4

When I was growing up, the sobriety about which I wrote in my Fenwick retreat resolutions was not the result of the good example of my parents. They represented two decaying, not to say decadent, Chicago lace-curtain Irish families. They firmly believed that, if one had to slide down the social ladder, one ought to do it with style. Noisy style.

My mother was a Cronin, a niece of the Dr. Cronin who was killed in an Irish-nationalist fight during the 1880s. Her father was also a doctor, who lived in the Canaryville section of the South Side, a pillar of St. Gabriel’s parish and a great friend, in his youth, of the legendary Father Maurice Dorney, the founder of the parish, a great friend of organized labor, and the man responsible for building a Burnham church in the shadow of the Yards.

“The smell of the Yards,” she would say, laughing, “is what puts the color in our cheeks in Canaryville.”

(The name, by the way, referred originally to swarms of noisy sparrows that settled each year just east of the Yards, and somewhat north of St. Gabriel’s at Forty-fifth and Wallace. Only later did the term extend to the whole neighborhood and especially to the Irish who lived in it.)

“Canaryville,” she would continue, groping around her littered worktable for her glasses, “is not to be confused with Back of the Yards, which is west of the Yards, or New City, which is south of the Yards, or Bridgeport, which is north of the Yards.”

She would then find her glasses and examine the sock she was darning, astonished that the sock was gray and the thread brown.

“New City is German, Bridgeport has a lower class of Irish, and there are foreigners in Back of the Yards.”

In 1940, when I imagine this paradigmatic scene taking place, my mother was thirty-four years old, tall, brown-haired, thin but not quite gaunt, with the cheekbones, jaw, and elegant manners and the slightly dotty approach to life one might have expected from an exiled White Russian countess, not that I would have known in those days what a White Russian countess was. Her habitual clothes were long skirts and sweaters whose colors never matched. She must have realized that the two-bedroom, third-floor apartment in the ten hundred block of North Menard was a big step down from the sprawling, Victorian, three-story home at 4502 Emerald (her father had purchased it from Gustavus Swift when the packinghouse barons migrated from the “Village of Lake” to Kenwood) in which she was raised in Canaryville. Nor could it be compared to the magnificent Doric-revival brick home on the park behind the Austin Town Hall to which she had brought Jane and me home from West Suburban Hospital, only a few blocks away.

Our flat was small and cramped. Before 1938, our ice was delivered through a hatch on the back porch. We kids hated the day our secondhand Serval refrigerator appeared because we knew we would miss the “iceman.” He lugged blocks of ice up the stairs on his back and dumped them through the “ice door” into the “icebox” inside, a metal-lined wooden cabinet that anticipated the modern refrigerator. He always had a kind word and a joke for us, poor man, too old for such hard work but knowing no other way to earn his living.

For Mom the fridge was a welcome relief from some of the worries and strains of housework—an ironing board in the kitchen, walks up and down four flights of stairs to the basement to a primitive washer with a hand-operated “wringer” through whose rollers clothes were passed after they were washed, heavy clothes baskets to drag out into the concrete backyard, laundry hung by wooden clothespins on lines that had to be put up after each washing, hot-water heat in noisy radiators fed by a coal furnace that left a fine layer of dark dust on everything in the house.

We were better off than many. We had inside plumbing and our dark apartment was lit by enough electric lights (some fixed to the now unused gas jets) that one could read after dark. But Mom had never lifted a finger at housework until the “Crash.”

I may have minded more than she did. I suppose my passion for money and order must have resulted from being very young but conscious enough when this dramatic change occurred in her life. As a little boy I must have been furious at what had happened to her. I wanted money so that I could restore her to those happy days in the house behind the Town Hall.

If the setbacks bothered her, she never let anyone else know about her discouragement. “Refinement,” she told us often, “has nothing to do with how much money you have or where you live. It’s part of your character.”

Even in those days I wanted to marry a woman like my mother, only one who was better organized and less absentminded. A wife like April Mae Cronin but one who would keep the house neat as well as herself and her children.

The coal furnace in the basement had to be fed by hand, a task that the other members of our family routinely forgot. So it was quite possible that they would wake up on a near-zero morning shivering with the cold: no coal in the furnace.

And even worse, no coal in the coal room because we had forgotten to call the coal man (on our wall-mounted four-party-line phone).

When I was old enough to assume responsibility for a morning paper route, I would go first to the basement and shovel coal into the furnace. And if the coal supply was running low, I would make a note in my notebook (carried even then) to call the coal man later in the day.

“And Englewood?” My father would look up from his Shakespeare and sip on his glass of port.

Mother would make a gentle face of displeasure, skin tightening over her high cheekbones.

“Lace-curtain, people with pretensions.”

Dad would howl with laughter and drain the port. “Which the Cronins were not.”

“Well”—Mom would smile sweetly—“we did have some lace in our house, but no pretensions.” The sweetness would acquire a sly tinge: “Not like the West Side Irish.”

And they’d both laugh together, often ending with an affectionate kiss.

My mother’s snobbery, like everything else about her, was amiable and kindly. Foreigners was a term applied to anyone who was not Irish, with the sometime exception of the Germans. (Protestants did not figure in the calculus because they were not important folks in the lives of the Chicago Irish at that time.) They were not bad people; you would never treat them unkindly and certainly never exclude them from your house. Given enough time, they would become as American as anyone else—meaning as American as we were. Indeed Mom found “foreigners” fascinating, puzzled as she was by the fact that anyone would choose to be a foreigner.

“They really are,” she would assure us with a benign smile, “very nice people.”

When I was in fourth grade, 1938, I came home from school one night during the week before Halloween and announced proudly, “We waxed that dirty kike Fineman’s windows for him. He’ll never get them clean. Serves the hebe right.”

Later I would learn to my dismay that I had become a bigot at about the same time of Kristallnacht, the night of the first major Nazi anti-Semitic outburst in Germany.

“Don’t ever say those words again in this house.” My mother took off her glasses and stared at me. “I won’t tolerate them, Charles Cronin O’Malley. I am not raising any bigots, do you understand?”

“I’m not a bigot,” I pleaded, near tears because Mom never shouted at me.

“Yes, you are. Now you go right back to that little dry-goods store and apologize to Mr. Fineman and clean every last bit of wax off his window.”

“Why?” I wailed.

“Because Jews are every bit as good as us, aren’t they, Vangie?”

“A little better, maybe. They work harder.” No help from my father, that was obvious.

“Jesus was Jewish.” Mom was still angry at me.

“So was his mother,” I said brightly.

“The Finemans are his relatives. Now go clean their window.”

Mr. Fineman, a little man with a gray face and dark, dark brown eyes, accepted my apology graciously. “So”—he waved his hands—“boys will be boys. You’re a good boy, you apologize. Why should you clean it up?”

“I didn’t know those were bad words,” I said honestly enough.

“You’re a sweet child,” said his plump little wife, “such cute red hair. You go home and tell your mother that I said so.”

“Mom won’t let me back in the house unless I clean the window.” I was beginning to understand what we later called ethnic diversity. “You know what Irish mothers are like.”

They both thought that remark was much funnier than I did. So they let me clean the windows.

So they gave me chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce and chocolate cookies and a chocolate candy bar.

“Eat them,” Mrs. Fineman said, “chocolate is good for you. It gives you energy.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I slurped up my reward. “May I wax your windows tomorrow?”

“Such a cute little boy. Isn’t he a darling?”

“Your mother”—Mr. Fineman pointed his finger at me—“is the classiest lady in the neighborhood.”

“Yes, sir,” I agreed. “She says you’re God’s relatives.”

They both laughed joyously at that.

“So we have clout?”

“You sure must.”

I went back often to their store after that to volunteer to run errands for them. They wanted to pay me, but I would accept only one Hershey’s bar.

Well, sometimes, maybe two.

Mom had attended St. Xavier’s Academy and then Normal School (later Chicago Teachers College and still later Chicago State University) in Englewood, even though the position of a teacher (like that of a nurse) was a bit beneath her social level. But her justification for that loss of caste was that she wanted to be a music teacher, even if that meant sitting in classrooms at the three-year college with foreigners.

“They really enjoyed my harp.” She would pause in her darning. “Sometimes”—another soft smile, suggesting enormous understanding and tolerance—“I think foreigners appreciate music and the arts more than we do.”

“Especially your Polacks!” My father would fill up his port again.

“Dear, the children!”

“Please call them Poles, Daddy.” My older sister, Jane, would frown with mock primness. “You don’t want us children to pick up bad habits, do you?”

Then they’d all laugh.

Jane, going on fourteen, astonished and delighted by the womanly body that had suddenly become hers, knew the lines in our improvised family comedy. It was her role to feed them to the principal actors while I played straight man and Peg and Rosie Clancy watched from the box seats with wide eyes and ready laughter.

April Cronin was really not designed for this world. She was most content when her long, graceful fingers were moving across the strings of her beloved harp. She should have gone to the Chicago Conservatory as Margaret Mary, her younger daughter, would do after the Second War, playing the violin in that august institution on Saturday mornings even when she was a pregnant college student. But such a choice was even more beyond the ken of the Canaryville Irish after the First War as was attendance at the University of Chicago—a choice exercised by her contemporary James T. Farrell.

“Oh, I knew Mr. Farrell,” she would tell us after playing the harp at the end of the day. “Not well. And I knew the poor boy on whom Studs Lonigan was based; his father repainted our house once.”

“What I want to know”—Dad would lean back in his springless easy chair and examine Morn through the ruby colors of his port—“is whether you know the real Lucy Scanlan.”

“Of course I did.” She would pick out a cord on the harp that sounded like love or maybe an invitation to love. “She is a dear, sweet woman, a few years older than us. Even nicer than Mr. Farrell makes her in the book”

“Has she read the book?” my father would demand, turning the port glass in his fingers.

“Do you know, dear”—with a sigh Mom would put the harp in its sacred place against the “parlor” wall—“I’ve never had the courage to ask her? I guess I didn’t want to spoil the story.”

“Well”—he grinned like Mephistopheles, a puckish demon with egg-bald head and vast red eyebrows—“maybe, dear, we shouldn’t be discussing a dirty book in the presence of the kids.”

“It’s not a dirty book—yes, just a tiny sip of port; oh, that’s too much”—but she didn’t pour it back into the chipped Waterford decanter—“not nearly so dirty as those terrible books you read by Mr. Joyce and M. Proust.”

“Mother,” Jane, bursting with her old wit and her new full-figured sexual energy, came in right on cue, “how do you know that the books are terrible, unless you’ve read them too?”

“Your mother”—Dad refilled his Waterford goblet (designed for claret, not port)—“particularly likes Molly Bloom’s fade-out in Mr. Joyce’s book.”

“Vangie . . .” Mom blushed and shook her head with the despair a mother might display over a cute but mischievous boy child.

Dad’s name was John the Evangelist O’Malley, John the Evangelist Mark Luke O’Malley—a three-of-a-kind label that for some reason discriminated against St. Matthew. Mom called him Vangie only occasionally and almost always with a blush. Dad was always faintly disconcerted when she used the nickname, but, mysteriously to me in those days, pleasurably so. In later years I would realize that it was a pet name in which there were strong overtones of sexual invitation.

Born in 1900, Dad was five years older than Mom, just old enough to be accepted as a volunteer (lying about his age) in the Army in the spring of 1918 after he had graduated from St. Ignatius College, as the good Jesuit high school was known in those days (with two extra years added on so that many young men went straight to law school or medical school after graduation). He was sent to Camp Leavenworth, Kansas, where in the autumn as the war in Europe ended, men would collapse and die on the parade ground every morning from the “plague of the Spanish lady” as the 1918 flu was called.

“I used to worry a lot, just like you do now, Chucky,” he would say to me with his expansive grin, one hand resting on his rather large belly. “Then it was my turn to collapse on the parade ground, November twelfth, 1918, the day after the war ended. I remember thinking that it was a nice irony to die from a bug after the shooting was over.”

“Why didn’t you die, Daddy?” Jane, the most lighthearted and merry of the family, could be counted on to have her lines letter-perfect, even if she had to work at being properly serious on the subject of our father’s escape from death.

Dad would laugh loudly, swallow another sip of sherry or port, and say, “ ’Cause God didn’t want your mother, who was then an innocent little freshman at the Academy, to go through life as a spinster.”

Laughter from everyone but Chucky.

“You flatter yourself, dear,” Mom would giggle. “I had lots of suitors.”

Dad would wave his massive paw, dismissing them as inconsequential. “They were in no rush to carry me off the parade ground to the base hospital. They figured I was dead already and the hospital was overcrowded anyway. I remember one medical orderly saying to another, ‘This kid is dead already.’ I tried to explain to him that I wasn’t, but, tell the truth, I thought I might be. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t talk, I felt like I was going to bed on Christmas Day for a long nap. Some people”—he would shrug his big shoulders—“made it and some didn’t. That’s when I made up my mind that my worrying days were over. Isn’t that right, dear?”

Mom would smile affectionately. “You certainly haven’t worried for more than five minutes since the morning you proposed to me.”

More laughter.

“Will the Spanish lady ever come back?” I would ask somberly, ready even then to take the grim view.

“Oh, Chucky, you’re so silly,” Rosemarie Clancy, who was even then hanging around our house, would protest because I had spoiled the story. Rosie loved stories and I loved facts.

“Let’s hope not, dear,” Mom would say, also a bit disappointed in me. “And pray to God.”

Dad left the Army in the spring of. 1919, his red hair already vanishing from the top of his head. He enrolled in the Illinois National Guard and in Armor Institute, one of the forerunners of Illinois Institute of Technology. The National Guard was an excuse to ride in the Black Horse Troop during Chicago parades. Armor Institute was an excuse to be a painter. His father’s family had come to Chicago before the Civil War and, unlike most Irish immigrants, had made common cause with “Mr. Lincoln”—as Grandpa O’Malley called him, much as if he were a next-door neighbor—and the Republican Party. Grandpa, once a Republican county commissioner, had become a federal judge, an old man with a white beard like Chief Justice Hughes, and a stern, almost Protestant, instinct for sobriety and decorum. He dismissed his son’s inclination to scrawl cartoons as harmless and insisted that if he wanted to be “artistic,” he ought to study architecture. Dad, like running water, followed the path of least resistance, and enrolled in the Institute. His mother, an immigrant Irish maid who had done a reasonably good job of educating herself after her marriage, surreptitiously encouraged her son to continue his painting.

As long as Dad had his paintbrush and Mom her harp, there were no insurmountable problems in the world. The cranky old Philco console that occupied a large part of our living room in the flat on the ten hundred block of Menard played all day long, normally blaring the current hit tunes such as “Jeepers Creepers,” “September Song,” and the memorable “Flat Foot Floogie (with the Floy Floy).” But I was the only one who heard the newscasts about the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. (Like The New World, the Catholic paper in Chicago, I was, at the age of ten, a supporter of the Spanish Republic.)

The war between the right and left in Spain caused the deaths of half a million people, mostly civilians. Both Germany and Italy on the one hand and Russia on the other became involved, tried out tactics, and struggled for control of Spain. The left (the Spanish Republic) murdered priests and nuns by the thousands; the right (the Rebels or the Nationalists) bombed cities and killed civilians. The right won the war. Its leader, General Franco, cleverly stayed out of World War II, though his sympathies were certainly with Germany and Italy.

The rest of the family hardly noticed the deal with Hitler at Munich. In 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain made a deal with Hitler at Munich that turned over substantial parts of Czechoslovakia to Germany in return for a guarantee from Hitler of “peace in our times.” Hitler didn’t keep his promise, and the Munich agreement has ever since been a symbol of the folly of appeasement.

The rest of the family was too busy singing and dancing, storytelling and drinking, painting and playing the harp, to pay much attention to the invasion of Poland, the German blitzkrieg into the Low Countries in the spring of 1940, the fall of Paris, the collapse of France. The day Paris fell—I heard a cop say to the local druggist, “It makes you wonder whether there is a God”—the Philco was firmly turned off in the middle of H. V. Kaltenborn’s funereal newscast so that the evening harp session could begin.

“Forget your silly old war,” Rosie Clancy snapped at me.

In 1940, Rosie was a diminutive, black-haired banshee with a pinched face, flashing eyes, and a furious temper—an angry Gypsy princess from a musical film. Her family lived in the most elaborate home on the block—the only two-story house on a street of bungalows and two-flats—a yellow-brick fortress with casements and turrets from which, in my imagination, guns were trained on all of us who walked by en route to St. Ursula’s school. I suppose I should add, in yet another effort at candor, that in my romantic dreams, I was the brave knight who rescued the Princess Rosa Maria from the evil warlock who had imprisoned her in a tower.

Rosie’s mother drank, not the way my parents did, not several drinks before and after supper every night, but all day, starting at breakfast.

“The poor little thing,” my mother would again sigh, “is going to be a real beauty too, like her mother was. She’ll break a lot of hearts.” When she was ten years old, you did not argue with the Princess Rosa Maria, whom I thought of as a spoiled little brat, not even when she interrupted Kaltenborn’s obsequies for Paris.

The only times the Philco wasn’t blaring during the daylight hours was when one of its tubes blew out. Then it would remain sullenly silent for days—until I pointed out that it wasn’t working.

“Mustn’t cut you off from Bob Elson and the White Sox,” Dad would mumble, searching among the bits of paper stuffed into his pockets, some of them from many years before, for money with which I could run off to Division Street to buy a new tube. He was a Cubs fan and could not comprehend why I would support a team that hadn’t won since 1919.

After I began working my newspaper route, I bought the tubes myself.

My parents’ wedding must have seemed a match with great prospects indeed. The bride and groom were the handsome and gifted offspring of two distinguished Chicago Irish families. Good history was behind them and good promises were in front of them.

During the Depression and the war I don’t think either of them felt their prospects were at all blighted. Mom did her own washing and ironing, mended our clothes on her pedal-operated Singer, and strove cautiously if without too much skill to make ends meet. The journey from the forty-five hundred block on Emerald to the ten hundred block on Menard was from genteel affluence to genteel poverty. Mom and Dad hardly noticed.

She always thought we lived in the eleven hundred block on Menard. If Augusta was ten hundred north, she would argue, then the houses north of it ought to be eleven hundreds.

That’s the way it was on the South Side, anyway.

In 1940, Dad was a big, husky, bald man with a large belly that did not seem so much fat as strong. He looked like pictures I had seen of Irish rural horse-traders. Later, during the war, he would lose weight.

“Vanity,” he would chuckle. “I don’t want to look like Major Blimp.”

“Colonel Blimp,” I would correct him, to the amusement of everyone but Rosie Clancy.

“I think you look wonderful, Mr. O’Malley,” she would thunder, “no matter what Chucky says. He’s just angry because he’s so short.”

Still later Dad would grow a fierce red beard, which eventually turned white. Then he looked like the abbot of a Trappist monastery.

He had worked on the plans for the Chicago Century of Progress World’s Fair (the fourth star in the city flag, if you hadn’t realized it) and supervised repairs on the fair during the summers of 1933 and 1944. “Broke my heart when they tore it down,” he would say, shaking his head sadly. “We beat that man Nice or whatever his name is to modern architecture.”

Dad was not exactly a fan of the Bauhaus, to put it mildly, and despised Mies and all his works, except the Lake Shore Drive apartments: “Well, they look pretty, April dear, but you wouldn’t want to live in them.”

At the end of the fair he found himself out of work with four children in the midst of the Great Depression. All our grandparents were dead, their resources wiped out in the Crash, as the stock market collapse was called. The house by Town Hall was sold and we moved into our crowded, chilly flat on Menard.

Fortunately for Dad he had converted to the Democratic Party, secretly, to vote for Al Smith in 1928, and openly, after the death of his parents, in 1932 to vote for FDR, as he was always called at our house, and the repeal of the prohibition amendment.

“It wasn’t economics, to tell the truth,” he would chortle later, “nor the hope of a job, if you take my meaning. It was the drink, don’t you see? It cost too much, even if I did meet your mother in a speakeasy in Walworth, Wisconsin.”

“That’s not true, darling,” Mom would say, blushing. “You’ll have the children thinking I was a loose young woman.”

“Not loose enough, then.” The emphasis on the last word would make Mom blush all the more. We would all laugh with them, though in 1940 only my precocious sister, Jane, understood.

And maybe the ever-present Rosie Clancy.

The Cronin Democratic connections and my father’s newfound Democratic faith, plus some residual Republican clout (there was some in Cook County in those days) landed him a job as “assistant architect” of the Chicago Sanitary District. The District was a treasure-house in which Chicago’s mayor after the murder of Anton Cermak in 1933, Edward J. “Sewer Pipe” Kelly, and many other Chicago politicians had become millionaires.

The Sanitary District (later the Sanitary District of Metropolitan Chicago, with its own rather grotesque Magnificent Mile high-rise right outside my window as I type these words, and still later the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, with a fountain and a sundial at the mouth of the Chicago River) was locally hailed as one of the seven engineering wonders of the world. It was a wonder all right—it permanently reversed the flow of the Chicago River, solved Chicago’s sewage disposal problems, ended floods, and made possible navigation from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Even more wonderfully, it made possible jobs and income for legions of party faithful, often with no discernible inclination to work. In its combination of operational efficiency and monumental corruption, the Sanitary District, I tell my own kids, is a quintessential Chicago institution: a sewage system that works!

The assistant architect had little work to do. No, that’s not accurate: he had no work at all. Dad would show up at the District offices on North Wabash a couple of mornings a week and reshuffle plans for the future—including, if I might say with some pride, his design for the Deep Tunnel, which is still under construction all these years after. Then he would come home to his palette and easel and draw great, sweeping skyscrapers for the days “when our ship comes in.”

When the ship did come in, when the myth degenerated into reality, no one was more surprised than Dad.

The salary of an assistant architect was not all that much—twenty-two hundred dollars a year (multiply it by twelve to get the mid-1980s value), but as my father would boisterously insist, “It’s a hell of a lot better than nothing, isn’t it, darling?” He would then wrap his arm around Mom’s waist.

“It certainly is, darling,” she would reply with an attempt at being prim. But she never did escape his grasp.

To have a job during the Depression was much better than not having one, especially since prices fell steadily in the middle 1930s. We should have been able to make ends meet with some frugality and prudence. But my parents were quite incapable of either. We bought good food and good drink—single-malt whiskey, the best Spanish sherry and port, the best cuts at Liska’s meat market—and good books. We did not worry about clothes or bills or furniture for the flat. We were always clean as were the frequently altered and repaired clothes we wore (April Cronin would not let dirty children leave her house), but the apartment was invariably a chaotic mess, despite Mom’s occasional burst of feverish ordering activity. The chaos in our home—newspapers, books (old and new; in 1940, Galsworthy juxtaposed with Eric Ambler, Richard Wright, and Upton Sinclair), magazines, laundry, unwashed dishes—seemed to me to represent the disorganization of all our life. With a little bit more planning, I thought, even in the later years of grammar school, we would not be in endless difficulty with bills, we would wear better clothes, and we would not be humiliated at the realization that we were poor.

I’m sure I was the only one who thought we were poor.

I was especially offended that we didn’t have a car. I didn’t expect us to be able to buy a new one. Only rich people like the Clancys could afford a new Packard every year. But there was no reason, I knew even then, why our ancient LaSalle, bought at the time of our parents’ wedding, should have died in 1938, no reason except that my mother and father were quite incapable of maintaining a car. Many of the old LaSalles (for the younger generation it was a GM car between the Olds and the Caddy on the prestige scale) lasted right through the war, but not the O’Malley car, which expired quietly of many afflictions, most notably the absence of an oil change for ten years.

It didn’t matter, Mom and Dad agreed. No one used the car anyway. It was a nuisance and an unnecessary expense during “hard times.” Dad took the Lake Street el to work; when Mom did substitute teaching at St. Ursula’s grammar school, she had to walk only three blocks, “well, really only two.”

“Two and three-quarters,” I would add, but no one ever heard me when I added precision to a discussion.

“And the children won’t be driving for at least ten years anyway. Our ship will certainly come in by then. We’ll have money for a new car.”

“Lots of them.”

“Jane will be able to drive in five years,” I observed.

No one paid any attention.

“It would be different,” Mom would continue, with her extraordinary ability to rationalize every economic necessity, “if we had a garage. I always say that no one should have a car unless they have a garage to protect it during the winter.”

“It would be nice to drive to Twin Lakes in summer,” I pointed out.

The other three kids laughed at me, not meanly, because my siblings were incapable of meanness, but as though I were Fred Allen or Jack Benny on Sunday-night radio.

“The train is more fun,” Dad would chortle, and pick me up and swing me in the air like a sack of new potatoes, which from his point of view might have been exactly what I was.

The four O’Malley children arrived quickly after our parents’ marriage—Jane in 1927, Charles Cronin in 1928, Peg in 1932, and Michael in 1933. Mom was twenty-seven then when Michael was born. (Perversely, he was only called Michael, not Mike or Micky. Peg was always Peg, so it was hardly a nickname. Only Chucky was favored with a distortion of his actual name.) During the birth-control crisis in my own marriage, I wondered how Mom and Dad resolved the problem of avoiding more children in the dark days of the Great Depression. It is inconceivable to me that they did not sleep together. There were three bedrooms in the apartment, two occupied by children. And their affection was too physical—hugs, kisses, affectionate touches—not to seek consummation. Moreover, my memories of the muffled laughter from their room when they were “napping” on Saturday afternoons, or when we would come in from school on the days Dad would not go down to the District, leave little doubt about the passion between them.

Years later I figured out that they probably crept back into the blankets of their unmade bed three days a week as soon as we went off to school after lunch. (We came home every day for a “hot” lunch—it was as important as vaccination in my mother’s health-protection efforts.) No wonder they were happy.

I supposed they solved the birth-control challenge the way many other Catholics did then and in the years after: they simply ignored what the priests told them. Before the Vatican Council, such inattention to Church authority was private, rarely discussed even between husband and wife; and my parents were marvelously skilled in ignoring or reasoning away obstacles to their rose-colored life.

I look at my snapshots taken at Twin Lakes in those years and marvel at how handsome Mom and Dad are and how complacent they are in their affection for one another. If ever there was a serene love match, theirs was it. I can’t remember them bickering about anything; it was impossible to argue with Mom anyway. And I wonder, as I ponder the faded pictures, how they managed to produce someone so totally unlike themselves as their son Charles.

Money was rarely far from my mind. I resented those who were rich, or at least whom I perceived as rich. I hated those who owned summer homes when we had lost both of our homes—the Cronin house at Long Beach and the O’Malley “cottage” at Lake Geneva (purchased after the wedding, especially for their new grandchildren).

I was not greedy in my envy. I did not want great wealth, as my Fenwick retreat resolution proves. I wanted only a modestly good life, orderly and restrained. And precise. Moreover I was willing to work hard for such a life. I fully expected a life of long and demanding hours over double-entry ledgers to earn my Oak Park bungalow, six-cylinder Chevy, and well-organized wife.

That was long before I came to terms with the reality that my life was to be a comedy of errors. You cannot escape the persona you are given. Rather you must improvise around it, skillfully if you are fortunate, ineptly if you are not.

I have a shoe box jammed with Twin Lakes pictures. I bought my Kodak Brownie with my newspaper delivery money—profit earned on a job that worried my mother constantly because it was her fiction that my health was “delicate” (how else to explain the changeling in your midst?) and that I was literally endangering my life when I trudged forth with my yellow pushcart filled with the Chicago Herald-Examiner every morning.

The Tribune was not tolerated: recent converts or not to the FDR faith, Mom and Dad wanted no part of “the Colonel” as the Roosevelt-hating editor of the Trib was called. Indeed the only time serious attention was paid to the Philco was when Col. Robert R. McCormick used the musical-comedy setting Chicago Theater of the Air—on WGN, owned then as now by the Trib—to blast away at Roosevelt.

“Turn that damn fool off,” my father would bellow.

I thought the Colonel was plausible enough. Had not FDR caused the 1937 recession, just when it looked as if the Depression might be over? Still, I turned him off. Obviously my life plan dictated that I would become a Republican, perhaps in time for the 1952 presidential election. But here too my plans went awry.

I used my newspaper money for film and for seats at the Rockne theater’s Saturday-afternoon triple features—in 1940, for example, one “major” film like Gaslight or Rebecca or Ninotchka and two B films, often with Richard Arlen, so readily forgotten that I’m not sure they were ever made.

(In those days I could not understand the fuss over Garbo. Having watched her again on tape more recently, I have no trouble understanding the fuss.)

Tolerantly skeptical about my wasting time at the Rockne, the rest of my family viewed my addiction to the camera with good-natured amusement.

“It shows the way things are,” I would insist, “not the way we would like them to be.”

My argument was a criticism of Dad’s increasingly surrealistic paintings. He did not, however, so perceive it.

“The camera,” he would say, rubbing his hands appreciatively at the prospect of a serious argument—I was the only one in the house who could satisfy that need—“has its uses as an archival tool, but it cannot express the insight of the artist nearly as well as the paintbrush.”

“I don’t want to, uh, express any insight,” I said, “I just want to catch things the way they are.”

“But”—Dad would favor me with a huge grin—“the way things are at any given moment is not the way they are the next moment. The photographer is exercising choice in angle, perspective, light, timing. He is interpreting despite himself. For example, take this picture of Rosie: you’ve caught her here on the beach in a very sad instant. Normally she is a vivacious child, bubbling with energy. It is an interpretive exercise to select out just the right second in which a pretty little girl is also sad. That’s art, inferior art compared to a canvas and paint I would contend, but art just the same. And, Chucky”—he would examine the picture critically—“not a bad portrait considering the limitation of your tools.”

“It was the only time she’d stand still long enough for me to take a picture. My Brownie is too slow to take her picture most of the time. Now if I had a Leica . . .”

Of all the things I wanted in the world, a Leica was what I wanted most.

“It still is an insightful shot.” Dad ignored my greed.

“Anyway,” Rosie protested, “I’m not a sad person.”

Yes, she was, but I wasn’t going to argue. She was not only sad but an intolerable pest.

“Don’t you think it is a lovely picture, Rosie?” Dad persisted. “Yes,” she said grudgingly. “Only it’s not me . . . would you print a copy for my mom, Chucky, please?”

“Sure,” I would agree, with no intention of ever doing it. I had better things to do in my crude little darkroom, which I had fixed up in the basement—with the landlord’s permission—than print pictures of obnoxious pests.

The shoe box of pictures of Twin Lakes—where we rented a tiny cottage for a couple of weeks every summer—wrench at my heart. It is a truism that youth slips away too quickly, yet when it’s your own youth, the experience of loss is absolutely unique.

I hated the bumpy Northwestern train ride to Lake Zurich and Crystal Lake and Richmond and finally to Genoa City, Wisconsin, where we would be picked up in a bus and ferried over to Twin Lakes, but loved those precious weeks of summer fun—heat, water, tiny beach, thick humidity, boats on the lake, hot dog and wiener roasts. We romanticize our memories of youth, but in my shoe box of pictures there is still plenty of summer romance. Our clothes are funny and the cottages and the lake are incredibly small, but my mother is beautiful and my father is handsome and everyone seems to be excited and happy.

One slips into the simmering wetlands of the past and finds them again warm and comfortable and sweet smelling, the true reality, while the steppes and the tundra of the present are mere illusion.

One wants to stay.

This one does anyhow.

I’m not in any of the pictures, since I was taking them. And most of the time I was not with the family anyway. Camera in hand, I spent much of my vacation exploring the lakeshore and the woods and the nearby farms—and daydreaming.

The snapshot of Rosie Clancy, in which my dad wanted to see so much meaning, was taken when I banished her from an exploration of birdhouses in the front yards on the lakeshore. Rosie spent most of her time during our two weeks at Twin Lakes visiting with us—chauffeured over every morning in her mother’s Buick. Neither of my two tormentors could tolerate a long separation from one another. Long was defined as anything more than a day. The shoe box still holds, within a tight and now fragile rubber band, my yellowed series on birdhouses. Pretty undistinguished stuff.

The snap of Rosie has long since disappeared. I often wonder what she really looked like in that picture.

Do I make myself seem to be an unattractive boy? Perhaps I was in fact quite unappealing as a child. Or maybe I only thought of myself as unattractive because I fit so poorly into the atmosphere of our family life. My grammar school classmates did not seem to dislike me. Short and red-haired, I was in fact selected as the class jokester. My outrageous comments, unnoticed at the family hearth, seemed to amuse classmates and teachers alike. Strangely, I cannot remember any of the school jokes while I can remember the remarks, decent and indecent, at home.

When Paris fell and Rosie wondered what difference it made to anyone in America: “Your mother will have to buy her new clothes at Marshall Field’s.”

Rosie didn’t get it; Mom and Dad both laughed in spite of themselves.

My delivery must have been special that day, because in retrospect it was a crude and cruel crack.

I justify it because I tried to convince myself that I hated Rosie and her money and Rosie’s mother and her expensive clothes, jewelry, and perfumes. And Rosie’s father and his new Packard every year.

Better to hate her than to succumb to the impulse to adore her.

Her mother’s furs too. While my mother had to wear a cloth coat that antedated the Depression.

“If they are so rich, why can’t they keep her in her own house some of the time?”

“Money doesn’t produce a happy family, dear,” Mom would reply, a touch wistfully.

“Why not?”

There was never any answer to that question.

While I was dissatisfied with the way our family lived, I cannot say I was unhappy. Neither, however, could I agree with Mom years later when our family fortunes had changed that “those days in the flat in the eleven hundred block on Menard were the happiest in our lives.”

They were not, not by a long shot. Money doesn’t necessarily spoil happiness. Poverty doesn’t help it either. But Mom never could see the point in that position.

Oddly enough, my brother and sisters, far less conventional than I was, have had quite ordinary and respectable lives: Jane the wife of an MD and an active civic volunteer; Peg the wife of a lawyer and commodity broker, busy with her concerts and her role as first violinist in the Chicago Symphony and a tenured professor at the Conservatory; Michael a rather stereotypical post-Conciliar pastor.

(“Father Michael,” sighs my little priest, “speaks all the proper progressive dicta at all the proper times. I fear he finds my irreverence a trial, but I am”—he grins like the slightly kinky cherub that he is—“after all a monsignor!”)

And Chucky, the family straight man, is the one whose life has been a comedy of errors.

Which, as Mom would say years after, just goes to show you.

What it just goes to show has always escaped me.

The blissful confusion on North Menard came to an end on December 7, 1941.