“Just a little hint?”
“And you call her a Maxwell Street merchant? Very well. One hint. You say to her, kindly but firmly, ‘Rosemarie, cut it out.’”
“I’ve said it many times before.”
“Does it work?”
“Always.”
“Well?”
There were benefits to that fifth child.
Moira the Red was a special prize.
“Well,” April Rosemary said, sighing just like her mother when she looked at the tiny, tiny girl-child with the bright red hair, “she is so beautiful that I suppose we’ll have to spoil her.”
“Love her a lot,” I corrected.
“That’s what I mean, DADDY.”
The transformation in our firstborn was remarkable. With another little girl in the house, finally, she dropped her fussbudget persona and became the serene child that we had known early in her life. And a little mother modeled in the image of her own mother.
I was holding Moira up in the air one day and she was making happy “ga-ga” sounds at me.
“Daddy loves Moira,” April Rosemary told her wide-eyed brothers, “because she has red hair just like he does.”
“Daddy,” I said, trying to sweep them all into a single embrace, “loves all his children.”
“But,” my eldest insisted, “he has to love us all differently because we’re all different. Mommy said so.”
That was that. I was outnumbered again.
At long last I worked up enough nerve to say, “Rosemarie, cut it out.”
“What did you say?” She threw away the volume of Toynbee’s A Study of History she was reading and rose from her chair, eyes dilated, face white, lips a thin angry line.
She missed, just as Peg had predicted she would.
I remembered the ten-year-old tyke about to have another one of her frequent tantrums. That image melted me into tenderness, not the emotion I needed.
“Well,” she thundered, “are you going to answer my question?”
She hadn’t thrown the book at me. The rage was in her eyes, however. What I had once thought was killing rage. It was not, I now tried to persuade myself, dangerous.
Rather it was a sign of fear—a fragile and terrified woman trying to defend herself.
“You heard me.”
“Cut out WHAT?”
“You know very well what I mean.”
“A hell of a husband you are.” She stormed out of the room. I heard doors slamming in the distance.
My stomach turned over slowly a number of times. I had been less frightened in the Bohemian Alps and when hiding in her father’s home at Lake Geneva.
I drew a deep breath and forced myself to walk, with infinite slowness, up the steps to our room.
She wasn’t there.
I pondered for a moment and walked back down to the first floor and then to the basement.
The Second Brandenburg was blaring with loud enough trumpets to serve on judgment day.
In maroon sweat suit she was pumping away on her exercycle.
“Don’t overdo it the first time,” I said, sounding like a bored confessor with an uninteresting penitent.
“Fuck you!” Her face was still twisted with rage.
“Don’t blame your sore muscles on me.” I walked to the machine and pushed hard on her thigh.
She stopped pedaling. “Asshole,” she muttered, the fight going out of her.
“Are you angry because I stopped you or because it took me so long to try to stop you?”
“Both.” The ends of her lips flicked up and down as though she might just smile sometime soon.
“I’m sorry for the second, not for the first.”
“Well, you should be.” The thigh muscles became docile under my hand and the blessed crazy imp expression appeared on her face. “Besides, if my muscles are sore, maybe someone will massage them with ointment.”
“That could be arranged anyway.”
“Sure?”—her voice choked—“even when they’re still so flabby?”
“Sure.” I began to knead the muscle under my control. Then its partner on her other leg.
Sobbing, she threw her arms around me. “I’m so sorry, Chuck, so very, very sorry.”
We must have clung to each other for an hour.
“You probably need a nice hot bath before the anointing with oils.”
“That”—her eyes widened in surrender—“sounds like a very wise idea. A long leisurely bath, huh?”
“You bet.” Then I said the word that first came to my lips at the airport in Mexico City. “You’re a very gallant woman, Rosemarie.”
“Gallant?” Her tears were replaced by laughter. “Me?”
“You. Now, about that hot bath.” I unzipped her jacket.
We progressed in the next several months, though there were terrible setbacks too.
For Rosemarie every new day was an occasion to begin again at the starting blocks. She was skilled at the race now, but the need to run it would never leave her life.
And I had to run it with her, with less skill and less courage than she, truth to tell.
I continued to worry, not every day but at least once a week, about the ice-cream bar.
37
Rosemarie was waiting for me in our marriage bed when I came up from the darkroom. She was bathed, anointed, perfumed, and serene, her long black hair artfully arrayed on a pillow, her arms on top of the sheet, her bare shoulders cream on cream.
An invitation to sex?
Well, that prospect was not excluded, but the invitation was to a dialogue, one of those rare interludes in which my wife summed up for me her progress in therapy—without ever once quoting her psychiatrist.
It was late January of 1961. Moira was not only adorable, she was blessedly quiet. My wife and I had returned to Mexico for a second honeymoon on the tenth anniversary of the first. She had been distracted, preoccupied, no longer the dynamic bride I had married at the first wedding in the new St. Ursula’s. The vacation, low-key and subdued, had been both pleasant and pleasurable. A husband and a lover had nothing about which to complain, only a lot about which to worry.
John Kennedy was inaugurated after we returned to Oak Park; the short years of Camelot had begun. We did not know then either that it was Camelot or that the years would be short.
“How’s the project coming?” Rosemarie called after me as I went into the shower.
I was catching up on my “Parochial School” show, long delayed by a last desperate push to publish my book before January 1, 1961.
“Now that he’s a doctor, even if he isn’t a real doctor like Uncle Ted,” April Rosemary had asked her mother in a stage whisper, “is Daddy going to stop being a crab?”
“Hush, dear,” said her mother. “Daddy’s a nice man most of the time.”
Brat. No, two brats.
Turning on the shower I yelled, “Still way behind.”
I thought I heard her say, “Maybe I can start helping again.”
Therapy and Moira the Red had removed Rosemarie once again from the darkroom. If she returned, I thought nervously as the shower’s warmth caressed my skin, it might be a critical turning point.
It seemed like a good time for a turnaround. Kennedy was about to set up the Peace Corps. Khrushchev was reforming Soviet agriculture. A South African black had won the Nobel Peace Prize. John Updike had begun his “Rabbit” series. Young people (that did not include me because I was now thirty-two) were dancing the Twist. At Mom’s songfest we were singing the songs from Camelot and “Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore”—with my older daughter shouting down everyone else in the room as she urged Michael to row. A new and better era had begun with the new decade.
Or so, alas, we thought. That era somehow seems more distant today than the late forties and the early fifties.
However, I remember with precise details the chain of events that began when, wrapped in a long terry robe, I sat at the edge of our marriage bed and began to stroke Ro
semarie’s wondrous black hair.
“I’m probably not an addict,” Rosemarie began, as she always began such reports with a startling statement that seemed to assume months of previous discussions.
“I didn’t think you were.”
“Yes, you did,” she said firmly. “An alcoholic.”
“Not like most alcoholics.”
“Actually it took the longest time for me to persuade Dr. Stone that I wasn’t promiscuous—with men, I mean. I guess lots of women who are abused by their fathers go that route. I told her that when it comes to self-destruction the Irish would choose the bottle over sex any day.”
I gulped.
“Do you understand?” Her hand touched mine.
“I guess. Go on.”
“Well, anyway, I’m not your typical alcoholic. Don’t worry, I’m not going to experiment or anything like that. I’m too afraid of the stuff. But the problem is that if I don’t drink I’ll think I have everything under control again and find some other way to destroy myself.”
“Not if I can help it.” I drew both our hands down to the side of her face.
“Dear, sweet Chucky.” She kissed my hand. “And sometimes it’s hard to separate what I’m doing because it’s a good idea and what I’m doing because I want to punish myself for what happened with Daddy.”
“Like Moira?” I could have bit off my tongue as soon as I said the words.
“Maybe you ought to be a shrink too.” She was not upset by my comment. “Economist, photographer, psychiatrist. Chucky Ducky the Renaissance man.”
“With a Renaissance wife.” I kissed her forehead.
“Really? No, I think I’m actually early medieval. Anyway, getting pregnant when I did was terrible. Only it was a good idea to finish the family. And I so love our poor little redhead tyke. So it’s all mixed up. I guess maybe I’ve learned something about tricks I play on myself, but I don’t know whether I can stop them.”
“Sure you can.” I slipped my hand under the sheet and rested it on her smooth, moist belly. Rosemarie was in perfect shape again, slender, strong, agile: the lithe woman athlete.
“Hey, don’t tickle me, not yet anyway.”
“I hadn’t started.”
“You were thinking of it. Not that I mind when you do it.” She grinned lasciviously and then became serious, even gloomy. “I’m never going to be all right, Chuck. What happened will always be part of me.” Her eyes filled with tears.
“For better rather than worse.”
“Maybe. The thing is, well … I’ve lived so far by isolating that from all the rest of my life, walling myself into two separate compartments. Now I’m trying to put them together, take down the walls, know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“I always thought that energy and determination were all I needed. Now I see that I need some wisdom, a lot of insight, and even more of the courage to accept what is. I have to learn to be good to myself, which is the hardest of all. I have to treat me like you do.”
She looked so unspeakably fragile that I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her close till Judgment Day. And after. It wasn’t time for my hand to start moving yet.
I looked into her deep blue eyes, was absorbed by them and then drawn into my wife’s soul.
Her soul—I can think of no other term.
I was immersed in a wild, beautiful, haunting, exotic landscape—vast deserts, deep, rich valleys, towering snowcapped mountains, multicolored gardens, clashing cymbals, soft violins. I knew her better than any human should know any other human. I was captured by her more than any human should be captured by another human.
When the interlude was over, a few seconds or the many hours it seemed, I bent over her face and kissed her gently and with all the love in me.
“Hmm. Nice. A little tickle now and then won’t hurt. … You can’t just take down the walls and leave the bricks on the ground. The next morning they’re back up again. I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life.”
“Easter Sunday is not achieved easily.”
She smiled. “I knew you’d understand.”
I wasn’t sure that I did, but at least I had said the right thing.
“See, the problem is that I intended this conversation to be a big success; I’d tell you all my progress and my insights and we’d have a big celebration. I wouldn’t let myself do that. I turn it into a wake.”
“Most vital corpse I’ve ever seen.” This time I did tickle her.
“Chucky, cut it out!” She didn’t mean it.
She twisted in feigned attempt to escape; the sheet fell away from her breasts; I claimed both of them. She grabbed my hands. “There’s one more thing I have to tell you. It’s not part of the celebration and I wasn’t going to mention it tonight, but you’re so gentle I have to get it off my mind.”
I returned my hand to her belly, this time taking the sheet down with it.
“Cover me up, please,” she whispered. “Let me talk just a little bit more. You can hold my breasts. Please, I want you to.”
I did as I was asked. My heart pounded anxiously.
“Did Daddy ever show you the pictures?” She closed her eyes.
“Pictures?”
“When I was in first year at Trinity, he hid a camera before… before we had sex. There were maybe half a dozen pictures. I didn’t know about them. He showed them to me at Christmas the year before we were married. Remember? The day you gave me the tennis dress?”
“A day I’ll never forget.” My voice had become a hoarse rasp.
“He said he’d show them to you if I ever dated you. He threatened it again when we became engaged. I didn’t know whether he would or not. I told myself I didn’t care. I should have warned you about them the day I told you about everything else. You were so upset I lost my nerve.”
“He never tried that. And it wouldn’t have made any difference.”
The stage lights had gone up again and I saw a terrifying scene on the stage in my mind.
“There’s nothing more, Chuck.” She opened her eyes and looked at my grief-stricken face. “I’m sorry to cause you so much pain.”
“It’s your pain that hurts me, Rosemarie. … Did it …?”
“Have any effect on my posing for you? I don’t think so. It was such a different, uh, context, I guess. Maybe there was a little wall there, but you always make my body feel good and innocent. It’s not the same thing.”
Every trace of sexual desire had deserted me, not because I felt that Rosemarie’s beautiful body had been tainted by those pictures, but because she had been hurt, violated, degraded, abused by an evil monster.
A sad and pathetic man, maybe, but an evil monster too.
“In fact”—she brightened—“Dr. Stone thinks that book helped my self-esteem a lot.”
“You don’t quote her very often.”
“Oh, damn.” She pounded the bed. “What I SHOULD say, if I were being good to myself, is that the book DID restore a lot of my self-esteem.” She put on her mock-serious expression. “You know, for an Irish matriarch, I am not completely unattractive.”
“Not completely.” I bent down and kissed her lips. Enough sexual desire returned so that my lips wandered down to her breast, still partially covered by the sheet.
Then the celebration of resurrection began. As was fitting for our two roles, it was a celebration filled with comedy.
When it was over and she slept peacefully in my arms, I found that I had another question and an answer to an old question.
I knew at last what was Jim Clancy’s final ice-cream bar.
38
Should I talk to Vince or to Ed Murray? Vince knew his way around the law profession as well as anyone. He didn’t have the political contacts that Ed had. This wasn’t, however, a political game. And Vince was family. I might need a man with family loyalties before this was over. Especially a man with Southern Italian family loyalties.
For that matter Ed Murray was almost family. Co
rdelia had become the foster sister’s foster sister, as thick as the proverbial thieves with Peg and Rosemarie. They lived two blocks away from us and three blocks from Vince and Peg—in a home that, according to Rosemarie, had been a “nice compromise between Lake Forest and Beverly.”
Rosemarie had surely found them the house.
“Love is. expansive, it seeks to embrace the whole world,” she had told me piously when I wondered if there was room in her friendship with Peg for a third person.
It turned out she was right. The “monstrous regiment” grew by one.
Still, near-family was not quite the same as family. I would consult with Vince.
I rode downtown on the Lake Street L and found Vince working on a brief in his office in what was then called the Field Building (now the LaSalle National Bank Building) on LaSalle Street.
It was a prestigious office, in an important law firm, for a very successful young lawyer.
“Not bad for an Italian kid from Division Street.”
“Cut it out.” He grinned as he shook hands. “The guy married. well, that’s all.”
“That he did, that he did.”
“Assistant concert master for her symphony.” He beamed proudly. “In musical circles I’m becoming famous because I’m her husband.”
We talked about our wives and kids for a few moments. Then I told him what I wanted.
“I suspect that Jim Clancy has left some dirt with his papers, nothing criminal, but something that would hurt Rosemarie terribly. The only reason it hasn’t come out is that old Joe O’Laughlin, who was Jim’s lawyer, died a few months after Jim. It’s probably sitting somewhere in the office of whoever took over O’Laughlin’s practice.”
“He was one of the great, all-time scumbags of the Chicago Bar. Crooked, corrupt, incompetent. No one ever did figure out where he put all his money. He was apparently not planning on dying, ever.”
“I figure that the only reason this dirt hasn’t surfaced is that whoever has it probably doesn’t know he has it.”
Vince drummed his fingers on his big mahogany desk. “Jim Clancy leaves the papers—or whatever—with Joe O’Laughlin. Gives him instructions to go public with them after a few months maybe. Joe dies and leaves no instructions with whoever took over that part of the Clancy files. So the stuff sits there for all these years, like a ticking bomb.”
A Christmas Wedding Page 38