Our trip to Europe was great fun, so much better than I would have dared to expect, that when it finally exploded I was caught completely unprepared.
Rosemarie was pure delight, protecting me from reporters and groupies (as we could call them now), nursing me in my travel ills, amusing me with comic commentary in dialects appropriate to the country we were in, encouraging me when I was discouraged, and loving me body and soul. She was the perfect agent/assistant/wife/mistress.
I told myself that my fears about returning to Germany were quite irrational.
I looked for Trudi in the faces on the railroad platforms and at the same time I was sure I would never find her.
Our German hosts were pleasant and obsequious. Even today, but more so then, they were not quite sure how to relate to their conquerors turned allies and protectors. They seemed to want to say, See how we have recovered from the war, see the spirit and the energy of the German people, see how good we are, see how efficiently we have thrown off the yoke of our Nazi past.
And you wanted to say to them something like, Yeah, but…
They were delighted that I had returned to “record the progress in the Federal Republic since your last visit.” Progress there had surely been. There were few traces left of the war, an occasional ruined house or legless vet of the Wehrmacht. The country was bursting with progress and prosperity, the German economic miracle was in high gear. So successful was the recovery that already the German literary left (Boll and Fassbinder, for example) were complaining about it, without, as befits the literary left, proposing any particular alternative.
We were presented to Herr Reichkanzler Adenauer in Bonn. He remembered me.
“Ya, ya, Herr Roter!” He exclaimed, embracing me, much to the astonishment of his attendants.
“Frau Roter,” he said, kissing my wife’s hand, much to that young woman’s blushing delight.
“You will see our Kurt and Brigitta?”
“Ja, ja!”
“Ja, gut!”
As an American artist, one who had studied Germany after the war with his camera (not knowing at the time that this was what I was doing), I was offensive to both the left and the right. The former saw me as a representative of American capitalism (which, God knows, I was) who had come to celebrate the “materialistic” economic miracle. The latter (much more quietly) saw me as someone who had come to probe beneath the surface of prosperity to remind the world of the Nazis and the Holocaust.
Hence, my exhibition in the gallery in Stuttgart, which looked like a concrete Zepplin hanger, was a retrospective on all my work, putting The Conquered into its proper context, as it was explained to me.
Thus the right could say that I was as critical of America as I was of Germany, and the left could rage more furiously than ever about American capitalism (which had provided the money that had in turn produced the resources that supported the university system off which the left lived).
I found these attacks more amusing than offensive. I suppose that both the left and the right were correct about me. I was indeed a celebrant of American capitalism, but a celebrant who saw the flaws. A quiet reference to what happened to me in Little Rock usually put down a reporter who suggested that I was nothing more than an agent of American imperialism.
Rosemarie, who was my interpreter, among her other roles (somehow she had managed to pick up enough German so that she became quite fluent once she was in the country for a few days), sacked for a ten-yard loss a contentious woman reporter with a thin face and long blond hair who would not abandon this theme.
“Herr O’Malley recognizes storm troopers very well, red or brown, right or left. He was beaten by some of them at Little Rock, an experience not unknown, I believe, to German artists.”
Clancy had once again lowered the boom.
I was also haunted by deep ambivalence about Germany. Anyone who lived through the war and the discovery of the Holocaust cannot escape such mixed feelings. But I did not believe in collective guilt. I had come to see, I kept insisting, not to judge.
“Judge not,” my agent/translator snapped, “that you be not judged.”
“I see long before I judge,” I would say, “and what I see is surely a function of what I am. You may not like what I see or what I am, but I cannot pretend to anything other. What was it a German religious leader said?”
“Hereon I stand, I can do no other,” my translator quoted Luther before I could.
That’s the trouble with a certain kind of translator, Irish Catholic woman translator, to be specific.
“And what are you, Herr O’Malley?” someone at the press conference asked.
“I’m an Irish Catholic Democrat from the West Side of Chicago with a camera,” I held up my Leica. “A German camera, as a matter of fact”
Most did not comprehend my response, much as they liked my reference to the German camera.
“You will excuse my ignorance, Herr O’Malley,” an infinitely polite, rotund gentleman with a beard and thick glasses said, “but what precisely”—a courtly bow—“iss dis Irish Catholic Democrat from the West Side of Chicago?”
“I’m not really a very good example. Let me see,” I faked it, “how can I find an example… ? I know, her!”
I pointed at my translator, who blushed contentedly as the crowd applauded.
“More seriously, I can only say that you will have to discover that by looking at my pictures and comprehend that I come to see and to understand, not to judge.”
“The West Side Irish”—Rosemarie could not be denied the last word, not ever—“are very empiricist, very pragmatic; they have universal ideas, maybe only once or twice in their lifetime, like dragonflies mate—and often with same result, death.”
More laughter and applause.
Maybe I should have stayed home and let her do the whole tour.
The trip to Germany was a replay of our summer at Long Beach, which had been pure idyll. As instructed, I had relaxed, read, played with my children, swum, and even played golf and tennis, badly, with my wife and Peg and Vince. I’d worked on my impressionistic study of kids (which did nothing to decrease my reputation as a sentimentalist). I’d finished my dissertation, which had for a year lacked only a few extra footnotes. I’d also begun my work on “Beauty at Every Age,” which would continue for years. I had started with Mom, much to her pleasure, and continued with various matrons of diverse ages in Long Beach and Grand Beach. These shots were not “foggy” (Rosemarie’s word) Ektachrome efforts but available-light Tri-X black-and-white, a real challenge.
This study was also erotically disturbing because the challenge I had set for myself was to see not only beauty but eroticism in all the ages of the life of a woman. If that’s what you want to see in your lens, then you’ll find it eventually, and get yourself caught up in it.
You’ve seen the study, in its most recent revision, so you know that in those days I was emphasizing bare shoulders, an altogether alluring technique, even if I tried for more subtle effects in later years.
I’m proud of the fact that even today feminists bicker about this study, some arguing that it recognizes many different kinds of womanly allure and others arguing that I exploit women at every age. The latter group, as far as I can tell, think that women at all ages ought not to be attractive to men.
Maybe in some other cosmos.
It was fortunate that the energies stirred up while I worked on the study that summer could be released, if that’s the right word, in my relationship with Rosemarie. Or maybe it was the fiery passion with my wife that sensitized me to the attractiveness of other women.
The best news of the whole summer was that Rosemarie’s drinking problem seemed to have vanished completely. Everything was working again in our marriage. We had both learned from our mistakes and would not repeat them.
I was hopelessly in love with the woman, far more than on our honeymoon. She was mine and I was hers and all was right with the world.
I could not get enough of her. Or she of me. Swimming and golf had rounded her body back into its nuptial perfection. She was provocative, tantalizing, seductive. My hands were attracted to her body like filings to a magnet.
Freedom from the fear of immediate pregnancy had reignited my woman’s sexual appeal and her sexual hunger. Rosemarie loved being a mother. She wanted a fifth child, so she hardly was a victim of the contraceptive mentality against which the leaders of our church would rail. A time of respite from childbearing and more responsibilities of child rearing had given her new life and new hope. She was a happy, satisfied, self-confident woman.
I talked to Father Raven, now a pastor in a Negro (as we called it then) parish, about it on the golf course one afternoon during his annual visit to Mom and Dad’s place. He was at least ten strokes ahead of me when I raised the question.
“I don’t see”—he paused for a backswing—“how most men and women living with the demands of our culture can be asked to sleep in separate bedrooms. Arguably it’s an ideal, and that’s what some of the moralists, even in Rome, are saying, but an ideal that is virtually impossible in practice.”
“We Americans don’t like to admit that we are deviating from an ideal. We’d like to think that what we’re doing because of our decisions is good and virtuous.” My drive carried fifty yards at the most.
“I’m merely offering you one way out. Can your marriage survive without sex?”
“With Rosemarie?”
“In separate bedrooms?”
“Not a chance.”
“Well?”
I hit my second shot; with an image of Rosemarie in my head it carried close to a hundred yards.
“You have to preserve your marriage, don’t you?”
“Lesser of two evils?”
“That’s how you could explain it to the Vatican.”
“I see.”
As well as I ever would.
I do understand how in the next ten years the Church came to lose its once enormous credibility as a sexual teacher. It didn’t listen to married people (even though it admitted that it should listen to them) and eventually married people didn’t listen to the Church.
And I had to contend not only with a healthy and happy wife but an insatiable one.
“I began this summer,” she murmured one unbearably hot evening, “determined that I had to please you if I wanted to win you back. Now I’m just a pleasure-hungry tart.”
“Pleasure-hungry wife.”
“Same difference.”
“You never had to win me back, Rosemarie.”
“You know what I’ve learned?” Her fingers traced a path from my face to my loins. “I’ve learned that a husband and a wife always have to win one another. It’s a challenge and an amusement that just never stops. Once you think you’ve won him permanently, then you’ve lost.”
“You’re probably right.”
Her fingers moved back up my body, light, teasing, frivolous. “Just as true for the man as for the woman. Courtship is not a time. It’s—what word am I looking for?—it’s a dimension of marriage.”
“Absolutely.”
It was that night, I think, that I began to see something about our marriage, something very important, that I did not want to see. I mean see it the way I “saw” Jim Clancy’s great little practical joke.
The “vision” was obscure that hot summer evening, but it was there in my head as my wife mounted on top of my body, and it would remain in the obscure dark alleys of my brain, haunting and bedeviling me. Like the image of Jim Clancy’s ice-cream bar.
Our renewed romance, courtship, passion continued on the trip to Europe, especially when we left behind the ceremonies and Frankfurt and Bonn and Stuttgart and in Rosemarie’s 300 SL roadster, bought in Stuttgart, traveled by ourselves through the German cities and countryside.
“You’re going to sell the gull-wing when we get home?”
“Course not, it’s certain to be a classic.”
“It leaks and it’s hard to get into the damn thing.”
“That’s why it will be a classic. This one probably will be too, and it cost only eighteen hundred dollars. A bargain like that you can’t pass up.”
We had opened the show in Stuttgart and would return at the end of the trip to receive some sort of prize. At first I anxiously watched the crowds who came into the gallery for a sign of Trudi or Magda or Erika.
Then I realized that my mixture of anxiety and hope was ridiculous. If they had not tried to get in touch with me in the last twelve years, why would they wander into a gallery exhibiting my pictures?
And would I recognize any of them?
Probably not.
We had dinner with Kurt and Brigitta, older now yet still handsome, and their four quiet and smiling kids. He was rector of the university and a member of parliament, she a Frau Professor. They told Rosemarie stories of my Bamberger exploits that went far beyond simple truth, just like the now legendary game with Mount Carmel.
We stayed at the reconditioned Bamberger Hoff and ate dinner at the Vinehaus Messerschmidt, as it was again called. Rosemarie insisted that the last night of our visit be spent in my old room at the Vinehaus.
She announced that the room was cute, even adorable, and seduced me with joyous determination.
Only much later did it occur to me that I had made love once with another woman in the same room.
“It’s almost impossible to describe how the city has changed,” I would tell her often in the next couple of days. “It’s hardly the same place. I felt like kind of reverse deja vu; I feel like I was never here before.”
In the decade that had passed, Bamberg had shed its drab and worn coat and clad itself once more in a sparkling set costume for a medieval film. Or maybe it was only the difference between winter and summer.
We walked through the Altstadt, visited the rose garden of the Residence, admired the Rider in the Dom, even retraced the path down the Judenstrasse from the Oberfarre to Kasernstrasse. Bamberg was a young and chic countess again. Those who had despoiled her had stayed to become her servants and admirers. Trudi’s house on the Obersandstrasse still seemed shabby. It exuded no magic vibrations for me, no reminders that up there on that second floor I had been initiated into the mysteries of love.
“Was this street important to you?” Rosemarie asked me. “You seem kind of spooked.”
“We tried to pick up some East German refugees here, turn them over to the Russians.”
“Did you?”
“Blew it.”
“Deliberately?”
“You bet.”
She laughed in approval.
I said very little as we strolled back across the Rathaus bridge, except to say that Cunnegunda had reminded me of Mom when I was here before.
My wife nodded silently. Then she threw her arms around me. “Poor, dear Chuck. You must have been so homesick.”
“I missed all the women in my life, I guess.”
My Rosemarie wept in my arms, beneath the smile of Saint Cunnegunda, for pain that I had not understood and still couldn’t quite acknowledge.
She would frown from time to time, trying to puzzle out, trying to understand, wanting to share in my teenage experience, but not able to grasp it.
“Sometimes I think I know what you mean,” she said with a sigh as we drove out to the farmhouse in the Bohemian Alps. “Then it eludes me.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not sure I trust my memory. I’m concentrating on what I see today. Let the contrasts emerge from the work.”
She nodded her agreement.
The farmhouse wasn’t there anymore. It had been replaced by a big new home with an adjoining barn. In front of the house was a Mercedes 180. A tall, slender young man was working on a tractor in front of the barn, a boy about the age of Kevin assiduously trying to help him.
“That’s the boy who was in the house when we raided it,” I said, pointing at the young man.
“Doesn’t look much like a werewolf.”
A sturdy young woman emerged from the house to shout something to her husband. Two younger kids, a boy and a girl, trailed behind her.
Rosemarie explained in her colorfully inaccurate German that I was an American photographer interested in pictures of German farms. Would they mind if we took some shots?
At first they hesitated, then, won by my wife’s dizzy charm, they laughed and agreed with great good nature. They even served us some strawberries and thick cream.
“They didn’t recognize you, did they?” she asked as we left.
“I had a big old white helmet on. I was a pale, scrawny kid and scared silly of the SS, who we thought were lurking in the house. No reason that they should recognize me.”
“Well you’re not pale after the summer at Long Beach.”
“I’m still scrawny?”
“In an attractive way. Hey”—she dodged my lascivious hands—“don’t distract the driver.”
“I’m not going to show the picture of the farm today in a companion shot with the farm twelve years ago. There’s no point in that”—I continued to distract her, but with less insistence—“and it wouldn’t be fair to them. Anyway, this is not to be a before-and-after project.”
“It may be”—she frowned again—“that he doesn’t even remember the incident, not really, anyway. Memory is a strange phenomenon.”
I had the bad taste to remember the bridge just outside the town where Trudi and I had made love—if that was what it should be called. And then I had the good taste to dismiss the image of bringing Rosemarie there.
I would find another place.
“You are still distracting the driver, depriving the poor woman of her sanity, in fact.”
“I know a mountain stream with a little meadow. We could eat lunch there.”
“And?”
“Well, we could see what happens.”
“I’m sure it will.”
It did.
“Clever of you to bring a blanket, husband mine.”
“I try to be prepared.”
“I noticed.”
Eventually we drove back to Stuttgart, happy with one another and pleased with ourselves.
I would receive the prize at the big concrete gallery, then we would drive into the Black Forest for the final five days of my planned shoot. When that was finished we would fly back to O’Hare in a jet, thank God.
I never did remark that this year the kids were able to get ready for school not only without my presence, but without their mother’s presence.
Disaster struck the first full day in Stuttgart, the day before I was to receive the prize.
Late in the afternoon, while I was working on my acceptance speech, I heard Rosemarie stride into our suite and slam the door with more than her usual vigor.
Earthquake.
I didn’t have to look around to know that she was furious with me.
“Well!”
I did look around. Her face was drawn, there was a tiny red spot on each cheek. Her lips were drawn in a thin, dangerous line. She was breathing heavily. I had never seen her so angry.
I could not avoid the quick thought that angry in a white two-piece dress Rosemarie was incredibly lovely.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just had tea with Trudi.”
“Who?”
“Trudi Weiss—that’s her name now. And I saw your son, a very cute little redhead that looks just like you.”
“My son?”
“His name as you may well imagine is Karl. That’s German for Charles, as I’m sure you know.”