same school we went to.”
He was very skillful at manipulating my principles. But, as I have said, he was a very smart lawyer, even if his billable rate was not as high as mine.
He also installed a small gym in the basement of our Dutch Colonial home on Lathrop Avenue and decreed rules on how often we must both use the equipment.
We were faced with career decisions of the sort that so many families with two professionals face. Markam, Kean wanted me back. I was a cash cow, though they were careful not to use that term, even if I wasn’t always around or occasionally brought a small redhead into the office to nurse. The money would be nice but I didn’t want to leave my children with a baby-sitter or a nanny during these precious years.
“That’s no problem at all,” Tommy said. “I’ll be the house-husband.”
“TOMMY! That’s absurd.”
“No, it’s not. Your daughters will bond with their father and we’ll all have a wonderful time, living off your income. And I’ll be able to finish my book about the decline of civility in American politics.”
“You’ll be the laughingstock of the Chicago bar.”
“And that will bother me a lot!”
“I know it won’t, but …”
“But nothing!”
“And it will drive your brother crazy.”
“Too bad for him … I have had it with Twenty-sixth and California. Daugherty and Klein will take me on as an ‘of counsel.’ I’ll help out on cases I can analyze at home, maybe make an occasional court appearance, mostly talk settlement with opposing lawyers from home.”
“And take care of the kids and write a book.”
“No big deal.”
“You want to steal my daughters from me.”
“You’ve got it … but seriously, by the time mommy comes home in the evening they’ll be so fed up with daddy that they’ll love mommy even more.”
He was right again. It was our solution, not one I’d recommend for anyone else, but then I don’t recommend anything for anyone else. It’s against my principles.
He was also right when he agreed that we should spend a month in Mexico every summer. It would be a wonderful educational experience for them and for us. Learn a different language, be part of a different culture. Right?
It was mostly my idea because I had powerful if hazy memories of West Germany when I was a little girl and Chucky had been Jack Kennedy’s ambassador there.
It would mean limiting our trips to Grand Beach, so much of my life when I was growing up, to an occasional weekend. But Chucky and Rosie, much to my surprise, insisted it was a wonderful idea. I was still dubious. How would our pale white gringa daughters with the brilliant crimson hair fit in with kids their age in a professional-class neighborhood in Hermosillo? However, I didn’t realize even then that our kids were adventurers, a band of explorers. They loved the shy, sweet Mexican girls their own age who came over to our bungalow to welcome them. They delighted in new places and new people and traveled as a gang of three, leaving behind all the spats that kids, especially girl kids, have with one another. This experience would pay dividends in years to come.
And Tommy and I were still deeply in love, unshakeable, unassailable love, or so we thought.
A case rolled up on Tommy’s desk in River Forest that changed our lives. It made him famous, well, a celebrity anyway in Chicago. He had to leave the house only twice, and Rosie was of course all too ready to spend the time with her granddaughters.
The case was a particularly nasty murder in Lake County, north of Chicago. The daughter of a very rich family had been beaten, raped and murdered, as was her eight-year-old daughter. The heads of both victims had been blown off with a shotgun. The husband, a somewhat unsuccessful investment broker, a dark-skinned Italian from Brooklyn, was an instant suspect. The cops, responding to the calls of neighbors who heard the shotgun blasts, found him wandering around the house in a daze, his hands covered with blood, clutching the shotgun. After twelve hours of questioning by the local police, he confessed both the murder and the rape. His arraignment was the kind of scene the media loved, the suspect sobbing hysterically, the victim’s mother and father shouting curses at him and demanding instant justice to the TV cameras. Given what TV viewers apparently want to see, the story began the evening news every night for ten days.
The firm sent the papers in the case out to my house hubby.
“Notice anything in the evidence?” he asked me.
“Offhand, no DNA evidence. Surely the cops are not that dumb up there?”
“Precisely.”
“They must have a semen sample somewhere.”
“I called them and told them that I was acting for the defendant and asked if they could provide any data on the DNA. They said that they sent it off to a lab, but didn’t have any report yet. They felt with the confession they didn’t need it.”
“Maybe they are that dumb … What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to call them twice more and then I’ll go into court and ask for an order to send it to an impartial lab.”
“What if it’s not his?”
“We will demand that the court order his release from prison and file a civil suit against the cops and the prosecutor.”
That’s exactly what we did.
And he was on the ten o’clock news that night, thankfully after the redhead brood were sound asleep.
My husband is a very photogenic, clean cut, wavy haired little Mick with a bright smile and evident intelligence. He also speaks English and not lawyer or cop talk.
“I told the court that we found it strange that the DNA from the victims had not been tested and asked the judge to order that it be sent to an independent lab for testing.”
“What good would that do, Mr. Moran?”
“If I were the State’s Attorney I would want that nailed down in case the defense asked during the trial.”
“Do you have any reason to expect that someone else might have committed the murders?”
“I just want to be sure.”
“Did the judge grant the motion?”
“She took it under advisement.”
“Do you expect that she will rule in your favor.”
“I certainly hope so.”
“Good, Tommy,” I exclaimed. “You’re great on camera.”
“Only on camera?”
“All the time! Do you have any hints that there is another man?”
“Our private eyes have dug up the dirt that she may have had a fling with a doctor from a local community hospital, a somewhat mercurial and unstable person.”
The judge turned down the appeal. Tommy’s partners went into the state appellate court on an emergency basis and demanded an immediate order, which of course they got. The DNA found on both victims was not the same as that of the defendant.
My brilliant house hubby immediately made his second trip to Lake County and demanded that he be released. The State’s Attorney argued that there was still the defendant’s confession.
Tommy repeated for the cameras after the hearing what he had said in response, in the calm, measured tones I knew so well.
I could develop a crush on that man, I told myself.
“It is not unknown, your honor, for people to confess a crime they have not committed after twelve hours of police interrogation. I suggest to you that there is a dangerous murderer out there whose brutality makes him a threat to the community. The police and the States Attorney have failed their responsibility to the public. As for my client, patently he is innocent.”
“Do you think she will rule in your client’s favor?”
“If she doesn’t, she’ll face another possible reversal in the appellate court.”
She ruled in Tommy’s favor of course and, changing her tactics, denounced the incompetence of the police and the State’s Attorney. The victim’s mother assaulted the defendant as he left the court a free man and then turned her attention to Tommy, giving him a black eye.
“I sympathize with the poor woman,” he said. “But grief doesn’t justify assault and battery.”
“Will you file charges or sue, Tommy?”
Already they are calling my poor husband Tommy! The hussies.
I put another pack on his eye and offered him a glass of Bushmill’s.
The mother’s lawyer offered an apology which Tommy’s firm accepted.
Tommy was too good on camera for the media to forget. They tripped out to our house twice more—when the doctor
was arrested and later when he was convicted. His comments were the same.
“All I can say is that I am happy that an innocent man was not convicted. This ought to be a warning to everyone how dangerous is a hasty search for a criminal, especially when your cameras are watching every move.” The kids were immensely proud of their father, especially because they had an answer now to the little bitches—a word I also forbid—who teased them that their mommy worked at an office but their daddy didn’t.
Shortly after that case, both of Tommy’s parents died, his mother first from a massive stroke, his father a month later from a heart attack, a broken heart Tommy had said. They were both in their early seventies, not all that old these days, but in poor health for a long time. They were shy, quiet, respectable people, the sort that almost never married. But the sting of passion had caught them at the outer limits of fertility. They produced Tony less than a year after they were married and my Tommy five years later. They were great readers, a habit Tommy had acquired very young in life. His father taught history, his mother math. Tommy told me after we had buried him that his father had worked for thirty years on a history of the Irish in America which he had burned the day we buried his mother.
“He wouldn’t let anyone read it. He was afraid they would ridicule it. I read a few pages once. It was brilliant.”
Father Tony was a whirling dervish during the first wake and funeral. Everything had to be perfect, the way his parents would want it—the flowers at the wake, the prayers, the liturgical details, the music. He could not eat or sleep. He had to drive himself half mad making sure his mother had the funeral she deserved. He moved his poor father around like he was part of the scenery. He said the Mass of course, but asked one of his fellow Clementines—“The best preacher in this country”—to give the homily. It was high-flown, abstract, and meaningless, a success as a homily only if you were into a rich, sonorous, and sanctimonious voice, as some of the Irish are.
My family are heavy into making wakes and funerals. Father Tony barely spoke to them at the wake and at the cemetery.
He was a different man after his father’s death, a pale ghost
of what he had been at the first funeral, quiet, mournful, dependent.
“Thank you for being with us during these difficult times, Mary Margaret,” he said to me at the cemetery as he held both my hands. “They loved you and your beautiful daughters very much. They were never demonstrative, but they did admire your courage and your generosity.”
“Uncle Tony was different this time,” Mary Ann whispered to me. “Like he kind of loved us.”
“I’m sure he always had, hon.”
She nodded, still puzzled.
“I’ve never seen him like that,” Tommy said later on. “I wish he were that way all the time.”
I thought to myself that the energizer bunny was much nicer when his batteries ran down. I hoped the change would last but it didn’t, especially when we turned to the next phase of our life.