A Christmas Wedding

by Andrew M. Greeley

  I would ask her politely if she might possibly turn the radio down a little bit. She would promptly comply, with a faint nudge to the knob that created no difference in the volume that I could discern. “That doesn’t seem to make much difference, darling.”

  “Maybe you ought”—she’d frown, as if worried about me—“to see a doctor about your hearing. You seem to have lost your ability to discriminate in volume.”

  “Maybe I never had it.”

  I liked to watch Ed Sullivan on our four-inch TV screen. She thought he was a jerk. So I didn’t watch him. She liked the news broadcasts because she thought there might be good news from Korea. I didn’t want to think about Korea. So we watched the news.

  In a proper marriage, we would have had it out then and there and negotiated (a term my kids use routinely) compromises. I had no idea how to push back.

  She was so vulnerable, despite her vigor, and so deeply in love with me—to my endless astonishment—that I thought noise, admittedly Bach or Mozart noise, was not important.

  So I repressed my anger. It festered beneath the surface, as did a lot of other repressed complaints.

  Loud music was a minor irritant compared to her occasional drinking bouts. It was impossible to reason with her when she was drunk; she’d scream obscenities and throw whatever object might be at hand—never hitting me. Rosemarie on a binge was a disgusting sight—foulmouthed, untidy, violent, spit drooling from her mouth, body odor filling the room, drunken laughter echoing through our vast house.

  After the binge she was so fragile and penitent that I was afraid to hurt her by argument.

  “I won’t do it again, Chuck, I promise. That was positively the last time.”

  “I don’t like to see you hurting yourself.”

  “I don’t matter. You do.”

  “If I could help—”

  “I have to do it myself.” Quiet and firm. “If only I didn’t have such a weak will.”

  “How can you do it alone?”

  “How else can I stop drinking?” Some asperity, thunderclouds gathering. “I guess I’ll have to pray harder for more character. Please don’t make it harder for me.”

  “I’d like to help.”

  “I SAID I had to do it alone.” More tears.

  Pierrot retreats in confusion. Blew it again. The results of his cowardice would haunt him in the years to come.

  In that spring of 1951 Vince was in Korea, in combat at Heartbreak Ridge, as a bloody battle in that forgotten war was called. Peg needed someone on whose shoulder she could cry.

  Ridgeway had counterattacked in late March and inflicted a massive defeat on the Chinese. He recaptured Seoul and drove the enemy back across most of their prewar border. There was talk of stalemate and negotiations, but it was still a dangerous war for Vince in the frontline foxholes.

  That was the year of the film Quo Vadis (“Deborah Kerr in a negligee,” Rosemarie tittered, “no wonder you like it), of “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening,” and of the first hydrogen bomb test. It was the time of the national orgy of support for General MacArthur, whom Truman had fired. The millions who cheered for MacArthur in the streets didn’t seem to realize that he was the one who had prolonged the war.

  The Board of Trade seemed at first to be pure terror, a mistake that would have no silver (even somewhat tarnished) linings. I felt that I did not belong there. I had neither the physiology nor the psychology for the daily gambling pool that was the wheat pit. I hesitated, I doubted, I thought, I worried. The good traders acted. They won some, they lost some, but—if they survived the first couple of years—they won more than they lost.

  Cautious, careful, orderly man that I was (and am, despite what you may have read elsewhere), I did not belong in the tumultuous battles on which the successful traders seemed to thrive. I belonged rather in the quiet, reflective, subdued precincts of O’Hanlon and O’Halloran (the Double O’s, as the two little gnomes who were the senior partners in the firm had been dubbed by my fellow traders, who entrusted all their complicated tax problems—as they thought then—to the whispering gnomes).

  I was there at the Board of Trade because I had promised my wife that I would give it a try. A curious attempt at a distant reconciliation with her father? Or did she want me to defeat him in the pit as I had in love?

  The nuances of her ambivalence toward her father were beyond my understanding.

  “How did Daddy seem today?” she would occasionally ask at the supper table.

  “A little tired. He had a good day, I think. There’s talk around the Exchange of him investing in a hotel in Las Vegas.”

  “Different kind of gambling, poor man.”

  When the doctor confirmed her pregnancy, I suggested she call him and tell him.

  “I don’t want to do that. You tell him tomorrow at work.”

  His only comment was, “Well, I suppose that was inevitable.”

  I lost heavily that day, unable to keep pace with a grain market that first slumped and then rebounded with unnatural vigor.

  “What did Daddy say?”

  I lied. “He beamed proudly and said I should congratulate you.”

  She smiled happily. “I’m so glad he’s pleased.”

  “He certainly seemed to be.”

  Then, after a moment’s reflection, she looked at me strangely. “You are telling the truth?”

  “About what?”

  “About Daddy’s reaction.”

  “He seemed very proud to be a grandfather.”

  Maybe I should have told her the truth. Maybe I should also have told her that he was systematically taking away my capital, or to be more precise, her capital. Perhaps he was merely reclaiming that which he thought by right was his—the money out of which his wife had tricked him in her final revenge. Perhaps he thought I would be so addicted to the pit that I would commit all of Rosemarie’s money and even our elegant old home, of which she was so proud, in a last roll of the dice.

  In that hope he was kidding himself. I was not a plunger, not a go-for-broke person. When the hundred thousand dollars Rosemarie had put in her investment account (to supplement the money my parents allegedly paid for my seat on the Exchange) was exhausted, I would wend my way back up LaSalle Street to the Double Os and the quiet life. And perhaps leave the economics department to enroll in the graduate school of business at the University. Or maybe, just maybe, continue in the economics Ph.D. program.

  There are, broadly speaking, three ways of earning your keep in the commodity markets. The most extraordinary way is to see a long-term trend developing, say in oil between the early seventies and the middle eighties, and put your money behind your faith in that trend—with a considerable amount of laying off and hedging, against the possibility that you might be wrong (at least you do it that way if you have any sense). The second method is spotting a powerful short-run trend just before it happens, like the soybean price explosion in 1972 or the expansion of the grain markets at the start of the Korean War. The third technique is to ride up and down, a little bit ahead of the trends, in the daily and weekly fluctuation of the markets. If you sign on for either of the first two styles and have enough sense to know when to get out, you can become very wealthy indeed. But big surprises of substantial duration are in the nature of things infrequent, so most traders make their money on the minute daily fluctuations in which nerve, instinct, and gut feel were critically important in the early fifties. They still are even today, despite all the computer programs that are loaded into the PC that your serious trader keeps by his bedside so he can trade on the Singapore Exchange at 2 A.M. (Chicago time).

  Every mature capitalist economy must have a commodity exchange so that farmers (and now businessmen and bankers) can hedge against the random ups and downs of their markets. Even the socialist economies, I argued in an article some fifteen years ago, have them to hedge in their black markets. The traders and their clients (politely called investors and not riverboat gamblers) absorb the risk from produ
cers in return for the chance to speculate on their guesses/hunches/instincts/voices in the night (to which today one would add computer programs). There are a lot of things wrong with the way this works out in practice, as many things today, when we speculate not only on grain or animals or butter and eggs but on such ephemeral pieces of paper as eurodollars and T-bills and “derivatives,” as there were when I rode home on the Lake Street L a nauseated wreck, oblivious to the spring lace appearing along the streets of Oak Park. But despite the mistakes, the corruption, the injustices, the occasional downright dishonesty, you can’t do without commodity exchanges.

  And while, God knows, they need to be regulated, there doesn’t seem to be a government in the world that has enough sense and intelligence to know how to regulate them.

  In principle, you can make money by being a bull or a bear. In the former case you buy futures, betting that the market will go up and you can sell them for more than you have contracted to buy them for (with a very small part of the actual costs, a “margin”). In the latter case you sell futures on the hope that the market will decline and you will be able to purchase grain more cheaply than you have sold it and thus make a profit. Rarely does a trader hold on to a contract till delivery time. You might buy October wheat today and sell it tomorrow because the cost of a contract has gone up overnight and you will make a nice profit. If you hang on to the contract too long, the market might fall and you’d lose your profit and your investment and might have to find more money to cover the losses that exceed the original margin you have invested. That way you can make a lot and lose a lot. In a hurry.

  I spoke of contracts being sold on the next day. In fact, it is quite normal to sell and buy and then sell again, all on the same day or in the same hour, as you bet, not on what a bushel of wheat will cost in October, but on what a contract for that bushel of wheat will cost in half an hour.

  I was convinced that I lacked the temperament for such quick and potentially costly decisions. There was no time to reach for my idea notebook (which amused my wife immensely) or to order my thoughts on a pad of yellow paper. I was therefore a sitting duck for the vultures who hover around the pits, looking for newcomers whose flesh they can pick off their bones.

  Jim Clancy, I would learn quickly, was a prime vulture, and the leader of the other vultures.

  While those who live off the daily fluctuations of the market have to be bears and bulls alternately—and often at the same time as they hedge against their own hedging—the long-term propensity is to be, you should excuse the quote, bullish on America. Over the long haul, the American, even the trader—especially the trader—believes in expansion. With each year that the Great Depression (out of which the truly shrewd bears like Joseph Kennedy had made huge fortunes) receded into the past, fears of another monumental contraction faded. Generally this long-run bullishness has paid dividends, and rich ones at that, in the last half century. Occasionally even the wise traders, or those who think they are wise, ride the market up even when there is excellent reason to think that it is too inflated. Thus in the notorious Hunt family attempt to corner the silver market in the late nineteen seventies, anyone with common sense knew that a silver contract was worth between five and ten dollars at the most and not almost forty dollars. They also knew that, if it became necessary to change the rules of the exchanges in midstream to protect themselves from the Hunts, the men in power would do just that.

  Yet a lot of traders were badly hurt in the run-up—sophisticated traders and not just the poor suckers who grab the coattails of every exciting trend with a sure instinct for their own self-destruction.

  The really shrewd traders and investors got out of silver early and made millions on the collapsing markets. But to sell against a trend that powerful requires not only shrewdness and sophistication but a naturally bearish personality.

  Like mine.

  If I had managed to bet in some systematic way in favor of the continued expansion of world grain demand occasioned by the Korean War, I could have survived my daily losses as the vultures manipulated prices up and down to amuse themselves while doing me in.

  “This Korean ‘police action,’ as that dumb hat salesman from Missouri called it, is almost as good as war,” I heard one of them say after the closing bell had hushed the madness and he and his cronies were leaving for the bars just off LaSalle Street. “It has kept the Depression away for five more years.”

  I reacted with the emotions of a brother-in-law and not of a trader. “The kids dying at Heartbreak Ridge might think differently.”

  “Tough shit. I don’t notice you fighting the gooks.”

  My instincts, notoriously inaccurate in most respects, said that the grain market was overvalued.

  But what did I know about it?

  Rosemarie was insistent about the contract she wanted me to sign “Please just sign this contract and then we can eat supper. April and I are both terribly hungry.”

  “What kind of contract is it?” I stirred myself out of my lethargic fog. “Wheat or corn?”

  “Pork bellies.” She jammed the pen into my hand.

  I lifted my pen to sign, hesitated, and began to read the long, obscure, tedious document more carefully.

  “It’s a book contract!” I rose from my consort’s easy chair in righteous anger.

  “Regardless.” She smiled demurely. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. This nice man from New York will publish your book for nothing and give you two thousand dollars, plus whatever royalties the book earns. I’ve had my new lawyer, Dan Murray, Ed’s father, look it over and he says it’s a good contract.” (Ed was flying a Phantom jet off a carrier on the Korean coast.)

  “That’s nice.” I scratched my jaw dubiously.

  “So all you have to do is sit back and collect the royalties—well, maybe write a teeny-weeny introduction.”

  “I’m not a writer.” I tried to read the contract again.

  “You’re a photographer, a great one, the man from New York says, so he must be right.”

  “How did you get to know this man in New York?”

  “Oh, that. Well”—she talked very rapidly—“a woman on the board at Marillac is married to a publisher and he knew this agent, Mr. Close, and Mr. Close knew this publisher and I sent him your German pictures and—”

  “My German pictures!”

  “Well, I thought I would begin with them.” She followed me as I paced up and down with anxious eyes. “There’s a lot more downstairs if this one is a success, which it certainly will be.”

  “I do not intend to sell my pictures.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re personal, a personal vision.”

  “Not just archives?” She was mocking me now.

  “Personal archives.”

  “It’s the personal vision, the man from New York said, that makes the book so moving.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” She didn’t sound too confident, however.

  “I won’t do it, Rosemarie.” I slumped back into the leather chair and tossed the contract back on her desk. “I don’t want any part of the professional artist’s world. It’s worse than the Board of Trade.”

  “How do you know?”

  “From my father.”

  “He’s a success, now isn’t he?”

  “At designing buildings, not at painting. There’s not enough money in it to support a family, Rosemarie. It would be crazy.”

  “Can’t you do it in the afternoons when you come home from the Exchange and after you’ve been to class? It’s better than drink or women. I have enough money to support a family.”

  “I won’t live off your money.”

  “Why not?” Her lips were tightening into an angry line.

  I must be careful. There had not been a drinking episode since she suspected she was pregnant. I did not want to induce another.

  “It’s just not right, Rosemarie, it wouldn’t be manly.”

  A male chauvinist? Wha
t can I tell you? It was 1951, remember.

  “Just one book,” she begged. “How would one book hurt?”

  “I’d make a fool out of myself.”

  “Which is it?” Her eyes flashed dangerously. “Making a fool out of yourself or living off your wife?”

  “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Rosemarie. I really do. But it’s only a hobby. I’m just not cut out for that kind of life.”

  She looked like she was about to ask me what kind of life it was for which I was cut out. Instead she sighed and said, “Definitely no?”

  “Definitely.”

  “You’re the boss.” She folded up the contract. “They’re your pictures, not mine.”

  “Thank you for understanding.”

  “I don’t exactly,” she wavered, ready to launch another attack, and then thought better of it. “I don’t want to be a nagging wife.”

  “You’ll never be that.”

  Which was both true and not true. Rosemarie’s “ought tos” would never drive me up the wall. Not quite. She always knew when to stop a fraction of an inch short of being a scold.

  “Let’s eat.” She led the way to the kitchen in which, to judge by the smell, we were going to eat spaghetti, our usual fare on the day our cook/maid was not around. (An extravagance I accepted because I had no choice: “Chuck, the poor woman needs the job.”) Rosemarie’s Italian food was excellent. Alas, it was all that she could produce. Well, you can get used to spaghetti once a week.

  If you have to.

  “By the way”—she heaped my plate with three times as much pasta as I could possibly consume—“Peg’s pregnant too. Honeymoon baby. They beat us in—what do you call it in the sailboat races?—elapsed time.”

  How did she know about sailboat races?

  She read the sports pages too. She read everything.

  “How is she?”

  “Sick, poor kid. And worried too. She had to leave Mass this morning before Communion. Father Raven told her she could eat bread when she gets up without breaking her fast because then it’s medicine. She didn’t want to.” Rosemarie made a wryly funny face. “Afraid that Father Raven might not have cleared it with God.”