The Search for Maggie Ward

by Andrew M. Greeley

  A few more run-ins and Hennessey left me alone. Found himself other goats to abuse.

  So I stopped attending the contracts class. Fuck it all.

  I hung around street corners with guys in the 52/20 club (the government paid you twenty dollars a week for a year if you were a veteran, just for doing nothing); drank more beer in a month than I had in all the years in the Navy put together; played basketball with Packy and his seminarian buddies (not all of whom found themselves a widow or a nun when the Church started to change); shot pool at Fred’s on Division Street in Austin a couple of nights a week; hung around some Loop bars; slept peacefully every night; and daydreamed that I saw Maggie’s body in the sky. For example, when crossing the Chicago River at sunset on the wooden Lake Street El train, as the setting autumn sun would bathe the river and the buildings near it in a misty Indian-summer gold.

  I dreamed about her and mourned for my lost love. I felt sorry for myself. I insisted in my diary that she was dead and I would not see her again. Yet I still looked for her every day in the crowds boarding the El train.

  I also dated, mostly young women from nearby Trinity or friends of Joanne’s from Barat. I heard Lawrence Tibbets in La Traviata and a recital by Gladys Swarthout at the Opera House, listened to George Szell conduct Mozart and Prokofiev at Orchestra Hall, watched Maurice Evans do Hamlet at the Erlanger, Joe E. Brown in Harvey at the Harris, the Laurence Olivier Henry V film at the Civic, Shaw’s St. Joan at the Goodman, Lindsay and Crouse’s State of the Union at the Blackstone, and Victor Herbert’s Sweethearts and Song of Norway at theaters I did not note in my journal. Neither did I write down the name of the author of the latter. Edvard Grieg seemed to be enough.

  I also began to take a mild interest in politics—enough to grind my teeth when I saw Harry Truman unable to keep the Democrats from going down to defeat in the 1946 congressional campaign. Some historians, most notably Robert Donovan in his excellent biography of Harry Truman, called the 1946 congressional election the “beef steak” election.

  During the summer, when price controls were lifted, meat prices soared and livestock dealers rushed beef and pork into the marketplace. Then, when controls were reimposed in September, meat seemed to vanish from the stores of the country as the dealers and growers stopped shipping meat, confident that the prices would soon go up again.

  Americans wanted plenty of meat at low cost and refused to choose between the two incompatible goals.

  Truman played into their hands: tales of whiskey-drinking, poker-playing cronyism in the White House—characteristics which, as Donovan says, makes Truman attractive in hindsight—infuriated Americans then. He was nothing but a stupid clown. I don’t suppose it helped that he didn’t look much like a President.

  (Incidentally, Dean Acheson, who was his Secretary of State, said that he had seen him drunk only once in the eight years of his presidency.)

  There was also a growing sense that we had won the war and lost the peace. The world did not seem to be an appreciably better place. Roosevelt, it was widely felt, sold Poland down the river at Yalta (a position that ignored the fact that the Red Army had already occupied most of Poland), and Harry Truman had been conned by the clever Russians at Potsdam.

  So blame Truman again.

  My burst of cultural and political interests—unsuccessful attempts to escape from the ghost of Maggie Ward, if the truth be told—astonished my family, especially since on alternate nights I was hanging around street corners or shooting pool.

  “Anything but study the law?” My father’s faintly leprechaunish grin appeared hesitantly.

  “Mom and Joanne want me to date nice girls,” I replied like one who is put upon by the whole world. “I guess I can’t do anything right.”

  The girls had a hard time figuring me out. I was polite, respectful, quiet, and gentlemanly. The last adjective meant that I normally made no passes and that my kisses at the end of a date demanded nothing in return. Some of them were frankly bored by the high culture (and to this day I’ll argue that Victor Herbert was high culture); others pretended to like it to keep their date happy; still others were delighted that some “boy” would finally take them to an event they liked. All three groups would be lucky to be invited again.

  The girls I would try on a second date were those who would admit honestly, “You know I’ve never been to anything like this before, but I could really get to enjoy it.”

  Which was my reaction too, I would confess.

  “Why do you go to the opera, then, Jerry?” the nicest one of them all, Kate Walsh, asked after La Traviata.

  My arm around her, as much as Roxinante’s gearshift would permit, I told her the truth. Mostly. “A girl I knew in the service kind of made me feel ignorant because I didn’t know about opera. She was right.”

  “Sounds a little nasty.” She leaned against my arm.

  “Not the way she did it.”

  “Did you love her?”

  More points for you, Kate, for being up-front.

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Oh”—fingers to my jaw—”how horrible! What happened?”

  “She drowned.”

  “Accident?”

  “I don’t think so. She … she was terribly discouraged about her life. With reason.”

  “Poor girl”—peck at my lips—”and poor Jerry.”

  “I haven’t told anyone but you,” I admitted, kissing her with more determination than any of the others. “Thanks for listening.”

  A good seduction routine? Sure, but I liked Kate too much to seduce her, even if I could have, of which I am not sure even now.

  We did go out several more times, to hear Stan Kenton at the College Inn in the old Sherman House and Jackie Mills at the Rio Cabana as well as the Symphony. I fell half in love with her, but the other half wouldn’t come. The problem was not that she was so different from Maggie, but that, despite her blond hair and pretty face, she was too much like her.

  Maggie, possessive little ghostly bitch that she was, kept getting in the way.

  Finally, after we had listened to Madame Butterfly in early December, our good-night kisses became torrid, a spontaneous hormonal reaction, I guess, of two young people who liked each other. My fingers found her breast beneath her V-neck navy-blue dress with the white collar.

  “Who’s Maggie?” she demanded, pushing me away gently. “The dead girl?”

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, angry, humiliated, ashamed.

  “Don’t be sorry, Jerry,” she whispered as she touched my chin again, one of her favorite gestures. “I understand. But I can’t compete with a ghost.”

  “You shouldn’t have to.” I would strangle that bitch Maggie Ward if I ever got my hands on her—in heaven or hell or purgatory or limbo or whatever.

  “I like you,” she said crisply. “And I could get to like you a lot, but …”

  “I guess I need more time.”

  “I don’t mean I won’t go out with you.” She smiled her marvelous imp smile. “You’re too much fun and too generous and even too good at necking and petting to give up, but I don’t want to get serious unless …”

  Kate would have made the right man a wonderful wife. In fact, she did make the right man a wonderful wife. And they do go to the opera.

  There wasn’t a ghost of a chance in December of 1946 of me being that man.

  The word “ghost” in that sentence was an accident. Or a Freudian slip, about which I did not know in 1946. But it describes my situation perfectly.

  I was still haunted.

  And the temper of the country was not much help. I began to think the wrong side had won the war.

  The winter of 1946/47 was a mean time in America. Much of Europe was still only a half step away from starvation. And Americans, who still feared a return of the Great Depression, were becoming nasty because they couldn’t buy all the things they wanted with the money they had saved during the war a
nd were still making, especially cars and houses. We wanted two incompatible goals—more goods and stable prices. OPA was mostly dead, but it lingered on such important items as cars. The black-market price on a new car was twice the OPA price. ($2600 for a Buick, as opposed to the $1300 OPA price. If you wanted one of the tiny, crude TV sets, you could get one for a mere $350.) We had a double-market economy for several months—OPA and black, the latter being the supply-and-demand market. Many of us could afford to pay the black-market prices to buy our Oldsmobiles and our Philcos and our Kelvinators, which is why there was a black market; but we resented that we had to pay such prices, forgetting that a few years before, we couldn’t afford such luxuries (now becoming necessities) at any price.

  Everyone else wanted cars and beef. I wanted Maggie. As much as ever.

  I still kept overlooking the most important piece of evidence and would continue to do so until it almost hit me on the head.

  CHAPTER 30

  MAGGIE WARD WAS IN MY ROOM WHEN PACKY BURST IN. “I thought I heard that noisy machine at work … hey, that’s not a mountain or a cactus! Some dame!”

  I was watching my Arizona slides for the second time. On the screen was the only shot of Andrea that had not been ruined.

  “The door was closed.” I tried to be angry, a waste of time with Packy.

  “Gosh …” He exhaled softly. “Is that the girl you were following, Jer? No wonder you’re gloomy all the time. How did she give you the slip?”

  My wife says that I idolize my brother Patrick because I see in him characteristics that I’d like to have myself. If my blond (still), six-foot-four, broad-shouldered, witty, persuasive brother has ever had a moment of self-doubt, he cured himself before anyone noticed. It’s lucky, my wife argues, that Packy is selling God and not encyclopedias. “Mind you, darling,” she adds, “I like him too, but he’d be the first one to admit that you’re the brother with depth.”

  Often I wish I could trade.

  “Do you think she’s prettier than Cathy O’Donnell or Teresa Wright?”

  Sensing my despondent mood, Packy had dragged me off that afternoon to see The Best Years of Our Lives (which later won the Academy Award as the best film of 1946). It had made me even more despondent.

  “They’re pretty dames.” Packy was eighteen, and in fifth year at Quigley, which combined four years of high school and one of college in a day-school seminary down on Rush Street, right next to Loyola Law School. “If they really let coeds into Loyola next year and they look like Cathy, it will be the end of vocations to the priesthood.”

  It was difficult to tell whether he was daydreaming about the young actress, unmistakably Irish-American, or my Maggie.

  “She’s gorgeous,” he said wistfully.

  “Cathy O’Donnell?”

  “Your dame. Why did you let her get away?”

  I almost told him the truth. The whole truth, not the partial truth I had shared with Kate.

  “It’s a long story, Pack.”

  “I bet it is; did you call her Dulcinea?” he continued. Then, focusing more closely on the details of the misty, impressionistic figure on the tiny screen propped up against my bookcase: “Does she have any clothes on?”

  “No.”

  “Wow.” He whistled softly. “I never thought you had it in you, Jer.”

  “Neither did I. And don’t stare. You’re going to be a priest.”

  “That has nothing to do with it.” He whistled again. “Any more pictures?”

  “No.”

  “It sure would be nice to have a sister-in-law like her around the house.”

  “It won’t happen. It’s all over.”

  “Sure?” He raised an eyebrow skeptically.

  “Absolutely.” I went on to the next slide.

  He nodded, as if he understood, a movement of the head just like hers. “Let’s have a game of twenty-one. You’re not going to help yourself any by sitting here brooding about her.”

  “Not now, Pack; I don’t want to help myself.”

  “You wanna brood?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess I see the point.” He glanced at the image of Gates Pass on the screen, as though Maggie were still there. “Are you sure it’s all over?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Oh my God … is there anything I can do?”

  “Go practice your hook shot,” I said gruffly, wanting his sympathy but not knowing how to respond to it. “I’ll be out in fifteen minutes or so.”

  He left quietly. I went back to the picture of Maggie. It was not just my love that imagined you beautiful. Even my kid brother, with the tastes of a typical eighteen-year-old (seminarian or not), thinks you’re gorgeous. I can’t believe you’re dead.

  And you are more beautiful than Cathy O’Donnell or Teresa Wright or Myrna Loy or Virginia Mayo.

  1946 was a great year for films—Notorious, My Darling Clementine, Best Years, Brief Encounter, It’s a Wonderful Life, Great Expectations, Till the End of Time, Two Years Before the Mast, Margie. It was also a great year for new young actresses, with the emphasis to meet the spirit of the times on wholesomeness instead of glamour. Rita Hayworth, Linda Darnell, Betty Grable, Virginia Mayo, Lana Turner were being succeeded by Donna Reed, Jeanne Crain, Mona Freeman, Gail Russell, Diana Lynn, and Teresa Wright and Cathy O’Donnell.

  They were too much for me because they all reminded me of Maggie. The wholesome domesticity between Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in Wonderful Life drove me out of the theater before the film was finished (Packy told me how it ended). I didn’t want domesticity yet; not exactly. But I didn’t exclude it either, did I? I was good with kids wasn’t I, even with the winsome little Ryan punk with his Pratt & Whitney roar?

  I wanted romance and adventure, didn’t I? How could I identify my Maggie with these suburban-housewife actresses?

  The answer was that romance and domesticity, adventure and a family—Maggie Ward seemed to promise them all.

  When I was thinking about writing this story, I bought videotapes of the great ‘46 films to see if they were as good as I remembered them.

  They were not. Even classics like Notorious and Clementine were not as smooth and professional as contemporary films. And the others were hokey. But the young actresses were still beautiful.

  My heart ached at the young Donna Reed, recently dead from cancer, and a striking promise of my own mortality.

  Every day after our birth, my wife noted while the tape was rewinding, is pure gift. For her and for us. There were tears in her eyes too.

  Both Best Years and Wonderful Life were, however, fascinating portraits of the time after the war. In both cases the heroes built homes for people. Fredric March (who won the Academy Award for best actor) and Jimmy Stewart fought with reactionary bankers to make loans to returning service men. Dana Andrews, decidedly overweight for a B-17 pilot, said that all he wanted was a home in the suburbs and finally went to work for a company building houses. He told Teresa Wright that it would be years before he made much money. Like any loyal lover of a returned vet, she replied, in effect, that it made no difference.

  They both were confident but uncertain.

  That was 1946.

  The two films were not left-wing critiques of American society. Both believed in the “American way”—hard work, ambition, expansion of opportunities, jobs for everyone. The “baddies” were those who wanted to return to the old rigid anti-expansionist spirit of the Depression. Bankers, in other words.

  Who was going to win?

  Like Fredric March and Dana Andrews and Jimmy Stewart and their lovely housewives-to-come-home-to, the films were betting on expansion. But uneasily.

  They didn’t realize that the expansionist energies were so powerful that even the bankers would soon be swept along. Willingly.

  That’s forty years later. Best Years oppressed me then because it made me feel ashamed of myself. Unlike Fredric March, I did not have to work for anyone. Unlike Harold Russell, I still had both
my hands. Unlike Dana Andrews, I was not burdened with a faithless wife and a job as a soda jerk. I was a spoiled rich kid, isolated from the experiences of my own generation.

  All right, I didn’t have women like they did, not yet. But there was a plentiful supply of those, too, some of them, like Kate, of the highest quality.

  But I had no good reason to feel sorry for myself.

  “Packy,” I asked on the El the next day, “what can I do to help poor people?”

  He looked up from his Greek book. “Huh?”

  “I want to help the poor.”

  “Invest in low- and middle-income housing,” he said promptly.

  “I saw the film too, remember?”

  “And listened to Dad and Ned. You want some direct experience? Well, there’s always the Catholic Worker house up on North Avenue. A bunch of vets run a soup kitchen every night for skid-row people.”

  “Communists?”

  “No. A woman named Dorothy Day founded the movement. She was a Communist who became a Catholic. Wrote a book called From Union Square to Rome. I have a copy somewhere. Radical, but Catholic.”

  “Like us.”

  “Not even remotely.” He laughed. “What’s her name?”

  “Dorothy Day, like you just said.”

  “No, dummy, the girl on the slide.”

  “Maggie. Or maybe Andrea. Hard to tell.”

  “Maggie? Like Grandma? That’s a free ticket in this family. What do you mean, ‘maybe’ Andrea?”

  “It’s a mystery, Pack. I’ll explain someday.”

  “I go up there to the Catholic Workers a couple of times a month,” he said as we left the El station at Forest—the end of the line. “Want to come?”

  “Why not?”

  It was time, I told myself, for some kind of political activity.

  We had lost the election. It was a sure defeat before the ballot boxes opened. Gallup predicted, accurately enough, that the Republicans would win control of the House and possibly the Senate. They also, to my father’s horror, won control of Cook County. The Kelly-Nash-Arvey machine, as it was called in those days, lost every race on the county ticket. A man named Elmer Michael Walsh (my father claimed that he didn’t really exist) defeated Dad’s good friend, State Senator Richard J. Daley, in the race for sheriff.