The Search for Maggie Ward

by Andrew M. Greeley

  I had to put him down that way. Just as my sons would do that to me when they were the same age.

  We talked for a few more moments and then said good-bye—after I had promised Mom that I would be careful.

  I would lose my mind, I thought, living in that house again.

  I turned on the shower; the commander would not appear at the swimming pool dirty and smelly. I resolved that there would be no repetition of the scene at Gates Pass. I would not make a fool of myself either by breaking down or by making a clumsy pass.

  The former would provide only temporary relief and the latter made no sense at all. There would be no sexual play between me and Andrea King during the next twenty-four hours.

  Why that part of the resolve?

  As a novelist wrote lately, it’s not easy to stop being Catholic.

  I’m not saying it was a bad resolution. There are so many “what ifs” associated with those days that I get a headache when I try to figure them out.

  It was a naive resolution, however. It assumed (a) that the man made the decision about initiating sexual play and then the woman made the decision about whether to respond and (b) that there was nothing about me that would be profoundly appealing to a haunted kid like Andrea King.

  It turned out to be a pleasant evening, punctuated by serious but not excessively heavy talk. It would also be the end of that part of my Arizona adventure which took place in a recognizable real world.

  I walked into the swimming-pool area, a copy of the Tucson Citizen under my arm. Had to read the evening comics too.

  Andrea King was already in the pool. She was neither a strong nor a skillful swimmer, but she cut through the water with the easy and natural grace that characterized everything she did.

  I sat down in a deck chair and opened the paper, waiting eagerly for her to climb out of the pool. In a swimsuit, she would be sumptuous.

  She was even more than that. Her luscious womanly body, encased in a white, corsetlike strapless suit, demanded to be embraced and loved.

  Yet so thin and frail—slender, soft, defenseless. She also demanded to be protected.

  A hard combination to beat.

  “How many pounds underweight are you, young woman?” I demanded over the top of the Citizen comics page.

  “What happened to my Blarney stone-kissing Irishman?” She shook the water out of her tight red hair. “Is that all you can say about me?” She dived back into the water, whirled around, splashed me.

  “Hey!” I jumped up to protect my Citizen. “You soaked Pansy Yokum.”

  “Who?” She made a disgusted faced at me.

  “Li’l Abner’s mother.”

  “I am”—breathless and laughing she climbed out of the pool again—”maybe seven or eight pounds underweight, since you asked. And a few more breakfasts like this morning and the problem will be of the opposite sort.”

  “Actually you take my breath away,” I admitted, as she spread out a towel and sat on the tiles next to my chair. The loudspeaker played “Tenderly” —just for us.

  “A cliché, Commander, but thank you anyway.… This is a lovely place. So few people. Summer, I suppose. That man looked like he thought you were crazy when you insisted on separate wings.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “Not really.” She shook water out of her hair. “Reading comics?”

  “Almost illiterate.”

  “You are NOT.”

  She leaned forward, arms around her legs, tops of her wondrous breasts pushed against the swimsuit.

  “I want to live, Commander.”

  “I should hope so.” I touched her shoulder, still wet from the pool. Her fingers took possession of mine, not so much to fend them off as to hold them.

  “If I were better educated, I could say it more clearly.… Now don’t tell me I’m smart. I know that. But I’m still uneducated.… I wanted to die. I still want to die most of the time. But inside me there’s something stronger that tells me I want to live, something as powerful as the ocean or the sky.”

  “Will to live.”

  “I suppose. I’ve thought about killing myself.” Her hand relinquished mine and her fists knotted fiercely. “I’ve given up so often. John … the baby … often I think I’m dead. Maybe I am. I know I’m damned. But I can’t and I won’t die and it’s almost not up to me.… Do I make any sense?”

  “Yes.”

  What would have happened if I had taken her into my arms then? I’ll never know.

  “I won’t give up. I won’t quit.”

  “I know that.”

  So in the fading daylight, while she finished Robert Penn Warren’s book (which she had started in Tombstone), I struggled through a half-mile swim and wondered who she was.

  And why, despite living in San Diego for a couple of years, her skin was so pale.

  After I climbed out of the pool, I sat on the lounge next to her, huddling in the twilight against the rapidly cooling mountain air.

  “I suppose you’ve figured out,” she said as she closed the book, “that John and I had to get married.”

  “Yes.” With Andrea King it was best not to pretend.

  “It was only once. I don’t think either of us knew what we were doing. I certainly didn’t. My aunt was a lot older than my parents were. She didn’t tell me much.” Her head was resting on her knees, her voice calm and controlled, almost clinical. “I knew where babies came from, but I wasn’t sure, not even at sixteen, how they were conceived. I was quiet and shy, good grades but not popular; you know the kind?”

  “Sure.”

  “John was my first beau. He was shy too and very bright. We seemed a natural pair. I thought I loved him and cried myself to sleep when he left for the Navy. I was sure he’d disappear just like my parents. When he came home on leave we talked about marriage after the war. Well, he talked about it. I wasn’t sure. He wanted to do … to make love … and … well, I wasn’t even certain what he wanted to do, but I finally agreed because he seemed so desperate. I knew it was wrong, but … I didn’t think it could be terribly wrong or John wouldn’t have wanted me to do it with him.…”

  She stopped talking. A loner, innocent beyond reason, unprotected by family or teachers, an easy target for a horny kid home on leave who has been teased by his buddies because he’s still a virgin.

  “You think God holds it against you?”

  She glanced at me. “That’s not the problem.”

  I waited, wanting to strangle someone, almost anyone for this poor child’s violation.

  “It hurt and it wasn’t any fun. I don’t think that John enjoyed it much either. I tried to forget about it. Then I got sick a month later in school. One of the nuns asked me if I was pregnant. I told her I didn’t know. A lot of them didn’t like me from grammar-school days. Said I was ‘too pretty’ for my own good.…”

  “Same order in both schools?”

  “Sure, it was a parish high school. I guess they didn’t like poor kids to be too pretty. This nun that caught me being sick said, first thing, ‘It’s what we’d expect from someone like you.’ ”

  “My God!”

  “In whom you don’t believe.” She grinned ruefully. “Anyway, it was terrible. She wouldn’t even let me go back to the classroom. Sister Superior screamed at me, the Monsignor screamed at me, my aunt screamed too, my uncle beat me with his belt, John’s parents screamed. They said I was ruining their son’s life.”

  “And they all said you had to get married?”

  She nodded solemnly. “I’m sure John didn’t want to. He saw his college education being ruined. But he was afraid to disobey his father. His parents were immigrants and they were very strict.”

  “And you?”

  “Sometimes I did”—there was not a trace of a tear on her smooth cheek—”sometimes I didn’t. I had hoped for a college scholarship. I worried about the poor baby. I didn’t want her to be abandoned like I was. I knew all along it would be a girl, you see. But I didn’t know what else t
o do.”

  “And no one offered to help.”

  “No one.”

  An old story and utterly ordinary, to the point of being a cliché. And if my son the priest is to believed, not so extraordinary today. Yet when it happens to you it is not a cliché. It looks like the end of your world.

  “It was decided by everyone, mostly by the Monsignor, that I would continue to live with my aunt until the war was over. But my uncle dug in his heels. He would not tolerate a public sinner in his house. So the Monsignor said I would have to live with John’s parents.”

  “Good God!”

  “Can’t help yourself, can you? Well, that would have been terrible. So I became stubborn for the first time in my life. I told them all that I would not move in with John’s parents. If he wanted to marry me, he’d have to take me with him to California. He didn’t want to because by now he was so ashamed that he hated me—everyone blamed me. He was a fine young man who had been tricked by a cheap whore—that’s what the Monsignor told his father. So I said, ‘Okay, we won’t be married and you can put me in a home somewhere.’ ”

  Which would not have been a bad idea.

  “So they all backed down.”

  “I won and it made them hate me even more. But, funny thing, once we had settled in San Diego, John and I got along reasonably well most of the time. We were on our own, but we were never lonely. He said to me one night, ‘Do you miss home?’ ”

  “I hadn’t thought about it much. So I said, ‘I guess not.’ ”

  “ ‘Me neither,’ he said, and sort of laughed. ‘I guess we’re free of them all.’ I really loved him deeply that night.”

  But he would have had to return home after the war. We all do.

  “It would have been hard, I suppose,” she continued, “as the years went on and we’d blame each other for the chances we’d lost. Still, we were happy for a little while.”

  I took her hand and kissed it.

  “Pretty cheap, commonplace little story, isn’t it?”

  “You are not a cheap, commonplace, or little person, Andrea King.”

  “Five feet three … well … two and a half.” She giggled and pulled her hand away. “I’m getting cold and you’re turning blue.”

  I helped her out of the chaise lounge. “Let’s go see about that seven or eight pounds.”

  “Thanks for listening. I don’t know why I had to explain.…”

  “As I learned this afternoon,” I said, opening the door to the corridor of the inn, “it’s good to be able to talk.”

  “Even to strangers?”

  “Especially to strangers.” I brushed my lips against her forehead at the door to her room, swearing to myself that I would never violate her like that fat little son of a bitch had violated her.

  In retrospect, I’m more charitable about him. A lonely, sensitive, and isolated young woman can send out signals of invitation to intimacy that are perfectly innocent to her but which an almost innocent young man might interpret very differently. John King, poor slob, might well have been able to convince himself that he had been seduced.

  Which doesn’t justify what he did. It does, however, make it a little more understandable.

  Walking back to my room that night at the Arizona Inn, caught up in conflicting passions that would soon run completely out of control, I wanted to tear someone apart for what had been done to Andrea King.

  No wonder she thinks You hate her, I informed the God in whom I did not believe. You’re a worse bastard than that fat uncle and fat priest.

  The deity in whom I did not believe did not deign to match me insult for insult.

  The intelligence officer in the back of my head, assuring me that he was not necessarily in the employment of the rejected deity, pointed out that there were a number of holes in the story about which I ought to seek answers. I didn’t pay any attention to him.

  At supper she wore a sleeveless white dress, matching white shoes, nylons, and a tiny gold cross at her neck. There was, I suspected, an iron buried in her cardboard luggage.

  The wedding band was still on her finger.

  We ate steak and pan fried potatoes and drank red wine and laughed like two people who are falling in love ought to laugh. I have no recollection of what we said at dinner, so it could not have been of any moment. She was, I thought, a charming dinner companion. Moreover, she would be a charming dinner companion on the Queen Mary or in the best restaurants and hotels in the world. I had no intention of bringing her home for the Butterfield Harvest Festival Dance, but she would be the center of attraction if I did. Andrea King was the kind of woman, I told myself confidently, who would be the center of attraction in any group in the world.

  And she was entitled to expensive clothes and costly jewels and wealthy suitors and brilliant orchestras and elaborate backdrops for her beauty and charm.

  I think I told her that after my last gulp of wine. I think she laughed at me, but she wasn’t offended. And possibly not even surprised.

  I don’t think I promised her that I would deliver all these commodities to her, all but the other suitors. But one part of me certainly intended to do just that.

  As best as I can recall those magic moments, she struck me as a dazzling blend of wide-eyed, naive child who required me as a teacher and a protector, and a mature and sophisticated woman of the world at whose feet I could learn for the rest of my life.

  It was not, even from the hindsight of forty years, necessarily an inaccurate evaluation. My resident CIC was inclined to agree, though he observed that such a woman was not necessarily the kind with whom I could live for very long.

  I told him that I certainly could and that I had about made up my mind—after fifteen hours—that she was the woman for me.

  But she was still scary, otherworldly and, at the same time, too much this-worldly for me.

  In her white dress she seemed innocent, virginal. Innocent she might be, but virginal she was not. She had slept with a husband, conceived and carried for a time a child, suffered twin losses. And was afraid of demons I did not understand.

  And on any bed of love, I would be the novice and she would be the novice mistress, I the virgin and she the experienced expert, I the student and she the teacher.

  That was arousing in a perverse sort of way, but also terrifying.

  What, I wondered, as we ordered our dessert, would that be like? I might once again make a total fool out of myself. Or I might have the time of my life.

  I do remember the conversation over our chocolate ice cream sundaes.

  “I think, Andrea King, that God sent me to take care of you.”

  The big spoonful of chocolate-drenched ice cream stopped in midflight and then returned to its goblet.

  “It is not true.” Her lips, normally generous, narrowed into a thin hard line. “I don’t want to hear it ever again.”

  “I’m sorry if I made you angry.”

  “It is not true.” Hands pressed together on her lap, she pushed her chair back from the table. “God did not send you.”

  Unaccountably she was furious.

  “If you say so …”

  “Maybe”—the steam seemed to hiss out of her anger—”I’m the one who was sent.”

  “I’ll gladly agree to that.” I reached for one of her hands.

  “And maybe,” she said as she pulled the hand away, “God shouldn’t be blamed for that. Maybe someone else sent me.”

  CHAPTER 6

  “WHO DO YOU THINK SENT YOU?”

  There was an awkward pause. She was still angry but beginning to regret her outburst. I was baffled.

  “I’m sorry, Jerry. I have an Irish temper.”

  “Too.”

  “ ‘Too’ or ‘two’?” She began to smile that wondrous, magic, light-extinguishing smile.

  “Both. Don’t let your ice cream melt. It’s worth at least a half pound in our fattening program.”

  She laughed happily. “You’re wonderful, Commander.”


  “When you smile at me that way, I think so too.”

  “Irish.” She dug into the sundae with renewed vigor. “You’re incorrigibly Irish.”

  “You deserve the best, Andrea King.”

  “The best?”

  “Clothes, homes, food, drink”—I filled her wineglass again—”cars, jewelry, children, lovers, everything.”

  “You said that before, but tell me why?”

  “As a setting for your beauty.”

  “That only earns you something if you’re willing to sell yourself. I’m not.”

  “I don’t mean economically.” The drink, as my mother would say, had loosened my tongue. “I mean artistically. Your smile lights up the world. Even your temper tantrums—which, candidly, scare the hell out of me—are irresistible.”

  “If I were better educated …”

  “You would agree with me completely.”

  We laughed together and the world seemed right in a way it hadn’t been since St. Luke’s won the West Suburban Grammar School basketball championship ten years before.

  After dinner we sat alone on the terrace, in the still, dark night, and sipped tea (“Earl Grey is my favorite,” she told me with happy round eyes)—and Napoleon Special Reserve brandy. I was happily in love, fantasizing about the look on the face of Barbara Conroy when I appeared with Andrea.

  Her hand touched mine and remained there, not holding it exactly but not about to let it get away either.

  “Can we talk about God once more?”

  “If you want.” I sighed.

  “You have to promise not to lose your temper.”

  “You’re the one who lost it the last time.”

  “You’re losing it already, Commander. Drink some more of this terrible, wicked liquor with which you’re trying to seduce me.” She drained her own brandy glass and winked at the waiter, who, like everyone else so far during the day, hardly noticed me when Andrea was present.

  “I’ll promise on one condition.”

  “Well,” she said skeptically.

  “I have permission to ask one question at the end.”

  “Just one.”

  “All right, I promise.”

  “Well.” She took a deep breath. “I want you to believe in God.”