All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  At the reception afterward I got a chance to size up Arnie’s congregation, mostly college-educated professionals, a lot of them from out of the state. Iowa produces more manufactured goods than it does agriculture, I was told, and the factories in the city were staffed by young managers and technicians from all over the country, smart, articulate men and women who knew what they wanted from their church. They were getting it from Arnie, who seemed to know all about the families of each of them. He even found one young man who had grown up in my parish in Chicago, though I barely remembered him.

  “Quite a fella, Arnie,” he said to me when the pastor went on to another knot of people, “the plainspoken-Iowa-farmer bit, and not a lot of what you’d call charisma, but he’s got us eating out of his hands because he’s so concerned about each one of us; love pays off, doesn’t it, Father?” he blurted, embarrassed by his show of piety.

  “I’m sure it does,” I said, sipping my punch and wondering about the impact of this basically frosty man on his sophisticated parishioners, most of whom were better educated and smarter than he. They called him “Arnie” to his face, too; there weren’t many places around the country even then where you could get away with that when your pastor was a monsignor—though he didn’t look much like a monsignor in his baseball jacket.

  I don’t mind questions after lectures, and I can tolerate receptions; but I warned Arnie before I came to omit the clerical bull session in the rectory afterward. I’m usually exhausted by that time and require one Librium (prescribed by my doctor for such occasions), a warm shower, and a comfortable bed. Arnie didn’t argue. The parish Mass was at noon, sleep as late as I want, we’d grab a bit of breakfast and see some of the country before my two o’clock plane back to Chicago.

  I felt soothed and relaxed in the shower, more than usual after a lecture. It was, I told myself, pleasure over Arnie’s success with his people … something missing in his style, though … he was good with his parishioners, but still the faraway look in his eye … you’re faking it with them, Arnie … you’re so good at faking that they don’t realize you’re going through an act … your mind is someplace else. It was very cold when I stepped out of the water onto the thick bathroom carpet, like getting out of a heated pool in zero weather. Shivering underneath my towel, I checked the bathroom thermostat. It was at seventy-five, where I had put it earlier. Why the hell was it so cold? I climbed quickly into bed and fell asleep almost at once, basking in a sensation of warmth and peace after the postshower shock; the Librium was working quicker than usual … maybe the light supper.

  Later, a little after midnight I guess, I experienced a vague unease in my sleep. I struggled to locate the unease: music. In the distance, barely audible, a piano was being played. I was in that state of mostly sleep—slightly awake—where you debate whether something is a dream or not.… I was imagining a Mozart sonata, I told myself groggily, because I had seen the music on Arnie’s piano. Reassured, I sank back into deep sleep. As the sound of the piano faded away, the judgment center in my brain decided that it was not dream music, but the Librium had done its work. I postponed till morning any questions about the piano player.

  The next time I woke, my passage from deep sleep to full, if confused, consciousness, was abrupt and rapid. I was tense, wide-awake, and cold. Someone had turned the light on in my room. I sat up with a start. There was another person in the room with me.

  She was sitting in the chair watching me. When I sat up, she rose from the chair and began walking toward the bed, bare arms outstretched. There was nothing ethereal or misty about her. She was as solid as the bed, the chair, the dresser; a slender graceful woman with a lovely figure and a sweet smile, clad in nineteenth-century undergarments. As she drew near the bed, hardly a foot away from me, I saw she was no longer young … in her late thirties or early forties … her beauty, the durable charm of a mature and sophisticated woman. I also realized that behind the sweetness of her smile she was sinister and threatening. She looked down at me with an expression of affectionate tenderness. Sexually attractive and inviting, but dangerous. An artery in her throat was pulsating, her nipples were outlined against the thin vest. Sadness blended with the gentleness in her face … she had suffered much. I almost forgot that she wanted to entrap me as she had entrapped Arnie. Then I saw her eyes and was conscious for the first time of my fear … a wild vacant stare … madness.… On impulse I made the sign of the cross.

  Instantly, she vanished, the light went out. I turned on the bed lamp—a different light from the one in which she appeared. The room was empty, but bitter cold. The thermostat next to the bed had been turned down to sixty-five, but it was much colder than that. I pushed it back up to seventy, and huddled under the thick comforter. Was any of it real? Then, as if to answer my question, I noticed the aroma of perfume that pervaded my room; it had been there since I awoke but I had not been paying attention to it. This time the scent—her scent?—faded slowly.

  Failing to win me to her cause, she wanted to be rid of me. Well, you win on that one, lady. I won’t spend another night in this damned haunted rectory of yours.

  I lay there in bed, light on, trying to think. My mind was clouded by the Librium and numbed by surprise. I was no longer afraid, though I should have been. I thought about haunted rectories. The English have no monopoly on them, though they get all the publicity. Bishop Muldoon walked the old St. Charles Borromeo rectory in Chicago until it was urban-renewed out of existence. Holy Family, next to St. Ignatius High School, teems with psychic disturbances. A haunted rectory in Iowa? How very interesting. Was she the reason for Arnie’s preoccupation? I calmed down slowly; next week would be a hard week: a report due; I needed my sleep; she had been given the signal I wasn’t interested in whatever she had to offer … to hell with it … I turned off the light and went back to sleep.

  It was warmth not cold which awakened me the next time … overpowering but not suffocating warmth … tender, protective, reassuring.… It pervaded my being and excited feelings of peace, security, love.… I was a child in the arms of a skilled mother … the reaction was not sexual, not in the usual sense of the word, at any rate, but it was enticing, attractive, demanding. I found myself yielding to it, slipping under, embracing its endearments.… At the last minute some dim instinct of self-preservation acted independently of conscious decision … I pushed the warmth away, mentally and physically, and turned on the light.

  There had been no glow this time and there was no lingering fragrance, but the room was frigid again, the thermostat was down to fifty-five. “Bitch,” I muttered as I put it back to seventy.

  I looked at my Seiko: 4:00 A.M. Damn the woman—damn Arnie—inviting me to stay the night in a haunted rectory. I put on some of my clothes and stormed out of the room; I was not going to spend another moment in his cotton-picking …

  Arnie’s room, which it occurred to me for the first time I had never seen, was at the end of the corridor. There was light coming from under the door … the same kind of glow in which she had walked. I hurried down the hallway and stood at the doorway listening … no sound … I was within a millimeter of breaking in on my classmate and his ghostly lover. Then something … delicacy? … I don’t know … anyhow, I walked slowly back to my room, got into bed, noted that the thermostat was where it belonged, turned off the light, pulled up the comforter, and fell promptly to sleep.

  I was in the kitchen eating breakfast (you got your own because there was no “Saturday housekeeper”) when Arnie showed up. “Hell, man,” he said, smiling, “you’re up early … sleep well?”

  “Wonderfully,” I replied evasively. His flinty plainsman eyes were curious. Let him wait till after my first cup of tea.

  “Who is she, Arnie?” I asked as soon as the first sip of the second cup was on my lips.

  My classmate sighed heavily. “I was hoping she would leave you alone; I’m sorry.” He looked away from me, putting his coffee cup on the table.

  “She didn’t,” I said
flatly, “but to repeat my question: who is she?”

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” said Arnie, rising from his chair and leaving the kitchen. He was back shortly with an old book; he opened it and put it on the table in front of my toast, covering with his hand the legend at the bottom of the page. A picture of a beautiful young woman. “That her?”

  “Younger in the picture, and more clothes on, but yeah, Arnie, that’s her all right. Now who is she?” I was losing my temper; you don’t like to be assaulted in the middle of the night by a lovely spook who is a complete stranger.

  Arnie removed his hand from the page. “Mary Jane Rafferty Alonso, 1860–1903” it read. I closed the book and looked at its cover: The Life and Times of James Michael Richard Sander, 1845–1903. Sander had been the second bishop of Arnie’s diocese and one of the brightest lights of late-nineteenth-century Catholic hierarchy—one which unlike its successors had shone with many luminaries—James Gibbons, Lancaster Spaulding, John Ireland. On the frontispiece there was a picture of Sander, a tall handsome man with high forehead and iron-gray hair; the genes of his convert Anglo-Saxon ancestors were dominant in that face, no ham-handed son of the Irish working class.

  “They died the same year,” I said.

  “Hell, man, the same day,” Arnie exploded. “Do you know any of the story?”

  “Not much.” I closed the book and went back to my tea. “There’s nothing in writing on it, but I’ve heard rumors on the church history grapevine. Something like the Spaulding-Caldwell affair, wasn’t it?”

  His plainsman eyes were glowing: a fire on the prairies. “Except that Spaulding and Mary Gwendolyn had half a continent between them; these two lived in the same Iowa town for ten years before she finally gave up and married her Italian count; and they kept it a secret for every day of those ten years.”

  “So that’s why Sander refused promotions to larger cities,” I mused.

  “That’s part of the reason.” Arnie was pacing with the same restlessness he used to display patrolling left field on the seminary villa baseball teams. “Hell, man, bring your tea and rolls and come into the parlor.”

  I trailed along behind him, noting that the Mozart music had been replaced by a Bach variation on the piano. Arnie reached behind a stack of books and pulled out a bulging manila folder. “Here it is, the whole story of the Rafferty-Sander love.” He shoved the folder at me enthusiastically. “Maguire, the man who did that book, found the letters. He was too good a historian to throw them out and too pious a churchman to print the story. When I moved in here and things began to happen, I dug through the archives and found them: ten years, most of the time within two miles of one another, except when one or the other was in Europe, and they wrote love letters every week … almost five hundred of them.”

  “How did you get the letters out of the chancery?”

  “I’m the vicar general, remember?” He sank wearily into his favored sofa, the file now on his lap. “Hell, man, I could steal the Peter’s Pence collection and poor dumb Micky”—his bishop—“wouldn’t know the difference.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said, adopting my best Rogerian counseling style.

  “Picture the situation.” His enthusiasm was returning. “Jimmy Micky Dicky, as the Irish called him, shows up here at the age of thirty-four, a few years after the end of Vatican One, a handsome, arrogant, ambitious genius, part of the same generation which produced Keane, Spaulding, Ireland, Jimmy Gibbons. He is a poet, a theologian, a skilled politician with a Roman education at the propaganda college, and superb contacts in the papal nobility. Everyone thinks he’s bound for Chicago or New York and the red hat, maybe the first in America. He takes this cow town by storm, especially since we’re making money by then and trying to appreciate the finer things.… He knows all about the finer things. No one is more impressed than Mary Jane Rafferty, the twenty-one-year-old beauty who has just inherited her father’s money and her mother’s piety … the richest woman west of the Mississippi … and according to some of the newspapers, the most beautiful.… But hell, man, you’ve see her.”

  “I’ve seen her picture, Arnie.”

  He looked startled but plunged on with his story. “Anyway, Jim Sander launched a vast construction program to put this diocese on the map and push his career, of course: schools, hospitals, a college, a seminary; you can guess who picks up the tab. It’s Rafferty Memorial Hospital and Rafferty Hall at the seminary even now.” The faraway look was back in his eye, Arnie saw the drama he was describing. “Within six months they were lovers; I don’t know how they kept it a secret in such a small place but they did. Sander turns down promotion after promotion, sits out all the great battles of the eighties, becomes almost a forgotten man in the American hierarchy.”

  “Living all the time in this old house.…”

  “She gave it to him the first month he was here. Anyhow, they have a big quarrel about 1890, she goes off to Italy and marries her count, he visits them in Como a year later, and they patch it up; there are some letters afterward, pretty tame by comparison. Here, you want to read these?” He passed the dossier in my direction.

  I reached out to take it, heard a warning bell, and pulled back my hand. “I don’t think so, Arnie, not now, but tell me more of the story. Why doesn’t Sander accept promotion now, or have they forgotten about him?”

  “Jimmy comes back here and rots.” There was a tinge of sadness in Arnie’s voice. “He stops writing, doesn’t answer mail from his friends Ireland or Spaulding. I often wonder whether he and Spaulding compared notes.… He ignores letters from Rome … is dead silent through the ‘Americanism’ heresy thing.… Mary Jane has a couple of kids and enjoys the life of the European noblewoman; the letters go quite domestic now. You wouldn’t know that they were lovers. Then, in 1896, Sander goes back to Europe. He’s fifty-one, an ecclesiastical recluse whom history has passed by. He stops at Como to see the D’Alonsos; she’s thirty-seven, the mother of three kids. Something happens … he continues the rest of his tour in the company of Baronessa Maria D’Alonso … she throws a party for him in Rome with half the sacred college in attendance.… Again they seem to fool everyone because I can’t find a hint of any gossip. Jimmy Micky Dicky begins to preach and speak again … he’s the toast of Europe, like Spaulding was the year before and John Ireland the decade before that … he goes home, and prose and poetry pour out like someone broke a dam … four books in two years—”

  “The best stuff he ever wrote,” I cut in. “Some of it’s still relevant.”

  “Hell, man, he anticipated the Vatican Council.” Arnie was sitting on the edge of his couch waving the dossier again. “No more letters, not a word between them. In 1898 he is offered … well, a very big archdiocese; one of the letters from a new Roman patron hints at a red hat shortly after; then she denounces him to the propaganda … apparently shows them some of her letters: end of Jimmy Micky Dicky.” He slumped back into the couch, exhausted.

  “Hell hath no fury…”

  “I guess, I guess … no trace of why, though … anyhow Rome wants to ease him out and he obligingly has a stroke in 1900; they send an administrator with right of succession; and he spends the last three years of his life crippled, never leaving this house. He has another bad stroke in 1903; everyone knows that he only has a few months to live; she sails to America when she hears. Well, I’m speculating about her reasons, but she’s traveling without her husband and children. She dies just outside of New York harbor, October sixth, 1903, of a stroke—two hours after he dies of the same thing—the feast of the holy rosary,” he added irrelevantly.

  “Awfully young to die of a stroke.” I opened the drapes to brilliant autumn sunshine, clear blue sky, perfect weather for a trip back to Chicago.

  “Not too young to die of a broken heart,” murmured Arnie with more sentiment than I could imagine he possessed.

  “So she comes back to the old house anyhow”—I walked over to the piano—“still trying to reach her lover before it
’s too late.…”

  He had slumped down, his head in his hands. “Trying to expiate what she did to him. Doesn’t it make sense?”

  It didn’t make sense at all. “Have you tried exorcism, Arnie?” I asked, touching the keyboard. I don’t particularly believe in exorcism, but I suspected he might.

  He looked up at me, his lean, hard face twisted with pain. “You’ve seen her. Does she look like an evil spirit? Besides, where would she go if we did get rid of her?”

  I picked out the opening bars of the Mozart sonata; Arnie didn’t notice what I was playing. “Arnie,” I said evenly, “Mary Jane Rafferty is dead; she died on a steamer in the Narrows almost three-quarters of a century ago. You and I believe that she is still alive, but not here. You’re contending with psychic energy, either the memories of the past or projections from your own deep involvement in the story. It’s not good.” I sat on the piano bench, knowing I was talking to a stone wall.

  “Hell, man, you saw her; does she look like psychic energy? Besides, I didn’t know about any of this stuff until after…” His voice trailed off momentarily. “I didn’t read Maguire’s book, I’d never seen her picture; you remember I didn’t give a damn about history.”

  “Do you talk with her?” I asked, now half believing it myself.

  “I … I won’t answer that question,” he said sullenly, retreating behind his frosty plainsman mask.

  “What’s she doing here?” I persisted.

  His jaw dropped in astonishment. “Why, she’s taking care of me. Isn’t that obvious?”

  Arnie was on the edge of madness. A woman dead for more than seven decades was taking care of him; he had fallen in love with the ghost in his haunted rectory. I wanted, like I’ve wanted few things in my life, to be on that United Airlines flight back to Chicago.

  “It’s bad for you, Arnie,” I insisted weakly. “You’ve got to get away from this place or that thing will destroy you.”

  “Destroy me?” said Arnie unbelievingly. “Hell, man, she’s saving me. I’ve wanted to leave the priesthood for four years. She won’t let me do it.”