Had her assignment been to recall me to my faith before she went to heaven? Was part of her purgatory the terrible fear that she was already in hell? Did she have to conquer that too?
It continued to be inadmissible that Maggie was damned. Had not I myself told her that God, should there be such, loved her as much as I loved her?
I would now add, as much as Jean Kelly and Sister Patrice Marie and Fred and Magda Weaver and Gunnery Sergeant Wendel and Ralph Without-a-Last-Name?
“All right, Maggie,” I promised her aloud there by her grave, “you win. I believe again. I don’t promise that I’ll bounce back into Mass next Sunday, but I’ll make my peace with God because you said I should.”
And that bizarre prayer brought me again a hint of the serenity I had felt the day before coming in on the FH-4.
I would never know what had happened on those strange, frightening, wonderful days in Arizona. I had loved and had been loved. That would have to suffice for the rest of my life.
It would probably be enough.
It would have to be enough.
Would I eventually forget her, as I’d forgotten my grandmother, the other Maggie, who died when I was a little boy, leaving only an impression of colossal energy?
No, this Maggie would be remembered with rich and full detail, in a memory that in time might turn from painful to bittersweet.
“You’ll be part of me for the rest of my life, Maggie Ward,” I told her.
Then I remembered the similar words of CIC, in his seraphic manifestation, at the Lost Dutchman’s Mine.
No, I’d never forget her.
I actually prayed for her then, said the utterly Catholic words, “May Eternal Light shine upon her,” rose from my knees and walked out of the cemetery and across Balboa Park, perhaps the most beautiful urban park in America.
Strangely, my numbness heightened my sensitivity to its beauty. The whole world, and especially this magnificent park, had become a warm blanket protecting my Maggie until we should meet again.
Twilight turned to dusk. A full moon inched its way over the mountains, turning the patches of fog into quicksilver dust that danced gently through the park. The full moon suggested the horror to me, as it would for the rest of my life. But the horror bound, locked up, restrained; only temporarily restrained, perhaps, and ready to break out at any time, yet sufficiently under control that I could admire the contradictory white forgiveness in the moonlight.
Only one other time in my life so far has the horror returned.
I found a Catholic church near the park. It was open, unlike most Catholic churches these days. Inside I knelt, not quite ready to resume diplomatic relations with the One represented by the flickering tabernacle light—a hint perhaps of the fragility and the durability of love—but ready to begin preliminary negotiations.
As if you can negotiate with God!
It seemed obvious to me that this crazy interlude in the first summer after the war—when most Americans were relishing a vacation and complaining about shortages—had to be put firmly behind me. Remember Andrea/Margaret Mary, yes. Benefit from my short interlude of love with her, I told myself, but do not become obsessed with trying to understand it.
The Adventure is over. The Romance is finished. The Woman has been won and then lost again.
Proceed with the serious business of life.
CIC for once agreed completely.
It was a sensible and reasonable reaction. In fact, its sensibility and rationality—as set down in my journal at the Del Coronado with the moon high in the sky over the quiet Pacific—astonishes me even almost forty years later.
It was a singularly ill-advised resolution and one that I would not be able to keep. And it was not the conclusion I ought to have drawn from my quest at all.
Perhaps I was too tired, too disappointed, maybe even too homesick to read the experience properly.
Or to note the hole in it, big enough for the USS Missouri.
It’s twenty-four hundred miles, more or less, from San Diego to Chicago. If you drive eight hundred miles a day on Route 66 (may it rest in peace), you can make it in three days. In 1946 there was no interstate system (Biddy won’t believe that there was ever a time when there was no interstate, just as she won’t believe that there was ever a time when the Mass was in Latin and young women her age wore girdles). To make your eight hundred miles, you had to average forty-five miles an hour for eighteen hours. If you took out a half hour here or there to eat and maybe an hour or two to nap about midnight, you could cover the distance even in a 1939 Chevy in a little under three days.
I turned off 66 (Ogden Avenue in Cook County) and onto Harlem Avenue at seven o’clock in the morning; fifteen minutes later, Roxinante steaming and puffing, I pulled up in front of our house on Lathrop, ambled into the kitchen and asked my delighted mother for a double order of pancakes. I assured my equally delighted father, before he buried his head behind the Chicago Sun (no Tribune in our house), that I would register for Loyola Law School that afternoon, told an astonished Joanne that I liked her hair blond, and challenged Packy to a game of “Horse” on the backboard on our coach house.
The headlines in the Sun said that the Senate was about to investigate the crazy racist senator from Mississippi, Theodore Bilbo; the government had issued an ultimatum to Yugoslavia demanding the release of survivors of two American planes the Tito crowd had forced down; UNRAA director Fiorello La Guardia had fired an assistant who charged the Russians with using UNRAA supplies for political purposes. And the Cubs had lost again.
Home is the sailor, home from the sea.
And the hunter home from the hill.
And the romantic home from the mountains.
Having forgotten, as you’ve doubtless noted, the most important clue of all.
PART THREE
Maggie Ward
CHAPTER 29
“HOW MANY DAYS OF COMBAT?” I TOWERED OVER MY FATHER in his “judge’s” chair.
“I suppose you could say two weeks”—he squirmed uncomfortably—”at the most.”
We were in his “chambers,” a room at the back of the house paneled in thick oak, with deep maroon carpet, bookshelves on every wall, and would you believe, a stained-glass window. It was to that room I was called as a child whenever I had violated some family rule, a more infrequent event than I would have cared to admit to my own children lest they conclude that Daddy was a creep.
My father was a big, solid Irishman, taller even than Packy, with a build like a wrestler or a truck driver and a face and a voice like an actor trained to play in Eugene O’Neill tragedies, qualities that served him in good stead in the courtroom and on the golf course.
He was also a gentle and humorous man who never could get over the wonderful joke of having a beautiful wife and three children. He worked hard but relaxed easily and lived into his eighties.
The only time I ever saw him angry was when Republicans won an election.
“And how many of your buddies died?”
“Three of them were wounded.”
I had been called in for “consultation,” as he always called it, when he heard from my mother that I had thrown the letter from the Navy Department in the wastebasket. Was I not perhaps forgetting the family tradition of citizen soldier?
“I don’t have a wife to bring from Ireland,” I snapped.
So it began.
Commander Jeremiah Thomas Keenan, USNR, Navy Cross (with star), having a problem readjusting to civilian life? Taking on his poor father in an argument about comparative war records?
What, me worry?
“And you rose to be captain?”
“First lieutenant.” He was grinning. On the one hand he didn’t like my decision to retire from the Navy in every possible way. On the other, good lawyer that he was, he relished his son’s courtroom performance.
“And you won the Silver Star?”
“Bronze Star … I’ll stipulate, counselor, that your war record is, ah, more exte
nsive than mine.”
“Wouldn’t you say distinguished?” I was not to be appeased by his wit. My father was always most dangerous in his arguments when the wit took over.
“Distinguished? Well, now would you summarize it again?”
“Two years of combat, a squadron commander, came out the equivalent of an army light colonel, and two DSCs—Navy Crosses to us.”
“Two?” He raised one of his silver eyebrows in surprise. “I didn’t know about the second.”
“I didn’t tell anyone. The point in this cross-examination is that I know what war is like. I don’t want any more of it. I don’t want to make it easy for the government to start another war.…”
“You’re not turning Republican on us, are you?” His handsome Irish face, red naturally and not from drinking, became seriously concerned. “You don’t believe that stuff about Roosevelt getting us into the war just to save England?”
“I don’t. And if he did, I wouldn’t have blamed him. The Japs and the Nazis had to be beaten. Maybe the next enemy will have to be beaten, but not by me. And if you give old men a standing military of young men, they’re more likely to start a war than if they have to rearm. No, Dad, I’m sorry. I’m not a pacifist in principle. But I saw too many fuck-ups to trust our leaders again.”
“Maybe you’re right.” He did not want to continue the argument, in fact regretted starting it. “The public won’t stand for another war—in this generation, anyway.”
My father was seldom wrong in his predictions, and probably never more wrong than in that one. As my wife would later remark, if I had stayed in the reserves I would probably have managed to get myself killed and would have left her a widow with two children and another on the way. I observed that, as best as I could remember, she was not expecting in 1950, and was told that I would have doubtless impregnated her before going back to war.
She was angry at me (for several hours) over what might have happened, not ready to give me credit for having foreseen and forestalled it.
You can’t win. The sooner you know that, the better off you are.
“Did you have a good talk with your father?” my mother asked anxiously, when I stalked through the kitchen to join Packy at the hoop.
It’s harder to be objective about your mother. I don’t think we ever realized how beautiful she was—long black hair turning silver, tall, durable full figure, sweet face, gentle voice, quick smile. My father loved her more intensely with each passing year. When he smiled at her Panglossian vagueness, it was never a smile of ridicule but rather of affectionate respect. He understood better than we did that beneath Panglossa there were shrewd street instincts that sized up others instantly and accurately, even if it was like pulling teeth to persuade her to share such an analysis with us.
“We had an argument and I won,” I said churlishly. “But don’t worry, Mom, I’ll straighten out eventually.”
That was her line to Dad, almost every night at supper when I did or said something boorish.
“He won’t,” Pack would chortle. “He’s going to be a permanent problem of psychological readjustment.”
“Patrick,” my father would say in grim warning, as if any threat could repress my irrepressible younger brother.
On weekends, when Joanne was home from Barat, she would inform me that I was being “drippy,” and I would retaliate by suggesting that she might try green rinse on her hair next week.
It was pretty hard to work up to a good generation-gap (as we would call it now) fight with my family. Mom was too gently vague and Dad too elusively shrewd. Packy was too much fun for sibling rivalry. The thickheaded Joanne was away at school most of the time.
I was also self-consciously aware that I was playing a role. I was indeed restless, frustrated, uncertain. But I also knew that I had cast myself into the part of the returned war veteran, indeed combat veteran, and so I was looking over my own shoulder watching myself.
That took some of the fun out of the game and also made me more careful about the feelings of others.
How much of the game was a real adjustment problem and how much Maggie Ward, damn her eyes?
I figured even then that I could only blame my reentry into civilian life (symbolized by “ruptured duck” discharge insignia on my flight jacket) for twenty-five percent, thirty percent at the most, of my problem. For all my good resolutions, Maggie was on my mind constantly.
She had been dead and buried in the tomb that morning I met her at Tucson. Damn it, she owed me an explanation.
So did He, especially since, even if I was ostentatiously avoiding Mass at Saint Luke’s on Sunday, I had more or less reestablished diplomatic relations with Him.
I assumed that there would never be an explanation, but that did not stop me from demanding one anyway.
The principal target of my rage was Loyola Law School, in which I had enrolled because my father had attended De Paul. The University of Chicago was not an option that would have occurred to any of us.
In 1946, Loyola moved from their old downtown headquarters into a “tower” building on Michigan donated by Frank J. Lewis. It was one of the wisest moves the Chicago Jesuits ever made. They were better prepared for the overwhelming influx of students than any other Chicago school; the University of Illinois was driven to teaching classes at Navy Pier.
Lewis Towers, once a hotel, had been a V-12, ninety-day-wonder midshipman school for Northwestern during the war, which turned out officers and gentlemen for the United States Navy in ninety days. The Jebs snapped it up in the nick of time. In 1946 the law school, closed during the war, opened with a first-year class of which I was a truculent and restless member.
I am convinced my son went to Yale Law School because I went to Loyola. I followed my father’s example and did not reveal this knowledge to my son. My wife’s threat to divorce me if I did, a threat not to be taken seriously in any event, was hardly necessary.
I suppose that the Deity whose existence I was now prepared to acknowledge, though only just barely, designed me to be a lawyer. I do not have a deep mind (my spouse disagrees, but I will let it stand), but my intellect is agile, my memory retentive, my tongue quick, and my self-confidence, in those days at any rate, was enormous.
Arguing the law is like flying an F6F, less dangerous but more intellectually rewarding. After the first week I knew I could breeze through law school with very little study and no anxiety. In a half hour of glancing at the books, I could absorb as much as many of my classmates would in five or six hours.
It wasn’t fair, but whoever said life is fair?
My contracts teacher took a dislike to me during the first week of class. The feeling was mutual. If I couldn’t fight with my father, and if God wouldn’t fight back, Professor Hennessey was the perfect substitute for both.
“Are you with us today, Mr. Keenan?”
I try to tell myself that my recollection that he looked like John Houseman was the result of seeing Paper Chase many years later.
“Present, sir,” I would snap back at him, as if he were a marine DI.
“Paying attention or scrawling your verse?”
“Both, sir. It’s easy in this class.”
Sometimes I was writing love poetry to Maggie, sometimes trying to sketch pictures of her—the face was fading already, the body was still clearly etched. My drawings, long since lost, were not, I am prepared to swear, obscene.
Not really.
“I see. Mr Keenan, what was your rank in the service, second lieutenant?”
“I’m retiring with a silver oak leaf, sir.”
Slight awe in the classroom.
“And now you are a lowly first-year law student.”
“I’ll stipulate the law-student part, sir.”
“I see. And what did you do in the war, Mr. Keenan? Sit behind a desk in San Francisco?”
He should have looked up my record before he got into a verbal battle with me. He was feeding me great lines.
“I flew an F6F, sir
. Grumman Hellcat.”
“I see. Very interesting. You are a decorated war hero, no doubt?”
The classroom was uneasy. A lot of professors need a goat to beat up on (the role my poor Maggie had played for the nuns at Saint Dom’s).
“Is that appropriate matter for class discussion, sir?”
“Not necessarily, Mr. Keenan; but I feel that your classmates have a right to know what sort of distinguished fellow student they have. A purple heart, I presume?”
“Navy Cross with star.”
Dead silence.
“Most impressive. May I make a suggestion?”
“I don’t see how I can stop you.”
“Why don’t you forget about law and seek an outlet for your natural heroic skills on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade?”
“I might do that too, sir.”
“Indeed. Now if you will explain this particular case, if you know which one we’re discussing?”
The kid in front of me, an ex-tank commander from the ETO, pointed to the case in his book. I wasn’t even on the right page. I faked my way through it and earned at least a draw in my responses to old man Hennessey’s questions.
“A very interesting position, mister … or should I say Commander?”
“Suit yourself, sir.”
“Well then, Commander Keenan, you argue an absurd position with considerable skill, but not enough to pass the exam at the end of the term, much less the bar exam. Too bad, you’d make an interesting crooked lawyer, but a lawyer you’ll never be.”
“Oh, I think I will, sir, but never a law-school teacher. I won’t have to beat up on first-year law students to make up for my professional failures.”
Gasp from the class. Then laughter.
It was like bombing the Yamoto. Too easy. I did become a law-school teacher—in addition to a number of other things in the profession, but I never did beat up on students.
I did beat up on poor Hennessey, however. He was a mean son of a bitch. I hated the Houseman character in the film. I even hated him in the Smith Barney ads on TV. He reminds me too much of Hennessey.
The Search for Maggie Ward Page 30