The Search for Maggie Ward

by Andrew M. Greeley

I thought it ought to be both realistic and hopeful. I tried for the right words and ended up with, “I love you, Maggie.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “But nothing. Yes, I will have another cookie. Your life has been different from that of the Rosary freshmen I wouldn’t date this year because they are too young and giddy. The result of what you have suffered and survived is that you are more attractive rather than less attractive. I don’t mind a little extra fragility, because there is a lot more strength.”

  Her eyes misted. “You are unbearably sweet.”

  “Sister Mary Norbertine doesn’t think so.”

  “Yes, she does. She told me so. Even”—she laughed—”if you do get into too many fights.”

  “Enough talk, Maggie Ward.” I finished my hot chocolate, wolfed down another cookie, and stood up. “I’ve waited long enough.”

  She rose also. “Me too.”

  I took her mug out of her hands, put it carefully on top of a stack of books, and consumed her in my arms. It was our first real kiss since Arizona, more slow and elegiac than passionate. A lot of mistakes and missteps were forgiven and dismissed.

  An El train roared by, stirring us out of an embrace that might have lasted forever.

  “Did we start that earthquake?”

  “You get used to them. I hardly notice anymore.”

  “There are certainly enough pleasant distractions in this apartment.”

  She rested her head against my chest. “Too long …”

  “Much too long.”

  I helped her out of her navy-blue sweater and dark wool skirt, a project that required much tugging and pulling and giggling and brought to mind shattering pleasure. I had to tug and pull some more and overcome hysterical giggles as I struggled with the thick winter underwear she was wearing over her bra and girdle and which were a delight to tug away.

  “It’s cold in here,” I protested as she began the same task with my clothes.

  “It takes time for the stove to warm up. Why don’t we jump into bed?”

  “Will it be warm there?”

  “Isn’t that up to you, Sir Lover?”

  Still partially clad, shivering from the cold that had not yet been exorcised from her apartment, and laughing happily, we dived under the covers of her harsh, narrow bed and clung protectively to one another.

  The uniquely human aspect of human sexuality, my son Jamie the priest tells us authoritatively, is its quasi pair-bonding dimension. Satisfying human sexuality differs from the sexuality of the other higher primates in that it disposes the couple, without any conscious intention on their part, to more sex. Their bodies are disposed, not fated, mind you, or genetically programmed, merely inclined to combine again.

  “Tell me about it,” his mother says patiently. Jamie prepares to tell her about it until he realizes that she is using the expression in its teen-talk sense. He grins sheepishly, knowing that Jamie the priest can do nothing really foolish in the eyes of his mother.

  My body and the body of Maggie Ward were certainly inclined to combine again. It is perhaps true that we were not programmed genetically to make love that afternoon, but our freedom of choice, as we clung to one another, sharing warmth and hope, was severely limited. To put it mildly.

  She was wearing my turquoise pendant. Fingers on the top of her breasts, I lifted it off her chest. “I should have given you a ring.”

  “I wouldn’t have taken it.”

  “If I’d had the nerve to buy it, I would have had the strength to make you take it. And then you couldn’t have run.”

  “I’ll never run away on you again,” she promised.

  “I won’t let you try.”

  It was an exchange of vows which, however well-meant, was not altogether binding. Not yet.

  There was no need to hurry, no rush to finish what we had started. The warmth of each other’s bodies on a damp, dreary afternoon was enough pleasure for the immediate moment.

  “Not as luxurious as Picketpost, is it?” Maggie’s fingers caressed my chest. “Tell me if I hurt you. I keep forgetting that you were banged up, despite the traces of those distinguished black eyes you had.”

  “If you bump one of those bum ribs, you’ll hear the yell.”

  “Not as comfortable as Picketpost, is it?”

  “More commonplace.” I was kissing her neck and throat. “And ordinary. Two lovers relaxing with each other on a gray Sunday afternoon in a dull city.”

  “Exciting city,” she reproved me. “I hope there are many such damp, gray Sunday afternoons.”

  “There will be hundreds of them, Maggie, thousands.”

  Maggie broke the spell of elegy first. “Please love me, Commander. It’s been so long.”

  Gently I unhooked her white bra and removed it with ceremony and flourish. “I’m getting to be an expert.…” My voice trailed off in awe as I beheld her beauty. A little waif child with glorious breasts—invitation, challenge, comfort, demand, quest, home.

  “Not as good as I used to be?” she asked dubiously.

  “Better than ever.” I brushed my lips against both wonders. “And, Maggie, you’re so thin and frail.”

  “Four pounds under Picketpost.” She sighed. “I think that will change now.”

  “Skin and bones.” I touched her ribs.

  “That all?”

  “A few more things too.” I touched each nipple, already firm and ready for me.

  She groaned and tugged at my shorts. “So you’re naked first. I’ve won.”

  “Hold still, you clever little imp.” I pinned her to the bed and, with no help from my squirming prisoner, pulled off her recalcitrant satin girdle. I paused to consider the results of my labors.

  “Your evaluation, Commander?” She stopped struggling and uncertainly offered herself for my scrutiny.

  “Well.” I pretended to ponder and inspect with the palm of my hand her breasts, her belly, her thighs, her delicious rear end. “Dulcinea continues to have the fresh, budding body of a young girl, but now a girl who is rapidly maturing, as predicted, into an exciting, no, wrong word, awesome woman.”

  “Impressive,” she moaned, her body stretching in anticipation of pleasure.

  “Did Finn MacCool have a woman?”

  “Etain.”

  “Fine, because he is about to become a berserker again.”

  “That is the general idea.” She dug her fingers into my hair. “Isn’t it?”

  So once more and, as I thought, finally and definitively, I took possession of my Holy Grail.

  “What would have happened,” I asked when we had finished the first round and, covered now with sweat, were lying side by side, immensely pleased with ourselves, “if, the first night I appeared here, I had peeled off those absurd flannel pajamas and done the same things I’ve just done.”

  “Some silly preliminary resistance, maybe,” she responded promptly, “but same final results. Which doesn’t mean that you made a mistake.”

  “I’ve been a bit of a dullard.”

  “And I’ve been a little fool.”

  “I still love you.”

  “And I love you too, Commander.”

  We silently enjoyed our joint self-satisfaction.

  “Why so quiet?” I finally asked.

  “ ‘Silence is the perfectest Herault of joy, I were but little happy if I could say, how much?’ ”

  “Shakespeare?”

  “Who else, silly. Much Ado About Nothing.”

  How many women can quote the Bard after they make love with you?

  I pondered that thought as I feel asleep.

  “No,” Maggie said suddenly, as if making a decision of enormous importance, perhaps to enter a contemplative order of nuns, “you don’t understand at all.”

  “What don’t I understand?” I asked sleepily.

  “What you do to me.” She squirmed around so that her head was resting on my stomach, her eyes looking up at me. I ran my hand down the curve of her back and rested it on her but
t. “You don’t have any idea at all.”

  “Maybe not,” I admitted.

  “Like all men,” she continued, launching into a classroom lecture, “you think you are the only one who is physically involved. You don’t understand that from the first moment in that railroad station, body and soul and whatever else there might be, I wanted you, needed you, had to have you.” She kissed my belly. “I’m not hurting your poor ribs, am I?”

  “Not at all.” I patted her rump. “Continue, please.”

  “It was not just that you’re cute, though you are,” she said as she caressed my torso playfully from top to bottom. “Or that you’re unbearably sweet, though you are that too.” She touched my cheek, the symbolic action which every mention of my alleged sweetness seemed to require. “I saw a handsome man that morning in Tucson who was also a good man.”

  “A good man with bad intentions?”

  She was now kissing my body, every inch of it, a new technique which effectively guaranteed that, except for moans, I would remain silent. “Even your ‘bad’ intentions were sweet. I hadn’t known many good men in my life who were also strong and brave and terribly passionate. If I was dead, and I was pretty sure that I was, you’d bring me back to life. Then the dam burst.” She drew my hand around to the thick wet swamp between her thighs. “The modest little convent girl who learned to play whore to please her brutal husband and unintentionally awakened herself sexually wanted to strip off her clothes right there in the station and take you into her body. I told myself that I ought to be ashamed of myself, and I covered up pretty well, didn’t I?”

  “You sure did.”

  “I was obsessed before we finished breakfast.” She was kissing me, passionately, demandingly, indeed obsessively. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over that obsession, Jerry Keenan. I know I don’t want to.”

  “It’s all right with me,” I gasped.

  “And I’m so afraid.” She paused in her ministrations.

  “Of hurting me? Stop worrying about that.”

  “You don’t understand, my darling … dear God, I love you … you’re so strong and good, I’m afraid you’ll destroy me with your love.”

  “Wait a minute.” I restrained her lips with one hand and one of her hands with the other, prolonging my delicious agony. “What are you saying?”

  “I may win the verbal sparring matches some of the time”—she squirmed to be free and return to her work—”but if I give myself to your love, I may stop existing. I don’t care anymore. I have to trust you.”

  “Huh?”

  “Let me go, you beast; if you’re going to annihilate me with your goodness, I should at least enjoy it … that’s better.”

  Now her demanding lips were everywhere. And I was going to annihilate her?

  “I understand, Maggie.”

  She suspended her attack on my loins and peered into my eyes, blue daggers knifing into my soul. “You do! Oh, Jerry, you do! How wonderful! Okay,” she whispered, returning to her destruction of my sanity, “I do trust you.”

  I was trapped all right, but I didn’t mind in the least.

  She threw back the blanket and knelt above me. Like a new postulant sacristan holding a chalice, she took possession of my most tender parts.

  “Maggie,” I groaned in protest.

  “You’re so beautiful,” she began to kiss her chalice, slowly, sweetly, reverently.

  “I think I’m being raped,” I gasped.

  “You don’t seem to mind.”

  “You’ll drive me out of my mind.” I cupped a firm breast in either hand and felt the full-blooded nipples challenge my palms.

  “So you lie there,” she said, suddenly very angry at me, “thinking you’ve found your Holy Grail who’s going to keep adventure and romance in your life till you’re eighty at least. And you’re wrong. I found my Holy Grail, right here in my hands, my sweet, good, passionate”—she drew a deep breath—”terrible, beautiful man.” Still holding her prizes, she straddled me. “Of whom I’m terribly afraid and whom I adore, and I found him before you found your silly old girl grail.”

  “Wonderful!” I howled, as I eased her into position above me, and then imprisoned her breasts again, this time crushing them in response to her pressure on me. “Would you admit that maybe we both found the grail that God wanted us to find?”

  “Don’t distract me with academic questions,” she insisted, very gently lowering herself on me, her body wet now with eagerness for mine. Then she paused. “If God loves me as much as I love you, then I am really frightened of Him. Isn’t that marvelous?”

  I could hardly, in the circumstances, disagree, could I?

  “I love to do this to you,” she shouted triumphantly and stretched out over me.

  An El train roared by as she screamed repeatedly in exuberant joy. Maggie was right about the Els: after a while you hardly noticed them.

  Father Donniger had told us only half the truth. If you are infinitely tender with your woman and almost obsessively concerned with the intricate details of her pleasure, she may on occasion—no guarantees—turn into a ravenous aggressor who will drive you to the outer reaches of ecstasy. I would learn that truth again in the years of marriage from my wife, who especially delights in the drive-the-man-to-ecstasy game after we’ve had a quarrel. Especially in the forced intimacy of hotel rooms.

  Thus Maggie Ward conquered me that damp gray day in 1947 as our bed became drenched with sweat of two hungry, twisting young bodies and winter temporarily melted at our window pane and El trains thundered in the background.

  Afterward, still naked but now all shy and modest, she cuddled herself in my arms and fell asleep, a single unexplained tear on either cheek.

  I thought my quest was finished. Maggie Ward was now mine, beyond any possibility of being lost again. And I, God knows, hers.

  A prediction that was about as accurate in its prophecy as my father’s prediction that there would not be another war in our generation.

  CHAPTER 44

  FIRST THERE WAS THE AUTO ACCIDENT.

  A drunk in a brand-new Buick piled into me in the darkness at North Avenue and Harlem, a crazy, dangerous corner because all the north-south streets jog at North. As the massive car raced through the stoplight and appeared at my window like a B-24, I’m sure I shouted “Maggie!”

  At least I tell myself that’s what I shouted instead of something irreverent like “Shit!”

  It was dark for a long time. When I finally woke up, the sun was shining and Maggie, Mom, and Sister Mary Norbertine were staring down at me, all too much like mourners at a wake.

  “Doesn’t he look natural,” I murmured. “Sure old Tom Smyth does a wonderful job with a corpse. Course he was a young man.”

  S’ter: Always was a smart aleck.

  Mom: You frightened us, dear.

  Maggie: Go back to sleep. Then open your eyes and ask where you are. Don’t you ever go to the movies?

  Me: My girl won’t go with me.

  S’ter: She has better things to do than to waste her time with the likes of you.

  Me: I agree.

  Maggie: I might make an exception.

  I had suffered a concussion and some new bruises on my ribs. I was lucky to be alive.

  Roxy was in the car-equivalent of Oak Park Hospital, receiving a total rehabilitation.

  Oh, yes, I was very lucky to be alive.

  And the law-school exams were two days away. Were my scrambled brains capable of answering a single question?

  “I’ll knock them cold,” I told Maggie. “Most lawyers have scrambled brains anyhow. And will you stop looking at me like the accident was your fault? You didn’t run into me with a brand-new Buick, paid for, I’m sure, with black-market money.”

  “If you hadn’t come to see me, you wouldn’t have been hurt.…”

  “That kind of argument is hereinafter completely forbidden; do you understand that, Maggie Ward?”

  “The accident did scramble your brains.”
/>
  “Not the rest of me. Now would you stop distracting me with your lovely body and permit me to get back to the much-less-interesting subject of contracts?”

  The exams did not seem too difficult. After the last one I declined my classmates’ proposals for a drinking bout and, my head still aching and my body still hurt in many and odd places, stumbled home for what I hoped was a good night’s sleep.

  I had just pulled the covers over my head and turned off the lights when Mom called up: “Maggie’s on the phone, dear.”

  I dragged myself into the hallway and picked up the phone.

  “Sorry to wake you, Jerry. Something very strange has happened.”

  “What?” I asked, feeling my stomach turn uneasily.

  “My father is here. He’s still alive.”

  CHAPTER 45

  “CHâTEAU LAFITTE, MAGGIE? IT‘S PREWAR.” ALLEN WARD removed his rimless glasses and laid aside the wine list. “I’m sure you’ll like it.” Glancing at me, he inquired, “Ever had any of it, Gerald?”

  God forgive me for my answer, true as it was.

  “My father put away a pipe of it in 1935.”

  I don’t think Allen heard me. Or, if he did, he dismissed my response as patently false. No Chicagoan could possibly have enough knowledge or money for so provident an action.

  He filled both our wineglasses and then put the bottle aside, some distance away from his own upturned glass.

  With considerable flourish, Allen had escorted us to lunch at the Pump Room in the Ambassador East Hotel. Movie stars in transit from Los Angeles to New York used to ride in limousines from one railroad station up to the Pump Room for lunch and then back to another station to continue the trip.

  It beats the Pancake House at O’Hare.

  Not to make the scene in the Pump Room (where a young ex-football player named Irv Kupcinet was already jotting down items for his column) was somehow to be déclassé.

  Unless you were a native Chicagoan.

  It was hard to dislike Allen Ward. Handsome, witty, urbane, he was short and dapper, youthful in appearance and manner, almost an elder brother to Maggie, a kind of Irish Thomas E. Dewey, although his mustache was trim and slender like the rest of him. You had to look at the lines around his darting brown eyes and then into the haunted eyes themselves to get a hint of years of hobohemia and alcoholism and then wartime combat in the Red Arrow Division from North Africa to Germany.