The Search for Maggie Ward

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “I’m sorry, uh, Commander Keenan,” she said with a tone indicating her contempt for the title, “I really can’t be of any help to you.”

  She was a tall, lean woman of indeterminate age, with thin lips, metal-rim glasses, and one of those handbells on which sisters superior used to ring for order. She fingered the bell lovingly, as if it were a fetish. I felt that she counted as wasted any moment in which she was not clanging away on the bell to exorcise disorder from the world over which she reigned.

  “The young man who was in my command,” I repeated my story, “may have graduated from your school, Sister. He was, I believe, very intelligent and very industrious. On his final leave it was necessary for him to marry a young woman who, it would seem, was a junior or possibly a senior in your school. She left school and went to San Diego with him.”

  “We had no such incident in our school, Commander, as I have already told you. We do not tolerate that sort of provocative behavior.”

  She spit out “provocative” as though it were a word that represented the summary and the quintessence of all evil. She sounded exactly like the kind of nun who had hounded my Andrea.

  “But what if such behavior happened?”

  “It does not happen here.”

  “It’s very important that we find the family of either of these children,” I continued with my story. “There are pension rights, military honors, and debts to be paid, all of great importance to many people.”

  “I’m sorry, uh, Commander, I have said for the last time that I can be of no assistance to you. Your persistence gives me no choice but to dismiss you.”

  I thought she was going to ring the bell. Instead she dipped a pen in an inkwell and began to write, in fine, nunnish script, on a sheet of snow white parchment paper, the only item other than a blotter on her black oak desk.

  “Thank you just the same, Sister.”

  She did not bother to acknowledge my gratitude as I left her office.

  I went silently into that good night, you say?

  Not for want of appropriate curses for the old bitch. But I did not want to offend her because I might be able to obtain her help anyway.

  My family was not without what we call in Chicago clout. Still has it, as a matter of fact, my wife especially. A call to my father would lead to a call to the Chicago Chancery, which in turn would produce a call at a sufficiently high level to the Chancery here in Philly that might make Sister Mary Regina a good deal more cooperative.

  The rules to be remembered about clout, which is a relationship based on the exchange of favors, is that you never use it unless you have to, you never demand more of it than you have to, you never cause anyone to lose face unnecessarily, and you never call upon it until other means have been exhausted.

  All these rules indicated that I leave Sister’s office politely and check the other schools, even that I return and inquire politely again before I mobilized the Seventh Cavalry.

  No one teaches you these rules. If you have to be taught them you’ll never learn them, much less understand the need for them. You just know them.

  But I was convinced that here in Saint Dominic’s would be my first lead in the hunt of Andrea King.

  My confidence that I could beat Sister Mary Regina consoled me, although the first step in my “smart” quest had met a blank and very solid wall. I’d be back.

  So I walked into the scorching street in front of the school—a shabby red brick building built before the First War (and shabby then doubtless) with the same sense of excitement and confidence that I felt the first moment I was airborne off the Big E.

  The neighborhood matched the school, moldering row houses that had probably never been attractive places in which to live but which had become grimly depressing through the decades of their existence. Ready-made slums for the ethnic immigrants. Many years later the descendants of those immigrants would grimly resist the attempts of immigrants with different skin color to move into their row houses. If I didn’t know how important a neighborhood is to those who live in it, I would not have been able to understand why those low-slung, ugly, morose rows of brick would be worth fighting about. Still later, the mayor and the police chief of Philadelphia would destroy part of a similar neighborhood by dropping an incendiary bomb on the roof of one of the homes in which a group of well-armed and crazy radicals had holed up.

  It was, not to put too fine an edge on matters, a sad and sour place.

  Enough to make any bright and vivacious young woman growing up in it feel depressed.

  Saint Pius’s was in a community on the southwest side of Philadelphia that was much less depressing: frame homes once occupied by the respectable Protestant middle class and now painted and maintained by the sober Irish Catholic middle class. It was a neighborhood in which even then the term “lace curtain” was not opprobrious.

  Sister Mathilda was helpful.

  “Such things do happen”—her gray eyes twinkled—”Commander, don’t they? And not always to the bad ones. We had a case here recently of a young woman whose parents were raised in our parish. Poor child, she was very unlucky in her timing. Well, the father and mother made such a fuss that I persuaded the pastor to look up the girl’s birthdate and the parent’s wedding date in the parish records. Would you believe, and I’m sure your laugh tells me that you will, that the daughter was born three months after their marriage? Decidedly premature, wouldn’t you say, Commander?”

  “The parents quieted down when you made that observation, S’ter?”

  “Did they ever.… Well, now let me see, we had three cases during the war of such unfortunate young women. Two of them did involve young men who had graduated from here. War encourages these sorts of occurrences, doesn’t it? Ah, here are the names. Marie O’Malley and Jane McDermott, both from large families. And the young men were Martin Finnegan, a terror, that one, and John Comaford. Marie and Martin live in the parish. They have two children now and are, I gather, expecting a third. Jane and John … hmn, I don’t know where they are, though I believe there are cousins in the neighborhood. I would have heard if he had been killed. Here we are; this yearbook will have pictures.”

  Jane was a thin girl with dark hair who bore no resemblance to Andrea. Marie did look a little bit like her. But Sister was sure that mother and father and two and a half children were diligent and devout members of the parish.

  Maybe if I continued to be drawn low cards I would come back and see them. I thanked Sister, found my hired cabby sound asleep in his car and directed him to Saint Malachy’s parish and school on the northwest side, near the railroad tracks that gave the adjacent suburbs their name, the Main Line.

  It was yet another step down the road which in a few years would lead the Irish to the suburbs—to catch up with those few who had gone there before the war, like my family: solid new homes and apartment buildings, Philly’s equivalent of Chicago’s bungalow belt, constructed during the nineteen twenties, before the Depression extinguished the building boom of that decade.

  Sister Irene Marie listened sympathetically, told me that she was new in the school, called in another nun and told her my story.

  The veteran nun was sure they had just the family I was looking for. The young man was a war hero, killed in Sicily, and the bride had come home to live with her parents and five sisters and raise her infant son. She would soon marry a young man of the parish who was doing very well at St. Joseph’s and would enroll next year in Penn law school.

  In her picture the kid was a cute, plump little blond who would doubtless keep the lawyer well fed and well tended even when he had made enough money to vote Republican.

  But Andrea she was not and could not be.

  Both the good ladies were quite disappointed when I left, so sure were they that I was making a mistake and missing an opportunity to end my search, an effort for which they praised me effusively.

  “Back to Saint Dominic’s,” I told my cabby.

  “Saint Dom’s is a real hellhol
e,” he said. “It’s had a bad reputation since I was a kid. Nuns who enjoy being mean.”

  I admitted that I could believe it.

  The school day was over by the time we returned to St. Dom’s, though many sullen students, with the hangdog look of reform-school inmates in the Dead End Kids films, were busy sweeping corridors, erasing blackboards, and scribbling furiously at their desks.

  My days of being kept after school were sufficiently close that I felt as guilty as they looked.

  Sister Mary Regina was not in her office. But in the office next door I found Sister Marie Neri, a much younger woman, not any older than thirty, I suspected, though in those days the age of nuns was impossible to guess. Her refined courtesy (“How may I help you, young man?) and tony voice suggested Main Line: Irish aristocracy like us.

  So my charm worked.

  “Sister is the superior and I am the principal, Commander.” She smiled graciously. “She is a bit more set in her ways. I will be happy to help if I can.”

  Fine, but you have that hair-shirt-wearing fanatic’s glow in your eyes, Sister. In ten years you’ll be worse than your patron.

  I told her my story.

  “We don’t like to admit that such things happen at Saint Dominic’s, Commander Keenan,” she said with a sigh, “as I’m sure you understand. We have had a long tradition of high moral standards. But, as you realize, this dreadful war has had a terrible effect on morality. So, to be perfectly candid, yes, we did have a number of such cases.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said with all the phony sympathy I could muster.

  “From what you tell me, it sounds like the case of Andrew Koenig and—let me see—what was that little chit’s name? Oh, yes. Margaret Mary Ward.”

  “Andrew Koenig?” I felt as if I had been hit with a two-by-four. Koenig meant King. And that was his name. “Yes, that does seem to be the name. He was called King when he was in our outfit.”

  “Here”—she offered me the yearbook—”is Miss Ward. I must say, Commander, she was an extremely provocative young lady.”

  Hands shaking, I hoped not visibly, I took the book from her and turned it around. On the page was a class picture of young women in drab serge uniform dresses that might have been appropriate for a prison.

  “Third one from the left in the front row; she was on the short side,” Sister remarked smoothly, “M. M. Ward.”

  “I see.”

  My fair bride? This innocent little girl with the pixie face, looking up at me somber and maybe a little frightened? Or angry?

  I wasn’t sure. Margaret?

  “It seems to fit, Sister. May I ask a few questions about the case and the families?”

  “Certainly, Commander. I’m afraid that the older sisters are almost superstitious about it, and I don’t accept the validity of such explanations. Yet they may have had a point when they said that Margaret Mary had bad blood.”

  Bingo!

  “Bad blood?”

  “Yes, poor Andrew John—his parents used both names—was a good boy, hardworking, studious, docile. He refused to be part of the wild bunch who used the war as an excuse for provoking behavior during the senior year. We thought he might very well consider college before he was called up or a college service program. His parents, however, hardworking immigrants who are the strength of this rather impoverished parish, thought otherwise. They felt that Andrew should learn a trade skill in the service. I remember his father saying to me that when the Depression returned, a tradesman—he himself was a mechanic—would never lack a job while many college graduates would be unemployed. It was, I assume you would agree, a realistic viewpoint?”

  “The Depression hasn’t returned yet, Sister.”

  “But it will.” She withdrew a large watch from somewhere in her skirt and glanced at it with a disapproving frown. Time had dared to slip on without her permission. “He is dead, isn’t he? Andrew, I mean. We had heard that, but we were never officially informed.”

  “Yes, Sister, he is. It might have been better advice to enroll in a V-12 program. He would have missed the war and would still be alive.”

  She missed my irony. “That will mean one more gold star for our flag.” She made a note with the same sort of straight pen that Sister Mary Regina used. Apparently the order did not countenance fountain pens yet. “Most unfortunate.”

  “Especially for him. His parents no longer live in the community?”

  “They took the scandal very hard, Commander.” She laid the pen aside at a neat right angle to her inkwell. “Quite properly so. It was a disgrace even if it was not their fault. Shortly after the wedding they moved away, very quietly. I believe that no one in the neighborhood knows where they went. It’s quite sad, really. He was their only son.” She timed her pause carefully to indicate appropriate grief over the Koenigs’ loss and still not waste any of the precious moments that were slipping by on her watch. “And all because of that foolish little girl.” Sister’s fine alabaster features contorted in a quick frown. “She was so …”

  “Provoking?”

  “Precisely. Bad blood, as the older sisters said. Her grandfather was an official of the city who was sent to prison for corruption. Her uncles were ne’er-do-wells, alcoholics and gamblers, you know. Her father, I am told, was a flashy young man, attractive and bright in a shallow way. He married a woman who was a model and a beauty queen: Mary Phalen was her name, as I remember. They were married with considerable ceremony just before the crash. I remember my parents saying—I was a little girl then—that no good would come of an alliance between Allen Ward and Mary Phalen. They were quite correct in their prediction, as it turned out. Mary Phalen may not have had bad blood, but she certainly had bad lungs. And Allen Ward did not have the courage to face life after his pretty little wife’s death.”

  So far there was little difference, except in the names, between Sister’s story and Andrea’s. But I could not understand the animosity toward Andrea’s—or should I say Margaret Mary’s—parents. Whatever the reason for the animosity, little Margaret seemed to have inherited it.

  “So the child was passed on to Mary Phalen’s sister at the age of five. It was all in the papers.” She frowned again, this time as if she had swallowed something distasteful. “Isobel Phalen was older than her sister and more sensible both in her personal life and in her choice of husband, Howard Quinn, a solid and respectable butcher. They had their hands full with that spoiled little girl, I can tell you.”

  Butcher? Andrea had corrected me when I said she went after her uncle with a carving knife. “Butcher knife.” It all fit perfectly. And tragically.

  “Mrs. Quinn had better fortune in her lungs too.”

  “Yes, indeed.” My Irish charm was not wasted on this youngish fanatic from the Main Line, but my Irish irony was still useless. “Actually, Sister Mary Regina, who was principal as well as superior then, did not want to accept the girl into school. The Monsignor, a little too much impressed with the power the Ward family had once enjoyed, insisted.”

  “She was troublesome from the beginning?”

  “She was always most provoking.” Sister laid the huge watch on the desk in front of her, at the opposite end of the blotter from her inkwell, an angel to monitor the time she would waste talking to me. “She pretended to be shy and studious, but she asked the most undocile questions in class and had a very bad habit of guessing what your thoughts were. She kept to herself, since the more respectable young women would not associate with her, though there was a small group totally lacking in docility of which she was the ringleader in high school.”

  “A constant disciplinary problem? I’m amazed that you kept her in the school.”

  Sister sighed patiently, hinting at the great forbearance of her order when confronted with undocile young women. “She was a very clever little miss. It was difficult to catch her in an actual disciplinary violation, until the end. Needless to say, we tried hard to find her in violations, but she usually eluded us. Po
or Andrew John, he was an innocent victim, I am sure. Now, Commander,” she said as she rose from her stern wooden chair and scooped up her watch, “I really must ask to be excused. I have a number of obligations to discharge before prayer.”

  She gave me the addresses of both families at the time of the great scandal. The Quinns had moved away too. Sister did not know where. Perhaps they would know at the rectory.

  “Oh, yes, Commander.” She stopped me at the door of her office. “Sister Patrice, our librarian, tried to help the girl when she was in high school. Sister is quite advanced in age now, but you might wish to talk to her. I don’t believe that she has maintained contact with her, however.”

  “Thank you, Sister.”

  The “library” was a couple of dusty classrooms with books on the walls and in dilapidated wooden shelves stretched across the rooms. There were no students in it and little sign that the dust had been disturbed very often. Pious and respectable students of Saint Dom’s learn to read. They also learn not to read too much. For if you read too much, you may read the wrong kind of books.

  Sister Patrice Marie was sitting in a corner at a small desk, sorting cards by the dim light of a single lamp. She was a cheerful, dotty nun who needed no explanation and no charm to tell me about Margaret Mary Ward.

  “Maggie Ward, young man? Poor little tyke; they had it in for her from the first day she came here to school. Proper folk don’t get their names in the paper, you see. And Maggie’s family’s name was in the paper all the time, fifteen or twenty years ago. Her mother was a great beauty, you remember. Maggie will be too, in a few years, poor thing. But if you’re running a school for respectable young women, you don’t want them contaminated by a child who might be a beauty and might get her name in the paper too, now do you?”