I turned on the light and was shocked at how much grief had blotched her face. She must have been weeping for hours.
My fair bride was now a wounded, frightened little girl. All the hurt of her life was branded on her face and her shrunken frame.
That bastard, I thought. He deserves to die.
“I’m no good, Chuck, no good at all.”
I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her against my body, breast to breast, loin to loin. I was weeping too, with fury, hatred, determination—and something else.
“Chucky, darling, you’re crying! Don’t cry for me, I’m not worth it.”
“Yes you are, and I’ll cry whenever I want.”
She managed to chuckle despite her tears. “See, only great men can cry. I’m so proud of you, husband mine.”
“Will you shut up and listen for just once?”
“Yes, lord and master.” Mercurial little wench, she jabbed at my ribs. “I will now, as of this second, shut up and listen.”
I didn’t know what it was that I wanted to say. Something important, no doubt, if only I could remember it.
Then the daimon took over. I SAW.
What?
Everything?
It was as if someone had turned bright stage lights on a set that had been immersed in total darkness. On the stage I saw my new wife and myself and the roles we had played all our lives—the masks and the costumes around which we had improvised our parts.
In the first decade of our marriage I made two terrible mistakes. At the end of the honeymoon I finally saw the first of them. It would take a long time before I discovered the second.
Still, that night and the next morning were a moment of truth. The words formed on my lips:
I love you, Rosemarie Helen, I love you with all the power of my not-normal soul. I’ve always loved you, since you were a pushy little brat driving me out of my mind with your noisy babble—which you are still doing, incidentally, not that I mind anymore. Or minded even then. I will always love you. Now stop crying and go back to sleep.
I didn’t speak then. Rather I drifted back to sleep. The next morning I realized that I’d had an important illumination, but I didn’t quite remember what it was.
16
In the airport at Mexico City the next day, changing planes for the flight back to Midway Airport, I watched her bound back from the newsstand with two copies of the New York Times under her arm, and I realized how gallant she was. Running on the enormous energy generated by determination and willpower, she had turned what could have been a disastrous honeymoon into a happy one. My wild Rosemarie charged right through obstacles.
Even obstacles like me.
“Something wrong?” She shoved one of the newspapers into my hand. “You know what, Chucky? I think I’ve lost our baggage tickets.”
I was not permitted to touch these tickets, since it was assumed, almost by definition, I would lose them.
“I was watching this beautiful woman—”
“Fine, but that doesn’t find the tickets.” She was poking around in her purse, with increasing concern.
“I love you, Rosemarie. I’ve always loved you.”
“Yes, of course, dear.” She sounded just like her mother-in-law. “I know that, but I have to find our baggage tickets. You must have them.”
“I don’t.”
I was hurt because she didn’t seem to think that my protestation of love, a cliché in words but entirely new in meaning, was important.
“Ah, here they are! See I did find them without your help!”
I took her into my arms and recited the lines I had just prepared about her gallantry and about how she had made the honeymoon so special.
“You’re not going to make love to me right here in the airport, are you?”
“I’d like to, but I can wait till we’re home.”
We continued our embrace for the next moment or two.
“Am I glad”—she slipped away from me—“that I found these tickets! We’d have a terrible time at Midway without them . … And, oh, Chucky what you just said was beautiful”—she winked at me—“but I’m sure I’ve heard it from you before. Still, it’s nice to hear it again.”
Thus for my great reform.
Except that when I opened my eyes briefly during my nap on the flight to Chicago, I saw tears of joy flowing down her face.
Now there was one more bond tying me to my mysterious, appealing, vulnerable, and probably doomed bride. When we left Butterfield Country Club to drive to Long Beach I was tied to her by the bonds of church and of society, by the obligation we all have to protect the innocent and the persecuted, and by the loyalties of long and affectionate friendship.
Now I was bound to her by something much more terrible in its power.
Passionate love.
1951
17
“Can I come into that terrible, smelly room?”
“When the red light is not on, it means you can come in.”
“It does not. It merely means that I won’t ruin your film if I come in. It doesn’t mean that you want me to come in.”
I opened the door for her. “You’re irritable enough to be pregnant.”
“No such luck,” she said forlornly.
“Really?”
She nodded. “A couple of days ago. I didn’t want to disappoint you. And I hoped that this time would be it.”
She was wearing the same white robe she’d worn the night I was entrapped in her apartment on Kenwood.
“I’m not disappointed. We’ve been married how long?”
“Six weeks.”
I had learned much about my wife in six weeks. Her favorite musician was Bach, though she “adored” Coltrane.
She “had” to exercise, in some way every day if only to run off her filly energy. She set up an exercise room in the basement near my darkroom where she jumped rope and rode an exercycle, with the Brandenburg Concertos playing over and over again on a phonograph.
Her favorite color was maroon; hence our bedroom was decorated in maroon and white, colors that I would not have thought erotic but that somehow became very tempting when I entered the room. She luxuriated in maroon lingerie, but would wear white to please me. “I absolutely hate black. I won’t wear it even if you like it. And the maroon has nothing to do with your university, either.”
In vain did I tell her that a) I liked her in maroon too, b) she never had to don black lace as far as I was concerned, and c) it was her university before it was mine.
She had not tried to preserve the Victorian arrangements of our house. “I hate small rooms.” So walls had been torn down with ruthless vigor. But the bright and airy results of her destructiveness were not decorated in airy colors, because “I hate pastels.”
The house was stylish but in an elegant and formal way—royal blues and deep grays and rich mahoganies and maroons, as though Rosemarie was nodding politely at the house’s refined shape and history.
It was a dramatic change from the cramped apartment on Menard. Recently I visited a young married couple in a similar apartment in a gentrified yuppie neighborhood. I was astonished at how small it was. So quickly do you forget what you have left behind.
It was expected and demanded that I approve of all arrangements in “our” house, but heaven help poor old Chucky if he ventured a dissent, much less a suggestion of his own.
“Chuck” was my usual name. “Chucky” was affectionately maternal. “Chucky Ducky” was an erotic invitation. “Charles” meant I was in trouble. “Charles Cronin O’Malley” meant I was in deep, deep trouble.
Her swings of mood were sudden, erratic, and often profound, but I could usually bring her out of the bad ones simply by touching her hand. I understood neither the moods nor my influence over them.—
“When I’m glum”—she pointed a book at me—“I read history. It’s better than fighting, right?”
“Right.” Who was I to disagree?
She had spent a lot of m
oney on the house, but ordinarily she spent little on her clothes. Her dresses were the imitations of fashion you could buy at Marshall Field, or even more likely, at Wieboldt’s.
She did volunteer work every week at Marillac House and did not want to talk about it. “I just do it, that’s all. Any objections?”
“I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be.”
She was also careful with food, warning me, in Mom’s words, “Waste not, want not,” and adding as Irishwomen do a reference to the group that was currently supposed to make us feel guilty—“the poor starving people in Pakistan.”
“It has never been clear to me,” I remonstrated in a fashion I would have never dared with Mom, “what impact my eating has on people in other countries. Arguably, if I ate less, there would be—”
“EAT!” Grinning, she pointed a carving knife at me. “Don’t argue.”
I was threatened by her anger even when she was joking. So I twisted more spaghetti around my fork and ate—as I had been told.
She loved me passionately the way I was, but had nonetheless determined to improve me around the edges.
And had fiercely, furiously determined to be a mother.
“And because you’re not pregnant yet,” I said that night in the darkroom, “you are afraid you’re not going to have babies.”
“We’ve done a lot of screwing, Chuck.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Beast.” She poked at my arm. “I suppose I’m being silly. Probably when I am pregnant I’ll hate it . … Can I come into your secret room and see what it’s like?”
“See what it’s like? You outfitted the whole thing—brilliantly, I might add.”
Somewhere in a magazine she had found a design for a perfect darkroom, all the equipment, every possible convenience, an ingeniously contrived layout, flawless electrical connections—everything the amateur would need so that he could mess around to his heart’s content.
“But you must have found something in here to distract you from your fair bride. I thought I’d check out the competition.”
“Just the night to do that. I’m working on the fair bride.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Then I can come in?”
I bowed reverently. “Please do, your Majesty.”
“Thank you, Sir Charles. Hey, it’s hot in here!”
“It has to be seventy-two degrees to keep the chemicals from spoiling.” I returned to the prints that I was soaking and then drying on the big dryer she had provided, the first one I had ever owned, if I could be said to own this one.
“So hot that I have to take off this robe.”
“I figured we were going in that direction. It looks like my art suffers again tonight.”
She flicked the robe away. It fell to the floor. I picked it up and hung it on a hook behind the door. Beneath the robe she was wearing a short white lace gown that was better than nothing, but not much.
“You said you liked white,” she explained.
The casual little seduction was an attempt at reconciliation. We had not quarreled. I did not know to quarrel constructively with a woman, having had no experience of such activity in my family. Hence my only response to trouble with Rosemarie was to sulk. Such conduct was no help: it hurt me, it hurt my wife, and it did not help me face the problem between us.
You do what you can do. So I sulked. And felt like a fool, and like a small, pouting child.
The conflict started with her father.
We came down from the clouds of our honeymoon with an uncomfortable thud. The city was paralyzed by a January thaw that had frozen overnight and made all the side streets as slippery as skating rinks. Then, just as we landed, yet another winter storm roared out of Canada and covered the ice with deceptively innocent snow. The rhythm of storm and subzero weather had frayed the nerves of Chicagoans, who in such winters come to believe that they are under attack by a mean-spirited lunatic and the only recourse is to act like mean-spirited lunatics themselves.
The drive back and forth between Hyde Park and home was a long, wearing struggle with ice, snow, and dangerous ill-tempered traffic. The sidewalks at the University were slippery, faculty members sullen, students suspicious of one another, and the staff prickly and dour.
Catching up on the first ten days of graduate school classes, an easy-seeming task when we planned it, now was absurdly difficult, especially since no one wanted to share notes.
To aggravate my own depression, Montezuma’s revenge, having held off until I returned home, smote me the second day of class.
“You ought to have been more careful of the water” was the only consolation available from Rosemarie, who was having reentry problems of her own. About which I didn’t want to hear. She definitely was not returning to school this quarter. We were not yet properly settled in our new home. She didn’t feel like sitting in a dull old classroom. She was not obsessed by the need for a degree the way I had been, anyway. And besides, she had to prepare for Peg’s wedding, didn’t she?
Peg and Vince were to be married the first week in March, after which he was going overseas, presumably to Korea. The Chinese had recaptured Seoul (the third time it had changed hands) but had been stopped cold by American artillery when the Eighth Army, now commanded by the brilliant Matthew Ridgeway, had fallen behind its prepared defenses—the talk about “prepared defenses” for once in military history had been true. There were rumors of an American counteroffensive.
It also seemed that everyone was fighting with his woman.
“Jane hasn’t spoken to Ted for three days,” Rosemarie announced to me one night. “I suppose”—she laughed—“you’d find it a blessing if your wife shut up for that long.”
“Is it serious?”
“The fight? Sure, all fights between lovers are serious. They’ll get over it.”
“What’s it about?”
“Who knows? Something dumb. Doctor again. He wants to give Ted office space in his own medical office building. The man never quits . … Most fights between lovers are dumb. Even between April and Vangie.”
“They don’t fight.”
“Sure they do, husband mine, but so subtly that only an outsider can notice it. They do it constructively.”
Aha.
Peg blew up at Vince, home for a weekend leave, the next night at supper at their house.
“Look, lover,” Peg said coolly, “I don’t expect to lose you. But if I do, I’ll never forget you and you’ll watch over me from heaven. But I absolutely refuse to permit you to ruin this happy time in our life. No morose stuff, understand?”
“You’re not the one who will be going into combat,” he snapped back at her.
“And you’re not the one who will be home alone, worrying every day. It’ll be hard for both of us. Let’s not have a contest to see who suffers more.”
“You want to call it all off?” His eyes flashed with anger at this outspoken lover of his.
“Just try it.”
“You don’t talk respectfully to me.” He frowned.
“Wrong nationality if you want a dutiful wife.”
“I’m sorry.” Vince looked sheepish. “I’ve been an ass.”
“I love you.” She embraced him.
The quarrel melted away.
“She was tough, wasn’t she?” I said to my wife in bed later.
“That’s Peg. She was right too.”
“Far be it for me to disagree.”
Why did men and women who loved one another have to fight that way? Wouldn’t it be better if they could work out their problems calmly and rationally?
Like archangels.
I was deeply troubled by all the conflicts, but there was nothing I could do about them.
So with unstable stomach and leaden spirits and anxious heart, I fought the maniac drivers alone every morning and evening without the consolation of my wife in the front seat next to me, offering irritable advice about how I “ought
to” cope with the traffic.
“You’d probably murder me by the time we arrived at Chicago Avenue.”
“I might at that.”
By the beginning of February we had hit rock bottom and, as young lovers do, begun our slow rebound. We were very much in love, she eager still to please me and I penitent (in my own mind) for not recognizing that I had always loved her.
“Well”—her fingernails ran down my back—“it’s about time we did something like that. I was afraid we’d forgotten how.”
“My fault.” I wanted to collapse into sleep, already dreading the morning ride.
“Let’s have a fight over whose fault it is.”
“Why?”
“Then we can make love again.”
“Tonight?”
“Why not?”
“Why bother with the fight?” I turned the light back on, pushed the covers off her, and enfolded her passionately. “I love you, Rosemarie. I’ll never be able to love you enough.”
“Oh, Chuck …” She was especially sweet that night, subtle, numinous.
The next morning, my eyes barely open enough to peer through the thick snow flurries, I regretted our indulgences. We ought not to do those kinds of things when I had an early-morning class.
I did not regret it so much that I was innocent of lust when I arrived home late that afternoon. Rosemarie was in her “study,” dressed in an Aran Islands sweater and matching slacks.
“Whatcha doing?”
Her “study” (as opposed to my “office”—the names were hers and both nonnegotiable), like the rest of the house, displayed little evidence of what one might think of as typical femininity. It rather reminded one of the “study” of an English rural aristocrat—oak and mahogany (more of the latter), thick carpet and drapes (maroons and beiges), leather chairs (including the massive judge’s chair behind her desk), prints of horses on the walls, large bookcases. There were also Early American antiques, placed in strategic positions. The rather frail Sheraton table that served as her desk looked a little overwhelmed by the maroon leather chair, but somehow it all fit together—elegant, tasteful, and strong. Dear God, how strong!
The sumptuous leather easy chair facing the desk had obviously been placed there for use by the consort. I would not have dared not to use it
A Christmas Wedding Page 15
