All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “They really are,” she would assure us with a benign smile, “very nice people.”

  When I was in fourth grade in 1938, I came home from school one night during the week before Halloween and announced proudly, “We waxed that dirty kike Fineman’s windows for him. He’ll never get them clean. Serves the Hebe right.”

  “Don’t ever say those words again in this house.” She took off her glasses and stared at me. “I won’t tolerate them, Charles Evans O’Malley. I am not raising any bigots, do you understand?”

  “I’m not a bigot,” I pleaded, near tears because Mom almost never shouted at me.

  “Yes, you are. Now you go right back to that little dry-goods store and apologize to Mr. Fineman and clean every last bit of wax off his windows.”

  “Why?” I wailed.

  “Because Jews are every bit as good as us, aren’t they, Vangie?”

  “A little better, maybe. They work harder.”

  No help from him, that was obvious. “Jesus was Jewish.” Mom was still angry at me.

  “So was his mother,” I said brightly.

  “The Finemans are his relatives. Now go clean their windows.”

  Mr. Fineman, a little man with a gray face and dark, dark brown eyes, accepted my apology graciously. “So”—he waved his hands—“boys will be boys. You’re a good boy, you apologize. Why should you clean it up?”

  “I didn’t know those were bad words,” I said, honestly enough.

  “You’re a sweet child,” said his plump little wife, “such cute red hair. You go home and tell your mother that I said so.”

  “Mom won’t let me back in the house unless I clean the windows.” I was beginning to understand what we later called ethnic diversity. “You know what Irish mothers are like.”

  They both thought that remark was much funnier than I did. So they let me clean the windows.

  So they gave me chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce and chocolate cookies and a chocolate candy bar.

  “Eat them,” Mrs. Fineman said. “Chocolate is good for you. It gives you energy.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I slurped up my reward. “May I wax your windows tomorrow?”

  “Such a cute little boy. Isn’t he a darling?”

  “Your mother”—Mr. Fineman pointed his finger at me—“is the classiest lady in the neighborhood.”

  “Yes sir,” I agreed. “She says you’re God’s relatives.”

  They both laughed joyously at that.

  “So we have clout?”

  “You sure must.”

  I went back often to their store after that to volunteer to run errands for them. They wanted to pay me, but I would accept only one Hershey bar.

  Well, sometimes, maybe two.

  The memory of the Hershey bars constrained me to order a third malt at the Rose Bowl on that September day in 1945. I needed some consolation while I continued to agonize over good and evil.

  Good and evil and Rosemarie Helen Clancy in between, the battleground on which the war was being fought.

  I did not like that image at all.

  It rained around midnight. The next day was murky and much colder. My mind churned all night long as I tried to sleep, and continued to churn at Mass.

  Like most Catholics, I enjoyed the Mass, even when it was in a language I didn’t understand and even when it is badly performed in English. Many years later, even after most Catholics decided it was not really a terrible sin after all to miss Mass (or the Eucharist, as it is called now) occasionally, they continued to attend just the same.

  I protested once to my parents when we were on vacation that according to my brother Mike, by then a student for the priesthood, we didn’t have to attend on Sunday if the trip required more than a half hour’s ride. So we wouldn’t sin if we excused ourselves from a forty-minute ride.

  “It’s not sin, dear; I like to go to Mass.”

  “It opens up our lives to the sacred,” Dad commented. “That’s why people stay Catholic.”

  They were right. Back in 1945 I didn’t understand the phenomenon, but I still enjoyed praying in church with everyone else from the parish.

  I went to the eight o’clock Mass so that there would be plenty of time to ride up to Hansen Park for the game. It was the Holy Name Sunday Communion Mass for “the men of the parish,” designed to persuade a generation of Catholic men, older than my father, that they should go to Mass once a month instead of once a year. Typically the church was crowded with more than eight hundred men and boys, a robust refutation of the notion that religion was only for women. The men entered together in procession led by a color guard of Boy Scouts carrying the American flag, the yellow and white papal banner, and the bright red Holy Name flag. Because Father Raven insisted, they sang “Holy God We Praise Thy Name,” a hymn normally reserved for the end of the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

  “It’s the only hymn they know,” Father Raven explained in answer to my question.

  Before Mass they repeated the “Holy Name Pledge,” a promise against blasphemy, which, to tell the truth, was not one of the more serious temptations for Catholic men of our neighborhood in those days.

  My father did not participate. Rather, he would attend ten o’clock Mass every Sunday with Mom, who sang in the choir.

  “Your mother has special clout with God. I don’t think He’d listen to my prayers if I dared show up without her.”

  That Sunday my prayer was a wordless plea for understanding. How could State Fair and Auschwitz be in the same world, the beautiful body of a young actress and the cordwood piles of corpses?

  Were the death camps finally what life was all about?

  And what did the horror in Rosie’s eyes mean?

  These were not questions about which I wanted to think. They were questions I could not drive out of my mind.

  I felt a little better after Mass, but the contrasting images of make-believe Iowa and all too real Dachau continued to struggle inside my head, with Rosie’s doomed face somehow in the balance. She was, or would be, as beautiful as Jeanne Crain, but the ugliness of the death camps was in her eyes.

  We routed St. Philip’s in the mud of Hansen Park 42–0. I held the ball eight times, so obsessed by my questions—a form I suppose of the only religious question which is worth asking—that I didn’t bother to close my eyes when Vince’s massive shoe crashed into the pigskin.

  The next day, walking home from the bus after school, I encountered Father Raven in his old Ford.

  “Give you a ride home, Chuck?”

  “Sure.”

  “Nice game yesterday.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You made a tackle.”

  “An assist. Vince really stopped the guy.”

  A point which Peg and Rosemarie had made with customary vigor, lest I get a big head.

  Rosie had added, “You did help, Chucky.”

  I kind of assumed that this unexpected touch of graciousness was evidence that her conversation in the confessional had provided her with a temporary respite and that I was being given credit for an assist there, too. Not yet would she destroy herself.

  “Why so cheery?” The young priest glanced at me as the car turned down Menard.

  “Father, does good win or does evil?”

  He turned the corner at Augusta and Menard, by Clebak’s Grocery, where we shopped now that we had a little more money.

  “Tough question, Chuck. The answer we believe is that good does, but only on the last play of the game.”

  The luminous beauty of my Indian-summer virgin wins out in the last play over the death camps?

  It’s the answer I endorsed then. “That makes sense.”

  It’s the answer I still cling to, sometimes by my fingertips. I can understand, however, that others don’t buy it.

  As my senior year at Fenwick continued, peaceful as it seemed, I still pondered the question.

  I also tried to figure out how the terror in Rosie’s eyes fit Father Raven’s answer
. I didn’t believe she was damned. What, I wondered, must it be like to think you’re damned?

  I suspected uneasily that I would have to do something about her terror. Despite my veneer of cynicism, I was, even at seventeen, an incorrigible romantic. In the deep subbasements of my character there existed a notion, which I would have denied vigorously should anyone have suggested it, that to rout Rosemarie’s terror would be high adventure and great joy.

  Eroticism or death—not an original dilemma for me, surely: part of the human experience. Which ought one to believe, the promise in the beautiful body of a young woman or the fate in the rotting body of a corpse? The balance seemed to tip in favor of the latter because the young woman would surely someday be a rotting corpse.

  Yet as John Raven told me during that autumn of 1946, “Like that crazy German Nietzsche said, only where there are tombs are there resurrections.”

  My dreams, wild, violent, and terrified, were obsessed with the problem. The women I had known, my mother included, became corpses in those dreams, and then returned to life.

  Sometimes.

  Sometimes in my dreams I wished they would stay dead—the ultimate terror was the return of the beloved. I can’t remember the images of those frenzied, turbulent dreams. If I still have them today, and I think I do, I can’t recall their content the next day. I must suppress them. However, I do know their “feel.” My unacceptable and unaccepted wish to escape from the demands of the beloved are caught perfectly by Samuel Beckett in one of those poems in which, with precise words and orderly cadences, he celebrates chaos and anarchy:

  I would like my love to die

  and the rain to be falling on the graveyard

  and on me walking the streets

  mourning the first and last to love me.

  * * *

  Very morbid and very Irish. Escape from the young woman to the crematorium?

  Surely I don’t believe that.

  One deep cellar of my being, however, understands.

  That was in my dreams. In my conscious life in those days, my body, if not my mind, wanted the body of a young woman for my own (to cherish with tenderness and respect while I was enjoying her, I quickly add). Her wonders would blot out for a few moments the grinning skull.

  My mind told my body that it would have to wait a long time for that pleasure.

  My body replied that it couldn’t wait.

  Patricia

  Patricia could have done almost anything well. Therefore she did nothing at all. Or as Sister Claire Marie, Patricia’s last defender in the parish, would put it, “She has done nothing yet.”

  She was, she would explain to you if you asked why she had given up a project, “not ready for that yet.”

  Sister says that if we give her time, she will be ready. Most of us think she’ll be ready the day after the Last Judgment.

  Patricia is a fine teacher, a presentable writer, a superb administrative assistant, an efficient organizer, a charming salesperson, a decent singer and pianist, a fine student, and a wonderful mother.

  Unfortunately she couldn’t choose all of these roles and activities. Therefore she chose none of them, except the mother role, which, if you marry and make love and do not prevent conception, is forced on you by the natural processes of the species.

  If Patricia had been programmed like an ant, so that her choices were made by instincts directing the natural processes, all would have been well. Unfortunately our species, the most protean of those we know, must program itself by choice. That Patty would not or could not do.

  Patricia is sweet and pretty, sexy in a fragile black-Irish, pale-skin, blue-eyed way. It is hard not to like her even though half the time she is likely to cancel out of a dinner or a date or a project or a commitment at the last moment, pleading some prior or overriding obligation, usually of the most intensely moral nature.

  You understood that half of the time, she would show up anyway, having been miraculously absolved from the obligation or having concluded that her obligation to you was even more overriding than the other obligation.

  You learned to expect such predictably unpredictable behavior from Patty, and because she was pretty and lively and fun to be with, once and if she did appear, you gritted your teeth and allowed for it.

  Rarely did she try to account for herself. To one of her friends, a lot of the drink having been taken, she once said, “I hope I never become an alcoholic. You don’t know what it’s like to have an alcoholic mother. You have to guess at what is real.”

  You never knew what her husband thought about her peculiar behavior. He was attentive and affectionate when they were together (which wasn’t too much, given his obligations as a high-priced corporate lawyer) and tolerantly supportive of her eccentric behavior, which he seemed to dismiss as appealing, if childish. When the multiple obligations became overwhelming, she would retreat into a “poor pathetic Patty” posture and win sympathy for herself from husband and friends.

  It was the last line of defense against adulthood.

  Sister Claire Marie, who is a psychologist, argues that Patty’s responses are typical of a child of addictive parents. Some of us who knew a bit of psychology point out that she did not marry an addict, as so many such children do. To which Sister replies briskly that Patty’s husband is a classic co-dependent—addicted to his work for a change of brain chemistry just as surely as her mother was addicted to the “creature.”

  “He’s like most men in the parish,” Sister insists, “a work addict. It’s so common that no one thinks it’s abnormal. Patricia is the child of an addict, the spouse of an addict, and an addict herself.”

  Not everyone agrees, though few dare to dispute Sister.

  When the Poor Pathetic Patty response was too overwhelming, she would depart with her husband on a vacation (often with agonized last-minute confusions about whether the kids would come or not). Oddly enough, in the totally unstructured environment of a vacation, she would relax and let the flow of the vacation world direct her life.

  That should have been a hint that she was capable of adulthood. Indeed, a lot of folk who would never be termed indecisive could not let go of control during a vacation, while Patty relinquished control in those circumstances enthusiastically and reverted to the style of a carefree, happy teenager.

  If the kids, four girls and two boys, thought their mother’s behavior odd, they never said so, though they would complain, as all kids do, of the “geeky” or weird things their mother expected of them.

  That they were not unaware of their mother’s indecisiveness can be gathered from the certainly not-apocryphal story of her elder son’s response when she criticized his inability to select a college major or decide what he wanted to be in life.

  “You’re twenty-two years older than me,” said the young man, “and you haven’t decided what you’re going to be when you grow up. Why should I?”

  The legend does not recount her reply, though it is unlikely that she laughed.

  Vacations with other couples, however, were disasters, and once they became widely known as such, no one in the parish would be available when Patty suggested that they “really ought to spend some time together on a vacation” (nothing, but nothing, could ever be proposed to others save in terms of obligation). The memory of their trip with the Kearneys up the Inside Passage to Glacier Bay had become a parish myth not to be forgotten.

  The trouble with cruise ships is that they offer a smorgasbord of activities to while away the essentially boring business of covering large spaces of water in an uncomfortably rattling ship jammed with affluent but elderly (for the most part) strangers.

  The passengers, especially if they have had previous experience, quickly sort themselves into the various categories to which the cruise staff is prepared to minister—the drinkers, whose morning grapefruit juice is laced with bourbon as a prelude to the rest of the day; the card players, who are at the bridge tables before the ship eases away from the dock; the gamblers, who stan
d in line waiting for the casino to open; the shoppers, who spend much of the waking day pawing over bargains in the ship stores (which cost on the average only twenty-five percent more than they would in a shop in the hometown of your choice); the partygoers, who make every entertainment act available on the ship every night and sleep most of the day; the exercise freaks, who walk, or better, jog around the promenade deck with determined and virtuous vigor (and little regard for the safety of the more sedentary types who might be lounging by the rails); the loafers, who do nothing at all and enjoy it enormously, even though such an attitude is thoroughly un-American; and the sightseers/picture takers, who peer eagerly through the fog, hunting for a vista to immortalize forever on Kodachrome (a discouraging enterprise in the Inside Passage because there is just so much mountain and forested island that the human brain can absorb; after a while you begin to imagine schools of whales); and finally the landing parties, who live from port to port and from one shabby portside tourist-trap row of souvenir shops to the next.

  Having paid your enormous price for a week or so on a cruise ship run by mysterious foreigners whom you suspect despise you, you’re entitled to whatever mix of the above life-styles you want to choose.

  It’s hard to do all of them. Even if you’re Patty. But you can give it the old obsessive-compulsive try, to use the adjective that Bill Kearney finally used when Patty tried to drag them away from the spectacular ice fields at Glacier Bay (worth the trip, perhaps) so that (a) they wouldn’t miss the new bargains in the ship stores, and (b) they might see the Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford film that they had all missed.

  It is not clear whether the sheer magnitude of options drove Patty round the bend on that cruise or whether the presence of the other couple was the cause. Or both. Having talked the Kearneys, who were new in the parish (and hence unprepared for what happened and unimpressed by the demands of the Poor Pathetic Patty reaction) and younger, into the trip, Patty assumed total responsibility for their enjoying every minute of it.