A Christmas Wedding

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “What does the Pope know about marriage?” She began to move the swing back and forth, fixing for an attack on the Pope.

  “Not much.”

  “You know what happens when we try rhythm?” She was adopting her Maxwell Street merchant persona, making me want her all the more powerfully.

  “We either don’t make love or you get pregnant.”

  “Right. And what about times like this when we both know that the best thing possible for our marriage would be for you to ravish me from now till supper?”

  “Or you ravish me.”

  “Regardless.” She waved my cavil away.

  “We’d either look at the calender or give up the idea because we’d be afraid to ask.”

  “Can we live that way?”

  “Dear God, Rosemarie.” I shut my eyes and saw through my camera eye the failures of the past five years. “I don’t think so.”

  “So?”

  “We stop receiving the sacraments, I suppose.”

  “I won’t do that!” Her lips tightened. “I won’t let a pope or a priest tell me that saving my marriage is a sin”.

  I had never quite thought of it in those terms before.

  “I’ll take care of it,” she went on. “You don’t have to worry your conscience about it.”

  “That wouldn’t be fair,” I protested.

  “Well then talk to some priest who will tell you that saving the marriage is more important. That’s what John Raven is saying.”

  “You talked to John?”

  “No, I made up my own conscience, like an adult should. But I know John is telling people that too. Michael says the same thing.”

  “My brother?”

  The robe had fallen away from her knees. I found myself slipping deeper into a luxurious swamp of desire. My manliness had recovered from its disgrace last night.

  “It’s probably not fair to cite him because I told him to say that.”

  “You told him?” I loosened my tie. Yes, she would have to ravish my body this time, having done in my mind and my conscience as foreplay.

  Michael had been ordained in early May, a proud day for my parents: nine grandchildren and now a priest in the family, a serious, devout, and dedicated young priest. Mom and Dad were, need I say it, late for the ordination ceremony. Some things never change.

  “Sure, they put the poor kid in a parish after locking him away for seven years and expect him to work intelligently with men and women who are older than he is and more experienced and better educated. So”—she shrugged, the Maxwell Street merchant—“he needs someone to ask about women and marriage and stuff like that.”

  Rosemarie as confidante to the clergy. Wow!

  “Do you object?”

  “Me? Hardly. I was merely admiring his good taste.”

  She blushed again and stayed crimson. “You’ll talk to John. He says, I’m told, that if the Pope doesn’t change the rule, the priests and people will change it for him. Married people can’t and shouldn’t live the way they told us we had to live. God understands that, even if the Church doesn’t.”

  I thought about it. “I’ll ask John what he thinks the next time I see him. But it’s obvious that you’re right, as always. The trouble with our marriage, like most, I suppose, is not that we have too much sex, but that we don’t have nearly enough.”

  She sighed, her robe now open from top to bottom. “I couldn’t agree more.”

  Thus did we change our attitude on family limitation, a few years before most Catholics and most priests. As I write these words, the Pope and some of the bishops, more than forty years later, are still kidding themselves into thinking that if they are clear enough about the Church’s teachings, we lay folk will put our marriages in jeopardy at their say-so.

  You don’t have to be married very long to know that the frictions and the tensions of the common life in which a man and a woman occupy the same house and the same bed are only tolerable when the pain can be healed and the love renewed in physical pleasure. From inside a marriage that fact is so evident, so “natural,” so undeniable, that you wonder how anyone can doubt it.

  Even if your wife is a splendid woman such as my Rosemarie, maybe especially if she is a Rosemarie, you simply have to love her physically or you go out of your mind with tension, conflict, avoidance, and frustration.

  If the Pope doesn’t like that, he should take it up with the God who made us that way.

  “Fifthly?”

  “Fifthly, I love you, Charles C.”

  “Then take off your robe, it’s too hot out here anyway.”

  “You’re the one who is too hot.” But she obeyed my command.

  Bikinis in those days, as I have said, were considerably more substantial than they are now. But there was still a lot of Rosemarie, nicely emphasized by white fabric and long black hair. It was such a comfortable swamp. Why not stay here all summer?

  “Thank you, Rosemarie.” I would wait a little while longer before joining her on the swing; a little more anticipation seemed appropriate.

  “For taking off my robe?”

  “That too. But mostly for lowering the boom. I would never have had the nerve, not in a million years. I’m glad my wife did.”

  “I was scared”—her voice caught—“you’d be mad.”

  It was a perfect time and occasion, was it not, for talking about the remaining problems on our marriageproblem agenda: her drinking habits and the mystery (in my head anyway) of her mother’s death?

  I thought about it, wondered how to raise the issue, and then, not nearly as brave as my wife, I postponed talk about her occasional drinking bouts to another occasion. It was a loss of nerve that would cost us both dearly.

  “Are you really going to stay with us all summer?” she asked.

  “Looking at you this moment, young woman”—I rose, walked to the swing, and sat beside her—“I think I’ll find it very hard even to drive into New Buffalo to buy the paper.”

  “It’s delivered during the summer.” Her voice was soft now with desire. “Let me take off your shirt.”

  The screens around our deck provided sufficient privacy to protect us from any voyeurs who might be off-shore in cruisers watching us with binoculars.

  “I knew, deep down, you wouldn’t be angry.” Her lips roamed lightly over my body, rewarding me for my co-operation.

  “I’ll never be angry when you say truths I need to hear.” I unhooked the back of her bikini top. “I can’t promise that you won’t have to do it again.”

  “It’ll be easier next time. … The little slob left some nourishment in there if you want it.”

  I turned her head and looked deep into her eyes. It was a fantasy that, I would learn later, many, if not most, husbands and wives have, but which few are able to discuss: nursing your own husband/son and being nursed by your own wife/mother.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Please,” she begged me, her back arching in anticipation. “I really want you to.”

  My lips circled her salty nipple and gently drew on them, sweet warm fluid slipped into my mouth. Rosemarie moaned softly. I felt like I was floating on a sweet-smelling, snow white cloud. I could stay here forever.

  She held my head against her breasts. There was no milk left but I did not want to leave. Not ever. Our renewed love was sealed. We would always be together.

  Rosemarie’s fingers began to fumble with my belt buckle.

  The renewal of married love that glorious summer was profound and powerful. Unfortunately, it was not strong enough to resist the storms that would assault it later on in the year.

  In our bedroom—to which we had eventually repaired—lying peacefully and happily in my arms, Rosemarie continued her litany.

  “Sixthly—”

  “I thought we were finished.”

  “No, but you seemed too preoccupied with other matters to listen.”

  “All right.” With my fingertips I skimmed her lips, back and forth, several times.
/>   “I can’t talk if you keep doing that.”

  “Sixthly … ?”

  “Sixthly”—she drew a deep breath—“we’re flying to Germany at the end of August. You have a contract to do an update of The Conquered. A big, big advance. They’ll print your old pictures with the new ones and you can write a long text too. It’ll be a major work, right? You can put in all that stuff from your dissertation about the Marshall Plan—which by the way we’re going to finish real soon, are we not?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Before Christmas.”

  “Labor Day. And then they’ve planned an important exhibition of all your work. So we have to go, don’t we? I mean we’ve never traveled on the continent together …”

  “Where”—my heart was sinking toward the bottom of Lake Michigan because I already knew the answer—“is the show?”

  “In that cute little city where they make the Benzes, you know, Stuttgart.”

  29

  Our trip to Europe was great fun, so much better than I would have dared to expect, that when it finally exploded I was caught completely unprepared.

  Rosemarie was pure delight, protecting me from reporters and groupies (as we could call them now), nursing me in my travel ills, amusing me with comic commentary in dialects appropriate to the country we were in, encouraging me when I was discouraged, and loving me body and soul. She was the perfect agent/assistant/wife/mistress.

  I told myself that my fears about returning to Germany were quite irrational.

  I looked for Trudi in the faces on the railroad platforms and at the same time I was sure I would never find her.

  Our German hosts were pleasant and obsequious. Even today, but more so then, they were not quite sure how to relate to their conquerors turned allies and protectors. They seemed to want to say, See how we have recovered from the war, see the spirit and the energy of the German people, see how good we are, see how efficiently we have thrown off the yoke of our Nazi past.

  And you wanted to say to them something like, Yeah, but…

  They were delighted that I had returned to “record the progress in the Federal Republic since your last visit.” Progress there had surely been. There were few traces left of the war, an occasional ruined house or legless vet of the Wehrmacht. The country was bursting with progress and prosperity, the German economic miracle was in high gear. So successful was the recovery that already the German literary left (Boll and Fassbinder, for example) were complaining about it, without, as befits the literary left, proposing any particular alternative.

  We were presented to Herr Reichkanzler Adenauer in Bonn. He remembered me.

  “Ya, ya, Herr Roter!” He exclaimed, embracing me, much to the astonishment of his attendants.

  “Frau Roter,” he said, kissing my wife’s hand, much to that young woman’s blushing delight.

  “You will see our Kurt and Brigitta?”

  “Ja, ja!”

  “Ja, gut!”

  As an American artist, one who had studied Germany after the war with his camera (not knowing at the time that this was what I was doing), I was offensive to both the left and the right. The former saw me as a representative of American capitalism (which, God knows, I was) who had come to celebrate the “materialistic” economic miracle. The latter (much more quietly) saw me as someone who had come to probe beneath the surface of prosperity to remind the world of the Nazis and the Holocaust.

  Hence, my exhibition in the gallery in Stuttgart, which looked like a concrete Zepplin hanger, was a retrospective on all my work, putting The Conquered into its proper context, as it was explained to me.

  Thus the right could say that I was as critical of America as I was of Germany, and the left could rage more furiously than ever about American capitalism (which had provided the money that had in turn produced the resources that supported the university system off which the left lived).

  I found these attacks more amusing than offensive. I suppose that both the left and the right were correct about me. I was indeed a celebrant of American capitalism, but a celebrant who saw the flaws. A quiet reference to what happened to me in Little Rock usually put down a reporter who suggested that I was nothing more than an agent of American imperialism.

  Rosemarie, who was my interpreter, among her other roles (somehow she had managed to pick up enough German so that she became quite fluent once she was in the country for a few days), sacked for a ten-yard loss a contentious woman reporter with a thin face and long blond hair who would not abandon this theme.

  “Herr O’Malley recognizes storm troopers very well, red or brown, right or left. He was beaten by some of them at Little Rock, an experience not unknown, I believe, to German artists.”

  Clancy had once again lowered the boom.

  I was also haunted by deep ambivalence about Germany. Anyone who lived through the war and the discovery of the Holocaust cannot escape such mixed feelings. But I did not believe in collective guilt. I had come to see, I kept insisting, not to judge.

  “Judge not,” my agent/translator snapped, “that you be not judged.”

  “I see long before I judge,” I would say, “and what I see is surely a function of what I am. You may not like what I see or what I am, but I cannot pretend to anything other. What was it a German religious leader said?”

  “Hereon I stand, I can do no other,” my translator quoted Luther before I could.

  That’s the trouble with a certain kind of translator, Irish Catholic woman translator, to be specific.

  “And what are you, Herr O’Malley?” someone at the press conference asked.

  “I’m an Irish Catholic Democrat from the West Side of Chicago with a camera,” I held up my Leica. “A German camera, as a matter of fact”

  Most did not comprehend my response, much as they liked my reference to the German camera.

  “You will excuse my ignorance, Herr O’Malley,” an infinitely polite, rotund gentleman with a beard and thick glasses said, “but what precisely”—a courtly bow—“iss dis Irish Catholic Democrat from the West Side of Chicago?”

  “I’m not really a very good example. Let me see,” I faked it, “how can I find an example… ? I know, her!”

  I pointed at my translator, who blushed contentedly as the crowd applauded.

  “More seriously, I can only say that you will have to discover that by looking at my pictures and comprehend that I come to see and to understand, not to judge.”

  “The West Side Irish”—Rosemarie could not be denied the last word, not ever—“are very empiricist, very pragmatic; they have universal ideas, maybe only once or twice in their lifetime, like dragonflies mate—and often with same result, death.”

  More laughter and applause.

  Maybe I should have stayed home and let her do the whole tour.

  The trip to Germany was a replay of our summer at Long Beach, which had been pure idyll. As instructed, I had relaxed, read, played with my children, swum, and even played golf and tennis, badly, with my wife and Peg and Vince. I’d worked on my impressionistic study of kids (which did nothing to decrease my reputation as a sentimentalist). I’d finished my dissertation, which had for a year lacked only a few extra footnotes. I’d also begun my work on “Beauty at Every Age,” which would continue for years. I had started with Mom, much to her pleasure, and continued with various matrons of diverse ages in Long Beach and Grand Beach. These shots were not “foggy” (Rosemarie’s word) Ektachrome efforts but available-light Tri-X black-and-white, a real challenge.

  This study was also erotically disturbing because the challenge I had set for myself was to see not only beauty but eroticism in all the ages of the life of a woman. If that’s what you want to see in your lens, then you’ll find it eventually, and get yourself caught up in it.

  You’ve seen the study, in its most recent revision, so you know that in those days I was emphasizing bare shoulders, an altogether alluring technique, even if I tried for more subtle effects in later years.

  I’m proud
of the fact that even today feminists bicker about this study, some arguing that it recognizes many different kinds of womanly allure and others arguing that I exploit women at every age. The latter group, as far as I can tell, think that women at all ages ought not to be attractive to men.

  Maybe in some other cosmos.

  It was fortunate that the energies stirred up while I worked on the study that summer could be released, if that’s the right word, in my relationship with Rosemarie. Or maybe it was the fiery passion with my wife that sensitized me to the attractiveness of other women.

  The best news of the whole summer was that Rosemarie’s drinking problem seemed to have vanished completely. Everything was working again in our marriage. We had both learned from our mistakes and would not repeat them.

  I was hopelessly in love with the woman, far more than on our honeymoon. She was mine and I was hers and all was right with the world.

  I could not get enough of her. Or she of me. Swimming and golf had rounded her body back into its nuptial perfection. She was provocative, tantalizing, seductive. My hands were attracted to her body like filings to a magnet.

  Freedom from the fear of immediate pregnancy had reignited my woman’s sexual appeal and her sexual hunger. Rosemarie loved being a mother. She wanted a fifth child, so she hardly was a victim of the contraceptive mentality against which the leaders of our church would rail. A time of respite from childbearing and more responsibilities of child rearing had given her new life and new hope. She was a happy, satisfied, self-confident woman.

  I talked to Father Raven, now a pastor in a Negro (as we called it then) parish, about it on the golf course one afternoon during his annual visit to Mom and Dad’s place. He was at least ten strokes ahead of me when I raised the question.

  “I don’t see”—he paused for a backswing—“how most men and women living with the demands of our culture can be asked to sleep in separate bedrooms. Arguably it’s an ideal, and that’s what some of the moralists, even in Rome, are saying, but an ideal that is virtually impossible in practice.”

  “We Americans don’t like to admit that we are deviating from an ideal. We’d like to think that what we’re doing because of our decisions is good and virtuous.” My drive carried fifty yards at the most.