I ENTERTAINED MYSELF WITH PLEASANT DISTRACTIONS about my imaginary but pliant lover at Lake Geneva, blended with self-pity because she wasn’t in my arms at that very minute. Thus distracted, I walked the six blocks to the former Quinn row house, at the very outer limits of Saint Dominic’s. I realized that if Andrea/Maggie had walked the shortest route to school, she would have passed the corner at the end of the street on which the Koenigs lived, a stoplight corner, where there would be a crossing guard. He could have waited for her there whether she wanted him to wait or not.
Saint Dominic’s was a shabby neighborhood; the street on which the Quinns lived seemed the most shabby of all the row streets in the parish, near a suburban railroad track and a truck depot, beyond which there was a block of aging factories and then the docks. The street had slipped irreversibly in the direction of a slum.
I pushed the doorbell button. I did not hear a bell ring. I waited a moment and then knocked on the door vigorously.
“What’s the hurry?” the young woman who opened the door demanded. “It’s too hot to hurry.”
She was tall and slender, with jet-black hair, buttermilk skin, a ridge of freckles over her nose, spectacular legs, and a thin, delicate face—a “black Irish” beauty in white shorts and halter, with an accounting textbook in one hand, a radiant movie queen who transformed her slum setting into a background for hope and laughter.
I stared with an open mouth. So, I think, did she.
“Good afternoon,” I said, trying to close my mouth. “I’m Jerry Keenan.”
“I’m Jean Kelly,” she said and returned my smile. “I’m studying for my summer-school exam at Saint Joe’s. Would you like a glass of lemonade?”
Both of us had spontaneously turned on our Irish charm.
“I’ve just finished three glasses of Italian wine. I think some Irish lemonade …”
“Might make you sick?
“Might sober me up.”
“I’ll get it out of the icebox—we still have an icebox—the iceman comes every day. My parents and brothers and sisters aren’t home, by the way.”
“I still feel reasonably safe.”
She laughed enthusiastically. “You talk funny.”
“No, you talk funny.” We both laughed together. I felt suddenly light-headed. I assumed that she did, too.
“You Navy?”
We had to talk about something besides our light heads and racing bloodstreams.
“Flyer.”
“Helldiver?”
“I’m still alive, am I not?”
(The SB2C was a dive bomber, same name as the biplane in the movie with Wallace Beery, but even more dangerous because its tail tended to fall off in dives, a notable problem in a dive bomber. And a disgrace that kids were made to fly them. My wife refuses to permit pictures of the second Helldiver in her collection, just as she interdicts the Douglas Devastator—TBD. These planes were swept from the sky by the Japs at Midway; torpedo eight lost all its men but one in these crates. I’m not sure about her logic, but I agree with her sentiments.)
“Fighter?”
“Hellcat; squadron leader eventually, if that doesn’t destroy your faith in the Navy.”
My children, who lived through the Viet Nam disaster, find it hard to imagine that young people talked about where they were and what they did in the war as casually as they talked about where they were attending college. It was not that we were militarists. Some of us had more reason to hate war than the college protesters twenty years later. Unlike them we had seen our comrades die. But military service was part of our story, one of the episodes in our lives by which we identified and defined ourselves. It was an incident in our lives of which we were not necessarily proud but of which neither were we ashamed.
“I can believe anything about the Navy. But you look all right.”
I didn’t know quite what that meant, but I followed her to the kitchen. Sure enough, an old-fashioned brown wooden icebox. We’d left that behind in 1930. However, the house was pin neat and spotlessly clean. That didn’t seem very Irish.
“I am mostly all right. But not totally all right.”
That produced a cheerful laugh. Anyway, the girl was certainly not afraid of me.
A more leisurely inspection revealed long, slender legs, a narrow waist, spherical white breasts which her halter was not designed to obscure, and a smile that invited you to enjoy her loveliness.
What was that other girl’s name again? The one I’m not searching for anymore?
“What year are you in?”
“Pre-freshman. I run an elevator in the Ben Franklin Hotel during the day”—she handed me the lemonade and led me back to the threadbare living room—”and go to school at night. I figure if I have a head start on the courses and get some good marks, they’ll continue my scholarship.”
Maggie would be the same age. For a moment I imagined she was Maggie. I was a half-inch away from taking her in my arms and smothering her with kisses. Instead I asked a dumb question, which I knew was dumb when I asked it.
“Why college for a girl, especially a pretty girl?”
“Everyone goes to college now.” She waved a hand flippantly. “Even girls. And we get the best marks because we’re smarter.”
“And prettier.”
“And just generally better.”
We laughed joyously, young and happy with all our lives ahead of us. Then I turned serious.
“I’m searching for Maggie Ward,” I said simply.
She put her lemonade on a coaster on the arm of her mohair-covered chair.
“I hope you find her.” The twinkle had vanished from her deep-blue eyes. “Maggie is a wonderful girl. Are you in love with her?”
“I think so.”
She nodded briskly, a possible flirtation turning into a serious business. “You have good taste. She’s astonishing, and against terrible odds.”
“I guess we’re both members of the fan club. Do you know where she is?”
“I heard from her when Andrea was born, an instant love affair that was. She adored the kid. Then came a note at Christmas saying that the baby had just died. It was the first time I’d ever heard Maggie sound down. Then another note around Saint Patrick’s Day. Wait, let me get it.” She bounded out of the room, leaving a trail of inexpensive but tasteful lilac scent behind her.
“It’s a strange letter,” she said as she settled back into her chair, grim and somber. “Maggie was always a little strange, kind of … what’s the word I’m looking for …”
“Uncanny? Ethereal?”
“Both words, I guess. She knew things, like she was plugged into another world. Anyway, listen.…
“I have more bad news, I’m afraid. Andrew has died too. I’ve lost my daughter and my husband in less than three months. His family did not even want the body. He’s buried here in San Diego. I’m so numb that I cannot even weep. I probably never could love him, as you know, but I had become fond of him. He was changing and improving till everything went wrong for us. Again. I guess I was fighting those awful parents of his every day. I thought I was winning, but you can’t win by yourself.
“Anyway, I miss him.
“I’m all alone now, free from Uncle Howard and Aunt Isobel, from my cute little daughter, and free from my husband for whom I tried so hard. Remember when I told you that someday I wanted to be free of all the obligations of the past and the present? Well, that day has finally come. And I discover that without obligations there is no reason to live.
“I am a very unimportant and useless person whom no one would miss. Maybe we’re all that way. Maybe I just found it out at a younger age than most people.
“We will not see each other again, Jean. Do well in college, don’t give up on Ralph, he has everything you want and need even if, poor dear sweet man, he doesn’t know how much he’s worth.
“I love you,
“Maggie.”
“Ralph?”
“A boy. TBF gunner.”
“Sandy hair, underweight, gentle brown eyes?”
“You got him.” She blushed. “He’s still kind of shook by the war. Lost a couple of pilots on his plane. He’s going to school with me—because I’m there—but he’s beginning to like it. You met him? He thought Maggie was wonderful too.”
Poor Ralph. Probably figured he didn’t deserve this intelligent bundle of loveliness. Probably he didn’t, but which of us does deserve the woman who salvages us?
“So he said.”
“This sounds like a suicide note, doesn’t it?” The light-pink glow on her face suggested that we’d best not talk about Ralph. “Is she dead?”
“I don’t think so … what did you do when you received this?”
“I had a return address from the card about Andrea’s birth. I tried to find a phone number from Information in San Diego. They told me the apartment building at the address had been torn down. There was no listing of either Ward or Koenig which could have been her. I didn’t know what to do, so I did what we Irish Catholics always do. I prayed for her. I still pray for her. Every night.”
“Don’t stop.… Do you think she might have killed him?”
“Maggie?” she exploded. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
“Sorry. I had to ask.”
“She had plenty of reason to kill the bastard.” Jean was not mollified. “But you know her. Is she the killer type?”
“I think she’s the victim type, the kind of woman that evil people enjoy hurting because she’s so good.”
“I can’t see her killing anyone.” Jean was not ready to drop her defense of her heroine.
“I agree.” I shrugged. “Unless she was defending someone else.”
We paused to consider that possibility. Jean then changed the subject.
“Are you sure she’s alive?” she pleaded, her eyes misting.
You were important to these people, Maggie Ward/Andrea King. Did you know that? I wondered.
“A stubborn, hungry kid when she wanted to be.” Jean Kelly folded the paper and placed it on the floor next to her chair. “He raped her, you know. Andrew Koenig, I mean.”
“I didn’t know.”
“She was still sixteen, didn’t know anything, her aunt never explained sex to her. The nuns sure didn’t. He came from the Navy, great big Joe War Hero, and wanted to screw her. She didn’t know what it meant. So he showed her. She cried in my arms the next day.”
“So she hardly could be said to have loved him?” My hands were wet, my throat tight. I wanted to kill him, but he was already dead.
“She was nice to him, because no one else liked him. When he talked about marrying her after the war, she listened politely but never agreed. I told her that he was a slimy little drudge and she said that she felt sorry for him. Maggie picked up strays—cats, dogs, birds, boys. Her aunt and uncle wouldn’t let her keep the pets so she’d make sure one of her friends would give the poor creature a proper home. She should never have married him, but she felt she had to for the baby’s sake. She even tried to love him, which is what Maggie would do. Poor kid. ‘Scuse me. I gotta get a hankie.”
My fists were clenched. I wanted to break something. Anything.
Jean Kelly returned, dabbing at her eyes. No makeup for this natural beauty.
“The nuns hated her, all except crazy old Patrice Marie, because her family had been famous—society pages of the papers and stuff like that when they were young. Her aunt hated her because her mother was pretty and she was ugly, and I mean ugly; a lot of the other kids hated her because the nuns like you if you hate the same people they hate.… You have nuns in school?”
“And priests in high school. Most of them weren’t that way.”
She nodded. “There’s some great young nuns in class with me. Maybe the Church will change. Anyway, some of us got to know Maggie in grammar school and, Jerry Keenan, uncanny and eth—”
“Ethereal.”
“Right”—she grinned—”ethereal she may be but she was also magic. Kind, funny, smart, always helping others … hey, are you another one of her strays?”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way”—it was my turn to feel warm in the face—”but maybe I was. Maybe she felt sorry for me too.”
Who took pity on whom in the railroad station with Bing Crosby singing “Ole Buttermilk Sky”?
“Poor Maggie was sort of a confessor for at least a dozen boys. I think it must have been those soft blue eyes. They poured their problems out to her and seemed to feel better afterward. Good thing, because all our real confessors could do was denounce ‘immorality,’ and you know what they meant by that.”
“She certainly listened sympathetically,” I agreed.
“You don’t look like a stray.” She evaluated me critically. “Not at all.
At our age, a little bit of flirtation was not out of order, even if we both had, more or less, other commitments.
“Do strays always look like strays?”
“Awful Andrew sure did. You see, the problem was his father. Dull and dumb, but stubborn. He pounded into his kid’s thick skull that if a real man wants something badly enough, he takes it. You put a dope like Andrew in a barracks with guys who give him the business every night about being a virgin and you set up a rape.”
“If he wasn’t dead, I’d want to kill him.”
“Calm down, Navy.” Her eyes met mine and held them. “Men get killed in wars. Women get raped. It’s not good, but it’s not new.”
“Please, God, never again.” Had I invoked a God I did not yet believe in?
“Amen to that.”
“Maggie was the leader of your bunch?”
“Sure was. Made us study and read and keep our noses clean with the nuns. And they never guessed what she was up to. She would have been class president if that old bitch Mary Regina had not gone to school with one of her great-aunts and envied her.”
“So that’s where it comes from?”
“The old bitch makes all the other nuns think like she does. You see, the great-aunt was class president when Mary Regina wanted to be. So she got even with Maggie. From day one.”
“Poor little girl, indeed.”
“She was a tough one, Jerry Keenan. She took it all, never was mean or nasty back, and never gave in either. Till she got pregnant. To make it worse, she was really sick—all day, every day.”
“Gallant?”
“Yeah.” She winked. “Ethereal and gallant. And I hope not dead.”
“I do too.…”
“Is she beautiful?” Jean Kelly picked up her lemonade glass and then put it down again. “She was pretty and I kind of thought that she might become a real beauty.”
“Like yourself?” God forgive me, I couldn’t resist it. Besides, it was true.
“Thanks.” She smiled ruefully. “But not like me, like someone you’d see in the movies. Maureen O’Hara, you know?”
“Jeanne Crain?”
She considered reflectively. “That’s better, a little bit more elfin face and maybe a more intelligent forehead than Jeanne. But just as lovely. Or will be soon, didn’t you think so?”
I hesitated. “On her way to it maybe, but as my father once told me, some women either become great beauties or wither by the time they’re twenty. Maggie could go either way. Depending.”
“On what?”
“On what happens to her.”
“She was the kind who survives,” Jean said thoughtfully.
“She had to, didn’t she? And by the way, you’re not the kind who withers.”
“You have a clever Irish tongue, Navy.”
“That’s what Maggie said to me.”
“Did she really? That would not have been a Maggie comment two years ago.”
“Would it have been a Jean Kelly comment?”
She laughed. “Hell, yes. So maybe the little brat was quoting me.”
“You don’t happen to know where her aunt and uncle are, do you?”
“Sure, I do.” She leaned forward, resting her chin on her hands as if in thoughtful conspiracy, and thus revealed ample amounts of breast for my inspection. “We’re supposed to forward anything that comes and not tell anyone, as if the FBI really cares about such small fish. I’m sure they don’t know where she is, and they wouldn’t tell you if they did.”
I took a deep breath, steadying my concentration. “I’m looking for a needle in a haystack, lovely lady, searching for hints, any kind of hints about where she might be.”
“They’re in Florida, a place called Port Lauderdale, which I never heard of.” She rose from her chair, being careful not to spill her lemonade, picked up my empty glass and left the room.
“Fort Lauderdale,” I called after her, sighing to myself with both disappointment and relief.
“That’s right.” She returned, refilled lemonade glass in one hand, a small piece of note paper in the other. “Fort Lauderdale. You must have got good grades in geography, Jerry. I guess he runs a meat market down there too. Probably still has his thumb on the scale. Don’t tell them where you found out about the address, not that it makes much difference.”
“Thanks.” I glanced at the address, put the paper in my shirt pocket, and attacked the lemonade.
“Do you think you’ll find her?”
“Of course.” I was not so confident, but I couldn’t let this lovely young woman think that I was discouraged.
She stared thoughtfully out of the spanking clean window of the row house.
“There was a streak in her of … gosh, I don’t even know what to call it … come on, Navy, you’re good at words.…”
“Fatalism?”
“Worse than that.”
“Despair.”
“Right.” She jabbed her finger at me in agreement. “Usually I would kid her out of it, but I was never sure that she wasn’t going along just to keep me happy. She was always worried about what the dumb nuns called the ‘unforgivable sin,’ as though God’s love can be limited.”
Beautiful and devout too. Lucky, lucky Ralph.
“God has not done all that well by Maggie.”
“He sent you, didn’t he?” She cocked an appraising eye.
“On that happy note,” I said as I rose from my chair, “I’d better ask if I can use your bathroom. It’s a long walk back to my taxi after three glasses of Chianti and two of lemonade.”
“First door on the left.” She was brooding again, her head on her fist. “Dear God, I’d like to see Maggie again.”
Need I say that the bathroom was spotless? Jean or her mother? Probably both.
“Your mother Irish?” I asked upon return.
“Sure … why … oh, you mean because the house is so clean. I guess we’re exceptions in that respect. Don’t drink, either.”
I took her hands in mine and lifted her out of her chair. She looked away from me.
We were both silent for a few seconds, permitting the delightful chemistry of attraction, about which neither of us was going to do anything, flow back and forth. When you’re young, some possibilities are better enjoyed if they can be remembered only as possibilities.
“Thank you, Jean Kelly. Jean Marie Kelly?” She nodded. “Of course it’s Jean Marie,” I went on. “Ralph is a lucky man.”
She sighed softly. “Maggie is lucky too, and it’s high time.”
I touched her lips with mine.
I wanted to touch her flat, pale belly with my fingertips and knew that CIC was correct in loudly warning against such behavior. So I released her and walked briskly to the door. “Get out of here with class,” CIC, absent for some time, interjected his opinion again.
“Go away until you can come back with your BAR,” I replied.
But he was right: I had better not tarry.
“Good luck with Ralph,” I said, shaking hands at the door.
“I’ll shape him up.” She smiled. “Never fear. Let me know if you find her.”
I promised that I would, kissed her once again, and departed with a reasonable amount of class.
“Well,” my wife would observe when I told her this part of the story, “at least you found out her name and address. That was better than you did with the might-have-been in San Francisco.”
No special credit. She told me her name. And she lived at the Quinns’ address which the nuns had given me.
And I would certainly never forget her.
Back at the Latham, I turned on the radio to discover that the Cubs were playing a doubleheader with the Phillies. They had lost the first game and were losing the second.
Naturally.
I couldn’t phone the family because they were at Lake Geneva, where my father resolutely refused to install a phone. So, while I listened with one ear to the Cubs booting ground balls, I began to fill in my daily journal entry. Maybe it was the sexual chemistry between me and Jean Kelly, but that day’s entry, now so faded as to be barely legible, does not embarrass me today.
The first impression I must put down on paper is the striking, humiliating, but not altogether unappealing thought that I may have been one of Maggie Ward’s strays. She told me that she wanted to make love with me when she first saw me in the station. But did she find me desirable because I was a disenchanted young man on the way home from the wars, a boy who needed a touch of the warmth stored up in her big blue eyes?
Whatever her own problems might have been, she would never have shared them with me unless she had first thought I needed her help. Afterward the mutual need between us became so demanding that it ran out of control.
Did I force myself on her like awful Andrew?
Certainly not. The love between us was passionate on both sides.
And my dreams about the Yamoto and my shipmates have stopped. Now that I’m on track in searching for her, I’m sleeping peacefully. It almost seems that the nightmare at Clinton was the last of the nightmares.
My life started to turn the corner when I met her. Maybe the corner has turned completely now. Perhaps the horror at Clinton was an end and a beginning. Could it be that Andrea’s—I should call her Maggie now—Maggie’s role was to teach me how to love a woman and point me in the direction of becoming a writer instead of a lawyer, or in addition to a lawyer?
She was a brief grace sent to teach me how to live and how to love. Is that not enough?
No. I want her in my arms.
I paused and pondered what I had written.
Had Quixote found a mission for his life so easily?
Perhaps I had learned all that there was to learn from the pale, haunted young woman I had met and loved and lost. Ought I to forget about a quest that was probably hopeless?
The Cubs managed to load the bases in the first of the ninth, with one out. They were down two runs. All right, now’s the turning point of the season.
I put my pen aside and listened intently.
By the way, what was the name of the American League club in Philadelphia in those days? No one knows? The A’s, since then in Kansas City and Oakland.
I beat my grandchildren at Trivial Pursuit as long as sports is the subject.
Or war.
The next Cub batter struck out. And the one after that popped up to the shortstop. No runs, two hits, and no errors. Three men left on base.
Paradigmatic.
I called Delta Airlines and was told that they had a DC-3 flight to Miami and “intermediate stops” on Monday morning. I made my reservation and didn’t ask what the intermediate stops were.
Then I returned to my diary.
She lied to me about two important facts. Her daughter did not die in a miscarriage. And her husband did not die on the Indianapolis. In fact, he apparently died six months after the war was over. Moreover, she had an excellent reason to want to kill him, although both Sister Patrice Marie and Jean Kelly believe that impossible.
But why lie to me?
I stopped my pen, or rather the Latham’s pen, poised uncertainly over the notebook.
Maybe because she was afraid I wouldn’t believe the truth.
I lifted the Latham’s pen off the page again.
What is the truth?
I thought about that.
Something so horrible that she thought that she was poised between earth and hell.
What could that be?
I read over what I had written. It settled the question, as if there ever had been any doubt about it. I would not, could not, give up my search for Andrea King/Maggie Ward until I had an explanation. I might not find her. I had to know her real story. Then I could understand, I hoped, the strange experience that we had shared above Lost Dutchman’s creek.
I went back to writing.
She seems like such an intricate and complicated person. How could a kid a little over eighteen be so elusive?
Maybe we’re all that way. If someone were trying to hunt down the facts of my life, would he not decide that I too was a bundle of contradictions. Even in the family. Talk to Joanne and you’d learn about one Jerry Keenan, and then talk to Packy and I’d be a very different person.
The men and women in Saint Dom’s remember her as sweet and pretty but indistinct. Ralph—the kid at the drugstore must have been Ralph, the lucky bastard—recollects her as hot stuff but still deserving respect. Jean Kelly, a bright, gorgeous, mature young woman, tells me that she was tough and ethereal and pretty and close to despair. For all her own talents and resources, Jean worshiped her and depended on her. She also tells me that Maggie played mother confessor to a group of boys.
She had a hard life, God knows. But she also had attracted good and loyal friends. Yep, that was my Andrea. She had character. I guess I knew that in Arizona. Not only tough, but strong.
And this is the “provoking little girl” that Sister Mary Regina despised.
Did you know any girls like her in high school?
Sure, I did. I never made love with any of them. Never fought the demons of hell for them as I did or imagined I did for her in the Superstition Mountains. Would they have been like her under the pressures she endured? Maybe. Why not?
So it’s not an impossible portrait, only a fascinating one.
Which is why I am in Philadelphia in this August of 1946 instead of Lake Geneva.
“CIC!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Didn’t you tell me that she would always be part of my life?”
“I don’t recall that I did, sir.”
“Well, the guy with the BAR did.”
“But that is true already, isn’t it?”
One tough, fascinating little bitch. Even if I don’t find you, you’ll be carved on my memory and my conscience as long as I live.
But I intend to find you. Not just your secret, not just your story, but you.
And then bring you home to the Butterfield dance (if not the Harvest Festival, then something later). And never let you go.
Never.
It’s your fault I didn’t take on Ralph in a competition for Jean Kelly this afternoon. Do you realize, Maggie Ward, what I’m giving up for you?
Well, I’ll ask you someday.
So as the sun set and a touch of breeze played with the curtain of my room at the Latham—no air conditioner but “on the north side of the hotel, sir”—I admired my virtue for not making a determined pass at Jean Kelly, considered the possibility of attending Mass the next day, and decided against it.
I would leave on Monday morning for Fort Lauderdale and her aunt and uncle whom I would like to strangle. I had no idea of what I would ask them or where I would search after what was certain to be an unsatisfactory talk with them.
I reconsidered my decision to stay away from Mass.
You could always pray “Dear sir or madam.”
Or even “occupant.”
When you were desperate enough.