As in, “I never said she was weird.”
“She’s afraid of us.” Maggie’s jaw jutted sharply, her blue-green eyes turned the color of alloy steel. “She knows Dad loves us more than he loves her. He would choose us if he’s forced to.”
An ominous threat if I ever heard one.
“I’m not going to put him in that position,” I said. “You have to give her a chance, Mag.”
“No way.”
The three of us argued with Maggie for another hour without budging her.
“She’ll be all right,” Lissa said to me as she was waiting for her date that night. “You know how dramatic kids her age have to be.”
“I hope so.” I didn’t feel much confidence.
So Lissa and I returned to our respective colleges for the long hard time between Christmas and semester break; gray cold, hectic, lonely days. Well, they weren’t gray or cold at Leland Stanford Junior Memorial University, but that was another matter. Dad phoned occasionally. He sounded harried and uncertain. He put Maureen on once. She asked me in a very timid and uneasy voice how school was.
“No problem.” I couldn’t believe I’d let the cliché slip out.
First thing I did when I got home in March was check with Tommy, Maureen’s only true ally among the family.
“I don’t think there will be a wedding,” he said in his best no-big-deal tone. “Probably they shouldn’t get married now anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Would you want a stepdaughter like Maggie bugging you every day for the next five years? What if you have a couple of kids of your own and she hates them, too?”
“She might love a little sister or brother.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“Has Dad talked to her?”
“Dad and Maggie fight all the time. Which is what Mag wants, of course. It worries Mau and then she and Dad fight.”
“Mau?”
“That’s her name, isn’t it?”
Like a coward I took off for Florida with only a quick conversation with Dad. He looked beat out and depressed. Maggie was winning.
The wedding was scheduled for the last week of May. I came home before exams at the end of April to interview for a summer job. The wedding was kind of on hold. Maureen did not appear at our house and I had the impression that she and Dad were in the middle of a long and bitter fight. Maggie seemed triumphant.
It was on a Friday, the last day of April that it happened. I had postponed my return to Palo Alto till Sunday night because of what seemed then a very problematic blind date. So I was in my room studying for my Latin American history final, trying to make up for the time I’d lost on the subject with the seductive argument that I always did well in history.
It was a glorious afternoon, the kind we don’t normally have in the Middle West because they passed a law against spring here in the days before Daley was mayor and could have prevented it. Green lace had begun to appear on the trees, Mom’s bulbs were blooming in the garden, the neighborhood was quiet, the sky clear, the air still and pure with a touch of lilac scent floating lightly in it—a Chaucer April day instead of a T. S. Eliot April day. I thought about writing a poem on the strength of life and then dismissed the idea because after Chaucer and Eliot, who was I to try April?
Even if the date turned out to be a dog (which I fully expected) I was glad I’d stayed to enjoy the day.
See how clearly I remember the details after ten years? Believe me, I don’t want to remember them.
A little before three I heard Maggie trudge up the stairs, home from seventh grade.
“Johnny?” she shouted. “You home?”
“Yeah, where’s Mrs. Finnerty?”
Our silent and patient housekeeper.
“Day off.” She sounded sullen. “I have to go to volleyball at the park at four.”
“I’ll drive you.”
Not a word of thanks. When Maggie was stonewalling the world, no prisoners were taken.
Fifteen or twenty minutes later the doorbell rang. I determined to ignore it. It rang again and then again.
“Mag, would you answer the door, please. I’m studying.”
“Answer it yourself.”
“Please, Maggie.”
“Oh, all right!”
As she clumped down the stairs, sounding like a platoon of fully equipped combat infantry, the bell rang again.
“Answer it, Maggie!”
“Okay!”
I continued to study.
Sometime later, five, maybe ten minutes, maybe less, Maggie bounced up the stairs and down the corridor to my room. I didn’t turn around. No point in worrying about the Brazilian empire on my blind date.
“John…” She sounded excited.
“Did you answer the door?”
“Yes!”
“Who was it?”
“Mom!”
I wheeled around in my chair and almost fell on the floor. Maggie was still wearing her plaid school-uniform skirt and white blouse. She was glowing with such ecstatic happiness that at first I thought she was standing inside a halo.
“Mom’s dead.…” The first hint of the uncanny, the first hint of many shivers.
“Oh, I know that. Only she isn’t, not really. She even bawled me out for not answering the door the first time, like she used to. Anyway, she says we should all be really good to Mau”—her words bubbled out like Chaucer’s cheerful brook—“and that she understands why we don’t like her, but she likes her a real lot and that she and Dad need each other and she’s happy for them both and that I should stop being gross and love Mau a whole lot because it’s hard for her to come into a family that’s already going and I should make up for all the times I made her cry, poor woman, and that everything is going to be all right and—”
“Maggie, who was it at the door?”
“I told you it was Mom, silly.” She was weeping but because of ecstatic joy. “Would I make something like that up? And she says you’re going to like your date tonight a real lot and that Mau and I will be great pals … remember how Mom use to say pals? And—”
“What did she look like, Mag?”
“Like she always did. I mean, how else would she look? Pretty and happy, with her white dress, you know, like before she was sick.… Now will you drive me over to volleyball? I’ll change my clothes real quick.”
She bounced down the hall to her own room.
In the car I tried to persuade her that she had either imagined it or made it up. She dismissed my arguments as not worth considering. “’Course she was real. You heard the bell, didn’t you?”
I then told her that maybe it would be a good idea to keep what happened to ourselves. She agreed readily. “They might not understand, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, I won’t tell anyone else.”
At least I wouldn’t have to worry about Maggie being shipped off to a shrink.
Was that all I did?
I’m afraid so. I was only twenty. Faced with the inexplicable and the uncanny, I chickened out. If Maggie was having a nervous breakdown, Dad would notice soon enough.
So I pretended to myself that whatever had happened did not happen and reflected on the joys of the blind date on the flight back to San Francisco on Sunday night.
Ten days later I came home for the wedding, the summer, and the pursuit of the blind date, in the reverse order of importance. The Friday-afternoon event had been stricken officially from my memory.
I had not put my duffel bag on the floor of the front room before the phone rang. The young priest. Would I mind dropping over to the rectory for a few minutes? Now?
Maureen was in the rectory parlor with him, gorgeous in a light blue dress. I kissed her on the lips—in love with one woman, in love with them all—and said brightly, “Nice dress, Mau, you’re looking great!”
They were perfectly agreeable lips, fun to kiss, tasting just now of very recently administered mouth spray. I must make a point t
o kiss them often. How better to let an appealing and vulnerable stepmother know she was accepted?
“Uh, thanks, Johnny.” She blushed and tried to gather her emotions together. “You’re very sweet.…”
Only then did it impinge on my consciousness that she and the young priest had both looked pretty grim when I barged in on them.
“Everyone is being sweet to Maureen these days.” The priest lifted his eyebrows. “Including Maggie.”
“A complete turnaround, John.” Maureen seemed breathless. “She couldn’t be more loving or supportive or helpful. She really is a marvelous little girl. I thought I would never like her, and now I find that I love her dearly.”
“Well, that’s the way Mag is. I figured she’d turn around like that.”
I had started to shiver, terrified and at the same reveling in the taste of Mau’s lips.
“But Maureen is now worried sick about her.”
“Really?”
Here it comes.
“She claims”—Maureen hesitated, flustered and baffled, and shivering a little, too—“that your mother came up to the door of the house and, well, sort of endorsed me.”
“She wasn’t supposed to tell anyone that.” I pounded the young priest’s desk.
“In other respects”—he rearranged his notebook and calendar which I had disturbed—“she seems perfectly normal and healthy. Sister tells me that she is no more hyper than any of the other seventh-grade girls with vacation coming. It is natural that she would feel, uh, some unease about your father’s forthcoming remarriage, and search for the sort of approval which would legitimize a change to a more positive attitude, one in keeping with her normal enthusiasms.…”
“I asked her why she had changed her mind.” Maureen was, quite unconsciously, wringing her hands, poor dear bikini-appropriate woman. “And so she told me. She said you’d made her promise not to tell anyone, but she didn’t think it applied to me.”
“Of course not.” The young priest rolled his eyes.
“I’m so terribly concerned about her. She said you were there.… Did you see…?”
“No, I didn’t see anyone.”
“My position”—the young priest tapped his fingertips together—“is that it was a harmless hallucination and that there is no cause for concern unless her behavior becomes disquieting in other respects. We take grace where we find it and with gratitude.…”
“Did you…?” Mau, my glorious stepmother-to-be, groped for words.
I knew that I had to tell the truth.
“I heard the doorbell ring.”
There was the stillness of the graveyard in the rectory parlor, maybe the stillness of “very early in the morning, the first day of the week.”
“You heard the doorbell?” the young priest asked, very tentatively.
“Yes, I heard the doorbell.”
“As I say, we take grace wherever we find it.…”
“You heard the doorbell?” Mau’s jaw dropped and her wondrous blue eyes opened into huge circles.
Then, despite the terror of the moment, or maybe because of it, I made explicit in my head an observation which had been implicit for a long time: she’d be great in bed. Simultaneously, I also finally admitted my father into the male half of the human race along with all the rest of us.
His delectable future wife and the young priest both shivered slightly.
“I heard the doorbell. Four times, the last just before Maggie opened the door.”
And now, ten years later, there is no escaping that point: I did hear the doorbell.
Four times.
Marge
At supper on Christmas Eve my mother and father began another argument. I was delighted. If his first Christmas at home turned into a brawl, he might start drinking again. Then he would leave and we would be rid of him.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Pat.” Mom poked furiously at the haddock which she had cooked because she knew he liked it. (In 1947 Catholics ate fish on Christmas Eve.) “The Depression is over. We’re going to have prosperity that will make the 1920s look dull.”
We were eating in the dining room, the table covered with Irish linen and laid with the best china and silver and Waterford crystal. Mom believed in elegance, especially at festivals. Dad did, too, as far as that goes. The Christmas tree in the living room was already lighted. It had been turned on for Uncle Ned, Aunt Kate, and their kids, who had stopped by earlier. A faint aroma of evergreen contended at the table with the lush thick smell of smoked haddock.
“Those who don’t heed the lessons of history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.” Dad jabbed the tablecloth with his knife. “There’s always a depression after a war. It’s your money and your company, Margie, but building a new plant is inviting trouble.”
“You’re damn right it’s my money,” she shouted at him. “And I’m not putting it in government bonds either.”
“I didn’t say you should,” he shouted back. “All I said was that I would do it if I were you.”
My parents could not disagree about the most abstract issue without it turning into a personal quarrel. At grace before we ate, Mom offered thanks for the good year her firm, which had changed to making television parts, had enjoyed. Dad, who was skeptical that television would ever replace the radio and the newspapers, murmured that it would take extra effort by God to protect firms that expanded when a depression was about to begin.
They were off to the races.
The night before, they had argued about communism. Dad knew European politics as well as our precinct captain knew Cook County politics. There would be trouble with Russia; the Truman doctrine and the Marshal Plan were the beginning of the confrontation. Domestic left-wingers would be in serious trouble. Mom was sensitive on this issue because her brother’s wife, Kate Collins Ryan, had been a communist in the 1930s for a couple of years. Another raging quarrel.
My father, Patrick Michael Casey, was one of the finest journalists in America. He knew world politics as well as anyone in Chicago. My mother, Margaret Ryan Casey, was as shrewd a business executive as you could find in the United States. She had turned a decrepit family company into an immensely successful corporation during the war. They both were right, as you’ve noticed, in their own field. But they both had to be right in the other’s field, too. So they fought.
They had battled in the early years of their marriage, but I was too young to know what the fights were about then. Now they were fighting at every possible chance in their second try together. Soon, I thought happily, that will fail, too.
Looking back on their life together, I seem to see clearly the reasons for the arguments were irrelevant. They fought because both of them had to be right all the time. Their need to be right and my grandfather’s contempt for journalists and my father’s drinking had broken the marriage up once. Dad had stopped drinking; Grandfather was dead; but the fights went on.
When Dad left to cover the Italian invasion of Ethiopia for the Chicago Daily News in 1935, the marriage was for all practical purposes finished, much to the satisfaction of Mom’s family and, I think, much to Dad’s relief. Fighting the Ryans was hard work.
My uncle, Monsignor Thomas Canfield Ryan (who was the cardinal’s secretary), tried to obtain an annulment, but in those days they were hard to get even if you had ecclesiastical clout like we did.
So between my fifth birthday and my sixteenth birthday, I saw my father five or six times, usually for a day or two while he was passing through Chicago on the way to Spain to report on the civil war or to China to write about the Sino-Japanese War. (He escaped from Nanking a half hour before the Japanese killed everyone they could find in that hapless city.) He was in Chicago, staying at the Stevens Hotel (now the Conrad Hilton), the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. Only once during the war did he stop by our modest bungalow in St. Ursula’s parish on the west side, traveling from Australia to Europe to be on the scene at D-Day.
That was the only time I saw him, after
the marriage ended, when he wasn’t drunk. In those days it was said that all Irish reporters in Chicago were drunks. Dad’s reply, according to Uncle Ned, the only one in the family who liked him, was that the statement was malicious calumny. Only the good ones were drunks.
He was a little man, shorter even than Uncle Ned, who was five nine, and barely as tall as Mom, with thin delicate features, a dimpled chin, silver-blue eyes like mine, and curly brown hair. “If he wasn’t so sensitive about being pretty, he wouldn’t drink so much,” my uncle Tom remarked contemptuously when he advised Mom not to take him back.
“He’s the one that’s taking me back,” Mom said firmly, to my annoyance and dismay.
Dad was born in 1900, the son of the editor of an Irish nationalist weekly. He graduated from St. Ignatius in time to lie about his age and fight in the marines at Belleau Wood in the First World War, and learn perhaps even then to prefer the grimy simplicities of combat to the subtle conflicts of ordinary life. When he came home from France, his father, who did not let his Irish politics interfere with making a little money on the board of trade, sent him to Notre Dame. When he graduated, he went to work as a copy-boy for the Chicago Examiner. He covered crime in Chicago during the days of Al Capone, Elliot Ness, Anton Cermak, Barney Ross, Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti, and such crooked journalists as Jake Lingle (who betrayed both his paper and the Mob and was gunned down in broad daylight) and such gifted journalists as Ben Hecht.
He was a witty and eloquent man, more witty and more eloquent, as I remember, drunk than sober, but still, stone sober, he talked like a college professor or an Oxford graduate in an English novel. Even when he was drunk, he was fastidious about his personal appearance—a stuck-up little dandy, Grandfather sneered; sailor straw hats, spats, French cuffs, cigarette holder. Drunk or not, he was clean-shaven and sweet-smelling. Except in combat, of course; there was no cologne on Guadalcanal.
Before that Christmas Eve he had had his last drink in Southampton on June 5, 1944, the day preceding his forty-fourth birthday, which was also D-Day. “Omaha Beach,” he told me after he’d come home and was trying to befriend me, “sobered me up in a hurry.”
All About Women Page 27