All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “It sounds like you have an intense and intricate relationship with your son the priest, Jenny.”

  “Mom’s the psychologist, Father,” said Jennifer. “Mustn’t stop her in midflight with your theories.”

  Jenny enveloped me with a smile, warm and soft this time. “It’s made more intricate because poor Joe is invested with residual memories of my relationship with my childhood sweetheart the priest.”

  General amusement from those present. Except me.

  With her family’s laughing consent, Jenny was defining me, claiming me, challenging me.

  The steel doors clanked shut.

  The laughing woman sitting across the table from me, hand held by her adoring husband, was a literate, urbane woman of the world. A long time ago we had exchanged a few sentences on the Washington Boulevard bus and an even longer time ago we had raced each other down Garden Boulevard. Two worlds, yet one person and one spectacular smile; slow, fragile, and then white heat.

  This poised, cultivated matron had decided that I amused her. Easy to walk back into her life and very difficult to walk out, even if I wanted to. How was I living up to her memories of me?

  “You realize it was all your doing, Father,” Jenny said, guessing my thoughts and reminding me that she had done that when we were both six. How could I have forgotten?

  “No,” I said dimly.

  “Of course it was,” Bart insisted. “If you hadn’t told her to leave Chicago, she would not have come to California and we would never have met. I could say thanks for the rest of my life and not even begin to catch up.”

  If I was entitled to my selective memories, so was she.

  “After I talked to you on the bus, I saved my money.” Yes, at six she was a delightful babbler, too. “Then when I had enough money for a one-way ticket to San Francisco, I sneaked out of the house and rode the Washington Boulevard bus to Union Station. I must have said fifty decades of the Rosary to keep up my courage. It was a terrible train ride. I wanted to quit before we reached Iowa. It was the middle of summer and the air-conditioning wasn’t working. I rode in the coach, got off at Berkeley, found myself a job as a waitress in an all-night food place, talked my way into a junior college, and ended up as a Ph.D. candidate doing my internship working in the probation office for himself”—she tilted her head in mock disrespect toward her husband—“when he was the assistant U.S. attorney. That was before he became the head honcho.”

  “And we fought from the first day she walked into the office,” Bart continued the story. “I was a stern guardian of justice and she was a gentle proponent of compassion. But she shouted at me and I talked softly to her and after six months brought her home to meet my mother and father.”

  “The nerd fell in love with me,” Jenny said, her eyes misting. “So I had to dump him real quick.”

  “She’s around teenagers so much she talks like them,” said Petey with a wink, clearly relishing a story he must have heard a thousand times.

  “She wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t answer my phone calls, avoided me in the office, asked for a transfer to Los Angeles. I didn’t know what to make of it because I thought she had fallen for me, too.”

  “He always was too vain for his own good.” Jenny’s smile when she looked at her husband would have lighted the entire Sierra Nevada mountain range.

  “So one Saturday morning I violated all my professional ethics and looked in her file. Then I understood. My parents are the quintessence of aristocratic San Francisco Irish respectability, pillars of the church and the community. I was aimed at a life of public service before I was conceived. I could not have a wife with a prison record. So I drank too much at lunch, went up to the twin peaks, listened to the army/McCarthy hearings on my car radio, mooned for the rest of the day, and then drove down at ten-thirty that night, walked into this dining room where my mother and father were sipping the same Courvoisier we’re drinking now, and told them the story.”

  The brandy, I might note, was superb and doubtless sinfully expensive.

  “You’d never believe what they told him,” Jenny said, grinning impishly and still pleased at her triumph.

  “What they told me,” Bart went on, “was that Jenny was the nicest girl I ever dated and if I let her slip away because of a silly nine-month prison sentence, they would be terribly disappointed in me. So I went to her apartment, dragged her out of bed—and then, as now, Father, she was very impressive in a thin nightgown—carried her bodily down the steps and dumped her in my car.”

  “A Packard, would you believe?” Jennifer giggled. “Who spirits away their true love in a Packard?”

  “Hush, dear,” said her mother. “They didn’t do Ferraris in those days or I would have held out for one.”

  “And carried her back to this house.” Bart continued the oft-told tale as though there were no female interruptions. “We’ve never let her out since.”

  “It wasn’t laughs all the time,” Jenny added. “But there’s been more laughs than anything else.”

  “We could have gone back to Chicago and wiped the slate clean,” Bart said. “Her trial was a farce and her lawyer a dunderhead, but we somehow thought it was better this way.”

  “You stand on the past,” Jenny said, dead serious for the first time that evening. “Instead of running from it. I never went back to the neighborhood. We’ve stopped at O’Hare lots of times, of course, and even gone downtown.…”

  “Jenny was never accepted there when she was growing up, Father, except by you and a couple of others. She was the stupid little girl who flunked out of school and got in trouble with the law. Hurt from those injuries never quite goes away. I think she ought to go back and let them see who she is now, but she’s still afraid.”

  My God, Jenny, that terrible day in Queen Kong’s class I laughed at you with everyone else. And you’ve forgotten all about it because you need me to explain your own courage. So you’re signing me on as an occasional part time chaplain because your memories are much less objective than mine.

  “The neighborhood isn’t there anymore,” I said. “Everybody’s moved out further west.”

  “It’s wrong of me to want to go back and impress them,” she said thoughtfully. “They’ve probably forgotten about me and they wouldn’t be impressed anyhow.”

  I sipped my brandy and felt the doors lock, the alarms activate, the guards take up their posts. Another memory of the young Jenny: she always won the arguments.

  Yes, Jenny. You win of course.

  And it’s not your story, is it? Not the story of a woman who turned death into life. Rather it’s the story of a priest who didn’t believe strongly enough in the power of life. If anyone rises full of grace today, it’s your childhood sweetheart the priest.

  “So what does my childhood sweetheart the priest think?” She was beaming happily, knowing that I would never escape from her again.

  “You really have to come back for the fortieth next year, both of you,” I said. “And with some of the kids, including the one that Jennifer said was the black sheep. Don’t do it for yourself, Jenny; you don’t need it. But I think we do.”

  “See?” said Bart, embracing her.

  “Nerd,” she said, pretending to try to push him away.

  Oh yes, it’s going to be a wonderful fortieth anniversary/reunion. Jenny will sail in with her handsome husband and her handsome family and wisps of the opera company and the museum and her Ph.D. trailing behind her, and rub everyone’s nose into the ground.

  She’ll be smiling the way she did so long ago and still does. Jenny Martin will be grace for all of us.

  Sionna Marie

  My name is Ed Nolan and I’m almost seventeen. Edmund Burke Nolan, if you want to be supercilious. (Our priest says I like to use big words and I get them about ninety percent right.) Everything in my life is okay except I have this terrible problem with my sister Shannon.

  I’m spelling her name the way most people would. She spells it Sionna ever since the prie
st told us that’s the real Irish way to spell it. It’s the name of a river and a goddess. Shanny doesn’t think she’s a river.

  She’s really Shannon Marie. Or Sionna Marie. She pronounces her second name the Irish way, “the right way” according to her—Marie pronounced like you have a bad cold which has settled in your sinuses sounds like “Maura.”

  “Shanny Maura,” says the priest. “That sounds like it might be the name of the woman who held the milk can when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern to start the Chicago fire!”

  My sister is quite ineffable. And I looked that word up in the dictionary to make sure I had it right before I typed it into my Apple Macintosh. It’s the right word, for sure. Shanny is ineffable. Not infallible (though she thinks she is), but ineffable.

  I’ve always had problems with Shanny. Mostly it was keeping her out of fights. Now … well, that’s what this story is about and my teacher says I’ll ruin it all if I tell you the end now.

  Shanny and I are Irish twins, which means I was born eleven months and twenty-nine days after she was. The priest says it wouldn’t make any difference if it had been one year and a day, we’d still be Irish twins.

  Mostly Shanny and I get along all right, more like real twins than like teenage siblings. That’s because she’s always been one of the guys, not afraid to climb fences or play basketball or things like that. Now that she’s getting ready to go to college next year she says she’s given up being a tomboy in public. But she’d still rather hang out with the guys than with the girls her age.

  I mean, how many big sisters do you know who come around to watch their little brother practice with the other guys on the wrestling team?

  The other guys noticed her, of course. Shanny is the kind you notice.

  “Hey, Nolan, is that chick your girl?”

  “Nah.”

  “Then why does she always show up for your matches?”

  “She’s my sibling?”

  “Your what?”

  “It’s nothing dirty. It means brother or sister.”

  “She’s no brother.”

  “You’re putting us on, Nolan, that chick isn’t your kid sister.”

  “You’re right, I’m her kid brother.”

  “No way.”

  “Really.”

  “No way!”

  “Hey, sis, you want to meet the guys?”

  She came down the steps of the gym grandstand in two bounds. Sure she wanted to meet the guys. I mean that was a substantial component of why she was there in the first place.

  You like that? “Substantial component”?

  Well, most girls would have been gross about it and become good friends with one or two of the guys. Not Shanny. She took over the whole team. All of them would come to the house to see her or even up to our place at the lake in the summer. Bother Shanny to be friends with the whole wrestling team?

  Not an iota. She loved every second of it.

  She sings and dances and acts, too. All the guys in the casts think she’s cute, though I’m not sure about the kind of guys who go out for drama.

  So how come I have to get her out of fights? Guys make passes and that sort of thing?

  No way. Shanny can take care of herself in that arena. I mean since she’s been lifting weights, she’s built, in both connotations of that word. Not muscle-bound or anything like that but strong and tough.

  When she water-skis (and she’s the best chick on the beach at skiing) she doesn’t so much skim the water as attack it.

  As you’ve probably guessed, she is totally bossy. Extremely so. The priest says that Shanny is rarely in error and never in doubt. He asked her once if she ever lost an argument. She thought about it for a moment and then said, “Well, sometimes my Dad thinks he wins an argument with me. It’s good for his morale.”

  The priest says that in another age she would have been a pirate queen or a mitred abbess ordaining priests no matter what Rome said, or maybe even an Irish goddess.

  “But,” he says ruefully (don’t bother looking that one up, I got it right), “it’s the 1980s, and she thinks she’s an Irish goddess, regardless.”

  Tell me about it.

  She’s also very thoughtful. Well, like my mom goes, more of the time than a lot of teenage girls. Like once last summer up at the lake I was really bummed out because my current chick’s mother had put the quietus on her spending the weekend at our house—like there was enough privacy in our place to do anything wrong even if we wanted to!

  Well, Shanny knew I was bummed out and knew why and knew that I might demolish a large complement of six-packs, so she organized a surprise birthday party for me—only five weeks late!

  So what about the fights I used to have to get her out of. (I know that’s two prepositions at the end of a sentence, but you expect me to say, “fights out of which I got her”?)

  See, you have to know about our little brother Jimmy to understand that. Jimmy was born when Shanny was five and I was four. The poor little guy had just about everything wrong with him. The doctors said he’d only live a couple of months and maybe Mom shouldn’t even bring him home from the hospital.

  Mom, who is a lot like Shanny, goes, “No way. He’s our kid and we love him, no matter what’s wrong with him, right?”

  I don’t remember what he looked like then, though I guess he never changed much. He certainly couldn’t see and probably couldn’t hear and never learned to walk. In fact, even at twelve years old he was no bigger than a baby. And to be objective about it, the little guy did look kind of different. But he was ours and we loved him, you know?

  I guess Mom and Dad were a little nervous when they brought him home, not sure how the rest of us would react. Mom said that Jimmy was sick and probably would never get better, but God loved him and so would we as long as we had him. So there were, according to family mythology, two little kids standing around staring down at this strange-looking baby, wondering what we were supposed to do.

  Then Shanny took him in her arms and began to sing a lullaby. I don’t remember exactly and I guess I’m superimposing what happened later, but poor little Jimmy would kind of smile whenever Shanny would sing to him.

  The doctors said Jimmy wouldn’t last a year at the most. We kept him alive for twelve years. They used to bring all of us kids over to the hospital every couple of months to ask us dumb questions. The priest said later that we were probably somewhere in an article in a medical journal about how families can cope.

  Don’t bother hunting up the article because me and Shanny made up funny answers to their dumb questions. Well, Shanny made them up and I regurgitated them.

  Mom says that we could have never kept Jimmy with us so long unless all the kids had helped. But all of us know that Shanny was the one who worked the hardest. She told me that she could never remember a time when she didn’t get up in the morning and bathe and dress and feed Jimmy. She wasn’t complaining (when Shanny complains it’s mostly about school being boring! and you can hear her all the way to Comiskey Park) she was merely stating a fact.

  I guess the doctors who asked the stupid questions were worried about what the effects of having Jimmy around the house would be on the rest of us. Well, as you can tell, I’m a real misfit, right? I mean I’d be okay if the chicks didn’t dig me so much I had to fight them off by the dozens. And Shanny sounds deprived, too, doesn’t she?

  I don’t know what would have happened in other families, but Mom doesn’t exaggerate when she says that Jimmy brought us all together and made us a family.

  The problem was other people—kids, grown-ups, well-meaning friends, and not so well-meaning strangers, as the priest said.

  That’s where the fights come in.

  I mean we walk into a restaurant on a trip somewhere and people would take one look at Jimmy and start complaining in whispers which were just loud enough to hear.

  “That child is disgusting.”

  I suppose he did look disgusting. He never did grow much afte
r Mom brought him home. His body was misshapen, his face twisted. After a while we didn’t notice. It didn’t matter to us. He was ours and we loved him.

  “They should put him away.”

  “Why was he permitted to live?”

  “How can we eat with him in here?”

  My parents would usually try to ignore them. Not Shanny. She would dash over to the table and scream at them, “He’s my brother and I love him and you just shut up.”

  Like, wow, huh?

  Usually they’d shut up. Occasionally some airhead would go, like, “You poor little thing; you shouldn’t have to put up with that monster.”

  That’s when Shanny would start punching and I’d have to pull her off. Mom and Dad would tell her she shouldn’t fight that way, but I think they were really proud of her. So was I, but I was always the one who had to drag her away.

  See what I mean, Shanny was always a problem.

  It was worse with kids. Grown-ups would usually keep their smart-mouth ideas to themselves. When Shanny got a little older and people would complain about Jimmy being down on the beach, she’d chew them out verbally instead of punching them out.

  She’d go, “You’re so uneducated that you make me sick. Don’t you understand that God wants us to love little people like Jimmy?”

  For starters.

  That would shut them up. Some people would even apologize and ask about Jimmy. Shanny is, like the priest says, nothing if not flexible, so she’d turn on all her “sweet little girl” charm and maybe even make them think a little. She got pretty good at her “canned” lecture after a while.

  Kids were harder, especially when, like we were in third and fourth grade, and fifth- and sixth- and seventh-graders—mostly boys but some girls, too—would make fun of Jimmy in the playground or when Shanny would take him out in the stroller.

  Well, Shanny didn’t put up with it and it didn’t make any difference how big the kids were. She’d charge them like she was Richard Dent, right?