A Christmas Wedding

by Andrew M. Greeley

  In my prayers that night, I asked God, Was that an offer, do You think? Was Rosemarie offering to be my wife, in the long term of course? What do You mean, I should know the answer to that? Have You forgotten what she was like the night before? You think that if I’m not willing to take the risk with her, I should get out of the relationship while I can?

  Or is it too late already?

  What do You mean, that’s not the question?

  You’re telling me the question is whether I want to get out, whether I’ve ever wanted to get out?

  That’s not a fair question.

  Anyway, what can she possibly see in me?

  No answer to that question?

  2

  There was trouble back in St. Ursula’s, trouble I didn’t need.

  Leo Kelly, my classmate from St. Ursula’s, who was a senior at Loyola and trainee in Navy ROTC, called me on the phone and proposed that we meet at Petersen’s ice cream palace on Chicago Avenue just east of Harlem to discuss a couple of problems that had arisen in the neighborhood.

  “Seven-thirty tomorrow night all right?”

  “Okay … Will Jane be there?”

  “Of course Jane will be there, Chuck.”

  “You’re too young to marry.”

  “Aren’t we all. Jane and I are not engaged yet. We haven’t even talked about it. Maybe after my four years in the Marines …”

  He didn’t ask me about Rosemarie. The common opinion in the neighborhood was that I’d eventually succumb, but that we were a long way from that. Hence it was unwise to ask either of us about our relationship. I would have denied that there was a relationship. Rosemarie? She would probably just laugh.

  Technically, the crazy O’Malleys no longer lived in the parish. Our new home was several blocks into Oak Park and beyond the boundaries of St. Ursula’s. However, my father claimed extraterritorial rights because he was the architect of the new church there. Rosemarie’s voting residence was at her father’s house at the corner of Menard and Thomas, though she spent most of her time either in her apartment in Hyde Park near the University, or in one of our guest bedrooms, called, by everyone but me, “Rosie’s room.” (I called it, when I called it anything, “Rosemarie’s room,” because that was her name. The name Rosie, I argued—uselessly—was vulgar.) It was at the other end of our second floor from my hideout.

  Peg and I, deeply attached to St. Ursula’s, refused to identify with St. Arthur’s our proper parish in Oak Park. St. Ursula’s problems were our problems.

  I phoned Rosemarie at her Hyde Park apartment.

  “Would you feel secure enough in the shower to spend tomorrow night at the crazy O’Malley’s’?”

  “The door is always open there too, Chucky Ducky.”

  “I’ll try to remember that.”

  “Any special reason—in addition to your lascivious fantasies?”

  “Leo called. Some kind of problem in the parish.”

  “With Jane?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why do you need me? I’m not a fixer like you are. I have enough problems of my own without intruding into other people’s problems.”

  “Since I don’t engage in vulgarities with the gentle sex, I won’t say what I think of that statement. We’re both born fixers.”

  She laughed. “I’ll be there.”

  Leo Kelly had been my opposite number at St. Ursula’s grammar school. Just as I was a noisy, obnoxious, contentious show-off (to use some of the milder words the nuns used), Leo was quiet and unassuming to the point of invisibility, a simple fellow, with a simple face and a simple air about him. Or so it was thought. Peg, who at one time had a distant crush on him, thought he’d make a great precinct captain because, unlike her brother, he knew when to keep his mouth shut, which was most of the time. He had gone to Quigley to study for the priesthood, though as my mother said in a rare moment of uncharity, the vocation was more his mother’s than his own. He left the seminary after third year and went to college at Loyola University. He majored in political science and planned, after his hitch in the Marines, to seek a Ph.D. at Harvard.

  “He wants to get away from that terrible woman,” the good April commented, continuing her violation of charity though hardly of truth. When Leo had left the seminary, his father, at his mother’s instigation, refused to pay his Loyola tuition. Leo joined the Navy ROTC to earn the money he needed.

  Jane was in our class too, the only civilized human being in a family of black Irish savages, the male members of which were alleged to be crooks. She was the acknowledged leader of the class, smart, pretty (black curls clustered around milk white skin), and dynamic. She hardly noticed Leo and she tolerated me as someone whom she might allow occasionally to steal the show from her. Not too often, however. Peg and Rosemarie at that time thought she was “stuck-up” but later revised their opinion to “sweet.”

  Packy Keenan, whose family lived in St. Arthur’s and were thus dismissed as rich snobs by us St. Ursula kids, attended Quigley with Leo and brought him up to their summer place at Lake Geneva, where somehow he and Jane discovered each other.

  Since I had returned from Germany, Leo and I had joined forces as problem solvers for the young people in the parish: he found the problems and I solved them. Well, he found the problems I didn’t find.

  So we met at Petersen’s and did our usual orders of sundaes and malts, two malts for me and two for Rosemarie.

  “Are you trying to match Chucky?” Jane asked with her usual dazzling smile, which enabled her to say almost anything and get away with it.

  Rosemarie waved her hand. “I may just have to order a third. My doctor says I should put on at least ten pounds.”

  “You look great!” Jane said, now solicitous.

  “Great but skinny,” I observed.

  “Chuck!” Jane exploded. “You’re terrible! Rosie is gorgeous.”

  “I bet she doesn’t drink three malts!”

  “Five dollars,” Jane said extending the little finger of her left hand and hooking it with mine—a Sicilian sign of a bet.

  “She can’t get sick, however.” I insisted.

  “Only outside!”

  “All right!”

  “Which one gives me the bigger cut?” Rosemarie demanded as she knocked off the first malt quicker than I did.

  “No fair!” Jane insisted.

  Gluttonous, but we were not dancing at the edge of sickness with alcohol. Not tonight anyway.

  We sang with the jukebox: “Mona Lisa,” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”

  Jane was too open ever to be a Mona Lisa. Rosemarie, on the other hand…

  Then, to the applause of Petersen’s patrons, Rosemarie and I did our theme song, “Younger than Springtime.”

  In my imagination it applied to Rosemarie.

  More applause.

  “One more!” begged a waitress.

  “Which one?”

  “You know!”

  I knew all right. Jane and Leo didn’t. It would be most embarrassing.

  “Rosemarie,” I temporized, “even if she is skinny, is prettier than Jeanette MacDonald.”

  “And you’re no Nelson Eddy,” Jane replied, “so it evens out.”

  So it did. We’d sung “Rose-Marie, I Love You,” often at home since the film in 1936 (when I was eight and Rosemarie was five!), and once or twice at Petersen’s. But neither of us liked doing that. The lyrics said things we weren’t quite ready to admit, even to ourselves, in public.

  Both of us, however, were crazy O’Malleys, I by birth and she by association. We loved a stage and an audience.

  “You gotta picture Chucky Ducky in a bright red Mountie jacket with one of those lanyard things around his neck,” Rosemarie warned the impromptu audience. “Make him taller and stronger. And I’m the one with the red hair.”

  Oh sweet Rose-Marie,

  It’s easy to see

  Why all who learn to know you love you.

  You’re gentle and kind,

/>   Divinely designed,

  As graceful as the pines above you.

  There’s an angel’s breath beneath your sigh,

  There’s a little devil in your eye.

  O, Rose-Marie, I love you!

  I’m always dreaming of you.

  No matter what I do, I can’t forget you;

  Sometimes I wish that I had never met you!

  And yet if I should lose you,

  ’Twould mean my very life to me.

  Of all the queens that ever lived I’d choose you

  To rule me, my Rose-Marie!

  I must admit that the real Rosemarie and I hammed it up a bit. However, the Petersen’s gang loved it. The applause was thunderous, as they say. The two singers were embarrassed and refused to look at each other. Jane watched us very carefully, opened her mouth to say something, and then shut it again.

  Then, out of loyalty to Rudolf Friml, I began the first bars of “Indian Love Call.” That gave us both a great chance to show off.

  Naturally there was more applause. The manager came over to shake our hands and say, half fun and full earnest (as the good April would have put it), that he’d like to schedule us for regular nights.

  “Romantic musical theater,” Leo observed pedantically, “reached its height in Europe before the war with the work of Franz Lehár of Merry Widow fame and then came to this country after the war with Sigmund Romberg, who wrote The Desert Song and The Student Prince, and Rudolf Friml, who was responsible for that theme song of yours. Both were immigrants. There’s a lot of development between them and Oklahoma! and—”

  “Shut up, lunkhead,” Jane commanded, with an affectionate smile. “You’re not a college professor yet. … I have to admire you two guys, I’d never dare turn an ice-cream parlor into a musical comedy state. No wonder they call you the crazy O’Malleys!”

  “He comes by it naturally,” Rosemarie assured her. “I was assimilated.”

  “I’m the white sheep of the family,” I said. “The only sane, normal one.”

  “How can you possibly believe that!” Jane objected. “You’re the craziest of them all. Isn’t he, lunkhead?”

  “No, he’s not,” Rosemarie cut in. “Chuck is really nothing more than an accountant, nothing special, no great talents, and certainly not the kind of complicated guy who would sing love songs in an ice-cream parlor.”

  Why was everyone saying I was complicated?

  Leo said nothing. A faint smile slipped across his face. He and Jane would talk about Rosemarie and me all the way home. Fair enough, we’d do the same about them.

  “What’s our problem, Leo?” I asked, rather too abruptly. “The Rizzos?”

  “Not at all! They’re fine. Jim’s straight A at Princeton Law, Monica’s pregnant. Her father now acts like he approved of the marriage all along. Uncle Sal the Pal is proud. Everything is fine.”

  “Thank God,” Rosemarie whispered.

  The two of us had crawled far out on a limb to scare Monica’s father out of his opposition to her marriage to the nephew of a “gangster.”

  “Then it’s Timmy Boylan!”

  Leo raised his shoulders slightly. “There’s been a sighting.”

  “Where?” I shouted.

  “Eyre Square in Galway Town in Ireland,” he said calmly. “One of my Loyola classmates was there for the Christmas holidays. He knew Timmy from St. Ignatius High School. Saw him working in a pub. Recognized him. Timmy refused to talk. Said he wanted to be left alone.”

  “Poor dear man,” Rosemarie sighed, just like the good April.

  Timmy Boylan was a big, strong, and dangerously brilliant guy, two years older than I, dangerous because he instantly saw through all my games. Therefore it was necessary that we become friends.

  When he was a sophomore the Army came around to the high schools. Really needed bright young men. Gave juniors and seniors special training. Got them out of school halfway through the year. Put them in important jobs. Intelligence, that sort of thing. By the summer of 1944 the Army didn’t need bright young men. It needed bodies. So all these kids who thought they were going to be intelligence officers found themselves combat infantry replacements. Cannon fodder. After six weeks of basic training, the Army sent them to replacement centers in France. Timmy was in one of those places for another week. Then they assigned him to the First Infantry Division in the Hurtgen Forest. He wasn’t even eighteen years old. A replacement replaces someone, usually a friend of the survivors in the outfit. They hated the replacement because somehow he was responsible for their friend’s death, so often they did nothing to help him get ready for battle. Tim was in combat for four days before a shell from a German 88 tore him apart. He was in the hospital for two years. His body is a mass of scars. He was not the same cute, funny boy he was when he graduated from St. Ignatius. He hated everyone and everything. Except, it would seem, a redhead whom he always called, with total disrespect, “Charles C.”

  “Does Jenny know?” Rosemarie asked. She was working her way through her third malt.

  Poor sweet Jenny Collins with her freckled face and bright eyes. After I had persuaded Tim to see Dr. Berman, the psychiatrist who had been in the Army with me, and Tim began to get his act together, Jenny had fallen for him. Apparently he had fallen for her too. However, since nothing is ever that easy, Tim disappeared one day without telling his family or Jenny or Dr. Berman or even me where he was going.

  Jenny said she would wait for him to come back, for a time anyway. Most of her friends told her it was a lost cause. I was more cautious. If you love him, give him a year or two.

  “I don’t think so,” Leo replied. “I didn’t tell her.”

  “She’ll wait forever,” Rosemarie said, as she struggled through the last remnants of her malt.

  “Do you think so?” Jane wondered. “She’s so cute, she’ll have plenty of opportunities to date.”

  “He’s a good guy,” I said. “If it wasn’t for ASTP”—as the Army Specialized Training Program was called—“he’d be a successful lawyer today, on his way to politics. … Do we know the name of the pub where he works?”

  “I asked my friend,” Leo said. “He couldn’t remember. Would you fly over to see him?”

  Three sets of eyes turned on Chucky the wonderworker.

  “Not now. Maybe just send him a card to let him know we’re on his side.”

  “And tell him that Jenny still loves him,” Rosemarie added.

  No one disagreed.

  “But we don’t know the address.”

  “Didn’t your dad have an Irish girlfriend, Chucky?”

  “The virtuous Vangie?”

  “Vangie” was a corruption—which Mom loved—of Dad’s middle name, “Evangelist, as in John Evangelist O’Malley.”

  “You never listen, Chucky! The good April kids him about her all the time. Her name was Siobhan.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe we could have her check on Timmy for us.”

  With a loud sigh she finished her third malt, and then she gobbled down the last two of the butter cookies that always accompanied malted milks in those happier days.

  “Not a bad idea,” Leo agreed.

  “Chuck,” Jane said, “you owe me five dollars.”

  I gave her a five-dollar bill, the last one in my wallet, with a great show of reluctance.

  “If she gets sick, I get it back.”

  “If she gets sick before we leave.”

  “I do not plan on getting sick.”

  Given Rosemarie’s willpower, she would not.

  “You’ll follow through on it, Chuck?”

  “Sure, we’ll see what we can find out. I’ll be in touch.”

  “What do you think of them?” I asked Rosemarie as she drove me home.

  “We shouldn’t talk about them,” she said primly.

  “They’ll talk about us.”

  “They’ll never figure us out.”

  “Can we figure them out?”

  She took a deep br
eath. “Well, I think they’d be very happily married, but I don’t think they’ll ever get that far.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re both afraid of love.”

  “Aren’t we?”

  “Not the same way.”

  That was that.

  The next morning at breakfast I raised the question about Siobhan.

  “The Clancy brat is defaming you, Dad.”

  That got all their attention.

  “I wouldn’t doubt it,” he replied. “Just like her.”

  Dad was the only one in the family who enjoyed my games.

  “She’s saying that you had a girlfriend in Ireland.”

  “I’ll have to talk to a lawyer,” he said, turning crimson. “I’ve never been in Ireland.”

  “Now, dear,” Mom corrected him, “you did have an Irish girlfriend when you were in Rome. Certainly you haven’t forgotten about Siobhan, the one who married the little Irish lawyer with the red hair.”

  Aha.

  Having read my father’s memoirs, I knew all about Siobhan.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, returning to the Chicago Sun, “Siobhan McKenna.”

  “Siobhan Moriarity, as she is now. We really must go over to Ireland and visit them when our work slows down.”

  The work would never slow down unless Peggy and Rosemarie and I intervened again.

  “You’re in touch with her and her husband?”

  “Ronan is her husband’s name,” Mom added helpfully. “We exchange Christmas cards. She’s a very lovely woman. A good loser.”

  “Mom!” Peg exclaimed.

  “Well, dear, she did lose, you know.”

  “Dad could write to Siobhan or Ronan,” I said, “and ask them if they can locate the address of the pub on Eyre Square in Galway where an American named Tim Boylan works. Also answer some questions about his behavior.”

  “You’ve found Timmy!” Peg’s eyes lit up. Young women found Tim cute, for totally different reasons, I suspected than they found me cute.

  “We think so.”

  “What will you do if they find him?” Dad asked, looking at me shrewdly.

  “Depends on what you find. Send him a note wishing him well.”

  “And tell the poor dear that we all still love him.”