“Tell me what happened.” My heart thumped irregularly. I too was terrified.
“Mom and I had been fighting, we usually did when she was drunk, which was almost all the time when I was in high school. She would hit me and I’d run away screaming.”
“Hit you with what?”
“Oh, a hairbrush”—she lifted her own and began to brush her hair again—“or a broom or something like that. She was such a quiet, sweet, sad lady when she was sober. She’d hug me and cry and laugh. And I’d hug her back. I loved her when she was that way, I really did. And when she wasn’t drunk she didn’t remember what she did to me. And I didn’t have the heart to tell her.”
“Peg knew?”
“Sure Peg knew. What doesn’t she know? She’s as bad as April for knowing everything. Anyway, she saw the black-and-blue marks.”
“Black-and-blue marks?”
“When Mom would beat me. Sometimes I’d let her do it. I thought maybe I was wicked and deserved to be punished and… and I didn’t want to hurt her. You know what kind of a temper I had in those days.”
“Poor kid.”
“I don’t know. I survived, I guess. Anyway, that day she threw a mirror at me. It hit me, not very hard. I didn’t feel like taking the punishment this time. I picked it up and threw it back. I missed like I intended to do. One of the maids saw us. I’m sure she told Dad and maybe he told the police. Anyway, I ran out of the house screaming and down to your house. I didn’t mean to tell Peg, but she guessed.”
“I’m sure she would—”
“So later she walked back with me. I begged her to come in. Mom would never do anything when there were neighbor kids in the house. So we went in the door. Mom was at the head of the basement stairs and saw me, she began to shout and kind of staggered toward me. I huddled against the door. She hit me with a hairbrush she had been carrying. Peg pulled it out of her hand. Mom ran back to the coat stand and grabbed an umbrella. She rushed toward the two of us—we were both too scared to move—and tripped on her robe just as she passed the door leading to the basement. She fell down the stairs. Peg and I screamed. We ran out of the house and back down Menard to your apartment. Your mom was playing the harp, so she never noticed that we’d left. We crept back to the house later and down the basement stairs. Peg picked up the umbrella and put it back on the coat stand. Then we called Doctor Vaughan. We were pretty clever little plotters, but you of all people know that, don’t you?”
“Contented victim… Did you know your mother was dead when you ran away the second time?”
“I think I did.” She put down the brush again. “We looked down the stairs and saw that she was awfully still. I was afraid she was dead. I dream at nights sometimes that if we had called the doctor right away she would have lived. I know that’s probably not true. Still, I feel guilty, sometimes terribly guilty.”
“You shouldn’t feel that way.”
She seemed not to hear me. “Peg and I promised each other we’d never tell anyone what had happened. The police were a little suspicious, but all the neighbors knew that Mom was drunk most of the time, and there was no sign of violence. I think they talked to your mother on the phone to make sure. We were terribly scared for a few days, you know how kids that age are—quick and shallow terrors, and then we forgot about it. I was sorry about Mom, she was a sweet and pretty lady, but so unhappy. We were never very good friends. She knew what Dad was doing to me, but she pretended she didn’t. So I guess I hated her. … Sometimes.”
I pondered with as much dispassion as my pounding heart and churning stomach would permit. Was this the whole truth?
“The reason you didn’t tell me this before?” I asked as gently as I could.
Rosemarie was not offended. “I didn’t even think of it, Chuck. The … the other was so much worse. And in my head I knew that I hadn’t done anything wrong. I mean, I often wished poor Mom was dead, and I still feel guilty, sometimes I even think I actually pushed her. But Peg insists that I never touched her. I was hysterical, so it’s hard for me to remember. I know, when I’m being sensible, that it was just a terrible accident and that I didn’t cause it.”
It seemed a reasonable explanation, but part of me resisted it. However, Art Rearden was the immediate problem.
“So Rearden read the records of the cops who investigated your mother’s death, and he bluffed. He doesn’t know anything more and you didn’t confirm any of his hunches. I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.”
“You do believe me?”
“Certainly I believe you.”
I did, about ninety-five percent. And in the other five percent I said to myself that if she had shoved back, she was acting in self-defense.
“Sometimes I dream that I pushed her down the stairs.” She repeated her plea: “But I didn’t. I know I didn’t Peg was there.”
Good old solid, tough-minded Peg, the one member of the family who had what I wanted and lacked—stability of character.
“It’s all over, Rosemarie. Don’t worry about it.”
There was, however, a tiny doubt in the back of my head, despite my best efforts to banish it.
“Thank you for believing me.” She stood up and pulled the slip over her head. “Would you please make love to me, Chuck, slowly and gently, so I can forget it all for a while?”
“I was hoping you would ask.”
Later, when Rosemarie, cuddled in my arms, was sleeping peacefully, I lay wide awake pondering what I was beginning to see—and not liking it at all.
I had begun to realize that the reason I could earn money and please patrons and critics with my photographs was that I saw things the way other people don’t see them—the essence of the artistic gift, I suppose. When I recorded the instant of glee on a trader’s face when he has made a sale, I did so because I saw the transient gleam in his eyes and the triumphant curve of his lips not as part of a continuous passing parade of emotions but as a moment of exploding illumination—a skyrocket on the Fourth of July. Or when I captured Rosemarie standing on her head, with a crazy smile on her face and her delectable body offered as an overwhelming gift, I saw not a brief segment of a nutty cartwheel, I saw in a dazzling burst of light a woman’s soul transparent in her body.
At first I thought that everyone experienced these brief instants of—what should I call it?—physical luminescence. Then I realized that not everyone did, not even every artist or photographer. It didn’t seem fair that such insight, which was a given for me, should be a will-o’-the-wisp for others. Fair or not, I had it.
Then I understood why I was able to plan the Wulfe’s escape, make love properly to Rosemarie on the day after the wedding by the ice dunes, and say the magic words to her at the end of our honeymoon, words that I had not even heard in my own brain till I spoke them. I SAW the world occasionally in bites of illumination—I can think of no other words to describe the experience—not unlike I saw my subject through the lens. No, the luminescence of the lens was merely one form of the gift, frequently unwanted, of sight.
The lights would suddenly turn up and I would see everything on the stage, not only the present act, but those before it and those yet to come.
In bed that night I SAW on the brightly lighted stage something I very much did not want to see. I also saw, in vague outline, what I must do about it.
John Raven’s sermon at the funeral mass the next morning was brilliant, a message of hope in the middle of the night, of God’s implacable love surviving even on the edge of the swamp of despair.
There were only a handful of mourners in the church to appreciate the sermon. Most of our friends felt that they had discharged their obligations to ambiguous sympathy by coming to the wake.
I listened to John out of one ear, as my mother would have said, and with the other ear listened to the rushing voices inside my head. It was one of the wildest ideas I had ever considered. Unfortunately the pieces all fit too neatly into place, pieces of an elaborate and cruel practical joke. The memory of my sicknes
s on his sailboat was as vivid in my mind as the day it happened.
I was one step ahead of Art Rearden because I was an artist and I saw the joke in its entirety. He saw only some of the parts.
Rearden was at the graveside in Mount Carmel Cemetery, hatless and huddled against the strong winter winds sweeping down from the northwest and turning the melted snow back into ice.
“Has he searched the house at Menard and Thomas?” I asked Ed Murray as we carried the casket toward the grave site.
“Sure. The morning of the explosion.”
“Find anything?”
“We would have heard about it if he did.”
“The house at Geneva?”
Ed looked at me and scowled. “That’s not in his jurisdiction. He’d have to persuade the FBI to get a federal warrant or ask the Wisconsin State Police, I suppose, to cooperate. Why?”
“He scares me, that’s all.”
Would a man like Art Rearden hesitate to break a law himself to find evidence? Especially if he knew where to look for it?
I doubted it. The courts might be hesitant to accept illegally obtained evidence (they were less hesitant in those days than they are now), but I didn’t want it to go that far.
It was becoming quite clear what I had to do. The logistics of my effort were still obscure.
I was, mind you, still a very young man. When my sons were twenty-seven, I thought, not without some reason, that they were mere children. Yet, to be more honest than I ever was with them on the subject, they were a good deal more mature than I was at that age. My actions in the next few hours were wildly impulsive. There were, there must have been, better ways to do what I saw had to be done. But, as with the escape to Stuttgart, I could see only one way.
If it didn’t snow, I calculated, I would need six or seven hours to carry out my plan. It could be done, if I could figure out a way to keep my emotionally paralyzed wife asleep till eight or nine o’clock the next morning.
And to get out of the house without being observed by anyone watching from the outside.
I needed co-conspirators.
As we left the graveside after Father Raven’s final prayers, Art Rearden sidled up to us.
“You folks are really rich now, aren’t you?”
“Please go away, Mr. Rearden,” Rosemarie begged. “We don’t need the money.”
“Some people never have enough.”
“Get out of here.” I stepped forward to push him away.
“Don’t hit a police officer, Mr. O’Malley; it’s disorderly conduct.”
“You want to get busted, Art?” Ed Murray stepped between us again. “You’re in hot water already.”
“Not as hot as your clients.” The cop slipped away, having delivered the message he came to leave.
Dan Murray joined us. “He was hoping the press would be here.”
“Why aren’t they?” I looked around for the first time. Like the funeral mass, the burial was private. The papers had left us alone, except for one photographer.
“Jim Clancy is not a very interesting subject anymore. A headline in the evening papers, some speculation in the early editions of the morning papers, a clip of a blown-up car on the evening news—that’s about all his death merits, maybe one more picture in the back pages of the late editions tonight. Rearden has forgotten how the game is played. The guy is really slipping.”
Probably counting on a big recovery, I thought.
I cornered Ted McCormack and asked for a prescription that would help Rosemarie get a good night’s sleep.
“Pretty strong stuff?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t leave it lying around the house.” He wrote out some illegible words on his prescription pad. “This medication can be kind of dangerous.”
“I’ll throw it out by the end of the week.” I took the piece of paper, shivering. “Getting cold again, huh?”
Ted looked up at the sky. “We’re supposed to have snow before tomorrow morning.”
Just what I needed.
We ate the obligatory lunch at Butterfield. I asked Vince for the loan of his Fairlane that night. “I’ll explain someday what’s up. Just trust me.”
“Sure,” he said.
“I’ll call you tomorrow morning when it’s all right to pick it up.”
Back home, I went to the darkroom.
Rosemarie went to the kids. “I’ll have to explain to them why they’re not going to see anymore a grandfather that they haven’t seen anyway. I’ll join you later in the darkroom.”
“Not necessary.”
“I don’t want you drooling over those Hollywood broads.”
She did work with me for a while, establishing once again that with chemicals, as with almost everything else, she was more skillful than I was.
Mrs. Anderson, our efficient housekeeper, put the kids to bed. We ate a cold supper, mostly in silence, went up to the bedrooms to kiss the kids good night, and returned to the chemicals.
“I want to work till I’m exhausted, so I’ll fall right to sleep,” Rosemarie said as I closed the darkroom door. “With dreams of the pretty broads filling my head.”
“You know as well as I do”—I pointed at the Rollei-flex transparencies of her—“who was the prettiest broad in the shoot.”
She picked up the magnifying glass. “I always have a hard time linking her”—she gestured with a touch of contempt at the transparencies—“with me.” She pointed the glass at herself. “Two different women.”
“One broad.” I patted her backside affectionately.
“I know that.” She giggled. “It’s just hard to comprehend it. Know what I mean?”
“Sure. It’s the other way with most people. They don’t like their portraits because they think they are better looking than the picture.”
“I’m a confused young woman.” She giggled again, but picked up one of the transparencies.
“Note the long black hair on the alabaster shoulders,” I recited as from a text, “which contrasts with the sapphire blue garment—”
“Ugh. Tight little thing.”
“Does the job. Not that, in the case of this model, a job is needed. She is a widely traveled, experienced woman of enchantment and mystery. A woman seeing the picture in Vogue would wonder whether, in the same garment, she too might look mysterious.”
“She’d wonder,” Rosemarie tilted it again, “until she found that it was only the photographer’s wife, a dull suburban housewife with three children.”
“And a gull-wing Mercedes.”
“A point… actually, no matter how I look at the transparency, she is a knockout.”
“She?”
Rosemarie put the slide back on its viewing stand. “I’m not that gorgeous,” she said slowly. “My husband took the picture and he’s prejudiced. But”—she paused, took a deep breath, causing her breasts to rise attractively under her gray darkroom smock—“I’m really not badlooking.”
“Progress of a sort,” I sighed. “You’ll agree, I take it, that we don’t have to retouch this one?”
“Don’t you dare even think of it.”
We kissed quickly and went to work.
Hours later, about eleven o’clock and right on my schedule, Rosemarie yawned. “Please, Mister Overseer, sir, can this slave go to bed now?”
“I suppose so. You can’t get the quality of slaves you used to be able to get in the darkroom. I’ll come upstairs with you.”
“Not necessary.”
“Ted gave me some medication to help you sleep.”
“Don’t need it.” She hung up her smock on the peg outside the dark-room. “Dead tired.”
“Ted said you should take it so you won’t wake up in the middle of the night.”
“Don’t want it.”
I had to insist when she was under the covers, almost forcing the pill and the water tumbler into her hands.
“Don’t leave these lying around.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise me you won’t stay down there with those smelly chemicals too long. You ought to get some sleep too.”
“I’ll be up in a half hour.”
I did not, however, return to the darkroom. Instead I phoned the weather service. The recording assured me that there would be snow by morning, an accumulation of two to four inches. Great.
Why did my comic adventures have to involve cars? I was as rotten a driver as I was at everything else requiring physical skills. No matter how hard I tried to concentrate on driving I would never be as good as Rosemarie—and she always drove with relaxed ease.
Had I made a mistake in excluding her from the operation—if one could use that word for a venture so mad?
No, she had enough trouble as it was.
I never doubted, by the way, the accuracy of my reading of Jim Clancy’s practical joke.
I looked out the front window of the house. As I had anticipated, there was an unmarked car a quarter block down the street, lights out. Either Chicago cops or Oak Park cops watching us at Chicago’s request. Probably Chicago. Rearden was not the kind of man who would want to cooperate with others, nor, unless I misread them, were these the kind of Chicago cops with whom our fiercely independent Oak Parkers would like to work.
I put on dark trousers and a black turtleneck, dug out some old, soft-sole boots and a black jacket Rosemarie had given me at Christmas. If I had worn a beret, I would have looked like a Corsican knife in the le milieu. Instead I found a thick fur cap that would obscure my red hair and keep me warm.
Vince’s keys were on the back porch where I’d suggested he leave them. Now all I needed was the other set of keys. They would be in Rosemarie’s jewel box.
Only they weren’t there.
Rosemarie was sleeping quietly, but I did not turn on the lights. There was no point in taking a chance that she would wake up before the pill took effect. Thus I walked carefully and worked by the illumination of the night-light. I felt around in the box again. Not many jewels—my wife believed in expensive jewelry but not much of it. I felt the chain of pearls for the third time: no, there was no key tangled in it.
I closed the box thoughtfully. What the hell?
I sat on her vanity chair. Where had she put the keys? I was quite sure that, like the house on Menard, the Lake Geneva place would quickly be put on the market and replaced, even before it was sold, by a house in Long Beach or Grand Beach, close to Mom and Dad.
A Christmas Wedding Page 27