“Hmmm…” The Southern California sun, compassionate and gentle, penetrated my muscles and bones, caressing and renewing my soul. “You think you could live in the Beverly Hills Hotel for the rest of your life?”
“And eat in the Polo Lounge Bar every day. Order me another Pepsi, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I waved my hand like I was perhaps a Turkish sultan or a degenerate Roman emperor. “And people would stare at you during the lunch hour every day because they would be sure you were some famous actress only they didn’t quite know which one.”
“Any mother of three children”—she shifted on her lounge—“would be flattered to be confused with a star, even more so with a starlet. … How old do you have to be before you are no longer a starlet?”
“Twenty-five,” I made up the answer. “It is written in the ordinances of Beverly Hills. You have another year.”
“I did say three children, didn’t I? Do I really have three children?”
“You do. In fact, we do.” I ticked them off on my fingers: “April Rosemary, Kevin Patrick, and James Michael, aged three, two, and six months. Not quite Irish triplets.”
“How did that happen?”
“Beats me.”
We both laughed. Our February 1955 trip to Southern California, in later days known appropriately as LaLa Land, had begun as business and was now ending on a note of intensely renewed sexual pleasure. Rosemarie and I had fallen in love again. We were experiencing the natural rhythms of married love without yet realizing that there are such rhythms and that the secret of happiness in marriage is to be sensitive and responsive to their ebb and flow.
She opened one eye. “You ought to rub on more suntan cream. You know what sun does to your skin.” She removed Vogue from its fortunate place on her belly, sat up, and reached for the tube. “I know, you’re waiting for me to do it.”
The subtle shifts in her body as she moved recalled the powerful emotions of the previous night. Rosemarie was a woman of infinite willpower. She had determined that three pregnancies would not noticeably affect her figure and that was that.
Only one human frailty seemed immune to the strength of her will—her occasional disastrous drinking bouts. And that had not been a major problem since the terrible week after the scene with her father at my first exhibition.
“I’m not an alcoholic,” Rosemarie had insisted without rancor when I finally asked why she had stopped going to A.A. meetings. “It might be easier if I were.”
I let the matter drop.
We pretended by mutual and implicit agreement that her father did not exist. He was excluded from family rituals and celebrations, stricken from the Christmas card list, banned from conversation. We dealt with him through lawyers and heard on the grapevine that he was spending more time in Las Vegas.
Vince Antonelli, who now held my seat on the Board of Trade, reported to me that Jim Clancy rarely appeared on the floor. His old ring of cronies had broken up; Jim was now more than ever a lone wolf trader, a fat, angry, reckless little man who, for all of his lack of “impulse control,” still possessed the instincts of a successful bandit and continued to pile up profits.
Vince, worn and haunted, had come back from Korea with a hero’s medals and a determination, more furious than mine, to make up for lost time. He’d abandoned his plans for law school and plunged into the commodities game with passionate enthusiasm. The redolute tenacity that kept him alive in the P.O.W camp served him well on the Exchange. He learned quickly and soon was making as much money in a month as his father, a shoemaker on Division Street, would make in a year. I turned over my account to him with instructions that I didn’t want to worry about it anymore.
“Unless I see Ed Murray charging after you.”
“If you can’t beat ‘em, hire ‘em. Ed and his father are my lawyers. Now that Ed’s married to Cordelia, he’s settling down to become one of the best lawyers in town.”
“Still the clever one,” Vince said with a grin. “Always thinking and planning?”
“Just a simple snapshot taker, trying to earn an easy buck.”
Despite the torments of the Korean camp, Vince seemed to adjust easily to civilian freedom. Peg and Carlotta were clearly happy, and now the latter had a little brother, Vincent, to complain about to her cousin April Rosemary, who knew all about the problems of little brothers.
There were times, however, when the distant, haunted look in Vince’s eyes worried me, as did the strained silences between him and Peg. I kept my worries to myself.
My parents were showing their years at last. Dad was fifty-five, Mom fifty-one, young by my standards today, but terribly old when you’re twenty-seven and basking under the sun of Southern California in February. They were aging elegantly, however, Dad with a white beard and Mom with carefully groomed silver hair that made her look even more like an exiled duchess. With their whole generation, they were still making up for the lost time of the Great Depression, never quite forgotten; but their vacations and cars and fur coats and new furniture were never vulgar. The two of them were, I thought, entitled to it.
Try as I might, I could not exclude the fear that my growing old would not have such grace.
At the side of the Beverly Hills pool, my wife rubbed the suntan cream into my skin as tenderly as she would rub baby oil into the skin of James Michael, a premature baby who seemed mortally terrified of the world. Her fingers gradually became demanding.
“I think you’re more interested in seducing me than protecting me from the sun.” I pretended to twist away.
She leaned toward me. “Southern California sun is dangerous. We have to do a good job of protecting the poor little redhead’s sensitive skin, don’t we?”
“You know what’s going to happen to you if you keep protecting me that way?”
“No, what?”
“You’ll be ravished.”
“Can I count on it?” Her caresses assumed a lascivious rhythm, her eyes grew soft and round, her lips parted, her body tensed. I imagined her loins moistening in preparation for me.
“Keep on, woman, and we won’t make it back to our cottage.”
“Really?” Her hand darted underneath my trunks. “I thought you were a rational man who wrote down all his bright ideas in a notebook.”
In the two years since Kevin’s birth, Rosemarie and I had begun to experience the same problems that affected most couples in our generation. On the one hand, we had invested our emotions heavily in the vision of domestic happiness—family, home, suburban affluence. On the other hand, the demands that we imposed on ourselves made sexual bliss at the family hearth almost impossible.
For us there was less excuse than for most.
Rosemarie had help with the children. We had more money than we needed. We were good at our sexual commedia when we bothered to play it out.
Nevertheless, I worked long and hard at my new profession. I did portraits for affluent Chicagoans who did not understand my vision but liked the results. I flew around the country on assignment for magazines. Occasionally I found time for my own “studies”—meditations and reflections like “The Conquered” and “Traders” and “Under the Golden Dome.” I stayed up often till after midnight working on prints for my books and exhibits. I had finished my course work at the University and was grinding away at a dissertation on the Marshall Plan. I would try to explain why the relatively small contribution from the United States had jumpstarted (as we would say now) the German economy.
Why did a professional photographer need a Ph.D. in economics? There was no good answer except that I had started it and I would finish it.
I realized even then that Rosemarie was right, as by her own admission she always was: the studies and the portraits were my strongest skills. Still I felt that I was not proving myself as a photographer unless I could earn a decent living for myself and my family with my camera, a monumentally difficult task as any photographer will tell you even today. (Unless you are among the few who can charge i
n five figures for two hours of work!)
For all my frenzied work, I still fell short of that goal. I would not listen to Rosemarie when she pointed out, not without acerbity, that I didn’t have to work that hard. The money from my investments, not to mention hers, was more than enough to supplement my earnings.
“The photographer is, or at least ought to be, a member of Plato’s leisure class, a man who does what he wants to do because he doesn’t have to do anything.” She then developed a long argument from Plato’s Republic about leisure as the basis for society and culture.
It was a powerful argument, like all her arguments, although I cannot, to tell the truth, remember its details.
“They had slaves.”
“We don’t need them because we have a much broader base of capital. You’re the economist. You should know that.”
She was right, naturally. I was exhausting myself to honor standards that I had made up, probably because I did not know any other way to live. In the process of chasing this new will-o’-the-wisp, however, I did learn some things about the eye of the photographer that would serve me well later on.
“Well,” I took the offensive, “you don’t have to work as hard with the kids as you do. You have help and you have Grandma.”
“I don’t want to ruin it for April.” Her lower lip turned down stubbornly. “And the help are not the kids’ mother.”
Rosemarie was a superb mother until she became compulsive about the role. She led the kids as the first among equals rather than trying to rule them like the empress she was with me. She presided over the revels, organized the gang, laid down the rules for the game, and rallied the population against “him.”
Meaning Daddy, who had to be treated very gently lest he break.
Then her conscience would catch up with her and she would become “responsible,” compulsively watching, supervising, worrying.
“Mommy, go take a nap with Daddy and leave us alone,” April Rosemary told her, maybe a little after 1955.
Paralyzed with laughter, Mommy did what she was told. Delighted with her success, the little monster often used the same line on her mother in later years.
The two older children treated me like I was a sibling too, a younger brother who was funny and entertaining, but hardly to be taken seriously.
When I tried to be angry with them, they laughed at me.
As the man says, you get no respect.
We would both have done better in our self-assigned roles if we had been able to approach them with greater relaxation and self-confidence. I should have given myself time to think and wander and reflect and observe. Rosemarie should have pursued her singing and her reading and her sometime role as my assistant. The culture of the 1950s and our own personalities did not permit such relaxation.
It is fashionable now to ridicule and blame the fifties for their emphasis on suburban domesticity and material affluence.
To which I reply, often infuriating April Rosemary and Kevin and their siblings, that suburban domesticity is preferable on both aesthetic and ethical grounds to the relentless narcissism of Halsted Street yuppiedom.
And I add, above the uproar, that the decision made by our society in the postwar years to provide higher education for everyone, including women and blacks, was the most important social choice of the century and is responsible for the shape of American society today more than anything done during the Big Chill years.
Except possibly, I sometimes add, the interstate highway program.
I defend the right of women to have options. I’m glad my daughters have other models available as alternatives to the suburban domesticity of our time—a domesticity in which, as someone said, women agreed to have more children in less space and with less help than their mothers, in return for the promise that men would provide for them with greater affluence.
Yet I am not sure that the availability of options has made women any happier, on the average. Those who are capable of making choices are surely happier, but those who are not are much less happy, drifting as they do through life with neither career (in any meaningful sense) nor family. The one option offered for women in our time at least protected some of the weaker from having to make their own decisions.
There are costs to freedom. And casualties in a revolution that offers more freedom.
Nonetheless, while I will defend the fifties from the criticisms directed at the lonely crowd (a reality only long years after David Riesman wrote about) produced during the “me” decade and from the slander of shallow reporters like David Halberstam, I still have to admit that Rosemarie and I messed up badly during the fifties—that era of bobby sox and hula hoops, of Ozzie and Harriet and The Honeymooners, of Billy Graham and Elvis Presley, of tail fins and conical bras, of Estes Kefauver and the Davy Crockett craze, of the Bunny Hop and Sputnik.
We messed up because we compulsively assumed unnecessary responsibilities, as did most of our generation (better behavior, I would still argue, than the compulsive rejection of necessary responsibilities that marked our successors). There was nothing wrong with the vision of suburban domesticity. The mistake was in blighting the vision with our own hang-ups.
“I made a mistake,” she said in bed once. “I was completely wrong, that’s all.”
“Call the press, sound the trumpets!”
“Silly.” She slapped my arm and closed The Blackboard Jungle, which she had been reading. “The mistake was about you and it was really dumb.”
“About me?”
“About you.” She sighed and took off her reading glasses. “I assumed that because you are an artistic genius, the accountant part of you was just an act. It took me all these years to figure out that it isn’t an act and that the picture taker needs the accountant too.”
“Uh-huh.” The idea had never occurred to me.
“So you probably ought to do what you want to do.”
“And, other than disrobing you and ravishing you, what is that?”
“Finish your dissertation. It will make your pictures even better. I’m not sure why, because I haven’t figured you out completely yet. But I know it will.”
“You read minds too?”
“Only about sexual desires in men, and that’s pretty easy. Don’t tear my gown, please.”
Thus it was decided—even if it took me several months more to wrap up the first draft.
So Rosemarie and I were close and loving partners, but in marriage that’s not quite enough, not when there are serious problems that are never discussed.
We joined the Christian Family Movement, as did many Catholic couples in that era. We were the “babies” of the group, assured by the other couples that we had no idea yet what “life is really like.”
Given Rosemarie’s experiences with her father, I found that argument ridiculous if not offensive.
The religious ideals we discussed in our analysis of the Bible and the liturgy and the world around us (in the paradigm of See, Judge, and Act) were a direct challenge to the compulsive suburban life. If we really trusted a good and loving God, if we really believed in the world view of Jesus, if we really thought that we lived in the palm of God’s loving hand (as the old Irish blessing puts it), then we would have been less compulsive, less preoccupied, less hassled, less impatient with one another and our kids, less irritable when the perfection of our vision was marred by the imperfection of the human condition.
Ted McCormack—also a C.F.M. veteran—would contend later that the movement came apart because of the demands of intimacy. The groups became surrogate families in which all the unresolved childhood conflicts with siblings and parents reemerged to bedevil the community. The vast area of relational problems that husband and wife had ruled off their personal agenda surfaced, if indirectly, at our meetings and scared the hell out of everyone.
“If you really loved one another that way,” Jane said with a shiver, “you could get yourself fucked to death.”
It was a colorful way of describing the
risks of intense intimacy, really intense intimacy, that seem to lurk at the core of the Christian message. (Small wonder that priests, even men like John Raven, didn’t dare preach it).
“And that’s the real problem, Ted,” I would add to his analysis. “The unresolved family conflicts are bad enough. Once you understand what Jesus really meant, you run for your life. It would be too scary to live that way.”
Anyway, at twenty-four and twenty-seven, with three kids and my seemingly dubious career as a camera artist (Rosemarie’s description), neither my wife nor I was capable of taking Jesus seriously. We had, we thought, lots of excuses and plenty of time.
A dangerous argument whenever you use it.
Our trip to California was courtesy of Vogue, which had been making up its mind for some two years whether I was a fashion photographer or not.
Curiously, it was an assignment that my wife, who disapproved strongly of my ventures into photo journalism, strongly advocated, and one that I resisted.
I came up from the darkroom to find her nursing Jimmy Mike and talking on the phone.
“My husband might not be worth fifteen hundred dollars a day”—she shifted her son—“but that’s what he gets. If you want him to shoot all those beautiful women, you simply will have to pay his rates.”
She was lying through her teeth about my rates.
“What? No, that doesn’t include expenses. Seventy-five hundred for five days, plus expenses. That includes me. I’m his assistant and I’m very expensive. Huh? My dear young woman”—she winked at me—“I assure you that I am not about to permit my husband to associate with those gorgeous models without my being there to protect him. Ten thousand? Well, that’s more like it.”
“Vogue?”
She nodded cheerfully. “Lingerie shots with ten of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. Sounds like fun.”
“Cheesecake.”
“Dear God, Jimmy Mike”—she disengaged the frail little punk from his source of nourishment—“will you listen to your daddy, the prude? So what’s wrong with a little cheesecake?” she said, giving me a look. “You like it well enough. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how you do. Maybe you should devote your life to studying beautiful women.”
A Christmas Wedding Page 24
