All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  From second grade on, Lisa had a circle of admirers and friends who were entranced by her enthusiasm and charm. When her mother pulled her out of St. Praxides (after a big fight with Sister Superior) and sent her to a private academy (“A talented child like my Lisa needs special training”) she continued to be friends with the others kids in the parish. Finally, after two years of high school, she persuaded her father, a defense attorney who worked mostly for the Outfit and left the rearing of the children to his much younger wife, that she belonged in a Catholic school. She was an instant hit at Mother Macauley, carrying off leads in the school play and soloing in the choir’s annual Christmas record both the years she was there (“O Holy Night” both times, of course). Her circle of worshipers expanded dramatically, as did the circle of resentment.

  Christmas was Lisa’s special time above all others. She poured her considerable energy and organizing skills (as evidenced by her recent success as a producer) into a round of parties, concerts, benefits, and sessions of strolling carolers. Was the temperature below zero? Dress warmly; there’s only one Christmas every year. Was there a foot of snow? All the more fun to mix caroling with snowball fights. And heaven help you when Lisa decided that your face required washing.

  There were many of us boys, of course, who could hardly wait to be dragged into a snowbank by Lisa.

  None of us who adored Lisa expected her success—two platinum records and an Academy Award nomination before she was twenty-six. But neither were we surprised by Lisa on the screen. She was the way she’d always been. Her acting skills were more polished, her voice in much better control (the voice teachers Mrs. Malone hired turned out to be inept), her humor a little more deft. Otherwise it was an act we’d all seen before.

  Her voice, as you know, is “sweet” rather than powerful, and limited in its range. She doesn’t do much rock and only the lightest of light opera. (“Bridge over Troubled Water” and “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” were her favorites that year. That was before her annual Christmas Special became almost as much a part of Christmas in America as the wise men.)

  One critic suggested she was born in the wrong era: Lisa Malone, he said, was designed to sing Victor Herbert. At a time of Altamont and Woodstock, she sang as though the Beatles didn’t exist. “Nonrelevant music,” sniffed Time. “A Singer for Escapists,” said Rolling Stone contemptuously. “A Kathryn Grayson or an Ann Blyth for her generation,” The New York Times said, perhaps more accurately.

  There was no ideology in her music, not because she lacked political concerns (“Why should anyone care what I think about politics?” she asked one interviewer) but because, as always, she did what she could do and did not attempt anything else. She admitted that she hated the Vietnam War but that did not prevent her from going to Vietnam one Christmas with Bob Hope.

  In Vietnam I had not heard about her success in her first appearance at Las Vegas and hence could not believe it was the same Lisa Malone. Still, I pulled all kinds of strings to get to the Bob Hope show, but was so far back I couldn’t tell whether it was our Lisa or not until she started to sing.

  I don’t suppose I could have talked to her that night even if I tried, but I didn’t try.

  An attractive, talented young woman from our own neighborhood, ideologically inoffensive, who managed in her interviews to sound intelligent, pleasant and even-tempered; why did we resent her instead of celebrating her?

  Those who come from neighborhoods like ours or small towns will understand why. “She could win the Oscar, the Emmy, the Tony, and the Nobel Prize to boot,” Blackie Ryan observed, his eyes blinking rapidly. “And it wouldn’t help. She’s still May Malone’s daughter. That mean’s she a reject by definition.”

  In communities like ours, some people are always “in” by definition, no matter what they do. The Ryan clan is loud, contentious, attractive, and dissident. Kate Collins Ryan (Ed’s first wife and Blackie and Mary Kate’s mother) was a radical always and at one time a communist. After she died, Ed married a much younger woman (selected, it was said, by Kate on her deathbed) and set about raising a second family. The Ryans collect strays and rejects, like Lisa, and me (if I’d let them), and defy the neighborhood arbiters of taste. Half the people in the parish bitterly resent them. Yet no one would dream of suggesting that they are outsiders. If you are a Ryan, you can do nothing wrong.

  If you are May Malone’s daughter, you can do nothing worthwhile, and TV specials, platinum records, even critical kudos are irrelevant.

  As any community does for its rejects, we fashioned brief descriptions of her which were applied from her sixth birthday to her twenty-sixth—“affected” (or “stuck up”), “spoiled,” and “her mother pushes her too much.” In 1970 the only change brought on by her success was to put “push” in the past tense. Once a community said, “Is this not the carpenter’s son? How come he’s working miracles?” We said, “Is this not May Malone’s daughter? What difference does it make if she has her own TV special?”

  May was, you see, a very pushy woman. There was nothing wrong with being a social climber in our neighborhood. In those days women whose children were in school often had little else to do. There were, however, unwritten but very important rules. May violated them left and right. She joined the Saddle and Cycle Club rather than the Beverly Country Club. She aspired to associate with Lake Forest elites. She went to polo matches in Oak Brook. She dressed her daughter in “daring” dresses (fashions of the year after next), intruded her in theatricals and weddings where she wasn’t wanted, arranged her debut at the Passavant Cotillion instead of the Presentation Ball, tried to send her to Bryn Mawr instead of St. Mary’s of Notre Dame, made a nuisance out of herself jabbering about Lisa’s dates with South Shore and North Shore boys, and didn’t show proper respect for her betters (women like my mother and Lucinda Sprague and Harriet Finch, none of whom would be forced to admit, as was May, that their father had been a “saloon keeper”).

  In 1970 they would add that “poor” May got what she deserved. She did not expect that Lisa would break the deadlock of St. Mary’s versus Bryn Mawr by opting for UCLA and Hollywood. Nor did she expect that as a sophomore Lisa would appear in very minimal attire in a bit part (no more than thirty delicious seconds) as a young singer in the undistinguished spy thriller Bloodnet.

  A week after he saw the film, her father had his third and last heart attack. Everyone in the neighborhood (except his cardiologist) blamed the attack on Bloodnet, including, it is to be feared, May Malone. At the wake Lisa was treated as though she were a leper even by her own family. Her mother went off to live with Lisa’s older brother, a hotshot surgeon in Connecticut ten years older than Lisa, and neither mother nor daughter ever returned to the neighborhood. In the interviews Lisa says that she visits her mother whenever she is in New York and that they are “good friends.”

  I have a tape of the film; while Lisa’s clothes may leave something to be desired, she was anything but lascivious. Truth to tell, she could not be lascivious if she wanted to. Even if she were stark naked, she’d still represent chaste Irish Catholic eroticism, which, mind you, is not necessarily bad.

  So why come back to the neighborhood for Christmas after all that? Why come back to a place where you have only a thin network of friends and a highly organized public opinion against you?

  The answer reveals the final secret about Lisa and the one which tarnished her innocence during the 1970 visit: immune to resentment and envy herself, she hardly noticed the vices in others. She could not help but realize that some people in the neighborhood didn’t like her. Yet even at her father’s funeral she was utterly unaware of the smug satisfaction of those who had always detested her. She came home at Christmas in 1970 not for vindication, not for acceptance, not to impress, but because she thought, poor gentle girl, that the neighborhood was home, a place where she loved and was loved.

  She swept down on the community like a playful winter storm. On Sunday after the 11:15 Mass, she shook hands
and hugged old friends in back of church like she was the pastor or a candidate for public office. She even shook hands with and hugged the pastor. That morning she agreed to sing at the parish Christmas dance, the country club Christmas dance, the High Club dance, the YCS program at the County infirmary, the High Club Christmas play, the grammar school Christmas pageant, and the Mother Macauley Christmas festival.

  Everyone wanted her to sing “I Think I Love You” (which the Partridge Family was doing at the time), “White Christmas,” and “O Holy Night.” Although my mother and her friends complained that it was all a public relations gimmick, there was no PR person present, and except for a note in Kup’s column in the Sun Times, no press notice of her visit.

  Lisa was having the time of her life, not enjoying a happy girlhood she never had, but rather reenacting a girlhood whose happiness was not tainted by her mother’s silliness or her neighbors’ resentment. The neighborhood loved it. As John O’Connor had remarked in his column in The New York Times, “Even if you are determined to resist Lisa Malone, her laughter and her innocent beauty force you to smile.” A lot of us smiled the week before Christmas of 1970.

  Much of this was reported to me secondhand and with considerable disapproval. I didn’t follow Lisa around. I was, however, constrained to be her date for the country-club Christmas dance. Mary Kate Murphy complained to me that she had run out of residents from Little Company of Mary Hospital and would I please take Lisa as a personal favor.

  Run out of dates for someone who had been named by Esquire as one of the fifteen most beautiful women in America? I went along with the game, however.

  Her wardrobe did indeed seem to be limited to the single garment bag: a wine-colored suit, a white knit minidress with a red belt, and a white formal also with red trim, which she wore to the country-club dance. The last-named garment was modest enough to satisfy the morals of the most finicky mother superior. Not that it mattered: Lisa’s figure was (and is) so attractive that she is erotic in almost anything. Especially to a lonely twenty-eight-year-old bachelor.

  Mary Kate insisted that I dig my tux out of mothballs and wear my contact lenses.

  Remember what kind of a year 1970 was. The sixties were over but there was still plenty of trouble. It was the year after Altamont, the year after Woodstock, the “incursion” into Cambodia, the Kent State and Jackson State shootings, the “interim” in which college kids were supposed to work for “peace” candidates (and mostly played basketball), the revelation of the My Lai massacre, the collapse of Biafra, the murder of the Black Panthers in Chicago, the Bobby Seale trial in New Haven, and airline hijackings almost every other week. We all needed a little light and a little laughter. And our own local Tinker Bell returning from the land of the stars showered us with both.

  Her first words when I picked her up, radiant and glowing, at Mary Kate’s, were that the pastor had invited her to sing “O Holy Night” at the midnight Mass, “The first time I’ve sung in church since I left … Mind you, I go to church, so don’t look so shocked.”

  I pleaded that I was dazzled, not shocked. Then, since it made her so happy, I added my congratulations on the midnight Mass song, something which in the past had always been reserved for adults.

  She was an adult, too, but it was hard to admit. She was still Lisa, our luminous teenage package of concentrated womanly energy.

  “I never dated a movie star before,” I said in self-defense.

  “I’m just Lisa.” She smiled affectionately. She then proved it for the rest of the evening by needling me, gently but tellingly, about being a conservative, stuffy accountant. I responded with the defense that I was not a conservative and that’s why I didn’t work for my father, who believed that computers would never be important in our profession.

  She listened carefully to my explanations about the future of personal computers and nodded intelligently. I had no idea whether she understood me, but she was so gorgeous that I didn’t much care.

  I also realized that she was sexually available to me. Nothing so crude or lewd as a proposition; no one else on the glittering dance floor would have noticed. We were not even dancing all that close. The body I held in my arms as we danced was subtly submissive, inviting me to accept it, willing to yield itself completely to me, offering itself as a gift with no strings, other than Christmas ribbons, attached.

  One of the fifteen most beautiful women in America in red and white wrapping as a Christmas present for you, George the bean counter. Are you going to accept the gift package? What are you going to do?

  Her sparkling hazel eyes were amused by my mask, as she saw it, of the precise and dusty bean counter. She thought she saw something beneath the mask that she wanted, lightly, playfully, but definitely.

  I love you, George the bean counter. Please love me in return.

  All without a word being said. It’s what happens when you find yourself dancing with an accomplished actress, more accomplished than her directors and critics realized then, in a white Christmas evening dress.

  Lisa knew her target. She realized that she was in no danger of a one-night stand or anything of that sort. The invitation, however, contained no restrictions or limitations. It was a gift, pure and simple.

  I was flattered and terrified and determined to run away as soon as I could escape from the club. How else would a sensible bean counter react?

  That night as I wrestled with fantasies and tried to sleep, I wondered if she had always danced with me that way when we were kids and I had never noticed. I also realized that she had returned to the neighborhood with an ulterior motive after all. Me. Doubtless it was a conspiracy set up by Blackie and Mary Kate. George the stray would be ministered to whether he wanted such attention or not.

  I avoided her until midnight Mass. By then the luster of the shooting star had been snuffed out temporarily.

  Our pastor at the time was an old-line Catholic liberal; he hated Nixon, denounced racism, and invited Dan Berrigan to speak in the parish hall. But he was pathologically afraid of complaints from parishioners. An anonymous letter or two, a few phone calls, a suggestion that “people” were criticizing him, was enough to cause him to make a quick and arbitrary and undiscussable decision.

  Harriet Finch, the chairman of the local Christian Family Movement group, called him the day before Christmas Eve to report that there was “talk all over the parish” about Lisa. “What’s the point in keeping our kiddies away from R-rated movies and restricting their TV programs when you permit a woman who is not much better than a harlot to sing at midnight Mass? People are saying that they don’t see why they should contribute to the Christmas collection when there is such hypocrisy in the Church.”

  That was that. A call went to the Murphy house five minutes later. Lisa was not home. Joe Murphy was told that “it has been decided” that there would be no soloists at midnight Mass, the implication of the language being that the choir director or the curate in charge of the liturgy or maybe even the liturgy committee had made the decision. Joe, who is quiet man compared to his in-laws, said that it was a very regrettable decision and hung up.

  Worse was yet to come. Someone, not my mother but probably my former fiancée Lou Anne Sprague O’Neill, cornered Lisa at the Rock Island Station on the morning of Christmas Eve and chortled about the cancellation of “O Holy Night.”

  “You’re an evil woman,” she was told. “You act in dirty films, you wear filthy clothes. You flaunt your vulgar body. You lead a scandalous life. You sing obscene songs. You’re a drug addict. You killed your own father. How dare you come back here and shock our innocent children? Thank God the monsignor has finally come to his senses and thrown you out of the midnight Mass. No one here ever liked you. You were always a spoiled, stuck-up brat.”

  “Stuck-up” was the kind of phrase Lou Anne would use.

  I learned all of this from Blackie, who called me before confessions (there were still a lot on Christmas Eve in those days).

  “Bitches!”
I exploded.

  “She-cougars,” he replied. “The males of the species, however, do not disagree.”

  There was a dig at me in the cougar crack. What, I asked myself after the conversation, could I possibly do to heal the hurt, to wipe away the tears, to restore the innocence.

  Nothing, I replied to myself. Not a darn thing.

  No shooting star this Christmas.

  Still, she was at midnight Mass. I saw her walking down the aisle to Communion in beige coat and wine suit with a red and green Christmas scarf, as I was returning from the altar rail, the hurt only in her eyes.

  Midnight Mass is the most spectacular of our Catholic services: lighted candles, poinsettias and evergreens, carols, bells ringing, feet crunching on snow perhaps on a crisp starry night, young people home from college, excited chatter and laughter as everyone wished each other “Merry Christmas.” Through the years St. Prax’s has learned how to do midnight Mass with style and taste and authentic Christmas joy.

  For me that night there was no joy.

  I slipped out of my pew and waited in the back of church because I was sure she would leave before the end.

  “Merry Christmas, Lisa.” I shook hands with her realizing that there was nothing I could say that would help.

  “And to you, George.” She shook my hand firmly in return. Consummate actress that she was, she exorcised the hurt from her eyes.

  “Where’s the Ryan and Murphy clan?” I was reduced to making small talk.

  “Father Blackie is going to say Mass at his dad’s this afternoon. A few people are coming over. I’m sure he would want you to join us.”

  “I’ll be there.” Christmas was beginning to look merry again. The pastor’s Christmas collection would be dangerously lower this year. The Ryans were the most generous contributors in the parish. Moreover, Ed Ryan and Mary Kate and Joe and Packy and Tim and Nancy and their spouses would all make it clear to the pastor over the next two weeks why they were not throwing envelopes into the collection.