“As I understand it, Mrs. O’Malley”—Lieutenant Arthur H. Rearden was three-quarters of a foot taller than me, lean as a street lamp, and had long unruly silver hair, excessive dandruff, and bad breath—“you inherit all your father’s money. Mr. Joseph O’Laughlin, who I believe is your father’s attorney, confirmed that to me.”
“You understand more than I do.” Rosemarie, demure and pale in a black suit, but dry-eyed, spoke calmly enough. She was dangerously close to an explosion.
So was I. Closer perhaps.
“You are not familiar with the provisions of his will?”
“My father and I have not been very close for the past several years.”
“Since”—he flipped his notebook with the hand not holding the cigarette—“since the public, uh, altercation at one of your husband’s exhibits.”
“Since my mother’s death, really.”
“I see.” He finished his cigarette and lighted another.
We were sitting in the office of Conroy’s Funeral Home at Lake and Austin. If you were not buried from those precincts, steeped in the smell of mums, you were not buried properly as a West Side Irishman.
“Is it not true”—he was standing at the door of the undertaker’s office—“that in that exhibition you were depicted in the nude?”
“No, it is not—”
“What’s the point of this, Detective Rearden? You sound more like a state’s attorney than a homicide detective.”
“I’m trying to establish motives for the crime,” he sneered, “MISTER O’Malley. Your wife has powerful motives. She inherits an enormous amount of money. She hated her father. You threatened him repeatedly, three times at least.” He flipped the pages of his notebook. “She also inherited money from her mother when her mother died. She claims not to have been in the house when her mother fell—or was pushed—down the stairs. The only witness who can establish her presence elsewhere is, marvelous to relate, your sister, Margaret O’Malley. Now Mrs. Vincent Antonelli. Married a wop, huh?”
“So?” I half-rose from my chair.
“Charles!” her voice cracked like a rifle shot. My temper simmered down. I sat back in the chair, my fists still clenched.
“So all you have to do is to prove that while we were in Los Angeles we wired my father-in-law’s Cadillac with TNT.”
“You could hire people to do that”—he shrugged—“and then go away because you thought it was an alibi.”
“So you need to find out whom we hired.”
“Which I intend to do.” As Art Rearden leaned forward, his bad breath almost choking me, Ed Murray and his father, Dan Murray, and his wife Cordelia appeared silently behind him. “All I know is that your wife’s parents are both dead and the two of you have inherited a lot of money. I intend to send you both to the electric chair. Your wife won’t look nearly so good after they’ve fried her.”
Rosemarie screamed, a little, plaintive cry of terror. I went after him. Ed stepped in between us. He was still substantially bigger than I was.
Cordelia embraced Rosemarie.
“We heard that,” said Dan Murray quietly. “And we aren’t about to forget it, Art. The Commissioner and the State’s Attorney won’t be at all pleased.”
Art Rearden turned on his heel and departed, trailing his various smells behind him.
“What was that all about?”
“A burglar killed his wife while he was on duty.” Dan Murray—a robust older version of his son—was frowning thoughtfully. “Accidental murder, she surprised the guy. Rearden has been a little nuts ever since. This time he’s gone too far. That was unprofessional and ugly. I think I will have a word with a few people. He should be regulating traffic over at Midway. Something like that.”
“Everyone in town knows,” Ed added, “that Jim Clancy was in bed with the mob the last few years. You hear on the street that some of our friends over on the West Side were upset with him because he was trying to pull something slick on them. Our friends don’t like that. Sorry, Rosie.”
“Ed, there was so much hate in that man’s eyes. He really does want to see me die.”
“Don’t worry, kid, they don’t have even the beginning of a case. The State’s Attorney’s office knows that. Art is acting on his own.”
We had flown home from L.A. on the first flight we could get, but it was still ten o’clock at night when we arrived at Midway. Vince and Peg met us, radiating the tenseness that so often seemed to accompany them.
Ed and Cordelia hovered behind them, their eyes on Rosemarie, horrified, I was sure, by her obvious pain.
Jim Clancy, they told us, had bounded out of his house, on the run, according to the woman who lived on the opposite corner of Menard and Thomas and who watched everything that happened in that street from sunup to sundown. He jumped into his brand-new car, parked in the driveway and not in the garage despite the bad weather, turned on the ignition, and disappeared in a burst of fire and smoke. The watching neighbor was taken to St. Anne’s Hospital for treatment of wounds to her face from the breaking glass of her windows.
There was enough of him left for an autopsy. The body would be released to Conroy’s the next day, after the autopsy. The papers had reported on Clancy’s recent relations with the mob. There was no mention of the art exhibit. The obituary referred to his long association with the Board of Trade.
“Will there be a big wake?” I asked Vince.
“Lots of people from the Board will come because of you and Rosemarie and there will be some curiosity seekers too. There’ll be cops hanging around to see about the Outfit, but the word is they won’t show. Don’t want anyone to infer a connection.”
“So I’ll have to stand there for two nights,” Rosemarie began.
“One night. April decided that promptly,” Peg cut her off. “She makes decisions for all of us that we don’t want to make ourselves. … How do you feel, Rose?”
“Numb. No feeling. You can’t miss what you’ve lost already. I felt sorry for him when he was alive. I gave up on trying to save him long ago. Still, he was my father.”
The numbness continued the next day, until the scene with Art Rearden. I couldn’t reach her. I could never reach that distant, frigid part of her soul where Rosemarie dwelt with the memories of her mother and father. Each time I thought about those memories—which wasn’t very often—I marveled that she could have matured into the usually self-possessed woman that she was. The astonishing thing was not that she drank too much occasionally, but that she didn’t drink all the time.
The wake was a strange one even for an Irish wake. The usual people showed up—politicians, distant women relatives who had not missed a wake in forty years, officers of parish societies, older priests who had once served at St. Ursula’s for whom wake attendance had become their only remaining priestly function, married couples who had known Jim and Clarice Clancy in their younger days at Twin Lakes, old-timers from the Board of Trade, nuns from the grammar school, our own friends and neighbors, including our C.F.M. group, and unidentified characters who may have wandered into the wrong wake.
The greeting was the same as at “ordinary” wakes: “Sorry for your trouble.” Monsignor Branigan’s bluff good cheer, as always, exorcised the specter of death for a few moments. “Those galoots of yours playing football yet, Rosie? We’ll be needing them at Notre Dame soon.”
It was all off-key. No one could observe, “My, doesn’t he look natural?” or “Didn’t Joe Conroy do a wonderful job?” because even the magic of the ancient funeral director could not assemble the scattered fragments of Jim Clancy’s body. The casket was closed, a phenomenon that didn’t seem right at an Irish wake, as fashionable as it had become for other groups.
Moreover, just as there was less sorrow at this wake for a man who had earned little in the way of mourning, there was also less of the crazy, archaic, cheerful hope that the Irish demand at their wakes. It was a quiet, gray-tinged ritual, a hesitant tribute and a very hesitant hope, at which my wife presided with a pale, tense graciousness.
Jim Clancy’s lawyer Joe O’Laughlin tottered in—a little old man with dirty white hair. “Sorry for your trouble, Rosemarie,” he said, sighing. “Sorry for your trouble.”
He was the only one with tears in his eyes.
He himself would be dead two months later, leaving Jim Clancy’s estate in a mess that took Ed Murray years to straighten out.
Only Father Raven, now transferred from St. Ursula’s, broke through the gloom.
“God loved him, Rose; no matter what happened God never stopped loving him.”
A tiny tear appeared at the corner of each of those marvelous dark eyes and slipped down her cheeks.
“Thank you, Father.”
The last visitor departed at nine-thirty, half an hour before wakes were supposed to end. Only Ed and Cordelia (she pregnant, and back looking very happy) and my family remained.
“It wasn’t much of a wake at all,” the old-timers would say. “But, ah, herself is a fine woman, now isn’t she?”
They might then add words of astonishment that Jim had fathered such an elegant daughter.
Ed Murray took Rosemarie and me aside as we were preparing to leave. “Did you know your father had terminal cancer, Rosemarie?”
Her eyes widened. “No, I had no idea…”
“They found it all over the organs on which they were able to perform an autopsy. His doctor told the coroner that he had diagnosed liver cancer three weeks ago. It had already metastasized. Your father would not have lasted more than a couple of months.”
“But why then would they kill him?”
“Those folks have their own code—if they knew, which maybe they didn’t.”
“I suppose,” she frowned, “they did him a favor.”
Later, when we were driving home from Conroy’s in Rosemarie’s gull-wing Mercedes 300 SL, with me at the wheel, she began to talk about her father.
“Losing his hair was the worst event in his life,” she said thoughtfully. “Mom always said that was the turning point. He had a big mop of curly black hair—a cute little boy with long eyelashes and pretty hair. Being short wasn’t bad as long as you were cute enough to be spoiled by everyone. When he lost his hair he stopped being cute.”
“Poor man.” We parked in the driveway. I’d let Rosemarie talk as long as she wanted. A February thaw was melting the snow piles and had turned the drive into a small lake.
“It was a bitter pill to swallow; one year he was a cute little trickster, the next year he was an ugly little practical joker. Somehow his greed for money, which didn’t offend anyone when he was cute, became terrible when he was ugly. He sensed that those who once admired him, or at least tolerated him, now despised him. So he began to overeat and became obese.”
“From an indulged, pretty child to a fat, ugly child?”
“That about says it, doesn’t it, Chuck? Losing his hair didn’t bother your father.”
“He wasn’t short and he sure wasn’t indulged. Anyway, people are different.”
“They sure are.” She sighed.
“I didn’t know about the practical jokes.”
“Mom told me that he had always been a prankster; his mother thought it quite amusing when they were courting. I have a picture somewhere—he was really an adorable little man with laughing eyes. He was always playing harmless little jokes on her. He gave her a dime-store ring before he gave her a real diamond—”
“Doesn’t sound very funny to me. Did he play tricks on you?”
“Oh sure, my dolls would disappear and then turn up in the attic or the coal bin. I’d laugh because he wanted me to laugh. If you didn’t laugh, he’d put you on his enemies list and not talk to you for days.”
“Enemies list?”
“He had a list of all the people who had ever offended him and his plans to get even. The last time I saw it was up at Lake Geneva. He kept it in an open safe on the wall behind the big painting of Mom, you remember, in the room—”
“Where you tried to seduce me for the first time.” We both laughed.
“I remember”—the smile vanished quickly from her weary face—“one Christmas I pleaded with him for a horse. I was about ten or eleven, the age when little girls want horses—substitute for a man under you, I suppose. I did a lot of riding that spring out in the Forest Preserve and then later on at the lake. Do you remember? Peg came sometimes.”
I nodded, though I did not remember.
“He promised that he would bring me one on Christmas day. So he gave me a little box, fancy one, with a toy horse wrapped up in red tissue paper. He thought it was a wonderful joke and became very angry when I cried instead of laughed. … I lost interest in riding after that.”
“How did you survive, Rosemarie? And survive to become the wonderful woman you are?”
“You’re sweet, Chuck.” She touched my hand, still on the steering wheel, affectionately. “Sometimes I don’t think I survived at all.”
“But you did.” I captured her hand and held it tightly.
“Well, if I did, the reason was your family, mostly. I don’t suppose that as a little girl I thought about it that way, but I knew I had to be with the O’Malleys. That’s why I was such a nuisance.”
I put my arms around her and kissed her as passionately as I could while still being very gentle. “Pesky little brat that I wanted to strangle. Or kiss till the end of time.”
“I think I wanted to kiss you the second time I saw you. Even though I hated you because you were a crude, ill-tempered BOY!”
“And I wanted to take your clothes off ever since I was twelve.”
“Dirty-minded little boy.” She kissed me. “I think I would have let you do anything you wanted—anything you could work up enough nerve to want.”
We laughed again.
“You go in the house, I’ll put the car away.”
“Thanks for listening. Sorry I ruined the weekend.”
I parked the car and went up to our bedroom. Rosemarie, in a black slip (tolerated only at times of mourning), was listlessly combing her long hair.
Knowing that she wanted to talk more, I sat on the edge of the bed and waited.
“I’ve never lied to you, husband mine, have I?”
“Lord, no, Rosemarie. If anything, I’ve thought, you may be too honest.” (Although sometimes, when you have that far away look in your eye or when you wake up at night crying as you did on our honeymoon, I wonder if there is yet another secret.)
“Then believe”—she placed the brush on her vanity table—“please believe that what I will now tell you is the truth.”
A sharp knife of fear jabbed into my gut. What now?
“Of course.”
“That terrible policeman knows something. Or thinks he knows something. Or has a hint of something. You see”—her breasts rose and fell in a quick spasm of breath—“Peg and I were in the house the day mother died… I mean before she died… and”—her voice caught—“when she died.”
“What?”
“You were in Germany and there was never any reason to tell you when you came home. We were two frightened, silly little girls.” She played lifelessly with her brush. “We hadn’t done anything wrong, but we were terrified, especially by the police.”
“Tell me what happened.” My heart thumped irregularly. I too was terrified.
“Mom and I had been fighting, we usually did when she was drunk, which was almost all the time when I was in high school. She would hit me and I’d run away screaming.”
“Hit you with what?”
“Oh, a hairbrush”—she lifted her own and began to brush her hair again—“or a broom or something like that. She was such a quiet, sweet, sad lady when she was sober. She’d hug me and cry and laugh. And I’d hug her back. I loved her when she was that way, I really did. And when she wasn’t drunk she didn’t remember what she did to me. And I didn’t have the heart to tell her.”
“Peg knew?”
“Sure Peg knew. What doesn’t she know? She’s as bad as April for knowing everything. Anyway, she saw the black-and-blue marks.”
“Black-and-blue marks?”
“When Mom would beat me. Sometimes I’d let her do it. I thought maybe I was wicked and deserved to be punished and… and I didn’t want to hurt her. You know what kind of a temper I had in those days.”
“Poor kid.”
“I don’t know. I survived, I guess. Anyway, that day she threw a mirror at me. It hit me, not very hard. I didn’t feel like taking the punishment this time. I picked it up and threw it back. I missed like I intended to do. One of the maids saw us. I’m sure she told Dad and maybe he told the police. Anyway, I ran out of the house screaming and down to your house. I didn’t mean to tell Peg, but she guessed.”
“I’m sure she would—”
“So later she walked back with me. I begged her to come in. Mom would never do anything when there were neighbor kids in the house. So we went in the door. Mom was at the head of the basement stairs and saw me, she began to shout and kind of staggered toward me. I huddled against the door. She hit me with a hairbrush she had been carrying. Peg pulled it out of her hand. Mom ran back to the coat stand and grabbed an umbrella. She rushed toward the two of us—we were both too scared to move—and tripped on her robe just as she passed the door leading to the basement. She fell down the stairs. Peg and I screamed. We ran out of the house and back down Menard to your apartment. Your mom was playing the harp, so she never noticed that we’d left. We crept back to the house later and down the basement stairs. Peg picked up the umbrella and put it back on the coat stand. Then we called Doctor Vaughan. We were pretty clever little plotters, but you of all people know that, don’t you?”
“Contented victim… Did you know your mother was dead when you ran away the second time?”
“I think I did.” She put down the brush again. “We looked down the stairs and saw that she was awfully still. I was afraid she was dead. I dream at nights sometimes that if we had called the doctor right away she would have lived. I know that’s probably not true. Still, I feel guilty, sometimes terribly guilty.”
“You shouldn’t feel that way.”
She seemed not to hear me. “Peg and I promised each other we’d never tell anyone what had happened. The police were a little suspicious, but all the neighbors knew that Mom was drunk most of the time, and there was no sign of violence. I think they talked to your mother on the phone to make sure. We were terribly scared for a few days, you know how kids that age are—quick and shallow terrors, and then we forgot about it. I was sorry about Mom, she was a sweet and pretty lady, but so unhappy. We were never very good friends. She knew what Dad was doing to me, but she pretended she didn’t. So I guess I hated her. … Sometimes.”
I pondered with as much dispassion as my pounding heart and churning stomach would permit. Was this the whole truth?
“The reason you didn’t tell me this before?” I asked as gently as I could.
Rosemarie was not offended. “I didn’t even think of it, Chuck. The … the other was so much worse. And in my head I knew that I hadn’t done anything wrong. I mean, I often wished poor Mom was dead, and I still feel guilty, sometimes I even think I actually pushed her. But Peg insists that I never touched her. I was hysterical, so it’s hard for me to remember. I know, when I’m being sensible, that it was just a terrible accident and that I didn’t cause it.”
It seemed a reasonable explanation, but part of me resisted it. However, Art Rearden was the immediate problem.
“So Rearden read the records of the cops who investigated your mother’s death, and he bluffed. He doesn’t know anything more and you didn’t confirm any of his hunches. I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.”
“You do believe me?”
“Certainly I believe you.”
I did, about ninety-five percent. And in the other five percent I said to myself that if she had shoved back, she was acting in self-defense.
“Sometimes I dream that I pushed her down the stairs.” She repeated her plea: “But I didn’t. I know I didn’t Peg was there.”
Good old solid, tough-minded Peg, the one member of the family who had what I wanted and lacked—stability of character.
“It’s all over, Rosemarie. Don’t worry about it.”
There was, however, a tiny doubt in the back of my head, despite my best efforts to banish it.
“Thank you for believing me.” She stood up and pulled the slip over her head. “Would you please make love to me, Chuck, slowly and gently, so I can forget it all for a while?”
“I was hoping you would ask.”
Later, when Rosemarie, cuddled in my arms, was sleeping peacefully, I lay wide awake pondering what I was beginning to see—and not liking it at all.
I had begun to realize that the reason I could earn money and please patrons and critics with my photographs was that I saw things the way other people don’t see them—the essence of the artistic gift, I suppose. When I recorded the instant of glee on a trader’s face when he has made a sale, I did so because I saw the transient gleam in his eyes and the triumphant curve of his lips not as part of a continuous passing parade of emotions but as a moment of exploding illumination—a skyrocket on the Fourth of July. Or when I captured Rosemarie standing on her head, with a crazy smile on her face and her delectable body offered as an overwhelming gift, I saw not a brief segment of a nutty cartwheel, I saw in a dazzling burst of light a woman’s soul transparent in her body.
At first I thought that everyone experienced these brief instants of—what should I call it?—physical luminescence. Then I realized that not everyone did, not even every artist or photographer. It didn’t seem fair that such insight, which was a given for me, should be a will-o’-the-wisp for others. Fair or not, I had it.
Then I understood why I was able to plan the Wulfe’s escape, make love properly to Rosemarie on the day after the wedding by the ice dunes, and say the magic words to her at the end of our honeymoon, words that I had not even heard in my own brain till I spoke them. I SAW the world occasionally in bites of illumination—I can think of no other words to describe the experience—not unlike I saw my subject through the lens. No, the luminescence of the lens was merely one form of the gift, frequently unwanted, of sight.
The lights would suddenly turn up and I would see everything on the stage, not only the present act, but those before it and those yet to come.
In bed that night I SAW on the brightly lighted stage something I very much did not want to see. I also saw, in vague outline, what I must do about it.
John Raven’s sermon at the funeral mass the next morning was brilliant, a message of hope in the middle of the night, of God’s implacable love surviving even on the edge of the swamp of despair.
There were only a handful of mourners in the church to appreciate the sermon. Most of our friends felt that they had discharged their obligations to ambiguous sympathy by coming to the wake.
I listened to John out of one ear, as my mother would have said, and with the other ear listened to the rushing voices inside my head. It was one of the wildest ideas I had ever considered. Unfortunately the pieces all fit too neatly into place, pieces of an elaborate and cruel practical joke. The memory of my sickness on his sailboat was as vivid in my mind as the day it happened.
I was one step ahead of Art Rearden because I was an artist and I saw the joke in its entirety. He saw only some of the parts.
Rearden was at the graveside in Mount Carmel Cemetery, hatless and huddled against the strong winter winds sweeping down from the northwest and turning the melted snow back into ice.
“Has he searched the house at Menard and Thomas?” I asked Ed Murray as we carried the casket toward the grave site.
“Sure. The morning of the explosion.”
“Find anything?”
“We would have heard about it if he did.”
“The house at Geneva?”
Ed looked at me and scowled. “That’s not in his jurisdiction. He’d have to persuade the FBI to get a federal warrant or ask the Wisconsin State Police, I suppose, to cooperate. Why?”
“He scares me, that’s all.”
Would a man like Art Rearden hesitate to break a law himself to find evidence? Especially if he knew where to look for it?
I doubted it. The courts might be hesitant to accept illegally obtained evidence (they were less hesitant in those days than they are now), but I didn’t want it to go that far.
It was becoming quite clear what I had to do. The logistics of my effort were still obscure.
I was, mind you, still a very young man. When my sons were twenty-seven, I thought, not without some reason, that they were mere children. Yet, to be more honest than I ever was with them on the subject, they were a good deal more mature than I was at that age. My actions in the next few hours were wildly impulsive. There were, there must have been, better ways to do what I saw had to be done. But, as with the escape to Stuttgart, I could see only one way.
If it didn’t snow, I calculated, I would need six or seven hours to carry out my plan. It could be done, if I could figure out a way to keep my emotionally paralyzed wife asleep till eight or nine o’clock the next morning.
And to get out of the house without being observed by anyone watching from the outside.
I needed co-conspirators.
As we left the graveside after Father Raven’s final prayers, Art Rearden sidled up to us.
“You folks are really rich now, aren’t you?”
“Please go away, Mr. Rearden,” Rosemarie begged. “We don’t need the money.”
“Some people never have enough.”
“Get out of here.” I stepped forward to push him away.
“Don’t hit a police officer, Mr. O’Malley; it’s disorderly conduct.”
“You want to get busted, Art?” Ed Murray stepped between us again. “You’re in hot water already.”
“Not as hot as your clients.” The cop slipped away, having delivered the message he came to leave.
Dan Murray joined us. “He was hoping the press would be here.”
“Why aren’t they?” I looked around for the first time. Like the funeral mass, the burial was private. The papers had left us alone, except for one photographer.
“Jim Clancy is not a very interesting subject anymore. A headline in the evening papers, some speculation in the early editions of the morning papers, a clip of a blown-up car on the evening news—that’s about all his death merits, maybe one more picture in the back pages of the late editions tonight. Rearden has forgotten how the game is played. The guy is really slipping.”
Probably counting on a big recovery, I thought.
I cornered Ted McCormack and asked for a prescription that would help Rosemarie get a good night’s sleep.
“Pretty strong stuff?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t leave it lying around the house.” He wrote out some illegible words on his prescription pad. “This medication can be kind of dangerous.”
“I’ll throw it out by the end of the week.” I took the piece of paper, shivering. “Getting cold again, huh?”
Ted looked up at the sky. “We’re supposed to have snow before tomorrow morning.”
Just what I needed.
We ate the obligatory lunch at Butterfield. I asked Vince for the loan of his Fairlane that night. “I’ll explain someday what’s up. Just trust me.”
“Sure,” he said.
“I’ll call you tomorrow morning when it’s all right to pick it up.”
Back home, I went to the darkroom.
Rosemarie went to the kids. “I’ll have to explain to them why they’re not going to see anymore a grandfather that they haven’t seen anyway. I’ll join you later in the darkroom.”
“Not necessary.”
“I don’t want you drooling over those Hollywood broads.”
She did work with me for a while, establishing once again that with chemicals, as with almost everything else, she was more skillful than I was.
Mrs. Anderson, our efficient housekeeper, put the kids to bed. We ate a cold supper, mostly in silence, went up to the bedrooms to kiss the kids good night, and returned to the chemicals.
“I want to work till I’m exhausted, so I’ll fall right to sleep,” Rosemarie said as I closed the darkroom door. “With dreams of the pretty broads filling my head.”
“You know as well as I do”—I pointed at the Rollei-flex transparencies of her—“who was the prettiest broad in the shoot.”
She picked up the magnifying glass. “I always have a hard time linking her”—she gestured with a touch of contempt at the transparencies—“with me.” She pointed the glass at herself. “Two different women.”
“One broad.” I patted her backside affectionately.
“I know that.” She giggled. “It’s just hard to comprehend it. Know what I mean?”
“Sure. It’s the other way with most people. They don’t like their portraits because they think they are better looking than the picture.”
“I’m a confused young woman.” She giggled again, but picked up one of the transparencies.
“Note the long black hair on the alabaster shoulders,” I recited as from a text, “which contrasts with the sapphire blue garment—”
“Ugh. Tight little thing.”
“Does the job. Not that, in the case of this model, a job is needed. She is a widely traveled, experienced woman of enchantment and mystery. A woman seeing the picture in Vogue would wonder whether, in the same garment, she too might look mysterious.”
“She’d wonder,” Rosemarie tilted it again, “until she found that it was only the photographer’s wife, a dull suburban housewife with three children.”
“And a gull-wing Mercedes.”
“A point… actually, no matter how I look at the transparency, she is a knockout.”
“She?”
Rosemarie put the slide back on its viewing stand. “I’m not that gorgeous,” she said slowly. “My husband took the picture and he’s prejudiced. But”—she paused, took a deep breath, causing her breasts to rise attractively under her gray darkroom smock—“I’m really not badlooking.”
“Progress of a sort,” I sighed. “You’ll agree, I take it, that we don’t have to retouch this one?”
“Don’t you dare even think of it.”
We kissed quickly and went to work.
Hours later, about eleven o’clock and right on my schedule, Rosemarie yawned. “Please, Mister Overseer, sir, can this slave go to bed now?”
“I suppose so. You can’t get the quality of slaves you used to be able to get in the darkroom. I’ll come upstairs with you.”
“Not necessary.”
“Ted gave me some medication to help you sleep.”
“Don’t need it.” She hung up her smock on the peg outside the dark-room. “Dead tired.”
“Ted said you should take it so you won’t wake up in the middle of the night.”
“Don’t want it.”
I had to insist when she was under the covers, almost forcing the pill and the water tumbler into her hands.
“Don’t leave these lying around.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise me you won’t stay down there with those smelly chemicals too long. You ought to get some sleep too.”
“I’ll be up in a half hour.”
I did not, however, return to the darkroom. Instead I phoned the weather service. The recording assured me that there would be snow by morning, an accumulation of two to four inches. Great.
Why did my comic adventures have to involve cars? I was as rotten a driver as I was at everything else requiring physical skills. No matter how hard I tried to concentrate on driving I would never be as good as Rosemarie—and she always drove with relaxed ease.
Had I made a mistake in excluding her from the operation—if one could use that word for a venture so mad?
No, she had enough trouble as it was.
I never doubted, by the way, the accuracy of my reading of Jim Clancy’s practical joke.
I looked out the front window of the house. As I had anticipated, there was an unmarked car a quarter block down the street, lights out. Either Chicago cops or Oak Park cops watching us at Chicago’s request. Probably Chicago. Rearden was not the kind of man who would want to cooperate with others, nor, unless I misread them, were these the kind of Chicago cops with whom our fiercely independent Oak Parkers would like to work.
I put on dark trousers and a black turtleneck, dug out some old, soft-sole boots and a black jacket Rosemarie had given me at Christmas. If I had worn a beret, I would have looked like a Corsican knife in the le milieu. Instead I found a thick fur cap that would obscure my red hair and keep me warm.
Vince’s keys were on the back porch where I’d suggested he leave them. Now all I needed was the other set of keys. They would be in Rosemarie’s jewel box.
Only they weren’t there.
Rosemarie was sleeping quietly, but I did not turn on the lights. There was no point in taking a chance that she would wake up before the pill took effect. Thus I walked carefully and worked by the illumination of the night-light. I felt around in the box again. Not many jewels—my wife believed in expensive jewelry but not much of it. I felt the chain of pearls for the third time: no, there was no key tangled in it.
I closed the box thoughtfully. What the hell?
I sat on her vanity chair. Where had she put the keys? I was quite sure that, like the house on Menard, the Lake Geneva place would quickly be put on the market and replaced, even before it was sold, by a house in Long Beach or Grand Beach, close to Mom and Dad.
Might she not have put the keys with the papers that were pertinent to Jim Clancy’s estate so that all of them could be turned over to the Murrays tomorrow or the next day?
I left the bedroom, thought of another angle, and returned to the bedside. I brushed my lips lightly against hers. Only a hint of response. Sound, sound asleep. I mussed my side of the bed to make it appear that I might have slept there for a while and then—last brilliant thought—turned on the light in the bathroom.
A sleepy woman, waking and wondering where her husband was, would see the light and slip quickly back into her drug-induced nothingness.
Brilliant, O’Malley, brilliant. You have improved at this comedy through the years. Your improvisations are not as stupid as they used to be.
I had opened the back door and shivered in the cold when I remembered that I’d forgotten to look for the key to the summer house in Rosemarie’s key box in her study.
Idiot!
I stole quietly back into the house, crept into the parlor and then into the study, and turned on her desk light. I fished the key box out of the drawer in her desk, and opened it. No key for the summer house.
Then it dawned on me that she might just possibly have left it on the key hanger that I had placed at the front door with the curt observation, “If we get into the habit of leaving all important keys here, we won’t have to search for them when we need them. Isn’t that true Rosemarie?”
She had sighed patiently. “Yes, dearest husband mine.”
Well, there’s nothing wrong with a little neatness, is there? Since we never used the house, we had little need of the key. Perhaps now Rosemarie would sell it and we would buy a house in the dunes.
Sure enough, the key to the summer house, with my tag on which SUMMER HOUSE had been neatly inked, was just where it ought to be.
I slipped out the back door, crept in the shadows alongside our garage into the alley. Yes, we have alleys in Oak Park.
Then I remembered that I had forgotten to take a flashlight. There would be one in Vince’s car, would there not?
Don’t bet on it.
I returned to the house, found a light after considerable searching, on a shelf outside my darkroom, decided I had to make sure I had reserve batteries, found them in the tool cabinet (totally unused by both my wife and me) in another corner of the basement, and crept out again into the winter night.
Once I was back in the alley I walked the full length of the block to Berkshire, turned west, crossed Oak Park Avenue, and, shivering with the cold, walked three more blocks to the Horace Mann School on Berkshire and Kenilworth.
There was the dark blue Fairlane, waiting for me as promised. It needed a wash, as did most cars in the Chicago area after a winter thaw. Neither my sister nor her husband was as compulsive as I was about keeping cars clean.
Or changing the oil.
I looked in either direction. No sign of activity. The Oak Park police would be around in another hour to ticket cars illegally parked on the streets after dark. Residents would know that, so any car on the street would say “cop” very loudly.
I switched on the ignition, waited for the motor to warm up, turned on the lights and the heater. It would take two hours or so to drive to Lake Geneva, maybe a little longer depending on how bad the roads were. I figured I would go as fast as I could on the way up in case I had to take it slow coming home.
There were many different routes to Lake Geneva in those pre-expressway days, the most favored being Illinois 41 (Cicero) or Illinois 42-A (Harlem) north to Wisconsin 50 and then left to Geneva City and along either side of the lake to the home you were seeking.
Those who lived, as did the Clancys and, once long ago, my father’s family, at the west or Fontana end of the lake sometimes argued for either U.S. 14 (Northwest Highway) or U.S. 12 (Rand Road). The latter wended its way through Fox Lake and Wonder Lake before it crossed into Wisconsin. The former took the long way around through Harvard and Woodstock and Walworth and came in to Fontana from the west; the distance was longer in miles but, according to its advocates, not in time because one missed the concentration of resort towns on the other routes.
I chose this route because I figured that the fewer people who had a chance to see me in the middle of the night the better off I would be. I drove up Harlem Avenue, turned left on Northwest Highway, and settled in for the long ride, WIND blaring popular music on the car radio to keep me awake. I winced when they played “Three Coins in the Fountain.” That interlude at the Beverly Hills Hotel must have happened in another incarnation.
The suburbs on the road, Des Plaines, Mount Prospect, Arlington Heights, Barrington, even Crystal Lake, had expanded enormously since the last time I had been on those roads before the war (and have grown even more incredibly since then). Small towns on the North-western, they had become part of the metropolis now. An idea for a study tickled the back of my head. I dismissed it for the present. I had other fish to fry.
Only in the Woodstock area and beyond did I find the familiar farmlands of yesteryear, now barren and blanketed with snow as they sped rapidly by on either side of me as I cut through the night.
I still had not dismissed the tiny scruple in the back of my head. Certainly I believed Rosemarie. Still…
If she had killed either or both, she had ample reason. Didn’t she?
So far it was all going easily. No flat tires. No red-haired French border guards. No black Zouaves.
I thought of Trudi again, for the first time in years. Eight years this coming summer I had driven them to Stuttgart.
I would never know what had happened to her, but it was, somehow, a comfortable mystery to eat up the time during my race through the February night.
North of Woodstock I opened up the car to seventy, but slowed down carefully to observe the speed limits in Harvard and Walworth, though it was most unlikely that the local police would be anywhere but in their beds.
As I told you, however, I am a careful man—given the mad assumptions of the context in which I found myself.
I had left Oak Park at 11:30. At 1:35, I turned the corner of the Walworth road, climbed over the hill, and entered Fontana, nothing more than a beach and a street or two of houses behind it in those days before the construction of the big hotels and marinas. The lake, in summertime a turquoise mirror nestled in the hills, was now a smooth dark patch surrounded by snow and an occasional streetlight.
Though I wanted to rush down, do my work, and return to the comforts of my bed, I forced myself to stop the car at the beach and think.
The only possible problem would be that Rearden might be lurking in woods, waiting for me. That was not very likely, but neither was it impossible.
I drove away from the beach, parked in the public lot near the town hall (jammed on summer weekends and, I was told, a marvelous place for necking at night), locked the car, and began to trudge the half mile along North Shore Drive to the Clancy house.
How many lifetimes ago since the prom?
Only nine years since I had fished her out of the lake and kissed and caressed her, with savage delight, to tell the truth, in the two-story “den” of this house?
It must have been longer than that, must it not?
My initial impression then had been correct in one respect: she was indeed a very satisfactory partner in the kissing and caressing business.
I wished I was home in bed with her, not making love, because she would be sleeping so deeply, but perhaps holding her hand.
It was bitter cold; the temperature must have fallen more than the Weather Bureau had anticipated. And the snow, off North Shore Drive, was higher than my boots. So a wet, insidious chill slipped into my stockings and then into my feet. If I was not careful, I would give myself a fearsome cold.
(I am aware intellectually that colds are caused by a virus, but I was raised in such profound faith that colds were caused by wet feet and unwrapped mufflers that I cannot shake those convictions.)
I had decided that if I was to continue to avoid even the unanticipated risks, I would not enter from the driveway into the Clancy house, but rather from the front door on the lake side. This would mean I would creep in over the property of the next-door neighbor and cross his front lawn. I assumed that the neighbor would not be on the premises during midweek in February.
Resorts in the dead of winter are ugly, naked places, bereft of their charm and glitter. A great idea for a study, wasn’t it? Well, even if this was a wild-goose chase, at least it wasn’t a completely wasted night.
I paused in front of the Clancy house. The lake was frozen, the pier removed so that it would not be damaged by the ice.
The scene was totally different, but, yes, I did fish her out of the water right there. It had turned out, on balance, not to have been such a bad error, even if it had brought me back here tonight under such preposterous conditions.
I put the key in the door, tried to open the lock, and discovered that it wouldn’t move.
Frozen?
One was supposed to heat the key with a match, then try again. Alas, O’Malley, who doesn’t smoke, virtuous and wholesome lad, doesn’t carry matches.
Well, the next step was to rub the key in your hands so that it would absorb some body warmth. Right?
I pulled off a glove and I began to massage the key, but it was cold and elusive. After a few brisk rubs, it slipped out of my hand. I reached for the flashlight, fumbled with the switch, and turned it on.
Beneath me was nothing but trampled snow.
I searched frantically with my bare fingers, ignoring the sharp pain from the cold snow and ice. I thought I had found it in a clump of snow, but it slipped out of my fingers. I dug deeper, but uncovered only a twig.
Had I not done the same thing in the forest between Bamberg and Nuremberg? Still clumsy.
Now nearly frantic, I flashed the light in all directions and, my knees digging into the wet snow, searched desperately in the mess I myself had created.
Finally I found it, wedged up against the screen door.
This time it turned the lock easily and the door swung slowly open. I was still thinking clearly, despite my clumsiness. The daimon, I suppose, was at work. Don’t leave any clues (other than your footsteps on the lawn and the trampled snow at the doorway!). Take off your boots and leave them inside the door.
So with wet stocking feet I padded down the corridor and into the big den. I paused in the dark to orient myself. On my left, where there was a massive patch of gray, would be the big window overlooking the lake. Dead ahead would be the fireplace with the moose’s head on the wall. Beneath it the rug on which I had romanced the young Rosemarie. On the right would be the massive desk and the library shelves with leatherbound books that Jim Clancy probably never opened.
Lord have mercy on him, as Mom would have said.
So, immediately on my right, hard right, would be the wall with the painting of Clarice and a safe behind it, usually left open because, according to Rosemarie, it contained nothing of value except Jim Clancy’s enemies list.
I flicked on the light quickly, flashed it on the wall, found the picture, and turned the light off.
Presumably there would be no one on the lake with field glasses focused on the Clancy windows, but why take chances, right?
Pull the shade?
And leave fingerprints?
I groped around in the dark, found a big, plush chair against the wall, climbed up on it, fished for the picture, discovered it, and, ever so gently, lifted it off its hanger.
Then I flashed the light on and off again to locate the safe.
Everything was going according to plan, I told myself. I touched the combination lock of the safe and eased it toward me. It swung open easily.
I probed around inside with my hand—several stacks of paper. I reached for them with such vigor that I fell off the chair.
And hit the floor with a noisy clatter and several appropriate obscene and scatological expressions.
Several parts of my anatomy, most notably my posterior, felt like they had been damaged for life. Moreover, I was dazed and confused. Where was I? What was I trying to do? Might I not need a little nap?
I struggled to my feet, limped around in the darkness to find the overturned chair, and tried again.
Dummy.
Steadying myself, I made sure that I had all the papers and then, much more carefully this time, eased my tense and aching body back off the chair.
I flicked the light on. A few bills, some prospectuses from Las Vegas hotels, and an unsealed envelope.
It was labeled, “For the police, in the event of my death.”
Nicely put, huh?
I opened it and glanced at the contents. Sure enough, a long letter claiming that Rosemarie had killed her mother and expressing fear that she and I would kill him. A list of servants who could testify to the strange events of the day of Clarice’s death and of witnesses who would testify to my many threats to kill him.
Nice practical joke, huh?
Still running on my daimon’s automatic pilot, I put the irrelevant papers back in the safe, closed it, and hung the picture. I flicked the light over the floor to make sure that I had not left any papers on the floor after my fall.
One of my shins began to hurt. A skinned knee probably, of the kind I thought I had left behind on my fourteenth birthday.
I had banged up my knee in Bamberg too. For a moment I thought I was back in the woods. I shook my head to clear the fog. Had I hit my head when I fell?
Mrs. Clancy—Clarice—I reflected, was a lovely woman, not as striking as her daughter but still lovely. Dear God, why did she have to suffer so much?
No answer.
I turned off the light to reflect. Would the practical joke have worked? Maybe. Maybe not? The Murrays would have found many witnesses to testify to Jim Clancy’s emotional aberrations. There could be no proof that Rosemary had killed her mother; his charges would not be enough to establish that. Who were the witnesses? Might he have paid them off to commit perjury? Would they be ready to take that chance after he was dead?
And, as to his own death, the mere fact that he expected his daughter and son-in-law to kill him would not prove that we actually hired the hit man who planted the bomb in his car.
No, neither he nor Rearden had enough to fry us. Still, there was enough to drag us through the courts for months, maybe years, and to destroy our reputations and make our lives miserable. And the lives of our children.
Great little joker, Jim Clancy. Quite amusing, as his mother had said.
Requiescat in pace.
Who were the witnesses?
I flicked on my flashlight and watched the light die. Ah, but O’Malley is provident. I pulled the fresh batteries out of my pocket and, bumbling and fumbling in the dark, tried to install them.
Finally I got all the parts of the light more or less properly screwed back together. Proud of my skills, I flicked the switch again. It didn’t work.
Provident O’Malley didn’t bring a fresh bulb.
Then I made a terrible mistake.
The most callow of readers will say that, having found what he expected to find, O’Malley should now redeploy. Instantly. Get the hell out. Who needs a flashlight? You can read the stuff in your car. Go home. To your warm bed. And your warmer wife. Right?
So O’Malley spends fifteen precious minutes groping and fumbling for a flashlight.
Fifteen stupid minutes.
Finally, I found a light in one of the drawers of Jim Clancy’s desk. I was about to turn it on when a searchlight swept across the room, nailed me behind the desk, and then passed on.
Whose searchlight? And from where?
A car door slammed. Voices crackled in the cold night air. The searchlight had been auto headlights. Had they seen me? Where should I hide? They were coming in the back door. So if I…
I rushed madly, banging my shins a couple of times, across the jet black room, and out the door into the corridor leading to the front entrance.
Should I try to make my escape, hoping that I hadn’t been seen? Or should I wait to see who they were and what they wanted?
With Clancy’s letter crammed into my trousers pocket, the better choice—and I admit it was a close judgment call—would have been to run.
So I stayed to listen.
The visitors had a hard time with the driveway door. One of them was, with considerable obscenity, trying to pick the lock.
Cops?
Or robbers raiding the house of a dead man?
Which did I want?
Professional thieves would not be so blatant or so clumsy.
Cops. Five will get you ten that it’s Rearden and a buddy. I would recognize him shortly, perhaps, by his smell.
Instead I recognized the voice. I omit the obscene language from the conversation because it would be tedious to record it all.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Artie; this is breaking and entering. And in another jurisdiction.”
“You read the letter, didn’t you?” The light went on in the den. “The evidence we want is here. We’ll take it and get out. Who’s to know where we found it? We’ll tell them it was in the old guy’s home in Chicago.”
“Geez, look at the layout, the guy must have been loaded, know what I mean?”
“And it’s all going to that little cunt and her faggot husband. I’ll laugh when they both fry.”
“You think you can fry them, Artie, really?”
“Him for sure. Her… well, it might be better than being raped by butches for the rest of her life. I’d enjoy thinking about that more. Serve the rich bitch right.”
“That’s for sure—hey, is that the picture the letter talks about?”
I’ll admit that I’d been pretty clumsy. But I was an amateur, not a pro. These two were as bad as Special Agent Clarke, the FBI man who wanted to turn Trudi and her mother and sister over to the Ruskies. Suppose some local police come by and see the car in the driveway and lights on in the house. Suppose they are a little trigger-happy. Suppose they come in with guns drawn, without warning. Suppose that Artie and his rasping buddy try to reach for their guns.
Then what happens to your genial red-haired eavesdropper, poor innocent Chucky, you ask?
Better that you don’t ask.
There was a rattle and then a bang as the picture was pulled off the wall and dropped on the floor.
“Yeah, there’s the safe. Hey, we’re home free!”
Then a string of very tedious and unimaginative obscenities.
“I don’t get it, Artie. The letter said all the proof would be here. How come there’s nothing but bills and ads for expensive hotels, know what I mean?”
“Because someone got here before us, that’s why.”
“Who? Not that O’Malley squirt. He’s still in his house.”
“Yeah?”
“Look, Artie, you know what they’re saying on the streets, that the old guy put out a contract on himself because he knew he had cancer and he wanted to go out with a ha, bang. Maybe this is some nut letter, know what I mean?”
More obscenities, again showing no creative imagination.
“Let’s search this place, tear it apart, the stuff must be here.”
Movement in my direction. I rush, as quietly as possible, for a closet that I remember is at the other end of the corridor.
I remember wrong.
“Hey, wait a minute, Artie. We got no warrant. This is out of our jurisdiction. What if the local cops show up? What if we don’t find anything? We’ve left our prints all over the place. What if the squirt goes after us? We could be in a whole lot of trouble.”
“I know they did it. I want to see him fry. I want to see that cunt turned over to the butches.”
“Yeah, sure, Artie, but cops don’t turn out so hot in stir either. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
“You losing your nerve?”
“You said right in, right out. You didn’t say search. Besides we’d need ten guys to go through this place. It’d be like looking for a needle in a haystack, know what I mean?”
“You are losing your nerve.”
“Come on, Artie, use your head. This isn’t working out, let’s get out of here before we’re both in real trouble. Know what I mean?”
Cursing and protesting, Artie apparently did know what his friend meant. They turned off the light, stumbled down the corridor, slammed the door shut, and started their car.
It was stuck in the snow.
The friend had to get out and push while Artie rocked it back and forth from second to reverse and finally got it moving.
Add multitudinous monotonous obscenities.
Finally they left, their headlights once more cutting a path across the den.
This time I was safely hidden in the corridor.
Three-thirty according to my watch’s luminous dial.
Give them a half hour and hike back to Fontana.
What if they recognize Vince’s car?
How many blue Fairlanes are there in America?
The license numbers?
Those two remember a license and then see it in the dark up here?
You’ve been reading too many mysteries.
I hiked back through the snowdrifts. Lazy flakes began to swirl around casually, white fireflies in the cold air. I huddled under my jacket and shivered desperately. What, I wondered, if the two bent cops were lying in wait for me.
I encountered not a single living being as I pushed my way through the snow and the cold. I imagined that I was Robert Scott struggling toward the South Pole. Where were the sled dogs? Oh, yes, we’d eaten them.
Finally I stumbled into the parking lot. Where was the Fairlane? What happened to it? Oh, there it was, covered with snow. Would the car door open? Or would the lock be frozen?
It opened just fine. Unfortunately the car wouldn’t start. The ignition turned over dubiously a couple of times and then gave up. When was the last time Vince had a tune-up? I pushed the gas pedal desperately. It still wouldn’t start. I smelled gasoline. I had flooded the engine.
Shivering uncontrollably now, I climbed out of the car and tried to clean off the windows. Even if I got it started, would it be able to plow through the snow out of the parking lot?
I returned to the car, depressed the gas pedal to the floor, and turned the key. There was a promising sound. I tried it again. A more promising sound of an ignition almost catching. You got me into this, I informed the Deity. It’s Your job to get me out.
Apparently He heard me. The engine started briskly, as though asking why I had messed it up the first time around. Just to show me that it was alive and well, the car lurched out of the parking lot, skidded across the highway, and paused at the edge of a snowbank.
Gently now I eased us back on the snow-covered highway and began the slippery ride to Oak Park.
I waited till I was on the outskirts of Woodstock to read the papers Jim Clancy had left as part of his practical joke. I memorized the names of the witnesses, in case we ever needed them, and then tore the pages into small pieces and trailed them out of the window of the car over the next thirty miles.
All except the brief description of how his wife died. Driven by a demon—and not my woman-loving daimon, who would be disgusted about such behavior—I folded those sheets and put them in my pocket.
Everything but the ice-cream bar. Did he have one more practical joke to spring?
I shifted uneasily. It would be like him to have one final trick in reserve.
The snow was falling hard now, just as predicted. I drove very carefully. I wanted very much to arrive home safely and fall into bed next to my wife.
I beat you, Jim Clancy. I beat you. She’s mine now.
In retrospect, my pride was hardly justified. I had simply made less mistakes than the two cops, just as I had made less mistakes than Agent Clarke.
Arthur Rearden was killed in a shootout in a bar on Seventy-ninth and Racine the next year. He was off-duty and drinking in the bar when two young black kids tried to rob it. He killed both of them. I hope somewhere he has found peace.
It never made the papers, but the police generally accepted the explanation they received from their stool pigeons: Jim Clancy had put out a contract on himself because he knew he was going to die.
He did indeed go out with a bang.
No one ever made the suggestion again that Rosemarie and I might have tried to kill him—until a rather recent article in a Chicago underground paper called The Feeder. A young woman photographer, convinced that my continued success was depriving younger photographers, “especially women with a feminist’s vision,” their justly merited success, assembled every nasty word ever printed about me in my whole career.
A labor of love, you might say.
Many Chicagoans have not forgotten that most of O’Malley’s wealth was inherited from his father-in-law and mother-in-law, both of whom died under mysterious circumstances. His mother-in-law, Clarice Clancy, was pushed down a flight of stairs. His father-in-law, James Clancy, was blown up by a car bomb. While police were never able to find evidence conclusively linking O’Malley to these killings, neither were they able to completely exonerate him. Given the paucity of his talent and the ambition that has driven him to the heights of success, one could expect almost anything from Charles Cronin O’Malley.
Not libelous, not quite. And the operative word, gentle reader, is not “exonerate”; it is “success.”
In The Feeder, hatred, so long as it is ideologically correct, covers a multitude of sins.
Back in 1955, that episode of my life was not quite finished. One small, suspicious, Othello-like part of me still did not quite believe Rosemarie’s account of her mother’s death. Was not the fall down the stairs too fortuitous, too much of a coincidence?
It was then, however, that I began to gather my little secret dossier about the deaths of her parents—against what event I was not sure, but so that I might have the data at hand if I ever needed it.
It was an almost harmless obsession, a tiny infection, a small wound that, I told myself, could not ever become serious enough to cause gangrene.
I had seen a look of fury occasionally in her eyes, almost always when she was drunk, and momentarily feared for my life and for the lives of our children. Sober, Rosemarie would not hurt even a bug—she chased flies out of the house rather than swat them.
Drunk… might she be a killer?
It was only a tiny fear, one to which I paid little attention. But it was there, as small as a virus that carries a deadly disease.
I drove slowly up to Greenwood and Euclid at seven-thirty, parked the car a block away, slogged through the falling snow down the alley and into our back porch. I returned the key to the key ring, threw the sedatives down the toilet, and collapsed into bed.
Hours later, freshly showered and morning bright, she brought me my breakfast.
“Did you take one of those nice little pills too?”
“No.” I had learned that you should not roll over in dismay when your wife brings you breakfast in bed.
“You were out like a light all night long.”
“Was I really?”
Rosemary did not get drunk the week her father died.
But she did the following week, when she discovered that she was pregnant again.
And I continued to worry about the ice-cream bar.