“Are you sure, Chuck? It would be much better for you—”
“I’ll judge what will be better for me.”
She did not respond. I turned away from the window. She was sitting quietly on the couch, head bowed, arms folded across her chest, a prisoner waiting for sentence. My anger, still free-floating, unfocused, surged to escape. I shut it down. Mostly.
“Do you want to cancel it?”
“No, Chuck.” Her eyes flickered at me and then away. “Dear God, no.”
“Well then, shall we dismiss that alternative?”
“If you say so.”
“Why did you wait so long to tell me?”
“I was afraid.”
“Of what?” Why was I sounding like a district attorney? I was no virgin either. But that was different. …
“I don’t know. Of you. Of everything. You’re the only one I’ve told. And Father Raven. Last week. In Confession. He probably had no trouble figuring out who I was.”
“What did he say?” I slumped into the easy chair.
“He said that I didn’t commit any sins and that I shouldn’t worry about the bad confessions I thought I’d made when I didn’t confess… what happened.”
“Certainly, you didn’t sin,” I barked at her. “What else did John say?”
I wasn’t coping very well with her shattering announcement. In my defense I plead that I was twenty-two and it was 1950. Paternal abuse of girls and women was a crime of which we were unaware. Or that we tried to pretend was impossible. Even Freud had not believed his patients. Or had not wanted to believe them. Now it is a recognized “problem.” One woman out of every twenty is a victim of assault by a father or stepfather, though not all of them are assaulted as often or as destructively as Rosemarie.
“He said I was an innocent victim and that I needed sympathy and help, not punishment. I don’t know whether that’s true. I asked him whether I should tell my fiancé. He said that it was up to me, but I didn’t have to. And I said I felt obliged to because it would explain why I am crazy some of the time. And he asked what you would say.”
“And you told him what?” I snarled.
“I said I wasn’t sure.”
“Why weren’t you sure?” I shouted.
“I don’t know, Chuck. I just wasn’t.”
I took a deep breath. And then another.
“I may not be saying the right things, Rosemarie.” I lowered my voice several octaves. “Forgive me if I sound harsh. I don’t mean to. I want to be sympathetic and helpful.”
“Oh, Chuck—” her voice caught.
“Why don’t you tell me whatever you want to tell me.
“You’re so wonderful.” She still wouldn’t look at me.
“I doubt it.”
For some reason we both laughed.
“All right, I’ll try to repeat what I told Father Raven.” She paused, gathering her resources. “I can’t remember a time when Daddy wasn’t very affectionate with me. I think way back when I was little I enjoyed it. Then, in seventh grade maybe, what he did didn’t seem quite right. Too… too intimate. I suppose it gradually crossed the line without either of us realizing that he was going too far. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to stay away from him. Mom didn’t seem to notice or to want to notice.”
She stopped. Then her head slowly came up. “Oh, Chucky…”
“Do I look like I’m judging you? I don’t mean to.”
“No, not at all. Just the opposite. You look so kind.” I didn’t feel kind. “Should I go on?”
“It’s up to you.”
“I guess I have to. I mean, what bothers me is that I did love him and I did enjoy his affection and I liked to make him happy. At first… I don’t know… I might have encouraged him without thinking that it was wrong. Or maybe without knowing how wrong it was.”
“John Raven told you that you can’t do serious wrong without knowing fully what you’re doing?”
She smiled wanly. “Sure. He said that I should stop tormenting myself by worrying about the degree of my responsibility. He said that I was innocent. And I asked whether that meant mostly innocent or completely innocent.”
“And he said that no one is completely innocent?”
“You’re wonderful, Chucky. You really are. I’m so ashamed of myself for not trusting you before.”
“You’re innocent of that too, mostly innocent anyway. Maybe you’d better tell me whatever you think you should tell me and take yourself off the stove.”
“All right. I’ll try to be as brief as I can.” She choked back a sob and continued. “In fifth, sixth grade he was definitely, well, petting me. A lot. He was so pathetic, so hangdog, I felt sorry for him. I didn’t like what he was doing but I wanted to make him happy. You can’t imagine what a weak, despondent little man he is. Then in seventh grade… well, I suppose you could say he began to rape me. I didn’t understand what was happening, not very often. I didn’t know anything about sex. I didn’t even know that what we were doing was sex. I was frightened and there was no one to talk to. I still felt sorry for him and wanted to make him happy. But”—her tone turned to a fervent plea—“I never took pleasure in it, Chuck. Never. I mean there was never any…” She paused, flustered.
“Orgasm is the clinical word, Rosemarie.”
“Thanks. It was never like that, never.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t You don’t think I would hold it against you if it were, do you?” An impulse, way down in a hidden basement of my soul, urged me to put my arm around her thin, dejected shoulders. I couldn’t embrace her, not yet. She seemed spoiled, spoiled for the rest of her life. I was bound to her now by ties that could never be ended, chains that could never be broken.
“I know that. I guess I’m saying what I have to say.” She paused for me to respond and then went on. “Anyway … it went on for three years, not very often, as I said, but still too often. Finally, when I was a freshman and had figured out what was happening, I made him stop. It almost broke his poor heart. He said he thought we were going to be good friends forever—”
“My God!”
“I know. It was crazy, but somehow he thought… I don’t know what he thought. Anyway, he tried again, often, but I managed to stop him with a feel or a hug or a kiss. It was so … I don’t know, so cheap and slimy. Remember that time when you saved my life at Geneva and then kissed me in front of the fireplace?”
“I’m not likely ever to forget it”—I found myself grinning—“Rosemarie, not ever.”
She blushed at the memory, the happy memory. “I knew that was the way it should be when a man and woman love one another and that what had happened between Daddy and me must never happen again. So you really saved me twice that day.”
“I’m glad I did.”
Savior, hero, knight, fool, clown, comedian.
“So I fended him off, more or less, till I was a junior. Then when Mom died he became determined again. I told him that either he left the house or I would. He said that he wouldn’t permit me ever to be separated from him. I said that if he touched me again I would kill him. I can be very angry when I want. Never at you.” She smiled shyly. “He believed me. I think I might have killed him too. I mean, I heard him talking to his friends one night about professional killers. I thought I had the right to defend myself.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“I guess that’s all.”
“How did you manage to live with it, Rosemarie? How did you… keep it all inside yourself?”
“I pretended, Chuck. I’m very good at pretending. I walled it up in a corner of my life. After it stopped I told myself that it had not really happened. I tried to forget about it. It was over. I had stopped it. My confessions were not really sacrilegious. God still loved me.”
“And John Raven agreed.”
“I had to tell you. Are you displeased that I did?”
I considered that question carefully. I wished she had kept her dirty secret to herself. Now it was my b
urden as well as hers. At least I knew what it was that I was carrying.
“I’m glad you trusted me enough to tell me.”
She rose from her couch, walked across the room, curled up at my feet, and wrapped her arms around my knees. “What are you feeling now, Chuck?”
“Anger.”
“At me?”
“Certainly not. At him.”
The sick little bastard had destroyed the life of a beautiful woman.
“Don’t be. If you only knew how sad and miserable he is. … Any other feelings?”
“Pain.”
“I’m sure it hurts you.”
“Not my pain,” I said roughly, still trying to focus and understand my emotions.
“Whose, then?”
My hand found her long, smooth black hair. “Yours. Hurt. Fear. Shame. Humiliation. I wish I could make it all go away.”
“Thank you, Chuck.” Finally she was able to weep. “You’ve healed a lot of it already.” She pressed my hand to her lips and kissed my fingers.
Charles Cronin O’Malley as substitute for Jesus.
Bottom-of-the-barrel substitute. Forth-string substitute on a team with only three strings.
I bent over and kissed her smooth, cool forehead. She smelled of evergreen. The tree in the corner of her tiny living room glowed hopefully.
“I absolutely refuse to let this interfere with your happiness, Chuck… if you still want me?”
“Let me be as clear as I can.” I tried to make my tenor voice sound firm and resolute. “I do still want you and that is that.”
“Then I will be a good wife and a good mother and a good bride.” Her lips tightened and her shoulders squared. “I won’t let the past interfere with the present or the future. Definitely. Nothing that has happened will prevent me from being a good… lover. Nothing.”
If raw willpower could make it so, then it would be so.
“You shouldn’t feel that you have to try too hard.” I touched her cheek. “Anyway”—a brilliant idea hit, brilliant for me that is—“no one who has any sense of how passionate a person you are Rosemarie, could doubt that eventually you’ll be a wonderful lover. Give yourself time. You don’t have to be instantly perfect”—another smashing notion—“because I know I won’t be.”
“If”—she sighed sadly—“you’ll just be a little patient with me.”
“Certainly not”—I was on a roll—“unless you promise that you’ll be more than a little patient with me.”
She smiled through her tears. “Fair enough.”
That was the extent of our premarital conversation about marital sex.
“Okay?” My fingers remained on her cheek. My emotions were still a tangled mess, more fury than anything else.
“What are you thinking now, Chuck?”
“It’s kind of strange.”
“I won’t mind.”
“There was a time last winter when we had started to go to concerts and occasionally to the College Inn at the Sherman House…”
“When you started to dance with me…”
“In spite of myself. Anyway, just before that and a little after too, I thought we were good friends and nothing more. We studied together, we joked together, we had fun together. I told myself that I wanted you as a friend for the rest of my life. Being friends was so calm and uncomplicated.”
“And it would have worked fine if we didn’t both have bodies that got in the way.”
“How odd of God to have made us with bodies, huh? So, now don’t be hurt, what I’m thinking now is that I feel like something terrible has happened to a friend. Does that make any sense?”
“A lot of sense.” She squeezed my hand. “I love you, friend, I’ll always love you. Let’s be friends and lovers forever.”
Later that afternoon I found Jim Clancy in his office at the Board of Trade, his tie askew, his face unshaven, a glass of whiskey in his hand.
I yanked him out of his chair by the tie and clamped my hands around his thick little neck.
“I know what you’ve been doing,” I whispered softly. “If you try it again, I’ll kill you. Stay away from her. Stay away from us. I don’t want to see you ever again. If you come to our wedding, you’re a dead man, understand?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he stammered, his face turning purple.
“Yes, you do.” I kept my voice deadly calm. “And don’t think I’ll kill you in such a way as to get caught. No one will know who did it.”
“I just want to be friends with you,” he begged. “Can’t we forget about the past and just be friends?”
Tears began to stream down the pathetic little man’s face.
“Try to be friends once”—I threw him back into his chair—“and you’re a corpse. Understand?”
He bent his head over the desk and sobbed.
I walked out of the office and closed the door gently behind me. I knew I had not seen the last of Jim Clancy.
11
On Christmas Eve, before Midnight Mass at St. Ursula’s, the crazy O’Malleys gathered around Mom’s harp in our house at East and Greenfield, a harp now the center of attention in her “music room.” We were all there, Jane proudly pregnant for the second time and Ted even more proudly protective; Peg and Vince, who was home on leave; Michael, a tall, quiet priest-to-be; and my shy, distant bride. Michael could not be best man at the wedding because the seminary forbade that (might give bad thoughts!), but he would be the altar server at Mass.
Vince was in uniform, confident and smiling. Peg, more a young April than ever, refused even to think about the possibility of his being sent to Korea. I envied them their seemingly simple, uncomplicated love—though not so much, antihero that I was, that I would have gone back into the service on a trade.
I wrapped my arm around Rosemarie’s shoulders as we sang “O Holy Night”; she was a supple gift, a live teddy bear who felt warm and good in your arms, but not a desirable woman into whose body I would shortly have to enter.
I was now not only worried. I was frightened. I had agreed with her that it would look bad if her father didn’t give her away. How could we ever explain to my parents if he were excluded from the wedding party. I clenched my fist every time I thought of him.
I must have hid it well.
“They blend beautifully, don’t they?” Mom plucked some strings of the harp. “Just like they always did.”
“Let’s see how well they blend next year,” Peg said with a broad grin.
Jane joined the fun. “I’m surprised that Chuck doesn’t look scared. Ted certainly did before our marriage.”
“What’s there to be frightened of?” Michael demanded, “Would sweet little Rosie scare anyone?”
“Brides are always scary,” Dad observed wisely, “especially when they are sweet and beautiful.”
“Me, scary? Quiet, self-effacing Rosemarie?”
General laughter in which I joined, though I didn’t think the conversation funny.
“Now, dears, you should all drink your eggnog while there’s still time so you won’t break your fast for Holy Communion.”
“To Chuck and Rosemarie.” Dad raised the Waterford tumbler. “May they always be as happy as his mom and dad.”
We drank the toast and Rosemarie, flushed and teary, kissed them both. I shook hands, rather formally I fear, with Dad and kissed Mom.
Our marriage had been their dream for years. “Poor little Rosie” would now officially be a member of our family. Strange, mouthy little Chucky would have a wife who would take care of him and love him despite his alleged complexities.
All would live happily ever after.
Eventually we would disappoint them. There would come a Christmas when… but I banished that picture from my head.
Rosemarie drank too much eggnog and could barely walk a straight line to the Communion rail at the first Midnight Mass in my father’s prize-winning church. No one seemed to notice. But she was led off to one of our many guest rooms a
fter Mass.
“No point in her sleeping alone in that drafty old house on Euclid Avenue,” Mom remarked soothingly.
“Only a few more nights without someone else there,” Peg said with a laugh. “I mean if you count Chucky as someone.”
Rosemarie was being married from our home, not from the apartment in Hyde Park nor from the house on Menard. No one discussed the reason for these arrangements. I wondered if, at some level in their serene souls, my family knew about what Jim Clancy had done to their foster daughter.
If they did, they’d never admit it even to themselves.
John Raven was no help when I cornered him in his rectory study on Saint Stephen’s Day. (Under Monsignor Mugsy, the second floor of the rectory was no longer off-limits to laity.)
“Terrified, Chuck? I don’t blame you.” He rocked back and forth with laughter. “The girl will drive you out of your mind. One surprise after another all the days of your life.”
“I’m not exactly terrified, Father.”
“No, but you feel that if you could, you’d call the whole thing off?”
“Maybe only delay it a few months.”
“Too late, my friend, too late!”
“I know that—” I spoke irritably—“but I don’t think it’s very funny.”
“You will eventually.” He stopped laughing long enough to light his pipe. “Most people marry strangers, Chuck; after the wedding come the surprises. Sometimes they’re quite unpleasant surprises. Sometimes … well, they go in the opposite direction.”
“I’ve known her all my life, Father.” I shrugged. “How could I know her any better?”
“Because Rosie’s been around all your life, you can deceive yourself into thinking you know her. She’s a very special girl, Chuck. Larger than life. Magic.”
This was a new theme: Magic Chuck and Magic Rosemarie.
“Beautiful and smart,” I said hesitantly, “and sometimes mysterious and sometimes hilariously funny …”
“That doesn’t even begin to describe her. Take my word for it, young man, it’s going to be a roller coaster, a very pleasant roller coaster, I might add.”
A Christmas Wedding Page 11
