A Christmas Wedding

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Certainly.” I nodded toward Rosemarie, who was bustling around with the lights, alternately fighting and flirting with the technicians. “Wonderful! Her rates?”

  “Same as the girl who canceled.”

  “All right.”

  “Rosemarie… come here, darling… see that blue corset, the strapless one?”

  “Foundation garment, dear, let me see.” She consulted her clipboard. “Sapphire blue foundation, panel in nylon lace, satin, net, with a latex back section—makes the skin look like alabaster.”

  “Right. Put it on. We need a model.”

  “No! I never wear that kind of thing. Ugh. It makes me feel all cramped-up just to look at it.”

  “Hurry up, we don’t have all afternoon.”

  “No.” She did not speak with too much conviction, however. Her refusal was merely for the record. As I knew it would be.

  “The actress’s rates, dear,” the editor from Vogue chimed in.

  “Do it, Rosie!” a technician yelled.

  “All RIGHT.”

  Rosemarie played it for laughs, overcoming whatever shyness she might have had. It was the best shot of the series, not a comic figure, but a mysterious, dark-haired, alabaster woman of the world. Afterwards she received several modeling offers, which she promptly and firmly turned down.

  “I only work with my husband,” she assured them primly.

  Her suggestion that I do the shoot was wise, quite apart from the renewal of our married romance it occasioned. I was very good indeed at capturing women in the eye of the camera. What might have been cheesecake, though in Vogue high-class cheesecake, became art. If I do say so myself.

  So there was a lot on our agenda at poolside as the sun began to fall behind the trees. She managed to drag me into our cottage as I frantically kissed her neck and shoulders, but we didn’t make it as far as the bedroom. Not the first time.

  We had supper sent to the room. Rosemarie phoned my mother, who was delighted to preside over the playroom till Monday evening.

  I was a genuinely happy young man. Despite our compulsions we were still very much in love. I was improving in my career. Rosemarie was a wonderful mother and an ingenious lover. All was right with the world.

  I often wonder how our life would have been different if we had been able to stay that weekend.

  At eight o’clock the next morning I was shaken out of my well-deserved sleep by a phone call. Where the hell was Rosemarie? She was the early riser.

  The shower was running.

  Damn the self-indulgent woman.

  I picked up the phone. “Yeah?”

  “Ed Murray, Chuck. Sorry to bother you. I’m afraid I have some bad news. …”

  The kids? My parents? Peg and Vince?

  “Jim Clancy got himself blown to kingdom come this morning.”

  24

  “As I understand it, Mrs. O’Malley”—Lieutenant Arthur H. Rearden was three-quarters of a foot taller than me, lean as a street lamp, and had long unruly silver hair, excessive dandruff, and bad breath—“you inherit all your father’s money. Mr. Joseph O’Laughlin, who I believe is your father’s attorney, confirmed that to me.”

  “You understand more than I do.” Rosemarie, demure and pale in a black suit, but dry-eyed, spoke calmly enough. She was dangerously close to an explosion.

  So was I. Closer perhaps.

  “You are not familiar with the provisions of his will?”

  “My father and I have not been very close for the past several years.”

  “Since”—he flipped his notebook with the hand not holding the cigarette—“since the public, uh, altercation at one of your husband’s exhibits.”

  “Since my mother’s death, really.”

  “I see.” He finished his cigarette and lighted another.

  We were sitting in the office of Conroy’s Funeral Home at Lake and Austin. If you were not buried from those precincts, steeped in the smell of mums, you were not buried properly as a West Side Irishman.

  “Is it not true”—he was standing at the door of the undertaker’s office—“that in that exhibition you were depicted in the nude?”

  “No, it is not—”

  “What’s the point of this, Detective Rearden? You sound more like a state’s attorney than a homicide detective.”

  “I’m trying to establish motives for the crime,” he sneered, “MISTER O’Malley. Your wife has powerful motives. She inherits an enormous amount of money. She hated her father. You threatened him repeatedly, three times at least.” He flipped the pages of his notebook. “She also inherited money from her mother when her mother died. She claims not to have been in the house when her mother fell—or was pushed—down the stairs. The only witness who can establish her presence elsewhere is, marvelous to relate, your sister, Margaret O’Malley. Now Mrs. Vincent Antonelli. Married a wop, huh?”

  “So?” I half-rose from my chair.

  “Charles!” her voice cracked like a rifle shot. My temper simmered down. I sat back in the chair, my fists still clenched.

  “So all you have to do is to prove that while we were in Los Angeles we wired my father-in-law’s Cadillac with TNT.”

  “You could hire people to do that”—he shrugged—“and then go away because you thought it was an alibi.”

  “So you need to find out whom we hired.”

  “Which I intend to do.” As Art Rearden leaned forward, his bad breath almost choking me, Ed Murray and his father, Dan Murray, and his wife Cordelia appeared silently behind him. “All I know is that your wife’s parents are both dead and the two of you have inherited a lot of money. I intend to send you both to the electric chair. Your wife won’t look nearly so good after they’ve fried her.”

  Rosemarie screamed, a little, plaintive cry of terror. I went after him. Ed stepped in between us. He was still substantially bigger than I was.

  Cordelia embraced Rosemarie.

  “We heard that,” said Dan Murray quietly. “And we aren’t about to forget it, Art. The Commissioner and the State’s Attorney won’t be at all pleased.”

  Art Rearden turned on his heel and departed, trailing his various smells behind him.

  “What was that all about?”

  “A burglar killed his wife while he was on duty.” Dan Murray—a robust older version of his son—was frowning thoughtfully. “Accidental murder, she surprised the guy. Rearden has been a little nuts ever since. This time he’s gone too far. That was unprofessional and ugly. I think I will have a word with a few people. He should be regulating traffic over at Midway. Something like that.”

  “Everyone in town knows,” Ed added, “that Jim Clancy was in bed with the mob the last few years. You hear on the street that some of our friends over on the West Side were upset with him because he was trying to pull something slick on them. Our friends don’t like that. Sorry, Rosie.”

  “Ed, there was so much hate in that man’s eyes. He really does want to see me die.”

  “Don’t worry, kid, they don’t have even the beginning of a case. The State’s Attorney’s office knows that. Art is acting on his own.”

  We had flown home from L.A. on the first flight we could get, but it was still ten o’clock at night when we arrived at Midway. Vince and Peg met us, radiating the tenseness that so often seemed to accompany them.

  Ed and Cordelia hovered behind them, their eyes on Rosemarie, horrified, I was sure, by her obvious pain.

  Jim Clancy, they told us, had bounded out of his house, on the run, according to the woman who lived on the opposite corner of Menard and Thomas and who watched everything that happened in that street from sunup to sundown. He jumped into his brand-new car, parked in the driveway and not in the garage despite the bad weather, turned on the ignition, and disappeared in a burst of fire and smoke. The watching neighbor was taken to St. Anne’s Hospital for treatment of wounds to her face from the breaking glass of her windows.

  There was enough of him left for an autopsy. The body would be releas
ed to Conroy’s the next day, after the autopsy. The papers had reported on Clancy’s recent relations with the mob. There was no mention of the art exhibit. The obituary referred to his long association with the Board of Trade.

  “Will there be a big wake?” I asked Vince.

  “Lots of people from the Board will come because of you and Rosemarie and there will be some curiosity seekers too. There’ll be cops hanging around to see about the Outfit, but the word is they won’t show. Don’t want anyone to infer a connection.”

  “So I’ll have to stand there for two nights,” Rosemarie began.

  “One night. April decided that promptly,” Peg cut her off. “She makes decisions for all of us that we don’t want to make ourselves. … How do you feel, Rose?”

  “Numb. No feeling. You can’t miss what you’ve lost already. I felt sorry for him when he was alive. I gave up on trying to save him long ago. Still, he was my father.”

  The numbness continued the next day, until the scene with Art Rearden. I couldn’t reach her. I could never reach that distant, frigid part of her soul where Rosemarie dwelt with the memories of her mother and father. Each time I thought about those memories—which wasn’t very often—I marveled that she could have matured into the usually self-possessed woman that she was. The astonishing thing was not that she drank too much occasionally, but that she didn’t drink all the time.

  The wake was a strange one even for an Irish wake. The usual people showed up—politicians, distant women relatives who had not missed a wake in forty years, officers of parish societies, older priests who had once served at St. Ursula’s for whom wake attendance had become their only remaining priestly function, married couples who had known Jim and Clarice Clancy in their younger days at Twin Lakes, old-timers from the Board of Trade, nuns from the grammar school, our own friends and neighbors, including our C.F.M. group, and unidentified characters who may have wandered into the wrong wake.

  The greeting was the same as at “ordinary” wakes: “Sorry for your trouble.” Monsignor Branigan’s bluff good cheer, as always, exorcised the specter of death for a few moments. “Those galoots of yours playing football yet, Rosie? We’ll be needing them at Notre Dame soon.”

  It was all off-key. No one could observe, “My, doesn’t he look natural?” or “Didn’t Joe Conroy do a wonderful job?” because even the magic of the ancient funeral director could not assemble the scattered fragments of Jim Clancy’s body. The casket was closed, a phenomenon that didn’t seem right at an Irish wake, as fashionable as it had become for other groups.

  Moreover, just as there was less sorrow at this wake for a man who had earned little in the way of mourning, there was also less of the crazy, archaic, cheerful hope that the Irish demand at their wakes. It was a quiet, gray-tinged ritual, a hesitant tribute and a very hesitant hope, at which my wife presided with a pale, tense graciousness.

  Jim Clancy’s lawyer Joe O’Laughlin tottered in—a little old man with dirty white hair. “Sorry for your trouble, Rosemarie,” he said, sighing. “Sorry for your trouble.”

  He was the only one with tears in his eyes.

  He himself would be dead two months later, leaving Jim Clancy’s estate in a mess that took Ed Murray years to straighten out.

  Only Father Raven, now transferred from St. Ursula’s, broke through the gloom.

  “God loved him, Rose; no matter what happened God never stopped loving him.”

  A tiny tear appeared at the corner of each of those marvelous dark eyes and slipped down her cheeks.

  “Thank you, Father.”

  The last visitor departed at nine-thirty, half an hour before wakes were supposed to end. Only Ed and Cordelia (she pregnant, and back looking very happy) and my family remained.

  “It wasn’t much of a wake at all,” the old-timers would say. “But, ah, herself is a fine woman, now isn’t she?”

  They might then add words of astonishment that Jim had fathered such an elegant daughter.

  Ed Murray took Rosemarie and me aside as we were preparing to leave. “Did you know your father had terminal cancer, Rosemarie?”

  Her eyes widened. “No, I had no idea…”

  “They found it all over the organs on which they were able to perform an autopsy. His doctor told the coroner that he had diagnosed liver cancer three weeks ago. It had already metastasized. Your father would not have lasted more than a couple of months.”

  “But why then would they kill him?”

  “Those folks have their own code—if they knew, which maybe they didn’t.”

  “I suppose,” she frowned, “they did him a favor.”

  Later, when we were driving home from Conroy’s in Rosemarie’s gull-wing Mercedes 300 SL, with me at the wheel, she began to talk about her father.

  “Losing his hair was the worst event in his life,” she said thoughtfully. “Mom always said that was the turning point. He had a big mop of curly black hair—a cute little boy with long eyelashes and pretty hair. Being short wasn’t bad as long as you were cute enough to be spoiled by everyone. When he lost his hair he stopped being cute.”

  “Poor man.” We parked in the driveway. I’d let Rosemarie talk as long as she wanted. A February thaw was melting the snow piles and had turned the drive into a small lake.

  “It was a bitter pill to swallow; one year he was a cute little trickster, the next year he was an ugly little practical joker. Somehow his greed for money, which didn’t offend anyone when he was cute, became terrible when he was ugly. He sensed that those who once admired him, or at least tolerated him, now despised him. So he began to overeat and became obese.”

  “From an indulged, pretty child to a fat, ugly child?”

  “That about says it, doesn’t it, Chuck? Losing his hair didn’t bother your father.”

  “He wasn’t short and he sure wasn’t indulged. Anyway, people are different.”

  “They sure are.” She sighed.

  “I didn’t know about the practical jokes.”

  “Mom told me that he had always been a prankster; his mother thought it quite amusing when they were courting. I have a picture somewhere—he was really an adorable little man with laughing eyes. He was always playing harmless little jokes on her. He gave her a dime-store ring before he gave her a real diamond—”

  “Doesn’t sound very funny to me. Did he play tricks on you?”

  “Oh sure, my dolls would disappear and then turn up in the attic or the coal bin. I’d laugh because he wanted me to laugh. If you didn’t laugh, he’d put you on his enemies list and not talk to you for days.”

  “Enemies list?”

  “He had a list of all the people who had ever offended him and his plans to get even. The last time I saw it was up at Lake Geneva. He kept it in an open safe on the wall behind the big painting of Mom, you remember, in the room—”

  “Where you tried to seduce me for the first time.” We both laughed.

  “I remember”—the smile vanished quickly from her weary face—“one Christmas I pleaded with him for a horse. I was about ten or eleven, the age when little girls want horses—substitute for a man under you, I suppose. I did a lot of riding that spring out in the Forest Preserve and then later on at the lake. Do you remember? Peg came sometimes.”

  I nodded, though I did not remember.

  “He promised that he would bring me one on Christmas day. So he gave me a little box, fancy one, with a toy horse wrapped up in red tissue paper. He thought it was a wonderful joke and became very angry when I cried instead of laughed. … I lost interest in riding after that.”

  “How did you survive, Rosemarie? And survive to become the wonderful woman you are?”

  “You’re sweet, Chuck.” She touched my hand, still on the steering wheel, affectionately. “Sometimes I don’t think I survived at all.”

  “But you did.” I captured her hand and held it tightly.

  “Well, if I did, the reason was your family, mostly. I don’t suppose that as a little girl I thoug
ht about it that way, but I knew I had to be with the O’Malleys. That’s why I was such a nuisance.”

  I put my arms around her and kissed her as passionately as I could while still being very gentle. “Pesky little brat that I wanted to strangle. Or kiss till the end of time.”

  “I think I wanted to kiss you the second time I saw you. Even though I hated you because you were a crude, ill-tempered BOY!”

  “And I wanted to take your clothes off ever since I was twelve.”

  “Dirty-minded little boy.” She kissed me. “I think I would have let you do anything you wanted—anything you could work up enough nerve to want.”

  We laughed again.

  “You go in the house, I’ll put the car away.”

  “Thanks for listening. Sorry I ruined the weekend.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  I parked the car and went up to our bedroom. Rosemarie, in a black slip (tolerated only at times of mourning), was listlessly combing her long hair.

  Knowing that she wanted to talk more, I sat on the edge of the bed and waited.

  “I’ve never lied to you, husband mine, have I?”

  “Lord, no, Rosemarie. If anything, I’ve thought, you may be too honest.” (Although sometimes, when you have that far away look in your eye or when you wake up at night crying as you did on our honeymoon, I wonder if there is yet another secret.)

  “Then believe”—she placed the brush on her vanity table—“please believe that what I will now tell you is the truth.”

  A sharp knife of fear jabbed into my gut. What now?

  “Of course.”

  “That terrible policeman knows something. Or thinks he knows something. Or has a hint of something. You see”—her breasts rose and fell in a quick spasm of breath—“Peg and I were in the house the day mother died… I mean before she died… and”—her voice caught—“when she died.”

  “What?”

  “You were in Germany and there was never any reason to tell you when you came home. We were two frightened, silly little girls.” She played lifelessly with her brush. “We hadn’t done anything wrong, but we were terrified, especially by the police.”