“And on the USS Wolverine on Lake Michigan.”
“Don’t mention that scow.”
I was pretty sure I hadn’t told her the name of the half-assed carrier on which we practiced landings on flights from Glenview. Moreover, I wasn’t thinking about it then. She must have recorded it from an earlier examination of my memory. She had a good filing system. Still maybe I had mentioned it to her after all. Maybe it was merely a case of a better memory of what I had said than I had.
“Furthermore,” she said as she stared at the piece of toast in her fingers, “the captain of his ship even holds bitchy, weepy women in his arms most of the night, even after they reject and hurt him.”
“You seemed to sleep well in that location.”
“Oh, yes.” She glanced at me nervously and then returned to her toast. “It was a very restful position. I could use four or five more hours.… Are we reconciled?” I felt her fingers on mine. Her eyes filled with tears.
“I am. I was last night.”
“If you are, I am … I …”
Instead of crying, she laughed at me.
And wiped her eyes with tissue.
After breakfast, we walked, at her suggestion, along Broad Street: past a two-story, brick Masonic temple down the street from the hotel; a depressing department store next to it; a stone county courthouse that you could have found in almost any town west of the Alleghenies; an old Southern Pacific station farther down.
“I could put you on the train to Phoenix.…”
“Certainly not,” she snapped. Then she asked, “I should wear slacks today instead of shorts? If feels like it will be the hottest day yet.”
“Might be a good idea. Rattlesnakes.”
“On this tour?”
“Can’t promise them, but we’ll try. It will be hot all right, but you’d better leave on the slacks, much as I like admiring your legs when you wear shorts.”
It was, after all, only a mildly suggestive comment. I was not hoping for a response and I did not get one. Instead there was a long period of silence as we stared thoughtfully at the SP station. I tried to break it.
“It would be horrible to live in a place like this, wouldn’t it?”
“Do you really think so?” She wandered over to the schedule board on the station. “You couldn’t put me on the train to Phoenix because there isn’t one. I could go to Bowie and from there to El Paso.”
“El Paso?”
“That’s in Texas, isn’t it?”
“West Texas, it’s still a long way. Do you want to go there?”
“No. I was trying to make an early-morning joke. I guess it wasn’t very funny.”
Across from the station, at the top of high steps, was a squat but quaintly attractive Romanesque church—Our Lady of the Angels.
“Can we go in?” She nodded toward the church.
“Why not?”
“I haven’t been to Mass since my husband’s death.”
“Really? You miss Mass on Sunday? God won’t like that.”
“God won’t care if He never sees me again.”
We hiked up the steep stairs, pushed open the heavy door and entered the church. It was like entering a different world, timeless, immutable, patient, confident—a world that would vanish in the middle nineteen sixties, to be replaced by a more interesting but less reassuring Church.
An old priest was finishing Mass, polishing the chalice after Communion. There were twenty or thirty people scattered in the pews. The inside was modest but tasteful. Some of the names in the stained-glass windows suggested a Czech past, but the priest’s Latin did not hide his Irish brogue.
I stood at the back while she kneeled in one of the pews and, as she had in the Saint Xavier Mission, bowed her head in what seemed to be desperate prayer.
“Were your prayers heard?” I asked as we walked back down the steps.
“No.”
That was that.
The old priest was standing on the street corner in front of the tiny white rectory next to the church. He saw us and strolled over.
“Sure, if I knew we were going to be after having visitors, wouldn’t I have started a few minutes later so you could have received Communion?”
“Would you have?” I said, playing the rules of answering a question by asking one.
“Would I not?”
He chatted pleasantly for a few minutes, asking where we were from and where we were going and, convinced that we were on our honeymoon, cheerfully wishing us a lifetime of blessings. “May God be with you on your way, and may you live to see your children’s grandchildren.”
“At least,” said I.
“Wasn’t I after meaning that?” said he with a wink. “And won’t you be living at least that long with such a fine woman as herself here to take care of you?”
Andrea hung back from the conversation, apparently afraid of the kindly old man.
“Why didn’t you talk to the poor man?” I asked as we walked back to the hotel.
“Where I grew up, priests never stand in front of the church to talk to the people. The sisters said that Protestant ministers did that.”
“Well, I guess that makes us Protestant in Chicago. Packy, my brother the seminarian, says all you have to do to be a good priest is preach a decent sermon, stand in front of the church and smile, and be nice to kids.”
“Where I grew up, priests didn’t do any of those things.”
“You’ll have to try Chicago Catholicism.”
She ignored, rather pointedly, my suggestion.
“Why should a priest talk to someone who is already damned?”
“If I believed in God, I know He wouldn’t damn you.”
“I wish I could escape from believing in Him.”
“The friars taught us in high school that no one is damned till the end of their life. You’re still alive. So you’re not damned.”
“Oh?”
“Don’t give me that elusive ‘oh’ of yours, Andrea King.” I was suddenly furious at her. “I do have some rights with you now, you know.” She opened her mouth and I put my hand over it. “Would you just shut up for a second, please? We’ll leave the nature and extent of those rights for another discussion.” I was warming up again for the jury. “I’m fed up with this divine-rejection theme of yours. You’re not entitled to think that you’re a great sinner or that you have somehow committed a sin against the Holy Spirit, whatever that is.” Ah, her eyes bulged; I’d hit home.
She tried to free her mouth to speak. I clamped my hand on the back of her head, paying no heed to the possibility that the natives might think I was engaged in some odd form of sexual perversity.
“Shut up, would you ever, for a minute? Forget your Irish and listen till I’m finished.” She stopped fighting. I searched for a summation. You must not keep a jury waiting. “If there is a God, He feels about you the same way I do. He adores you. He’s crazy-mad in love with you. He can hardly wait to get your clothes off and get into bed with you. He wants to play with you, kiss you, bury himself inside of you.” Not bad for a spur-of-the-moment argument, huh? “He’ll put up with holding you in His arms if that’s all He can get. And don’t tell me that God isn’t that way, because, whatever the nuns may have told you in that creepy place you were raised, that’s what Jesus told us about God.”
I removed my hand from her mouth, because I knew she’d listen now. I continued, however, to restrain the back of her red-haloed head because that was fun.
“I don’t doubt God’s love. I doubt his power. What’s the point in having a God if He can’t prevent the bad things from happening? But I’d never for a moment doubt that He wants to prevent them. The God in whom you believe is a terrible God. He doesn’t love you, which is bad taste, since He made you so lovable. The God who may exist for me is a sweet, nice old God who means well and thinks you’re irresistible. Now, Andrea King, you go back to our chaste bedroom in the Dominion Hotel and take out the Gideon Bible in the drawer of the dresser—if
you’re damned anyway, you won’t go much deeper into hell for reading a Protestant Bible—and ask which God is the one Jesus talks about in the Gospels: your powerful God who hates or my sometimes weak God who loves.”
Now very angry at her, I grasped her thin shoulders and began to shake her.
“If God has anything to say about the rest of your life, it will be happy …”
“You’re hurting me!”
“I am not hurting you,” I shouted. “I am shaking you. There’s a big difference. And I’m shaking you because God, if He exists, wants to shake you too, you stupid, damn-fool little bitch. Then He wants to absorb you in his love just like I do. You’re an idiot for believing anything else.”
Not a bad final argument, huh? For the spur of the moment? So good I had begun to persuade myself. I guess I started to believe again at that moment on Broad Street in Globe, Arizona, on July 26, 1946. Tentatively. Or maybe to realize that I had never stopped, could never stop believing.
“What’s God like? He’s like me, you gorgeous little nitwit—loving, inept, and dumb. Run from that if you want, but don’t make up an imaginary hanging judge who won’t give you a second chance.”
Loving, inept, and dumb—that was the God into a belief in whose existence I had talked myself. Tentatively. When I read over my journal, written up several days later, and see that line, I have this hilarious and not altogether irreverent image of a deep basso voice from heaven saying, “Dumb I may be, buster, but not as dumb as you.”
If You’re thinking that, touché.
“If only I could …” she began.
“If only you would. Just keep this in your thick little skull: the God Jesus talked about is not interested in damning you. He’s like me—say that over and over—and right now He wants to do the divine equivalent of finding a quiet corner somewhere, taking off your clothes and making love to you all day long. And into the night. Any other God is a faker.”
“If He feels that way about me, why did He let my daughter die?” She clenched her fists, angry at the traitor God.
“Hey, I don’t believe in Him.”
“You’re talking yourself into it.”
Dear God, if you are there at all, do you look at me with a similar magic smile?
“All I can say is that He has to have loved your daughter too, and that, as best He can—inept, dumb, and loving, maybe—He’ll take care of her too.” Then I remembered a sermon I’d heard at Easter from a young chaplain. “As best He can, He wants to wipe away all our tears so that we will all be young again and all laugh again.”
“You should be a priest.”
“I doubt it. Have I convinced you that whatever you’ve done wrong or think you’ve done wrong, you have a second chance?”
She tilted her jaw stubbornly up. “Some people don’t deserve second chances.”
“No one deserves a second chance.” I grabbed her shoulders and shook her again. “ ‘Deserve’ isn’t the point. Lovers give second and third and fourth chances because they can’t help themselves.”
Now that’s a theological observation of which I’m proud even today.
“You’ve given me a lot to think about.” She was both agitated and miserable, her eyes darting back and forth, her fingers jerking anxiously. “If you’re right … If only … I don’t know, Jerry. It would be wonderful if you’re right.”
“I’m rarely wrong. Come on, pretty lady, let’s get this Apache Trail out of the way.”
The argument—no, my sermon—was over. I had accomplished two things for myself. I had veered back toward God—on my terms but in my hypothesis that was all right. Lovers don’t give a damn about terms. And I had told my “bride” of the day before that I loved her. Obscurely and indirectly, but she was too smart to have missed it.
Was she happy to hear it? Hard to tell.
But we did walk back down Broad Street to the Dominion hand in hand.
“Are you packed, Dulci?” I asked her when we came up to the faithfully waiting Roxinante.
“Ready to go.”
“I’ll bring down your luggage and you see the folks in the kitchen about water and ice for these thermoses.”
“Yes sir, Commander, sir.”
“I thought I was a captain?”
“Only on board ship.”
Our room was already stifling. Better face the heat in the great outdoors than in this place.
Her bag was packed and on the bed. The room was as neat as it could be. Her compulsion for order was impressive.
Then I saw my journal on the dresser top where I had left it the night before. Dumb.
I’d lost portions of it before and had to do all the work of filling it out again. Talk about compulsions. This notebook had only a couple of weeks of my raw memories. But they were interesting memories and it would not do to lose them.
I opened the journal and glanced at the last page. There was an entry in someone else’s handwriting, neat Catholic-school Palmer Method:
“I haven’t looked at any of the other pages. I hate you, Jerry Keenan. I had given up all hope and you’ve driven me to hope for hope. I had believed that love was impossible and you’ve made me want to love again.”
That’s all.
That short paragraph is in front of me now, on my Wilson Jones copyholder, mute testimony that at least some of my Quixotic and bumbling search for the grail forty years ago was not just a dream.
I paid our bill with the remnants of the two one hundred dollar bills that I had broken in Tucson and Superior. I had a $1.40 and eight new hundreds.
Three nights for two people, two of the nights in excellent hotels, for less than two hundred dollars. My children and grandchildren will no more believe that than they will believe that I purchased poor old Roxy for a hundred and twenty-five dollars and that brand-new the Chevy had cost $699 FOB Detroit.
I put Andrea’s trunk and my journal in the backseat, climbed into the driver’s seat of Roxy and reached for the manual clutch. I wanted to say something about her entry in my diary, but my muse had overworked in front of Our Lady of the Angels and was now sleeping somewhere in the inner recesses of my brain.
I did notice that another button was open on her blouse, a signal surely. As my wife later remarked apropos of another woman, rarely does something come unbuttoned by chance. There’s usually a message, only the message changes, even with the same person.
So I said nothing about my journal and her button, and she asked nothing about the journal. I started the car, backed up, turned around, and started down the road to Miami, the Superstitions, and Phoenix. Just short of the town, we turned off US 60 and down the unpaved tracks of Arizona 88 toward Roosevelt Lake and the “back door” to the Superstition Range.
“More dirt roads?”
“That’s all there is up here.”
“If I had not packed my rosary, I’d say it.”
“Not much confidence in the captain. Count it on your fingers. Quietly. I may need prayers, but I don’t need distractions.”
In response she kissed my cheek. Lightly, but that was enough. Even forty years later that kiss still stands out as the happiest moment in the trip.
CHAPTER 16
“IF I WEREN‘T TRAVELING WITH SUCH A LITERATE WOMAN, I’d say that the ride from Globe down Pinal Creek Canyon was like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. But with you I’ll say it’s like descending from the hills of purgatory to the valleys of hell.”
“If you believe Dante, the bottom of hell is ice.”
“You’ve read the Divine Comedy?”
“Certainly, although my nuns thought part of it was risqué. Actually Dante called it simply La Commedia in Italian. Someone else added the ‘divine’ later on. Haven’t you read it yet?”
“No … It’s …”
“On your list.”
“Right.”
Was she making fun of me? Probably. The light kiss had somehow rearranged our relationship, making it both more personal and less volat
ile. Now we could laugh at each other, complain, bicker, even argue without fear that something vital would be hurt.
Such is the power of the right kiss at the right time.
“If you intend to be a writer you’ll have to catch up with those books.”
“It’s unnatural how many books you’ve read. Here, tackle this one.” I tossed her Barry Storm’s Thunder God’s Gold. “It will save me the obligation to lecture you.
“After Roosevelt Lake,” I continued, violating my promise not to lecture, “we will enter what is properly called the Apache Trail, named after the Apaches who built Roosevelt Dam at the turn of the century, the first big reclamation project in this country. It was not an original trail used by the Apaches when this was their territory, though they probably did wend their way through the maze of creek and river canyon and washes which crisscross these hills. It is a perfect hideout for light cavalry, as you might imagine.”
“Yes, Professor.”
Since the road down to Pinal Creek Canyon is relatively straight, I took my eyes off it for an instant to determine whether she was laughing at me or reading her assignment.
She was doing both.
“If you don’t like the tour, you can get off and take the stage.”
“Stage? You mean one of those horse-drawn things? That would be even worse than your driving.”
She was still laughing. Damned but capable of being amused by a foolish male boy child.
“They don’t use horses anymore. The picture in the hotel suggests a very old motor bus. Before the war it went through to Roosevelt from Phoenix. Now it stops at Tortilla Flat.”
“What?”
“Not the place in the novel.”
“I’m glad. How far is it to this stage stop?”
“Maybe fifty miles. It’s only a few miles beyond Fish Creek, where Clinton is. That’s our ghost town. In Lost Dutchman Canyon.”
“So I have to stay with the tour till then, Commander?” Now she was chuckling loud enough for me to hear her.
I hunched the old car to the side of the road, turned off the ignition and took her into my arms. “We seem to have forgotten something last night.”
She did not protest or resist, but permitted me to smother her with quick, delightful kisses. “The more you complain”—I paused for breath—”the more I kiss you.”
The Search for Maggie Ward Page 17