Unfinished Business

By Alan Simon

From the author of The First Christmas of the War and Thanksgiving, 1942: an "edgier and darker" historical novel, also set in mid-20th century Pittsburgh:

Roseanne DeMarco often thought about her brief two-month affair with Frank Donaldson throughout the nearly nine years that followed those summer months of 1942. Almost every time, in addition to slipping into a near-trance as she vividly relived some moment or another during the affair that was burned into her memory, she found herself asking the same question she had asked herself so many times while it had still been going on: Why?

The explanation––the justification––offered by Roseanne’s conscience for what had happened in July and August of 1942 was always the same: she simply hadn’t felt truly married, with her brand new husband Joey she had suddenly realized she barely knew before he was called away to the Army. And when the suave Frank Donaldson, the cousin of one of her friends, joined the group of young women in a nightclub one evening Roseanne all but forgot that she was a newlywed. The affair abruptly ends after two months when Frank is called away to the Army and at almost the same moment––and quite a surprise and shock to Roseanne––her husband Joey winds up coming home and assigned to guard Pittsburgh's steel industry for the duration of the war.

Flash forward to mid-1951.

After nine years of tranquil (if complacent) marriage to Joey DeMarco and three sons, what would be Roseanne’s explanation and justification in the years to come for resuming her affair with Frank when he suddenly reappears in the middle of June that year...only weeks after Roseanne’s husband was called back into the Army and sent to fight in the Korean War? And what will be the outcome of this renewed affair when––or if––Roseanne's husband returns from war?

---------
Trivia: Look for a cameo appearance by Joey DeMarco, the "off pages" husband in UNFINISHED BUSINESS, in Alan Simon's just-published novel THANKSGIVING, 1942.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alan Simon
• Release date: Jul 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9780578020679

Alan Simon

Alan Simon is a Senior Lecturer in the Information Systems Department at Arizona State University's WP Carey School of Business. He is also the Managing Principal of Thinking Helmet, Inc., a boutique consultancy specializing in enterprise business intelligence and data management architecture. Alan has authored or co-authored 29 technology and business books dating back to 1985. He has previously led national or global BI and data warehousing practices at several consultancies, and has provided enterprise data management architecture and roadmap services to more than 40 clients dating back to the early 1990s. From 1987-1992 Alan was a software developer and product manager with Digital Equipment Corporation's Database Systems Group, and earlier he was a United States Air Force Computer Systems Officer stationed at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. Alan received his Bachelor's Degree from Arizona State University and his Master's Degree from the University of Arizona, and is a native of Pittsburgh.

Book preview

Unfinished Business

a novel by

Alan Simon

Unfinished Business

Copyright © 2009-2012 Alan R. Simon. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be used, reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations for reviews and critical articles.

First Paperback Printing 2009

First Kindle eBook version 2010

Revised Kindle eBook version 2012

PERMISSIONS

Excerpts from the following previously published works are used within this novel with permission of their respective copyright owners:

Mockin’ Bird Hill and Changing Partners by Miss Patti Page

Too Young by Nat King Cole

War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk, published by Little, Brown, and Company

QED seal of approval

QED stands for Quality, Excellence and Design. The QED seal of approval shown here verifies that this eBook has passed a rigorous quality assurance process and will render well in most eBook reading platforms.

For more information please click here.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

Extras

Previews of The First Christmas of the War and Thanksgiving, 1942

Preview of Gettysburg, 1913: A Novel of the Great Reunion, Part I

We were waltzing together,

To a dreamy melody

When they called out, change partners

And you waltzed away from me.

Now my arms feel so empty,

As I gaze around the floor;

And I’ll keep on changing partners

Till I hold you once more.

-- Patti Page

Prologue: How Roseanne Married Her Husband and Then Met Her Lover

Roseanne DeMarco often thought about her brief two-month affair with Frank Donaldson throughout the nearly nine years that followed those summer months of 1942. Almost every time, in addition to slipping into a near-trance as she vividly relived some moment or another during the affair that was burned into her memory, she found herself asking the same question she had asked herself so many times while it had still been going on: Why?

The answer her mind offered back each time she asked that question (not aloud, of course) never varied: Because I just didn’t feel married back then, that’s why. Occasionally some guilt-laden corner of her conscience would launch an assault and remind her that no matter how married she felt or didn’t feel, she had still taken a vow of marriage and eternal fidelity standing side by side with Joseph DeMarco before God on the St. Michael’s altar. Nowhere in the marriage vows Roseanne Conte-about-to-be-DeMarco had recited had there been anything that could have been misconstrued as terms of conditional compliance, an escape clause of sorts, that blessed Roseanne DeMarco to commence an affair barely a month later while Joseph – Joey, as he was known to everyone save his old country immigrant parents who insisted on using the given names of all their children – was away at basic training in Mississippi. 

Roseanne, apparently, had become expert at confronting any attempt by her conscience to shame her for what she had done. She would begin her defense with a chronology dating back to the previous October, after the homecoming football game in which Joey starred for Pittsburgh’s Schenley High School, the same night she abruptly broke up with Tony Cortese and began dating Joey. Fast forward ahead six months: April, 1942. With graduation less than two months away Joey had already enlisted in the Army, a step or two ahead of the draft notice that would have found him sooner or later anyway, now that he was eighteen. Soon off to boot camp and then possibly to war, he proposed to Roseanne Conte, who – suddenly feeling very grown up with her own graduation date approaching as well, being a senior just like Joey – quickly accepted.

Roseanne’s parents weren’t quite as thrilled as she had hoped they’d be when she told them that no, this engagement wouldn’t be a long-term one that would last until Joey came back from the war in a year or two or three, or however long what was now being called World War II would last. Instead, like so many of her girlfriends in her graduating class and like so many seventeen- and eighteen-year old girls all over Pittsburgh and throughout the country, the marriage ceremony would occur days after graduation, shortly before Joey would get on that train that would take him south to basic training, leaving behind his hometown and those last remaining fragments of his youth.

They argued with her for weeks – Roseanne’s mother more so than her father, which was no surprise considering Virginia Conte’s temper and stubbornness, both of which were famous not only within the Conte family but throughout the Italian side of their Pittsburgh neighborhood of Bloomfield. (Virginia would also occasionally – proudly – point out in accented English with some choice Italian phrases interspersed that even many of the Polish and Slav families in other parts of Bloomfield knew well enough not to provoke her anger.) Wait until the boy comes back; why not? But when it was apparent Roseanne wouldn’t reconsider, Virginia Conte’s argument quickly and bluntly degenerated into the unthinkable: Suppose he’s killed in the war? Do you want to be an eighteen- or nineteen-year old widow?

But despite a flash of Roseanne’s favorite literary heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, in much the same situation – even the same sudden widowhood that Virginia Conte direly warned of – she wasn’t to be dissuaded. Since she was already eighteen years old Roseanne no longer needed her parents’ legal permission to get married, and as much as she wanted to have their blessing she had made her mind up that if they refused to sanction this union with Joseph DeMarco, the two of them would slip away to some Justice of the Peace where they would be married anyway. She would just hope that over time, the inevitable estrangement from her family would give way. Realizing that they could do nothing to change their daughter’s mind, Salvatore and Virginia Conte finally gave in, though for the next five weeks until the wedding day Virginia fed a steady diet of biting remarks to her daughter every time the two of them engaged in any dialog, whether about the wedding or if they were simply discussing what to serve the Conte boys and men (Roseanne was the oldest child but also the Contes’ only daughter among their six children) for supper.

As much as Roseanne Conte wanted to relish this hard-fought victory over her mother, when the truce was finally declared in early May Roseanne suddenly found herself shivering with anxiety – with fear – at the thought of what she had actually won in this battle. The grown-up feeling of being engaged was nowhere to be found, and when she was honest with herself, as happened in an unguarded moment here and there, Roseanne was petrified at the thought of actually marrying Joey DeMarco. Dating him, going steady with him, necking with him…well, that was all fine and good. But my God, she had gone steady with Tony Cortese more than twice as long as the six months she had been with Joey when he asked her to marry him. Did she even know Joey DeMarco at all? And what if her mother was right after all; suppose Joey did get killed in the war; what then?

It’s too late to back out now, Roseanne told herself each time she caught her mind racing, trying to find some excuse to either prolong the engagement or perhaps even cancel the engagement altogether. Her pride wouldn’t allow her to turn around and admit to Virginia Conte that perhaps the older woman wasn’t so old-fashioned, her ideas so outdated, after all. Besides, none of Roseanne’s friends who had become engaged to their steady sweethearts around the same time that Roseanne had accepted Joey’s proposal were backing out, and none gave any indication of second thoughts.

It’s just pre-wedding butterflies, Roseanne wound up telling herself each time; just nervousness, it will disappear after we’re married.

And so graduation day came in the first week of June, and the following Saturday Salvatore Conte walked his daughter down the aisle at St. Michael’s, kissed her nervously and self-consciously on her cheek (Salvatore Conte loved his wife and his daughter and sons, but he had never been one for exhibiting any sort of affection in public), and Roseanne Conte quickly became Roseanne DeMarco.

Joey had saved up a little bit of money from the job he had held the past two years, loading boxes and doing all kinds of odd jobs down on Pittsburgh’s strip district at the J. Weisberg & Sons produce store, and he and Roseanne had originally talked about driving to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon, staying there four or even five days. However, the United States Army had other ideas and back in mid-May, Joey had received a telegram directing him to immediately get down to the recruiting office in the Oakland neighborhood to pick up his orders; he would be reporting to basic training in Mississippi the Thursday after his wedding date, which meant that he needed to be boarding a train in downtown Pittsburgh on Tuesday.

So with Niagara Falls out of the picture, the newly wedded DeMarcos’ honeymoon consisted of checking into the William Penn Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh for three nights until it was time for Joey to board his train, at which time Roseanne would simply go right back to her parents’ house on South Mathilda Street, back to her room, and...well, Roseanne wasn’t quite sure exactly what she would do, now that school was over. Her life would certainly be different (it would have to be, would it not, being done with high school and now newly married?) but she had no clue how those two apparently momentous facts would actually affect her life.

That first night at the William Penn was the first time that Joey made love to Roseanne. They had done a little bit of fooling around here and there parked in Joey’s Hudson Super Six, but she had never let him do it even after they had become engaged. Now, the long-anticipated event over quickly, Roseanne wondering to herself – but not daring to speak the words out loud – so is that it? she spent a mostly sleepless night occasionally staring at the hands on the bedside clock, listening to her new husband snore the night away, apparently pleased with himself.

The next night was much the same – one time only, enveloped in the room’s blackness; concluded quickly; and Joey soon asleep and snoring – and yet again the next night, their last night together, another near-identical repeat performance.

And then he was gone.

|         |         |

For the first two weeks, Roseanne mostly stayed around the Conte house, helping her mother with housework and errands and cooking as she had the previous summer when school let out, and the summer before that, and the summer before that one. Roseanne would go to the butcher shop over on Friendship Avenue that they favored while her mother went to the bakery on Coral Street, in the other direction; Virginia would take Salvatore’s shoes to the cobbler down the street to be resoled and reheeled, while Roseanne would go to the corner market to pick up ever-scarce grocery items with the ration coupons and stamps the government had begun issuing. Roseanne would dust the furniture downstairs, listening to the war news interspersed with more soothing music on the radio, while Virginia would scrub every inch of the bathroom upstairs. Other than her last name now legally being DeMarco instead of Conte, Roseanne’s life was remarkably unchanged despite now being a married woman.

One Friday afternoon in the last week of June, the summer heat and humidity now firmly ensconced all over the Pittsburgh area, the telephone in the Conte home rang. Roseanne, being closest to the phone, answered it and for the first time since her wedding, the phone call was for her. Connie Grassi, one of Roseanne’s friends who not only had not gotten married since graduation but who also wasn’t engaged to be married next month or next year or, for that matter, anytime in the foreseeable future, was calling to see if Roseanne wanted to go with several other single, not-engaged friends to the Crawford Grille – one of Pittsburgh’s most popular nightclubs, a place Roseanne had never been before. Benny Goodman’s orchestra was in town and appearing at the Crawford, and they could listen to the music, maybe even dance...

Roseanne found herself enthusiastically answering (actually, almost shouting) Yes! into the phone. Finally, a break from the incredibly dull routine that still hallmarked her life. Going to the Crawford Grille: a grown-up thing, the kind of thing that she had envisioned herself doing with her husband one day when she was married. Well, here she was, married, but her husband was more than a thousand miles away. For a fleeting instant she felt a tinge of guilt, heading off to the Crawford while Joey was probably crawling around under barbed wire with bullets flying over his head, or whatever they did in boot camp – Joey had taken her to several war movies earlier that year, and at least that’s what the soldiers did during boot camp in the films – but she pushed her hesitancy aside, determined that she was not going to spend the entire war, however long that might be, running errands for her mother and endlessly cleaning while she waited for her husband to come home from the war.

That night there were four of them clustered around a tiny linen-covered table, nursing their cocktails as they listened to Benny Goodman’s band’s first set. The band paused after nearly an hour for a break, and as Roseanne was getting ready to get up from the table and head to the ladies’ room, she heard Connie say There’s my cousin! Turning around and for some reason expecting to see another young woman of the same age as the four of them, Roseanne instead was surprised to see a tall, pleasantly attractive man who looked to be in his early 20s walking towards their table.

Connie introduced her cousin – Frank Donaldson, his name was, just graduated from Carnegie Tech with a degree in civil engineering – to the three girls at the table, and by the time the Benny Goodman band was ready to start their second set, Frank Donaldson was seated at the table with them, tightly squeezed between his cousin Connie on his right and Roseanne DeMarco on his left. The Crawford being as packed as it was that night – it was Benny Goodman, after all – the owners had just about covered every square inch of floorspace with tables and chairs for the large crowd. As the conversation at the table faded away when the band began playing again, Roseanne found her attention uneasily divided between the music floating towards them from the stage and her right leg pressed tightly against Frank Donaldson’s left one, neither of them making any attempt to readjust. And by the time the second set was winding down, Roseanne wasn’t even aware that she was (in sailing terms) listing to the right, her right shoulder and arm now also delightfully pressed against him…

|         |         |

The affair began three nights later and ended after two months because of the most curious set of circumstances: Joey DeMarco was coming home! The U.S. Army, still incredibly worried about German bombers sneaking up on the American east coast and wreaking havoc and destruction from the air on industrial cities like Pittsburgh that were so critical to the war effort, was placing air defense artillery batteries around the major steel mills up and down the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers. And in the wisdom of the U.S. Army, Joey DeMarco’s greatest contribution to the war effort would be as one of the soldiers manning those batteries, watching for the Luftwaffe bombers that it turned out would never come anywhere near Pittsburgh. In effect, Joey DeMarco was one of the very few lucky soldiers who would spend the entire war living in his own house (actually, his parents’ house on Pearl Street, just a couple of streets down from where the Contes lived, where he and Roseanne moved two days after his return to Pittsburgh since the DeMarcos had more room than the Contes did) and sleeping in his own bed, his wife by his side.

From the moment she learned the news – courtesy of a mid-August telegram from Joey, several weeks before he finished boot camp and was on a train back to Pittsburgh – Roseanne frantically tried to think of a way to keep her affair with Frank Donaldson going even after her husband came home. She couldn’t formulate the words, even silently in her own mind, but the horrible truth was that she didn’t love Joey DeMarco, at least not like she thought she did when she agreed to marry him only a few months earlier. She wasn’t sure if she loved Frank Donaldson or not, but was absolutely sure that whatever it was she felt for Frank it was much, much stronger than what she felt for her own husband.

But fate has a way of intervening, and a week after Roseanne received the news about Joey, Frank Donaldson told her his own bit of news: He had received his own draft notice, and by the time Labor Day rolled around, he would be on his way to Officer’s School in New Jersey after which he would be joining the Army Corps of Engineers. Building bridges and such, he began explaining to Roseanne, but she didn’t hear much of anything he told her after she realized that within weeks, Frank Donaldson would be gone, the affair over.

|         |         |

So the explanation – the justification – offered by Roseanne DeMarco’s conscience for what had happened in July and August of 1942 was always the same: She simply hadn’t felt like a married woman, and at the time making love with Frank Donaldson just didn’t seem to be a betrayal of a husband 1400 miles away, a brand new husband Roseanne DeMarco now realized she barely knew.

What, then, would be Roseanne’s explanation and justification in the years to come for what was about to begin – or, more precisely, about to resume – in the middle of June, 1951?

Chapter 1

Eat your breakfast, Roseanne DeMarco warned her three sons who, like most mornings, seemed to be doing little other than playing with their food, marking time until their mother dismissed them from the kitchen table and shooed them off to school or outside to play, whichever it would be that day. She then picked up where she had left off softly humming Tennessee Waltz along with the radio as she tried to get a jump on doing the morning dishes while the boys were still eating…or at least while their breakfast plates were still in front of them.

If their father were here at the same table with them, on this sunny late May day that was already unseasonably hot and humid despite the early morning hour, he would look up from the morning Post-Gazette and shoot them one of his patented warning glances that told his sons that they had damned well better listen to their mother, the last thing they wanted was for him to have to say anything to them. But this morning, just like every morning for the past four months, Joey DeMarco was nowhere to be found at his own kitchen table. Instead, he was half a world away, somewhere in Korea – hopefully South Korea, Roseanne prayed, not up north – and hopefully in a more or less comfortable chow hall somewhere (what time is it there right now, Roseanne wondered, never quite sure how many