The candlelight dinner was all that was promised. Rosemarie was giddy and tense and embarrassed by the gown, which made imagination unnecessary. I ought to have been aroused to the edge of frenzy—my wife, even coming out of the depths, was incredibly lovely—but I felt dull, leaden, heavy.
“Something wrong, husband mine?” She passed the carrots to me. “The gown too much?”
“The gown is wonderful and the woman inside even more wonderful.” I pushed back my chair and stood up. “It’s me, not you.”
“I don’t understand, Chuck. If you’d rather wait till I am better…”
“That’s not it.” I started to pace restlessly. “This is all wrong, Rosemarie, all wrong.”
“Wrong?” Worry lines spread across her face. “How?”
I slumped back into my chair. “I feel like I’ve been guilty of infidelity.”
“I’ve given you enough reason.” She reached across the table and took my hand.
“Not that kind of infidelity. Maybe something worse. Now I have to hunt for the right words, Rosemarie.”
She continued to hold my hand, possessively, fiercely. “Look”—I struggled to describe the “vision” I saw—“you’ve forced me to make my dreams of being a photographer come true, right?”
She nodded.
“Sometimes against the most dogged and stubborn opposition from me, right?”
She nodded again, a faint smile twitching at her lips.
“And last spring, when I was running on empty, you forced me to stop and refuel, right?”
“Not the best metaphor, but okay.”
I grinned back at her, still feeling hollow and drained. “All right, you forced me to renew our marriage. Whenever you did push me, you took a great risk. You could never be sure how I’d react—”
“I was pretty sure.”
“You drew the line. Clancy lowered the boom.”
She tilted her head and stared at me intently, trying to understand. “If you want to put it that way.”
“I grew up in a family where lines aren’t drawn. And the booms aren’t lowered. No, that’s not true. They are lowered all the time, they’re as subtle as the atmosphere. But because they’re so subtle, I never learned how…”
“And you married a woman on whom subtlety of this sort would be completely lost?” She was smiling again, and clinging to my hand for dear life.
“I was astonished by your answer to my ultimatum.”
“That I didn’t know any psychiatrists? But I didn’t?”
“That you would see one at all.”
She frowned, puzzled. “What else could I say? You were right. I knew that as soon as you said it.”
“Don’t you see? I could have insisted that you see a psychiatrist anytime since our honeymoon and you would have done so, right?”
“Promptly. I’d even thought about it myself pretty often. I needed a little push.”
“I wouldn’t push. I was too frightened to give that little push. So I let you go through years of unnecessary hell. Isn’t that infidelity?”
“You’ve been a good husband, Chuck.” Her eyes were filling up. “Don’t do this to yourself.”
“Pretty good, maybe, some of the time, but I messed up on this. I’m the one who needs to be forgiven. Not you.”
“I never thought of it that way.” She still watched me, puzzling, searching. “I suppose you’re right, kind of. Maybe this is the first time I’m really ready for it. … Anyway”—she grinned crookedly—“I do forgive you”—the tears flooded up again—“the way you forgave me, and…” Her crooked grin exorcised the tears. “Don’t let it happen again!”
“I’ll try.”
“You’d better. Now, do you want ice cream or me?”
“The ice cream can wait.”
“Good. Let’s go to your room. I mean, we’ll go back to our room tomorrow, but tonight I want to feel that I’m so attractive that my husband just dragged me off.”
“I think I can manage that.”
Our love was quiet and restrained, a subdued wedding night.
“Not as passionate as last summer,” she murmured apologetically.
“What we begin now will be much better than the summer.”
“It won’t always be easy, Chuck.”
“I know that.”
It wasn’t easy, not at all, especially not the next day, when I forced myself to work up the courage to ask Peg what had really happened the day Clarice Clancy had died.
34
“Why should you believe me”—Peg refilled my teacup—“if you don’t believe your wife?”
We were sitting in the “sunroom” of the Antonelli house. Outside, the tender warmth of Indian summer continued to bathe the world in golden gloss. Johnny Antonelli, the newest of the babies (with bright red hair), slept peacefully in his crib. His mother’s violin lay on an antique table next to the music stand. Dressed in a white blouse and dark blue slacks, brown hair falling to her shoulders, slim, slim waist enclosed in a cowboy belt, her pert breasts firm against the fabric of her blouse, my sister was a wondrously beautiful, self-possessed woman—her mother’s daughter with none of April’s vagueness.
“I believe that she believes what she told me.” I barely tasted the tea. “But if I’m going to see her through this period in her life, I have to know the truth.”
Peg sat on the couch against the wall of the sunroom and lifted her own teacup. “I suppose so.” She nodded. “Maybe you should have seen me about this long ago.”
“Maybe I should have done lots of things long ago.”
“Is she going to make it, Chuck?” Peg sipped her tea slowly, thoughtfully.
“Yes.”
She nodded again. “I think so too. … You should hear her talk about you. Poor child adores you. ‘He’s so authoritative that I just know he has enough strength for the two of us.’”
“Rosemarie has more than enough strength for herself.”
“Sure she does.” Peg grinned. “But let her think that you’re the powerful one just now. Seriously, Chuck”—astonishingly, my sibling’s eyes were shining with admiration—“you’ve been wonderful, just perfect with her this time. I know it will work out.”
“I’m ashamed that I waited so long. And maybe I ought to be ashamed that I let this… this doubt torment me.”
“Well… more tea?… it was never a problem till now. I mean, Rose is a great kid, but face it, Chuck, she’s come from a strange family. She’s worth the effort, but let’s not fool ourselves about the effort.”
Peg was a stranger to be discovered, just as my mother had been.
“I will believe you, Peg,” I said simply.
“I’m sure of that.” She uncurled her long legs, walked to the coffee table, refilled her cup, and passed a plate of cookies to me. I succumbed to the temptation, as I always do. “You know that her father was molesting her?”
“Raping her.”
“I thought as much. She never said exactly what he was doing. I didn’t know what incest was … exactly.”
“She told me before we were married.”
“Good for her. I hoped she would.” Peg was frowning thoughtfully. “Her father was raping her, her mother was beating her. And somehow she still survived and is our wonderful…”
“Wild Irish Rosemarie!”
“Right.” Peg grinned briefly and then became serious again. “What I have to do is figure out whether I should wait till her therapist sends her to me to find out what really happened that day or bring it up myself.”
“Do you have to choose?”
“Maybe not. Maybe it will come up indirectly. Anyway”—she blew on her tea—“I’ll listen for the opportunity.”
“She didn’t kill her mother?”
“Certainly not.” She sounded impatient with my stupidity. “I mean not only in the general sense that Clarice’s problems were created by her own parents and by her husband, not by poor Rose, but in the more specific sense that she didn’t
push her down the stairs. The wonder is that Clarice didn’t kill her before that day.”
“The beatings were that bad?”
“Rosie tell you she came after us with an umbrella?”
“Yes.”
Peg shook her head. “Poor kid can’t admit to herself how bad it was. Chuck, it was a poker from the fireplace. If I hadn’t been there, she would have killed Rose. You know the way Rosie is—all bark and no bite.”
“Oh?”
“She’d try to ward off the blows when her mother hit her, but she’d never fight back. If I wasn’t there, she would have tried to shield herself from the poker, but she wouldn’t have done anything else.”
“Really?”
“Sure, you know that Rosie’s temper is all show, don’t you? Hell, I figured that out in third grade.”
“All show?”
“Sure. Has she ever hit you?”
“Well, no.”
“See?”
“I’ve never hit her either.”
“You don’t have a temper. Anyway, count on it, like I say, there’s no bite at all.”
So now I learn that.
“What would have happened if you hadn’t been there?”
“What would have happened?” Peg put down the cup and saucer with a bang. “Poor Rosie would have cowered at the door, hands over her head, and whimpered while Mama bashed her brains out.”
The shadows were lengthening across Peg’s vast garden of mums. Darkness and winter were approaching.
“Dear God!”
“Oh, He sent me all right.”
“Rosemarie didn’t push her down the stairs.”
“Chuck, what’s the matter with you?” Peg gestured at the pieces of my dossier next to her Belleek teapot. “Can’t you draw the obvious conclusion from your evidence? Isn’t it apparent who killed Clarice Clancy?”
“I’m afraid not.”
But then I saw, just as she told me.
“I did.” She rose from the chair and picked up her violin. “Who else? I’m glad I did. She would have killed Rose—that day or the next day or the day after. I saved Rosemarie’s life. I’m not sorry about that at all.”
“You pushed her down the basement stairs?”
“Not deliberately.” She tucked the violin under her chin and began to tighten its strings. “She came at us with the poker and swung it at Rosie’s skull. I pushed Rose out of the way and grabbed the poker. Poor dear woman, she was terribly strong when she was drunk. We wrestled all over the parlor for the poker. She pulled it out of my hands and ran back to the doorway where poor Rosie was bleating like a sheep at the stockyards.”
“Peg—”
“I leaped on her back and pulled her away, so she missed, by maybe a few inches. Then she turned on me. I don’t think she knew the difference between the two of us. We struggled for the poker again. Finally I pulled it out of her hands. She jumped on me and I pushed her back. Hard. Real hard. She tumbled over and… well, you can imagine the rest.”
“But why does Rosemarie not remember the fight?”
“She can’t permit herself to think”—Peg drew the bow across the strings—“that her best friend pushed her mother to her death. Better to imagine that it was pure accident or blame herself when she’s worried and frightened. For all her strength, Rosie’s pretty fragile sometimes. I don’t have to tell you that, do I? By the way, Chucky Ducky,” she tapped my head with the violin bow, “you’re marvelously tender with her. Now that you draw the line or lower the boom or whatever, you’re the perfect man for her. You know that—always did think you were perfect, didn’t you, big brother?—but it doesn’t hurt to hear it from someone else.”
“Then what happened?”
She tested each of the strings, then rested the violin against the music stand. “I was scared. And terribly sad, because I knew Mrs. Clancy was dead. And I was excited—sky high—because I knew she would have killed us both. I had saved Rosie’s life. She was hysterical, poor kid. So I knew I had to figure out what to do. I told her what we would have to say and made her promise to say exactly what I told her to say. I don’t know”—she placed the violin under her chin again—“maybe we should have told the police the truth. Now I think they might have believed us. Still, Rosie has enough to carry through life as it is without a reputation as a killer.”
She began to play something—Mozart, I think.
“Incredible.”
She continued to play. Slowly, thoughtfully.
“Sometimes I can’t believe myself that it really happened. The police were too dumb even to notice the gash on the door that the poker made. After it was all over I went back with your Brownie—remember you gave it to me when you went to Fort Benning—and took a picture of it. The gash I mean, with the poker next to it. I’ve got it around some place. I’ll dig it up for you.”
“In case you needed evidence?”
“I read mystery stories. It was probably silly. Anyway, I was as cool as the ice Mr. Walker used to bring up our back steps. Until the next night. Then I fell apart and cried myself to sleep. I still feel like crying, for poor Mrs. Clancy, I mean. I tell myself I did her a favor. Suppose that she had killed Rosie? How could she have lived with that?”
“You tell April?”
“MOM?” She suspended Mozart. “She would never have been able to cope! I told Daddy later. We went to see Father Raven. They both thought that maybe we ought to have called the police but that it was too late now. They both”—she shrugged indifferently—“thought I was a heroine.”
“I agree. … No guilt?”
“A little. Not much. Like I said, she would have killed Rosie. Maybe me too. Naturally I told the guy.” She tapped Vince’s picture with her bow, “When we were married, I mean. He understood. Said”—she grinned—“he’d stay away from stairways when I was angry at him. … Do I sound indifferent to Mrs. Clancy’s death? I’m not. I still weep for her. I pray for her every night. But I had to protect Rosie’s head from the poker.”
“No.” I shut my eyes. “No, Peg, you don’t sound indifferent at all.”
Dear God in heaven, how much You must have loved my Rosemarie to send such a fierce and tender woman to protect her.
“We worried about you and Rosie. I mean all of us. Dad and I especially because I had to tell him most of what I knew. Mom is good on the little things, Dad on the big ones. We knew how much you had always loved her”—she laughed—“staring at her with your tongue hanging out. Well, almost. So we would have a hard time preventing the marriage. And she always loved you every bit as much as you loved her. But she had so many problems. …”
“You didn’t want me to marry her?”
My whole world of explanations was coming apart.
She sat on the arm of my chair, put the violin on the coffee table, and put her arm around my shoulder.
“We wanted you to marry her. Wanted it in the worst way. But we worried, not about her, but about you. Finally Dad said, ‘Hey, Chucky loves her. He’ll take care of her and they’ll both be happy. And we can’t stop him anyway, even if we wanted to and I don’t think we do.’ So that was that. And it has all worked out, hasn’t it?”
“I’m glad”—the words were true again in the saying—“that you didn’t try to stop me.”
“See!” She bounced off the arm of the chair and reached for her violin.
“This helps a lot, Peg.” I stood up slowly, to make sure my legs were still capable of supporting me. “Together we can do it. Rosemarie and I. I’ll yell if we need help.”
“Damn well better,” she said gruffly. “I’ll walk you to the door.”
She peered into the crib, as mothers do, to make absolutely certain that the child is still breathing. Johnny was very much alive. She smiled fondly at him, this ferocious woman warrior.
“I think”—I wrapped my arm around my beautiful sister—“I’ve lucked out with the women in my life—mother, sister, wife.”
“You sure have.” She was cryi
ng against my shoulder. “Don’t ever forget it.”
“If I do you’ll remind me.”
“Oh, Chucky.” She was sobbing now and clinging to me. “What would have happened to all of us if we hadn’t grown up with Rosemarie to love and treasure?”
That was one way of putting it.
Come to think of it, maybe the only way to put it.
For the O’Malley clan, poor, fragile Rosemarie had been and still was pure grace.
35
I pondered the statement I had written the day after my conversation with my sister. Clipped to the paper was Peg’s blurry picture of the door and the poker, not legal evidence, but conclusive as far as I was concerned.
I have concluded my ill-advised and faithless investigation of the deaths of Clarice and James Clancy. The county coroner’s verdict was correct in both cases—accidental death and murder by person or persons unknown.
If my sister had not been present to intervene the day Mrs. Clancy fell down the steps, the woman would have killed Rosemarie—second-degree murder or perhaps voluntary manslaughter.
Peg saved Rosemarie’s life and arguably mine too.
For what would I have been without my Rosemarie?
Did Jim Clancy know the truth about what happened? I doubt it, or he would have tailored his story to fit the actual facts. In his bitter, hate-filled, love-starved mind he may actually have believed his version of the events.
I stand guilty as charged: guilty of not trusting my wife; guilty, Othello-like, of permitting a tiny doubt to become a deadly cancer of suspicion; guilty of seeing murder in eyes where there was only raw terror. I thought I saw the expression of a black widow. But it was only the face, in Peg’s excellent metaphor, of a lamb going to the slaughter.
I write this concluding note and will maintain the file to remind myself of the folly of which I am capable, even about someone I always loved. More than life itself.
The only worry that remains, just as it did when I found the papers in the safe at Lake Geneva, is the chocolate ice-cream-bar factor. I still worry about Jim Clancy’s last trick. Maybe it’s not out there, a trap waiting to be sprung. But deep down I think it is. I haven’t won the game yet.
A Christmas Wedding Page 36