All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “I’m sorry if I made you angry.”

  “It is not true.” Hands pressed together on her lap, she pushed her chair back from the table. “God did not send you.”

  Unaccountably she was furious.

  “If you say so…”

  “Maybe”—the steam seemed to hiss out of her anger—“I’m the one who was sent.”

  “I’ll gladly agree to that.” I reached for one of the hands.

  “And maybe…” She pulled the hand away. “God shouldn’t be blamed for that.”

  There was an awkward pause. She was still angry but beginning to regret her outburst. I was baffled.

  “Don’t let your ice cream melt.”

  She laughed happily. “You’re wonderful, Commander.”

  “When you smile at me that way, I think so, too.”

  “Irish.” She dug into the sundae with renewed vigor. “You’re incorrigibly Irish.”

  “You deserve the best, Andy King, if that’s your real name, which I doubt.”

  “The best?”

  “Clothes, homes, food, drink.” I filled her wineglass again. “Cars, jewelry, children, lovers, everything.”

  “Why?”

  “As a setting for your beauty.”

  “That only earns you something if you’re willing to sell yourself. I’m not.”

  “I don’t mean economically.” The drink, as my mother would say, had loosened my tongue. “I mean artistically.”

  “If I were better educated…”

  “You would agree with me completely.”

  We laughed together and the world seemed right in a way it hadn’t since St. Mark’s won the West Suburban grammar-school basketball championship ten years before.

  After dinner we sat alone on the terrace, in the still, dark night, and sipped coffee—still black—and Napoleon special reserve brandy. I was happily in love and she was preoccupied.

  “We both need sleep. Neither of us had much last night.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “You drove all night, didn’t you? Besides, you’re so old, you should get your sleep.”

  I hadn’t told her that I drove all night. But it didn’t matter.

  “I’ll walk with you to your room in the other wing.”

  “That will be nice.”

  It took us some time and much tipsy laughter to find the right corridor.

  At the door of her room, in the dimly lit and suggestive pastel hallway, I kissed her forehead. She lowered her eyes. “Good night, Commander, and thank you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and departed, full steam astern, if you please.

  If I had invited myself into her room and into her bed, she would not, I thought on that stern run, have resisted. But we had a whole lifetime ahead of us. Why should I rush her?

  I was, after all, trustworthy, if not completely trustworthy.

  Only as I was falling into a happy, if slightly inebriated sleep, did I wonder who she thought had sent her into my life. If not God, then who else?

  She was quiet and reserved at breakfast the next morning. I wondered if I had offended her the night before. Perhaps she had expected me to make love to her. She was, after all, sexually experienced, probably much more than I. I had treated her like a seventeen-year-old virgin on a prom date. Perhaps she was disappointed and frustrated.

  She had given no sign that she wanted me in bed with her, had she?

  How would I know what the signs were like?

  And pushed by the demons of curiosity which had almost landed me in naval intelligence instead of in the cockpit of an F6F, I made my cursed phone call after breakfast to the manager of the Del Coronado.

  “No, Commander, we have not employed a woman named Andrea King since we reopened. No Andreas and no Kings. Not at all, Commander, glad to help.”

  Right.

  I gave the cashier one of my hundred-dollar bills and waited for the change.

  “Very lovely young woman, sir.” He had a leathery cowpoke’s face. “Terribly pale, isn’t she?”

  “Pigmentation,” I murmured.

  “When she talks and smiles, you don’t notice, but before that you wonder if she’s stepped out of a coffin.”

  I checked the remaining bills. Nine of them all right. “Doctor says she has very sensitive skin. Should stay out of the sun.”

  Already lying to protect her. Andy King, or whoever she might be, was lonely and alone. She needed my protection. Everything else would take care of itself.

  I noted that her blouse was clean and her skirt neatly pressed. There was certainly an iron in the luggage I had hefted into the backseat of the Chevy.

  She was not wearing her thin wedding band. What did that mean?

  I was not sure I wanted to think about that subject.

  “Where are your Superstition Mountains?” she asked as I reached for the ignition of the Chevy.

  “Between Florence and Phoenix. I’ll drive you to Phoenix first.”

  She hesitated, closed her eyes, and murmured, “Why do they have such a strange name?”

  “Maybe because they look so strange; there’s lots of legends about ghosts and Apache thunder gods.” I picked up the guidebook next to me and opened to the page where there was a picture of the Superstition range—stern, foreboding volcanic tuffa which seemed to warn you to stay away. “They are a bit intimidating, aren’t they?”

  She opened her eyes, looked at them, and shuddered. “How terrible.”

  “Just dactite rock.”

  She crossed her arms in front of her breasts, huddling from the cold which the mountains seemed to radiate for her. “That’s where your Dutchman is?”

  “And your Dutchman wanders around on a ship, wandering around singing melancholy Dutch songs!” I touched her arm in cautious reassurance. “Weird people, the Germans!”

  Her face relaxed in that wonderful smile, as though I had pushed a button. “Aren’t we Irish terrible bigots?”

  I gulped and leaned back against a seat. “Has anyone ever told you about your smile?”

  “No.” She was watching me suspiciously. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It turns out all the other lights.”

  “The Irish are terrible indeed.” And she smiled again. I was captured. Years of celibacy, partly voluntary, partly involuntary, vanished in the mists. I wanted her.

  “Tell me more about your Dutchman.” She turned, embarrassed by my desires, which she seemed to absorb like everything else I thought or felt. Embarrassed but not frightened or repelled.

  So I told her about the pre-Christian Indian mines, and Coronado, and the early Spanish mines, and Peralta’s Sombrero Mine in the shadow of Weaver’s Needle, and the Apache massacre, and the survival of one Mexican woman who for a time was “married” to Jacob Walz—the Dutchman. Then I added the more recent parts of the story: Walz’s murder of his Mexican workers and eventually of his friend Miez, the earthquake which closed the door of the mine, the floods which the thunder gods sent, rumors of Apache warriors still guarding the approaches to Weaver’s Needle, the death of Walz and his legacy of a map to Clara Thomas, a Negro who was an ice-cream-shop proprietor, the search for the mine by Thomas and her friends the Petrasch brothers, the discovery of bodies with arrows in the back, the death of a woman doctor just before the war.

  “And you want to find that treasure!” She regarded me with a mixture of terror and disbelief. “How could you?”

  “Not really.” I removed the guidebook gently from her hand and closed it. “I don’t need the money or want it. But since I was a kid and read Treasure Island, I’ve been fascinated by buried treasure.” I shrugged indifferently, not exactly having an explanation myself. “It’s a great American legend, like Wyatt Earp. And I’m on a great American tour.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said decisively. “I think it’s horrible and I’ll be scared every moment. But I can’t let you go up into that terrible place”—she gestured toward the guidebook—“by yourself.
You might get hurt.”

  “And what would you do then?”

  “Well…” She actually grinned. “I could drive for help.”

  “Can you drive?”

  “No … but please let me come. I promise not to smile too much.”

  And she smiled again and I couldn’t say no. I touched her red hair, glinting in the morning sunlight, and said, “Delighted to have you.”

  It sounds like the beginning of a romantic adventure story, which is just what I was looking for at that troubled time in my life. But even then it did not quite ring true. I had not forgotten the manager of the Del Coronado. And I had not shaken my strong instinct that this pale, pretty young woman was not quite alive, not the way the cashier at the Arizona Inn and I were alive. She was some sort of in-between creature, a red-haired Irish Flying Dutchman. Or Lost Dutchman. Or lost Irishwoman. Or whatever. Wandering for a time between life and death and seeking my help, even though she knew that I could not help.

  It’s been forty years, yet I don’t think I embellish my memory of that feeling. Why did I not drive her to Phoenix and get rid of her?

  Because she was young and beautiful and she needed help and because I was young and I wanted her?

  I suppose so. And also because I didn’t seem to have much choice. We were both fated, I thought as I drove down Elm Street toward First Avenue and the road to Globe, and that was that.

  “Would you mind if we took the roundabout way and saw some mountains and copper mines?”

  She hardly seemed to have heard me. “You’re the tour guide.”

  So we lurched across the desert under the scorching sun, sometimes in clouds of dust so thick they reminded me of the morning fog over the Sea of Japan.

  In those days, U.S. 89 was paved all the way from Tucson to Phoenix, and Arizona 77 was blacktopped from Oracle Junction to the San Manuel Mines behind the Santa Catalina Mountains. But the rest of the picturesque trip through the Dripping Springs Mountains up to Superior and U.S. 60 was on a “macadamized” road—an uneven mixture of treated gravel and dirt (the sort of highway in which my children resolutely refuse to believe).

  The Sonora Desert is a weird place—saguros (giant cactuses with arms raised to heaven in prayer), octilos (trees which produce leaves only after rain, but after every rain), palo verdes (trees with their chlorophyll in the bark), rattlers, sidewinders, scorpions, Gila monsters, tarantulas, an occasional herd of mountain sheep, and once in a great while (so my guidebook said) a solitary mountain lion.

  Andrea’s moods changed as dramatically as did the scenery. In the barren desert north of Tucson she frowned with disapproval and informed me that she thought the bojimba tree with its skinny finger reaching skyward was “insane.”

  “Take that up with God. He made it.”

  “You don’t believe in God.”

  I didn’t remember that I had told her about my loss of faith on the carrier. “You do?”

  “I wish I didn’t.”

  But in the mountains she twisted in every direction to marvel at the spiral peaks, the occasional Mormon irrigated farm (“like a beautiful green carpet!”), and the indifferent cattle grazing near a wash which provided enough moisture for grass and a stand of cottonwood or oak (“aren’t they cute?”).

  I played the tour-guide role, explaining the formation of the mountains, the history of the Mormons, the reasons that the desert and the grass country often existed side by side, the terrible conflicts between the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) and the copper-mining companies.

  “You know everything.” It was a statement of fact, neither criticism, nor compliment.

  “You know more about literature and music.”

  “Much good that does.”

  At the lookout point above the vast Ray Mine between Hayden and Superior we stared in silence at the rusty, tarnished, man-made grand canyon, stretching for miles in either direction.

  “Strange but beautiful,” she said. “And scary too.”

  Still a child on a tour, curiosity and wonder not yet dead.

  I put my arm around her and led her unprotestingly back to the car.

  “People died here.” She shuddered.

  “It has always been violent. The unions haven’t won yet. The Mine, Mill, and Smelter Union is communist. I can’t blame them for being radical—”

  “Hold me, please.” She pressed against me, trembling violently.

  Normally I would have relished the opportunity to embrace an attractive young woman. But there was too much terror in that slim frame for me to permit any erotic feelings. Well, perhaps there were a few.

  “What should I do?”

  “Get me out of here. Quickly.”

  So I led her to the car and chugged up the mountains, across the sweeping curves and down toward Superior, driving slowly not only because of the dirt road, but because, inexperienced mountain driver that I was, I was scared stiff of the steep canyons that yawned only a few feet off the road.

  She clung to my arm until we were safely through Superior and back on the paved road. Then she revived completely as we drove up U.S. 60 through the burnished peaks of Queen Creek Canyon.

  “This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been!” she exclaimed.

  “Please sit still. I’m not used to driving on mountains.”

  “Yes sir, Commander, sir.”

  “And stop laughing at me.”

  “How do you know I’m laughing when you don’t even take your eyes off the road to look at me?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  Without any exchange of affection, we spent the night (in separate rooms) in the red-brick Pioneer Hotel in Globe; like the rest of the town, the Pioneer was not quite frontier, but not quite postwar either—a somewhat careworn place which had known better days and did not expect to see their like again.

  (Mining towns always look poor, even when they are prospering. I saw Globe on TV during a recent strike. I was struck by how little the feeling of poverty had changed.)

  Despite the musty, acrid smell of the room, and the hard mattress, I fell quickly to sleep, exhausted by my struggle with the mountain roads. Sometime during the night, a few hours later perhaps, the dreams came again—thousands of men screaming as their battleship rolled over and died, then my own comrades who had perished because of my orders and my mistakes.

  I woke up, drenched in sweat, although the temperature had fallen and it was cool in my room.

  Terrified and hungry—for a woman, not food. I knew, or thought I knew, that she was waiting for me. I clenched my fists and said no. I may have lost my Irish Catholic faith, but I had not lost the accompanying morality.

  Or inhibition.

  After a silent and soggy breakfast, we walked, at my suggestion, along Broad Street—a two-story, brick Masonic temple stood across the street from the hotel, a depressing department store next to it, an old Southern Pacific station farther down.

  “I could put you on the train to Phoenix…”

  “Of course not,” she snapped. She didn’t seem to have slept much either.

  She was wearing the white blouse (doubtless laundered overnight) and white tennis shorts. She had, as I noted before, beautiful legs, and, with an extra button on the blouse open, wondrous breasts.

  “I should put on slacks before we leave?”

  “Might be a good idea. Rattlesnakes.”

  “On this tour?”

  “Can’t promise them, but we’ll try.”

  A long period of silence as we stared thoughtfully at the SP station. I tried to break it.

  “It would be horrible to live in a place like this, wouldn’t it?”

  “Do you really think so?”

  Across from the station, at the top of high steps, was a squat Romanesque church—Our Lady of the Angels.

  “Can we go in?” She nodded toward the church.

  “Why not?”

  A priest was finishing Mass, polishing the chalice afte
r Communion. There were twenty or thirty people scattered in the pews. The inside was modest but tasteful. Some of the names in the stained-glass windows suggested a Czech past, but the priest’s Latin did not hide his Irish brogue.

  I stood at the back while she kneeled in one of the pews and bowed her head in what seemed to be fervent prayer.

  “Were your prayers heard?” I asked as we walked back down the steps.

  “No.”

  That was that.

  The old priest was standing on the street corner in front of the tiny white rectory next to the church. He saw us and strolled over.

  “Sure, if I knew we were going to be after having visitors, wouldn’t I have started a few minutes later so you could have received Communion?”

  “Would you have?” I said, playing the rules of answering a question by asking one.

  “Would I not?”

  He chatted pleasantly for a few minutes, asking where we were from and where we were going and, clearly convinced that we were on a honeymoon, cheerfully wishing us a lifetime of blessings.

  Andy hung back from the conversation, apparently afraid of the kindly old man.

  “Why didn’t you talk to the poor man?” I asked as we walked back to the hotel.

  “Why should he talk to someone who is already damned?”

  “If I believed in God, I know he wouldn’t damn you.”

  “I wish I could escape from believing in Him.”

  “The friars taught us in high school that no one is damned till the end of their life. You’re still alive. So you’re not damned.”

  “Oh?”

  So we drove out of town, back toward the “twin” of Globe, the even less prepossessing town of Miami. Just short of the town, we turned left off U.S. 60 and down the unpaved tracks of Arizona 88 toward Roosevelt Lake and the “back door” to the Superstition range.

  “More dirt roads?”

  “That’s all there is today. This is the Apache Trail, named after the Apaches who built Roosevelt Dam at the turn of the century, the first big reclamation project in this country.”

  “Yes, Professor.”

  Since the road down to Piñal Creek Canyon is relatively straight, I took my eyes off it for an instant to make sure she was laughing at me.