The Search for Maggie Ward

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “She was the kind who survives,” Jean said thoughtfully.

  “She had to, didn’t she? And by the way, you’re not the kind who withers.”

  “You have a clever Irish tongue, Navy.”

  “That’s what Maggie said to me.”

  “Did she really? That would not have been a Maggie comment two years ago.”

  “Would it have been a Jean Kelly comment?”

  She laughed. “Hell, yes. So maybe the little brat was quoting me.”

  “You don’t happen to know where her aunt and uncle are, do you?”

  “Sure, I do.” She leaned forward, resting her chin on her hands as if in thoughtful conspiracy, and thus revealed ample amounts of breast for my inspection. “We’re supposed to forward anything that comes and not tell anyone, as if the FBI really cares about such small fish. I’m sure they don’t know where she is, and they wouldn’t tell you if they did.”

  I took a deep breath, steadying my concentration. “I’m looking for a needle in a haystack, lovely lady, searching for hints, any kind of hints about where she might be.”

  “They’re in Florida, a place called Port Lauderdale, which I never heard of.” She rose from her chair, being careful not to spill her lemonade, picked up my empty glass and left the room.

  “Fort Lauderdale,” I called after her, sighing to myself with both disappointment and relief.

  “That’s right.” She returned, refilled lemonade glass in one hand, a small piece of note paper in the other. “Fort Lauderdale. You must have got good grades in geography, Jerry. I guess he runs a meat market down there too. Probably still has his thumb on the scale. Don’t tell them where you found out about the address, not that it makes much difference.”

  “Thanks.” I glanced at the address, put the paper in my shirt pocket, and attacked the lemonade.

  “Do you think you’ll find her?”

  “Of course.” I was not so confident, but I couldn’t let this lovely young woman think that I was discouraged.

  She stared thoughtfully out of the spanking clean window of the row house.

  “There was a streak in her of … gosh, I don’t even know what to call it … come on, Navy, you’re good at words.…”

  “Fatalism?”

  “Worse than that.”

  “Despair.”

  “Right.” She jabbed her finger at me in agreement. “Usually I would kid her out of it, but I was never sure that she wasn’t going along just to keep me happy. She was always worried about what the dumb nuns called the ‘unforgivable sin,’ as though God’s love can be limited.”

  Beautiful and devout too. Lucky, lucky Ralph.

  “God has not done all that well by Maggie.”

  “He sent you, didn’t he?” She cocked an appraising eye.

  “On that happy note,” I said as I rose from my chair, “I’d better ask if I can use your bathroom. It’s a long walk back to my taxi after three glasses of Chianti and two of lemonade.”

  “First door on the left.” She was brooding again, her head on her fist. “Dear God, I’d like to see Maggie again.”

  Need I say that the bathroom was spotless? Jean or her mother? Probably both.

  “Your mother Irish?” I asked upon return.

  “Sure … why … oh, you mean because the house is so clean. I guess we’re exceptions in that respect. Don’t drink, either.”

  I took her hands in mine and lifted her out of her chair. She looked away from me.

  We were both silent for a few seconds, permitting the delightful chemistry of attraction, about which neither of us was going to do anything, flow back and forth. When you’re young, some possibilities are better enjoyed if they can be remembered only as possibilities.

  “Thank you, Jean Kelly. Jean Marie Kelly?” She nodded. “Of course it’s Jean Marie,” I went on. “Ralph is a lucky man.”

  She sighed softly. “Maggie is lucky too, and it’s high time.”

  I touched her lips with mine.

  I wanted to touch her flat, pale belly with my fingertips and knew that CIC was correct in loudly warning against such behavior. So I released her and walked briskly to the door. “Get out of here with class,” CIC, absent for some time, interjected his opinion again.

  “Go away until you can come back with your BAR,” I replied.

  But he was right: I had better not tarry.

  “Good luck with Ralph,” I said, shaking hands at the door.

  “I’ll shape him up.” She smiled. “Never fear. Let me know if you find her.”

  I promised that I would, kissed her once again, and departed with a reasonable amount of class.

  “Well,” my wife would observe when I told her this part of the story, “at least you found out her name and address. That was better than you did with the might-have-been in San Francisco.”

  No special credit. She told me her name. And she lived at the Quinns’ address which the nuns had given me.

  And I would certainly never forget her.

  Back at the Latham, I turned on the radio to discover that the Cubs were playing a doubleheader with the Phillies. They had lost the first game and were losing the second.

  Naturally.

  I couldn’t phone the family because they were at Lake Geneva, where my father resolutely refused to install a phone. So, while I listened with one ear to the Cubs booting ground balls, I began to fill in my daily journal entry. Maybe it was the sexual chemistry between me and Jean Kelly, but that day’s entry, now so faded as to be barely legible, does not embarrass me today.

  The first impression I must put down on paper is the striking, humiliating, but not altogether unappealing thought that I may have been one of Maggie Ward’s strays. She told me that she wanted to make love with me when she first saw me in the station. But did she find me desirable because I was a disenchanted young man on the way home from the wars, a boy who needed a touch of the warmth stored up in her big blue eyes?

  Whatever her own problems might have been, she would never have shared them with me unless she had first thought I needed her help. Afterward the mutual need between us became so demanding that it ran out of control.

  Did I force myself on her like awful Andrew?

  Certainly not. The love between us was passionate on both sides.

  And my dreams about the Yamoto and my shipmates have stopped. Now that I’m on track in searching for her, I’m sleeping peacefully. It almost seems that the nightmare at Clinton was the last of the nightmares.

  My life started to turn the corner when I met her. Maybe the corner has turned completely now. Perhaps the horror at Clinton was an end and a beginning. Could it be that Andrea’s—I should call her Maggie now—Maggie’s role was to teach me how to love a woman and point me in the direction of becoming a writer instead of a lawyer, or in addition to a lawyer?

  She was a brief grace sent to teach me how to live and how to love. Is that not enough?

  No. I want her in my arms.

  I paused and pondered what I had written.

  Had Quixote found a mission for his life so easily?

  Perhaps I had learned all that there was to learn from the pale, haunted young woman I had met and loved and lost. Ought I to forget about a quest that was probably hopeless?

  The Cubs managed to load the bases in the first of the ninth, with one out. They were down two runs. All right, now’s the turning point of the season.

  I put my pen aside and listened intently.

  By the way, what was the name of the American League club in Philadelphia in those days? No one knows? The A’s, since then in Kansas City and Oakland.

  I beat my grandchildren at Trivial Pursuit as long as sports is the subject.

  Or war.

  The next Cub batter struck out. And the one after that popped up to the shortstop. No runs, two hits, and no errors. Three men left on base.

  Paradigmatic.

  I called Delta Airlines and was told that they had a DC-3 flight to Miami and “in
termediate stops” on Monday morning. I made my reservation and didn’t ask what the intermediate stops were.

  Then I returned to my diary.

  She lied to me about two important facts. Her daughter did not die in a miscarriage. And her husband did not die on the Indianapolis. In fact, he apparently died six months after the war was over. Moreover, she had an excellent reason to want to kill him, although both Sister Patrice Marie and Jean Kelly believe that impossible.

  But why lie to me?

  I stopped my pen, or rather the Latham’s pen, poised uncertainly over the notebook.

  Maybe because she was afraid I wouldn’t believe the truth.

  I lifted the Latham’s pen off the page again.

  What is the truth?

  I thought about that.

  Something so horrible that she thought that she was poised between earth and hell.

  What could that be?

  I read over what I had written. It settled the question, as if there ever had been any doubt about it. I would not, could not, give up my search for Andrea King/Maggie Ward until I had an explanation. I might not find her. I had to know her real story. Then I could understand, I hoped, the strange experience that we had shared above Lost Dutchman’s creek.

  I went back to writing.

  She seems like such an intricate and complicated person. How could a kid a little over eighteen be so elusive?

  Maybe we’re all that way. If someone were trying to hunt down the facts of my life, would he not decide that I too was a bundle of contradictions. Even in the family. Talk to Joanne and you’d learn about one Jerry Keenan, and then talk to Packy and I’d be a very different person.

  The men and women in Saint Dom’s remember her as sweet and pretty but indistinct. Ralph—the kid at the drugstore must have been Ralph, the lucky bastard—recollects her as hot stuff but still deserving respect. Jean Kelly, a bright, gorgeous, mature young woman, tells me that she was tough and ethereal and pretty and close to despair. For all her own talents and resources, Jean worshiped her and depended on her. She also tells me that Maggie played mother confessor to a group of boys.

  She had a hard life, God knows. But she also had attracted good and loyal friends. Yep, that was my Andrea. She had character. I guess I knew that in Arizona. Not only tough, but strong.

  And this is the “provoking little girl” that Sister Mary Regina despised.

  Did you know any girls like her in high school?

  Sure, I did. I never made love with any of them. Never fought the demons of hell for them as I did or imagined I did for her in the Superstition Mountains. Would they have been like her under the pressures she endured? Maybe. Why not?

  So it’s not an impossible portrait, only a fascinating one.

  Which is why I am in Philadelphia in this August of 1946 instead of Lake Geneva.

  “CIC!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Didn’t you tell me that she would always be part of my life?”

  “I don’t recall that I did, sir.”

  “Well, the guy with the BAR did.”

  “But that is true already, isn’t it?”

  One tough, fascinating little bitch. Even if I don’t find you, you’ll be carved on my memory and my conscience as long as I live.

  But I intend to find you. Not just your secret, not just your story, but you.

  And then bring you home to the Butterfield dance (if not the Harvest Festival, then something later). And never let you go.

  Never.

  It’s your fault I didn’t take on Ralph in a competition for Jean Kelly this afternoon. Do you realize, Maggie Ward, what I’m giving up for you?

  Well, I’ll ask you someday.

  So as the sun set and a touch of breeze played with the curtain of my room at the Latham—no air conditioner but “on the north side of the hotel, sir”—I admired my virtue for not making a determined pass at Jean Kelly, considered the possibility of attending Mass the next day, and decided against it.

  I would leave on Monday morning for Fort Lauderdale and her aunt and uncle whom I would like to strangle. I had no idea of what I would ask them or where I would search after what was certain to be an unsatisfactory talk with them.

  I reconsidered my decision to stay away from Mass.

  You could always pray “Dear sir or madam.”

  Or even “occupant.”

  When you were desperate enough.

  CHAPTER 24

  THE DELTA AIRLINES DC-3 THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO MAKE the run to Miami was out of service. So the three passengers scheduled to board in Philadelphia and the lone stewardess, a honey blonde with a wonderful Georgia drawl, were loaded on a Boeing 247D.

  Of which my youngest daughter—the ineffable Biddy—said, when shown the picture in her mother’s collection, “You’d have to be crazy to fly in something that tiny.”

  Such is the character of the 747 generation.

  I’m not sure, however, that she was wrong. The 247D had seen better days, probably before the war; and we were buffeted by ridge after ridge of thunderstorms all day.

  I wanted my good, solid, stable Grumman back the worst way. I also wanted to take the aircraft away from the idiot who was flying it, an impulse from which my wife has had to protect me intermittently in the course of our traveling together.

  “Buy yourself a Gulfstream, dummy, if you want to play jet pilot,” she tells me.

  Note well the kind of woman she is: she says “Gulfstream” not “Learjet.”

  There were six intermediate stops between Philadelphia and Miami, of which I can only remember the first and the last—Washington and Jacksonville.

  The other Philadelphia passengers were a honeymoon couple who had been married on Saturday—no other explanation for their lofty self-preoccupation was possible. So I had the blond Georgian to myself on the hop down to Washington.

  Or she had me to herself.

  There were two possibilities, I told myself as we bumped over the Washington Monument in downdrafts so strong I was convinced we were going to impale ourselves on it: either there had been a notable increase in the number of friendly young women available in the world during the past three weeks, or Andrea King, née Margaret Mary (Maggie) Ward, had pulled the blinders off my eyes.

  Or maybe my dreams about Jean Kelly had poured high octane fuel on my already ignited lusts.

  Drenched my bloodstream with more hormones, I’d say now. My virtue was strengthened, though not greatly, by the fact that in addition to listening to the Phillies on the radio the day before, I had taken in Meet the Press, The NBC Symphony, and The University of Chicago Round Table. On the first, a dullard named Joe Martin attacked Harry Truman for the “price-control mess,” on the second, Toscanini conducted the Shostakovich Fifth; and on the last-named, two ponderous idiots talked about what GIs wanted out of education (a degree, but they didn’t seem to realize it).

  I didn’t normally listen to symphonic music, but Maggie, as I was now thinking of Andrea, liked it. So …

  They didn’t have the ingenious custom of the mile-high-club then, the 247 could not make it to five thousand feet to save our lives, and there was not enough room in the single-toilet facility crunched into the back of the 247 even for the specified functions (at my height or any height more than that of a midget). But there wasn’t much question about the Georgian’s intentions.

  It was flattering, especially when she gave short shrift to the other travelers who embarked and disembarked after we had jumped over the various puddles between Pennsylvania and Florida. As the nuns at Dom’s would have undoubtedly said, the war caused a great increase in immorality. And, to quote Jean Kelly, you know what they mean by that. It was my impression, and still is, that immorality in that sense of the word has never been unpopular.

  But, you will be happy to hear, I persisted in virtue.

  She was, after all, a Protestant, albeit, she claimed, an Irish one.

  And I was no longer Quixote, but Galahad on the ques
t.

  The civilian airport adjoined the Naval Air Station at Jacksonville. I fidgeted nervously in my seat at the sight of the Phantoms and a newer jet, which I assumed was the Panther, on the tarmac. As we chugged up to the Quonset hut terminal, a flight of three Phantoms raced down the runway, stuck their noses firmly in the sky, and soared away, leaving their roar trailing behind.

  For a moment I regretted my perfectly sensible decision to leave the Navy before I was hooked on jets.

  You haven’t left flying, I told myself, you’ve just left the Navy.

  “Shore do make a heap of noise, don’t they?” my blond friend observed.

  That comment on the grace of the Phantoms scaling heaven confirmed my virtue.

  I thought of the three students in my class who washed out, permanently, while we were in nearby Pensacola. Two of them collided shortly after takeoff—steering-control malfunction on one of the planes—and the other simply disappeared over the ocean.

  Like Maggie’s father, he never came back.

  I was able to ponder their deaths with more objectivity than ever before. Maybe I was growing up, or maybe only becoming insensitive.

  The commander of the NAS had been my captain on the Enterprise at the end of the war. When I was finished in Fort Lauderdale, perhaps I could come back here, pay my respects, and hitch a flight to …

  To where?

  Well, I could decide that later.

  I evaded the persistent Georgian at Miami Airport, a small art deco (as we could call it now) terminal on the edge of the murky Everglades, and took a cab to the Waldorf Towers, an elegant hotel on the beach at Ninth Street (also art deco), where our family used to escape at Easter time. It has long since disappeared, to be replaced by one of the monsters of the late fifties, which in their turn are surviving now only on the courtesy of British excursion tours. Florida has become for the English what it was for us till the jets transformed the world: a haven of sun and warmth in the middle of winter (with no guarantees underwriting either sun or warmth).

  When my kids ask what a 1920s Florida resort hotel was like, I tell them that it looked much like Al Capone’s Florida home, which was celebrated earlier this year when WGN did the national con game about the walled-up chambers beneath the Lexington Hotel in Chicago.