“I can’t call it that. She made it clear that she considered herself free.”
“And you were unhappy at first, but not anymore?”
“I had dinner with Barbara and her husband—a supply officer from the ETO—when I was home last. They already have two kids. I feel like a pilot who found his carrier just before dark. A close call. I mean, she’s a wonderful woman. But she doesn’t want the same things out of life that I do.”
“And what do you want out of life, Commander Jeremiah Keenan, USNR?” Her eyes twinkled with amusement.
“I don’t know, Andrea King.” I leaned back and sighed. “I haven’t the faintest idea. I know only what I don’t want.”
“And that is …” She nodded for more coffee to the elderly waitress, who doted on her like a loving mother. “Thank you very much.”
“What Barbara and her husband already have … that doesn’t make much sense, does it? I suppose I mean a dull, ordinary life. Maybe I’m a kind of Don Quixote … I don’t know.”
“Searching for windmills?” Her voice, light and musical, hinted at both amusement and sympathy. I was too elated with the self-disclosure (as I would call it now, having learned the phrase from my wife and kids) of the conversation to notice how much progress I had made with her. Already she felt sorry for me. “And Dulcinea?”
“Especially Dulcinea!”
We laughed together and she smiled and all the other lights went out again and I was hopelessly in love.
“How can you not believe in God?” She was deadly serious now. “Aren’t you afraid of Him?”
“How can you believe in Him?” I was serious too. “He took your husband away from you, didn’t he?”
She put down her coffee cup. “Maybe”—she would not look at me—”I deserved to be punished. Maybe I wasn’t good enough for him.”
“You want to believe in a God who plays tricks like that?”
“I often wish I could not believe in Him,” she whispered, bowing her head, “then I would not have to be afraid. I …”
“Yes?” I snapped.
“Well.” She stumbled over the words. “I wouldn’t have to live suspended between earth and hell.”
Those were her exact words. I felt a tremor of ice slip through my body. A touch of the uncanny.
“That’s an odd thing to say.”
“Is it?” Her eyes were cold now. Glacial and hard.
“I mean”—it was my turn to grope for words—”shouldn’t you say ‘between heaven and hell’?”
“Should I?”
“Everyone has a chance at heaven.… I mean, that’s what the priests and nuns taught me in school.”
“Did they?”
“You’re not damned until you die. If you believe in God, that is, you believe that you have chances for forgiveness up to the last second of your life, don’t you?”
“Do you?”
An exchange like that certainly extinguishes the fires of passion in a hurry. So I changed the subject.
“You haven’t said much about your family.”
“There’s not much to say.”
“Say what there is to say.”
“I don’t really have a family.” She moved her coffee cup around in a little circle in its saucer. “I was raised by my mother’s sister and brother-in-law—my aunt and uncle. Mom died of TB when I was a little girl. Dad … he sort of disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
She nodded. “Became a hobo, I guess. He was … is … I don’t know … a lawyer, like your father. He couldn’t find work during the Depression. After Mom died he must have given up hope.”
“You think he’s dead too?”
“I’m not sure.” She hesitated, her eyes narrowing in pensive calculation of the odds. “Maybe. Maybe not. I hope not … sometimes I think he’ll reappear tomorrow and I’ll be happy again like I was when I was a little girl.”
“And you still believe in God?”
“Oh, yes. I have no choice.” She made a mark on the tablecloth with her knife. “No choice at all.”
“I don’t want to argue theology with you, Andrea King,” I said cautiously.
“No arguments.” She put the knife down. “Just tell me your reasons and I’ll drop the subject.”
“I’ve killed a lot of people in the war. Hundreds, maybe even thousands.…”
“Thousands?”
“In a way. Some of them were enemies. Young men my age. Probably a couple of them planned to return home and be lawyers with their father, just like I do. Why am I alive while they are dead?”
“War …”
“Why does your God permit war? And why does He grant me life when so many of my friends had to die? More than half my class from Pensacola are dead, many of them, the majority, I think, in accidents—crash landings, splashing after takeoff, running out of gas, engine failures. The Japs didn’t kill them.” I was shouting at her now and the waitress was glaring at me. “We didn’t kill them. God killed them!”
“We all die sometime.…”
“But you and I have a chance to live out our lives. They didn’t.”
“Do we?”
I ignored her question. “It isn’t fair. A God who isn’t fair is no God at all.”
“Do you mean”—she leaned forward, reminding me of my father in the middle of a legal argument—”that you don’t believe in God because He is unfair? Then He really exists, but you don’t like Him?”
“If He really exists”—I was confused by her argument—”He’s not worth believing in. So His existence is irrelevant.”
She nodded again. “How often I have wished that I could feel the same way.”
It was an invitation to probe, which I foolishly rejected.
“God is a murderer!” I pounded the table. “He ought to be put to death in the electric chair!”
She pulled back, now genuinely frightened of my anger.
So was I. Frightened and astonished.
“Sorry, Andrea.” I used words that both of us would repeat often in the next few days. “My mother, who is a wonderful, dear, understanding woman, says I’m having trouble readjusting. I think she read the word in a magazine somewhere.”
“I’d say your mother is right.” She touched my hand. “It’s okay.”
“I didn’t buy you breakfast,” I said, holding her hand momentarily, “to make you an audience for my atheist harangue. You do make a pretty audience, though.”
“Thank you. I don’t feel harangued. But I do understand why you’re driving around the country before you return home. Where are you going next?”
Had I told her about my tour, my windmill-hunting, Dulcinea-seeking tour? I couldn’t remember that I had.
“Down to Colossal Cave and over to Tombstone, then up to Phoenix, probably by way of Superstition Mountains.”
“What are those?”
“Where the Lost Dutchman Mine is supposed to be. I’m curious.”
“Yes. I know. Is that any relation to the Flying Dutchman?”
“Who’s he?”
“An opera about a sea captain who is doomed to roam the world forever without ever finding port.”
“I don’t know much about opera.”
But she did. And she hadn’t graduated from high school. How had she learned so much?
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Phoenix. I know someone who thinks she can find me a job. Waiting on tables in one of the winter resorts. They call it the Arizona Biltmore.”
“Can I give you a ride?”
“I don’t think …” She drifted off, considered me again, even more cautiously, over a fork of syrup-drenched pancake. “That would be very nice. I don’t have much money.”
I was not a total innocent. I asked about insurance and a pension. But the Navy Department was slow. She’d run out of the money she’d saved from John’s family allowance, which had been sent routinely while he was still alive.
I didn’t pry. It was none of my bu
siness why she had left San Diego or why she had been unable to find a job there.
A thin but not improbable story. I was not inclined to question it. An hour before I’d been an ex-naval officer struggling with depression and wondering what point there could be in the rest of my life. Now I had a beautiful young woman to protect and care for.
At almost twenty-four that is enough. Even if the young woman is smarter than she has any right to be.
And even if there is something just a little strange, almost uncanny about her.
That was the right word. Uncanny. Andrea King was not quite of this world. In the back of my head even then I think I knew that. I did not want to pay any attention to what I knew.
No, she didn’t mind if we detoured to the Cave and Tombstone before driving up to Phoenix. The job, she had been told, was waiting for her whenever she came. Thank you very much for breakfast.
I glanced at the Arizona Daily Star on the newsstand in the hotel lobby, SEVENTY-SIX DIE IN JERUSALEM HOTEL BLAST! I bought the paper. Zionist terrorists had blown up the King David Hotel. I no longer asked when the killing would finally stop. I knew it would never stop. Damn God.
I bought the Star and Time and Life (the latter two cost fifteen cents), even though they were banned at my parents’ house because of what my father claimed was their anti-Truman bias. Vivien Leigh, hauntingly lovely, poor woman, was on the cover of Life for her film Caesar and Cleopatra with Claude Rains. Salazar of Portugal was on the cover of Time.
We walked up Stone toward Toole Street, paper and magazines under my arm; her quick eyes were drinking in everything about this sleepy little city.
“Is this the place where the movie was made?”
“You mean My Darling Clementine?”
“I loved it.”
“The yards down the street next to the station are the spot where Wyatt—Henry Fonda—and Doc Holliday—Victor Mature—caught up with Frank Stilwell, the man who shot Morgan Earp. He was a deputy in Cochise County and under indictment here in Pima County for cattle rustling. It was pretty hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys in those days.”
“Really?”
By unspoken agreement we had paused at the corner of Toole and Fourth while I gave my Tombstone lecture. It was made more memorable because of what looked like admiration in her gentle blue eyes.
“You see, in the real world, Wyatt had taken a woman away from Johnny Behan, the sheriff at Tombstone—Cathy Downs in the movie. So Behan came over one night to beat up on Wyatt and instead was worked over by Morgan Earp. Then Behan arranged to have his deputy, Frank Stilwell, kill Morgan. Doc Holliday was even closer to Morgan Earp than Wyatt was. So Doc got liquored up, as they say, and went gunning for Johnny. Wyatt had to stop him because they really didn’t have enough evidence to kill a sheriff. Then, when they brought Morgan’s body into the station here on the train from Tombstone to ship back home to California, they caught Frank skulking around the yards, perhaps with instructions to kill Doc. They both emptied their guns into him. Which was safe here in Pima County because he was a wanted outlaw here.”
“How terrible!”
“The Wild West was not a nice place. And it was not so long ago. Josie Earp, Wyatt’s wife—she started out as Josie Marcus, a rich Jewish kid in San Francisco, and ended up as a high class prostitute in Tombstone before she linked up with Behan and then Wyatt—died only two years ago. Same for General Custer’s widow. Doc Holiday died of TB, as you know, and became a Catholic at the last minute in response to the prayers of his cousin, who was a Sister of Charity and the only woman he really loved—not Linda Darnell like in the film.”
“Do you know everything?”
Definitely admiration, almost awe. My face was pleasantly warm.
“I saw the earlier film, Frontier Marshal with Randolph Scott and Cesar Romero—you know, the Cisco Kid—on the carrier. And there was one in the early thirties called Law and Order with Walter Huston. There isn’t much to do in an air crew when you’re not flying and if you don’t like to play cards. So I did a lot of reading on the American West. That’s why I’m going to Tombstone.”
End of lecture, but not end of admiration.
“How wonderful. But why?”
“I want to know more about my country.” We started to walk toward my car again. “And it’s something to do.”
“I see.”
“You think I’m crazy.”
“No, not at all. Just different … Why did they give you the Navy Cross?”
The humidity had already laid a thick soggy curtain on Toole Street.
“Philippine Sea. I saved some TBF pilots that were in trouble.”
“Does that help your conscience?”
“Some American women are not widows—if the TBF men made it through the rest of the war. Some Japanese women are.”
Immediately I regretted the harshness of my reply. It did not, however, seem to bother her.
“We didn’t start the war.”
We turned down Toole, almost as though she knew where my 1939 Chevy ($799 FOB Detroit) was parked.
There were three million autos in America at the end of the war. Now, a year later, there were six million. That said a lot about 1946.
“How did you know I got the Navy Cross?”
“I guess”—she tilted her head to glance at me ruefully—”that I’m a pretty good guesser.”
She stopped next to a battered blue car before I did. “Roxinante?”
“Damn good guesser.” My beloved Chevy, the first car of my very own, was a humpback bug, longer and less appealing than the later VWs. Kids today don’t fall in love with their first cars the way my generation did.
“Only car on the street.” She laughed, a pure, open laugh which hinted that long ago she might have been the life of the sophomore hops at her high school.
A long, long time ago.
“Yeah, but you knew the street.”
She laughed again and waited till I opened the door for her. “Thank you. Yes, I’m a very good guesser. It scared the nuns at my school.”
“I bet it did, Dulcinea.” I bowed her into the car, noted that she had excellent legs, accepted her smile as a reward for my courtesy, and staggered, I think, around to the driver’s side of the car.
Nuns, I thought. Catholic high school. I bet they expelled her when they found out she was married. Pregnant? Lost a child?
I rolled down the window of the Chevy and turned to the sports section.
“Do you mind if I catch up on the news?” I had already buried my head in the paper. The Cubs had lost again. A long way down from the World Series last year.
“The schedule is up to the tour guide.”
“Hmn …” Maybe the Bears would redeem the year.
Then the comics. Terry and the Pirates, Smilin’ Jack, Dick Tracy.
I looked up. Andrea was smiling at me, a mother watching a funny little baby. Navy Cross and Smilin’ Jack. I suppose I was funny.
Her smile quickly faded. “I had a miscarriage after John sailed. I don’t know whether my letter ever caught up with him. I hope it didn’t.”
She was replying to the thought I had had as I’d walked around the car, several minutes before. I ought to have worried about that, but she was so fragile and sweet that I couldn’t have been afraid of her. Not then anyway.
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded again.
“Does God provide, Andrea?” I asked weakly.
“It’s not God I’m worried about.”
CHAPTER 3
DO YOU REMEMBER 1946?
Chances are pretty good that you weren’t even around then. It was a big turning point for America; how big is hard to explain unless you were alive before then.
The Depression didn’t return.
We started on a roll of prosperity that has gone on, with some ups and downs, without interruption for forty years. Despite inflation, real income (real standard of living) has doubled at least twice since 1946. Not ever
yone has benefited equally or all the time. But unemployment has never gone beyond 8 percent. It was 25 percent during the Depression.
In 1946 we began to draw the outline of the matrix for permanent prosperity.
None of us knew that then. Most of us expected the Depression to come back. But in that first postwar summer, all who could were treating themselves to a vacation, maybe the first in ten years, and maybe, we thought, the last for the next ten years.
There were still shortages—cars, soda pop, tires, roads, summer-resort rooms, meat (especially meat) were all in short supply for our vacations. We grumbled about the difficulties of finding a new house or buying a new Philco radio or installing a new phone or having a new refrigerator delivered.
We blamed it, not unreasonably, on the government and contended that the only reason those idiots had won the war was that the leaders on the other side were dumber.
There were four big news items that summer, only one of which mattered to us—OPA, Office of Price Administration. We were of mixed mind about OPA, we resented the vast, incomprehensible, and seemingly inequitable structure of its rules; we blamed it for shortages; and we also feared that if it should die, prices would skyrocket. So President Truman was blamed both for sustaining OPA and for not eliminating it.
The Luce magazines, that very day I was indulging in delicious fantasies about the nubile body of Andrea King, were having a field day, coming at poor Truman from both sides. He was an incompetent bungler who was to blame for the failure of OPA and also for its demise. Life said that there was no great cause for alarm so long as Americans restrained their impulse to purchase the things they wanted.
That was, looking back on it, the worst possible advice. If the flood of consumer demands was not released, production would slump and we would indeed crash back into a depression. Fortunately no one paid any attention to Mr. Luce. Americans were no longer as poor as they had been in 1939. Most of them were making good money, and many had considerable savings from the war years. So we went on a buying binge and caused prices to skyrocket and, happily, production to do the same thing. The surge in production and jobs more than canceled out any negative effects on the standard of living that inflation might have caused.
The Search for Maggie Ward Page 3