The Search for Maggie Ward

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Most of them, I think, concluded that I was a harmless nut. On a couple of occasions all my Irish charm was required to confirm the “harmless” part.

  Maybe I was a bit of a nut. I had endured a traumatic emotional experience that night in Clinton. It would be years before those terrible images ceased to be the raw material of my dreams. Even now I wake occasionally to the Dutchman’s laughter or to the rumble, as it seems, of Michael’s automatic-weapon fire. My wife must, under such circumstances, hold me tight until my nerves relax and I realize that I am not in Clinton anymore—activity that both of us find comforting, I might add.

  I was also in an almost constant state of sexual arousal. My romps with Andrea had only teased my appetite. I wanted more of her. In her absence I wanted more of someone, anyone. I didn’t act on these fantasies because I was caught up in the fervor of my quest.

  Quixote, desperately afraid of the return to La Mancha and first-year law school, had found a cause. He was convinced that Andrea King was not a haunt, but a real if deeply troubled woman and that he loved her. She needed his help and protection, whether she knew it or not.

  And whether she wanted it or not.

  Obviously she didn’t want my help or she would not have slipped away from the site of our inconclusive battle with the forces of evil, my hundred-dollar bill in her purse. Just as obviously my chances of finding her in the train stations, bus depots, and hotels of cities from Santa Fe to Seattle were pretty slim.

  Twice I thought I had found her—the same gait, a mixture of convent-school modesty and the slightest bit of provocation, the same thin, determined shoulders, even the same pale-blue eyes.

  “Andrea”—I grabbed one such woman by the shoulders—”I’ve found you.”

  “I’m not Andrea.” The kid—that’s all she was—grinned at me. “And I’m not lost.” She took me in at a glance. “But I’m willing to be found.”

  For a few seconds I thought she was lying. Then I realized that, although the young woman of whose shoulders I had taken possession was lovely indeed, her beauty was not the same as my Andrea’s, not quite so fine-drawn and haunted.

  “My mistake.” I released her as though there were a live electric current in her trim young body. “I’m sorry.”

  “Lost your girl …”—she hesitated and then guessed accurately—”sailor? I must say she has bad taste.”

  I think we were on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, though the memories of those frantic days are blurred now.

  “I wonder if you’ve seen her,” I pleaded. “She’s about your height and looks like you. She’d probably be wearing a brown suit or maybe blue slacks and a white shirt.”

  “I don’t think so.” The girl wrinkled her nose. “Where did you see her last?”

  “In Tucson,” I blurted the words without thinking.

  “You have it bad, sailor.” She shook her head sadly. “Were you on a sub?”

  “Carrier. Her hair was shaped just like yours.”

  “Maybe, but I’m still not Andrea, worse luck for me perhaps. Air Crew?”

  “Yeah, F6F. I’m sorry, miss. I think I’ve made a fool out of myself.”

  “I hope she’s worth it.” The girl’s smile was warm and sympathetic, inviting friendship but without pushing me too hard.

  “She is. If you’ll excuse me … again, I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Good hunting.” She looked a little wistful. “I hope you find her.”

  As I said, I can’t remember the city, but I can remember the smile. And, naturally I suppose, the figure. I wonder what might have happened if Quixote had been able to slow down his mad dash for a few moments and offer the kid a drink, or possibly a Coke. It was an era of frantic search for domesticity. Everyone in our generation was desperately searching for a partner with whom to settle down to child-producing suburban prosperity. We weren’t very subtle about it. My own goals were different. I wanted my permanent quest, but that didn’t exclude a partner and child-producing. I was chasing a girl as well as a grail, after all.

  In the final analysis, I have done well enough in the girl department and I would not, save in occasional moments of conflict, want to trade her in on might-have-beens. Still, it’s pleasant on occasion to fantasize on our might-have-beens. The girl on Fisherman’s Wharf was cute and smart. It was dumb of me not to get her name.

  Even my wife agrees that it was dumb.

  I was not without a strategy, though it was the sort that would have flunked me out of preflight if I had turned in a paper describing it.

  I hit all the West Coast cities—Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles; and then the inland cities—Santa Fe, Salt Lake, Denver; airline service wasn’t what it is now, needless to say, but there were a lot of C-47s (DC-3s to you) left over from the war, and for the first time in our history you could be in a different city every day, if you moved quickly enough from the downtown hotels to the airports—all of which were erecting terminals that summer.

  I raced about the western states in a twilight haze of not enough sleep, too much caffeine, dirty clothes, unshaved face and automatic responses. I was a “tough guy” detective, who was neither very tough nor much of a detective.

  Many of the flights were on Western Airlines, which was boasting then that it was the oldest airline in America—twenty years old. The DC-3 was its big plane. I had two flights on a Boeing 247D, which was the first passenger airplane that looked like an airplane—a kind of sawed-off DC-3. And one on a Fokker F-10 trimotor, which was a newer aircraft in those days than the 747 is today.

  The latter is almost as safe as the Ford and Fokker trimotors.

  Like most pilots, I must go through the mental motions of flying every plane I’m on. None of the trimotors were easy to fly, even mentally. And they may have been the noisiest machines humans have ever invented. By the time we finally landed, in Spokane, I think it was, I was ready to trade it in on a trainer and try to land on the Wolverine again.

  Flying was the easy part—the time to catch my breath, worry a little bit about my dirty clothes and whether there was a quick laundry service at my next hotel and maybe sleep. Once the plane landed, I had to return to the quest or the chase or whatever it was.

  Besides stupid.

  My technique was to visit the major hotels and inquire, with all my haut-bourgeois Irish charm working at full blast, whether they had hired any new waitresses lately. If Irish charm didn’t work—and it usually did—and does, for that matter—I’d fall back on the Navy Cross with star. I became skillful at subtly raising the subject of my war record. I never told anyone that my Hellcat had never once encountered an enemy bullet.

  Then I’d check out the bus terminal and the train station. I’d hang around until the cops began to look at me suspiciously, watching young women get on and off the buses or trains.

  It was in a bus terminal in Salt Lake, just down the street from Temple Square, that I thought I had found her for sure. I won’t go through the embarrassing details. (My wife rarely advises me while I’m writing, except to ask me where I am in a story. When I told her that I was describing my race around half a continent searching for my first love, she said, “Well, I hope you’re not going to make yourself look ridiculous by writing about that foolish business in Salt Lake City when you were hunting for that dreadful girl.”)

  It suffices to say that the woman, unlike her look-alike in San Francisco, was definitely not amused.

  And the Salt Lake police, presumably devout Mormons, were immune to Gaelic charm.

  I finally escaped after showing them the documentation for both my navy crosses—the medals were not enough. Suspicious people.

  In some terminals I would ask whether anyone had seen a young woman who fit Andrea’s description. Everyone had, but none of the leads, which in Denver and Seattle sent me on a tour of inexpensive hotels and a hunt for taxi drivers, proved to be helpful.

  Did I show them the picture of Andrea? That question dates the asker; as I’ve
said before, only Kodak could develop Kodak films in those days (later the courts properly ruled that the practice was a restraint of trade). I wasn’t in one place long enough to put my films in the mail and wait the week or so until they came back. I’m not sure the picture would have been that much help anyway. She looked charming in it, but a little too fey to be recognized on the street.

  I called home almost every night. I had told the folks I had left my car in San Diego, and was seeing America by air. My father was convinced that I was suffering from “a minor case of shell shock, nothing serious,” so the family humored me. I made the daily journal entries, which demonstrate a level of stupidity that I will not inflict on my readers.

  My chances of finding her by these frantic perambulations were virtually nil. She could have chosen almost anywhere in America. And I had only her word that she worked as a waitress. Indeed both the hotels she had mentioned to me—the Del Coronado and the Arizona Biltmore—had never heard of her.

  She could easily have been in any of those cities, perhaps only a few minutes’ walk from the hotel in which I slept (if I didn’t opt for a bench in the airport), and I would have missed her completely. I guess I knew that, but in my manic and lovelorn condition I had to do something.

  And on the list of the things that might be done I had not placed “thinking.”

  My narrow escape from the law in Salt Lake slowed me down a bit. That night, in the DC-3 which picked a very careful way through the peaks of the Rockies on either side en route to Denver, I read over my journal and began to listen again to my resident intelligence officer, who was, incidentally, no longer seraphic.

  “An F in strategy,” he told me candidly.

  “So what?”

  “So even if you never find her …”

  “I’ll find her. I love her.”

  “Regardless. Even if you never find her, you could at least be intelligent about your search.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You might think about the clues she gave you.”

  “What clues?”

  He had signed off, as he always does when I raise that kind of question.

  So I pondered and agonized and finally, two weeks too late, began to think.

  From the hotel in Denver I called home, even though it was midnight in Chicago. Fortunately Packy answered.

  My brother, Patrick Joseph, now an outspoken Catholic priest (and monsignor), was just a little short of his nineteenth birthday. He had been an obnoxious little adolescent punk when I left for the service. In the years I was away he had grown into a tall, marvelously handsome, utterly self-possessed young man. I had been convinced that Quigley, the high school preparatory seminary, would inhibit maturity. Now I wondered if maybe I should have gone there instead of to Fenwick.

  Did my brother threaten me just a little in those days?

  You’d better believe it.

  “Still hunting for that luscious broad you met in Tucson?”

  “How come a seminarian is always thinking about women?”

  “All men of our age,” he promptly replied, “think about women. All the time.”

  “When does that age end?”

  “A hundred or so if you’re unlucky.”

  “Packy.” I had put all my clues together. “I need a big American city.”

  “Be glad to provide one for you. What are the characteristics?”

  “Heavily Catholic, pretty conservative, standoff clergy, lots of Catholic schools, some parishes with a grammar school and high school, taught by nuns though the school is coed.”

  “Need more.”

  I pushed hard at my memory. “Churches burned in the eighteen thirties.”

  “Philly,” he cut in sharply. “New York and Boston don’t have the schools. What order?”

  “Dominican.”

  “Call me tomorrow night and I’ll have a list of schools. Any special neighborhood description?”

  “Not a River Forest kind of place. Poor but hardworking.”

  “Like Saint Mel’s. Okay. See what I can do.”

  He was almost too helpful. As a Sancho, my brother Packy was, to use the modern term, dangerously overqualified. I, not Packy, was supposed to find the girl.

  In my dream that night I was inside of Andrea at the height of passion when she turned into a madly screaming demon. It’s a dream that still recurs. I woke up, not so much aroused as frightened and frustrated.

  How much of my quest was sexual? A lot of it, obviously. As Packy said, I was at the age when men pursue women.

  But not so sexual that any attractive woman would do. The girl in San Francisco would have been perfect if that were all I had in mind.

  I’m not sure how important Andrea still was. After the snafu in Salt Lake, I realized that I couldn’t remember precisely what she looked like. My sexual hunger was for the chase, an impossible chase, obviously, and I think that I knew that even when I woke up in Denver the next morning. But I still had to get it out of my system before I returned to River Forest and domesticity.

  I went through the motions in Denver, even imagining I saw her board the Denver and Rio Grande. For a moment I was sure that it was Andrea. Then, fearful of making a fool out of myself again, I stopped chasing the train and returned disconsolately to the terminal.

  I could have sworn it was Andrea. But that’s what I had thought in Salt Lake too.

  Packy had the information that night.

  “Three parishes, Saint Dominic, Saint Pius, and Saint Malachy, all in South Philly. If they don’t work out, call me. There’s a couple of other places, but they don’t seem to fit the description so well.”

  “You didn’t ask me why I wanted to know about these parishes.”

  “I figure when you want to tell me, you will. Besides, I think I can guess.”

  “I very much doubt it.”

  United Airlines, I learned from a phone call, had a C-54 (DC-4 to you civilians) that flew from Denver to Philadelphia with a stop at Chicago, in the “mainliner time” of ten hours.

  I slept soundly that night for the first time since I had left San Diego.

  San Diego, you say, why didn’t dummy go to San Diego, save to park his car, first thing after he left Tucson?

  If you’d asked me that as July turned into August in 1946, I would have said because that’s where she came from. Why should she go back there?

  To which you might have replied, “But you don’t know how long ago she left San Diego.” Or, perhaps even more wisely, “Is not that the first place to look for a solution to the mystery of Andrea King, the city where she lived with the husband she might have murdered?”

  If you asked me that question now, I’d say I was young and in love and the last possibility I wanted to consider seriously was that the woman I loved, the woman who was the object of my quest before I returned to La Mancha on the Des Plaines River, might actually be a murderer, perhaps a double murderer.

  The ride from Denver to Chicago in the C-54 was rough. We found ourselves in a thunderstorm and rode it all the way into Midway Airport, which even in those days had become a typical Chicago airport—a mess. The DC-4, you may remember, was not pressurized (that came with the DC-6), so it couldn’t go much above ten thousand feet at the most, which meant you either flew around thunderstorms or through them. We flew through as many as we could find.

  I was woozy from motion sickness at Midway and wished I had my good old stable F6F with its reliable Pratt & Whitney instead of being forced to sit in what was merely an oversized four-engine DC-3.

  Despite my reluctance to return home and face law school and domestic respectability, it seemed kind of nice to see Cicero Avenue again. When I was a kid and my mother and I would ride back from the Loop on the Lake Street El, Cicero Avenue was the first sign we were nearing home. After Laramie, the next stop, we’d descend to ground level and that was almost as good as being home.

  I called the family but only Joanne was in the house.

 
“Where are you NOW?” I could tell she was pouting even over the phone.

  “Denver,” I lied.

  “Aren’t you going to be back for the Harvest Ball?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Mom will be so disappointed,” she said triumphantly, another score against the despised older sibling.

  Then I listened patiently to a list of who had received diamonds last week.

  “If you don’t hurry up and get one, Jo, you’ll be an old maid for sure.”

  “I think you’re horrible,” she screamed.

  “Horrible and with a plane to catch.”

  Mom and Dad would hear about how horrible I was for the next day and a half. Well, it was their fault for permitting the spoiled little brat to use the phone.

  My ride from Chicago to Philadelphia was enlivened by a gorgeous stewardess who flirted with me from the first moment I reboarded the plane. I told her in elaborate detail how I had, with little help from Bill Halsey and Chet Nimitz, won the war single-handedly.

  I’m sure she would have been happy to share a bed with me when we finally found the Philadelphia airport at ten o’clock that night. She even asked at what hotel I was staying.

  I didn’t rise to the bait. But that I noticed the bait and considered it, however remotely, was evidence that I was returning to normal.

  As I unpacked my duffel and sorted out the laundry—practically everything—I told myself that at last my brain was beginning to function again.

  “About time,” said the ship’s intelligence officer.

  “I want Mike back.”

  “Who’s he?”

  But the ride to Philly was the turning point in that phase of my quest. From then on my search was reasonably surefooted.

  Not that I would like what I found at the end of it.

  CHAPTER 21

  AT SAINT DOMINIC‘S SCHOOL IN SOUTH PHILADELPHIA, east of the docks and above the Naval Yard, just off Oregon Street, I learned that it was not only the Mormons in Salt Lake who found my Irish charm resistible and my title “Commander” unimpressive. Sister Mary Regina (pronounced like the city in Canada) viewed me with the same fastidious dismay with which she would consider a fly in the convent butter supply. It was an attitude, I felt sure, she maintained toward anyone who was not a member of her order and probably anyone who was not a sister superior in the order.