All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  I’d be locked up for psychiatric observation. No one would search for her.

  I tossed the cotton rag on the floor, limped back to the Chevy, backed it up, turned around and went down the mountains.

  Ought I not return for one more search? Had I not discovered two rafts after the battle we called Marianas Turkey Shoot and saved seven lives?

  Yeah, and your tank had a thimbleful of gas when you landed on the E.

  Fuel is not a problem in this mission.

  She’s not there. She’s not anywhere.

  I continued on to Tucson. Arriving after midnight, I collapsed into bed in my old room at the Arizona. The registration clerk had not asked about Andy, thank God. None of the lies I had concocted on the way back from the Superstition Mountains would have been very persuasive.

  I slept till noon the next day. If I had any dreams, I don’t remember them.

  I woke up a with a terrible headache, a thick tongue, a bad sunburn, and an acute fit of depression. Having demanded black coffee and orange juice from room service, I gave the depression my full attention.

  Who was she? Or, better, what was she?

  A lost soul doomed to wander the earth like a Flying Dutchman?

  A demon sent to tempt me? God knows she’d been successful at that.

  A creation of my disturbed imagination? So maybe I should see a therapist, as my father had suggested.

  A ghost haunting navy flyers?

  I would never know.

  I soaked a washcloth, put it on my head, and pitched back into bed.

  Only to be pulled out of it by room service. The Arizona Star headlined WALLACE PROPOSES TRUMAN APPEASE RUSSIA.

  A secret letter had been released in which the former vice-president advocated that the United States destroy its atomic bombs because the Russians resented the American monopoly.

  Most senators ridiculed the suggestion. Wallace might be a nut, I thought, but how many of those who ridiculed him had seen Nagasaki?

  Halfway through my first cup of coffee I had an idea. My contact at the bureau of personnel quickly confirmed what I had suspected: a radar technician named John King had never served on the U.S.S. Indianapolis.

  Who was I to think (I could hear my sister’s voice) that I was someone special? The great war adventure, ugly but exhilarating, was over. There would be no more adventures and I should accept that and settle down. Right?

  Besides, this last great romantic adventure with the widow of a radar technician who had never lived had turned into a nightmare, a real-life nightmare, which made the kamikaze attacks seem boring.

  Forget it, Daugherty. Go back to River Forest and act like the ordinary human being that you are supposed to be. Marriage, family, career are enough for everyone else, why not for you? Why do you need some special purpose in life?

  Your sisters and your mother will find a nice Trinity-grad virgin who will be a good, unexciting spouse.

  In fact, get on with it. Since you’re horny again, go home and inspect the girls they’ve lined up.

  I drained the coffee cup and filled it again.

  Abandon this quixotic jaunt across the continent and fly home tomorrow. Catch a plane in Phoenix. Who flies there? TWA? They must. What sense does it make to call yourself Transcontinental and Western if western doesn’t include Phoenix?

  I had the money for a ticket, didn’t I?

  I stretched out on my bed, reached into the pocket of my tattered and soiled jacket, and pulled out my wallet.

  Sure enough, the thin stack of bills was still there. I counted them. Eight. Just like there should be.

  I replaced the wallet and returned to my coffee.

  Eight?

  I reflected very carefully, while my heart pounded like a damaged engine on an F6F. I had had ten of them when I drove into Tucson. I used one to pay the charges here the night before last. I had bought nothing else, not even lunch.

  There should be nine.

  I thought about that. Go on, dopey, count them again.

  Fingers trembling, I recovered my wallet. I removed the bills gently and counted. My heart sank. There were, indeed, nine.

  Try again.

  This time there were eight.

  You’re losing control.

  I spread the C notes out on the bed in pairs.

  Four pairs. Four times two is eight.

  I felt my painfully burned face cracking into a grin.

  I replaced the wallet, set aside my coffee cup, and relaxed on the bed, hands behind my head in complacent satisfaction.

  My grin widened as I reviewed the bidding. I whistled “Anchors Aweigh,” extraordinarily pleased with myself.

  A thief would have taken all nine.

  A ghost would not have needed any.

  So she was a human girl—lonely, frightened, perhaps in some crazy way possessed. Yet she was out there, still running. Still in the grip of her fierce desire to live.

  She was mine. Had I not won her the night before?

  Mine. And I was hers, too. Fair enough.

  Had she murdered her husband and child?

  Had I murdered Rusty and Tony and Hank?

  No.

  If she were out there, I would find her. And drag her home by her thick red hair. With a stop here for purposes of lovemaking. Honeymoon. Whatever. We’d see about how hard indeed it was for a determined lover to remove a corsetlike wet swimsuit.

  Not too hard, surely.

  Then River Forest. It would never be the same.

  I would hunt down my leprechaun girl with her pot of gold.

  My own Holy Grail to pursue, to drink from, to keep, to treasure.

  She was somewhere out there. Terrified. I would find her and save her from whatever was causing the terror.

  No, with someone like Andrea-King-if-that-was-her-name, you helped her to save herself from the terror. And then you protected her from more terror by loving her passionately and tenderly forever.

  There was no room for doubt. I would indeed love her forever.

  Pilots, man your planes!

  The air group commander called room service again and ordered pancakes.

  And steak.

  April Mae

  Monsignor Joseph Meany reached out from the tomb in the spring of 1945 to prevent Rosie from planting the May crown on the head of the Virgin Mary. The monsignor’s ghost encountered a grimly determined exorcist—my mother, April Cronin O’Malley.

  April Mae Cronin O’Malley.

  “Unlike the Mercy Sisters,” my father would say, looking up from a blueprint or a drawing, “old Joe Meany was well named.”

  “Vangie!” My mother would protest the irreverence and uncharitableness and then laugh, thus honoring the obligations of respect for the pastor, love for her husband, and truth, with deft economy of effort.

  Joseph Peter Meany was a tiny man, a shriveled gnome, not much over five feet three, thin, bald, and like my mother, nearsighted and too vain to wear glasses. He compensated for his height, so my father said, by communicating with mere mortals in a deep bass bellow.

  He firmly believed, Dad also said, that within the boundaries of St. Ursula he was God.

  At least.

  “Everyone,” Mom would sometimes protest with little conviction, “thinks he’s done such a splendid job as pastor.”

  That observation was also true. Meany Meany, as we kids called him, was of that generation of Irish pastors who could have counted on the complete loyalty of a majority of his parishioners even if he had been caught committing fornication with Mother Superior on the high altar during the solemn Mass of Easter Sunday.

  Incest even.

  “Sure,” Dad would snort, “it was a brilliant financial decision not to build the new church in 1937 because he thought prices were going down even more. Now we won’t have the church till after the war is over. If then.”

  My father had some interest in the topic. He had designed the long-awaited new church. For free. In the middle of the Great Depression.


  I hated Monsignor, mostly because he had, I thought, cheated my father out of payment for his work. I did not feel the smallest hint of grief when he went to meet his maker because of a heart attack. He expired consuming his third scotch in celebration of the death of Franklin Roosevelt.

  “God knows the old man died happy,” John Raven, the young priest, said to my mother. “But if they assign Joe and the president to the same section of purgatory, he’ll ask for a transfer to hell.”

  “Where he belongs,” I added piously.

  “Chucky!” my mother protested. And then laughed.

  “Like father, like son,” Father Raven noted.

  I pressed the point. “Look at the way he treated Gold Star families. He won’t even come down from his office to tell them that they can’t have a priest from outside the parish say the funeral Mass. Instead he makes you do it. And he doesn’t even show up for the wake or funeral unless it’s a rich family!”

  “Chucky!” My mother’s tone this time said I’d better shut up. Even at seventeen I had sense enough not to argue with such a tone in the voice of an Irishwoman.

  Rarely did any parishioner who was not wealthy speak to the pastor. He immured himself in his suite after Mass each day (at the most a seventeen-minute exercise) and descended only for meals. He would talk to no one in the rectory offices. Rarely did he attend wakes or funerals or weddings and never did he make a hospital visit. His curates had to make an appointment to talk to him, and sometimes they waited for weeks.

  He kept, locked in a sacristy safe, a special bottle of wine to be used only at his Masses, a much more tasty and expensive vintage than the wine assigned to the other priests. I speak as one who had sampled both, with more restraint, I hasten to add, than certain other altar boys (who depended on me to open the monsignor’s safe).

  Monsignor Meany was convinced that John Raven’s name was James and called him that, as in “James, that car door ought not to be open. Take it off!”

  So great was the power of the pastor’s command that John Raven, as he later admitted, without any hesitation or reflection, drove the monsignor’s sturdy old LaSalle straight into the offending door and continued serenely down Division Street as the door bounced a couple of times on the bricks before it halted at a stoplight.

  “Serves the damn fool right!” the pastor crowed.

  No one ever complained about damage to the car.

  The other priests called Father Raven “Jim” at the meals which the monsignor attended.

  The pastor thought that William McKinley was the last American president untainted by communist sympathies, took the biased news stories in the Tribune as gospel truth, insisted that FDR was a Jew, opposed aid to “Bloody England,” became a fan of Father Couglin when the “radio priest” turned anti-Semitic (the same time that my father made me stop selling Couglin’s paper, Social Justice after Mass on Sundays), and firmly believed that Roosevelt had conspired with the Japanese to launch the Pearl Harbor attack. He never spoke against the war exactly, but whenever someone from the parish was killed in action, he would mutter audibly, “Another young man murdered by that Jew Roosevelt.”

  He would have easily won reelection as pastor if such had been required. His fans pointed to the monsignor’s extraordinary personal piety, as evidenced, for example, by his pilgrimage to Lourdes in the spring of 1939. They did not add that the monsignor shipped to France on the same boat which he favored with his presence, both his LaSalle and his housekeeper (I forget her real name, but we kids called her “Mrs. Meany Meany”).

  My father lamented the fact that he got out of Europe before the war started in September. “Hitler probably would have given him an Iron Cross.”

  “Vangie!”

  “With oak leaf cluster!”

  “They don’t give oak leaves…” I began.

  “Enough from both of you.”

  Wisely we both lapsed into devout silence.

  In Joseph Meany’s religion there was only one sin: “impurity.” It was denounced with great vigor on every possible occasion—with, need I add, not the slightest indication of what it consisted.

  Hence his stern injunction to Sister Mary Admirabilis (“Mary Admiral” to us kids and then “Mary War Admiral,” after the Kentucky Derby winner) that only “a young woman who is a paragon of purity may crown the Blessed Mother. We must not permit Our Lady to be profaned by the touch of an immoral young woman.”

  “One with breasts,” my older sister Jane snorted. “If Rosie didn’t have boobs…”

  “That’s enough, young lady.” Mom didn’t laugh, but she kind of smiled, as proud of Rosie’s emerging figure as though she were her own daughter.

  It was the middle of May, a week after VE day and the end of the war in Europe. Monsignor Meany was in his grave—and whatever realm of the hereafter to which the Divine Mercy had assigned him—and Monsignor Martin Frances “Mugsy” Branigan had replaced him. In his middle forties then, Mugsy was already a legend: shortstop for the White Sox in 1916, superintendent of Catholic schools, devastating golfer, ardent Notre Dame fan, genial, charming, witty.

  The red-faced, silver-haired Mugsy had been assigned to St. Ursula’s with indecent haste.

  “Old Joe is hardly cold in the ground,” Dad commented as he toasted (in absentia) the new pastor. (There was always something to toast when he came home after the long ride from Fort Sheridan.) “I guess the Cardinal knows that he has a problem out here.”

  So Monsignor Mugsy was ensconced in the great two-story room in the front of the second floor of the rectory, the part which was covered with white stone. But Mary War Admiral had not yet extended diplomatic recognition to him. In the school the word of the late pastor was still law.

  Even though, as John Raven remarked, there is no one deader than a dead priest.

  So Mary War Admiral voided Rosemarie Helen Clancy’s nearly unanimous election by the eighth grade, in solemn conclave assembled, as May Queen, because she was not the “kind of young woman who ought to be crowning the Holy Mother of God.”

  She then appointed my sister Peg as Rosie’s replacement. Peg would have won on her own—she never lost an election that I can remember—but she had determined that her inseparable friend Rosie was going to crown Mary and that, Peg being her mother’s daughter, was that.

  When informed by Sister Mary War Admiral that she was to replace Rosie, Peg replied with characteristic quiet modesty, “I’d kill myself first!”

  My mother’s reaction was that (a) she would go over to the convent and “settle this problem” with Sister Mary Admirabilis, and that (b) I would accompany her.

  “I will not visit the parish,” she insisted, “unless I am accompanied by a man from my family.”

  “I’m a short, red-haired high-school junior,” I pleaded.

  “Your father’s in Washington this week at some meeting with the War Department, young man, and you will come with me.”

  “You don’t need a man to ride the Central bus with you up to the Douglas plant,” I countered.

  “That’s different. Besides, you’re as bad as your father. You’re dying to get into a fight. Now go wash your face and comb your hair.”

  “My hair doesn’t comb. Wire brush. Good for scraping paint. Bad for combing.”

  “TRY!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I kept my opinions on the May crowning to myself. Sister Mary War Admiral, I thought, might have a point. The word from Lake Delevan (alias Sin Lake) the previous summer was that for someone just entering eighth grade, Rosie Clancy was terribly “fast.” Admittedly, fast in those days was pretty slow by contemporary standards. But that was those days, not now.

  At that time Rosie and Peg were slipping quickly and gracefully—and disturbingly as far as I was concerned—into womanhood.

  “They had their first periods the same week,” I heard Mom whisper to Dad one night after the Bing Crosby “Kraft Music Hall” while I was supposed to be sleeping in the enclosed
front porch I shared with my little brother.

  I still didn’t know exactly what a period was, but I suspected that it meant more trouble for me.

  Standing together, whispering plots, schemes, tricks and God knows what else, they seemed almost like twins—same height, same slim, fascinating shapes, same dancing eyes, same piquant, impish faces. Like Mom, Peg was brown-tinged—eyes, hair, skin—an elegant countess emerging from a chrysalis. Rosie was more classically Irish—milky skin that colored quickly, jet black hair, scorching blue eyes.

  Peg was the more consistent and careful of the two. She worked at her grades and her violin with somber determination. Her grace was languid and sinuous, a cougar slipping through the trees. She rarely charged into a situation—a snowball attack on an isolated boy (like me)—without first checking for an escape hatch or an avenue of retreat. Rosie was more the rushing timber wolf, attacking with wild fury, mocking laughter shattering the air. If Peg was a countess in the making, Rosie was a bomb thrower or revolutionary or wild barroom dancer.

  She might also, to give her fair credit, have been a musical comedy singer; she had a clear, appealing voice, which, I was told to my disgust when I was constrained to sing with her at family celebrations, blended “beautifully with yours, Chucky Ducky.”

  Yuck, as my grandchildren would say.

  I must give her due credit. If she and Peg tormented me, for example, by putting lingerie ads from Life in my religion textbook and stealing my football uniform the morning of a game, they also came to my aid when I was, or was thought to be, in trouble.

  Once when I was in eighth grade, two of the more rowdy of my classmates made some comments which indicated that Dad was a “slacker” because he was stationed at Fort Sheridan. In fact, he was the oldest serviceman from the parish. Moreover, neither of their fathers was in the service.

  Instead of pointing out these two truths, I made some more generalized comments on their ancestry and on their relationship with their mothers.

  And thus found myself on my back in the schoolyard gravel, being pounded, not skillfully perhaps, but vigorously.