IT WAS A SIMPLE INSCRIPTION ON THE SIMPLER TOMBSTONE:
MARGARET WARD KOENIG
MARCH 15, 1928—APRIL 23, 1946
MAY SHE REST IN PEACE
The late-afternoon trade winds were cooling San Diego and wafting in streamers of fog. In the distance, beyond the elegant greenery of Balboa Park, there stretched the blue waters of the bay and, disappearing in the fog and then briefly reappearing, the low-slung shape of Coronado Island.
A lovely view for my Maggie’s last resting place, in its stark unpretentiousness; not quite a potter’s field, but surely right next to it.
I was too shattered by the sight of that headstone to weep, to pray, to ponder. I knelt in the grass next to it and remained in a kneeling posture for a long time.
Why?
Why such a senseless life? Why such a terrible waste of talent? Why such a futile death?
Then I was angry at the Church. How could they know the state of Maggie’s soul? Could they not have at least given her the benefit of the doubt?
In Chicago they would have, I told myself—a conclusion that Packy later confirmed. “Around here we figure that anyone who is so troubled that they would end their own life has to be incapable of serious moral reflection. That’s the way the Romans figured, too.”
But the biggest question of all: Why had this body, corrupted by many weeks in the ocean, appeared to me, alive and attractive, the day after it was laid to rest in this far end of the Municipal Cemetery?
Was it the same person? Was Andrea King truly Maggie Ward?
Who else could she be? Did not all the clues confirm that, even the Earl Grey tea?
Had her assignment been to recall me to my faith before she went to heaven? Was part of her purgatory the terrible fear that she was already in hell? Did she have to conquer that too?
It continued to be inadmissible that Maggie was damned. Had not I myself told her that God, should there be such, loved her as much as I loved her?
I would now add, as much as Jean Kelly and Sister Patrice Marie and Fred and Magda Weaver and Gunnery Sergeant Wendel and Ralph Without-a-Last-Name?
“All right, Maggie,” I promised her aloud there by her grave, “you win. I believe again. I don’t promise that I’ll bounce back into Mass next Sunday, but I’ll make my peace with God because you said I should.”
And that bizarre prayer brought me again a hint of the serenity I had felt the day before coming in on the FH-4.
I would never know what had happened on those strange, frightening, wonderful days in Arizona. I had loved and had been loved. That would have to suffice for the rest of my life.
It would probably be enough.
It would have to be enough.
Would I eventually forget her, as I’d forgotten my grandmother, the other Maggie, who died when I was a little boy, leaving only an impression of colossal energy?
No, this Maggie would be remembered with rich and full detail, in a memory that in time might turn from painful to bittersweet.
“You’ll be part of me for the rest of my life, Maggie Ward,” I told her.
Then I remembered the similar words of CIC, in his seraphic manifestation, at the Lost Dutchman’s Mine.
No, I’d never forget her.
I actually prayed for her then, said the utterly Catholic words, “May Eternal Light shine upon her,” rose from my knees and walked out of the cemetery and across Balboa Park, perhaps the most beautiful urban park in America.
Strangely, my numbness heightened my sensitivity to its beauty. The whole world, and especially this magnificent park, had become a warm blanket protecting my Maggie until we should meet again.
Twilight turned to dusk. A full moon inched its way over the mountains, turning the patches of fog into quicksilver dust that danced gently through the park. The full moon suggested the horror to me, as it would for the rest of my life. But the horror bound, locked up, restrained; only temporarily restrained, perhaps, and ready to break out at any time, yet sufficiently under control that I could admire the contradictory white forgiveness in the moonlight.
Only one other time in my life so far has the horror returned.
I found a Catholic church near the park. It was open, unlike most Catholic churches these days. Inside I knelt, not quite ready to resume diplomatic relations with the One represented by the flickering tabernacle light—a hint perhaps of the fragility and the durability of love—but ready to begin preliminary negotiations.
As if you can negotiate with God!
It seemed obvious to me that this crazy interlude in the first summer after the war—when most Americans were relishing a vacation and complaining about shortages—had to be put firmly behind me. Remember Andrea/Margaret Mary, yes. Benefit from my short interlude of love with her, I told myself, but do not become obsessed with trying to understand it.
The Adventure is over. The Romance is finished. The Woman has been won and then lost again.
Proceed with the serious business of life.
CIC for once agreed completely.
It was a sensible and reasonable reaction. In fact, its sensibility and rationality—as set down in my journal at the Del Coronado with the moon high in the sky over the quiet Pacific—astonishes me even almost forty years later.
It was a singularly ill-advised resolution and one that I would not be able to keep. And it was not the conclusion I ought to have drawn from my quest at all.
Perhaps I was too tired, too disappointed, maybe even too homesick to read the experience properly.
Or to note the hole in it, big enough for the USS Missouri.
It’s twenty-four hundred miles, more or less, from San Diego to Chicago. If you drive eight hundred miles a day on Route 66 (may it rest in peace), you can make it in three days. In 1946 there was no interstate system (Biddy won’t believe that there was ever a time when there was no interstate, just as she won’t believe that there was ever a time when the Mass was in Latin and young women her age wore girdles). To make your eight hundred miles, you had to average forty-five miles an hour for eighteen hours. If you took out a half hour here or there to eat and maybe an hour or two to nap about midnight, you could cover the distance even in a 1939 Chevy in a little under three days.
I turned off 66 (Ogden Avenue in Cook County) and onto Harlem Avenue at seven o’clock in the morning; fifteen minutes later, Roxinante steaming and puffing, I pulled up in front of our house on Lathrop, ambled into the kitchen and asked my delighted mother for a double order of pancakes. I assured my equally delighted father, before he buried his head behind the Chicago Sun (no Tribune in our house), that I would register for Loyola Law School that afternoon, told an astonished Joanne that I liked her hair blond, and challenged Packy to a game of “Horse” on the backboard on our coach house.
The headlines in the Sun said that the Senate was about to investigate the crazy racist senator from Mississippi, Theodore Bilbo; the government had issued an ultimatum to Yugoslavia demanding the release of survivors of two American planes the Tito crowd had forced down; UNRAA director Fiorello La Guardia had fired an assistant who charged the Russians with using UNRAA supplies for political purposes. And the Cubs had lost again.
Home is the sailor, home from the sea.
And the hunter home from the hill.
And the romantic home from the mountains.
Having forgotten, as you’ve doubtless noted, the most important clue of all.