A priest’s-eye view of my bride. Priests, I knew, found women appealing, just like every other normal, healthy man. Since they knew so many women more than just superficially, I presumed that they had a better perspective than most men. So John Raven’s delight in Rosemarie seemed, well, strange. Almost as though he knew that, given different circumstances, he could love her too. I didn’t begrudge him that fantasy. Quite the contrary, he was entitled to it.
He knew about her father, did he not? It was under the seal of Confession, so he couldn’t talk about it; but did he have to pretend to an optimism about us that he couldn’t feel?
“Well, thanks for the reassurance, Father.”
I rose to leave, zipped up my jacket, pulled on my gloves.
He grinned, enormously pleased with the prospects of my downfall. “You think too much, Chuck, you spend too much time analyzing and examining your motives, you try to make the world fit your own outlines.”
“Sounds pretty bad.”
“Not at all. You’re a fine young man,” he said as he led me down the steps to the first floor of the rectory. “Intelligent, ambitious, generous, responsible. Maybe a little bit too conventional in reaction to your flamboyant parents…”
“Dull?” I pulled off my right glove to shake hands with him at the rectory door.
“And probably more gifted than any of you”—he ignored my self-deprecating comment—“in ways you don’t begin to understand yet. Your wife will challenge you to your limits. The surprises may rock you, but they’ll be good for you.”
“My larger-than-life, magic wife?” I shook his firm hand.
“Much larger than life and very magic.”
I left St. Ursula’s rectory more confused than ever. But happier.
After the rehearsal on Friday night Rosemarie once again offered me a chance to leave the sinking ship. We huddled together at the door of the church, shivering in the bitter wind as she told me I was making a terrible mistake.
It would be so easy to postpone the marriage till spring, perhaps a double wedding with Vince and Peg.
I opened my mouth to accept her offer.
Instead I said, “No.”
Could I possibly have refused to run for cover?
“No, what?” she said softly.
“NO!”
“You want to tell everyone that we’ve agreed to postpone the wedding?”
“NO means NO!”
I took her into my arms roughly.
“We will be married tomorrow morning, Rosemarie Helen McArdle Clancy. That is that. Till death do us part. Moreover, it’s not a terrible mistake at all. You’re a very special girl, Rosemarie. Larger than life. Magic. You will be a challenge and a delight for the rest of my life. I’m the luckiest man in the world!”
Who said that? I couldn’t possibly have said that! Could I? Like Peg says my mouth is faster than my mind.
It’s all your fault, I told God as I held my almost-wife to my chest. She leaned against me, breathing deeply, struggling to recover her composure.
Then someone told me something else brilliant to say. “I’m glad you gave me the final chance, Rosemarie, my love. Now I have no doubt what I want. And what I want is you. I want everything that you are, body and soul, hopes and fears, sorrows and joys. Tomorrow night I’m taking on the first taste of a mysterious and glorious meal.”
She giggled. “With chocolate ice cream for dessert?”
“And for salad too.”
So that was that.
I ran through the neighborhood that night, down the streets, through stores and bungalows, dodging in and out of doors and windows, scurrying behind curtains, hiding in empty rooms, racing across Austin Boulevard to Oak Park and then back to Chicago. I didn’t know who was chasing me but they were right behind. Wherever I went they followed after. Finally, at Austin and Division, a streetcar waited for me. As I drew near, it changed its warning bell and then lurched away. I reached for the handrail to pull myself up on the running board and missed. I fell into a snowbank.
Who is chasing me? I demanded. Then I looked around my room and realized that I had been dreaming. I sat up and quivered with the cold of the snow into which I had fallen. It was real, it wasn’t a dream. I had run for hours. Otherwise, why was I cold?
Then I realized that I had left the window open. I jumped out of bed and slammed it shut.
Tomorrow night there would be someone to keep me warm.
12
The next morning, the morning of my marriage, my Christmas wedding, I was as morose as a mourner at a wake. It was one of those clear, brutally cold days in which the Middle West specializes between Christmas and New Years. Inside the soaring arches of St. Ursula Church the air was warm—Dad’s heating system worked—and the big, impressionistic stained-glass windows bathed the nave in magical colors. Christmas wonderland inside and out. A slightly kinky mixture of Impressionism and the Gothic that somehow worked.
The perfect setting, it seemed, for my magic bride.
“You don’t look quite as happy as a lucky groom should look, fella,” Vince chided me.
Michael was to be the altar server, Vince the best man, Peg the maid of honor. No one else. Rosemarie did not want, and God knows did not need, a large wedding party.
“I am tired,” I complained testily, “of being told how lucky I am.”
Vince found that very funny. “Well”—he shrugged his massive shoulders—“maybe Rosie is a little lucky too.”
“There’s an Irish saying that fits,” I continued to complain. “’The Lord made ’em and the divil matched ’em.’”
He found that amusing too. Then he became deadly serious. “I don’t have any premonitions, except that I’ll be back here in law school in eighteen months, but if anything happens—”
“You’ll be back all right—” I gripped his arm—“and we’ll take good care of Peg while she’s waiting.”
“Not many guys”—he blinked a couple of times—“have friends like you, Chuck.”
Wedding-day sentimentality, I told myself, and then prayed for Vince and Ed Murray and all the rest of my generation who had not been as fortunate as I. And for eternal peace for the souls of Christopher Kurtz and Leo Kelly.
We started fifteen minutes late. Mom was striking in maroon and white—University of Chicago colors, we all insisted. I suspected that she and Dad were more concerned about the appearance of the bride than of the groom. In fact, I doubt that anyone looked at me all through the Mass.
After Mom was seated and had found the tissue required to dab at her nose, Peg, also in maroon and white, proceeded down the aisle and joined arms with her own intended groom. She seemed quite satisfied with herself—as well she might be. Her plot to marry me off to Rosemarie had succeeded.
Then Rosemarie herself, waxen and yet radiant, drifted toward the front of the church, seemingly borne on waves of light. Her bridal gown was simple and unadorned, the sleeves reaching to her wrists and the collar enclosing her neck: pure, virginal, ethereal. She glided along on my father’s arm as though he were a guiding seraph.
Morose and worried and reluctant groom that I was, I still felt a catch in my throat. The first bride in the new church would be the most beautiful it would ever see.
I looked up at Father Raven and Monsignor Branigan. The ineffable Mugsy winked at me.
I looked back and Rosie and Dad were already at the head of the aisle.
Jim Clancy had believed my warning. His housekeeper had called Mom the day before: Mr. Clancy had a high fever. The doctor said he must stay in bed for a week. He was so sorry to miss his daughter’s wedding. Would Mr. O’Malley do the honors for him?
Rosemarie seemed neither surprised nor disappointed.
Dad kissed her and shook my hand as he placed hers in mine.
“You’re a lucky man, Chuck.”
“I know I am, Dad,” I croaked.
Now I had to say something to Rosemarie. “I’m awed, Rosemarie, blinded.”
&nb
sp; “Thank you, Charles,” she murmured, not looking at me. Was she scared? Or worried? Did she have last-second doubts about me?
“You really want to marry this galoot?” Monsignor Mugsy peered over his trifocals. “Sawed-off redhead?”
The Monsignor gave away at least an inch and a half to me.
Rosemarie turned toward me, as if considering her options. Then she lit up the whole sanctuary with a dazzling smile. “I think I’ll take him, Monsignor.” She may even have winked. “He’ll do. And he has nice parents.”
It was the last time I saw her eyes until after the Mass.
My vows were spoken in a loud, clear—and arguably obnoxious—voice. Rosie, now visibly quivering, spoke in a frightened whisper. The hand that held mind was not about to let go.
Not ever.
My fears, my doubts, my worries about the night ahead of us (in the house at Long Beach where Rosemarie insisted we should consummate our marriage) were temporarily erased by the bewitching aura of my bride—now, after the words had been spoken, my wife.
“Mrs. Charles Cronin O’Malley,” Monsignor Branigan announced happily.
A sound came from behind her veil, which had somehow fallen back into place.
Gasp? Sob? Laugh?
Surely the last.
Our kiss in the back of church, with the cold air rushing in through the open doors, was perfunctory. Neither of us was ready for passion.
“Anyone tell you that it’d be a cold day in hell when you found a wife, Chucky?” Perhaps a hundred people insisted on that tasteless remark.
Cold weather or not, there was a maroon-and-white canopy (“for OUR university”) at the entrance to the church. And there were forty Irish pipers.
“Did someone die?” I demanded as they began to wail. “That noise would chase all the banshees back into hell.”
“Only”—she tightened her grip on my arm—“an Irish bachelor.”
At Butterfield, after a seemingly endless receiving line, we finally marched into the dining room with Wagner’s march (portraying, in the opera, a march to the bedroom) drowned out by the cheering guests. They must have thought this was a special wedding. Special bride, yes? But didn’t many of them wonder why she had not found a better husband for herself?
Dull little redhead. Thinks too much. Talks too much. No accounting for a woman’s taste, I suppose.
“I’ll always love you, Chuck,” she whispered as I drew back her chair, carefully so as not to entangle her train.
Still the reply froze on my lips.
Vince proposed the toast to the new Mr. and Mrs. O’Malley. It was now my turn to toast my wife.
Dear God, she isn’t my wife, is she?
Yes, she is.
And I forgot the literate and carefully nuanced toast I had prepared.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I am alleged to have said, “I had a toast appropriate for a graduate student from the University of Chicago: elegant, literate, probably obscure, a trifle arrogant. Someday, perhaps, I will remember that toast. But right now it is as lost as are the Chicago Cardinals’ hopes for a football championship. All I can say is that a man who can remember a toast, or anything else, on the day that he has, astonishingly, acquired a wife so beautiful, so intelligent, so charming, so good, and, to quote Father Raven, so magical, probably doesn’t deserve her.”
Mom and Dad were grinning. I was doing okay. Now what?
“So what can I do but give you Rosemarie, my Rosemarie”—then the daimon took over—“my wild Irish Rosemarie!”
I began to sing, not in the whiskey tenor with which this sentimental Irish-American kitch is usually sung, but—what shall I call it, clear as it is in my memory after all these years?—a romantic tenor.
I sang it unaccompanied for only one verse. My wife rose next to me, encircled me with her arm, and joined the song.
We must have been pretty good, because the rest of them kept silent till the final chorus.
“Dazzling, Chuck,” she whispered. “And so typical, my love.”
What, I wondered, as I sipped the champagne, was typical?
“Hey, this stuff is good,” I announced between swallows. “Great!”
“Easy does it, husband mine.”
Rosemarie was beginning to enjoy herself. I thought I might as well do the same. You are, after all, married only once. I drained my glass and gratefully accepted a refill from the ever-present waiter. Why had no one told me champagne was so splendid?
We cut the cake and fed little bites to one another—the only food I was able to force into my mouth all day. We danced with each other.
“Not bad, husband mine,” she smiled shyly, “for someone who pretends to be a stumblebum. I think I’ll keep you for a little while anyway.”
“I’m merely floating on your cloud.”
She laughed and kissed me, delicately, affectionately, proudly.
I danced with Mom. Rosemarie danced with her dad, who had shown up looking not sick but sheepish. He watched me uneasily. I should have put my foot down about inviting him. I couldn’t think of a good explanation that would not have betrayed Rosemarie’s secret.
“I’m so happy,” Mom said through her tears. “God made the two of you for one another.”
“I’m glad you’re not unhappy about losing me.”
“Lose you?” She was genuinely astonished. “To Rosie?”
“You haven’t lost a foster daughter, you’ve merely locked up a son!”
“Chucky!” She thought it was pretty funny too.
“What did you say to my father?” Rosemarie asked anxiously when I reclaimed her for the next dance.
“I more or less told him to leave you alone from now on.”
“Thanks, Chuck.” She squeezed my shoulder, “I appreciate that.”
I’d thought she might be angry at me for banishing him from the wedding. Was everything I did fated to be defined as good, wonderful, perfect from now on?
Well, that might not be all bad.
I must not be a complete failure tonight. She had been badly hurt by sex before. I didn’t want to make it worse.
I thought about it over another glass of champagne. Wonderful stuff. Maybe it was time, now that I had become a married man, to learn to enjoy wine—sherry and port and champagne.
I was not, I insisted to myself, drunk when the time came to leave Butterfield for our marriage bower.
Just not quite sober.
I changed into a brown suit, chosen by my mother and sisters, and met my wife, in a navy blue suit and white blouse, at the door of the club.
“Let me help you with your coat.” I held her mink, somewhat unsteadily.
“Is that the courteous Chucky Ducky speaking or the Dom Pérignon?”
“I beg your pardon?” I bowed elaborately.
“Just a minute, dear.” She patted my arm. “I have to throw this bouquet so Peg can catch it.”
Peg didn’t leave the catch to either the skill of her quarterback or the chances of the wind. She dove for Rosemarie’s pass like she was Don Hutson of the Green Bay Packers (who still holds many of the NFL pass-catching records—but I digress).
“You look darling in that brown suit, Chucky. Heavenly.”
“Your co-conspirators picked it out for me. I suppose the same for your suit, which”—I choked with tipsy sentimentality—“my wild Irish Rosemarie, clings to your lovely self in such a way”—I searched for a way out of the sentence into which I had plunged—“as to confirm my conviction that you are in all probability the most beautiful woman in the world.”
She dragged me out the door into the bitter cold. “Button your coat, dear,” she warned. “We can’t have you catching cold before Acapulco, can we?”
“Where’s that?” I stumbled toward the waiting limo.
I now realized that I was drunk, very drunk. On my wedding night.
“Steady, lover, the walks are still slippery.”
I was the one who was supposed to protect the innocent and t
he vulnerable, wasn’t I?
In the limousine, which had been assigned to drive us to a garage on South Boulevard in Oak Park, the new Mrs. O’Malley held out her hand.
“The keys, husband mine.”
“I beg pardon?”
“The keys to my…’ cuse, our Buick.”
“We’re driving to Long Beach.”
“I’m driving to Long Beach.”
“Are you implying that I am inebriated?”
“No, dearest one, only that you ought not drive. You might not be as lucky as I was on Stony Island Avenue. Now give them to me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I searched for the keys in my overcoat and dropped them into her imperiously extended hand.
“Thank you, husband mine. And don’t think I’ll hold your first bout with champagne against you for the rest of the marriage. I may forget it”—she chuckled—“in forty years.” Then she huddled against my arm. “You’re so adorable, Chucky Ducky, so wonderfully adorable.”
“Even if I am not permitted to drive your…’ cuse, our Buick.”
She dismissed me with her favorite hand-wave. “Just for today, dear. And, to tell the truth—as you’d say—you’re even more adorable when you’re so solemnly funny.”
Isn’t that nice?
Well, John Raven said I was in for some surprises in my marriage. I suppose this is the first one.
There would be others before our wedding day was over. And our honeymoon.
13
Dear April,
I’m so glad that you invited us to the wedding and that we were able to come. It was one of the most beautiful weddings I’ve ever attended.
You had so much to be proud about that day. Chucky. What a fine, witty, handsome young man he has grown up to be, so much like his mother and father.
You have even more reason to be proud of Rosemarie. You had faith in her when everyone else had written her off as an insufferable brat Now she’s so sweet and gentle. And so, so beautiful.
“I haven’t had one of those terrible temper tantrums in years, Mrs. Cleary,” she says to me. “I know you hated them. So I thought I’d tell you I gave them up. And not just for Lent.”
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