“Has it been going on long?” I asked, sure that Peg had told her everything through the years.
“Up and down. Never this bad. I didn’t tell you because you’d feel you had to do something, like you always do, and there’s nothing that can be done until poor Vinny is ready.”
“Do you think they’ll separate?”
“I hope not. Peg has to mean it, though, or it won’t work. If she bluffs and he calls her bluff it’s curtains.”
More silence.
“Am I ever that way?”
“You! Oh, Chucky, how funny!”
“Well…”
“No, no, no.” She punched my arm. “You’re the one who puts up with the nut in the family.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing at all again.
“Thanks,” she continued “for taking care of the dishes.”
“I figured I should, since I ate all the food. … What can I do to help them?”
“Nothing!” she gripped my arm fiercely. “And please, please, don’t even try. You’ll only make matters worse.”
“You’re going to intervene?”
“Certainly.”
“With Vince?”
“Naturally.”
“Poor man.”
“He has it coming.”
“All right.” I felt rebuked. “Will they make it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Bet?”
Her outrageous leprechaun grin cracked her solemn face. “Never, husband mine, bet against Clancy when she’s about to lower the boom.”
27
“You don’t really want to return to your motel”—Millie tilted her brandy glass in my direction—“do you? Why don’t you spend the night here with me?”
Her invitation made explicit what the situation already conveyed—a fire crackling against the early spring chill, two people alone in a suburban parlor outside of New York, a sumptuous woman clad in a shimmering black robe under which there was almost certainly nothing but her, a man who had been wined and dined into insensitivity, four days of close cooperation that had eased into intimacy, an absent husband, an atmosphere of recklessness and adventure.
Why not? It was, after all, June of 1958 and I was a sophisticated man of the world, was I not? Especially with two-thirds of a bottle of wine in me. All right, I don’t drink, but this was a special situation, wasn’t it?
“That’s an interesting invitation.” I looked at my empty glass.
“You’re temporizing, Charles.”
You bet I am.
Holiday had asked me to do a “portfolio” on “life in the suburbs.” “We’ve heard too much that is critical of the suburbs,” Millie Edwards said to me over the phone. “We want this piece to be a celebration of the freedom and the culture and the togetherness that suburban life has made possible. We know you are a suburbanite yourself and that you reject much of the criticism. We thought some quality shots from you would make the piece a really major contribution to the discussion.”
“What suburb?”
“The one I live in. That way we will have no trouble finding the people and the places.”
“I have approval on what you use.” Rosemarie was no longer acting as my agent, but I knew what she would say.
“Surely. We don’t want to violate your integrity.”
“Integrity” probably didn’t mean the same thing to both of us. My “portfolio” would probably be four pictures at the most. I liked the idea. And I could use the shots in the suburb project that was in my idea notebook.
So, I agreed. Rosemarie thought it sounded good. No, she couldn’t come. Not at the end of the school year when she had to get the family ready for Long Beach.
How much of a West Side Irish Chicago local I was became obvious almost on arrival. The chosen “suburb” was much like John Cheever’s Shady Hill, utterly unlike Oak Park and River Forest and not at all the “ticky-tacky boxes” of the social criticism and the songs. It was supposed to be a slick piece defending the people who read the magazine.
They, in their turn, were not like my friends and neighbors. They were from all over the country, rootless, driven, bright, sophisticated, and—to my quickly jaundiced view—both supercilious and amoral.
Millie Edwards (“my professional name, Wright is my husband’s name”) was also unlike any woman I had ever met, the WASP beauty after whom Woody Allen chased and about whom I was ignorant. She was perhaps ten years older than me, tall, both svelte and voluptuous (I mean really voluptuous), and iridescent sexually.
I tumbled quickly and, I fear, completely. She knew that she had awed the red-haired runt from Chicago and was frankly amused by her conquest.
Acutely conscious of her presence behind me, I clicked away with my Rolleiflex and Hasselblad. Westchester County or Cook County, Dutch Colonial or ticky-tacky, my kind of people or other kinds of people, the themes were the same: domesticity, “togetherness” in family life, gadgets (electric carving knives, washers and dryers, tail fins on cars, hi-fidelity stereo systems, ever larger TV sets), child-centered living, religious devotion, commuting fathers, Bermuda shorts, chauffeuring mothers, conformity, etc., etc.
So I took pictures of PTA meetings, barbecues (around swimming pools, which at that time you couldn’t find in most suburbs, even modestly affluent ones like Oak Park), wives greeting husbands at the seven-thirty train, martini-drenched cocktail parties, pastors in turtleneck sweaters leading bible discussion groups in luxurious homes, tail fins in front of churches, T-birds in high school parking lots, mothers delivering children to their respective post-school activities, waiting rooms in maternity wards, new homes on the fringe of the expanding suburb—read about all of it in the popular histories of that era.
Change the hairdos and the clothes, the car styles and the slogans and you could take most of the same pictures today. Suburbs, then and now, are a nice symbol by which one group in the upper middle class (professors and journalists) can scapegoat another segment (businessmen and professionals). Moreover, they also were an excellent inkblot in which those who fancied themselves a cultural elite could see—and protest against—the weakening of their monopoly on the good, the true, and the beautiful.
The more affluent members of the middle class have always wanted the “good life” that the postwar suburbs made possible. The difference between the pre-1950s suburbs and the myth I was trying to capture was size: prosperity gave many more people a share in affluence. And the difference between then and now is that far more people (too many, probably) take affluence for granted today.
My generation, born or raised in the Depression, was catching up; because of the flourishing economy a lot more of us caught up than were ever expected to do so.
Suburban “lifestyle” a dramatic social change in the fifties? Not in quality, only in quantity.
I grew angry at the stereotyping as I wandered through Westchester County, watching Millie Edwards out of the corner of my eye, especially because scapegoating was the work of those who were enjoying the affluence as much as anyone else.
The Holiday project was ambivalent in its essence: it was supposed to celebrate suburbia as well as critique it. I did my best to celebrate Prosperity, which is much better than Depression.
I know, I’ve lived through both.
I think I did a pretty good job despite my distractions.
I saw some of my shots cited in a “social history” book the other day as evidence of how “complacent and conformist” Americans were in those days.
Only in those days?
Millie is in one of the shots in the book. My memories were accurate enough: she was a devastating woman.
Her allure was not merely physical, though there was plenty of that, God knows. She was bright, sophisticated, accomplished. Wasn’t my wife worthy of all of those adjectives too?
Yeah, except Rosemarie, like all the other women in my life, was anything but cosmopolitan. West Side Chicago Irish to her painted fingernails. Awa
re of the outside world, but not deeply involved in it and not even eager to be.
Millie was part of the Big World—whatever the hell that was. She’d graduated from Radcliffe, she’d done graduate work in Paris, and she skied in the Alps every year after Christmas, vacationed in Corfu, bought her clothes in Paris, knew Frank Sinatra, spent weekends on Martha’s Vineyard.
Cortina, Corfu, the Vineyard—and we had Grand Beach!
“Chicago sounds like such an interesting city, I really want to visit it sometime. Tell me about your Mayor Daley. He is an interesting primitive type, isn’t he?”
See what I mean?
All of which is to say that she was different. That may have been the strongest part of the temptation.
Would my Rosemarie have been attractive to a visiting artist from Westchester?
He probably would have thought her the Irish serving girl type. Poor man.
“Your wife sounds like a fascinating woman, Charles. Looks like one too. Oh, yes, I saw the picture in Vogue. Simply adorable. You’re a very lucky man.”
In a tone of voice that made me wonder whether I was in a rut.
Clever.
If I hadn’t been tempted, I would not have been human.
I would enjoy the flame of her company, I told myself, without flying into the fire of infidelity.
Right?
Rosemarie and I had drifted apart again by the late 1950s. We would have denied it then. We both would have asserted pugnaciously that we were very much in love. But the truth is that love that is not tended grows cold and perhaps dies. Can it be reborn?
Perhaps. If the opportunities are seized.
We had stumbled into an opportunity in Beverly Hills. If there were any other opportunities we missed them. We slept in the same bed—when I was home. We were not unfaithful to each other, heaven knows. We made love—nice, safe, unexciting married love—when we were not too tired at the end of the day, which we were most of the time.
We lived the kind of life in which you begin every day rushing and at the end, even though you have never once slowed down, you are even farther behind than when you started.
Rosemarie had not reached her twenty-fifth birthday when Sean Seamus O’Malley, our third son and fourth child, was born. She was sick through most of the pregnancy, the delivery was more difficult than the first three combined, and she was depressed for several weeks after Seano’s birth, so depressed that the task of restoring her body to its previous perfection was delayed for several months.
“I could have fifteen more before menopause,” she said. “Do you want a family that size?”
“I think not.”
“I love every one of them,” she said as she soothed “poor little Seano,” who as far as I could see was neither poor, nor, even then, particularly little. “I wish there was a bit more time to breathe.”
Jane and Peg and our whole generation were having children at about the same rate—gamely, enthusiastically, even joyously. At first.
When they found that perennial pregnancy was ruining their bodies, their nervous systems, their marriages, their lives, many of them became angry—at the Church, at their husbands (first available target), and at themselves. I read somewhere that until the early part of the last century in Western Europe (and much more recently elsewhere) 6.38 pregnancies were required on the average to produce two adults, in other words, for the married couple to reproduce themselves. When we were having children, 6.38 pregnancies would produced seven children (since one must round to the nearest whole child).
I’ve never been able to figure out how much the Church’s birth control teaching contributed to the break-down and collapse of many marriages of our generation. Some marriages would have fallen apart anyway. Other marriages survived and flourished. But in between were a lot of marriages that might have continued to be love affairs, but became conflict and hate affairs because of exhausted women and little or no healing renewal from sex.
The Church, ignoring the experience of married people, didn’t think that healing and renewal of love were what married sex was about. Sex was for having children. If you didn’t have children it was dirty.
I must be candid about the deterioration of our love during those years. If the puritanism and insensitivity of the Church leadership at the time aggravated our problems, they did not cause the problems. I could hardly plead, as did many of my male contemporaries, that I was working day and night, not for myself but for my family. I could not claim that I was doing it all for my wife and kids.
For they didn’t need any more money than we already had.
Nor could I complain that my wife was a nag. Save on the subject of photojournalism, she almost never harassed me. Her “ought tos,” as I knew well by now, were suggestions and not conditions for continued love. She was still beautiful, still witty, still mysterious. I had little time to appreciate any of these characteristics.
She did drink too much on occasion, but her binges had settled into a pattern that did not seem especially dangerous: once every six or eight months she would drink herself to sleep in the quiet of her study, sometimes spending the night there, sometimes staggering up to bed later on. The next day she would be quiet and wan, perhaps apologetic. The day after, she was herself again, mistress of the revels with which she and the foursome kept themselves busy.
I consoled myself with the piety that the problem had lessened and that soon it would disappear completely.
The children tired her, but she did have two helpers and was never physically prostrated like other woman of her generation. She could always sneak out for a movie (like The Seventh Seal or The Man with the Golden Arm) or a concert or a recital with Mom and Peg—much more freedom and self-realization (or whatever you want to call it) than other women could enjoy.
She was compulsively responsible about the kids, but, the children, led by the indomitable April Rosemary, knew how to deal with her. They were developing distinctive personalities of their own. April Rosemary was a serious, all-wise little mother; Kevin a clown; Jimmy a dreamer; Seano a resourceful, self-possessed foil for everyone else.
My Rosemarie governed them all like she was their big sister. I was terribly proud of her skills at motherhood. I told her so. Right? Wrong. I was not too busy to notice. I was too busy to comment. Though the children continued to treat me like a very funny baby brother, they worried that I was not like other daddies: I didn’t go to work in the morning.
“Taking pictures is not work,” A. R. insisted, hands stubbornly on her hips.
“I agree, honey, but I get paid for it.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
They were fully prepared to offer me their best thoughts on what to shoot and how. April Rosemary even began to say, “Daddy, you ought to…”
I took them to a circus once. They agreed on the way home that I was funnier than any of the clowns. Their mother did not dissent.
Nonetheless their mother and father drifted apart, not because the deck was stacked against us but despite the fact that the deck was mostly stacked in our favor. We did not talk about our dwindling sexual activity because we accepted the folk wisdom that such diminution was natural and inevitable. To discuss that most poignant aspect of marital intimacy requires a willingness to be vulnerable and to put the whole relationship in the balance. Husbands and wives are mostly unready, I have learned from experience and observation, to take such a chance.
The Church’s teaching, bad enough as it was, also became an excuse not to face what I call the romantic imperative of marriage: To wit, you take periods of romantic renewal out of marriage and it isn’t marriage anymore.
The realist argues that marriage and romance are two different phenomena. Marriage is too serious a union to confuse it with romantic love. I respond that it is so serious a union that you must have romantic love to sustain it.
My book The Romantic Imperative has sold more than any of my other works, more than most of them put together. More
about that later, however.
So Rosemarie and I were doing what most people our age were doing: we were using career and family as an excuse to avoid the challenge of maturing intimacy.
The Church sure did help us in this evasion.
In my more reflective moments, I envied Peg and Vince their bitter fight. They could not continue to drift. They had to face the issues and talk about them.
A few weeks after the night I demolished the Syrian meal, in the early evening, I was walking by their house and, disobeying my wife’s strict orders, I impulsively walked up the steps to ring their doorbell. On the porch, I hesitated. There was no noise inside. The house, with a single light in the living room, hinted that no one was home. I glanced in the window to see if anyone was home.
My sister and her husband were huddled on the couch, her arms protectively around him, his head resting on her chest. From a distance and through the thin drapes, it was obvious that he was weeping.
I tiptoed away.
What a wonderful picture of forgiving love it was. Too bad I could not take a picture of it, especially of Peg’s tender affection, big enough in the scene briefly observed to embrace the whole world and all of a life-time.
Some woman, my sister.
A day or two later the phone rang. No one was around, so, against strict orders that artists don’t answer phones, I picked it up. “O’Malley residence.”
“You’re not supposed to answer the phone.” Peg, the purest sort of joy in her voice.
“Only when I know it’s good news.”
“That obvious, huh?” She sounded ecstatic.
“So obvious that even dumb Chucky notices.”
“Dear God, brother, it’s wonderful to fall in love again.”
“I’m glad it worked out,” I said with more than my usual flair for an original phrase.
“The guy is so ashamed of the other night. Be nice to him when he calls.”
“Unlike the other times when I was not nice to him.”
“What? Oh, don’t be silly! Tell Rosie I called.”
“Surely.”
A Christmas Wedding Page 30
