All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Mo-THER!”

  “Article in the Sun Times,” Joe added gently.

  “Fa-THER!”

  “The color composition is excellent.…”

  “I want you to look at the eyes, Father Rick.” Caitlin took his arm and guided him to the pictures. “See how fierce each of these mothers is? I tried to catch the passion they feel for their little boys. I didn’t do it very well, but…”

  “Very interesting.” If the Lord God had appeared with an offer to carry him off in a flaming chariot, poor Rick would not have hesitated a second.

  Joe rolled his soft gray eyes, a gesture which said, “She is her mother’s daughter, no doubt about it.”

  “I think that’s the way God feels about us, don’t you, Father Rick?” The naive student willing to learn from the great theologian. “I mean, She loves us with the same sort of protective intensity that you see in a young mother’s eyes. Right?”

  “Right,” he agreed weakly.

  Was she making it up on the spur of the moment or had she thought that way all along? With my Caitlin, who can tell? Right?

  “So that anyone who causes us to suffer is going to be in as much trouble with God as a person who hurts a baby would be with the baby’s mother, don’t you think?”

  “Of course.” He picked up a little confidence. “St. Bernard says—”

  “Yes.” Caitlin nodded her agreement. “We should suck the milk of grace from the breasts of Christ. I was kind of imagining a series next year on nursing mothers. Do you think the pastor”—all sweet, diabolical innocence—“would let me exhibit them in church? I mean, isn’t God happy when She’s feeding us sort of like a mother is when she’s nursing a little baby?”

  “Certainly.” He was now searching for an excuse to flee to the safety of the sacristy.

  “My madonnas’ breasts would have to be beautiful,” she mused. “Because they reflect God’s beauty, don’t they?”

  “That’s sound theology,” he gasped, now the color of Cardinal Cronin’s best robes.

  “Theologians should use pictures in their books, don’t you think, Father Rick? I don’t mean pictures of women. Necessarily.”

  “An interesting idea.”

  “I mean God uses pictures when he makes us. Right?”

  “Uh … I suppose so. Right.”

  “Then you think the pastor wouldn’t mind? Bare breasts in church … I don’t know. ’Course, the hungry baby sort of represents the hungry people of the world, doesn’t he?”

  “Lots of churches in Europe have nursing madonnas,” he mumbled. “I really have to get ready for the next Mass. Nice to see you again, Joe, Mary Kate, Caitlin.” He smiled faintly and blundered into one of the glass doors. “Have a … a happy Christmas.”

  Caitlin fired her parting shot as he fled up the aisle. “Merry Epiphany, Father Rick!”

  “Witch,” I said proudly.

  “Well.” Caitlin sighed contentedly. “At least I didn’t call him Father Grinch, poor dear man.”

  Laura

  “You’ve never liked me, Ray.” The gorgeous, suntanned blonde considered me with her cool, aloof blue eyes, glacial ponds glistening in the midmorning light, facsimiles of the lake next to which we sat on rainbow-colored deck chairs. “Why not?” She gestured submissively toward herself, a novice asking for a mother superior’s judgment. “What’s wrong with me?”

  In our house, above the sun deck, my little sister’s radio was announcing that diamonds were a girl’s best friend. Laura Hurley was wearing her diamond, but unless I misread the signs, it was not just now her best friend.

  “I don’t like you?” I pretended to look around to see if she was talking to someone else. Our red and white prewar Higgins, smelling as always of ancient lubrications and dry rot, rocked uneasily next to its bleached and battered pier. Laura Jane had invaded my dreams in fifth grade. Dislike her? I adored her.

  “You,” she said, distinctly not amused. “You and Michael both. Neither of you have ever liked me. Why? I’m not too old to change.”

  Twenty was certainly not too old to change, not in the summer of 1950 with the warm sunlight on Lake Geneva promising you, if you are beautiful enough and smart enough, a life of happiness and excitement. Laura was model beautiful and scholarship smart, if by reputation shallow and “stuck up.” Why worry about an inoffensive seminarian and a loudmouth navy veteran turned college freshmen? Why even think about them when you are engaged to the scion of an important west-side medical family?

  “You’re wrong, Laura.” I sipped some of my mom’s lemonade and shifted my chair so I was looking directly at her finely cut face, fine as Irish lace. Michael, not Mick. No one called him Michael. Except maybe someone who was in love with him. The phonograph switched to “C’est si bon.”

  In those days a priest or a would-be priest enjoyed a certain security in the man/woman game. He was mostly dismissed from the flirtation/pursuit/seduction ritual which is built into the relationship between the sexes. He could hide behind the mask of ecclesiastical wisdom, and a woman could be more relaxed and trusting with him. It’s a useful custom that still persists, though some of the lads messed it up badly during the chaos of the late sixties, when, in the name of self-fulfillment, they turned predator.

  “The little Hurley girl is here to see you,” my mother had said fifteen minutes before. I was on the deck above our boat house, partly reading Abbot Marmion on the love of God and partly thinking of Janet Leigh in The Red Danube the night before (those were in the pre-Psycho days).

  “She’s not little.” I put the Abbot aside. Lovely women on the screen (black and white) were much less disturbing than lovely women in flesh and blood (full color and stereo sound) on a humid summer day by the side of a lake studded with bouncing diamonds lapping against our decrepit old pier a few feet away.

  “She’s not in that two-piece swimsuit,” Mom said reassuringly. My mother, who had never announced a visitor before, was about ninety-five-percent respectable upper-middle-class Irish matron. The other five percent was leprechaun waif. She rolled her eyes. “Not that it matters much. I’ll bring lemonade.”

  “You’d better.”

  Mom was right; it didn’t matter what Laura was wearing. Her light blue shirt, pleated white slacks, red belt, and red sandals did nothing to obscure her radiance. Lithe and willowy rather than voluptuous, tall, a slender, brisk, self-possessed athlete with pale blond hair (contained by a light blue ribbon which matched her blouse) and a porcelain-figurine face. Who needed Janet Leigh?

  “Have some more lemonade.” I filled her glass. “Have one of my mother’s chocolate-chip cookies.”

  “Do you like chocolate-chip cookies … um, not as good as mine.” She smiled slightly, a rare enough event, and Lake Geneva disappeared. “I’ll make you some so you can compare. And you haven’t answered my question. I’m serious, Ray. I won’t leave here without an answer.”

  The phono switched to “Mona Lisa.”

  “I’ll take the cookies, but only by the barrel.” Cookies from Laura Hurley. I bet she’d never offered to make them for the Mick.

  “Let me count the ways that I love her,” he had said to me the other day. He had slipped away from summer school to take me on at the Commodore Barry Golf Course at nearby Twin Lakes. I bumped over to meet him at the train in our prewar LaSalle, which could have served as a Sherman tank. The Mick was out of shape. I beat him by nine strokes.

  “I like school,” he said. “Can you imagine what Sister Lourdes would say? Mick Breen likes school.”

  We were sitting outside the Red Barn, a publike place near the first tee of the course. Mick was drinking Coca-Cola.

  He was, in those days, your Tyrone Power kind of Irishman: wavy black hair, skim-milk skin, dimpled jaw, thick eyebrows, low forehead, haunted eyes, half pirate captain, half poet. The son of a cop, he had joined the navy as soon as he graduated from high school (barely, because of time spent on mischief and beer drinking) to make it under the wire on t
he benefits of the GI bill. He’d spent three years scraping paint off ships in the San Diego navy yard (avoiding the shore patrol and the brig, much to the astonishment of the neighborhood) and was now working as a runner at the board of trade while he struggled through college, starting just as the rest of us were about to finish.

  “I particularly like English literature.” A deep flush spread over his dark face; Mick needed a shave every couple of hours. “This guy Browning…”

  “What’s that got to do with pork belly futures?” I wiped the sweat off my forehead.

  “There’s a trader in the corn pit who can quote whole passages from The Ring and the Book.”

  “The Ring and the Book?” I choked on my beer. “The only other person I know who’s read that is Laura Jane Hurley.”

  “You see her?” he asked with elaborate casualness, his face so gentle that you’d have thought he was holding a six-month-old child in his arms.

  “Her family still owns the house over in Glenwood Springs. She comes to my sister’s parties.”

  “Still stuck up?”

  “Surely not. Did we say such things about her, Mick?”

  “Kids are cruel, aren’t they?” He jammed his hands into his dirty navy fatigues and began pacing again. “I can’t stop thinking about her. She haunted me every night for three years in San Diego. How do I love her … let me count the ways.…”

  “That’s Elizabeth to Robert,” I pointed out.

  “I know that.” He sank to the ground and leaned against the tree, holding his Coke glass in front of him as though it were a chalice. “I’m not a complete dummy, Ray. Just an incorrigible romantic who has fallen in love with an inaccessible woman.”

  The Mick was now up by four strokes in a much more intricate game than golf. He was reading the Brownings, he admitted he was an incorrigible romantic, he had confessed that, like me, he was obsessed with the lovely Laura, and he was prepared to grant that the obsession might be directed at a fantasy woman instead of a real one.

  “Don’t turn her into a goddess or a statue, Mick,” I said, ducking behind priestly wisdom. “She’s a flesh-and-blood person.”

  “Yeah.” He stared dreamily at the whipped-cream clouds marching across the blue Wisconsin sky. “‘I love her freely as men strive for Right;/I love her purely, as they turn from praise./I love her with the passion put to use/In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.’”

  This was, you must remember, 1950, and the west side of Chicago (in its summer mode). Our generation didn’t quote Victorian poets. For that matter, we didn’t know Victorian poets existed.

  In one tiny corner of my brain there was the persistent thought that maybe she was not lost to either of us. You don’t like to be ruled completely out of the game before it starts.

  “I don’t think she loves Tim Scanlan.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My sister says so. She knows everything.” What Irish sister doesn’t?

  “How can I compete with Tim?” He spread his hands abjectly. “What could I offer her?”

  “You don’t need four or five drinks in you to be funny and fun. You can make her laugh; that’s all she needs.”

  “Yeah, Mick Breen the clown.” He hit the hard sand of the golf course like he wanted to start an earthquake.

  “You gotta figure out whether you’re Robert Browning or Pagliacci.”

  “Come on.” He shook it all off with a laugh, typical Mick reaction. “I’ll play you another nine.”

  I beat him by five strokes.

  I had had some time to think about Mick and Laura before she showed up two steps ahead of my mother’s lemonade and chocolate chips. What was I supposed to do?

  She sat in the shade against the hill and slipped her sunglasses into the pocket of her blouse. We talked first about school. How did I like the seminary? I was surviving. How did she like Manhattanville? Wonderful. She was excited about the plays of Christopher Fry, especially The Lady’s Not for Burning; The Masters by C. P. Snow, and the Cantos of Ezra Pound. She didn’t like Henry Morton Robinson’s The Cardinal and simply adored Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain, was terrified by but loved the film Rashomon. What did I think?

  Laura had become a blossoming intellectual, careful and modest in her opinions, but articulate and willing to stick to her guns, chin resting on hand, long, distracting legs elegantly crossed, when I disagreed about Thomas Merton. (In retrospect, she was obviously right.)

  After she graduated, she might enroll in a program in creative writing at the University of Iowa. Tim, however, disapproved. Why did a woman need creative writing to be a good wife and mother?

  I was dazzled, awed, overwhelmed. What had brought this challenging goddess/genius to our sun deck? Then she asked, long fingers, nails burnished a pale red, resting defenselessly on solid, white-covered thighs, why I disliked her.

  We both knew that wasn’t the issue at all. Opportunity for treason to Mick appeared on the horizon, no bigger, as the Bible would say, than a man’s hand. But getting bigger.

  “You’re wrong, Laura.” I repeated my protest. “We don’t dislike you.”

  Her skin tightened over those incredible facial bones. “You both think I’m stuck up. You both hate me.”

  Hey, don’t break down and cry on me. I have no idea what to do with that.

  My sister, in her role of music director, now provided “Good Night Irene.”

  “We both respect you a lot,” I tried again. “Just the other day over at Barry we agreed that you weren’t stuck up.”

  “Thanks,” she said, bitter and unappeased. I filled her lemonade glass and offered her another cookie.

  A mask had slipped away from Laura Hurley during our intense conversation about books and films and politics. Her eyes danced with pleasure that someone cared what she thought. She even laughed twice, once mildly and at me when I said I did not know who Ezra Pound was, and once enthusiastically and with me at herself when I said that she probably identified with the heroine of The Lady’s Not for Burning.

  Ah, lovely Laura, I can make you laugh more than Mick can.

  Mick who?

  Body and mind, sex and ideas, breasts and thighs and brain, vulnerability and strength, surrender and aggressiveness; if the spiritual director at the seminary could picture you and this conversation, he would be properly horrified. Not without reason. My “vocation” was in jeopardy.

  What vocation?

  Even today, the poignancy of that moment stings at my eyes, not for the pain of what would come later but for the beauty of the moment itself. It was a heady, dizzying quarter hour, like drinking too much of my father’s prewar sparkling burgundy, which coexisted in our garage with the prewar LaSalle.

  She would be well matched with Mick, my gentle roughneck mystic, my sweet-tempered roustabout saint. Only just now he was second in line to me, a golden-tongued precinct captain—well, silver-tongued anyway. A distant second.

  Those were the most grace-drenched minutes of my life. Later, when I doubted the wisdom of my response, I complained to God that S/He shouldn’t have permitted me to face a turning point in three lives with so little preparation. Still later I learned that grace has a timing of its own. You’re never prepared for it, and you must always prepare for it.

  “You avoid me. You despise me. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be beautiful? Everyone hates you.” Tears were replaced by fury tinged with despair. “Women because they’re envious and men because they want you and you won’t let them have you. It makes me feel foul and dirty and worthless. Why don’t you like me?”

  “Let me count the ways.”

  “You’re quoting Elizabeth Browning out of context,” she sniffed. “She was talking about love, not hatred.”

  I was now running on pure west-side Irish political instincts. “So am I.”

  “Huh?” She placed her lemonade tumbler carefully on the deck.

  “I love you, Laura.” I spoke very slowly. After this,
I told myself, the subdiaconate with its commitment to celibacy would be a snap, if I ever arrived at that turning point. “I can’t remember not loving you. Certainly from third grade on. I’ve always been about eighty percent in love with you. I avoid you partly because it takes boys our age a long time to get over their shyness with dazzling women and partly because I’m afraid of you.”

  “Afraid?” she stammered. “But I wouldn’t…”

  “Afraid.” I plunged on; now it was sink or swim and I thought I would sink in the next couple of seconds. “That I’ll fall the other twenty percent; that wouldn’t be good for either of us.”

  Tiny circles of perspiration appeared on both sleeves of her blouse. Laura was shedding disguises with a more disconcerting effect on me than if she were shedding her clothes, a fantasy which at that moment seemed less troubling than what was actually happening. Gather ’round, you angels and saints; Ray Casey is in trouble.

  Years after that morning I would read in Buber about what happens when an “it” becomes a “thou.” Laura was in those precious seconds my first “thou,” no longer merely exquisite breasts and quick wit blended into an appealing package, but a person like me, with fears and hesitations, hopes and anxieties, dreams and terrors. That made her all the more challenging, all the more mysterious, and therefore all the more delectable, all the more in need of me.

  I wanted to reach across the few inches which separated us and touch her face with my consoling fingers.

  “Why do you love me, Raymond?” Water was welling up in her eyes again.

  I told her why I loved her. Not very poetic or romantic sentences. Straight pragmatic facts—all the time pretending to timeless priestly rationality and thus able to speak words otherwise impossible at the beginning of courtship. She was smart, beautiful, personable, honest, loyal, virtuous, everything a woman should be. She didn’t laugh enough—we both laughed uneasily—but that could be cured. I even stumbled through some stuff about her own anguish and the desire to heal it. I added, as an inspired afterthought, that she was not only graceful but grace.

  I felt that as a neophyte lover I hadn’t done too badly. Dear God, how I loved her that morning in 1950.