All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “I know what you are saying, Raymond.” She leaned her head back against the fabric of the deck chair and closed her eyes. “It’s not the way my parents see me.”

  “If someone says such things to you often enough, you’ll begin to believe them.” Now comes the hard part, Ray Casey. Let’s see how the golden-tongued orator copes with this one. Mick no longer exists. God? Who’s He?

  She loves me as much as I love her. A thin line of moisture was beginning to appear above her upper lip. “Tim thinks I’m a pretty nitwit.”

  Laura, as I’m sure you understand, did not need my advice to give Tim his walking papers. She had made up her mind to that and was now testing other waters. Nonetheless, ducking behind my mask, I gave advice.

  “Get rid of him.”

  She tore away my mask. “You’re sure you’re going to be a priest, Raymond?” She opened her tundra eyes and examined me curiously, respectful but still appraising.

  There it is, you angels and saints, we all knew it was coming, didn’t we? Make your decision, Casey.

  “Yes.”

  I couldn’t quite believe I said it. I still can’t.

  She nodded again. “I’ve always loved you, too, Raymond. I never could make up my mind between you and Michael.” She blushed and grinned impishly. “I took turns with my crushes. Still, I’m glad you’re going to be a priest.”

  “So am I. I think.”

  “Does Michael love me, too?”

  Aha. That was the question, which at some not completely unconscious level of her personality she had come to ask. So … So why should I feel offended? So, she asked about me first, didn’t she? So I wasn’t an also-ran, was I?

  “You don’t expect me to answer that, do you, Laura? Ask him yourself.”

  “He doesn’t intend to be a priest, does he?” The fingers of her right hand touched the back of my left hand, lingered for a few seconds, and then quickly pulled away, as if I were a hot oven.

  “I think you can count on that. Here, swallow this chocolate chip while you’re digesting the canary.”

  We both laughed, easily this time. Almost home.

  “Then…” She wore a puzzled frown, an intellectual woman with an intractable problem. “Why be afraid of me? I’m only Laura.”

  “You didn’t listen to me.” I was as exhausted as if I had sailed our dory all day in a brisk wind. “If Laura is who I say she is, any man in his right mind would be afraid of her, especially a shy young man without much money who has only begun to discover himself.”

  She stood up crisply. “Well, I have my assignment.” She considered me again with clouds over her glacial eyes. “Thank you, Ray.”

  “Don’t mention it.” I was entitled to my share of good, honest self-pity.

  She kissed my cheek, hesitated, and then moved her lips to mine. Oh boy, I thought, I’m going to have to make that decision all over again.

  “I’ll always love you, Raymond. Always.”

  “Oh?” I said intelligently, for lack of something else to say. “Why?”

  Her turn, “Count the ways.” More tears. “‘And if God chose, I shall but love thee better after death.’”

  Then something happened—hormones in youthful animals, I suppose. Our arms encircled each other, our bodies pressed desperately together. If you’re going to have only one skyrocket passionate kiss in your life, it might as well be with someone like Laura. She was as ethereal as the first shaft of light after a summer thunderstorm, as magical as the aurora on an August night, as solid and substantial as the noonday sun in the sky above us.

  I was immersed, submerged, drowned in a soothing, gentle caldron of grace. Whatever the resident angels and saints might think, I resolved I would remain there always, even if she did taste strongly of lemonade and faintly of a post-toothbrush cup of coffee. We were betraying God and the Mick, but it didn’t matter.

  I know now that love between Laura Jane Hurley and me would not have betrayed anyone. I think I knew it then, too. Grace did not calculate obligations. It offered options.

  I would still be there if she had not broken away, tears cascading again, and dashed up the steps. No, that’s not true: if I had clung to her, she would not have broken away. On the lawn she turned, waved in a glorious, devastating gesture, and shouted, “Thanks, Ray, I’ll never forget this morning.”

  The image of her waving to me, hand raised, magic figure extended invitingly against the cloudless sky while the phonograph played “Good Night Irene,” is burned in my memory, never to be exorcised. Venus du lac. Deeply but, I must confess it, pleasantly shaken, I returned to the good Abbot Marmion. The song now was “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena!” No one had the right to be that vigorous on a humid Wisconsin summer day, not even a Sabra warrior.

  “Who won?” my mother asked maybe ten minutes later.

  “God, I guess.”

  “He usually does.”

  “Yes.” Actually I was beginning to feel pleased with myself. I had not behaved brilliantly, but I hadn’t booted it completely either. Laura had learned that she was loved. So had I.

  “And the Mick?”

  “Unless he’s a complete idiot.” I turned the page in Marmion, quite unaware of what the man had said on the last ten pages.

  It’s worked out, I guess. They seem happy together. There have been troubles: a leukemia death; conflict in 1968; a son, an ROTC officer, wounded in Nam; a daughter, a peace activist, arrested at the Democratic convention; parents torn between them, blaming one another. Now all reconciled. A number of fierce battles; they both walked out twice, though never for longer than forty-eight hours. (“My fault all four times,” Laura insists, but her husband claims it was his fault at least three times.) Five healthy kids now, four marriages, six grandchildren. One son, a blond-bearded giant, is still in graduate school in comparative literature at Harvard. Laura smiles and laughs more than the Mick (still “Michael” to her, save on comic occasions when I think the nickname is a secret erotic invitation) and he smiles and laughs even more than he did in high school.

  He’s the only trader on the floor with a Ph.D. in English literature. She’s published two books of short stories and a book of poems and has won some prizes. To my prejudiced eyes she is more beautiful now than she was then.

  Do I regret my decision? Every day. It was the right choice for all of us. If you go north and are happy there, you regret that you did not go south and mourn for all the lost joys that may have been yours in the south. If I had gone south, I would now have even more regrets. The luminous Laura’s soul blended much better with the spirit of a roughneck mystic than it would have with that of a silver-tongued precinct captain.

  Do I believe that? Sure. Usually ninety percent. Sometimes fifty percent. Occasionally, hardly at all.

  We have never spoken about the humid summer morning in 1950 when to the music of “Good Night Irene” I held her in my arms, her breasts firm against my chest. Maybe I should ask her how she remembers it. I guess I’m afraid she won’t remember it.

  I dream of her often. I still love her and always will. A grace forever and ever.

  Amen.

  Does she still love me?

  I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her.

  However, I never suffer from a shortage of chocolate-chip cookies.

  Maggie

  It happened ten years ago and I still shiver when I think about it.

  Usually I don’t think about it, if I can avoid the subject. And when I do remember what happened, I try to persuade myself that it didn’t happen or that it was a dream or that I have forgotten all the details.

  Then I remember that I heard the doorbell. There can be no doubt about that. I heard the doorbell.

  I’m afraid to talk to Maggie about what happened that day. I tell myself that she probably doesn’t remember it at all. She was only twelve, going on thirteen. Kids don’t remember, I tell myself. Why upset her?

  The truth is that I fear she will remember perfectly. Then I’ll be deprived o
f my treasured half conviction that it never happened.

  I shiver as I set down these sentences. Shiver is the only word I can use to describe the reactions of myself and the others involved, so you must excuse me if I use it often toward the end of the story.

  Like, as poor Mom used to say, someone walked over your grave. A touch of the uncanny, like being afraid of the dark in the middle of the night when you were a little kid.

  I got over shivering in the dark. If it has lasted ten years now, I don’t think I’ll ever be cured of the shivers when I recall that beautiful spring afternoon.

  If it really happened. Maybe it was all a dream.

  Anyway, with Maggie’s marriage at hand, the memories of that afternoon are strong these days. Maybe if I set the story down on paper, I’ll realize how absurd they are and I’ll stop shivering.

  The four of us did not exactly react enthusiastically when we heard that my father intended to remarry. Mom’s slow, brave, agonizing death eighteen months before had been a shattering experience for three teenagers and one preteen. A stepmother we did not want or need.

  Especially one like Maureen. She was much younger than Dad, a junior partner in his law firm. Short, pretty, even sexy in an intense blond way, she was as different from Mom as anyone could possibly be, the cool, competent, ambitious young professional woman to the tips of her well-manicured fingernails.

  Why her? we all thought.

  She tried to be cautiously friendly with us, doubtless because she had read somewhere about the problems of resentful teenage stepchildren. She was, however, in a no-win situation. If she had been more friendly, we would have resented her presumption. As it was, we resented her aloofness.

  In theory we knew that Dad would remarry eventually, but we were not happy that he had not waited till we were all firmly out of the way—till after Maggie was married, for example.

  So Christmas that year was not much fun. Melissa came home from Miami of Ohio, where she was a freshman, with that terrible eagerness for home and family and old friends that only a freshmen can feel—to find Maureen waiting for her. She cried herself to sleep the first night.

  I arrived home from Stanford the next day to encounter Lissa, Tommy, and Maggie in a hysterical fight over the cars. It took me hours to find out that the real cause of their rage was her.

  Tommy, a high-school senior at the “no big deal” stage, insisted repeatedly that Maureen was no big deal. Maggie told me between weeping jags that she hated Maureen and always would. Lissa took the position that it was all right with her if Daddy had to take a woman to bed with him, but “why such an incredible drip?”

  “Don’t be crude, Lissa,” I protested.

  “I don’t care. I think it’s disgusting.”

  So did I, to tell the truth. Kids and young people can be horny, but not parents.

  I should add that they were not living together and, for all I knew, not sleeping together.

  I disliked her at first meeting; she was just too much well-dressed, funny-talking Ivy League for me; arrogant, I told myself, and frigid. I also felt a tiny bit sorry for her. We scared the living daylights out of her.

  And she had lots of reasons to be scared.

  Mind you, we were perfectly civil. We had been brought up to be polite to strangers and we were polite. Unassailably correct. We communicated our feelings about Maureen to her—Dad was too out of it to perceive our signals—by silence, by body language, and by conversations from which she was excluded because she didn’t know the contexts.

  We never mentioned Mom, of course; a much more effective technique than if we had talked about her all the time.

  I suspect that we sent her home in tears more than one night during that holiday season. The party for us at her (elegant and tasteful) apartment was a total disaster, largely because Maggie came down with what she alleged was the “stomach flu” in the middle of the meal and didn’t quite make it to the bathroom.

  Maggie was a strawberry blonde poised temporarily on the border of radiant young womanhood, smart, lively, funny, and model beautiful, enough to threaten any stepmother.

  Mom had been a Maggie, too, when she was growing up—short for Margaret Mary, of course. Dad always called her Margaret. Our sister was a namesake and, like all youngest children, acquired her nickname without anyone realizing. As Mom used to say of her, “She’s a Maggie, all right, not a Peggy or, God help us, a Megan.”

  She was also diabolically clever at practical jokes, a cleverness which was now being turned to deadly serious purpose.

  Daddy was immune to everything. We were one big happy new family and everyone would love Maureen as their “new mother.” Maureen, to give her credit, winced whenever he said that and tried to pull back discreetly from an instant intimacy that she saw we did not want. She tried subtly to hint to Dad that he should cool it for a while, but he was so much in love, poor man, that he didn’t hear her.

  “This marriage will be the best thing that has happened to our family in a long time,” he announced cheerfully as we rode home from the debacle at Maureen’s apartment near Lincoln Park.

  “I wish you wouldn’t say that, Daddy.” Lissa was not a drama major but she had a fine sense of how one should deliver a carefully prepared dramatic statement. “It may be the best thing that’s happened for you, and of course we are happy for you. But it’s not the best thing that’s happened for us.”

  Before Dad could ask for an explanation, almost as though she were reciting a line, Maggie retched again. Dad had to stop the car on Lake Shore Drive so she could vomit.

  The next day I went over to the rectory and talked to the young priest.

  “Of course you resent her,” he said. “So what else is new?”

  “What do you think of her?” I demanded.

  “What does it matter what I think?”

  “I don’t trust what I think.”

  “Ah, Johnny, you are growing up. What a pity. We lose one of the great all-time teenage hardheads. Let me try your maturity further. What if you met Ms. McNulty at a party and there was no prospect of her marrying your father?”

  “Well … I’d size her up, figure she was pretty cool, and feel disappointed that she wasn’t a few years younger.”

  “Precisely.”

  “A nice, intelligent, attractive, even very attractive young woman.”

  “Ah?”

  “I’d probably wonder a little what she’d be like in bed and kind of envy anyone who was going to find out.”

  “Now we get down to cold, hard, clinical male judgments. She’s not what you would call voluptuous?”

  “There’s different ways to be sexy.” I felt my face grow warm, because I was both defending my intended stepmother and admitting that my own criteria had changed in the past several years—as the young priest had cheerfully predicted. “And she paints and plays the piano and reads a lot.…”

  “And?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t mind seeing what she looks like in a bikini.” Which was true enough, but more important to maintain a little of my rectory image.

  “You may then eventually come to accept her as your father’s wife?”

  It was a clever way to put it. I knew all along that I would eventually make my peace with Maureen—probably on the day I called her “Mau.”

  “It’s not me I’m worried about. It’s Maggie. She can be a bitch on wheels when she makes up her mind.”

  “That, John, my newly wise friend, is an understatement.”

  So I called a family meeting.

  “I like her, you know.” Tommy astonished us all. “She likes hard rock, too. Not just that classical stuff she played for us. She’s not bad-looking, either.”

  “Don’t be infantile,” Lissa sniffed.

  “I hate her, hate her, hate her.” Maggie clenched her fists in somber determination.

  “Cool it, you guys,” I ordered, in my role of senior offspring. “Dad loves her and wants to marry her. In a few years we will all have left
home. I don’t want to have to worry about his being lonely.”

  “I’ll have to put up with her till I go to college,” Maggie sobbed. “Five years! I can take care of him as well as she can.”

  Even then I was smart enough to know that was the issue. Maureen was taking Dad away from Maggie, who had seen herself as both daughter and wife all through her high-school years.

  “A daughter is no substitute for a wife.” Lissa agreed tentatively with my position. “But why did he have to pick someone so weird?”

  “What’s weird about her?” I asked.

  “Well … those yucky paintings…”

  “You like the ones Jan Crowley does.”

  “That’s different. She’s my friend. Anyway I don’t think Maureen is marrying Daddy because she loves him. She just wants to stay with the firm.”

  “Oh, she loves him all right.” Tommy changed the station on the FM radio which was always by his side. “She’s goofy about him. Worships him.” He sighed. “Probably figures that with him as a husband to take care of her, she can relax a little and enjoy living.”

  “She does not love him,” Maggie screamed. “She’s marrying him to keep her job.”

  “No, she’s not,” Tommy continued doggedly. “She will leave the firm and go somewhere else after they’re married. I heard Mr. Clarke kid Daddy that they were losing the best young lawyer he’d seen in the last ten years.”

  “What do you think, Johnny?” Lissa turned to me.

  “Well…” I spoke slowly and carefully. “I agree with Tommy. She’s like a teenager who has fallen in love for the first time. If Dad does that to women, we have to figure that he’s going to come home with a new wife eventually. We could do a lot worse than Maureen. She’ll be good to him, and that’s what he needs. It’s up to him, after all.”

  Lissa seemed relieved, positively eager to accept my judgment. “I suppose you’re right.” She brightened. “If Dad likes her, it doesn’t matter that I think she’s weird.”

  There was a hint in her conclusion that Lissa’s dramatic role had ended and that her judgment about Maureen’s weirdness was subject to later review.