The Search for Maggie Ward

by Andrew M. Greeley

  On the ride home that night on the Lake Street El at Halsted, I could have sworn I saw Maggie on the opposite platform. Seeing her again was like an explosion, like ice floes breaking apart. I left the train at Loomis, crossed over to the opposite platform, and rode back to Halsted. The young woman who I thought was Maggie was still waiting on the platform. Not Maggie, not even pretty.

  Idiot, I told myself as I descended the stairs and crossed over to the westbound platform. Lovesick, haunted idiot.

  (It was quicker to ride downtown on the subway and hike from Forest Avenue at the end of the El ride to our house than to take the North Avenue streetcar straight west. I am convinced that there are still North Avenue streetcars wandering west, even though buses replaced them decades ago.)

  It was a great year for songs, Carousel and Brigadoon had both spawned hit tunes, “Don’t Fence Me In” and “Swinging on a Star” were still popular. “Tenderly,” “Come Rain, Come Shine,” “The Gypsy,” and “Doing What Comes Naturally,” were the songs of the year in addition to those I’ve already mentioned. The songs wore better than the films, some of them became standards as the years went on.

  “Tenderly” was our song—Kate and mine. It made me wonder whether Maggie and I had a song which was ours.

  “Ole Buttermilk Sky” in the train station?

  The Cook County Forest Preserve District had thoughtfully maintained Thatcher Woods on the west end of River Forest, just a block away from Trinity.

  The night after I met Dorothy Day, with “Tenderly” playing softly on one of the music stations, I was kissing Kate’s naked breasts in the front seat of Roxinante, ignoring the restraints imposed on me by the gearshift.

  There were pretty, fresh young breasts, all the more delectable because I was sure that I was the first man to see them naked or to kiss them.

  Caution and maybe fear finally stopped us.

  And my inexcusable comparisons between her breasts and Maggie’s—the ghost was a jealous lover.

  “I guess we should stop.” Kate sighed and rearranged her straps (two sets, because the slip was a more extensive garment in those days) and her satin cups. “You are quite good at this sort of thing, Jeremiah. I’ll always have pleasant memories of how good it can be.”

  I zipped up the back of her dress. “I’m sorry if I went too far.”

  “Nonsense,” she said briskly. “I didn’t try to fight you off, did I?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t think clearly,” she said as she turned off the radio, “with that song playing.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “So am I.” She laughed. “But we should think clearly for a minute.”

  I knew what was coming.

  “We are becoming, I believe the word is”—she laughed again, not in the least nervously—”involved with one another.”

  “You’ve noticed that?”

  “I have.” She touched my jaw. “And I don’t mind in the least. I am not in any rush to marry—”

  “First date that hasn’t talked about furniture.”

  “Be quiet, please.” She put her hand over my mouth. “On the other hand, we are both kidding ourselves if we think we’re not stumbling in that direction.”

  “Those are supposed to be my lines.” My mouth escaped from her hand, but was quickly recaptured.

  “I think I could probably go to bed with you,” she went on calmly, “with less guilt feelings than you could take me to bed. That’s not the point. The point is that we are both sufficiently Irish Catholic as to figure that we’d have to marry. Right? Don’t answer. Just nod your head.

  “Okay. I could get ready to marry if it came to that. Could you? Just shake your head. See? It’s not only that you have to resolve your Maggie problem. You also must figure out what you’re going to do with your life. Stop struggling.” Her eyes turned teary. “You shouldn’t try to settle that question just because you find that you’re stumbling into marriage, right?”

  I nodded agreement and she released my mouth.

  “So I’m not saying we’ll break up and I’ll certainly not let you out of taking me to that Benedictine ball—”

  “Bachelors and Benedicts,” I corrected her.

  “Right. But nothing steady or nothing heavy from now on, are we agreed?”

  It was a breakup, a friendly one. And we would date occasionally. But the romance was over.

  And I felt like a prize fool. How can anyone give up an intelligent, generous, lovely young woman like Kate because of a haunt?

  But give her up I did.

  Well, I thought to myself that night, if I do go to confession on the law-school retreat—which started the next day—I wouldn’t have to confess that I was still in the “occasion of sin.” As if someone like Kate were really in God’s mind an “occasion of sin.”

  I had learned a few things in my pilgrimage away from the Church and back. Like who God was.

  And while I still didn’t much like Him, I had to admit I was caught in the chance metaphor I had dredged up from my unconscious in Globe to persuade Andrea that she was not damned.

  God felt about me the way I felt about Maggie. Or even the way I felt about Kate.

  “That is flattering,” I told Him, “but You sure do have a strange way of showing Your love.”

  It would seem even stranger after the bombs the retreat master dumped on me, a retreat which, incidentally, nearly caused my expulsion from law school.

  CHAPTER 31

  I ALMOST FORCED THE JESUITS TO THROW ME OUT OF LAW school.

  Then I never would have met Father Donniger, the priest who told me that my experience with Maggie Ward was “not at all unusual, my very dear one.”

  The rules said that everyone in the university must make an annual retreat—a rather pathetic attempt in retrospect to maintain a Jesuit influence in a school that was being overwhelmed by an influx of students the Jebs had never anticipated.

  The “spiritual exercise” became a game in which administration and students matched wits. The students usually won. The administration’s techniques for checking attendance were ingenious, but not as ingenious as the students’ tricks for evading attendance. Priests in general and Jesuits in particular have displayed as long as I can remember remarkable abilities at getting into no-win situations with young people.

  I would not play the game. Religious devotion, I told the Dean, a layman, and the “Regent,” a Jeb, ought to be a matter of free choice. Virtue, I quoted a passage from Thomas Aquinas that I had picked up in first-year college, results from the repetition of free acts. They had no right to attempt to impose it, and their abuse of student freedom was counterproductive: the retreat was doomed to failure before it began, no matter how good the retreat master.

  “It’s our school,” said the Jeb, “we make the rules, you keep them or you leave.”

  “I think the courts might hold differently,” I replied curtly. “I can see the headline, ‘Navy Pilot Expelled from Law School over Retreat.’ ”

  “It won’t come to that, I’m sure,” the Dean, a nervous little man with no hair on his head and a rubicund face like my father’s, pleaded. “No one else protests, Jerry. I’m sure you’ll change your mind.”

  “Fat chance,” I snarled at him.

  I would like to persuade you that as long ago as 1946 I was a defender of the civil liberties of students, a cause I would later join with better legal preparation. I would also like to persuade you that I was anticipating by a decade and a half or so the opening up of Pope John’s window in the Catholic Church.

  In fact, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, Quixote had found another windmill with which to joust and thus distract himself from the lost Dulcinea.

  Both the Dean and the Regent knew my father. They were aware that he was sufficiently a radical Irish Democrat actually to go to court to defend the religious freedom of his son, even though he thought the son was a damn fool for refusing to go on the retreat. The Jebs were not sensitive to PR in th
ose days, but the Dean was, especially since the law school was in the midst of a fund-raising drive—that was the beginning of the time when universities were always in the midst of fund-raising drives.

  He proposed a not unreasonable compromise: I would agree to attend. They would agree not to demand my attendance card after the first session.

  “If you feel compelled in conscience,” the Dean said uneasily, “to stay away from the other sessions and thus override your agreement with us, we will not be able to enforce the agreement.”

  “You will, however, attend all the sessions.” The Regent didn’t like the Dean’s compromise.

  “I’m not a Catholic anymore,” I insisted with little regard for the facts.

  “Everyone benefits from a weekend devoted to God, no matter what their faith.” The Regent sounded like a braying farm animal when he preached, as he was at that moment.

  “I don’t have any faith, and I don’t believe in God.” I wondered if Maggie’s ghost was listening. “And I won’t go to your retreat. When was your last retreat, Dean Rochford? If students must make retreat, why not administrators?”

  “You be at that retreat,” thundered the Regent, “or we’ll expel you.”

  “See you in court, Father.” I walked jauntily out of the Dean’s office.

  Why did I show up at Lewis Towers—across from the old Chicago Water Tower, which seemed an eyesore in those days and not a precious historical landmark—the first weekend in December for the retreat?

  Kate made me.

  “If ever I saw a stupid son of a bitch who needed a retreat, it’s you,” she said with the timeless authority of an Irishwoman when she sees the spiritual welfare of her man in jeopardy. “Of course you’ll make the retreat.”

  So that was that, even if we did break up, more or less, between the conversation and the retreat. Maggie’s spirit did not need to come back to haunt me.

  The law-school retreat was not exactly what Saint Ignatius of Loyola had in mind when he designed his Spiritual Exercises. We did not go off into a quiet place in the country. Rather, we rode the El or the streetcars down to Lewis Towers, where we attended class every other day of the week. We listened to the retreat master’s conferences in the small and stuffy chapel and then were supposed to wander around the building or the streets outside in silence. Then we were expected to return home, avoid our girlfriends or our wives and the radio and newspapers, and devote our “free time” to prayer and reflection.

  Nor did we dedicate thirty days to our “spiritual renewal.” Rather we participated in one conference on Friday evening, returned Saturday for three more conferences, and concluded on Sunday with Mass, two conferences, and the final “papal blessing” (which was supposed to prepare us for instant heaven should we die on the way home).

  The final conference, Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, and papal blessing were timed nicely to coincide with the Bear-Cardinal game, the most important annual conflict between the South Side and the rest of the city, dwarfing the springtime “city series” between the Cubs and the Sox.

  The returning vets on the Bears might have been a pale shadow of the great 1942 team, but they were still good enough to have clinched the Western Division title three weeks before the season was over. Nonetheless, a victory for the Cardinals would prevent mass suicide on the South Side, so the game was of enormous importance.

  And we would be imprisoned in the Lewis Towers chapel.

  The Jebs always showed a wonderful sense of timing. Like the United States Navy, they did things their way. Regardless.

  Father Donniger was an odd duck, a tall, broad-shouldered German farmer from Kansas who taught theology at the Jesuit Seminary in Saint Mary’s, Kansas. He looked like an aging and withered Gary Cooper, an illusion fostered perhaps because his voice sounded like Cooper’s with a smoker’s hack.

  Most of the retreat was devoted to “sins of the flesh,” rather a distortion of the genius of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius but common fare for the time at retreats for Catholic men and boys. If we were not married, we were not supposed to enjoy women at all; if we were married, we were supposed to enjoy other women not at all, and our wives as little as possible.

  No one had told Father Donniger that two-fifths of the law-school students were married men. So we were warned repeatedly against “those sins of the flesh popularly known as necking and petting.”

  “I wish we had time for even a little necking and petting,” a married student whispered in my ear. “It was more fun before we were married.”

  By our age in life we were immune to the Church’s diatribes on the subject of sexual play. We might confess it before receiving Communion, much like a hockey player would sit patiently in the penalty box after a rule infraction, but we didn’t intend to stop, mostly because it was almost impossible to stop even if we wanted to and we didn’t want to. Nor did we think we would be damned to hell for all eternity because we “fooled around” a little bit. Or a lot.

  “Better that they should insist on play after marriage,” my wife remarks bitterly, “than denounce it before marriage.” Even today that is an apposite observation.

  After his ritualistic denunciation of “sins of the flesh,” however, our Kansas farmer talked about the proper “attitude toward and treatment of women” with discernment and a sensitivity I have rarely heard from any man. Even the married students sat up straight and listened carefully.

  “When you think, my dearest ones, you have been more gentle and tender with a woman than you ever believed possible, that you have become a paragon of consideration and affection, I tell you, my dears, on that day you will only have made a poor beginning in responding to their legitimate emotional needs.”

  I had absorbed some such wisdom from my father’s relationship with my mother, learned it practically in my glorious few days with the lost Maggie Ward, and had grown, though not much, in the exercise of this wisdom in my dates with Kate. But the aging Jebby was the first man who ever put these insights into explicit sentences for me.

  “If you are not willing to abandon your harsh, aggressive male instincts and approach a woman with complete concern for her longings and desires, you are unfit ever to marry a woman. You can take it, my dears, as an absolutely certain law of nature, that it is impossible to shower a woman with too much undemanding affection.”

  “Right,” my wife would agree emphatically later when I told her about the retreat.

  Father Donniger was preaching this excellent wisdom at a time when most retreat masters still thought women were traps designed by the devil to lure men’s souls to destruction.

  When he warned of the dangers of the sins of the flesh, commonly called necking and petting, I ostentatiously scribbled erotic poetry, whether about Maggie or Kate I no longer knew because they were becoming identified. When he talked about tenderness with women, I listened carefully—only pretending to write poetry.

  Father Donniger was talking about what my son Jamie calls “sexual affection as communication,” though I’m sure he would have been horrified by the terms. Indeed, his discussion of the care and treatment of women (he wouldn’t have used those words either) never mentioned sex, almost as though tenderness and sex were utterly unrelated subjects.

  “I can hardly wait to get home and try this on my wife,” the married vet whispered into my ear again. “It makes the Bear-Cardinal game look dull.”

  “Heretic,” I whispered back. But I was thinking of Kate too. And of how much I had learned about women and about love and about life at the Picketpost House.

  Father Donniger told us after the first conference that he was available for “consultation and direction” in an office on the floor below the chapel, “any hour of the day or night, my most dear ones.”

  The “dear” stuff, Packy assured me on Friday night, was Jesuit novitiate talk. “In Europe, where it’s all done in Latin, they call each other ‘carissime,’ which is, as I’m sure you realize, the vocative case and the
superlative mode of the adjective ‘carus,’ which means ‘dear.’ It’s a lot less objectionable in Latin. They use the literal English translation here. I guess the Jebs become accustomed to it, and don’t know how dopey it sounds.”

  “I would use a stronger word.”

  Anyway, on impulse I blundered into his office after Mass on Sunday while the rest of the law school was eating stale rolls and drinking coffee so strong that it could have floated the Enterprise.

  I spilled the whole story of Andrea King/Maggie Ward, understanding as I poured it out—effectively told, wasn’t I going to be a storyteller—how badly I had wanted to tell someone about what had happened.

  “Remarkable, my very dear one,” he said as he beamed enthusiastically, “you are to be congratulated. You are among the very fortunate.”

  “I certainly would not want to be responsible for her damnation, Father.” I had expected the usual fierce confessional denunciation that exorcised some of the guilt you felt that you might have used the girl—which you probably had. How dare he not provide me with the guilt release I wanted.

  “I wouldn’t worry about that.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Human weakness is such that God readily waives punishment on sins of the flesh.”

  “Huh?”

  “Let me ask you some questions, my dear.” He leaned forward eagerly, his pale-blue eyes sparkling behind thick horned-rim glasses. “You tell me your plane was never hit by enemy fire. Could the reason have been that you knew the instant before where the enemy fire would be?”

  “Uhm … well, now that you mention it …”

  “And you know the instant beforehand when a professor is about to ask you a question in class?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Poor Hennessey.

  “And you admit that you knew the young woman”—he rose triumphantly from the chair behind his standard Jesuit-issue late-medieval desk—”was a ghost as soon as you saw her?”

  “Well … I did have that reaction.”