“This marriage is a mistake,” the shivering woman said to me. “You should cancel it while you still have a chance.”
Surrounded by banks of newly shoveled snow, we were huddled in the dark at the entrance of the new white stone St. Ursula Church, which loomed above us like a doubtfully brooding angel. The rest of the wedding party had left with cheerful promises that the warmth of Nuptial Mass and the banquet at Butterfield Country Club and the subsequent marriage bed would exorcise the subzero cold.
The rehearsal itself had been a giddy slapstick comedy, with bride and groom both—the groom more than the bride—nervous about the change that was about to occur in our lives. I assumed responsibility for making everyone laugh, a familiar enough task.
“Father Raven,” I had said at the beginning of the rehearsal to our wise and handsome assistant pastor, “weren’t you the one that said that it would be a cold day in hell when I married this woman?”
General laughter, despite a gentle reproof from my mother.
“You will sleep in a warm bed tomorrow night,” my younger sister had whispered, a suggestive comment that was most unlike her. Never one to miss a chance to reply, I had observed that a couple of extra blankets would serve just as well.
Now the woman wanted to call it off. Or rather she wanted me to call it off. I might have to resort to those extra blankets. On the whole, I preferred a woman to blankets—though not necessarily tomorrow night.
“What do you mean, I should cancel the wedding?” I demanded through chattering teeth. “If you want to call it off, go ahead.”
One part of me did want to call it off. I was much too young to marry. We both were too young, weren’t we? I would wake up in that warm bed the next morning a husband, with a wife in bed next to me. Wasn’t I too young to have a wife?
I had some small knowledge of the physiology of a woman, much less of the psychology. I was no more ignorant than other men my age who were rushing into youthful marriages. Unfortunately for me, perhaps, I was aware of my ignorance. I had enough problems in life without adding a wife to my list of worries. Why couldn’t I just settle down and be an Irish bachelor, a crotchety old Irish bachelor?
Across Massasoit Avenue, Christmas tree lights glowed faintly in several of the bungalow windows, a reassurance that goodness flourished somewhere in our neighborhood, if I wanted such reassurance.
“I’ll be nothing but trouble,” the woman insisted. “You know that. My father is a monster, my mother died in dubious circumstances. I drink too much. You’re marrying into sickness.”
That was a vivid way of putting it. I was about to marry into a stench of vomit and alcohol, a cacophony of curses and sobbing, a sloppy emotional mess like a women’s washroom in a madhouse.
She had also finally admitted that there was a mystery about her mother’s death. Did I want to marry into a police investigation, a ticking bomb that might explode when I least expected it?
Nonetheless I said, lamely, I admit, “That overstates the problem.”
Her head averted, her body wracked with shuddering, she continued her argument. “You go around saving people in trouble. You’re very good at it. Don’t waste your time on me. I’m doomed. I’m not worth saving.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, with an attempt at manliness.
“I don’t want your help,” she said bitterly. “Anyway, I seduced you into this marriage. You should get out of it while you still can.”
Had I been seduced? If I had, I had been a willing victim.
She was not weeping yet. Rather she spoke with the icy detachment of a woman who thought she was damned.
My family would be embarrassed. Or would they? During the weeks of wedding preparation they had seemed uneasy, as if a stealthy germ had infected their joy over a marriage they had long anticipated. Besides, my mother was convinced that anything her firstborn son did was wise and good. Well, almost anything. Would they sigh with relief if I went home and told them that my bride-to-be and I had decided to cancel the whole thing?
We were much too young to marry, were we not?
Yes, we certainly were.
“I appreciate what you’re doing,” she continued, her face a dim blur in the faint street light. “It just won’t work. Besides, we’re too young to marry.”
“If you don’t want to marry me,” I said, trying to sound reasonable, “then just tell me that and we’ll call it all off.”
“But I do want to marry you!” she cried. “I just don’t want to ruin your life!”
Life was a long time.
“You know me,” she continued, “I have a vile temper and I cling to my rages and I have a terrible tongue.”
“Vile,” I corrected her. “Terrible’ is too generic.”
We laughed together. Some of our friends said that we were at ease with each other like a man and a woman who had lived together for years. “One of the advantages of incest,” I had replied brightly, “is that you know the bride pretty well before you bed her.”
She had been a kind of foster sister for as long as I could remember. We knew a lot about each other—enough to understand how little we actually knew. Still, we could put on a good act, harmonizing our dialogue as we did our duets, she the soprano and I the Irish whiskey tenor who didn’t drink whiskey.
“I love you too much to marry you,” she said, sniffling. “But if you are dumb enough to want me, then you can have me. Only please don’t.”
The argument was typical of her. Did she really want to cancel our wedding or was she trying to calm her conscience? Or both?
“Please don’t do what I want? Many a husband would love to hear those words!”
She didn’t laugh this time, harmony off-key.
She was certainly afraid of hurting me. That was typical too. Beneath her rage was a paralyzing tenderness, so sweet as to break your heart with pleasure if you were fortunate enough to be its target.
All I had to say was, “Let’s postpone it for a while. Give ourselves time to mature and understand a little bit more about life.”
How much time? Twenty years maybe?
“More time,” would have been the perfect answer. We would go back to the house on East Avenue in Oak Park and tell my family that we had made a sensible, rational, adult decision.
The only problem was lust. Or desire. Or maybe love. Maybe. At twenty-two, do you know the difference?
She had used the magic word—“want.” Did I want her? When had I not wanted her? Even when we both were too young to know what wanting another human being meant I had wanted her, though I did my best to pretend that she was just an obnoxious pest, which she often was. I hadn’t known in those days what wanting was, save that it was a need to possess. Now I would add “the need to be possessed,” as an elderly Jesuit had put it at a dinner party up in Lake Forest. That night in the passionless ivory shadow of the new St. Ursula’s, I wanted desperately to possess this woman for whom I had yearned so long. I was uneasy about the need to perform in the marriage bed the following night, but I wanted with more hunger than I had ever known to make that lovely body my own.
Love?
Did that enter into the calculation at all?
Maybe it did. In the frigid wind that attacked the gothic pile of St. Ursula’s and then bounced back to hit us a second time, fear dominated the equation.
I was a careful and circumspect young man, a prudent accountant in the making. My prospective bride was perhaps correct. Beautiful young woman that she was, she could easily ruin my life. That was the long run. In the short run she would be a luscious bedmate.
No insurance for long-run failure? Was I going long, as they said at the Board of Trade, in what might be a buyer’s market?
There was not the slightest doubt what a careful investor ought to do.