Dead Wrong

by William Kienzle

  “No. As a matter of fact, it was her idea to call you.”

  “Her idea!” Koesler stopped stock still. “What’s this all about, Eileen?”

  “I’ll tell you—or, more probably, Oona will explain it all.”

  He followed her into the house.

  Oona was ensconced in the recliner, the living room’s most comfortable chair, which was tipped halfway back. She seemed listless, weak, as if she were in the early stages of convalescence from some serious operation or illness. Except that she was neither ill nor had she had a recent operation. Her eyes were alert, giving the lie to her seeming lassitude.

  Whenever Koesler saw his cousin like this, he was reminded of the hypochondriac’s epitaph: I told you I was sick.

  “Oona! Happy Birthday! I don’t remember whether I wished you one the other day when we almost had your party.”

  “You didn’t. No one did,” Oona added. “That’s why we’re here.”

  “Oona, dear,” Eileen said, “maybe we ought to go into the background a bit before we tell him.”

  Oona betrayed a smidgen of disgust, then said softly, “Oh, very well… if you think it’s important.”

  That’s Oona and that’s Eileen, thought Koesler. Oona tended to think explanations were foolish, a waste of time. Eileen was inclined to prepare people for good news as well as bad.

  Koesler preferred Eileen’s method.

  “It’s about our family,” Eileen began.

  “Whose?” Koesler asked. “Yours or mine?”

  “Ours, of course,” Oona replied. “But you’re included.”

  “Yes,” Eileen said, “we’ve been talking about it almost constantly since that flare-up at Oona’s party the other day … the girls, you know.”

  “Mary Lou and Brenda,” Oona supplied.

  “Of course.” Eileen’s tone had an edge. Even she had a threshold of interruption tolerance.

  “If it’s about the girls, how come Maureen isn’t here? No one’s closer to the kids than Mo.”

  “That’s what this is all about,” Oona said.

  “It will be clear as we explain it.” Eileen was retaining her narrator’s role with difficulty.

  “You remember how we grew up together,” Eileen said.

  “Of course,” Koesler replied. “Two families, the Koeslers and the Monahans, living in identical flats—above the family grocery store for you and above the Tamiami Bar for us. Sharing a common staircase and, for much of the two apartments, common walls. On the corner of Ferdinand and Vernor. We might just as well have been brother and sisters … that about right?”

  “Yes.” Eileen was smiling, perhaps at the memory of it. “And then you went away to the seminary. We were so proud of you.”

  “I didn’t know you were particularly proud,” Koesler said. “If you were, it was probably a bit premature. It was one thing to be accepted by the seminary in those days, and something else to make it all the way through high school, college, and the theologate. You would have done well to put your pride on the back burner till I got ordained.”

  “We did. But regardless, we were proud of you all the way through. Each of us spent twelve years boasting about ‘our cousin the seminarian.’ And then finally, ‘our cousin the priest’ … isn’t that right, Oona?”

  “I suppose so. I don’t remember every year of it.” Oona was showing signs of impatience.

  “And”—Eileen did not seem to notice Oona’s testiness— “before you went to the seminary—when we were very young children—you used to play at saying Mass, and we would be your altar servers?”

  Koesler smiled. “I’d almost forgotten that. We sort of anticipated the current introduction of girl ‘altar boys,’ didn’t we?”

  “We were all you had,” Oona pointed out.

  “That’s true,” Koesler agreed. “It was a very private fantasy I was living as a kid. The fantasy wouldn’t have survived any teasing or mocking. I guess that’s why I included you girls in my dream. I knew I could trust you.”

  “Why don’t you get to the point?” Oona said to Eileen.

  “I am, dear. Be patient,” Eileen responded. “We were close. As close as brothers and sisters could get. Maybe closer, since there wasn’t any sibling rivalry going on. We trusted each other implicitly.”

  Koesler rubbed his chin reflectively. “That’s true, Eileen. It’s absolutely true. I just never thought of it in these terms. I must apologize for taking for granted this lovely relationship we had—have,” he corrected himself.

  “Now?” Oona said.

  Eileen nodded. “Remember your first solemn high Mass?”

  “Sure. I’ll never forget it. June 6, 1954, Holy Redeemer church. Just two blocks from where we grew up.”

  “We’ll never forget it either, dear. Remember how, when it came time to receive Holy Communion, the ushers made sure to line the family up so we would all receive Communion from you?”

  The memory was as vivid for Koesler as if the ceremony had been yesterday.

  “There was your dear mother and father. Then, next came our mother—God rest all of them now—and the three of us.”

  “Yes,” Koesler said, remembering.

  “Well, we haven’t exactly followed you around from parish to parish,” Eileen continued. “But there are times, special occasions, when we do come together and you offer Mass … like the anniversaries of our parents’ deaths.”

  Koesler nodded.

  “Well …” Eileen seemed to be approaching her objective. “… there’s a difference now. When we go to Communion. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, dear?”

  Koesler had followed Eileen’s direction every step of the way. “You mean that’s always how it is now? Maureen never takes Communion anymore?”

  Both Eileen and Oona nodded in sad confirmation.

  “I’ve wondered about that, of course,” Koesler said. “But, as you say, we don’t get together all that often at Mass. Yes, I’ve noticed that Maureen doesn’t receive Communion. Neither does Brenda, anymore. Of course, with Brenda … there’s Ted Nash.” He hesitated. “I don’t think we can overlook him anymore, or pretend that there isn’t something going on between them. And the fact that Brenda no longer receives Communion is, I suppose, confirmation that she realizes the sinfulness of the relationship. I guess I came to accept that that was the way it is with Brenda.

  “But I really didn’t give it that much thought. I just kept making up excuses why Maureen might not be ready or able to receive Communion.” He looked at each of them in turn. “And now you’re implying there’s a deeper reason, aren’t you? That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

  Oona caught her breath and at one and the same time sighed in that seamless expression so common to Irish speech. “Didn’t you ever wonder enough about it to come right out and ask Maureen?”

  “That would be impolite,” Eileen chided.

  “For the love of God, woman,” Oona erupted, “you’ve already said that we were as close as brother and sisters! Why couldn’t Father Bob have talked to her about it? Besides, he’s a holy priest of God, save the mark! Who better to talk to her about a matter as important as Holy Communion?”

  Koesler suppressed a smile. “I’m sorry, Oona; I just don’t operate very well on that score. I guess I respect other people’s privacy too much.”

  “Well, I’d say you certainly do!” Oona seemed personally offended.

  “Can’t help it,” Koesler said. “It’s just the way I am. Sometime back I stopped making resolutions I knew I’d never keep. Confronting someone about a matter I know they don’t want to talk about comes under that heading. I know there are some priests who do this as a matter of course, but I can’t. And it’s doubly difficult if the person in question is as close as Mo is to me. Now, if she wanted to talk to me about it, that would be something different.”

  “What if we tell you what the problem is?” Oona said.

  “Do you really think we ought to?” Eileen ask
ed.

  “Why do you think we called him here?” Oona said.

  “But after what Father Bob has just said, we may be placing a terrible burden on his shoulders.”

  “No, no, that’s all right,” Koesler said. “Go ahead and tell me if you want to. Don’t you see? You want to tell me something that affects all of us. So, I want to hear it. It’s not like I’m prying into your privacy. So, go ahead: What’s this all about?”

  “Well,” Eileen began, “you know us well enough to know that Maureen always was the more active of us girls.”

  “Wild!” Oona contributed.

  Eileen glared at her, then turned back to Koesler. “Anyway, what with one thing and another, it just seemed that none of us would marry, but that if any one of us did, it probably would be Maureen.”

  Koesler suffered an almost total distraction. Eileen had touched on a topic that was plain as day but one on which he had never dwelt at any length.

  Here were these four extremely Catholic children—Koesler half Irish on his mother’s side and the three girls 100 percent Irish. In keeping with the trend of the thirties and forties when they were growing into adulthood, odds heavily favored that all, or almost all, of them would marry. And yet not one of them did.

  Koesler, of course, had the most obvious reason for staying single. He had chosen a vocation that had been decreed to be incompatible with marriage. And, now that he thought of it, no one in the family had seemed to expect the girls to marry. On the rare occasion that any one of them had a date, a great deal of fun—and by no means playful fun—was made of the occurrence.

  Why was that?

  Was it the Irish heritage? Traditionally, though not so true of present Irish youth, the Irish showed no impatience to enter the holy state. One of the native Irish jokes had a prospective bridegroom proposing marriage by asking his beloved, “Would you by any means be interested in being buried in our family plot?” And by the time they did get married, burial was not all that far in the future.

  However, this was not Ireland. And when nice young Irish-American women waited for just exactly the right man at just the right time, sometimes life passed them by.

  This appeared to be what had happened to the Monahan sisters. Always with the exception of Maureen, who braved her mother’s sarcasm and often barbed remarks on leaving for and returning from dates.

  As a result, what was really quite normal behavior for this country, this society, and this era gained her the reputation of being “loose.”

  Whenever he thought of it, which was not often, Koesler surmised that Maureen had caved in to the pressure of her home and remained single as had her sisters. He also figured that Maureen’s taking in Mary Lou and Brenda was a type of protest against a spinsterhood that was in effect forced upon her.

  This distraction was so compact that Koesler was almost immediately able to return his attention to what Eileen was saying.

  “Well, anyway,” Eileen continued, “after you were ordained in fifty-four, you got all wrapped up in your assignments and we weren’t as close as we had been.”

  “That’s true,” Koesler said. “But it’s also kind of natural. Those assignments, especially in the beginning when I had so much to learn about being a priest—so much they didn’t, and couldn’t, prepare us for in the seminary—those assignments took up almost my every waking moment.”

  “Of course, dear,” Eileen said. “But while you were starting a brand new life and career, life was going on for us too.”

  “Don’t go including us with Maureen,” Oona admonished.

  “I know, I know,” Eileen said. She turned back to Koesler. “No, shortly after you were ordained, Maureen began to go her own way. At first, it was just casual dating … some of the young men she worked with. Then, some of the affairs got sort of serious. She began to confide in the two of us less and less. We really began growing apart. Then it was … when was it, Oona: Do you remember?”

  “1959!” Oona said with assurance.

  “Yes, 1959. Where were you then, Father Bob?”

  “Fifty-nine? I think I was just ending a tour of duty at St. Norbert’s in Inkster, as I recall.”

  “Well,” Eileen continued, “that was when it happened. Or, rather, when it began. Maureen met somebody special. She was so sure of herself in this relationship that she began to confide in us again—”

  “Not that we could do anything about it, mind you,” Oona interjected.

  “That’s right. In the beginning we hoped it would work out and Maureen would be happy. But as time passed, we both—Oona and I— became more and more convinced that Maureen was living on promises. It was all promises. ‘Next month we’re going to go to Bermuda.’ ‘In July we’ll go to Montreal.’ Just promises and no fulfillment. They never went anywhere. Oh, the movies, or out to dinner. But weekends, almost every weekend, spent in one motel or another.”

  “Her beau was getting everything he wanted,” Oona remarked.

  “After a while,” Eileen continued, “Maureen began to withdraw from us again.”

  “Because,” Oona explained, “we were asking too many questions. Questions she couldn’t answer.”

  “It wasn’t so much the questions, I think, as it was that we were trying to convince her that her boyfriend was leading her down the primrose path.”

  “She wouldn’t listen to us.”

  “The poor girl just wanted to believe, to hope so much, that she closed her eyes to reality,” Eileen said. “She should have remembered that in the beginning we were as happy about her good fortune as she was. She talked herself into believing we were jealous of her because we didn’t have any gentlemen friends. Either she talked herself into it or he talked her into it.”

  “Jealous! Us?” Oona exclaimed. “How could we be jealous of the runaround she was getting?”

  “Yes, well, anyway, then it happened. In March of 1960.” Eileen fell silent. For a change, Oona added nothing.

  “Uh … what happened?” Koesler ventured.

  “Maureen got pregnant.”

  “Pregnant!”

  “Yes,” Eileen said. “Of course, Maureen didn’t realize it until she missed several periods. In June, I think it was … yes, June, she went to the doctor and he confirmed her worst fears.”

  “Then she came back to us. Now that she was in all that trouble,” Oona said.

  “We were all she had. She had no one else to turn to. Poor thing. She was frightened, bewildered.”

  “What do you mean she had no one to turn to?” Koesler protested. “She could have come to me.”

  “You were absolutely the very last person in the world she wanted to know about her predicament,” Oona declared.

  “But … but, why not?”

  “Dear,” Eileen said, “do you remember yourself back in 1959? Before the Vatican Council? Before you became editor of the diocesan newspaper?”

  The question pulled Koesler up short. Himself in 1959. The year Pope John XXIII called for the council and also called for the reform of Church law.

  That had been the pre-conciliar Church and a pre-conciliar Koesler. He and the hopelessly outdated Church law were of one mind back then.

  How open and nonjudgmental would he have been even to his dear cousin Maureen? According to the testimony of these two cousins who knew him so well, it may have indeed been true: He might very well have been the last person Maureen had wanted to know about her condition.

  Somewhat humbled, he pulled himself back to the conversation. “All right, so she couldn’t come to me. At that time, anyway. I’ll go with that. But she did turn to you. Could you help her? Did you help her?”

  “We certainly tried,” Eileen replied. “We found her a lovely home for unwed mothers in a Chicago suburb.”

  “We drove her there ourselves,” Oona said. “Visited her regularly.”

  “Chicago!” Koesler exclaimed. “Why Chicago? There were some good places here in the Detroit area.”

  “Where she easily c
ould have bumped into people she knew. Or people who knew you. Or people who knew your parents or our mother, all of whom were still alive then.”

  “Your own mother didn’t know?” Koesler was amazed.

  “That was the hardest part, not telling mother. Keeping it from her. She wasn’t well then; that made it a little easier to keep her in the dark.”

  “I still can’t believe,” Koesler said, “that Maureen went all the way through a pregnancy and I didn’t know anything about it.”

  “As I recall, dear, you were just transferring to another parish about then.”

  “June of 1960 … yeah, you’re right. I was just going into St. Ursula parish. That was a huge change. You’re right.”

  “It was providential. It really was,” Eileen said. “Your folks were barely in touch with us. Mother was quite ill. And you were extremely busy. With all that going on, it wasn’t that difficult to cover up for Maureen. And, if directly asked, to explain that a new job called her out of town for a while.”

  “‘For a while’? She planned—you planned for her to return?”

  “Oh, yes, when it came time.”

  “And that was …?”

  The sisters looked at each other for a few moments. Neither addressed Koesler’s question.

  “She did deliver the baby, didn’t she?”

  “Oh, yes,” Eileen said.

  “Then, when?”

  “November …” Eileen said so softly Koesler barely heard her.

  “November 1960,” he reflected. Then something clicked. “November 1960! The girls—Brenda and Mary Lou! They were both born in November 1960! Are they …? Is one of them …?”

  “Yes,” Eileen said.

  “Which one … which one is Maureen’s real daughter?” He was aware that he feared the answer.

  “Mary Lou,” Eileen said. “Mary Lou is Maureen’s real daughter. We were able to be with her right after the delivery—in Harper Hospital. Then she pulled a curtain down, as it were. We were not able to see her again for almost two weeks. By then, Maureen had decided she couldn’t keep Mary Lou. But she kept in touch—that is, she always knew where the baby was. A series of foster homes and, finally, St. Vincent’s Orphanage.