A Christmas Wedding

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Then what happens to your genial red-haired eavesdropper, poor innocent Chucky, you ask?

  Better that you don’t ask.

  There was a rattle and then a bang as the picture was pulled off the wall and dropped on the floor.

  “Yeah, there’s the safe. Hey, we’re home free!”

  Then a string of very tedious and unimaginative obscenities.

  “I don’t get it, Artie. The letter said all the proof would be here. How come there’s nothing but bills and ads for expensive hotels, know what I mean?”

  “Because someone got here before us, that’s why.”

  “Who? Not that O’Malley squirt. He’s still in his house.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Look, Artie, you know what they’re saying on the streets, that the old guy put out a contract on himself because he knew he had cancer and he wanted to go out with a ha, bang. Maybe this is some nut letter, know what I mean?”

  More obscenities, again showing no creative imagination.

  “Let’s search this place, tear it apart, the stuff must be here.”

  Movement in my direction. I rush, as quietly as possible, for a closet that I remember is at the other end of the corridor.

  I remember wrong.

  “Hey, wait a minute, Artie. We got no warrant. This is out of our jurisdiction. What if the local cops show up? What if we don’t find anything? We’ve left our prints all over the place. What if the squirt goes after us? We could be in a whole lot of trouble.”

  “I know they did it. I want to see him fry. I want to see that cunt turned over to the butches.”

  “Yeah, sure, Artie, but cops don’t turn out so hot in stir either. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “You losing your nerve?”

  “You said right in, right out. You didn’t say search. Besides we’d need ten guys to go through this place. It’d be like looking for a needle in a haystack, know what I mean?”

  “You are losing your nerve.”

  “Come on, Artie, use your head. This isn’t working out, let’s get out of here before we’re both in real trouble. Know what I mean?”

  Cursing and protesting, Artie apparently did know what his friend meant. They turned off the light, stumbled down the corridor, slammed the door shut, and started their car.

  It was stuck in the snow.

  The friend had to get out and push while Artie rocked it back and forth from second to reverse and finally got it moving.

  Add multitudinous monotonous obscenities.

  Finally they left, their headlights once more cutting a path across the den.

  This time I was safely hidden in the corridor.

  Three-thirty according to my watch’s luminous dial.

  Give them a half hour and hike back to Fontana.

  What if they recognize Vince’s car?

  How many blue Fairlanes are there in America?

  The license numbers?

  Those two remember a license and then see it in the dark up here?

  You’ve been reading too many mysteries.

  I hiked back through the snowdrifts. Lazy flakes began to swirl around casually, white fireflies in the cold air. I huddled under my jacket and shivered desperately. What, I wondered, if the two bent cops were lying in wait for me.

  I encountered not a single living being as I pushed my way through the snow and the cold. I imagined that I was Robert Scott struggling toward the South Pole. Where were the sled dogs? Oh, yes, we’d eaten them.

  Finally I stumbled into the parking lot. Where was the Fairlane? What happened to it? Oh, there it was, covered with snow. Would the car door open? Or would the lock be frozen?

  It opened just fine. Unfortunately the car wouldn’t start. The ignition turned over dubiously a couple of times and then gave up. When was the last time Vince had a tune-up? I pushed the gas pedal desperately. It still wouldn’t start. I smelled gasoline. I had flooded the engine.

  Shivering uncontrollably now, I climbed out of the car and tried to clean off the windows. Even if I got it started, would it be able to plow through the snow out of the parking lot?

  I returned to the car, depressed the gas pedal to the floor, and turned the key. There was a promising sound. I tried it again. A more promising sound of an ignition almost catching. You got me into this, I informed the Deity. It’s Your job to get me out.

  Apparently He heard me. The engine started briskly, as though asking why I had messed it up the first time around. Just to show me that it was alive and well, the car lurched out of the parking lot, skidded across the highway, and paused at the edge of a snowbank.

  Gently now I eased us back on the snow-covered highway and began the slippery ride to Oak Park.

  I waited till I was on the outskirts of Woodstock to read the papers Jim Clancy had left as part of his practical joke. I memorized the names of the witnesses, in case we ever needed them, and then tore the pages into small pieces and trailed them out of the window of the car over the next thirty miles.

  All except the brief description of how his wife died. Driven by a demon—and not my woman-loving daimon, who would be disgusted about such behavior—I folded those sheets and put them in my pocket.

  Everything but the ice-cream bar. Did he have one more practical joke to spring?

  I shifted uneasily. It would be like him to have one final trick in reserve.

  The snow was falling hard now, just as predicted. I drove very carefully. I wanted very much to arrive home safely and fall into bed next to my wife.

  I beat you, Jim Clancy. I beat you. She’s mine now.

  In retrospect, my pride was hardly justified. I had simply made less mistakes than the two cops, just as I had made less mistakes than Agent Clarke.

  Arthur Rearden was killed in a shootout in a bar on Seventy-ninth and Racine the next year. He was off-duty and drinking in the bar when two young black kids tried to rob it. He killed both of them. I hope somewhere he has found peace.

  It never made the papers, but the police generally accepted the explanation they received from their stool pigeons: Jim Clancy had put out a contract on himself because he knew he was going to die.

  He did indeed go out with a bang.

  No one ever made the suggestion again that Rosemarie and I might have tried to kill him—until a rather recent article in a Chicago underground paper called The Feeder. A young woman photographer, convinced that my continued success was depriving younger photographers, “especially women with a feminist’s vision,” their justly merited success, assembled every nasty word ever printed about me in my whole career.

  A labor of love, you might say.

  Many Chicagoans have not forgotten that most of O’Malley’s wealth was inherited from his father-in-law and mother-in-law, both of whom died under mysterious circumstances. His mother-in-law, Clarice Clancy, was pushed down a flight of stairs. His father-in-law, James Clancy, was blown up by a car bomb. While police were never able to find evidence conclusively linking O’Malley to these killings, neither were they able to completely exonerate him. Given the paucity of his talent and the ambition that has driven him to the heights of success, one could expect almost anything from Charles Cronin O’Malley.

  Not libelous, not quite. And the operative word, gentle reader, is not “exonerate”; it is “success.”

  In The Feeder, hatred, so long as it is ideologically correct, covers a multitude of sins.

  Back in 1955, that episode of my life was not quite finished. One small, suspicious, Othello-like part of me still did not quite believe Rosemarie’s account of her mother’s death. Was not the fall down the stairs too fortuitous, too much of a coincidence?

  It was then, however, that I began to gather my little secret dossier about the deaths of her parents—against what event I was not sure, but so that I might have the data at hand if I ever needed it.

  It was an almost harmless obsession, a tiny infection, a small wound that, I told myself, could not ever become serious enough to
cause gangrene.

  I had seen a look of fury occasionally in her eyes, almost always when she was drunk, and momentarily feared for my life and for the lives of our children. Sober, Rosemarie would not hurt even a bug—she chased flies out of the house rather than swat them.

  Drunk… might she be a killer?

  It was only a tiny fear, one to which I paid little attention. But it was there, as small as a virus that carries a deadly disease.

  I drove slowly up to Greenwood and Euclid at seven-thirty, parked the car a block away, slogged through the falling snow down the alley and into our back porch. I returned the key to the key ring, threw the sedatives down the toilet, and collapsed into bed.

  Hours later, freshly showered and morning bright, she brought me my breakfast.

  “Did you take one of those nice little pills too?”

  “No.” I had learned that you should not roll over in dismay when your wife brings you breakfast in bed.

  “You were out like a light all night long.”

  “Was I really?”

  Rosemary did not get drunk the week her father died.

  But she did the following week, when she discovered that she was pregnant again.

  And I continued to worry about the ice-cream bar.

  25

  I will now tell you the story of my wife’s death. The true story.

  He had typed the document himself. It was sloppy, marred by erasures and misspellings—and thus seemingly more authentic.

  I have attached the names and addresses of my servants at the time, who will testify to the truth of my story.

  My daughter Rosemarie was a difficult, spoiled child. My poor wife indulged her and then, when our child became a hot-tempered little monster, feared her. With good reason.

  In her rages she frequently assaulted my wife physically. I felt that the child needed psychiatric attention, but Clarice objected that such attention would suggest to others that we had ‘bad blood.’

  I lived in terror for many years that in one of these assaults she would do serious harm to my wife. I never suspected how much harm she might do.

  On the day of her death my wife had been ill with a serious headache. She forbade Rosemarie to go out with Margaret O’Malley, whom we both felt was a bad influence on our daughter. Her parents tended to be lax with children and we were convinced that Margaret encouraged my daughter to resist her mother’s wishes.

  Rosemarie disobeyed my wife’s orders, in the hearing of our housekeeper. Later, she returned to the house, with the O’Malley girl. My wife reproached Rosemarie for her disobedience. Rosemarie attacked her and in the ensuing struggle pushed her mother down the steps to the basement. Then she and the O’Malley child fled back to the O’Malley residence. They either persuaded or deceived Mrs. O’Malley to tell the police that neither of them had left.

  I was aware of what happened, but instructed my servants not to speak to the police about the actual events of that day. I had lost my wife. I did not want to lose my daughter. Moreover, I believed that the tragedy was an unfortunate accident and that no useful purpose would be served by inflicting punishment on my daughter.

  Since I made that decision, however, I have often wondered whether I misinterpreted the facts. Was my wife’s death—with so many years of life still hers by right—a tragic accident or the result of a deliberate and cold-blooded murder?

  I am now prepared to say that the latter is the truth. And that I am the next target.

  Thanks,

  James Patrick Clancy.

  26

  The volcano smoldering under Vince and Peg finally blew up.

  At our house at supper.

  They probably should have called and canceled the evening. But it was only two weeks since the death of Jim Clancy and they doubtless felt that they owed it to Rosemarie to come to the Syrian meal she had promised them.

  The strain between them was so strong when they came into the house that even I noticed it.

  We chatted about the Vogue shoot. They both admired my proofs and were properly impressed with my wife in the blue “foundation garment.”

  “I always said you should be a model, Rose.” Peg beamed approvingly.

  “If I ever have a career, which I doubt”—Rosemarie began to distribute the spicy meat dish that, at the risk of my life, I had earlier called Irish stew—“it would be doing something, not just posing for a camera.”

  “Gourmet cook,” I suggested, shoveling the tasty meat into my mouth.

  “Human garbage scow”—Peg smiled indulgently—“you don’t count.”

  “As long as it isn’t moving,” Rosemarie agreed, “Chuck will eat it.”

  Vinny was tense and silent, his eyes dark, his lips thin.

  “Do you like it, Vince?” I asked tentatively.

  “Great.” He smiled like the Vince of old. “Rosie’s a wonderful cook.”

  “Thank you.” She bowed in gratitude.

  “Peg’s a wonderful cook too.” Vince relaxed and smiled. “Not a gourmet chef like you, Rosie. Not everyone has time for that.”

  Peg turned white. Somehow her anger jumped across the table. Vince, who had meant a sincere compliment—well, eighty-five percent sincere anyway—turned dark again. “I mean”—he tried to recapture his composure—“you’re not busy with a musical career like Peg, are you?”

  “She’s my agent,” I said, ineptly trying to smooth things over.

  “That doesn’t take her out of the house all the time, does it?”

  “She’s home more than a lot of women.” Rosemarie was about to join the brawl. I wished I could find that plane which was leaving for Katmandu.

  “Women that have to work for a living”—his voice rose—“women whose husbands are not able to support them.”

  Oh boy.

  “There is nothing wrong with a woman having a career,” Rosemarie fought back. “Just because I stay home, it doesn’t mean—”

  “Why don’t YOU become a professional singer?” Vince yelled. “Then you can leave your kids alone as Peg does.”

  “I’m with them more than you are.” Peg’s fingers gripped her Waterford claret glass.

  “It’s my job to earn the money, yours to raise the kids.” He pushed away from the table. “A woman belongs at home.”

  “Bullshit,” said my wife, pouring oil on the flames.

  “Your children are never neglected, Vinny,” Peg said wearily. “You know that.”

  “They need a full-time mother.”

  “And a father,” she fired back, “who keeps his agreements.”

  “What do you mean by that?” He leaped out of the chair.

  “I mean”—her voice was icy—“that you agreed before we were married that it was all right if I continued with the violin. You urged me not to give it up when I was willing to do so. Now you’ve changed the rules.”

  “All those months in hell in Korea”—he was sobbing now—“I dreamed of peace and happiness at home. I should have let myself die that night they soaked me and left me out in the cold. If I thought I’d return to a wife who loved her fiddle more than she loves me and our children, I would have died.”

  “Always Korea, Vinny,” she stared at him coldly. “Always Korea, when you want to intimidate me.”

  “You weren’t there. You don’t know what it was like.”

  “If I’d thought it would be held over my head throughout my marriage, I would have volunteered as a Red Cross worker.”

  “Bitch!” he screamed.

  “Not in my house!” Rosemarie screamed too. “You don’t call your wife that in my house.”

  “Calm down, Rosie.” Peg did not take her eyes off her husband, who was rampaging back and forth on the other side of the table from her. “It’s been coming a long time. I’m only sorry that it had to happen in front of you.”

  “You’ve all looked down on me because I’m Italian.” Vince pounded the wall. “Not good enough for a shanty Irish wife.”

  “Veneti
an-blind Irish,” I murmured.

  “That’s the last cliché, Chucky. First it’s neglecting the kids; second it’s Korea; third it’s the despised Italian people.”

  “Bitch!” Vince screamed again.

  “You can think of better words than that, Vince.” She glared at him. “All right, it’s been building up. I might as well say it in front of witnesses: This has to stop. Either we find help to put our marriage back together or you get out. I will not have my children subjected to these foolish rages of yours. I love you and I always will love you. I’ll fight with you as often as I need to, I’ll ask for forgiveness whenever I’m wrong, which is often, but I will not, Vinny, not, tolerate this rage of yours anymore.”

  “You’ll have to tolerate it,” he sneered. “I bring home the money. I’m the breadwinner.”

  “Go home, Vinny,” she replied composedly, “and calm down. Or don’t go home. Spend the night at your mother’s. She won’t put up with it for long either. And don’t come back until you agree that we both need help.”

  “Fuck you!” he roared and bolted from the house.

  “Sorry, Chuck.” She glanced at me. “I know how much you respect him.”

  “I could tell there were some troubles,” I said lamely.

  “It’s Korea, as I’m sure you’ve guessed. He’s never quite recovered his confidence since they tried to break him. Law school was supposed to help and it made things worse.”

  “He’s always this way?”

  “Dear God, no, Chuck. Most of the time, he’s the sweet wonderful man who took me to his senior prom. But it’s getting worse. I had to lay down the law. I’m not sure it will work.”

  “I’ll drive you home, Peg.” Rosemarie laid aside her napkin and stood up. “You don’t mind, Chuck?”

  “Huh? Oh, no.”

  The two of them needed to cry together.

  I finished the rest of the “Irish stew.”

  That night, Rosemarie and I lay silently next to each other in bed, the lights still on.