The Stolen Marriage

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Oh, the one with the rosettes was beautiful,” Mimi agreed.

  I caught the smile that passed between Vincent and his father as the girl talk continued. Those two handsome, dark-eyed, dark-haired men stayed at the table, smoking cigarettes and bickering about the Baltimore Orioles, while Mom, Mimi, and I began clearing the dishes and carrying them into the kitchen. Vincent was leaving most of the wedding plans up to me. The wedding would be small. We planned to invite only thirty people to the reception, which would be held in one of our favorite neighborhood restaurants. We couldn’t afford much more than that, but I wouldn’t have cared if only our families were present. It was the marriage I longed for, not the wedding.

  My mother was washing the dishes and Mimi and I were drying when Vincent walked into the small kitchen. “Can I steal Tess away from you ladies?” he asked, his hand already at my waist.

  “Of course.” Mimi pulled the dishtowel from me. “Go on now.” She gave me a little shove toward the door. “You two have fun.”

  Vincent took my hand and led me through the living room and toward the front door. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. Outside, he put his arm around me as we turned left on the sidewalk. Vincent’s touch had been electrifying me for years. The first time I’d felt that lightning bolt pass through me when he touched me, I was fifteen years old and he was nineteen and home from college. I’d been trying unsuccessfully to change the needle on the Victrola in the Russos’ living room. Vincent had moved me aside, gently, his hands on my rib cage, and my legs went soft in the knees. He’d replaced the needle and turned to me.

  “What do you want to hear?” he’d asked. I couldn’t respond for the buzzing in my ears. My mind was suddenly mush and my body a solid mass of nerve endings. His smile told me he knew exactly how I felt. Then he asked me to a movie. That was the beginning of everything. Seven years we’d been together now. Seven long, wonderful, love-filled, and sometimes very frustrating years. We wanted more of each other than we could have. I looked forward to the day when we could finally sleep in the same room. The same bed. At last we would be lovers, a thought that filled me with a hunger for him. It was both amazing to me as well as a source of pride that we’d been able to wait this long. We hadn’t even come close to making love because Vincent didn’t want that temptation. He’d grown up expecting to become a priest, so it made sense to me that he would never pressure me to cross that line before we were married. Gina teased me about it. She and her boyfriend Mac made love before he joined the army and she thought Vincent and I were crazy for waiting. She didn’t think sleeping together was a sin. Gina didn’t think much was a sin, actually.

  “Something’s come up that I need to talk to you about,” Vincent said now, lowering his arm from my shoulders and taking my hand as we walked. His tone, which had been playful all through dinner and our birthday-and-residency celebration, was suddenly serious and I wondered if I should be worried. My biggest fear was that he would be called up for service. He had a minor problem with his heart—a murmur, his doctor called it—and so far, that had kept him out, a fact he felt guilty about. The heart murmur caused him no trouble at all, thank God. “Why should I get to stay safe at home when so many others have to fight?” he would say. Selfishly, though, I was happy he couldn’t be drafted.

  “Do I need to be worried?” I asked now.

  He gave my hand a squeeze, and in the golden evening light, I saw him smile. “No,” he said. “You just need to be a bit … flexible.”

  “I can do that,” I said, happy just to be holding his hand.

  We walked past the row houses on our block, several of them bearing the red-bordered blue star flags in the windows, indicating that a family member was serving in the armed forces. One of the houses had two blue stars and one gold. It was sobering, walking past that house. This was a costly war.

  The air was warm and silky on my bare arms as we headed toward the place we always went to talk: St. Leo’s. Our church. The hub of Little Italy. Even as kids, Vincent and I had had whispered conversations in St. Leo’s. It was where we made our first communions and confirmations and it was a source of comfort for both of us. It was also where we would become husband and wife.

  We reached the church and, once inside, sat down in the last pew, still holding hands. I breathed in the scent of musk and candles and incense that seemed to emanate from the cold stone walls and the smooth wood of the pews. It was a scent I always equated with comfort and safety. As much as I loved St. Leo’s, though, I knew it meant more to Vincent than it did to me. While I felt the comfort of knowing I belonged in this church where people loved me and cared for me, Vincent felt something deeper here. Something spiritual. He’d tried to explain it to me, but it was the sort of thing you couldn’t force another person to feel—that intense closeness to God. One of the priests at St. Leo’s had recognized Vincent’s brilliance in math and science early on and encouraged him to go into medicine instead of the priesthood. “There are many ways to serve God,” he’d told him. I would be eternally grateful to that priest.

  There were only a few other people in the church this evening. They sat or kneeled in the pews much closer to the altar. A few of them were at the side of the church, lighting candles. Since the war began, another bank of candles had been added. We had so many young men to pray for these days.

  I leaned my head on Vincent’s shoulder. “So,” I said softly. “What do I need to be flexible about?”

  “There’s been a small change in my plans for the next few weeks,” he said. “I need to go to Chicago for a little while.”

  I lifted my head to look at him. “Chicago? Why?”

  “There’s an infantile paralysis epidemic there,” he said. “They’re asking for doctors to volunteer.”

  “Ah,” I said, understanding. “You’re thinking about your cousin Tony.” Vincent’s much older cousin had contracted infantile paralysis—polio—as a teenager. He was in his forties now and he wore braces on his legs and needed crutches to help him walk.

  “Yes,” he said. “I guess I’m a little more sensitive to polio than another doctor might be, but I’d want to help anyway.”

  That was Vincent. Always first to jump in when someone needed help. “There are so many kids living in poverty in this country,” he’d told me once. “I’ll devote at least part of my practice to helping them.” I had the feeling we would never be rich, but that was fine.

  “How long do you think you’ll be gone?” I asked.

  “I’m hoping only a couple of weeks,” he said. “These epidemics tend to happen during the summer and run their course by fall.”

  I hated that frightening disease. Every summer, it seemed to set a different part of the country in its sights, attacking the children and leaving them horribly ill, sometimes paralyzed, for months or years or even the rest of their lives. As a nursing student, I’d seen a couple of children who’d been devastated by it.

  Vincent let go of my hand and put his arm around my shoulders and I snuggled closer. “I don’t want to be away from you any longer than that,” he said.

  A couple of weeks. That sounded like a lifetime to me right then and I felt like protesting, but I needed to support him. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I wish I was done with nursing school so I could go with you to help.” I had another week in my summer program and the fall semester would start shortly after.

  “That would have been perfect.” He squeezed my shoulders. “I’ll miss you,” he said, “but I’ll be back in no time.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said again. I was determined to mean it.

  2

  Vincent’s two weeks in Chicago stretched into three, then four and I began the final semester of my nursing program. We’d never been apart for so long. He was desperately needed there, he wrote in his letters, which arrived a couple of times each week. They were short letters, his handwriting sloppy, hurried. He rarely called. The boardinghouse where he was staying had only one phone for eight men to shar
e. Plus, he was so busy. He promised to be home by early October, but I was beginning to doubt his promises. Those few times I spoke with him, I heard something new in his voice. A different sort of energy and excitement. He couldn’t stop talking about the children he was seeing and the work he was doing. And he was falling in love with Chicago, he said. Would I ever consider living there? That sort of talk worried me. Chicago? Leaving Baltimore and our families had never been part of our plan.

  As for me, I’d talk about my challenging classes and how Mimi and Pop were doing and the plans for our wedding. I’d talk about loving him. About our future, when we would work together in his pediatric practice. About the children we would have. He’d make a gallant effort to respond to what I was saying, but after a sentence or two he’d ease the conversation back to his work. I knew he was committed to me. I knew he wanted a future with me, and yet I felt something like impending doom during those weeks apart. I tried to remind myself that many of my friends, Gina included, had boyfriends thousands of miles away who faced danger and death every single day. My fiancé was safe. How dare I want him even closer to me when he was doing such important work and taking so much satisfaction from it?

  The day before he was to come home, he called again. From the moment he said “Hi, Tess,” I knew what he was going to tell me.

  “I have to stay a bit longer, darling,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Words failed me, and he rushed on.

  “I’ve gotten involved in some research here,” he said. “You know, into the cause of infantile paralysis? And the various forms of treatment? It’s so important. You understand, don’t you?”

  “You said you’d be home tomorrow.” I heard the slightest break in my voice and hoped he hadn’t noticed. I would not be a baby.

  “I know, and I’m sorry, but this isn’t the sort of thing that can be put off,” he said. “The work has to happen while the polio virus is still active in the area. Plus most of the other personnel have had to go back to their jobs, but since I’m not practicing yet, I’m free to stay.”

  “What if our wedding were tomorrow?” I tested. “Would you still stay there?”

  He hesitated as though he couldn’t believe I’d actually asked that question, and I felt ashamed for doubting him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you’d come home.”

  “Of course I would.”

  “Maybe I could come there? I have the weekend off, plus my Monday classes don’t start till afternoon.”

  Again that hesitation. I squeezed the phone cord, waiting tensely for his answer.

  “Honey,” he said. “Do you know how long that would take you? First, it’s nearly impossible to get a train reservation with the way they’re moving the troops around. Even if you could get a reservation, you’d have to spend twenty hours on the train. And once you got here, I don’t have any place for you to stay. I’m in a boardinghouse, remember? Plus I’ll be working all hours of the day and into the night.”

  For the first time in our long relationship, I wondered if he might be seeing someone else. The thought felt like a knife in my chest. He couldn’t be, though. Not Vincent. We’d been apart too long. I was losing my memory of who he truly was. I was letting myself get bitter.

  “All right,” I said, then before I could stop myself, I added, “I’d ask when you’ll be coming home, but it doesn’t really matter what you say, does it? You’ll just change the date as it approaches.”

  “Tess,” he chided. “That’s not like you.”

  “I know.” He was right. It wasn’t like me, but I couldn’t help but feel hurt that I seemed to be last of his priorities.

  “Look, I need to get off, darling,” he said. “Someone else wants to use this phone. Give me two more weeks here, all right? I promise, I’ll come home then, no matter what’s going on here. Just remember that you and I have our whole lives together. Ten years from now, you’ll look back on these few weeks and laugh at how insecure you sound. Keep your chin up for me now, all right, sweetheart?”

  “All right,” I said after a moment. “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” he said, “and don’t you ever forget it.”

  3

  By the middle of October, Vincent still wasn’t home. I sat with Gina in her bedroom, both of us in our dungarees and cotton shirts as we smoked cigarettes and drank Pepsi Cola on her twin beds. She’d added a shot of whiskey to my Pepsi. “For your nerves,” she’d said.

  I usually loved sitting in Gina’s room. It hadn’t changed since she was a little girl and the pink and white striped curtains and ruffled pink bed skirt were a sweet counterpoint to our cigarettes and whiskey. Today, though, even Gina’s room gave me little comfort.

  She lit another Chesterfield and turned to face me.

  “It’s time you opened your eyes, Tess,” Gina said after I told her that Vincent had postponed coming home yet again. “He’s seeing someone. Even Vincent Russo is a man, not a saint.”

  “I don’t believe he’d ever cheat on me,” I said. Most of the time, I didn’t. Only when I was lying in bed after another day of not hearing from him by phone or letter did I give in to any doubt about his fidelity. During daylight hours when I was happily absorbed in my nursing program, I knew it was me and me alone that he loved. Nighttime, though, was a different matter.

  “It’s not so terrible, though, honey.” Gina brushed a lock of her dirty-blond hair from her cheek, then took a drag on her cigarette. “He’ll be back,” she said. “He’s probably just nervous about getting married and needs one last fling. Let him get it out of his system and then he’ll be yours for the rest of your life.”

  “He’s not having a fling,” I said, though there wasn’t much power behind my words. I hated that I felt any doubt about him at all.

  “I think you’re kidding yourself,” she said. “Do you think for one minute Mac hasn’t had some fun while he’s over there?”

  I was shocked. “Has he told you that?”

  She shrugged. “He doesn’t have to.” She sipped from her glass, then set it back on the night table between the beds. “He’s a man,” she said. “It’s different for them. They can’t go that long without a girl.”

  “Doesn’t the thought of him being with someone else bother you?”

  “I just don’t think about it,” she said. “He’s fighting for his country. It has to be terrible, what he’s going through. I wouldn’t blame him if he could find a little pleasure.”

  I felt a chill run up my spine. “You’re a lot more forgiving than I am,” I said.

  “You know what we should do?” Gina stubbed out her cigarette and sat up straight, crossing her legs Indian-style on the bed. I’d known her a long time and recognized the look of mischief in her eyes.

  “What?” I asked warily.

  “We should get out of here for the weekend,” she said. “Let’s see if we can get on a train to Washington!”

  “What if Vincent calls while I’m away?”

  She scowled. “What’s the likelihood of that?” she asked. “You said he hardly ever calls. And you can’t live your life waiting for him to get in touch. Come on. Let’s do it.”

  Washington, D.C., was only an hour train ride from Baltimore. I’d been to the city several times to tour the museums and once to see a play, but never overnight. “Where would we stay?” I asked. “Washington will be a zoo these days with all the government workers and military and—”

  “My aunt has that tourist home near Capitol Hill, remember?” she interrupted me. “Maybe she has a vacancy. Let me call her and see if she can put us up. It wouldn’t even cost us anything.”

  “I think I just want to stay home and sulk this weekend,” I said, lighting another cigarette.

  “No you don’t!” She leaned forward, riveting me with her blue eyes. “And really, Tess. You’re usually so tough and I love you but now you’re starting to get on my nerves with your whining. Think about it, will you? My boyfriend’s in harm’s way
every minute of every day. He can’t even tell me where he is. His letters come through V-mail after the censors have gone over them. His life isn’t his own right now. Do you hear me complaining? No. Your boyfriend is a few hours away doing something he loves. So you have to stop this griping. All right?”

  I was taken aback, first by her criticism and second by the fact that she was right. I’d become self-absorbed in the last few weeks. Gina probably needed an escape for the weekend even more than I did.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. Let’s go to Washington.”

  4

  We arrived in Washington at eleven-thirty the following morning after the stifling-hot train ride. The train had been so crowded with boys in uniform that we’d had to stand until two very young-looking soldiers offered us their seats. Union Station was packed wall to wall with travelers. Businessmen in suits and women in their hats and white gloves were lost in a sea of military uniforms. Everyone looked rushed as they swarmed through the massive station. It took us several minutes to work our way through the crowd, our suitcases thumping into the legs of other travelers, before we made it to the exit and out onto the sidewalk. The scent of early fall mingled with the smell of cigarettes and perfume and hair tonic as we joined the mob waiting for a taxi. There was a chill in the air and I drew my coat tighter across my chest. We were both wearing skirts and blouses beneath our lightweight coats, as well as the tams we’d bought on a shopping spree the year before. Gina had lamented that she was completely out of nylons, so she’d carefully applied a line of eye pencil up the back of her leg to fool the casual observer. I still had two pairs of nylons in reasonable condition—not counting the white stockings that went with my nurse’s uniform—and I was wearing one of them now.