The Search for Maggie Ward

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Roger. Proceed as indicated.”

  I signaled for my check. Pay for the second cup of coffee and leave.

  “Your husband in the service?”

  Startled, she glanced around, uncertain that I was speaking to her.

  “He was on the Indianapolis.”

  A sentence of death. No wonder the terrible pain in her soft blue eyes.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She nodded, accepting my sympathy. “I hope he died on the ship, before the sharks got to them.”

  “What did he do?” Navy talk to cover the awkwardness and the sorrow. Somehow my intentions became, if not completely honorable, at least more respectable than they had been.

  “Radar/tech/first. He said that electronics training”—she reached into her purse—”would guarantee a job after the war. Even better than civil service.” She opened a cheap wallet to show me his picture. A husky towhead in high school graduation pose. “He was only nineteen.”

  “Classmate?”

  “Two years ahead. I was a junior when I married him. The nuns said we were too young.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe we were. I don’t know.”

  Just barely legal age. In some states. Probably had not graduated from high school. Pregnant?

  “I’m sorry.” What else could I say?

  “What kind of plane did you fly?”

  It was my turn to be startled. How did she know that I was a pilot?

  “F6F.”

  “Hellcat. What ship?”

  “Enterprise.”

  She raised an auburn eyebrow. The Big E was a legend. “Lieutenant?”

  I spread my hands in fake humility. “Gold oak-leaf type. Silver one when my reserve term is up next year.”

  Hope that impresses you, kid.

  She smiled and Tucson disappeared for a couple of moments. “Impressive.”

  “Survival.”

  I wanted to tell her everything. She would understand. I hated the killing and the dying. I missed my friends who had crashed into the Pacific—Saipan, Leyte, Yap, all those other places that had even now blurred in my memory. But I also missed the roar of engines, the surge of power as my Grumman lifted off the deck, the sky dark with our fleets of planes, the excitement of battle, the triumph of return, the fierce yank of the arresting gear as I touched down on the deck, then the horror of counting noses and vacant bunks.

  “A trip across the country before you settle down?”

  “And begin to grow old.” Did she read minds?

  “Real old-timer.” She smiled again; her teeth were fine and even, like her delicate facial bones. She was a natural beauty, needing neither makeup nor expensive clothes to strike at your heart.

  “The war made us all grow up too soon.” I pushed aside my plate of soggy pancakes. “I wish … I don’t know what I wish.”

  “I wish,” she said as she finished her coffee, “I had my husband back.”

  “Let me buy you a real breakfast.” I stood up from the counter and walked around to the other side.

  “That isn’t necessary.” She clutched her purse. “I’m not hungry.”

  I picked up her suitcase. Heavy, probably all her worldly goods. “Yes, you are. I don’t have any … well, bad ideas.”

  I did too. Just a few minutes ago. But I’d banished them.

  She considered me very carefully, her eyes probing at my soul like a doctor’s exploring scalpel. “You do, too, Commander, but you won’t act on them, will you?”

  “Not at the breakfast table.”

  “Nor with an enlisted man’s widow. All right, sir.” Yet another smile. “I’ll admit I’m starved.”

  Four times she had read my mind. I thought it odd, but not frightening, much less dangerous. Only later would I try to fit it into the whole strange picture of Andrea King, if that really was her name.

  CHAPTER 2

  “YOU KNEW I’D ASK?” WE WERE WALKING UP SIXTH AVENUE, past the Congress Hotel. My guest thought I would take her there. I said that when I take a young woman to breakfast it was in the best hotel in town. She had flushed, her skim-milk skin turning a lovely pink.

  “I thought you might.” She smiled again—dear God, what a wonderful smile. It really does turn out the other lights.

  “You hoped I would?”

  “I told myself that I’d decline politely.”

  “I told myself that I wouldn’t ask.”

  We laughed together, as we would many times despite the turbulences of the next several days.

  “You figured out that I was a serviceman’s widow, didn’t you? That’s when you made up your mind.”

  “Eighteen is too young to be a widow.”

  “Almost nineteen.”

  “How much almost?”

  She hesitated. “Well, eight …” She paused, considering perhaps the obligations of truthfulness that the nuns had taught her. “Almost nine months.”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “Jerry Keenan.”

  “Yes, Commander, sir.”

  When the vibrations were good between us during the next few days—and sometimes they were very good—she made gentle fun of me. It was like being bathed in warm, sweet-smelling, healing water of an imaginary South Pacific.

  Had she come from San Diego? I had wondered as we left the station. Not necessarily. The Southern Pacific tracks ran in all directions outside of Tucson. And the Greyhound depot was right across Sixth Avenue.

  We turned into Congress Street, the “main” street of Tucson then, long before shopping malls, and walked by the Palace Theater, where The Lost Weekend was playing a year late. Tucson was not much more than a small town in those days, thirty thousand people. East of the railway there were blocks of adobe houses, slums for Mexicans. In the other direction stretched neat lines of bungalows with withered grass lawns—home designs transplanted from New England or the Middle West. Why would anyone want to live in this furnace? I wondered. Humid furnace at that. As I had driven in at sunrise on Highway 86, I had passed the sleepy red brick University of Arizona. It would be on the bottom of my list.

  Yet the desert mountains all around—the Catalinas looming to the north, the lofty Santa Ritas on the south, the Tanque Verdes to the east, and the Tucson Mountains to the west—held my attention: barren desert mountains, not a bit like Fuji. But American mountains, thank God. And hence dear to a man who had decided after Yap that he would never live to see America again.

  “And your name is?” I was tempted to link my arm with hers, but rejected the idea. Too soon. What would come after breakfast?

  Wait and see.

  “Do I have to tell you?” It was a factual question.

  “As a payment for breakfast? No. Certainly not.”

  “Andrea King.”

  “Lovely name. Fits somehow.”

  “Thank you.… Clever mick.”

  “The question is whether we received the Blarney stone because we needed it or deserved it.”

  “You’ve been there?” Her wondrous blue eyes widened. “Kissed it?”

  “Before the war.”

  So I had established my family as rich. Traveled to Europe during the Depression. Not Joe Kennedy rich, but still well off indeed.

  “How wonderful. On the Queen Mary?” She linked her arm with mine as though it were the most natural movement in the world. “What was it like?”

  No trace of envy. A remarkable young woman.

  “More comfortable than the Enterprise. Greta Garbo was with us—I mean, on the same crossing. Not exactly a neighbor.”

  “Wow! What was she like?”

  “Radiant.”

  “Wow!”

  I was feeling light-headed and happy. I wanted to sing.

  “Where are you from?”

  “The East. You?”

  “Chicago. Well, a suburb called River Forest. My father is a lawyer. Inherited the firm from my grandfather. I’m supposed to follow the family tradition.”

  �
�Do you want to?”

  “Mostly.”

  From the “East.” Where in the “East”? I was too busy displaying my own accomplishments to ask.

  At that age in life, my daughter the doctor informs me, the bloodstream of the human young is suddenly soaked with enormous amounts of endocrine secretions. From being incapable of reproduction only a few months or years previously, both the male and the female surge into their most fertile years. The evolutionary process has selected for those genotypes which can rapidly reproduce replacements at the earliest possible age.

  So sex is an obsession, often the only thing they can think about.

  “One may,” she continues, “deny that sexual outlet for several years and obviously do so without causing any great deal of personal harm to the individuals. The species is plastic. It can, for good and useful purposes, or sometimes not so good and useful, modify its own reproductive strategies. But one must realize that the compulsion to couple in both the physical and psychological sense is enormous.”

  “What is objectively sinful,” adds my brother the priest, “often in circumstances loses most of its malice.”

  “Sacramental marriage,” continues my son Jamie the priest, “is not merely an exchange of vows but the result of a long process of exploration and experimentation which begins long before.”

  “Kids will fuck,” I add intelligently.

  “Hush,” says my wife, laughing tolerantly at me.

  “They are under enormous biological constraint to do so, especially in times of social disorganization,” the daughter continues. “They can cause great harm to themselves because they do not have the experience or the maturity to cope with the demands of the rather intense and complex intimacy that surrounds human mating.”

  “Amen,” agrees her husband.

  “Hush,” she says.

  “I don’t notice the compulsion diminishing, do you dear?” I say to my wife.

  “Hush,” everyone says. Amid laughter.

  “Sense increases,” the wife says. “In some people.”

  So Andrea King and Jerry Keenan, strolling arm in arm under the desert sun that day in the summer of 1946, were under enormous biological constraint to couple. The loneliness they both had been experiencing and the sudden, rapturous release from that loneliness was nothing more than a biological imperative that disapproved of a young man and a young woman their age being alone. They were acting out a scene that seemed utterly unique to them even though it is a commonplace for the species.

  There were other imperatives at work, however, not biological in the ordinary sense, but profoundly sinister. Even now I’m not sure what to call them.

  We passed Steinfeld’s Department Store. She glanced in the window, reacting to a display of summer clothes the way all women do—roughly the same way a little boy reacts to a drinking fountain.

  Poor kid, she didn’t have any money to buy new clothes.

  “V-5?” she continued the conversation, asking about my navy training.

  “A year at Notre Dame. I had two years there altogether. With a little luck and some paternal clout, I can go straight into law school.”

  “Football?” She considered my six-foot-one frame carefully.

  “Only in high school. Fenwick, a Dominican place in the neighborhood.”

  “I had Dominicans too. Quarterback?”

  “Tailback. We didn’t play the T-formation.”

  “Passer?”

  “Not very good, I’m afraid.” One male of the species preening his modesty. “My brother is the athlete in the family. Basketball. He’s studying for the priesthood.”

  “How wonderful!” She sounded as if she meant it.

  “My parents think so. He’s a pretty good guy actually, for a younger brother, that is. Do you have brothers or sisters?”

  “No. Iowa preflight?”

  “Yep.” I nodded. “Then Pensacola. Carrier training back home at Glenview. Landing and taking off on a converted Great Lakes excursion ship called the Wolverine on Lake Michigan. Most dangerous landings ever.” I tried showing off my historical knowledge. “It was the excursion boat Eastland on which hundreds of people died when it tipped over in the Chicago River. I always thought it was haunted.”

  Especially the cold day in January when a flight of four Wildcats was lost in snow flurries over Lake Michigan. We were running low on fuel, but the jaygee in command insisted that we would find the Wolverine regardless. We might have made it back to Glenview and we might not. Fortunately some instinct of mine told me where the carrier was and I kind of conned the jaygee into finding it.

  We landed quick and then hightailed it off to Glenview.

  “How did you know?” one of the other ensigns asked me afterward.

  “Luck,” I said. It was a lie. I knew.

  Andrea shivered when I mentioned the Eastland.

  My historical expertise hung there in still air like a tasteless joke.

  We crossed the street at the corner of Congress and Stone and approached, somewhat warily, the very elegant Pioneer Hotel, surely the most impressive building in Tucson, a kind of vest-pocket version of the Blackstone in Chicago. Would they let us in this red brick palace with two-story arched windows above the entrance and penthouses on the top floors? She looked like an underage waif and my expensive sport jacket and slacks hadn’t been pressed in several days. I decided I would rely on my Irish smile, usually a pretty good strategy.

  “Were you in the Islands?”

  She meant the Solomon Islands campaign, a conflict in which we lost a lot of ships and a lot of air crew.

  “I arrived later, or most likely I wouldn’t be about to walk into this hotel with you.”

  “Thank God,” she said fervently, not so much in gratitude that I was there to buy her breakfast as that one life had somehow been spared.

  “I don’t believe in God,” I said, stupidly parading my atheism.

  “Really?” She seemed astonished. “Why ever not?”

  I didn’t answer her because we entered the hotel and were directed by the bell captain with notable lack of enthusiasm to the dining room, an elegant place with patterned carpets, mirrors, and sparkling white tablecloths, and a primitive but effective air conditioner puffing away.

  The elderly and very proper waitress, gray hair knotted in a severe bun, was immune to Irish charm but not to the piquant appeal of my little waif (she was lucky to measure five two). “Right this way, dear,” she said as she beamed an approving smile.

  “Thank you very much.” Andrea sounded like an obedient little girl.

  The waitress considered me again and apparently decided that I was a proper protector for my charge.

  Two things I had learned about Andrea King: people liked her instantly, and she fit into any environment, railroad station or hotel, like one who belonged.

  “This town will never amount to anything,” I proclaimed as I held the chair for her.

  “Until they put air-conditioning in every home.”

  “That will never happen.” I sat next to her and picked up the menu.

  “How can people live in brick houses in this weather?” She reached for the menu like a kid grabbing for a box of Christmas candy.

  “Did you notice the homes with the walls all around them? I suppose that’s the Spanish emphasis on privacy. You wouldn’t have to wear much behind those walls.”

  “I bet they do.” She blushed lightly and my heart beat faster.

  She ordered orange juice, bacon and eggs, pancakes, and coffee, and demolished the meal with quiet efficiency.

  “Not hungry, huh?”

  “Very hungry, Commander. Are you married?”

  Direct, right down to business. Moreover, her pale skin was a screen on which multiple shades of red played back and forth as her emotions and her intelligent, mobile features changed with them. Light pink meant enthusiasm, a darker rose indicated embarrassment (when I mentioned wearing clothes or not wearing them behind the walls), scarlet sugge
sted anger. And a faint but suggestive crimson hinted discreetly at sympathy and affection, especially when combined with a smile. I would learn during the next three days to wait desperately for that combination.

  There was no flush at all when she asked about my marital status.

  “Jerry. No.”

  “Engaged?”

  I hesitated.

  “More or less?” She smiled at me, as if to say that it was all right, she didn’t expect me to be unattached.

  “Oh, no. No prospects even. I was almost engaged once. But it didn’t work out. She’s married now.”

  “Oh.” She dug into her pancakes.

  “Grammar-school sweetheart. Her father is a partner of my father. She went to Trinity, the Dominican women’s high school in our neighborhood. We went to proms and dances together all through school. There was never anything official, but our parents were pleased. They kind of expected that we would marry.”

  She nodded above a large slab of syrup-soaked pancake. How could anyone gobble food so quickly and yet keep her dignity?

  “When I was at Pensacola we wrote back and forth, pretty intense stuff. Then, while I was doing the carrier landings out of Glenview, she gave me the ultimatum: marry before I left for the Pacific or all bets were off. She might wait and she might not.”

  “Why did you say no?” She scooped up more pancakes.

  I realized that the answer might be painful to her, but I was telling truth (and she was evading it, but I hardly realized that until later).

  “I knew about the casualty rates in air crews. I didn’t want her to be a young widow.”

  “Shouldn’t she have had the choice?” She put down the fork and watched me intently, her blue eyes probing and intelligent, a wise old woman pondering a callow lad.

  “That’s what she said. And she had a point. Our families were both in favor of marriage, although they thought we were terribly young, which we were.”

  “But you weren’t sure?”

  “I wasn’t sure. Odd, isn’t it? Parents and bride ready to take a risk. Groom being cautious and prudent?”

  “No, I don’t think it’s odd.” She returned to the pancakes, dousing them first with yet more maple syrup. “Unusual, but it looks like you’re an unusual person.… So she sent you a ‘dear John’ letter?”