“No, S’ter,” I said respectfully.
The old nun cackled. Clearly I understood.
“She was in here all the time. Read ‘most every book I had. Got herself educated despite them. Course they held that against her too. A child that reads too much may get undocile thoughts, eh, young man?” She cackled again. “Become provocative. Even think for herself. Ask questions we aren’t able to answer. Can’t have that, can we, young man, eh? What’d you say your name was?”
“Jerry, S’ter. Jeremiah.”
“Major prophet, huh? Do you know Maggie? Where is she?”
“I thought you’d be able to tell me.”
“ ‘Fraid not. Got a card from her when the baby was born; lemme see, girl baby, I think. About a year ago. Just before the war ended. No return address, just a San Diego postcard.”
So the child had not died in a miscarriage.
“They made her life miserable here, did they?”
“Terrible. Some women”—she winked—”need a child in the school to hate, hold up as an example of evil to be avoided. Why, even though she had the prettiest voice in the school, they wouldn’t let her sing in the choir or even try out for a part in the play. Fired her from the debate team because she won all the time.… Ever try to argue with her, young fella?”
“It didn’t do much good.”
“See? I told you. She would have been a state champion. Someday the order is going to have to pay for such cruelty.”
Her merry eyes snapped with delight at the prospect of the order being punished. I too hoped that I would be around for the assignment to appropriate regions of hell of Sister Mary Regina and her stooges.
“You’re hunting for Maggie?”
“In a way, S’ter.”
“In love with her?”
“Not that way, S’ter,” I lied.
“Hmmp.” Clearly she didn’t believe me. “Could turn out to be a fine woman if someone loved her properly. Wouldn’t blame her at all if she killed that little brute who got her pregnant. Always thought he was a sneak.”
“Andrew Koenig?”
“Andrew John,” she said with a sneer. “One name for each cretin grandfather. Shifty-eyed little ape.”
“Did you hear that she killed him?” I rose to leave. My friend at the Bureau of Personnel should be able to do something about the name Andrew Koenig.
“Little Maggie? She wouldn’t hurt a fly. He died in the war, didn’t he?”
“I believe so. Thank you very much, S’ter. You’ve been a big help.”
“She was a funny little one, all the same.” Sister’s eyes were cloudy with memories. “Knew what people were thinking a lot of the time. You can imagine what that did to certain women who were already afraid she’d contaminate their precious little respectable school.”
“And she did contaminate it in the end, didn’t she, S’ter?”
“Young man, Jeremiah, major prophet.” Sister shook an amused finger at me. “You and I both know there’s a lot worse things in the world and in this school building than a pregnancy, don’t we?”
“Yes, S’ter, we sure do.”
CHAPTER 22
“YOU KNOW HOW MANY NAMES WE HAVE IN THIS BUILDING?” my friend from the Bureau of Personnel demanded. “I’d probably have a hard time finding your records if you didn’t have that medal. Give us a couple of years to get organized.”
“You didn’t have any trouble when I asked about the Indianapolis.” I was sitting in my room at the Latham Hotel, at Seventeenth and Walnut streets, talking above the noise of the renovators who could be found in this first summer after the war in most older American hotels.
“That was different. If your Andrew John Koenig was on a major loss like that and you can tell me the ship, I won’t have any trouble checking him out. Or if there’s some sort of pension or insurance payment. Anything else will be pure luck.”
“Well, check the Indianapolis again. And see if anyone is collecting insurance benefits. And try your luck on anything else. I’ll call back tomorrow.”
After I check out Maggie Ward’s neighborhood and see if I can find out where her aunt and uncle live.
The fellow with the butcher knife.
Maggie Ward. Can you have a grail quest for someone with that kind of name? Andrea King has a hint of mystery and adventure. Maggie Ward, short for Margaret Mary Ward, is the name of the girl down the street.
And if perchance she should change it to Maggie Keenan, it would bring memories of an earlier generation of madcap micks.
A “Maggie Ward” is the kind of a girl who wants to look at furniture on the second date. Not the kind with whom you encounter demons and perhaps a gun-toting angel in a ghost town in the Superstition Mountains.
In the dour, dry respectability of Saint Dominic’s parish, Clinton, Arizona Territory, seemed quite improbable. So, too, did lustful romps in the Picketpost House bridal suite.
Nonetheless, any girl who could survive Saint Dom’s with the capability for such a romp would be well worth hunting, the girl next door with a few extra added attractions, as they used to say in the film previews.
Only one tough little bitch would survive at all.
Maggie Ward Keenan, it had a certain promising rhythm, hinting at several pixie-faced, tough little girl children, with freckle cheeks and turned-up noses.
Among other things.
I phoned home. My parents had gone up to Lake Geneva for the weekend. Packy was about to leave to join them when I called.
“Find the girl yet, kid?”
“Your information was very useful,” I said guardedly. “I’ll tell you the whole story someday.”
“To hell with the story. I want to meet the broad.”
“I never said there was a broad.”
“Yeah? Well, where to next?”
“Here, for another day, anyway. I’ll stay in touch. Have a good time at the lake.”
“I plan to. I’m going to try waterskiing.”
“What’s that?”
“Skiing on water, what else, genius? Behind a boat. They started it on the Riviera before the war. It looks like fun.”
“It will never catch on here,” I said. Another one of my prize-winning predictions. I thought it was definitely confirmed later when I read an article in Life that pointed out that it would cost thirty-five dollars to buy the seven-foot-long, seven-inch-wide skis!
Having discharged my obligation to phone my family, I turned to the twin responsibility of my journal, which in those early August days of 1946 was devoted almost entirely to the search for Andrea King, possibly née Margaret Mary (Maggie) Ward.
August 9th. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that they’re still fighting at the Paris Peace Conference, there’s a race riot in Athens, Georgia, it’s the 100th anniversary of the Smithsonian Institution; and Ben Hogan has won the Canadian PGA. My family has departed for a long weekend at Lake Geneva, for which I find myself unaccountably longing, even if I would have to travel through La Mancha to get there.
And I continue my search for Andrea, whose real name might be Maggie. I have confirmed today some elements in her story.
1) Her family was indeed fading well-to-do Irish: fashionable weddings, society pages in the papers, summer homes at Cape May and in the Poconos, all of this before she was born.
2) Her father did disappear shortly after her mother’s death and she was raised by an aunt and uncle, the latter a man who would have a butcher knife readily available because he was a butcher. They were indeed strict, not to say cruel.
3) The nuns at her school did not like her, mostly because of her family background. Andrea did not mention the family resentment element in their dislike for her. Maybe she was unaware of it or did not understand it.
4) She was intelligent, shy, and mysterious, reading the minds of her teachers, asking “undocile” questions, and devouring serious books borrowed from the school library.
5) She was pregnant at the time of her marriage to
an industrious only son of an immigrant family.
On the other hand, there are some parts of her story that are at odds with the history I gathered today:
1) She told me that she had lost a child through a miscarriage. It would appear, however, that she did have a live baby, possibly a girl, about a year ago. This would fix the time of her marriage in January or February of 1945, when she was a junior in high school, perhaps not yet seventeen. If her husband was on the Indianapolis, which I am not able to confirm, he would have died about the same time the baby was born. The nuns seem to agree that he died in the war, but there is some uncertainty about when and where and how. Indeed, the principal of St. Dom’s only added him to her list of gold stars when I confirmed his death.
2) There is conflicting evidence about her husband. She admitted that he was dull and slow, but claimed to have loved him. The anti-Maggie nuns at St. Dom’s are high in their praise for Andrew Koenig, but nonetheless he sounds in their description like the same young man Andrea portrayed for me. On the other hand, Sister Patrice Marie said he was a brute and she would not have blamed Maggie for killing him. She quickly added that Maggie wouldn’t hurt anyone.
The picture in the 1944 yearbook when she was a sophomore is enough like the young woman I encountered in the station in Tucson almost three weeks ago to persuade me that they are the same person. She looks so young and frail. So, too, did Andrea.
So I have found my Andrea’s neighborhood, and school, and teachers, and her real name, of which I am becoming increasingly fond. She continues to be elusive, however; magical, mysterious, and haunting.
If she is some sort of ghost, a spirit lingering between earth and hell, she is at least a ghost of a real human person who has suffered more in a short life than most do in much longer lives. I will not believe in a God who feels any less love for her than I do.
She now seems more pathetic. She was forced to grow up before her time, to become an adult hardly before she put away her dolls. If her aunt and uncle permitted her dolls. I wish I was holding her in my arms at this moment in my room here at the Latham.
I love her more than ever.
But I find it hard to remember what she looked like.
Both her family and her husband’s family have left the neighborhood. Tomorrow I will try to learn where they might be. Even if I find them, however, I won’t necessarily be any closer to Maggie—I guess I had better start calling her that now—than I was when I awoke from my dream, or whatever it was, in the Superstition Mountains.
I do not, however, intend to give up my search.
Brave young man, isn’t he? And utterly unaware of the obvious truth that he will find Andrea King/Maggie Ward only if she wants to be found.
And is in a world where she can be found.
The next morning, Saturday, I ate a leisurely breakfast, read the comics in the Inquirer, deplored the Cubs’ continued fall from grace, and set out again by cab for Saint Dominic’s. I told my driver to meet me in front of the church at 4 P.M. It was a hot summer Saturday; lots of people would be on the porches or the door stoops or the streets, and I expected to be overwhelmed by waves of clues.
The image of waves reminded me of Lake Geneva and raised again the question of why I wasn’t there, swimming in the lake, sailing in my father’s cutter, and looking forward to a date that night with some lovely young thing who was prepared to adore the heroic naval aviator and listen wide-eyed to his description of learning how to fly a Phantom jet.
“We call it an FH-1, honey. ‘F’ stands for fighter, ‘H’ for McDonnell, and ‘1’ means that it is the first version of this model. Understand?” Small kiss of reward if she does and of punishment if she doesn’t.
This not unrealistic picture (it leaves out the likelihood that the young woman would want to look at furniture the following weekend) became more appealing as the hours of that hot August Saturday continued.
And I saw Maggie everywhere in her old neighborhood. Scores of young women with auburn hair and bouncing breasts were on the streets of Saint Dominic’s, teasing, tempting, inviting. Fortunately for the peace of the community, I was able to resist the urge to speak to them.
She’s not here, I told myself every five minutes. That girl is not Maggie. This is the last place you’ll find her.
But the girl is cute, isn’t she?
“Stop thinking that way,” CIC demanded.
“Go away until you can come back with your automatic weapon,” I replied.
The people of Saint Dominic’s, being Irish, were willing to talk to the tall stranger with a Middle Western accent, despite the fact that his blue slacks and short-sleeve white shirt were a bit too expensive-looking for the neighborhood. The heat, the dust, the dense humidity, the impoverished atmosphere of the neighborhood did not inhibit their tongues. It was the same sort of environment I would encounter years later, with much lower temperature, in the west of Ireland on a week-end trade fair. They were more than willing to provide information about Anton (“Tony”) Koenig and Howard (“Howie”) Quinn and their families, lots of information, in elaborate detail and with as many illustrative anecdotes as I was willing to hear.
When have the Irish ever been reluctant to provide information?
But the information was useless for my purposes. Both Tony and Howie were described either as “hardworking” or “kinda dull.” Howie was said to have a fierce temper and there were hints of black-market meat during the war.
“If you ask me, he got out of town not because of the girl but because of the cops.”
“He had some friends who were friends of the big pols. They gave him a chance to vanish or go to jail.”
As for Anton Koenig, a cop on the beat shook his head slowly. “He wasn’t like us, Commander. Pretended to be quiet and thoughtful, but I think he didn’t say anything because he didn’t have anything to say.”
That would never stop “us.”
Both the women were described in varying degrees of hostility as thinking they were “better” than anyone else.
Young Andrew, I was told, was “very serious, didn’t hang around on the street corners with the young hoodlums.”
On the other hand, a sandy-haired kid who had been a gunner on a TBF whom I encountered in front of a corner drugstore confided that “Andrew was a jerk, sir. No one could believe that he’d be able to knock up that cute little kid. Musta got her drunk first. A lot of guys would have been willing to go after her, if they had a chance. Still would if she comes back. He caught it, didn’t he?”
“On the Indianapolis, I think.”
“Yeah? I heard he was transferred off before she brought the Bomb out to Tinian. A submarine guy a year ahead of me in school said he saw him repairing radar at Ulithi. Never did hear how he died, though. Something sort of mysterious. Is she coming back? Really hot stuff.”
I wasn’t sure and didn’t tell the kid, who had no right to be alive, that I had a prior claim.
Ulithi was an atoll in the western Pacific, same meridian as Tokyo, which replaced Pearl Harbor as the Navy’s advance base in the last months of the war. You could sit on the island of the Enterprise in that lagoon and see as many as ten carriers getting ready to go back to battle. It made you wonder—it still makes me wonder—how the Japanese thought they were going to win the war.
I pondered the possibility that Maggie’s husband had been one of the technicians who tinkered with the Big E‘s dubious radar.
“I don’t know whether she’s coming back.”
“She was the kind of kid”—his worried frown deepened, as if he were wrestling with the ultimate meaning of human life, Jacob struggling with the angel—”you had to treat with respect if you had any sense at all. Know what I mean, sir?”
“I do and neither of us are in the Navy anymore.”
“Yeah.” The kid grinned. “Hard habit to break. You know, sir”—he laughed—”sorry, but what I mean is that you come back and you find that there are a lot of girls like her and you wo
nder what kind of an asshole you were for not noticing them before. They figure”—he sighed—”they’re gonna straighten you out.”
“And they probably will.”
“You know it!” He laughed. “Good luck, she was a great kid. She deserved a lot better than what happened to her.”
Dear God in heaven, she certainly did.
(“That’s right, darling,” I told my fictional Lake Geneva date, to distract myself from the phantoms I was meeting on the streets of Philadelphia, “he was a gunner on a TBF, not a long-life-expectancy job in 1944. ‘F’ stands for Grumman, darling, so it’s a Grumman torpedo bomber, not nearly as much a flying coffin as the TBD, the Douglas torpedo bomber that came before it, but not exactly a safe ride either. It was a good thing we made almost ten thousand Avengers, that was the name for the TBF; we ran through them pretty quickly. Do you want another beer?”)
That was the most I was able to learn from anyone on the streets about Maggie Ward. She did not seem to be so clearly sketched in people’s memories as her family and her in-laws.
“A sweet little girl. Very pretty. From a famous family that was in hard times, like the rest of us.”
The cop who felt that Tony Koenig didn’t talk because he didn’t have much on his mind had the sharpest image of her. “She was a nice little girl, poor kid. She used to smile at me every morning and say, ‘Hello, Officer Sullivan, how is your wife feeling today?’ My missus has poor health, you see. I don’t care what they say about her father, the Wards always had class and she did, too.”
Indeed yes, officer, but where do they live now?
No one had the answer to that one. The Koenigs had left the neighborhood, it was generally agreed, because of the disgrace of the shotgun marriage; the Quinns one step ahead of the FBI. Andrew was dead. Maggie had given birth to a baby girl; she had mailed a few cards to her friends with that joyous news. No one knew where she lived now. Nor did they have any idea of where her family, or his, had moved.
The row house in which the Koenigs had lived was occupied by an Italian family of vast size, the mother of which fed me a plate of marvelous pasta and confessed that she had no idea where the Koenigs had moved. And couldn’t have cared less.
The Search for Maggie Ward Page 24