The jukebox reminded us that “diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”
Rosemarie brushed her ring possessively.
“Do you feel bad that you’re not over there fighting?”
“No. I did my time. I feel bad that Christopher and Leo are over there and that, if this foolish thing doesn’t stop, Vince and Ed and all my friends will be over there too.”
The American public was supporting the war, as it always did when the war was new and the casualties were light. If the war stretched on and more and more young men were killed, then the people would turn against it.
Chris had been in the Western Pacific before the invasion. Leo was there now too. Since the First Marine Division had not been in combat yet, there was obviously something afoot. I prayed every night for both of them.
I accepted the conventional wisdom that we had to draw a line beyond which Stalin could not go. But I hated the war and had begun my pilgrimage toward opposition to war—at least to long overseas wars fought by draft armies. My hatred for the war was based on the fact that my generation had to fight it—my friends, my classmates at St. Ursula’s and Fenwick and Notre Dame and Chicago. I was very happy that I would not have to join them.
Coward?
Never said I wasn’t.
Christopher had sent me one brief note.
Can’t say where I am or what’s up. Action soon I think.
I’m scared. Pray for me. Love to Rosie.
Chris.
I called Jane Devlin to ask whether she had heard from Leo.
“Lunkhead called our house at Lake Geneva before he left. I wasn’t home. He left a message. It was a week before anyone told me that he’d called. I don’t know what the message was.”
She sounded so sad, almost like she had lost him already.
“Any letter?”
“No… it was kind of a strange relationship, Chuck. We loved each other, I think. Mostly at the Lake in the summer. We weren’t close when we were in Chicago.”
That was weird, but who was I to talk about a weird relationship with a woman?
“You didn’t break up or anything like that?”
“I don’t think so. We were very close and not that close at all. He didn’t invite me to his graduation from Loyola. I guess they didn’t give him time in June before they sent him to camp somewhere. … I’m worried sick about him.”
I promised her my prayers.
“I hear that you and Rosemarie are engaged. Congratulations!”
“A lot of people are saying that. She has a diamond and she claims I gave it to her. So I guess we’re engaged.”
“Same old Chucky.”
Her laugh was sad and lonely. My heart ached for her.
It had been a bad summer. The Catholic War Veterans’ softball league had dried up. The vets were now for the most part responsible husbands and fathers. Some of them were back in service. They had stayed in the active reserves to make a few extra dollars and now would be in harm’s way again. None of my crowd were at the Magic Tap anymore. The Greenwood Community had collapsed, as communes do. Some of the members had been called back into the service; others were threatened with the draft. They were fighting one another over ideology; the Pope’s condemnation of the New Theology had disillusioned them. Many of them never finished their dissertations and were teaching at small Catholic colleges. Of those who did finish, only one or two had distinguished careers. There would be many more young Catholics at the University in later years, some of them destined to be brilliant scholars. But the enthusiasm of that first wave was never matched.
I had taken my classes at the University and worked at O’H and O’H. My parents had proposed to provide me with the money for a seat on the Board of Trade—the last refuge for a young Irish Catholic male who didn’t seem to be qualified for anything else. Rosemarie was behind it, of course. I had procrastinated. Wait till after the wedding, I had argued.
“Chucky, dear, you don’t seem like a young man who is engaged to be married at a Christmas wedding.”
“I’m worried, Mom.”
“Poor dear, you always worry too much. You laugh a lot and cut up, but deep down inside you’re a worrier. That’s a shame because you’ll be happy with Rosemarie … eventually.”
That settled that.
Nevertheless, I continued to worry.
About marriage, about the war, about my friends, about Peg and Vince, about the future. I didn’t hang out anywhere, except one or two nights a week with Rosemarie at Petersen’s.
The North Korean army was far better trained and equipped than Americans had anticipated. They had wiped out the Twenty-fourth Division, the first American outfit to arrive in Korea, and pushed us back into a small enclave around the port of Pusan at the bottom end of Korea. However, we had held them there and there were rumors of a counterattack.
That meant the First Marines and Leo and Christopher.
The Twenty-fourth had been part of the Army of Occupation in Japan, no more prepared for battle then we had been in Bamberg. No wonder that our infantry broke and ran—“bugged out,” as they called it—at the first sign of an enemy.
“You’re worried about them, aren’t you, Chucky?” Rosemarie asked me that night at Petersen’s.
She touched my hand with her fingers and sent a shot of warm electricity through my body. Would her touch always do that to me?
“I guess so.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“Do you remember when Dad was at Fort Leonard Wood in 1941 and likely to go to New Guinea or some other terrible place?”
“Sure! You said he would be a menace to all the troops, including himself.”
“And a certain obnoxious little ten-year-old said that if I knew so much why didn’t I do something about it.”
She colored and lowered her eyes. “I can’t imagine who that would have been.”
“You don’t remember saying that?”
“It sounds like me, Chuck, but I don’t remember.”
A remark that changed my life and she doesn’t even remember!
“Then you don’t know what I did?”
She shook her head.
“I went over to see the Congressman and got Dad transferred to Fort Sheridan where he belonged.”
“You did? Chuck, how wonderful! And you were only thirteen!”
“Yeah, so the Congressman asked me if I played football and I said I did, which was true. I didn’t say I was fourth string quarterback on a team with three strings, and that’s how I got into that comedy of errors when we beat Mount Carmel for the Catholic league championship in 1945.”
“You beat Carmel, Chucky, all by yourself!”
There was no longer any point in arguing. Even Rosemarie, who knew the facts better than anyone, had reinterpreted them. The facts were that I was a mascot and the holder for kicks. When the real quarterbacks were wiped out by injuries and the flu, they sent me in with orders not to call my own play, of which there was no danger in any event. The team moved down the field toward the Mount Carmel goal line by dint of my skillfully keeping out of their way. On the last play the Carmel defenders broke through our line. In sheer terror, I threw a pass in the direction of no one. Some idiot blocked it and it fell on my head and then into my unwilling hands. I saw this ten-foot monster—Ed Murray, as it later turned out—coming toward me and I ran for my life. He hit me like a locomotive. I flew into the air and the ball flew out of my hands, according to the ref only after I broke the plane of the goal line.
Somewhere there must be movies that show the truth.
“You’re sure you don’t remember telling me that if I was so smart I would do something about it?”
“I don’t. But I was a terrible little bitch in those days. … Oh, you think you should do something about Vince and Leo and Christopher and Ed!”
I shrugged and slurped up the rest of my first malt. The young waitress, knowing the game, promptly replaced it.
“That’s ri
diculous, Chuck. You can’t assume responsibility for everyone.”
I shrugged again.
The jukebox played “C’est la Vie,” which didn’t help my mood.
“I sent Timmy Boylan an airmail invitation to our wedding,” I said. “I put in a note saying that we would expect him.”
“Do you think he’ll come?”
“No. But he’ll know we haven’t forgotten him.”
“Are you marrying me to save me, Chuck?”
Bad question. Wrong time. Maybe I was.
“I’m marrying you because I think you’ll be a good lay!”
“Chucky Ducky!” She turned purple. “What would the good April say if she heard you!”
“Something like ‘Well, darling, that is one of the things men, poor dears, want from their wives, isn’t it!’”
We both laughed.
I was pleased with myself. I had avoided the question.
“Well, Chucky Ducky?”
“Well what?”
“Do you think I will be a good lay?”
The music changed to “Younger Than Springtime,” our song. We began to sing it, an obligation we always honored. Like everyone else who witnessed our little act, a musical comedy come to life, the Petersen’s people applauded.
“Well… ?” she persisted after the applause died.
“Certainly you will. The point is, Rosemarie, I’m marrying you because I love you.”
I wasn’t so sure that I had the faintest idea what love meant.
It was an evening like the whole summer. I felt miserable after Rosemarie dropped me off at the O’Malley house on East Avenue and drove off to “our” place on Euclid, where she was living some of the time so she could supervise the construction.
I knelt by my bed. The words would not come. All I could say to God was “Help!”
Three days later the X Corps, which included the First Marines, landed at Inchon in the most brilliant American military tactic in history. They recaptured Seoul, the capital of Korea, and joined with the Eighth Army, which was driving up from a breakout at Pusan. The North Korean army was destroyed. We had won the war. There was nothing to worry about.
I could not have been more wrong. Without asking anyone’s permission, General Douglas MacArthur crossed into North Korea and drove toward the Yalu River border with China—the worst mistake in American military history. The Chinese repeated their warnings to stay away from their border. MacArthur did not listen. He was so popular in America that no one dared to try to stop him. The First Marines landed at Wonsan on the east coast of Korea and marched toward the Yalu. Then, in the snow and the wind and the bitter cold, a hundred thousand Chinese troops attacked. Despite plenty of warnings, MacArthur was caught by surprise.
The First Marines were trapped in mountains at the Chosun reservoir and buried in snow and cold.
9
I guess I don’t have to say that Rosemarie and I were utterly unprepared for marriage.
We were not even smart enough to know that we were unprepared. Thus, when Father John Raven suggested we make one of the new pre-Cana conferences, we agreed, more to humor John than because we thought we needed to plan our married life together.
Pre-Cana was a cautious Catholic attempt at marriage education, progressive by the standards of the Church then, simple-minded and chauvinist by the standards of today, and inadequate in terms of the problems our generation of husband and wives was going to face.
The Church once again was doing too little, too late, for its laity.
Our pre-Cana was scheduled for the week before Halloween, the first anniversary of my first tennis triumph over Rosemarie at Skelton Park. We still played at least once a week, despite the activity of trying to finish school and prepare for the wedding, mostly at Rosemarie’s insistence.
“I’m not letting my husband get out of shape,” she asserted.
I won an occasional set, but not on the anniversary Saturday. The angel Gabriel could not have beaten Rosemarie that day.
The next day, after I turned off the broadcast of the Chicago Cardinals game, Rosemarie and I walked over to St. Ursula’s for the first part of the three-day conference.
When the priest began his talk at the Sunday afternoon session, he said, “The mark of success of a good pre-Cana is the number of men and women who cancel their marriage after the conference.” The participants laughed, some nervously. Rosemarie and I joined in the laughter.
My laugh might have been a little nervous because I knew it was too late to cancel anything.
We were both too young to marry. If any of my children had told me that they planned marriage at our ages, I would have been profoundly offended. Fortunately none of them did. We understood nothing about the strains of the common life. We never discussed money, though it was obvious that we had very different attitudes toward it and would bitterly disagree about whether any of Rosemarie’s money could be used for our family needs.
We had been raised together. We had spent many hours together in the year since I had been expelled from Notre Dame. We had argued about Plato and Goethe, Augustine and Freud, William James and Thomas Aquinas. Rosemarie had won most of the arguments, I had won a few. But neither of us understood much about the meaning of life. Or about one another. Despite our long acquaintance and our intimate friendship we hardly knew each other at all.
Nor had we discussed sex. We knew we wanted it. We knew we would like it. We were convinced that we would never tire of it. Unlike most devout Catholic young women of her age, Rosemarie did not seem to be afraid of sex or inhibited in her sexual feelings. What else did we need?
She wanted five children, which seemed to me a nice number.
And we certainly did not and would not and probably could not discuss her drinking problem—if that’s what it was.
That Sunday afternoon, in the stuffy, tile-lined parish hall in the basement of St. Ursula’s school, the handsome young priest explained to us that the man was the head of the family and the wife the heart of it.
“Many Catholic couples feel,” he said, “that the wife should quit working at the time of the marriage. It is not good for the head of the house to have to depend even for a few months on his wife’s income to support the family, especially if, God forbid, she should make more money than he does. That would be a disastrous beginning for a marriage. You’re going to quit as soon as you’re pregnant anyway, and that’ll be only a few months after your marriage, maybe even when you come home from your honeymoon. So why not quit before you’re married and avoid the conflicts of two-income families, of families where the wife thinks that because she has some money, she is also head of the family.
“That would be a terrible embarrassment to the husband and, worse still, would make it hard for the wife to play her God-given role as the warm, tender, affectionate member of the partnership.
“Some women think that they are doomed to second-class citizenship because they are the heart of the family and not the head. But doesn’t everyone know that the heart is more important than the head? Most men will admit that it is the love of their wives that keeps them going. If anyone is second-class in a family, it is the head, not the heart.”
The last is true enough, God knows, if your wife is Irish.
I didn’t and couldn’t, given my own background, accept the passive description of women implicit in the theory; it offended me.
Rosemarie merely giggled, hand over her mouth so as not to offend the others, especially the young women, who were feverishly writing in their notebooks, just as they had in their high school and college classrooms.
The “head and heart” theory was carried throughout his whole presentation and used to account for the “differences” between men and women.
Men were more rational, women more emotional.
An affronted snort from my future bride.
Women forgave more easily than men and were less likely to hold grudges.
Vigorous nod and a poke in my ribs.
<
br /> Men tended to be insensitive, women oversensitive.
A derisive grunt.
Men like to argue about differences. Women like to seek compromises.
A rare poke from my elbow.
Women are more affectionate, men more guarded emotionally.
A triumphant poke in return.
Time was allotted for questions after the priest’s talk—written questions.
Rosemarie scratched on the sheet that had been provided, “What if you’re smarter than your husband and he won’t admit it?”
I wrote, “What if your wife is oversexed?”
Neither question was read aloud by the priest.
He did, however, answer a lot of questions about birth control.
Sample: “Is oral intercourse permitted after marriage?”
We both gasped at that suggestion.
“Anything is permitted so long as the marriage act is completed in the proper fashion. But no man would want to impose on his wife something she finds repulsive. Often, of course, that kind of intercourse is simply another form of mutual masturbation—birth control, in other words.”
“What if,” Rosemarie whispered in my ear, “the wife wants it?”
“Then the husband is lucky,” I replied uneasily.
Birth control was the big issue. The priest’s answers were blunt: it perverted the purpose of marriage. The Church would never change on the issue. “Rhythm” was always a possibility for Catholics, though it was usually a sign of a lack of self-control, especially on the part of the husband. If married couples did not want to have as many children as God would give them, then they ought to sleep in different bedrooms.
The group stirred uneasily. They didn’t buy it.
“I should think five is enough, don’t you?” Rosie asked me as we were walking by the new church, now almost finished. “Do you think God really expects more?”
I hadn’t thought about it.
“It’s a full house.”
“And I bet He doesn’t like it when husband and wife sleep in separate bedrooms. He made them to sleep together, didn’t He?”
A Christmas Wedding Page 9
