It was paradise that oppressively hot day in August of 1946. Like the Arizona Inn, it had, thanks be to God, air-conditioning. (Noisy window units, but who cared?) I was weary from the flight and mildly sick from the day-long bumping in the thunderstorms. I turned on the air conditioner in my room and despite its noise promptly fell asleep. Ten hours later, when I woke up, I could not remember any dreams about blond Georgians or black Irish Pennsylvanians.
Which didn’t mean that I didn’t have any such dreams.
I ate a huge breakfast, swam in the ocean, and walked the beach, where I noted that the shorts-and-halter style affected by Jean Kelly was popular this summer. I applauded it and wondered whether it would be considered too immodest for Lake Geneva. I was pretty sure it would be.
Bikinis they were not. The shorts would be laughed off the beach today because they hid more thigh than they displayed. The suits were the equivalent of heavy girdles and bras legitimated for beach wear, graceless and ugly. But they did reveal a little bit more belly and breast than the one-piece suits. They seemed to invite you (if you were young and horny) to take the wearer in your arms and kiss her respectfully but persistently. For that time, they were perfectly delightful.
My eyes feasted on these lovely bodies and my imagination respectfully (more or less) undressed the most promising of them, including the occasional well-shaped mother in her thirties strolling the beach with a kid or two in tow.
Even fictionally naked, none of them compared with Maggie Ward.
I was reluctant to dress in my most conservative shirt and tie and be about my day’s work. It would be much more pleasant to woman-watch on the beach. (I would have said girl-watch in those pre-feminist days, though the change of the name does not alter the pleasant nature of the activity.)
However, I turned in my laundry, ate an orange, and found a taxi driver who was prepared to drive me up to Fort Lauderdale.
In those days it was but a small suburb of Miami, hardly the place were the boys would be fifteen years later and then indefinitely thereafter at Easter. It was also so hot that Arizona seemed in comparison to be no worse than purgatory.
Quinn’s Meat Market was beyond Fort Lauderdale off the road to Pompano Beach, on a side street halfway between the beach and the Inland Waterway. It was as shabby as the row house in Philadelphia, the most depressing store in a line of dismal shops on the first floor of a decrepit low-slung stucco two-story building, whose white paint, where it had not chipped off, had turned a kind of shoddy gray.
“Not much,” the cabby observed, doubtless wondering what someone who stayed at the most discreet of the Miami Beach hotels was doing in this backwater dump.
“Hardly anything at all,” I agreed, bounding out of the car as if, despite my sweat-soaked shirt, I were a competent and zealous government agent.
I was also furiously angry, more angry at the Quinns than I was at the Japanese whom I had fought during the war. They had not done anything to me, but they had hurt my poor Maggie Ward.
The Quinns, standing together behind the counter as if united in fierce resistance to a hostile world, looked like an Irish caricature of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, at the same time ridiculous and pathetically comic. Tall, skinny, rigid, bespectacled, he in a vest with a butcher’s apron, she, astonishingly in the heat, in a dark-gray sweater, they watched my approach to the counter with a mixture of greed and fear. I was either a sucker to be taken or an enemy to be detested.
Ducks in a shooting gallery, more to be pitied than to be blamed, I thought. Then I remembered a vivacious little girl committed to the care of these monsters, who must have come into the world elderly.
“Do you want to buy something, sir?” he said obsequiously, hand on the butcher knife, which may have been the one that Maggie had used to threaten him.
Gutsy little tiger.
“Not especially.” I leaned casually against the counter, glanced at the dreary chops in the display case and wondered if this part of Florida had no laws regulating the sale of meat.
“Well, what do you want?” she said in a dry, high-pitched voice.
“To talk a little,” I replied, opening my wallet and flashing my officer’s club ID card, which looked official enough to get me into Fort Knox. “About a number of things.” I flipped the wallet shut and jammed it back in my pocket. “Black-market meat for one thing. Stealing from your niece’s estate for another.”
Bull’s-eye. Direct hit. Target in flames and sinking.
“You’re talking nonsense,” he blustered, but all the starch went out of both their spines.
“Has that man finally come back to claim his sluttish daughter?” she sneered.
The shop smelled of an unhealthy mixture of Lysol and rotten meat. Even the sawdust on the floor looked old.
“I’ll ask the questions,” I sneered back.
I hadn’t thought about the possibility that they might fear not only the FBI but Maggie’s long-absent father.
“We didn’t do anything wrong.” He was surely the weaker of the two. “It costs money to raise a child—clothes, tuition, books. We sent her to a Catholic school.”
“As a charity case,” I fired in the dark again and again hit the target. “And then kept the money for school expenses. Don’t try to fool me. We know everything.”
“You won’t be able to prove it in court,” Isobel Phalen Quinn screeched. “You don’t have any evidence.”
I ignored her. “We know that you used to beat her with a belt, the one you’re wearing, as a matter of fact; that you made sexual advances to her until she threatened to emasculate you with that butcher knife you’re holding—”
“This is a carving knife.” Hand and knife quaking, he tried to cut me off.
“Don’t interrupt,” I shouted. “We have enough to put both of you in federal prisons for the rest of your miserable lives.”
“Shut up, you fool,” she shouted. “Don’t tell him a thing.”
“What would a jury think”—I turned my anger on her—”of a woman who forced her sister’s only child to marry a brute who had raped her, so that she could get rid of the child and have the child’s money all to herself?”
They probably were misers, with lots of money, most of it Maggie’s, socked away in War Bonds.
“It’s not true.”
“Ah, but it is,” I proclaimed triumphantly. “All of it, and a lot more besides.”
“What do you want to know?” Howard Quinn sighed in resignation. “We’re simple, hardworking people. We don’t have the money for lawyers.”
“With all that money in government bonds? Don’t try to kid me.”
“What do you want to know?” Isobel was hysterical now.
“To begin with, where is she?”
I’d shot par for the first seven holes. I think, I told myself, you bogeyed that one.
“We don’t know,” they replied together, relaxing.
“She was always an ungrateful little chit,” the woman continued. “After all we did for her, she never wrote us. We had to learn from our neighbors when her baby was born.”
I teed up again. “The child to whom the inheritance should rightfully belong.”
A chip shot away from the green.
“It’s not much money, and with the way prices are going up”—the carving knife slipped out of his wet palm—”it won’t be worth anything at all.”
“You know full well that the little girl died. The question is whether you are responsible for her death.”
“NO!” they bellowed together.
“We might have made some mistakes with the money”—he was melting into cheap lard—”we always tried to be fair, but we’re not murderers.”
Probably not. That would take more courage than they possessed.
“The father is dead, too.”
“The United States Government is well aware of that fact, ma’am,” I sneered. In truth, the government was not sure that he had ever existed, though his records were doubtl
ess somewhere in a file in the “temporary” Navy Department buildings on the Mall in Washington. “We also know how he died.”
That was hardly the truth.
“We don’t know anything about it,” her husband pleaded. “We don’t even know how he died.”
“Come now,” I blustered toward a putt that would mean another par. “You don’t mean to tell me that you raised the girl for eleven years and don’t know the circumstances of her husband’s death? You can’t expect the government of the United States to believe that, can you?”
I missed the putt.
“She hated us because we tried to raise her to be a decent, God-fearing young woman,” Isobel whined. “And she disgraced us and forced us to leave the community where we’d spent most of our lives.”
“Really, Mrs. Quinn.” This was an easy par-three hole. “We both know better than that. If it had not been for some lingering goodwill toward Margaret Mary’s father’s family, you would not have been permitted by the Philadelphia police to slip out of town before the FBI arrested you.”
Okay, I won the hole, but I wasn’t going to win the match.
“We don’t know where she is.” He was sobbing. “If we did, we’d tell you.”
I was sure he would.
“We’ll see about that.” I sneered again, hoping I looked like Paul Muni playing Al Capone. “We’ll be watching your every move. And you’d better spend some of that money of yours on a lawyer.”
I swaggered out of the store, breathing with relief the steamy salt air of the Atlantic Ocean.
I had beaten them into the ground, avenged myself a little on them, and felt rotten.
Ducks, indeed, in a shooting gallery.
And I had not eased any of Margaret Mary Ward’s pain. Only God, should He really be, could do that.
And Maggie, my Maggie, was quite incapable of vengeance. She would have been furious at me.
I had learned that her childhood after her father’s vanishing act had been even worse than I could imagine. So I had more respect for her gumption, for what I would call today her integrity.
There had to have been a gumption gene somewhere in the Ward past. Maggie had inherited it in all its purity and power.
Fine, it was nice to know that, though I could have surmised it without a flight to Fort Lauderdale.
But they didn’t know where she was and neither did I.
I had expected such a result of my pilgrimage to the Quinns’ meat market. Yet I was angry at myself, at the Quinns, at the world, and at whatever powers were responsible for the world, when I found that my expectations were confirmed.
I was not angry, though perhaps I ought to have been, at Andrea/Maggie for slipping away from me in the early morning hours in the Superstition Mountains and starting me on this dizzy, crooked pilgrimage. I would be angry at her later, but it didn’t help.
“Any luck?” the cabby asked as I slammed the door of his 1937 Ford.
“What I didn’t think I’d find out, I didn’t find out.”
I failed to add that I had no idea what came next.
Back at our family’s favorite Florida hotel, I stripped off my soggy clothes, pulled on my swimming trunks, and swam at least a mile in the Atlantic, venturing out much farther than I should have because of my frustration and anger.
I read the papers—H. G. Wells had died, the Paris Peace Conference was fading, ships filled with Jews were running the British blockade into Palestine, and the Cubs had split a doubleheader on Monday—and tried to figure out what to do next.
I was at a dead end. As I had expected I would be. There was nothing more to be learned about Andrea/Maggie from those who had known her as a little girl and then as an emergent young woman in Saint Dominic’s parish in Philadelphia.
I liked this Maggie Ward person, but I still had no idea where she was or where I should look next.
I phoned Delta Airlines and made a reservation for the flight the next morning to Jacksonville.
The admiral would bend regulations and put me on a plane to anywhere in the world that I wanted to go.
Fine. Where did I want to go?
Home to La Mancha? There surely would be a flight to Glenview.
No, not yet. There was still a month before law school began at De Paul or Loyola—if the latter was going to reopen now that the war was over.
I phoned home while I was pondering the problem.
Dad answered the phone. I told him I was in Miami.
“Are you really looking for a girl?” he asked, not so much upset as astonished.
“Trying to solve a puzzle.”
“Where did the puzzle start?” he asked lightly.
“I suppose you could say”—I hesitated; the puzzle really was the death of Maggie’s daughter and husband—”San Diego.”
“Then what are you doing in Miami?” he asked, his voice patient as it always was when he felt his children were being thickheaded.
“I’m leaving for there tomorrow,” I said. “Probably on a navy flight out of Jacksonville. I had to clear up some details first.”
“We have a good contact or two in San Diego if you need it.”
He meant political clout. That’s what “contact” always means in our family vocabulary.
“Thanks. I may need it.”
Amazing how much smarter Dad had become since I’d left for the service.
“San Diego,” I wrote in my journal. “Where I probably should have started.”
I thought about that.
“And I have no idea where I’m going to start when I get there.”
CHAPTER 25
I STARTED SEARCHING AT THE OBVIOUS PLACE, THE DEL Coronado Hotel (though it only became obvious to me when our FH-4 roared over it on its landing approach at the San Diego NAS). The flight time was a little less than seven hours, with two refueling stops and against a head wind. Despite the cramped quarters—the young Annapolis grad who flew the aircraft and I were virtually in one another’s laps—and the uncomfortable crash helmet, I reveled in the excitement of the trip.
I told you that I wanted adventure.
I flew the second leg of the trip myself. The FH-4 was an easy plane to fly when you are at forty thousand feet. Taking off and landing were not so easy. I turned the controls back to the jaygee when we began our approach.
Withdraw your resignation, I told myself tentatively. You want adventure? Here you can have it.
CIC intervened. “And you want to endure the navy bureaucracy on the ground? Better you do what Maggie said and become a writer.”
“Maggie is my woman, not yours.”
Share and share alike.
I spent much of time there above the clouds thinking about her, puzzling over her story, trying to fit the pieces together in a coherent pattern. That was a mistake; none of us is coherent or consistent. Any simple explanation of the richness of a human person in a couple of sentences is prima facie erroneous. I’ve been married to the same woman for many, many years. I enjoy her in every way a man can enjoy a woman. I gave up trying to explain her even to myself long ago. She claims that she was too smart ever to try to reduce me to a couple of sentences. The reward of abandoning the search for understanding of a character, real or fictional, is that you are then free to enjoy.
So with poor Maggie Ward. The more I tried to piece together in a reasonable composite the various portraits that had been offered me in Philadelphia and Miami, the more elusive she became. And the composite sketch only overlapped partially the young woman I had met in the railroad station at Tucson and made love with in the bridal suite at Picketpost House.
Sister Mary Regina, Sister Marie Neri, Sister Patrice Marie, the people in the parish for whom she was a sweet and pretty little memory, Ralph, the Quinns, Jean Kelly—she was a different young woman for all of them. My own picture was most like Jean’s, but there was something in each of their snapshots that seemed to apply and much that did not; even in Jean’s warmly sympathetic portrait, I did not see th
e maturity or even the sophistication that Andrea King seemed to possess, a poise far beyond her years.
There were, God knows, enough traumas in her young life to demand rapid maturation as the price of survival.
And how did she survive? I wondered as our Phantom raced the sun toward the Pacific. Was not that the greatest mystery of all?
If she had indeed survived, a point about which I had not been sure since our first encounter in Tucson.
But even to be the kind of adolescent (teenager became a category in the late forties and early fifties) Jean Kelly had described was a remarkable achievement, given her life story.
I had not read, indeed probably not even heard of, Freud then, but I decided that her first five years must have been very happy and that her relationship with her mother and father and theirs with each other must have been deeply loving. One may have had weak lungs and the other weak will, but they produced a daughter with enough strength to survive and even to flourish.
At that moment I loved her with all the power and enthusiasm of which my young man’s body and soul were capable. I wanted her. I would find her and save her.
Then, somewhere over west Texas or maybe even over southern Arizona where I had first met her, with the cloud layer a cotton carpet far below us and the sky a deep purple blanket almost at our fingertips, a strong memory of our first union at Picketpost returned, the image of her lovely young body as I removed the old-fashioned white nightgown seemed to be printed in full color on the sky.
I had to find her.
I can’t claim that the Furies inside me had been extirpated. Rather they were chained by a more powerful force. The rest of the quest would be executed with controlled rationality. Quixote became Sherlock Holmes.
The question of whether she might not want to be saved became irrelevant.
As we landed, with a hard bump, I wondered briefly about her father. Were his bones rotting somewhere in a hobo jungle, his throat having been slit a decade ago for maybe a nickel or a dime?
Or had he been killed somewhere during the war? Maybe at Clark Field, where that monumental idiot Douglas MacArthur had his B-17s lined up in neat rows for the Japanese attack planes nine hours after he had learned that Pearl Harbor had been bombed?
The Search for Maggie Ward Page 27