A Christmas Wedding

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “And that Jenny will never stop loving him.”

  “Depends,” I said.

  “I’ll get the letter off today,” Dad promised.

  3

  “We’ll double for the St. Patrick’s Day dance, of course,” my sister Peg, the other pea in the pod occupied by Rosemarie, said at the breakfast table.

  I continued to eat my second helping of buttermilk pancakes without comment.

  Breakfast was an important family ritual for the remnants of the crazy O’Malleys, as we were often called by fellow parishioners at St. Ursula’s. My younger brother, Michael, was off in the seminary. My older sister, Jane McCormac, now happily pregnant, lived with her husband. So there was only four of us around the breakfast table. Soon Dad would bury himself in the blueprints in his office at the back of the house and Mom would take over as office manager. Peg would dash over to Rosary College in River Forest, where she was a sophomore majoring in music education. I would be the last to leave the breakfast table. Before departing for the University I would naturally wash the breakfast dishes and clean up the kitchen so that the family would not look like slobs to the cleaning lady when she arrived.

  “I was talking to you, Chucky,” Peg insisted.

  “I think I’ve heard this argument before,” my father said, as he savored the second of the two cups of coffee we permitted him at breakfast.

  “Now, dear, don’t be difficult,” my mother insisted.

  “I was not planning to go to the St. Patrick’s Day dance at St. Ursula’s,” I said. “While I can claim to be a veteran, I am not a war veteran. I’m therefore not eligible. Besides, at the moment I am not dating anyone.”

  I knew it was a lost cause. However, the traditional rituals must be observed.

  “The dance is for everyone. The Catholic War Vets is only the sponsor.”

  Outside our house on East Avenue, the Chicago region was reverting to its primal swamp as, under the fiercely bright sun, an early February thaw—a false promise of the coming of spring—melted a couple of feet of snow. It would be a slushy drive to the University. There would, however, be many opportunities for my photographic archival activity, perhaps a shot of Rosemarie as the ice maiden of Russian folklore melting into slush. It would be an interesting trick, if I could pull it off.

  Yes, I was taking pictures again, mostly of her.

  “That does not deal with my second problem,” I said, soaking the pancakes with more maple syrup.

  “You can be so exasperating, Chucky,” my sister said impatiently. “It would be Vince and me and you and Rosie.”

  Rosemarie and Peg don’t really look like twins. My sister is taller and somewhat more statuesque. Her hair is short and curly, her face round and freckled. One thinks of them as twins, however, because they always seem to be together and to read each other’s thoughts without talking. Especially, I had reason to believe, if I was the subject matter of their thoughts. Their personalities were different too. I had once compared Peg to a mountain lion and Rosemarie to a timber wolf—metaphors that had pleased both of them.

  “Rosemarie and I are not dating,” I said firmly.

  Peg and I adored each other. We merely had to play out our usual scenario.

  “The four of us saw All the King’s Men when Vince was in from Notre Dame.”

  “A film,” I said, “is not a date, a dance is. Besides, the virtuous Rosemarie is dating my old enemy Ed Murray.”

  “He is not an enemy. Won’t you ever forget that terrible football game?”

  “I’ve been trying to forget it.”

  “You’re close friends and you know it. Besides, Rosie and Ed broke up over Christmas.”

  That I did not know.

  “Did they?”

  “And do you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because, just like your buddy Christopher, Ed got tired of all their conversations being about you.”

  I felt my face turn red.

  “They must not have talked very much.”

  “And you spent a night at her apartment too!” Peg accused me.

  “Locked behind a door.”

  “She didn’t lock the door!”

  “That’s because she knew, dear, that she could trust poor Chucky,” Mom said. “I’ll grant you, Peg, that she looks quite attractive after her morning shower.”

  That stopped them all.

  “Tell you what”—Peg grinned shrewdly—“the guy and I will be there on a date and you and Rosie can tag along with us on a non-date.”

  “I see no reasonable objection to that.”

  Dad put down his copy of the Sun, Mom paused as she prepared to pour me another cup of tea, Peg’s grin faded. I had raised the white flag much earlier than usual.

  “You want to go to the dance with Rosie!”

  “I told you, I was quite impressed with her after her morning shower.” I lifted the tea cup toward my mother.

  Peg frowned. It was unlikely that I had actually seen Rosemarie coming out of the shower. If I had, she would have certainly reported such an encounter to Peg. On the other hand…

  “Now, dear,” Mom intervened, “I’m sure nothing like that happened.”

  Dad, quicker than the others to catch on to my word games, chuckled.

  “Ask her,” I said as I polished off the last remnant of the pancakes.

  “I certainly will!”

  “After you tell her that I agree to tag along to the St. Patrick’s Day dance.”

  That evening Dad showed me a letter from the Moriaritys.

  Dear John,

  Your son must be a very interesting young man. We’ll really have to meet him soon. Next year you must come see us. It’s only twelve hours in those new DC-7s from St. John’s in Newfoundland to Shannon. We could meet you there. We have a summer home near Rory’s birth-place out beyond Dingle. He’s Irish-speaking, you know.

  There surely is a young man named Timothy O’Boylan working in Brandon’s Pub right across the street from the Railroad Hotel in Galway. He’s a quiet boy, very good looking and very respectful. The publican told us that he works very hard and doesn’t drink and had terrible war experiences. He does look a little haunted.

  All our love,

  Siobhan

  Aha!

  I drafted a card and called Rosemarie for approval.

  “Be sure you send it air mail, Chuck.”

  “That’s expensive!”

  I then checked with Leo.

  “I knew you’d find him, Chuck.”

  “We Mounties always get our man.”

  Dear Tim,

  As I’m sure you expected, I found out where you are. Don’t worry that we’ll come swarming across the ocean to drag you back. We miss you and await your return. Everyone still loves you, especially the wondrous Jenny Collins. You’d better answer this.

  Charles Cronin O’Malley

  Perhaps there would be a trip to Ireland soon. Mom and Dad were taking their afternoon nap almost every day as they had when we lived in the cramped two-flat on Menard Avenue. Maybe they realized that they couldn’t keep on living the way they had in the boom years immediately after the war. Peg and Rosemarie and I knew about the naps, of course, but we didn’t talk about it to each other.

  That spring of 1950 was a glorious time. The weather was wonderful, the songs and films were memorable, and we were all young and full of hope. Maybe I was in love. The country was more prosperous than it had ever been (though not everyone—especially Negroes, as we called them then—was benefiting from the prosperity). By the end of June it would be all over. On the last Sunday of the month the headlines reported an invasion of South Korea by North Korea. The war would shape and sober our generation. I would lose several friends, one of them forever. I had seen tragedy in Bamberg with the Constabulary. Young men I knew had died in the Second World War, but no one of my generation. I left my youth behind in 1950. Maybe I even grew up a little, though there are those who would dispute that.

  La
ter that morning, with no sense of impending doom, I struggled to escape Rosemarie’s laughing revenge as she buried me in a pile of melting snow and washed my face, not the first time she had worked that indignity on me.

  “You saw me coming out of the shower!” she shouted as she pushed another mittful of snow into my mouth.

  “Peg did not listen to what I said,” I pleaded. “I said you were attractive after your shower, which was certainly true. She chose to put a salacious interpretation on it.”

  “Because you wanted her to!”

  She released me and stood up, proudly surveying the damage to person and my clothes.

  “A man is permitted his fantasies. Besides, the door was locked.”

  She extended her hand to help me up.

  “You knew it wasn’t, Chucky Ducky.”

  “I overslept.”

  “Anyway, I’m glad you’re going to the dance. It should be a lot of fun.”

  “We’ll see,” I said grudgingly.

  “You’d better act right,” she warned me.

  “What choice do I have, trapped between a mountain lion and a timber wolf?”

  “Shall we go up to the reading room and get to work?” she asked, flushing as she so often did.

  “The chairman of the economics department wants to see me.”

  “Are you in trouble?” she asked nervously.

  “Probably. I think they may have caught up with me.”

  “They’re smart around here,” she snorted, “real smart. But they’re not that smart.”

  As I ambled up the stairs of the social science building to the fourth floor offices of the economics department, I remembered hearing my mother say in our apartment on Menard Avenue, when I was supposed to be asleep on the porch that adjoined our parlor, that Peg and Rosemarie had their first periods on the same day. Could they be planning to have their marriages on the same day and perhaps give birth to their first child each on the same day?

  You’re slipping into their trap, I told myself.

  Maybe I’d always been in it.

  Palmer Tennant, the departmental chairman, kept me waiting for fifteen minutes, less than students were normally left fretting in his outer office.

  “Come in, Mr., uh, O’Malley,” he said with a massive scowl. “Sit down.”

  Mr. Tennant always scowled.

  (At the University everyone was Mr., not Doctor or Professor. There were not enough women faculty in those days to worry about whether they were Miss or Mrs.)

  “The department has been watching you closely, Mr., uh, O’Malley.”

  Palmer Tennant was a squat, bald man with expressionless gray eyes behind thick horned-rimmed glasses. He had held an upper-level job at the Treasury Department during the war. It was said that if there had been a Nobel Prize in economics, he would have won it.

  “The red hair is pretty hard to hide, sir.”

  He squinted, not quite getting my point. Then his lips parted slightly in what might have been a smile.

  “You would stand out in the classroom even if you were silent, which, of course, you’re not.”

  Peggy had said that I had a fast mind and a faster tongue. That had generally worked to my advantage at the University. Maybe they had indeed caught up with me.

  “Genetic weakness, sir.”

  He didn’t try to figure that one out.

  “However, papers like this”—he waved my paper at me like it was a lethal weapon—“in which you compare the Negro neighborhoods of Chicago to Germany after the war, would attract our attention anyway.”

  “I ride through them every day on the L, Mr. Tennant. It was hard not to notice the similarity between them and Bamberg when I first arrived there in 1946.”

  “Germany is struggling out of it now,” he observed.

  “The Marshall Plan made a big difference, sir.”

  He smiled. As well he might. He’d been one of those who had sold Dean Acheson on the plan, which Acheson had then sold to George Marshall.

  “It wasn’t all that much money, Mr., uh, O’Malley.”

  “Enough to prevent starvation, enough to start the wheels turning again.”

  “You quote General Lucius Clay in this paper. Did you know him?”

  “I met him once, sir, when he was visiting the Constabulary headquarters with the Herr Oberburgomeister of Cologne.”

  I was not above name-dropping when it suited my purpose. I would have told him the whole story if he had asked. Naturally he didn’t.

  “A great man… You cannot, however, seriously compare the Negro population of Chicago with the population of Germany. Whatever we may think of the latter, those that survived the war had the work habits and motivation necessary to rebuild their country. We don’t see much of that in the ghetto.”

  “As I said in the paper, sir, I don’t mean the comparison to fit perfectly. However, if one could increase the purchasing power of Negroes it would go a long way to sustain the present prosperity of this country.”

  I had by 1950 abandoned my notion that the Great Depression would inevitably return. I still believed in the Business Cycle, however. I was terrified of it.

  “We may be going into a bit of a recession,” he said, scowling more deeply, “but we now know a lot more than we did twenty years ago about containing such events.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In any case, you are quite right that improving the quality of education among the Negroes is absolutely essential. … All in all this is a very intelligent and creative paper. The department is pleased with your work. You do not use your patent creativity as a substitute for rigorous analysis.”

  The hell I didn’t, but I let that go.

  “Thank you, Mr. Tennant.”

  “What are your, uh, plans upon graduation, Mr., uh, O’Malley?”

  “I already have a position, sir, with a downtown accounting firm. I will continue to work for them.”

  “Accounting?” His thick eyebrows rose in disbelief.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Young man, you have enormous talent and the discipline necessary to harness that talent. While accounting is not without its creative aspects, I must tell you in all candor that it is the opinion of this department that your abilities would be wasted in such a profession.”

  “Oh.”

  “Moreover, I have been authorized to offer you a full-tuition scholarship and, uh, some kind of financial aid for the pursuit of a doctorate at this University. I should think, on the basis of this paper,” he brandished it again, “that you might like to study the economic revival in West Germany.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you find that offer attractive?” he demanded.

  Frightening.

  “Yes, sir.”

  How could I tell this man that because I was a Depression child I didn’t believe in taking chances in any aspect of my life?

  “It surprises you?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  He paused, then said, “Perhaps this department should have made clearer to you its, uh, interest in your work. In any event, I’m sure you will want time to think before you make a decision. The offer is not exactly open-ended, but it will be on the table,” he dropped my paper on his desk, “for another couple of years.”

  It was time for my quick tongue to operate again.

  “I am not only surprised, Mr. Tennant, I am very grateful for the department’s vote of confidence. I would be very interested indeed in studying the situation in Germany. However, as you say, I will have to think about it and discuss it with my family.”

  I knew what they’d say, so I really wouldn’t tell them about it. Nor Rosemarie. I’d take time to appear to think so as not to offend the department unnecessarily. The Chicago Irish never burn bridges.

  “Excellent, Mr. O’Malley.” He rose and actually extended his hand. “We’ll be expecting to hear from you.”

  I left his office dazed. I was no academic. I didn’t want to be an academic. Certainly not an intell
ectual. I wanted a secure controlled life, didn’t I? Why should I be flattered because a bunch of ivory tower intellectuals thought I would fit into their world?

  I remembered a conversation I’d had a few months before with my father.

  “Dad, what was it like when the Depression hit you and Mom?”

  He had looked up from blueprints over which he had been puzzling. “Uhm? What was it like?” he mused. “Well, like a combination of a tornado and an earthquake, I guess. Everything was swept away and the ground collapsed beneath us.”

  “How could you go on?”

  He put aside the blueprints and glanced up at me. “How could we not, Chuck? We had each other, we had Jane and you. We were a lot poorer but still happy. It wasn’t like the famine hitting Ireland in 1847.”

  “Did you think it would ever end? Did you really believe that your ship would come in?”

  He had laughed—the big hearty laugh for which all of us O’Malleys loved him.

  “Certainly not! Then it did, a whole convoy of ships. They’re still coming in. A lot of men my age attribute it all to their ability and intelligence. Truth is that it was pure luck. We happened to be alive at the right time.”

  “Do you think something like that will happen again, the tornado and the earthquake together?”

  “We journey with our fingers crossed, Chucky. If it happens it will happen. We’ll still have each other and the four of you and a bunch of grandchildren probably and our friends and our music. If it does happen again it will be different. We understand now that life can be tragic and that we can absorb tragedy. … We lost all our money. Family is more important than money.”

  I had wanted to argue further and then thought better of it.

  As I entered the reading room of Harper Library, I resolved that I would certainly not tell Rosemarie about the interview.

  She looked up at me as I joined her at our usual study table and frowned.

  “You look like it was bad news,” she whispered.

  “Not bad really,” I replied.

  “Then why do you look unhappy? Let’s get out of this mausoleum and go someplace where we can talk.”

  There weren’t many places to talk either in Harper Library or in the adjoining social science building. We ended up on the first floor looking out the pseudogothic windows on the torrent of melted snow rushing down Fifty-ninth Street in a desperate effort to get to Lake Michigan.