I could only agree.
“I don’t think the priests or the nuns know what they’re talking about. Sex is for holding husband and wife together as well as having kids, isn’t it?”
“Seems reasonable to me.”
Which is as far as we went on that one.
Indeed it was the only discussion we had the first day of our pre-Cana conference.
Monday night we were back in the parish hall to hear the talk by the married couple, a sleek-looking lawyer and his worn-out wife. Small wonder that she was worn out: she had born thirteen children, all of them alive and well.
Much of their presentation was devoted to jokes about having that many kids around the house. They were good speakers and the jokes were funny and it was patent that they loved each other very much. It was also patent, however, that most of the group could not identify with them.
One question: “It’s all right for you to have thirteen children because you’re a professional man and make a lot of money. But what about those who don’t?”
Answer: No one has that much money, but God will provide for those who trust him.
Another question (from Rosemarie): “Suppose that the wife has inherited some money. Would it be wrong for the family to use it?”
Answer: It would threaten the husband’s position as head of the home. Much better that the money be saved for the college education of the children.
An angry snort from Rosemarie and a “See!” from me.
“Do you want to live in an apartment instead of my house?”
“You win.”
That was our only discussion about the second part of the pre-Cana. To be fair, the speakers were wise and witty and had many sensible things to say about dealing with each other’s moods, about sex as a renewal of love, and about financial problems.
Neither of us listened.
And we were, I think, the green wood. Most of what was said went in one ear and out the other. I think now that such wisdom would have been much better received in the second year of marriage. The problem, however, then as now, would be to get husband and wife to come.
Wednesday night was devoted to talks on SEX! by two M.D.s, one for the men and one for the women. I mean, you can’t have a man and his future wife hear about sex and even discuss it in the same room, can you?
My doctor knew all the technical terms for the relevant organs. But he didn’t seem to know anything about women. Nor, to judge by the questions, did most of the other grooms-to-be know anything about them. The session scared the hell out of me.
I was grateful to Trudi for what I had learned from her. Again I wondered what had happened to her. It was an academic question by then, almost as if Trudi had been a person I met in a storybook and not in real life.
“Learn anything?” I asked Rosemarie as we walked through the dark streets of Austin back to Oak Park and our house (she was living at our place almost all the time now).
“Men are horny beasts.”
“You knew that.”
“And women’s job is to keep them in line.”
“Which you do by…?”
“Manipulating them. Give them something but not everything. They’re insatiable.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Not about my future husband.” She put her arm around me.
“I’m probably insatiable.”
“The way you’re insatiable I won’t mind.”
Thus for our marriage preparation.
Like everyone else, we stumbled toward consummation with our eyes closed.
10
Rosemarie offered me an escape hatch from marriage.
I desired her. I admired her. I wanted her, I guess. She still drank too much and had a crazy father. And she was only nineteen. I had lots of second thoughts—and third and fourth and fifth thoughts too. But I went along with the drift, driven by a mix of lust and inertia.
Maybe a little bit of love too.
She opened the hatch the same week we attended the funeral Masses for Christopher Kurtz and Leo Kelly.
The phone had rung at our house on Thanksgiving afternoon. As always I was the only one to hear it. It was Mrs. Kurtz.
“Charles, I knew you would want to hear the news.” Her voice was calm, controlled, but I knew the news before she spoke it. “We just heard from the Defense Department. Christopher was killed during the retreat from the Chosun reservoir.”
“Dead?” I said in disbelief. “He can’t be!”
“I feel that way too, Charles. But I’m afraid it’s true. The memorial Mass will be at St. Gertrude’s next Monday.”
“I’ll be there. We’ll pray for you and the family, Mrs. Kurtz.”
“Thank you, Charles, I’m sure we’ll need those prayers.”
So simple. So quick. So devastating. I would never have a friend like him again.
He had been promoted to captain in the field, I would learn later, and had died covering the retreat of his outfit in the face of the Chinese attack that Douglas MacArthur had foolishly brought on.
They awarded him the Navy Cross. That did not bring him back for any of us.
Even today I miss him. Even today I feel the numb shock of his loss. We will not see his like again.
At least I won’t.
Sometimes at night even now, I wake up from a dream in which he is still alive and we are both laughing together as we did in the spring of 1949.
And, in truth, even today I feel that he is not absent from my life.
I must have looked like a zombie when I returned to the dining room.
“Chuck!” Rosemarie screamed. “What’s wrong?”
“Christopher is dead,” I slumped into my chair and spoke automatically. “Killed in action at the reservoir. The funeral is Monday at St. Gertrude’s.”
Rosemarie sobbed in my arms. “I loved him almost as much as you did,” she cried.
“He loved you too, Rosemarie.”
“He’ll watch over our marriage, won’t he?”
Tears in my eyes, I could only nod. He’d have his work cut out for him.
“Maybe we should stop the Thanksgiving dinner,” Dad said tentatively.
“Christopher would be the last to want that,” I said.
“We should be grateful”—Rosemarie’s voice was muffled by my chest—“that we had him with us as long as we did.”
There were few dry eyes in the crowded church on Monday morning. Christopher had more close friends than any of us had realized. He was a magic young man.
He should have been a priest, I thought again. And that way he’d still be alive.
Cordelia had flown in from Paris for the Mass and stood next to Rosemarie in St. Gertrude’s church. My friends from Notre Dame were all there, sad over the death of someone they all had liked and worried about their own fates.
When the final prayers were over we walked slowly back to our cars.
“How is Paris?” Rosemarie asked Cordelia.
“All I could have hoped for. I work very hard and I’m still trying to get used to living in a strange country, but I’m doing quite well. … You’ve settled on a Christmas wedding?”
“I think we have. … Rosemarie?”
“You know very well, Charles Cronin O’Malley, that it will be the Saturday after Christmas!”
“That’s right! Why do I keep forgetting?”
We needed to laugh. But we were unable to do so.
“Congratulations to both of you,” Cordelia said. “I know you’ll both be very happy.”
“I’m sure Christopher will take care of us,” Rosemarie said fervently.
Before we separated, I probed Cordelia about her concert career.
“I’m working with Madame Boulanger. She’s very nice but very demanding. Today makes it all seem a little absurd. None of us have much time, do we?”
“We all live under death sentences,” Rosemarie agreed grimly.
“What do you think?” I asked my bride-to-be.
�
�I think she’s having a very hard time.”
“You were sweet to her.”
“I can be sweet on occasion, Chucky Ducky.”
We were hardly in the house on East Avenue when the phone rang.
“It’s for you, Chuck!”
Jane Devlin.
“I heard today, Chuck, that Leo was killed in Korea. His family didn’t bother to tell me. Mass at St. Ursula’s tomorrow.”
“Dear God, Jane!”
“I’ll be all right, Chuck. I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me.”
Her hollow voice made me worry all the more.
“They’re giving him the Medal of Honor.”
Mild, soft-spoken, serious Leo Kelly a war hero!
“That’s nice,” I said lamely.
“It doesn’t bring him back. I would never have had him anyway.”
“Why not?”
“There was a terrible accident at the lake last Memorial Day. Four of us in a car ran into a tree. Leo was nearby. He pulled me out and tried to save the others. He burned his hands trying to open the door. Then the car blew up. The parents of the dead kids looked for someone to blame. The sheriff arrested Leo and beat him. Then Jerry Keenan—you know, Packy Keenan’s father—made them stop because Leo was not responsible. He went off the next day for the Marines”—she gasped to overcome a sob—“and he never called me after that.”
I mumbled something. What could I say?
“Thank you, Chuck, he admired you very much.”
“Leo?” Rosemarie said as I joined the others.
“Another funeral tomorrow … at St. Ursula’s.” Everyone in the room wept. Poor Peg sobbed hysterically. Rosemarie and the good April hugged her.
I wanted to swear.
I muttered only to myself, “Goddamn war!”
We all went to the Mass the next morning, the womenfolk in black. The mourners filled every pew in St. Ursula’s most of them weeping. Monsignor Mugsy struggled to contain his tears. John Raven preached. I’m sure he was wonderful, but I don’t think I heard a word of it.
Leo Kelly would never have thought that he had meant so much to so many people.
After Mass, Rosemarie and I tried to find Jane.
“I wonder if she came.”
“I don’t think so, Rosemarie. She sounded so hollow yesterday.”
“Hollow?”
“Someone deprived even of the right to grieve.”
“How terrible. … If you don’t mind, I’ll spend the rest of the day with Peggy.”
“Good idea.”
On the Thursday following Thanksgiving, the last week of our semester at Chicago, she cornered me after my late afternoon class.
“Come to my apartment for supper?” Her expression was somber and grim, her color the same as the gray of her jersey dress. “I have something to discuss with you.”
“Sure.” I felt my stomach do a tentative half turn. “Anything serious?”
“Probably. You’ll have to decide that for yourself.”
Sounded like Clancy was about to lower a boom.
I went to the library to study for an hour, accomplished nothing, and then walked in the chill rain to her apartment.
The last time she had summoned me to such a conversation, the subject was her demand that I quit my job or at least take a leave of absence till March. “If you’re studying full-time and working full-time, what time will you have for your bride? I’m working every day to fix the house and all you’ll do is sleep in it. I won’t tolerate that.”
I acquiesced, not really having any choice. She was not certain yet about her own academic future. She would ride out to the University with me every day for the winter quarter after our honeymoon. It didn’t make much difference to her whether she would finish the five remaining quarters for her degree. “It’s important for me to learn,” she contended. “And I intend to do that for the rest of my life. Degrees don’t make any difference.”
Not if you had as much money as she did—and as strong a dedication to reading. She had lost most of the weight she had put on during the spring and the summer.
“Too much on my mind to worry about eating,” she said, waving her hand dismissively.
She often didn’t show up for class during the autumn quarter because she was busy supervising the remodeling of our honeymoon house and trying to calm Peg.
“I’ll pass the exams anyway.” She waved off my concerns. “I’m learning more from redoing the house.” She returned to the interior design book she had been studying.
I looked around at the still empty living room of the old place. “It’s an awfully big house.”
“We’ll fill it up.”
I didn’t want to argue that point. I had already moved my photographic records into a spectacularly appointed darkroom Rosemarie had prepared in the basement of the house. I was sure, however, that she didn’t mean with photographs.
Peg was smiling gamely, even though she was worried sick about Vince. Like most of my classmates from Fenwick, he had been drafted for the Korean War. He hoped to get the weekend off for our wedding. If it looked like he was going to be sent overseas, he and Peg would be married before his departure, even if it meant moving the wedding up from its early June schedule.
Although MacArthur had squandered his victory at Inchon by invading North Korea, American leadership (including President Truman) was loath to bring the general to heel. The Chinese had entered the war, as they had promised they would if we pressed on to their borders at the Yalu River; and, despite his anguished pleas to start a war with China, MacArthur was forced to fall back to the “waist” of Korea. Only brilliant field leadership, particularly by General Almond of the X Corps, prevented the American retreat (“advance to the rear,” the Marines called it) from becoming a debacle. It looked like a long war.
The war had ended the five years of peace and prosperity after the end of the big war. My generation was devastated by the wholesale draft when we least expected it You cannot expect the same generation to fight two wars.
I did not think that I was in much danger. I would be called up only if there was general mobilization. Even with the defeat at the Yalu River, I doubted that there would be a general mobilization.
As I approached Rosemarie’s apartment on Kenwood that day in December in the cold rain, which was beginning to turn to snow, I devoutly thanked God that I had done my time in the military. Nothing could be quite as bad as the situation in which poor Vince found himself.
I took Rosemarie in my arms when she opened the door, intending … intending what, I don’t quite know.
“Please.” She squirmed away. “Later, if at all.”
Was she going to beg out of the marriage? My spirits soared. I really wanted out.
Then I felt depressed. Part of me, the demonic part, I suppose, didn’t want out at all.
She was beautiful and fragile and needed my help and my protection. If I was strong enough and resourceful enough and courageous enough, I could save her. I would save her.
I was mostly self-deceptive, not facing the truth that most of the time I was either a coward or a fool, especially with women.
I had to think, I had to take out my idea notebook and write down my master plan. My instincts, particularly when dealing with women, were almost nonexistent. To the extent that they did exist, they were untrustworthy.
That’s too harsh.
“We’ll work it out, Rosemarie,” I said, trying to sound reassuring.
“Will we?” she fired back at me. “Typical of your naïve Lockean optimism.”
Not bad for a put-down, huh?
I mean, how many of you can say you’ve been written off by your bride as a naïve Lockean optimist.
“I’m sorry,” I said, intimidated as always by her temper.
“Later,” she repeated. “After supper.”
She had been decorating a small Christmas tree in the corner of her front room. “Why decorate a tree when you’re not going to be here for Ch
ristmas?” I asked.
“Because I like to decorate trees.”
We had decided to keep the apartment in Hyde Park for the winter quarter anyway. Well, Rosemarie had decided.
“We might not want to take the long ride back to Euclid Avenue every night,” she announced on the day she informed me that we were going to keep the apartment, “especially if it’s snowing. And we might want it for other purposes.”
“We might. A man gets breakfast in bed in this place, as I remember.”
“Depends on what else happens in bed.”
I figured that perhaps this pre-Christmas command performance would be about our future sex life.
We ate ravioli and meatballs and talked about school and about my still-uncertain plan to continue graduate school.
“All right,” I said as I helped her to clear the table. “What’s up?”
“In the front room,” she said, “with our coffee.”
So I sat on her beige couch, Irish Belleek cup in front of me on the coffee table, next to a book about Vermeer.
“So?”
“So—” she stirred her coffee vigorously—“I think you ought not to marry me.”
“Why not?” I tried to keep my voice steady, neutral.
“I’m damaged goods, Chuck.” She was icy calm. There would be no tears tonight.
“Damaged goods?”
“You assume I’m a virgin, don’t you?”
“Not necessarily—” I began.
“Well, I’m not, I’ve had intercourse, oh, I suppose at least eight or nine times.”
“With different men?” Dear God, I didn’t want to sound like a prosecuting attorney.
“No. One man.”
“Who?”
“My father.”
“I’ll kill the bastard! I’ll cut off his balls and stuff them down his throat!” I ranted, clenching my fists and pacing the floor.
Big deal, huh? But what else do you say? Anyway, at the time I meant it. Or thought I did.
“No, you won’t,” she said sadly. “The question is whether you want to cancel the marriage.”
I stopped pacing long enough to look out the front window and watch the snowflakes melt on the pavement of Kenwood Avenue. Why were there always snowdstorms?
“Of course not.” The words rushed from my lips before I had a chance to think about them. Words didn’t matter anyway. Now there was no chance at all to escape the marriage.
A Christmas Wedding Page 10
