A Christmas Wedding

by Andrew M. Greeley

  I put down my fork. “Does Vince know?”

  “She wrote him.”

  We both were silent.

  “It doesn’t seem fair.”

  Rosemarie put her hand on mine. “He’ll be all right, I just know he will.”

  “It’s a dumb war.”

  “All wars are dumb.”

  “Why is he there when I’m not?”

  She squeezed my hand. “Maybe because I’m not nearly as strong a woman as your sister.”

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  I toyed with my fork. The Board of Trade was a jungle, but not as bad as Heartbreak Ridge.

  “Eat,” she said, “you’re getting thin. People will say that terrible woman doesn’t feed you.”

  “Plenty of good pasta.” I picked up the fork.

  “I’m reading a book about French cooking; pretty soon we’ll have pasta only every other week.”

  She could have said that she was asking me to risk less with my pictures than Vince was risking in Korea.

  She didn’t. Maybe she knew that I would think it without her telling me.

  The next day I actually made some money in the wheat pit. I had begun to figure out the signals Jim Clancy was using with his buddies and I crossed them up at the last second jumping off one of their artificial surges before they could pull the bottom out from under me.

  “Got the bastards today,” John Kane, silver-haired Irishman with a handsome red face—he could have been a cop or an undertaker as well as a trader—said to me, “didn’t you, son?”

  “Figured out their strategy.” I could hardly walk off the floor. “They’ll have another one tomorrow.”

  “Some of them lost a little of their precious capital. Beat them a few more times and they’ll leave you alone. It’s hazing, you know, like those college fraternities. They don’t mean nothing by it. They do it to all the young fellows.”

  “To see if you’re a man?” I asked bitterly.

  “Well, that’s what Old Jim might say, and himself such an impressive specimen, if you take my meaning.”

  “He’ll be back again tomorrow.”

  “It’s a little bit more vicious than usual, I’ll admit that.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “But I like the cut of your jib, son. You know how to fight back.”

  “I hope so.”

  “You’ve got good eyes. Watch their faces. See the fear when they think they’re going to lose.”

  “They make great pictures,” I agreed, “Old Jim more than most.”

  “He’d break the camera.”

  For the first time that year I noticed the early May signs of spring as I walked down East Avenue from the Ridgeland L station—ten blocks, but I needed the exercise. What a dope you are, Charles Cronin O’Malley, to permit a clique of evil old men to prevent you from enjoying spring and the springtime of your life.

  “Made some money today, dearest,” I chirped as I strutted into her office.

  If I had been smart, I would have noticed that the stereo was silent: a trap was being baited.

  She was, as promised, poring over a French cookbook—in French, mind you—with a notebook on her lap.

  “Two thousand dollars?” She cocked a critical blue eye at me. “Like you could have made yesterday.”

  The contract was resting dead center on her desk, a pen next to it.

  If the red-faced mick hadn’t spoken his few words of praise, I might not have been tempted.

  As it was, I hesitated. “And after it fails, where does the next two thousand come from?”

  “We wouldn’t even consider”—she turned up her pretty Irish nose in disgust—“two thousand the next time. There’s a wonderful little thing in the contract called an option. Your second collection will earn a five-thousand-dollar advance.”

  “That’s crazy.” I shifted uneasily in her leather chair, purchased and positioned precisely for a weary husband coming from work to render an account of his stewardship.

  “The man from New York, Mr. Close, says that your ‘Football Weekend’ portfolio would make a fine book.”

  “Have you taken all my prints out of the cabinet downstairs?”

  “Not the early ones.”

  “Hey … come to think of it, how did you get into them in the first place. I lock the cabinet after every time I use the darkroom.”

  “You don’t think, do you, husband mine”—she favored me with the wicked, crooked grin of which I was seeing a lot lately—“that I’d have a cabinet like that made without a spare key? I mean, what if you lost your key, with your disorderly habits and all?”

  “How dare you!” I was now, belatedly, furious.

  “I’m your wife. It comes with the body.”

  “The bad with the good!” I was working myself into a rage.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “How many times do I have to say no before you understand that I mean no?”

  “Three times.” She glared at me defiantly. “No more. So, O’Malley, you have one more shot and then I leave you alone.”

  I leaped out of the leather chair, bent over the desk, and furiously scrawled my name on the bottom of the final page.

  I was so angry that I didn’t think to put in “Cronin” or “C.”

  “Satisfied?” I growled at her.

  “Astonished.” She looked at the signature carefully. “I guess it’s valid. I’ll just sign my name, much prettier in both sound and appearance, and we’ll be two thousand dollars richer. There.”

  “You didn’t think I’d do it?” Unaccountably, I was breathing heavily as though I were sexually aroused. In fact, I was not; that, I imagined, would come later.

  “No, I didn’t,” she admitted, hugging me. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “You have every intention”—I still was simmering—“of changing my life?”

  “Isn’t that what wives are for?”

  “Now let me ask you some questions about money.”

  “Anything you want to know, husband dear.” She lowered her eyes modestly.

  She had a surprisingly precise knowledge of her own financial affairs—money, property, investments. Her fortune was substantial, but not unlimited. “Satisfied?” she asked me when she’d finished.

  “I have an accurate picture. I guess that finishes the agenda for this afternoon.”

  “Not quite.” She rose from her judge’s chair and crossed to me, sitting on the edge of my assigned consort’s chair. “I’m not finished with you yet.”

  “What else?” I had missed the wicked gleam in her eye.

  “What do you think?” She unbuckled my belt.

  “Rosemarie, do you want everything?”

  “Exactly.” Her hand probed my loins. “Your pictures and your career and your body. Now don’t squirm while I undress you.”

  “Gravy for the gander—”

  “Is gravy for the goose. Precisely. I said hold still.”

  “How can I when you’re teasing me that way?”

  So I was appropriately rewarded for my twin acts of courage, signing the contract and asking about her money. I’m sure she viewed only the first as courageous. At the most.

  Over supper she said, “I almost forgot. I had a letter from Polly Netteton today.”

  “Who?!”

  “Your good friend Captain Polly.”

  “What did she want?”

  “To answer my letter.”

  “What did you write to her for?”

  “To find out the details of why you were a hero in Bamberg.”

  “I wasn’t a hero, damn it!”

  “The good April would disapprove of that language. You told me the truth all right, Chuck, about the black market, but not the whole truth. Polly told me the whole truth. I could hardly believe you’d be so reckless.”

  “Controlled recklessness. I didn’t take any chances that I didn’t have to take.”

  “She also told me that you like caviar.”

  I felt my face turn hot as I remem
bered the party at the Netteton’s apartment where I made a fool of myself by eating a pound of caviar.

  “Woman has a big mouth. Why did you want to know all the details?”

  “I kind of figured what you’d do in such a situation. And you did. So I wonder why you don’t do the same thing at the Exchange?”

  “Oh,” I murmured. “You want me to act like I did in Bamberg?”

  “I’m sure you could and you’d beat my daddy and those other terrible men and make a lot of money.”

  “Maybe,” I admitted.

  Somehow the possibility appealed to me.

  The next morning on the Lake Street L, I calculated how much my potential capital (including Rosemarie’s money), against margin calls, would be if I protected the house and enough money for the education of three or four children. I had no intention of doing anything reckless, no conscious intention at any rate.

  If I were to pursue the photography game, I could not continue working at the Board of Trade. The two occupations were quite incompatible, I told myself. Obviously I couldn’t earn a living with a camera. However, the Double O’s still liked my neat ledger sheets. (If my handwriting wasn’t as pretty as my wife’s, it was notably more legible.) Their offer of half-time work was always open.

  I might well try that for a while. Until I proved to the damned beautiful, sexy bitch with whom I slept that I was not a great artist.

  Right?

  After I had failed at the career she was forcing on me, I could work full-time at the firm and maybe continue my education in night school. Fine. Everything neat and orderly?

  The young redhead doth protest too much, you say?

  Didn’t he sign that contract in an awful hurry?

  Tell me about it.

  On the front page of the Tribune that morning there was a story that General Eisenhower, then president of Columbia University, was considering a presidential race on the Republican ticket. Already Henry Cabot Lodge (whom the Trib despised) was reported to gathering a staff which would help the General deny (the Trib’s word) the nomination to Senator Robert Taft, who, most Washington Republicans were saying, was “entitled” to it.

  The war was settling down to a stalemate and there were rumors of peace negotiations. They could drag on for a long time. But I thought that Eisenhower might end the war more quickly than Harry Truman, if only because he might be in a position to threaten to use the bomb against the North Koreans and the Chinese.

  Vince’s year would be up before the presidential election, so it wouldn’t make any difference to him.

  It might make a difference to other young men, however.

  Those were my only reactions to the possibility of Ike’s running. The Republicans, I thought, can’t win with one of their own, not even against Truman. So they’re about to nominate a man who has been a Democrat most of his life.

  Maybe Colonel McCormick of the Trib had a right to be angry.

  I had not thought of the possible impact of the story on the grain market.

  Everyone else had. Peace, even a ceasefire or negotiations, would depress the price of wheat. The market in October wheat took a nosedive that morning, which is what I’d figured it would, especially because I was convinced that it was overvalued and had been for weeks. I stood by watching in disbelief the folly of men earning a living by betting on war and peace.

  A wild and reckless scheme began to waken in my head. I wouldn’t do it, of course. Wasn’t I the timid and cautious accountant?

  Me, Charles C. O’Malley, Scaramouche?

  Me with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad?

  “Not trading?” John Kane asked me.

  “Today’s crazy,” I responded.

  “On days like this, fortunes can be made and lost.”

  I was not reassured.

  As the closing bell approached, the price of October wheat soared back to its high of the previous day. That made no more sense than the fall earlier in the day. The war would end within the year, no matter who was nominated or elected. The market was far too high. It had been too high even at the day’s low. Why couldn’t everyone see that?

  Probably because they were more concerned about the game than the real world outside the game, same as they imagined that world affected the game.

  Jim Clancy was buying grain like it was about to disappear from the face of the earth. He was stupid after all, wasn’t he?

  In a few weeks everyone would know the grain market was too high. Why did I know it before the others?

  I pondered that one. I wasn’t smarter than they were, was I?

  Yeah, maybe I was. Or perhaps only not as dumb as they were.

  Enter Scaramouche, sword in hand. I sold every possible contract for October wheat that I could afford, given the potential capital I had calculated while on the L train. I was, after all, a natural “bear,” was I not?

  It was an angry, irrational, clownish decision.

  I rode home on the train exhilarated. I had taken a long-term position. I would not have to range through that jungle every day. If my wife’s wealth was wiped out, that was her fault for trusting me with it. We’d still have the house and money for college for the kids.

  After my crazy adventure with the camera was ended, we could live normal lives like normal people.

  Did I believe that?

  Mostly, but not entirely.

  I did return to the Chicago Board of Trade the next day.

  With my camera.

  19

  “April.” My wife moved our daughter from one breast to the other.

  “Rosemarie,” I insisted just as vigorously.

  “See what a silly, stubborn man, Dadums is, honey? You and I will have to work real hard to keep him in line.”

  I winced as she poked playfully at our daughter’s little belly. Already she treated the child like a live doll, part playmate and part plaything.

  The little brat, content with her food, did not protest Already I was outnumbered.

  “You like the name April, don’t you, Snookums?”

  “Snookums doesn’t get to vote. We’ll name her Rosemarie, just because she’s as beautiful as her mother.”

  “More so.” She kissed the infant’s head. “But flattery will not win the argument for you. April.”

  We were in Oak Park Hospital where, two days before, our first child had emerged happily and easily into the world. The doctor, ignoring the physiological impossibility, declared that she had appeared smiling. She certainly seemed to be a placid child. More like her father than her mother, right?

  “Rosemarie. I insist.”

  “What you insist doesn’t make a particle of difference. We had an agreement that I’d name the girls and you’d name the boys. You ought to keep your word.”

  That was such a bold lie that she didn’t dare to look at me when she spoke it.

  “Besides,” she continued, talking to our offspring instead of to me, “Snookums loves her pretty grandmother and wants her pretty name, doesn’t little April, Snookums.”

  Rosemarie’s first pregnancy had been relatively easy. And free from drinking bouts.

  Except the night she smashed the Buick into the tree in front of our house, the night that Vince had been reported missing in action. For a few terrible hours I thought I would lose all three of them.

  “She shouldn’t be drinking this way when she’s pregnant”—the young resident in the emergency room at Oak Park Hospital shook his head in dismay—“and certainly should not drive when she’s been drinking.”

  Rosemarie screamed obscenities at him. “I’m not pregnant, you goddamned fucking asshole. I’ll never be pregnant again.”

  When I brought her home the next day, my wife had forgotten about her drunken screams and seemed more concerned about the damage to the “cute little tree.”

  I blew my top. For the first time in our marriage I raged at her. “You stupid little fool. If you want to kill yourself with your crazy drinking habits, th
at’s up to you. But I will not have you risking the life of our child.

  This stupidity must stop. I will not permit you to drink ever again in my presence. Is that clear?”

  Real swift, huh?

  She ran off to her study, wailing hysterically.

  It had been a bad week in late August Our interlude at Long Beach was destroyed by persistent October weather come early. The first Chicago reviews of my book The Conquered had been patronizing and disdainful. I was making no progress with the prints for the option book Trades, unable now to make a satisfactory print to be seen by others as well as by myself.

  All these were minor pains compared to the devastating wire from the Defense Department Vince had been preparing to leave for R and R in Hong Kong. His letters said that the action was dying down in their sector. Then there had been a quick Chinese raid across the lines.

  The chances that he was still alive seemed to me to be minute. However, from what we heard, it was better to be a prisoner of the Chinese than of the North Koreans.

  Christopher, Leo, and now Vince.

  To make matters worse, the following week, on the Labor Day weekend, Peg almost lost the baby. After a hurried rush to St. Anthony’s Hospital in Michigan City, the pains stopped. Her doctor, who happened, thank God, to be at nearby Grand Beach, said that he didn’t think there was any connection between her condition and the news from Korea.

  “How does he know?” Mom asked with unaccustomed bitterness.

  The prescription for Peg was to stay in bed for the rest of the pregnancy. “Don’t even get out of bed to go to church in the morning,” the doctor insisted.

  “I have to pray for my husband.”

  “Pray for him, and your child, in bed.”

  It was a roller coaster of a summer for Mom and Dad. A second grandson born (Theodore McCormack Jr.) two more grandchildren coming (one promised, with total faith, to be a granddaughter), a son-in-law missing in action, and a book of prints by their conventional son published to thunderously bad local reviews.

  “Dull and trite,” said the Trib.

  “Must be given credit for boldness to publish such amateurish efforts,” argued the News.

  “A sick exhibition of our corruption of defeated enemies,” said the Herald.