A Christmas Wedding

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Going over checklists for the wedding.” She looked up at me, frowned, and then smiled. “It looks like you have rape on your mind.”

  “Me?”

  “You … my God, Chuck, you’re crazy. Let me go. We do have a bedroom you know. Hey, stop that—”

  “Who needs a bedroom?”

  “Are you trying to set a record”—she twisted in a pretended attempt at escape—“for stripping me?”

  “Twenty-five seconds,” I exaggerated as I yanked off her panties and pushed her back on her big, luxurious chair. “Have you ever been ravished on this chair?”

  “Chuck … don’t! I have work to do.”

  “Indeed you do, now start working.”

  “All right, since you put it that way.” Her voice diminished to a satisfied moan. “A woman isn’t safe anywhere in her own house.”

  Later, the sweater tied provocatively at her waist, she made us both hot chocolate and cuddled with me on the chair. “I should keep a blanket here for these events.”

  “I may not strike here the next time.”

  “Anytime.” She stroked my chest. “Any place.”

  I had promised to start to work at The Exchange (called that in the same way that the University of Chicago was The University). I did my best not to think of the confusion and chaos of the wheat pit. My fear was not helped when Jim Clancy called me to offer me some advice. He was quite drunk.

  “Who was that, dear?” Rosemarie asked.

  “Your father.”

  She turned pale. “What did he want?”

  “He offered to show me the ropes.”

  “Listen to him, Chuck, but don’t trust him. Ever.”

  Rosemarie did not try to defend her father on those rare occasions when we discussed him. He was a poor, sad little man, she would say, but such pity did not blind her to his evil.

  The next night, when I came home from the University, she was drunk. I heard the key turn in the lock of her study when I came in the house. She spent the night there, leaving me alone in our marriage bed.

  Which, without her, was appallingly empty. Privacy I had again and I didn’t want it.

  The next night was a repeat performance. I was wakened about three by a stirring besides me. The nuptial bed was no longer empty. I went back to sleep.

  And left the next morning without waking her.

  That night she was prepared to pretend that nothing happened.

  So I punished her by sulking.

  We slept as far apart as we could and still be in the same king-size bed. By day, her dull, dejected, guilty eyes tore at my heart. Finally I resolved that whatever I did the next time she went on one of her binges, I would not sulk. It didn’t help her and it made me feel terrible.

  So now in her diaphanous frills she had invaded my darkroom.

  As she was poking around in my inner sanctum, I figured out the immediate causes of the latest tailspin. My conversation with her father, followed almost immediately by her period, had devastated her. If she didn’t produce a child, she must have thought, she was worthless.

  How could a callow twenty-three-year-old boy cope with that sort of mentality?

  “What are you working on?”

  “My wife, like I said.”

  “No, I mean in your pictures.”

  “I mean my wife in pictures. The honeymoon shots you complained that I hadn’t developed.”

  “May I look?”

  “You’re the model.”

  The darkroom was the inner corner of my soul into which no one had ever penetrated, a part of myself I had shared with no one.

  I wanted to share it with her and I wanted to keep it private. If she had not been draped in alluring wisps of lace, I might have sent her away. My life was about to be changed forever because of her blatant womanly appeal. The same womanly appeal was patent on the Kodak photographic paper. I was ripe to be changed.

  “Oh, Chuck!”

  “You don’t like?”

  “How utterly beautiful! You’re a genius, really you are!”

  “Good model.”

  “You took this the first afternoon, when I was brushing my hair?” She held the print against her breasts.

  “When you practically demanded that I take it.”

  “What I said was that if you were going to look at me that way, you might as well take pictures.” She peeked at the print. “Dear God, it’s perfect.”

  “So are you.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean the light and the composition and the expression. You really ought to take lessons. I have some folders from the Art Institute—”

  “Look at the other prints.”

  She went through them, slowly and carefully, with the solemnity of a child in her First Holy Communion procession. When she was finished she put them back on the worktable where I had stacked them, facedown. She stood by the table, as if frozen in time, one hand still on the pictures, another clutched at her breast. She was breathing rapidly and deeply, but not crying.

  I dried my hands and encircled her waist. I pressed the firm muscles of her stomach.

  “What do you think?”

  “I wish I was that beautiful.”

  “The camera only records reality. It does not interpret.” I kissed the back of her neck.

  “That’s not true, Chuck, and you know it. The photographer catches a single second of the passing parade on a woman’s face and explains who she is with that instant of illumination.”

  “Fine.” I kissed her again. My fingers touched a fresh young breast. “If you want to explain it that way. I see the real Rosemarie and capture her in that instant when she is most who she is.”

  She slipped away from me and donned her robe again. “Can I sit and watch?”

  “I suspect that you installed that comfortable couch for sitting and watching.”

  “Minimally. Will you teach me how to develop pictures?”

  “No.”

  “Please!”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll be better than I am.”

  “If I promise not to be better than you?”

  “Well …”

  “Goody!”

  My Rosemarie in those days was not very good at sitting and doing nothing. Give her a book to read and she would wait patiently till Judgment Day and indeed protest when called upon to put it down. But without a distraction she would shortly pop up and bound around a room, sniffing and snooping like a high-spirited Irish wolfhound.

  “What do you have here in your secret cabinet, Chucky? Can I look? Are there any pictures of other naked women?”

  There weren’t. My picture of Trudi and the roll of shots that had produced it were locked in a bank vault.

  “Hey, that’s private!”

  “We’re married!”

  “Stay out of there!” I charged across the room.

  She slipped away from my rush and opened the neat brown folder on top of my secret portfolios.

  “Give it back.”

  She retreated across the room, folder in both hands.

  “No.”

  “You have no right to look at those pictures.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” She considered my claim carefully. “But I don’t think so. And, Chucky, you look just like you did when I started to take off your swim trunks at the pool in Mexico.”

  “I feel the same way.” Should I tear the folder—it was one about Germany I had titled “The Conquered”—out of her hands, surely the only way I would recover it?

  While I was deciding, she opened the folder, glanced at the first few prints, and then collapsed into the couch.

  “I’m sorry, Chuck. I really am.” She closed the folder. “I apologize. I had no idea. I really didn’t. I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect anything like …”

  I was disappointed. I had wanted her to see them and hoped desperately that she would be impressed.

  “You’re apologizing for looking at my pict
ures?”

  “Certainly not.” She dismissed that possibility with her brisk hand gesture. “I’m apologizing for being dumb.”

  “Dumb?”

  “Suggesting that you go to the silly old Art Institute.” She opened the folder again and examined the prints with respectful caution. “Busybody little housewife trying to make her husband into a good picture taker when he’s already a genius.”

  “I’m not a genius, Rosemarie.” I was enormously pleased with myself.

  “I mean, these poor people, so much suffering, so much hope, and a lot of arrogance too.”

  “And you feel so ambivalent about them.”

  “Right. Is this the girl who gave you the Leica?” She turned the picture of Trudi, in front of the food store, in my direction.

  “Yes.”

  “Poor little kid. Did she make it?”

  “I think so. She disappeared, but I believe she’s all right.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “She’s not a trollop, Rosemarie.”

  “Only an idiot would think she was.”

  So she didn’t remember what she had said the night she was drunk in Mexico. Or maybe she did and was apologizing.

  I still dreamed that she and Mom and Peg would meet Trudi somewhere and disown me as a coward and a liar. But in my realistic moments I knew they would never meet. And if they did, Trudi would never tell. And, finally, so what? I wasn’t perfect Who was?

  Those rationalizations did not assuage my guilt or my fears.

  “Definitely a genius.” She continued to page through my prints.

  “I’m not a genius,” I said irritably.

  “Yes, you are.” She examined me shrewdly. “And I think you suspect it too.”

  “I just take pictures.”

  “I say you’re gifted.” She closed the folder abruptly and pointed a sharp index finger at me. “And I am a woman of enormous taste. In men too.” She grinned impishly. “You know, you want a man, and he never does propose. So one night you show him the house in which the two of you will live after you’re married and you’ve got him. Good taste.”

  “Good political skills.”

  “Regardless.” She waved her hand again. “Grant that I have good taste? I mean seriously.”

  Her invasion of my darkroom and my secrets was an experience very like the wedding night when she reveled in undressing me. I had to yield my modesty again and make a gift of myself. I was delighted with the experience but also embarrassed and disconcerted.

  The image of the wedding night repeated sent torrents of hormones rushing into my bloodstream.

  “All right”—desire for her, imperious, violent desire, surged in my body—“seriously, I do grant that you have good taste.”

  “Then you agree that you are a great artist because I say so?”

  “I don’t know, but if you say so—”

  “Oh, Chuck, this poor old woman at the railroad station—”

  “She’s not old, Rosemarie. She’s in her early thirties. I call it ‘Fidelity.’ She waited at that station every afternoon for the train from Leipzig. Her husband was a Panzer commander who was captured at the battle of Krusk, the biggest tank battle in history. Occasionally Stalin sent a few of his prisoners home. They always came down on the Leipzig train.”

  “And he never came?”

  “Oddly enough he did. Here, let me find a picture of the two of them.”

  I pulled out the shot of Kurt and Brigitta and their two children, Henry and Cunnegunda.

  “It’s not the same woman!”

  “It is. She’s expecting their third child.”

  Thank goodness she didn’t ask me the child’s name. It was Karl, out of gratitude for the job I had found for Brigitta at our headquarters at the Residence. Nor was there any point in telling Rosemarie that I had met Kurt at the train because Brig was translating for Herr Oberburgermeister Konrad Adenauer and General Lucius Clay, and the future Herr Reichkanzler and I had it off well.

  Rosemarie closed the portfolio.

  “Fine … what other portfolios do you have for me to see?”

  “I’ll show them all to you, Rosemarie. Every one of them.”

  “Great! Let’s start right now.”

  “Later.”

  “Why later?”

  “Take off that robe, woman,” I demanded.

  “Don’t look at me that way, Chuck.” She meant it. “You frighten me.”

  “I intend to. Take it off, I said.”

  “But—”

  “Damn it, woman, you come in here and stir me up and then hesitate. Do what I say and do it now!”

  “All right” Timidly she let the robe fall to the floor. “Please don’t look at me that way. You never have … acted that way before.”

  “And the … whatever you call it.”

  “Chemise. Chuck, you’re going to hurt me.”

  “I thought that was impossible. Take it off before I rip it off.”

  “All right … I’m afraid of you.” She pulled the tasty bit of lingerie over her head and, holding it protectively against her breasts, backed up against the wall.

  What a wonderful picture it would have made. Threatened woman? Ah, no. Wife egging on her husband, challenging him, testing him to see how he could improvise this role in their commedia dell’arte all’improvviso.

  Very effective challenge at that.

  “Drop it.”

  “You’re trying to prove you’re a man after I invaded your privacy and found out about your pictures.”

  “Right.” I gripped her wrist. “And I propose to prove it spectacularly. Now drop it.”

  The chemise joined the robe on the floor. She cowered against the wall. “You’re … scary. Can’t we go upstairs? All these terrible smells.”

  She was a little scared, and delighted in herself being a little scared. Being assaulted by her funny little husband was like riding the Bobs at Riverview.

  “They’re an aphrodisiac.” I pinned her against the wall.

  “Chuck … don’t … oh my God … what are you trying to do … ? Stop it … don’t drop me … PLEASE . …”

  Do I have to say that it was a game, that she knew it was a game, and that I didn’t hurt her? We were improvising around our roles. We romped in the most abandoned coupling thus far in our marriage. Then we looked at all my prints and romped again.

  Whatever problems we would later have in our marriage, we could never argue that they were caused by sexual maladjustment during our early days. We improvised spectacularly in our first months together.

  Many turning points were reached that night, not enough maybe but still a lot. Among other things, as improbable as it may seem given the calendar of Rosemarie’s physiology, we conceived our daughter that night.

  18

  “Just sign your name on that cute little dotted line”—my wife sounded like a wandering catch-basin cleaner—“and you get a check for two thousand dollars.”

  Hector Berlioz was playing on her stereo, at a sufficient volume to wake up those peacefully sleeping in distant Mount Carmel Cemetery.

  “I lost that much last week at the Exchange.” I was in no mood for Rosemarie’s daffy little games. It had been another brutal day at the Board of Trade. I was convinced now that Jim Clancy and a ring of his cronies were making sport of me, jerking me up and down—in the slang of the trader. I had yet to figure out how the game was being played and how I might defend myself against them. I did not want to be a trader. I ought to sell my seat and return to being an accountant—concentrate on my doctorate.

  “This is the first of many contracts that will make you a lot more famous than the silly old Board of Trade, husband mine.” She jabbed a ballpoint pen at me. “Just sign here, please.”

  I shook my head, blinked my eyes, and tried to focus on the long document in front of me. What mischief was she up to now?

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.” My stomach knotted and unknotted as it had done all day every day
for the last two months.

  “You don’t have to understand.” She tapped the antique desk in her study with the top of her pen. “I’ll do the understanding, you do the signing.”

  Pregnancy, even more than marriage, had lured out the natural goblin in Rosemarie. She was sick in the morning for exactly two days, which she took to be a sign that God had excused her from all purgatory in this life and in the next because she had to put up with me. She bounded more enthusiastically, laughed more boisterously, fought with me more cheerfully, and spent money more wildly. Before I knew it she had a closetful of maternity clothes, albeit inexpensive maternity clothes. She changed dresses three or four times a day just so she could examine her pregnancy in different colors and perspectives. She enrolled in Rosary College and returned to her voice lessons, the former (despite her dislike for nuns) to keep Peg company, the latter so she would sing pretty lullabies to “little April”—that our child would be a girl and would be named after her grandmother was a foregone conclusion I dared not dispute.

  “No parading on the sand at Long Beach this summer.” I had looked up from my Daily News, in which I was searching (vainly) for some understanding of the day’s grain prices.

  “I will too.” She lifted her nose into the air. “I want everyone to know that I’m not practicing birth control.”

  In those days, to have a large family was to reaffirm your Catholicism. Big families were in fashion after the war, especially among Catholics. The children of such families almost always opted for much smaller families and chose to display their Catholicism in other ways. The country was making up for the low birth rates of the Depression, and Catholics, having finally climbed out of poverty, were doing so with special vigor.

  I don’t think the birth control teaching was all that important even then. Most of the women who were bearing five or six children before they were thirty began to disregard the Church’s teaching around 1960.

  Our marriage at that time was happy enough. The only problem was that Columbine was larger than life and Pierrot smaller than life. In Columbine’s world there were, for example, two volume levels for the radio and phonograph: loud and louder. Come to think of it, there were two styles in her life: forceful and more forceful.