The GI Bride (18 page)

Staying at the Edgewater Beach was like
living inside a scene from a movie. It was very elegant and we stayed in a magnificent
penthouse suite. I had my first room-service meal there, complete with champagne. Palmer
looked handsome and debonair with his dark brown eyes and slicked-back black hair; he
wore silk pyjamas and a matching bathrobe, and I felt like a movie star in my diaphanous
white peignoir. It was like a fairy-tale. As I stood at the vast walls of glass that
looked out over the lights of Chicago, I kept thinking, If they could see me now.
However, the wedding night was not the success I’d hoped it would be. The romance
fizzled out because Palmer seemed more interested in guzzling champagne than he was in
making love to me. I almost had to force myself on him. He tried to make a joke of it,
telling me we had all the time in the world for lovemaking; I should relax, drink some
wine and enjoy the luxury while I could. I don’t remember much more about that
night. What I do remember is that the day had been seriously marred earlier. Palmer and
I were on the Lake Street elevated train, on our way into Chicago to be married, when he
turned to me with a very serious look on his face. ‘I have an important question
to ask you before we get married,’ he blurted out.

‘Now?’ I said. ‘Sure, ask
away. What is it?’

And then he dropped the bomb.

‘Can you swear to me you’re not
marrying me because you’re pregnant with someone else’s child?’

The air went right out of me and I could
hardly breathe. I felt as though he’d punched me hard, right in the solar plexus.
When I was able to speak, I choked out, ‘You’re joking, right?’

‘No, I’m very serious,’ he
replied.

Who is this man I’m about to marry? I
thought. Who is this stranger? I should have jumped off the train at the next stop.
However, all I could think was that it was too late for me to turn back, and so, after
I’d caught my breath, I assured him that I was not pregnant, and on we went.

To this day, I cannot believe that I still
went through with the wedding. If there was one piece of advice I could give to anyone
getting married today, it would be this: for God’s sake, if you have any doubts or
fears about the person you’re about to marry, or about the marriage itself,
it’s never too late to back out, even if you’re standing at the altar.

I was eventually able to push the incident
to the back of my mind, and I comforted myself that his parents had undoubtedly put that
thought into his head and he had asked me for their sake.

After Palmer and I were married, I opened
the mail each day and was horrified to discover that he was in a far worse financial
situation than I was. I simply had a difficult time making ends meet, but he was up to
his neck in debt. One of the first bills I opened was from a downtown Chicago florist
for all the flowers he had sent to me during our courtship. It came with a threatening
‘past due notice’. That bill was a shock, but not nearly as shocking as some
that came later.

That evening, after we’d had our meal,
I presented the bills to him, pointing out the demand from the florist.
‘What’s all this about?’ I asked him.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said.
‘It’s just temporary, a misunderstanding I’m trying to get sorted out
with my bank.’

Another thing I found strange after we were
married was Palmer’s compulsive behaviour. For instance, there was his bedtime
routine of checking the locks on the doors and windows. First, he would lock them, then
tug each handle exactly twelve times to make sure they were secure. Sometimes, if he
wasn’t sure he had counted correctly, or if he lost count, he would start again.
Not of major importance, I suppose, but if I had known then what I know now, that
behaviour would certainly have rung warning bells for me. Occasionally, I would tease
him. ‘I don’t think you counted right,’ I’d say. Not that I
actually knew, I just wanted to see what he’d do. I knew it was
mean to do that, but what the heck? I had little else to laugh about.

‘Goddamnit,’ he’d say, and
check them all again. Once, I couldn’t stop laughing, and he became so angry that
I thought he was going to punch me, so I decided it safest to ignore his weird
behaviour. After all, what harm was it doing?

We had managed to find a much nicer
apartment to move into after we were married. It had two bedrooms, a huge living room
with a dining area, a modern bathroom, a smallish kitchen with lots of cabinets, and
there were huge wardrobe-type closets throughout.

There was plenty of room in the second
bedroom for Wayne, his toys and clothes; the walk-in closet was as big as a small
bedroom, and he often used it as his den. We’d had little money to spare so
he’d never had his own space before, a place where he could invite friends to
play. The little guy had adapted to our compromised situation since his father and I
were divorced, and now I was happy to be able to provide such a lovely spacious room for
him. I let him help to pick out the bedspread and curtains.

The apartment, considered a basement
apartment since it was partially below ground level, had large picture windows and was
light and cheery. The building was almost new and was in a great neighbourhood. We were
about half a block from the elevated train, the library, the YMCA and the Chicago Park
District Recreation Center. There was also a children’s playground across the
street and two parks nearby. Then, just one block away, was the school and all the shops
we could need. It was perfect, especially
since we had no car at the
time; we certainly didn’t need one as long as we lived there.

We soon met our next-door neighbours, Mary
and John Nicholson. They were also newlyweds and both worked for airlines. Mary soon
became my best friend. Other people in the building included a novelist and an
advertising man, an artist and a furniture designer, Greek restaurant owners, Jewish
dress-shop owners, and a beautiful model who was the mistress of an infamous union
leader and mobster. Later, another newlywed couple moved in a May and December match:
she, another Mary, was just twenty-one and he was over fifty. Within nine months of
their marriage, they had a baby, and then, little more than ten months later, they
produced twins. Jack was already a grandfather so this new family must have been quite a
shock to him, and to his adult children. We never understood what Mary saw in him. Every
time we met, he was drunk, not pleasantly so. He always became obnoxious and often
demeaned and insulted Mary in front of us.

‘Look at my wife’s fat
ass,’ he’d say. ‘She’s got nice big tits, though.’
He’d be laughing as poor Mary cringed.

Overall, it was a most interesting group of
people; we all got along well and had great fun together. Our neighbours were like an
extended family; even the wife of our Italian janitor, who baby-sat for us regularly
another Nonie to Wayne seemed part of the family.

There was another apartment building next
door where a number of children lived, so Wayne had plenty of playmates. One of the
families in that building was Greek and their
yia-yia
, Greek for
‘grandmother’, lived with them to
take care of the
children while the parents worked. Yia-yia also took care of any other neighbourhood
children who happened to be around. Every morning she would cut a fresh long switch from
the lilac bushes that ran along the edge of our properties, and she would use it much as
a goatherd would in rounding up the goats. She couldn’t speak a word of English
but jabbered away in Greek all day long, waving her switch menacingly at the children.
The children adored and respected her. We never had to worry about them they could be
outside from dawn to dusk, only coming in for meals, and we knew they were safe with
Yia-yia. I remember telling Wayne, ‘You are such a lucky kid.’

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Well, you have an American grandma,
an English nan, an Italian
nonna
and a Greek
yia-yia
.’

He looked puzzled. ‘How come
I’ve only got one horrible grandpa, then?’

Hmm, I thought. I’d better change the
subject, but first I reminded him that he had a nice granddad who lived in England.

‘Oh, that’s good,’ he
said, ‘but I wish I had one here.’

Besides school, there was an abundance of
free or cheap activities for children nearby. They could swim in the indoor pools at
either the YMCA or the Park District, listen to stories at the library, play basketball
at the court across the street and attend all kinds of fun classes at the Park District,
which ran a day camp when school was out for the summer. There were just as many
activities available for adults. Living in that kind of old neighbourhood, which is rare
today, was much like living in an English village.

None of us ever had much money and our
entertainment was simple. We had dinner parties within our building so we never had to
worry about driving under the influence of alcohol. We would get together with Mary and
John Nicholson almost every weekend and usually had baked beans, date bread and hot dogs
for dinner. John was from Boston and baked beans were a weekend tradition. Sometimes the
men would play basketball across the street or we would go for walks together around the
neighbourhood. Usually on those promenades, Palmer would end up saying the same thing:
‘You know what they say. You can travel widely on your own block.’
We’d all nod and grunt in agreement with his words of wisdom.

A day or two after one of our neighbourhood
strolls, I was having coffee with Mary Rogers, the girl with three babies, and she said
something that shocked me. ‘I was watching you guys walking up the street last
weekend and couldn’t take my eyes off Palmer. He walks funny, like a girl,’
she said. ‘Have you ever noticed how he bobs up and down? And my Jack was just
saying that he thinks he’s a bit limp-wristed.’ Without hesitating, she
continued, ‘Do you think he might be queer?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I
protested. ‘We have a very healthy sex life. There’s nothing wrong with
Palmer, I can assure you. He’s all man. He plays golf and poker, and homosexual
men don’t do that.’

‘Hmm, well, I was just saying,’
she said.

Just saying, my foot, I thought. How dare
she say such a thing about my husband? I wanted to tell her what I thought of her
drunken poor excuse for a husband, but I
held my tongue. Least said,
quickest mended, I thought. Although, I must admit, I had often watched Palmer and
thought how oddly he walked. It really did look a little effeminate. And I had lied
about our sex life: it was almost non-existent.

I honestly don’t think Palmer was
homosexual. If anything, he was asexual. An online encyclopedia seems to confirm my
conclusion: Wikipedia says, ‘Asexuality (sometimes referred to as non-sexuality),
in its broadest sense, is the lack of sexual attraction to others or the lack of
interest in sex.’ That certainly seems to fit.

On many occasions, I tried to entice him
into having sex with me. I would try to emulate the seductive poses I’d seen in
magazines and movies, wear sexy nightwear and such, but he simply wasn’t
interested. I often cried myself to sleep. I discovered after I’d lived with him
for a while that he had a strong dislike of women: he seemed to have no respect for them
and often said demeaning things about them. I’m sure his beliefs and behaviour had
something to do with his childhood and upbringing: I knew he had no respect for his
mother but, then, he had even less for his father.

On a couple of occasions, we went to Peoria,
Illinois, to visit Palmer’s parents. The fun part, especially for Wayne, was
travelling on the Peoria Rocket, which had run from Chicago to Peoria for many years.
Palmer would book us into a private carriage, which made it even more of an adventure.
It wasn’t a long journey, but there was enough time to have a meal on board, which
seemed a luxury to me. Peoria, though, was dreary, at least where the Palmers lived in
their converted attic apartment. Mrs
Palmer made a special tomato soup
every time we visited; apparently, it was one of her son’s favourites and she made
it with milk. I tried to duplicate the recipe several times but each time it curdled; I
was sure there was a secret ingredient that she hadn’t divulged. We ate most other
meals out, usually at my father-in-law’s local tavern, which stank of stale smoke
and spilled beer.

One Peoria visit stays with me. I had to
confide in my mother-in-law that I was terribly constipated and asked if she had any
medicine I could take for it. I don’t remember if she did, but later that day, as
we were all sitting around the table playing a game, she brought up the subject of
constipation. ‘If you don’t get relief,’ she said to me, ‘for
goodness’ sake, don’t do anything drastic.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked,
already embarrassed at having my problem discussed in front of the men.