Rosemarie offered me an escape hatch from marriage.
I desired her. I admired her. I wanted her, I guess. She still drank too much and had a crazy father. And she was only nineteen. I had lots of second thoughts—and third and fourth and fifth thoughts too. But I went along with the drift, driven by a mix of lust and inertia.
Maybe a little bit of love too.
She opened the hatch the same week we attended the funeral Masses for Christopher Kurtz and Leo Kelly.
The phone had rung at our house on Thanksgiving afternoon. As always I was the only one to hear it. It was Mrs. Kurtz.
“Charles, I knew you would want to hear the news.” Her voice was calm, controlled, but I knew the news before she spoke it. “We just heard from the Defense Department. Christopher was killed during the retreat from the Chosun reservoir.”
“Dead?” I said in disbelief. “He can’t be!”
“I feel that way too, Charles. But I’m afraid it’s true. The memorial Mass will be at St. Gertrude’s next Monday.”
“I’ll be there. We’ll pray for you and the family, Mrs. Kurtz.”
“Thank you, Charles, I’m sure we’ll need those prayers.”
So simple. So quick. So devastating. I would never have a friend like him again.
He had been promoted to captain in the field, I would learn later, and had died covering the retreat of his outfit in the face of the Chinese attack that Douglas MacArthur had foolishly brought on.
They awarded him the Navy Cross. That did not bring him back for any of us.
Even today I miss him. Even today I feel the numb shock of his loss. We will not see his like again.
At least I won’t.
Sometimes at night even now, I wake up from a dream in which he is still alive and we are both laughing together as we did in the spring of 1949.
And, in truth, even today I feel that he is not absent from my life.
I must have looked like a zombie when I returned to the dining room.
“Chuck!” Rosemarie screamed. “What’s wrong?”
“Christopher is dead,” I slumped into my chair and spoke automatically. “Killed in action at the reservoir. The funeral is Monday at St. Gertrude’s.”
Rosemarie sobbed in my arms. “I loved him almost as much as you did,” she cried.
“He loved you too, Rosemarie.”
“He’ll watch over our marriage, won’t he?”
Tears in my eyes, I could only nod. He’d have his work cut out for him.
“Maybe we should stop the Thanksgiving dinner,” Dad said tentatively.
“Christopher would be the last to want that,” I said.
“We should be grateful”—Rosemarie’s voice was muffled by my chest—“that we had him with us as long as we did.”
There were few dry eyes in the crowded church on Monday morning. Christopher had more close friends than any of us had realized. He was a magic young man.
He should have been a priest, I thought again. And that way he’d still be alive.
Cordelia had flown in from Paris for the Mass and stood next to Rosemarie in St. Gertrude’s church. My friends from Notre Dame were all there, sad over the death of someone they all had liked and worried about their own fates.
When the final prayers were over we walked slowly back to our cars.
“How is Paris?” Rosemarie asked Cordelia.
“All I could have hoped for. I work very hard and I’m still trying to get used to living in a strange country, but I’m doing quite well. … You’ve settled on a Christmas wedding?”
“I think we have. … Rosemarie?”
“You know very well, Charles Cronin O’Malley, that it will be the Saturday after Christmas!”
“That’s right! Why do I keep forgetting?”
We needed to laugh. But we were unable to do so.
“Congratulations to both of you,” Cordelia said. “I know you’ll both be very happy.”
“I’m sure Christopher will take care of us,” Rosemarie said fervently.
Before we separated, I probed Cordelia about her concert career.
“I’m working with Madame Boulanger. She’s very nice but very demanding. Today makes it all seem a little absurd. None of us have much time, do we?”
“We all live under death sentences,” Rosemarie agreed grimly.
“What do you think?” I asked my bride-to-be.
“I think she’s having a very hard time.”
“You were sweet to her.”
“I can be sweet on occasion, Chucky Ducky.”
We were hardly in the house on East Avenue when the phone rang.
“It’s for you, Chuck!”
Jane Devlin.
“I heard today, Chuck, that Leo was killed in Korea. His family didn’t bother to tell me. Mass at St. Ursula’s tomorrow.”
“Dear God, Jane!”
“I’ll be all right, Chuck. I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me.”
Her hollow voice made me worry all the more.
“They’re giving him the Medal of Honor.”
Mild, soft-spoken, serious Leo Kelly a war hero!
“That’s nice,” I said lamely.
“It doesn’t bring him back. I would never have had him anyway.”
“Why not?”
“There was a terrible accident at the lake last Memorial Day. Four of us in a car ran into a tree. Leo was nearby. He pulled me out and tried to save the others. He burned his hands trying to open the door. Then the car blew up. The parents of the dead kids looked for someone to blame. The sheriff arrested Leo and beat him. Then Jerry Keenan—you know, Packy Keenan’s father—made them stop because Leo was not responsible. He went off the next day for the Marines”—she gasped to overcome a sob—“and he never called me after that.”
I mumbled something. What could I say?
“Thank you, Chuck, he admired you very much.”
“Leo?” Rosemarie said as I joined the others.
“Another funeral tomorrow … at St. Ursula’s.” Everyone in the room wept. Poor Peg sobbed hysterically. Rosemarie and the good April hugged her.
I wanted to swear.
I muttered only to myself, “Goddamn war!”
We all went to the Mass the next morning, the womenfolk in black. The mourners filled every pew in St. Ursula’s most of them weeping. Monsignor Mugsy struggled to contain his tears. John Raven preached. I’m sure he was wonderful, but I don’t think I heard a word of it.
Leo Kelly would never have thought that he had meant so much to so many people.
After Mass, Rosemarie and I tried to find Jane.
“I wonder if she came.”
“I don’t think so, Rosemarie. She sounded so hollow yesterday.”
“Hollow?”
“Someone deprived even of the right to grieve.”
“How terrible. … If you don’t mind, I’ll spend the rest of the day with Peggy.”
“Good idea.”
On the Thursday following Thanksgiving, the last week of our semester at Chicago, she cornered me after my late afternoon class.
“Come to my apartment for supper?” Her expression was somber and grim, her color the same as the gray of her jersey dress. “I have something to discuss with you.”
“Sure.” I felt my stomach do a tentative half turn. “Anything serious?”
“Probably. You’ll have to decide that for yourself.”
Sounded like Clancy was about to lower a boom.
I went to the library to study for an hour, accomplished nothing, and then walked in the chill rain to her apartment.
The last time she had summoned me to such a conversation, the subject was her demand that I quit my job or at least take a leave of absence till March. “If you’re studying full-time and working full-time, what time will you have for your bride? I’m working every day to fix the house and all you’ll do is sleep in it. I won’t tolerate that.”
I acquiesced, not really having any choice. She was not certain yet about her own academic future. She would ride out to the University with me every day for the winter quarter after our honeymoon. It didn’t make much difference to her whether she would finish the five remaining quarters for her degree. “It’s important for me to learn,” she contended. “And I intend to do that for the rest of my life. Degrees don’t make any difference.”
Not if you had as much money as she did—and as strong a dedication to reading. She had lost most of the weight she had put on during the spring and the summer.
“Too much on my mind to worry about eating,” she said, waving her hand dismissively.
She often didn’t show up for class during the autumn quarter because she was busy supervising the remodeling of our honeymoon house and trying to calm Peg.
“I’ll pass the exams anyway.” She waved off my concerns. “I’m learning more from redoing the house.” She returned to the interior design book she had been studying.
I looked around at the still empty living room of the old place. “It’s an awfully big house.”
“We’ll fill it up.”
I didn’t want to argue that point. I had already moved my photographic records into a spectacularly appointed darkroom Rosemarie had prepared in the basement of the house. I was sure, however, that she didn’t mean with photographs.
Peg was smiling gamely, even though she was worried sick about Vince. Like most of my classmates from Fenwick, he had been drafted for the Korean War. He hoped to get the weekend off for our wedding. If it looked like he was going to be sent overseas, he and Peg would be married before his departure, even if it meant moving the wedding up from its early June schedule.
Although MacArthur had squandered his victory at Inchon by invading North Korea, American leadership (including President Truman) was loath to bring the general to heel. The Chinese had entered the war, as they had promised they would if we pressed on to their borders at the Yalu River; and, despite his anguished pleas to start a war with China, MacArthur was forced to fall back to the “waist” of Korea. Only brilliant field leadership, particularly by General Almond of the X Corps, prevented the American retreat (“advance to the rear,” the Marines called it) from becoming a debacle. It looked like a long war.
The war had ended the five years of peace and prosperity after the end of the big war. My generation was devastated by the wholesale draft when we least expected it You cannot expect the same generation to fight two wars.
I did not think that I was in much danger. I would be called up only if there was general mobilization. Even with the defeat at the Yalu River, I doubted that there would be a general mobilization.
As I approached Rosemarie’s apartment on Kenwood that day in December in the cold rain, which was beginning to turn to snow, I devoutly thanked God that I had done my time in the military. Nothing could be quite as bad as the situation in which poor Vince found himself.
I took Rosemarie in my arms when she opened the door, intending … intending what, I don’t quite know.
“Please.” She squirmed away. “Later, if at all.”
Was she going to beg out of the marriage? My spirits soared. I really wanted out.
Then I felt depressed. Part of me, the demonic part, I suppose, didn’t want out at all.
She was beautiful and fragile and needed my help and my protection. If I was strong enough and resourceful enough and courageous enough, I could save her. I would save her.
I was mostly self-deceptive, not facing the truth that most of the time I was either a coward or a fool, especially with women.
I had to think, I had to take out my idea notebook and write down my master plan. My instincts, particularly when dealing with women, were almost nonexistent. To the extent that they did exist, they were untrustworthy.
That’s too harsh.
“We’ll work it out, Rosemarie,” I said, trying to sound reassuring.
“Will we?” she fired back at me. “Typical of your naïve Lockean optimism.”
Not bad for a put-down, huh?
I mean, how many of you can say you’ve been written off by your bride as a naïve Lockean optimist.
“I’m sorry,” I said, intimidated as always by her temper.
“Later,” she repeated. “After supper.”
She had been decorating a small Christmas tree in the corner of her front room. “Why decorate a tree when you’re not going to be here for Christmas?” I asked.
“Because I like to decorate trees.”
We had decided to keep the apartment in Hyde Park for the winter quarter anyway. Well, Rosemarie had decided.
“We might not want to take the long ride back to Euclid Avenue every night,” she announced on the day she informed me that we were going to keep the apartment, “especially if it’s snowing. And we might want it for other purposes.”
“We might. A man gets breakfast in bed in this place, as I remember.”
“Depends on what else happens in bed.”
I figured that perhaps this pre-Christmas command performance would be about our future sex life.
We ate ravioli and meatballs and talked about school and about my still-uncertain plan to continue graduate school.
“All right,” I said as I helped her to clear the table. “What’s up?”
“In the front room,” she said, “with our coffee.”
So I sat on her beige couch, Irish Belleek cup in front of me on the coffee table, next to a book about Vermeer.
“So?”
“So—” she stirred her coffee vigorously—“I think you ought not to marry me.”
“Why not?” I tried to keep my voice steady, neutral.
“I’m damaged goods, Chuck.” She was icy calm. There would be no tears tonight.
“Damaged goods?”
“You assume I’m a virgin, don’t you?”
“Not necessarily—” I began.
“Well, I’m not, I’ve had intercourse, oh, I suppose at least eight or nine times.”
“With different men?” Dear God, I didn’t want to sound like a prosecuting attorney.
“No. One man.”
“Who?”
“My father.”
“I’ll kill the bastard! I’ll cut off his balls and stuff them down his throat!” I ranted, clenching my fists and pacing the floor.
Big deal, huh? But what else do you say? Anyway, at the time I meant it. Or thought I did.
“No, you won’t,” she said sadly. “The question is whether you want to cancel the marriage.”
I stopped pacing long enough to look out the front window and watch the snowflakes melt on the pavement of Kenwood Avenue. Why were there always snowdstorms?
“Of course not.” The words rushed from my lips before I had a chance to think about them. Words didn’t matter anyway. Now there was no chance at all to escape the marriage.
“Are you sure, Chuck? It would be much better for you—”
“I’ll judge what will be better for me.”
She did not respond. I turned away from the window. She was sitting quietly on the couch, head bowed, arms folded across her chest, a prisoner waiting for sentence. My anger, still free-floating, unfocused, surged to escape. I shut it down. Mostly.
“Do you want to cancel it?”
“No, Chuck.” Her eyes flickered at me and then away. “Dear God, no.”
“Well then, shall we dismiss that alternative?”
“If you say so.”
“Why did you wait so long to tell me?”
“I was afraid.”
“Of what?” Why was I sounding like a district attorney? I was no virgin either. But that was different. …
“I don’t know. Of you. Of everything. You’re the only one I’ve told. And Father Raven. Last week. In Confession. He probably had no trouble figuring out who I was.”
“What did he say?” I slumped into the easy chair.
“He said that I didn’t commit any sins and that I shouldn’t worry about the bad confessions I thought I’d made when I didn’t confess… what happened.”
“Certainly, you didn’t sin,” I barked at her. “What else did John say?”
I wasn’t coping very well with her shattering announcement. In my defense I plead that I was twenty-two and it was 1950. Paternal abuse of girls and women was a crime of which we were unaware. Or that we tried to pretend was impossible. Even Freud had not believed his patients. Or had not wanted to believe them. Now it is a recognized “problem.” One woman out of every twenty is a victim of assault by a father or stepfather, though not all of them are assaulted as often or as destructively as Rosemarie.
“He said I was an innocent victim and that I needed sympathy and help, not punishment. I don’t know whether that’s true. I asked him whether I should tell my fiancé. He said that it was up to me, but I didn’t have to. And I said I felt obliged to because it would explain why I am crazy some of the time. And he asked what you would say.”
“And you told him what?” I snarled.
“I said I wasn’t sure.”
“Why weren’t you sure?” I shouted.
“I don’t know, Chuck. I just wasn’t.”
I took a deep breath. And then another.
“I may not be saying the right things, Rosemarie.” I lowered my voice several octaves. “Forgive me if I sound harsh. I don’t mean to. I want to be sympathetic and helpful.”
“Oh, Chuck—” her voice caught.
“Why don’t you tell me whatever you want to tell me.
“You’re so wonderful.” She still wouldn’t look at me.
“I doubt it.”
For some reason we both laughed.
“All right, I’ll try to repeat what I told Father Raven.” She paused, gathering her resources. “I can’t remember a time when Daddy wasn’t very affectionate with me. I think way back when I was little I enjoyed it. Then, in seventh grade maybe, what he did didn’t seem quite right. Too… too intimate. I suppose it gradually crossed the line without either of us realizing that he was going too far. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to stay away from him. Mom didn’t seem to notice or to want to notice.”
She stopped. Then her head slowly came up. “Oh, Chucky…”
“Do I look like I’m judging you? I don’t mean to.”
“No, not at all. Just the opposite. You look so kind.” I didn’t feel kind. “Should I go on?”
“It’s up to you.”
“I guess I have to. I mean, what bothers me is that I did love him and I did enjoy his affection and I liked to make him happy. At first… I don’t know… I might have encouraged him without thinking that it was wrong. Or maybe without knowing how wrong it was.”
“John Raven told you that you can’t do serious wrong without knowing fully what you’re doing?”
She smiled wanly. “Sure. He said that I should stop tormenting myself by worrying about the degree of my responsibility. He said that I was innocent. And I asked whether that meant mostly innocent or completely innocent.”
“And he said that no one is completely innocent?”
“You’re wonderful, Chucky. You really are. I’m so ashamed of myself for not trusting you before.”
“You’re innocent of that too, mostly innocent anyway. Maybe you’d better tell me whatever you think you should tell me and take yourself off the stove.”
“All right. I’ll try to be as brief as I can.” She choked back a sob and continued. “In fifth, sixth grade he was definitely, well, petting me. A lot. He was so pathetic, so hangdog, I felt sorry for him. I didn’t like what he was doing but I wanted to make him happy. You can’t imagine what a weak, despondent little man he is. Then in seventh grade… well, I suppose you could say he began to rape me. I didn’t understand what was happening, not very often. I didn’t know anything about sex. I didn’t even know that what we were doing was sex. I was frightened and there was no one to talk to. I still felt sorry for him and wanted to make him happy. But”—her tone turned to a fervent plea—“I never took pleasure in it, Chuck. Never. I mean there was never any…” She paused, flustered.
“Orgasm is the clinical word, Rosemarie.”
“Thanks. It was never like that, never.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t You don’t think I would hold it against you if it were, do you?” An impulse, way down in a hidden basement of my soul, urged me to put my arm around her thin, dejected shoulders. I couldn’t embrace her, not yet. She seemed spoiled, spoiled for the rest of her life. I was bound to her now by ties that could never be ended, chains that could never be broken.
“I know that. I guess I’m saying what I have to say.” She paused for me to respond and then went on. “Anyway … it went on for three years, not very often, as I said, but still too often. Finally, when I was a freshman and had figured out what was happening, I made him stop. It almost broke his poor heart. He said he thought we were going to be good friends forever—”
“My God!”
“I know. It was crazy, but somehow he thought… I don’t know what he thought. Anyway, he tried again, often, but I managed to stop him with a feel or a hug or a kiss. It was so … I don’t know, so cheap and slimy. Remember that time when you saved my life at Geneva and then kissed me in front of the fireplace?”
“I’m not likely ever to forget it”—I found myself grinning—“Rosemarie, not ever.”
She blushed at the memory, the happy memory. “I knew that was the way it should be when a man and woman love one another and that what had happened between Daddy and me must never happen again. So you really saved me twice that day.”
“I’m glad I did.”
Savior, hero, knight, fool, clown, comedian.
“So I fended him off, more or less, till I was a junior. Then when Mom died he became determined again. I told him that either he left the house or I would. He said that he wouldn’t permit me ever to be separated from him. I said that if he touched me again I would kill him. I can be very angry when I want. Never at you.” She smiled shyly. “He believed me. I think I might have killed him too. I mean, I heard him talking to his friends one night about professional killers. I thought I had the right to defend myself.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“I guess that’s all.”
“How did you manage to live with it, Rosemarie? How did you… keep it all inside yourself?”
“I pretended, Chuck. I’m very good at pretending. I walled it up in a corner of my life. After it stopped I told myself that it had not really happened. I tried to forget about it. It was over. I had stopped it. My confessions were not really sacrilegious. God still loved me.”
“And John Raven agreed.”
“I had to tell you. Are you displeased that I did?”
I considered that question carefully. I wished she had kept her dirty secret to herself. Now it was my burden as well as hers. At least I knew what it was that I was carrying.
“I’m glad you trusted me enough to tell me.”
She rose from her couch, walked across the room, curled up at my feet, and wrapped her arms around my knees. “What are you feeling now, Chuck?”
“Anger.”
“At me?”
“Certainly not. At him.”
The sick little bastard had destroyed the life of a beautiful woman.
“Don’t be. If you only knew how sad and miserable he is. … Any other feelings?”
“Pain.”
“I’m sure it hurts you.”
“Not my pain,” I said roughly, still trying to focus and understand my emotions.
“Whose, then?”
My hand found her long, smooth black hair. “Yours. Hurt. Fear. Shame. Humiliation. I wish I could make it all go away.”
“Thank you, Chuck.” Finally she was able to weep. “You’ve healed a lot of it already.” She pressed my hand to her lips and kissed my fingers.
Charles Cronin O’Malley as substitute for Jesus.
Bottom-of-the-barrel substitute. Forth-string substitute on a team with only three strings.
I bent over and kissed her smooth, cool forehead. She smelled of evergreen. The tree in the corner of her tiny living room glowed hopefully.
“I absolutely refuse to let this interfere with your happiness, Chuck… if you still want me?”
“Let me be as clear as I can.” I tried to make my tenor voice sound firm and resolute. “I do still want you and that is that.”
“Then I will be a good wife and a good mother and a good bride.” Her lips tightened and her shoulders squared. “I won’t let the past interfere with the present or the future. Definitely. Nothing that has happened will prevent me from being a good… lover. Nothing.”
If raw willpower could make it so, then it would be so.
“You shouldn’t feel that you have to try too hard.” I touched her cheek. “Anyway”—a brilliant idea hit, brilliant for me that is—“no one who has any sense of how passionate a person you are Rosemarie, could doubt that eventually you’ll be a wonderful lover. Give yourself time. You don’t have to be instantly perfect”—another smashing notion—“because I know I won’t be.”
“If”—she sighed sadly—“you’ll just be a little patient with me.”
“Certainly not”—I was on a roll—“unless you promise that you’ll be more than a little patient with me.”
She smiled through her tears. “Fair enough.”
That was the extent of our premarital conversation about marital sex.
“Okay?” My fingers remained on her cheek. My emotions were still a tangled mess, more fury than anything else.
“What are you thinking now, Chuck?”
“It’s kind of strange.”
“I won’t mind.”
“There was a time last winter when we had started to go to concerts and occasionally to the College Inn at the Sherman House…”
“When you started to dance with me…”
“In spite of myself. Anyway, just before that and a little after too, I thought we were good friends and nothing more. We studied together, we joked together, we had fun together. I told myself that I wanted you as a friend for the rest of my life. Being friends was so calm and uncomplicated.”
“And it would have worked fine if we didn’t both have bodies that got in the way.”
“How odd of God to have made us with bodies, huh? So, now don’t be hurt, what I’m thinking now is that I feel like something terrible has happened to a friend. Does that make any sense?”
“A lot of sense.” She squeezed my hand. “I love you, friend, I’ll always love you. Let’s be friends and lovers forever.”
Later that afternoon I found Jim Clancy in his office at the Board of Trade, his tie askew, his face unshaven, a glass of whiskey in his hand.
I yanked him out of his chair by the tie and clamped my hands around his thick little neck.
“I know what you’ve been doing,” I whispered softly. “If you try it again, I’ll kill you. Stay away from her. Stay away from us. I don’t want to see you ever again. If you come to our wedding, you’re a dead man, understand?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he stammered, his face turning purple.
“Yes, you do.” I kept my voice deadly calm. “And don’t think I’ll kill you in such a way as to get caught. No one will know who did it.”
“I just want to be friends with you,” he begged. “Can’t we forget about the past and just be friends?”
Tears began to stream down the pathetic little man’s face.
“Try to be friends once”—I threw him back into his chair—“and you’re a corpse. Understand?”
He bent his head over the desk and sobbed.
I walked out of the office and closed the door gently behind me. I knew I had not seen the last of Jim Clancy.