A Christmas Wedding

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “I’m merely offering you one way out. Can your marriage survive without sex?”

  “With Rosemarie?”

  “In separate bedrooms?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Well?”

  I hit my second shot; with an image of Rosemarie in my head it carried close to a hundred yards.

  “You have to preserve your marriage, don’t you?”

  “Lesser of two evils?”

  “That’s how you could explain it to the Vatican.”

  “I see.”

  As well as I ever would.

  I do understand how in the next ten years the Church came to lose its once enormous credibility as a sexual teacher. It didn’t listen to married people (even though it admitted that it should listen to them) and eventually married people didn’t listen to the Church.

  And I had to contend not only with a healthy and happy wife but an insatiable one.

  “I began this summer,” she murmured one unbearably hot evening, “determined that I had to please you if I wanted to win you back. Now I’m just a pleasure-hungry tart.”

  “Pleasure-hungry wife.”

  “Same difference.”

  “You never had to win me back, Rosemarie.”

  “You know what I’ve learned?” Her fingers traced a path from my face to my loins. “I’ve learned that a husband and a wife always have to win one another. It’s a challenge and an amusement that just never stops. Once you think you’ve won him permanently, then you’ve lost.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  Her fingers moved back up my body, light, teasing, frivolous. “Just as true for the man as for the woman. Courtship is not a time. It’s—what word am I looking for?—it’s a dimension of marriage.”

  “Absolutely.”

  It was that night, I think, that I began to see something about our marriage, something very important, that I did not want to see. I mean see it the way I “saw” Jim Clancy’s great little practical joke.

  The “vision” was obscure that hot summer evening, but it was there in my head as my wife mounted on top of my body, and it would remain in the obscure dark alleys of my brain, haunting and bedeviling me. Like the image of Jim Clancy’s ice-cream bar.

  Our renewed romance, courtship, passion continued on the trip to Europe, especially when we left behind the ceremonies and Frankfurt and Bonn and Stuttgart and in Rosemarie’s 300 SL roadster, bought in Stuttgart, traveled by ourselves through the German cities and countryside.

  “You’re going to sell the gull-wing when we get home?”

  “Course not, it’s certain to be a classic.”

  “It leaks and it’s hard to get into the damn thing.”

  “That’s why it will be a classic. This one probably will be too, and it cost only eighteen hundred dollars. A bargain like that you can’t pass up.”

  We had opened the show in Stuttgart and would return at the end of the trip to receive some sort of prize. At first I anxiously watched the crowds who came into the gallery for a sign of Trudi or Magda or Erika.

  Then I realized that my mixture of anxiety and hope was ridiculous. If they had not tried to get in touch with me in the last twelve years, why would they wander into a gallery exhibiting my pictures?

  And would I recognize any of them?

  Probably not.

  We had dinner with Kurt and Brigitta, older now yet still handsome, and their four quiet and smiling kids. He was rector of the university and a member of parliament, she a Frau Professor. They told Rosemarie stories of my Bamberger exploits that went far beyond simple truth, just like the now legendary game with Mount Carmel.

  We stayed at the reconditioned Bamberger Hoff and ate dinner at the Vinehaus Messerschmidt, as it was again called. Rosemarie insisted that the last night of our visit be spent in my old room at the Vinehaus.

  She announced that the room was cute, even adorable, and seduced me with joyous determination.

  Only much later did it occur to me that I had made love once with another woman in the same room.

  “It’s almost impossible to describe how the city has changed,” I would tell her often in the next couple of days. “It’s hardly the same place. I felt like kind of reverse deja vu; I feel like I was never here before.”

  In the decade that had passed, Bamberg had shed its drab and worn coat and clad itself once more in a sparkling set costume for a medieval film. Or maybe it was only the difference between winter and summer.

  We walked through the Altstadt, visited the rose garden of the Residence, admired the Rider in the Dom, even retraced the path down the Judenstrasse from the Oberfarre to Kasernstrasse. Bamberg was a young and chic countess again. Those who had despoiled her had stayed to become her servants and admirers. Trudi’s house on the Obersandstrasse still seemed shabby. It exuded no magic vibrations for me, no reminders that up there on that second floor I had been initiated into the mysteries of love.

  “Was this street important to you?” Rosemarie asked me. “You seem kind of spooked.”

  “We tried to pick up some East German refugees here, turn them over to the Russians.”

  “Did you?”

  “Blew it.”

  “Deliberately?”

  “You bet.”

  She laughed in approval.

  I said very little as we strolled back across the Rathaus bridge, except to say that Cunnegunda had reminded me of Mom when I was here before.

  My wife nodded silently. Then she threw her arms around me. “Poor, dear Chuck. You must have been so homesick.”

  “I missed all the women in my life, I guess.”

  My Rosemarie wept in my arms, beneath the smile of Saint Cunnegunda, for pain that I had not understood and still couldn’t quite acknowledge.

  She would frown from time to time, trying to puzzle out, trying to understand, wanting to share in my teenage experience, but not able to grasp it.

  “Sometimes I think I know what you mean,” she said with a sigh as we drove out to the farmhouse in the Bohemian Alps. “Then it eludes me.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not sure I trust my memory. I’m concentrating on what I see today. Let the contrasts emerge from the work.”

  She nodded her agreement.

  The farmhouse wasn’t there anymore. It had been replaced by a big new home with an adjoining barn. In front of the house was a Mercedes 180. A tall, slender young man was working on a tractor in front of the barn, a boy about the age of Kevin assiduously trying to help him.

  “That’s the boy who was in the house when we raided it,” I said, pointing at the young man.

  “Doesn’t look much like a werewolf.”

  A sturdy young woman emerged from the house to shout something to her husband. Two younger kids, a boy and a girl, trailed behind her.

  Rosemarie explained in her colorfully inaccurate German that I was an American photographer interested in pictures of German farms. Would they mind if we took some shots?

  At first they hesitated, then, won by my wife’s dizzy charm, they laughed and agreed with great good nature. They even served us some strawberries and thick cream.

  “They didn’t recognize you, did they?” she asked as we left.

  “I had a big old white helmet on. I was a pale, scrawny kid and scared silly of the SS, who we thought were lurking in the house. No reason that they should recognize me.”

  “Well you’re not pale after the summer at Long Beach.”

  “I’m still scrawny?”

  “In an attractive way. Hey”—she dodged my lascivious hands—“don’t distract the driver.”

  “I’m not going to show the picture of the farm today in a companion shot with the farm twelve years ago. There’s no point in that”—I continued to distract her, but with less insistence—“and it wouldn’t be fair to them. Anyway, this is not to be a before-and-after project.”

  “It may be”—she frowned again—“that he doesn’t even remember the incident, not really, anyway. M
emory is a strange phenomenon.”

  I had the bad taste to remember the bridge just outside the town where Trudi and I had made love—if that was what it should be called. And then I had the good taste to dismiss the image of bringing Rosemarie there.

  I would find another place.

  “You are still distracting the driver, depriving the poor woman of her sanity, in fact.”

  “I know a mountain stream with a little meadow. We could eat lunch there.”

  “And?”

  “Well, we could see what happens.”

  “I’m sure it will.”

  It did.

  “Clever of you to bring a blanket, husband mine.”

  “I try to be prepared.”

  “I noticed.”

  Eventually we drove back to Stuttgart, happy with one another and pleased with ourselves.

  I would receive the prize at the big concrete gallery, then we would drive into the Black Forest for the final five days of my planned shoot. When that was finished we would fly back to O’Hare in a jet, thank God.

  I never did remark that this year the kids were able to get ready for school not only without my presence, but without their mother’s presence.

  Disaster struck the first full day in Stuttgart, the day before I was to receive the prize.

  Late in the afternoon, while I was working on my acceptance speech, I heard Rosemarie stride into our suite and slam the door with more than her usual vigor.

  Earthquake.

  I didn’t have to look around to know that she was furious with me.

  “Well!”

  I did look around. Her face was drawn, there was a tiny red spot on each cheek. Her lips were drawn in a thin, dangerous line. She was breathing heavily. I had never seen her so angry.

  I could not avoid the quick thought that angry in a white two-piece dress Rosemarie was incredibly lovely.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just had tea with Trudi.”

  “Who?”

  “Trudi Weiss—that’s her name now. And I saw your son, a very cute little redhead that looks just like you.”

  “My son?”

  “His name as you may well imagine is Karl. That’s German for Charles, as I’m sure you know.”

  30

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” She slapped a card with an address on it next to the manuscript of my talk. “That’s where Frau Weiss lives. You ought to visit her, you know.”

  Her eyes said “murder”—the same rage I had captured twice when she was a child. I was afraid for myself and for our children.

  The fear that had been teasing at the corner of my mind since her father’s death had now become raw terror.

  I passed my tongue over my dry lips, searching for words that I could not find. “I didn’t know about the boy, I really didn’t. I searched here often when I was in the service. They disappeared. How did you find them?”

  “I was over at the gallery”—she collapsed into the big beige couch on the other side of our suite—“listening to what the volk were saying. They like the stuff, not that it matters anymore. And then I see an O’Malley, a junior version, but a real O’Malley, no doubt about him. He’s with his mother, a blonde. I recognize her too. She’s the girl in your picture, you know which one.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well”—Rosemarie was surging toward hysteria—“I follow them home, ring the doorbell of their nice little house, and say that I would like to take a close look at my husband’s son.”

  “Dear God, Rosemarie, why?”

  “Why not? Your Trudi doesn’t try to bluff. She recognizes me instantly from all the pictures in the gallery. She invites me in for tea. Wasn’t that sweet of her?”

  Would I be able to explain? Ever? In terms that Rosemarie could understand? I wasn’t sure.

  “It’s not what you think, Rosemarie.”

  “Oh”—she waved her hand contemptuously—“she told me a little of the glorious story. What a hero you were. Saved them all.”

  “I did not want to abandon them. I searched—”

  “I don’t care about that.” She leaped off the couch. “What I want to know is why the fuck you didn’t tell me?”

  It was a fair question. I had thought about it often and prepared my answer. The only trouble was that now I couldn’t remember it.

  “Rosemarie”—my voice cracked on the word—“I thought about it and I decided that it would not… not help matters any.”

  “I told you about Dad.”

  “That was different.”

  “How the fuck was it different?”

  “You said then that the reason to tell me was to explain why… why you would be under stress sometimes. I didn’t think that my… my affair with Trudi made that much difference.”

  “Screw them and leave them, huh, O’Malley?”

  Why didn’t I yell at her to shut up and act her age? It never occurred to me to do so. I felt too guilty to defend myself.

  “It wasn’t that way, Rosemarie. It really wasn’t. We were both young and lonely and scared. I thought I loved her. I don’t know, to tell you the truth, what she thought, whether in her situation she had any choice. She wasn’t a whore, Rosemarie, nothing like that.”

  “That’s patent. I’m not angry at her. I’m angry at you.”

  “We weren’t engaged then, Rosemarie. I was not unfaithful to you. I’ve never been unfaithful to you.”

  “Was she better in bed than I am?” She was striding back and forth across the parlor. “Were her tits better than mine?”

  “No to both questions, not that they’re to the point. We were kids, Rosemarie, kids.”

  “You still love her, don’t you? Do you want to divorce me?”

  “Rosemarie, that’s asinine. Calm down so we can talk about it reasonably. You’re acting like a maniac.”

  “Do you think so? Funny, I don’t, you miserable, lousy little son of a bitch. I asked you a question. I demand an answer. Now that I’ve found your mistress for you, do you want to get rid of me?”

  “All right.” I buried my face in my hands. “I’ll answer if you insist, but I think our years together should make the answer clear before I say it.”

  “Goddamn it, you little motherfucker, answer me!”

  I didn’t mind the “motherfucker,” although it was not part of Rosemarie’s normal vocabulary. Or even her drunken vocabulary. I didn’t like the “little” at all, but now was not the time to debate that.

  “No.” I sighed. “I don’t want a divorce.”

  “Do you still love her?”

  “Not the way I love you.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Yes, it is,” I shouted back, “you’ve no right to cross-examine me this way!”

  “Right! Will you look at who’s talking about rights? Well, I have a right to know if you still love her. DO YOU STILL LOVE HER?”

  “I haven’t seen her”—I struggled out of my chair at the table, now angry myself—“in ten years.”

  “So?”

  “Damn it to hell, Rosemarie, will you simmer down and listen? It was a teenage love affair, a long time ago. It has nothing to do with us now.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I thought it would unnecessarily upset you—”

  “And there I was”—she slammed the table—“thinking that you were very clever as a virgin lover. She taught you how to love.”

  “You taught me a lot more,” I said heavily.

  “Bullshit… you still haven’t answered my question: DO YOU STILL LOVE HER?”

  “I have fond memories”—I tried to choose my words carefully, knowing that I was guilty till I was proven innocent, and I couldn’t prove myself innocent—“of those months. As anyone would of a teenage love affair. But I have no desire, not the slightest, to renew that affair. You’re my wife and my lover and my agent and my friend. There isn’t, there can’t be, there never will be anyone else.”

  “Bul
lshit. You’re a lousy lying little fucker,” she screamed. “I’ll never trust you again.”

  “Is there nothing that I can say”—I was filling up with tears now, my whole life disappearing before my eyes—“that will persuade you that… it’s been over for ten years?”

  “There’s a red-haired little boy that suggests it hasn’t.”

  “I didn’t know about the boy.”

  “Are you proud that you have an illegitimate child?”

  “Of course not. But I’m glad he’s alive.”

  “I BET you are.”

  “I can’t take this anymore, Rosemarie.” I choked on the words. “I’m going out for a long walk. I hope you’ve calmed down when I come back.”

  “Don’t bother coming back!” she shouted after me.

  I walked for hours, all the way to the outskirts of the town, almost as far as the Mercedes works. I knew that I had bungled the confrontation. My decision not to tell her about Trudi, damn it, was the right one. Why couldn’t she see that?

  Because she was shocked and upset. Understandably. She had reason to vent her emotions. I should have vented my emotions back at her. The confrontation flickered out because I had run away from the fight. It would have been much wiser to stand up to her and clear the air. If I had continued to shout at her, she would have run out of steam eventually and we could have picked up the pieces.

  I could not deal with an angry woman who shouted obscenities at me. I had run away from my wife’s temper and foul tongue.

  Mistake.

  I was not at all sure that I could avoid the mistake again when I returned to the hotel.

  I walked back to the Bahnhaus Platz with much less energy than had marked my hike to the edge of the city. Too much exercise, I told myself as I rode up the elevator to our suite that I absolutely had to stand up her.

  I wasn’t sure I could.

  In fact I didn’t have to.

  There was a note waiting on the bed:

  “Gone home.”

  31

  “Your wife is even more beautiful in person than she is in the photographs.” Trudi Weiss was stiff and formal as she poured tea. “She was so polite and kind with me. I was afraid that she would be angry. But she is quite sweet.”