MAGGIE WARD WAS IN MY ROOM WHEN PACKY BURST IN. “I thought I heard that noisy machine at work … hey, that’s not a mountain or a cactus! Some dame!”
I was watching my Arizona slides for the second time. On the screen was the only shot of Andrea that had not been ruined.
“The door was closed.” I tried to be angry, a waste of time with Packy.
“Gosh …” He exhaled softly. “Is that the girl you were following, Jer? No wonder you’re gloomy all the time. How did she give you the slip?”
My wife says that I idolize my brother Patrick because I see in him characteristics that I’d like to have myself. If my blond (still), six-foot-four, broad-shouldered, witty, persuasive brother has ever had a moment of self-doubt, he cured himself before anyone noticed. It’s lucky, my wife argues, that Packy is selling God and not encyclopedias. “Mind you, darling,” she adds, “I like him too, but he’d be the first one to admit that you’re the brother with depth.”
Often I wish I could trade.
“Do you think she’s prettier than Cathy O’Donnell or Teresa Wright?”
Sensing my despondent mood, Packy had dragged me off that afternoon to see The Best Years of Our Lives (which later won the Academy Award as the best film of 1946). It had made me even more despondent.
“They’re pretty dames.” Packy was eighteen, and in fifth year at Quigley, which combined four years of high school and one of college in a day-school seminary down on Rush Street, right next to Loyola Law School. “If they really let coeds into Loyola next year and they look like Cathy, it will be the end of vocations to the priesthood.”
It was difficult to tell whether he was daydreaming about the young actress, unmistakably Irish-American, or my Maggie.
“She’s gorgeous,” he said wistfully.
“Cathy O’Donnell?”
“Your dame. Why did you let her get away?”
I almost told him the truth. The whole truth, not the partial truth I had shared with Kate.
“It’s a long story, Pack.”
“I bet it is; did you call her Dulcinea?” he continued. Then, focusing more closely on the details of the misty, impressionistic figure on the tiny screen propped up against my bookcase: “Does she have any clothes on?”
“No.”
“Wow.” He whistled softly. “I never thought you had it in you, Jer.”
“Neither did I. And don’t stare. You’re going to be a priest.”
“That has nothing to do with it.” He whistled again. “Any more pictures?”
“No.”
“It sure would be nice to have a sister-in-law like her around the house.”
“It won’t happen. It’s all over.”
“Sure?” He raised an eyebrow skeptically.
“Absolutely.” I went on to the next slide.
He nodded, as if he understood, a movement of the head just like hers. “Let’s have a game of twenty-one. You’re not going to help yourself any by sitting here brooding about her.”
“Not now, Pack; I don’t want to help myself.”
“You wanna brood?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess I see the point.” He glanced at the image of Gates Pass on the screen, as though Maggie were still there. “Are you sure it’s all over?”
“She’s dead.”
“Oh my God … is there anything I can do?”
“Go practice your hook shot,” I said gruffly, wanting his sympathy but not knowing how to respond to it. “I’ll be out in fifteen minutes or so.”
He left quietly. I went back to the picture of Maggie. It was not just my love that imagined you beautiful. Even my kid brother, with the tastes of a typical eighteen-year-old (seminarian or not), thinks you’re gorgeous. I can’t believe you’re dead.
And you are more beautiful than Cathy O’Donnell or Teresa Wright or Myrna Loy or Virginia Mayo.
1946 was a great year for films—Notorious, My Darling Clementine, Best Years, Brief Encounter, It’s a Wonderful Life, Great Expectations, Till the End of Time, Two Years Before the Mast, Margie. It was also a great year for new young actresses, with the emphasis to meet the spirit of the times on wholesomeness instead of glamour. Rita Hayworth, Linda Darnell, Betty Grable, Virginia Mayo, Lana Turner were being succeeded by Donna Reed, Jeanne Crain, Mona Freeman, Gail Russell, Diana Lynn, and Teresa Wright and Cathy O’Donnell.
They were too much for me because they all reminded me of Maggie. The wholesome domesticity between Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in Wonderful Life drove me out of the theater before the film was finished (Packy told me how it ended). I didn’t want domesticity yet; not exactly. But I didn’t exclude it either, did I? I was good with kids wasn’t I, even with the winsome little Ryan punk with his Pratt & Whitney roar?
I wanted romance and adventure, didn’t I? How could I identify my Maggie with these suburban-housewife actresses?
The answer was that romance and domesticity, adventure and a family—Maggie Ward seemed to promise them all.
When I was thinking about writing this story, I bought videotapes of the great ‘46 films to see if they were as good as I remembered them.
They were not. Even classics like Notorious and Clementine were not as smooth and professional as contemporary films. And the others were hokey. But the young actresses were still beautiful.
My heart ached at the young Donna Reed, recently dead from cancer, and a striking promise of my own mortality.
Every day after our birth, my wife noted while the tape was rewinding, is pure gift. For her and for us. There were tears in her eyes too.
Both Best Years and Wonderful Life were, however, fascinating portraits of the time after the war. In both cases the heroes built homes for people. Fredric March (who won the Academy Award for best actor) and Jimmy Stewart fought with reactionary bankers to make loans to returning service men. Dana Andrews, decidedly overweight for a B-17 pilot, said that all he wanted was a home in the suburbs and finally went to work for a company building houses. He told Teresa Wright that it would be years before he made much money. Like any loyal lover of a returned vet, she replied, in effect, that it made no difference.
They both were confident but uncertain.
That was 1946.
The two films were not left-wing critiques of American society. Both believed in the “American way”—hard work, ambition, expansion of opportunities, jobs for everyone. The “baddies” were those who wanted to return to the old rigid anti-expansionist spirit of the Depression. Bankers, in other words.
Who was going to win?
Like Fredric March and Dana Andrews and Jimmy Stewart and their lovely housewives-to-come-home-to, the films were betting on expansion. But uneasily.
They didn’t realize that the expansionist energies were so powerful that even the bankers would soon be swept along. Willingly.
That’s forty years later. Best Years oppressed me then because it made me feel ashamed of myself. Unlike Fredric March, I did not have to work for anyone. Unlike Harold Russell, I still had both my hands. Unlike Dana Andrews, I was not burdened with a faithless wife and a job as a soda jerk. I was a spoiled rich kid, isolated from the experiences of my own generation.
All right, I didn’t have women like they did, not yet. But there was a plentiful supply of those, too, some of them, like Kate, of the highest quality.
But I had no good reason to feel sorry for myself.
“Packy,” I asked on the El the next day, “what can I do to help poor people?”
He looked up from his Greek book. “Huh?”
“I want to help the poor.”
“Invest in low- and middle-income housing,” he said promptly.
“I saw the film too, remember?”
“And listened to Dad and Ned. You want some direct experience? Well, there’s always the Catholic Worker house up on North Avenue. A bunch of vets run a soup kitchen every night for skid-row people.”
“Communists?”
“No. A woman named Dorothy Day founded the movement. She was a Communist who became a Catholic. Wrote a book called From Union Square to Rome. I have a copy somewhere. Radical, but Catholic.”
“Like us.”
“Not even remotely.” He laughed. “What’s her name?”
“Dorothy Day, like you just said.”
“No, dummy, the girl on the slide.”
“Maggie. Or maybe Andrea. Hard to tell.”
“Maggie? Like Grandma? That’s a free ticket in this family. What do you mean, ‘maybe’ Andrea?”
“It’s a mystery, Pack. I’ll explain someday.”
“I go up there to the Catholic Workers a couple of times a month,” he said as we left the El station at Forest—the end of the line. “Want to come?”
“Why not?”
It was time, I told myself, for some kind of political activity.
We had lost the election. It was a sure defeat before the ballot boxes opened. Gallup predicted, accurately enough, that the Republicans would win control of the House and possibly the Senate. They also, to my father’s horror, won control of Cook County. The Kelly-Nash-Arvey machine, as it was called in those days, lost every race on the county ticket. A man named Elmer Michael Walsh (my father claimed that he didn’t really exist) defeated Dad’s good friend, State Senator Richard J. Daley, in the race for sheriff.
Time chortled that the political tide of history had been turned and that the Democrats would be out of power for the foreseeable future. The Daily News announced the “End of the Machine” in headlines that would be repeated many times over the next forty years.
In fact, 1946 was the only time in the last sixty years that the Republicans won both houses of Congress. They are not likely ever to do it again.
And the report of the machine’s demise was premature, as it was many times later.
The media, particularly the Luce journals, discovered that they could not control the outcome of elections save perhaps in reenforcing the way people already felt two years later, when “Fighting Tom” Dewey was turned back by Harry Truman, who also swept back in a Democratic Congress.
Two events had taken place: the final lifting of price controls and the conversion to peacetime economy had opened the cornucopia of consumer goods, and people discovered, without knowing it yet, the concepts of “real wages,” or “lifestyle”—prices went up but income went up more.
And Truman earned for himself the reputation of being a tough, feisty man, especially by fighting the unions, and especially later that winter by fighting the universally despised John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, who was trying to improve the “real wages” of the miners and of other union members so they could deal themselves into the prosperity that was emerging. It was only common sense that, if the industrial workers were going to buy the consumer goods necessary to sustain prosperity, their wages had to go up.
But that common sense was not evident to a President who desperately needed a victory over someone and a press and public who needed someone to blame for the “slowness” of the postwar recovery—anything short of instant conversion from planes to automobiles, refrigerators, radios, and homes was too slow.
Everyone seemed to be on strike—bus drivers for fifty days in Chicago, airplane pilots, construction workers, copper miners—but no strike was a better target than the coal strike, welcomed by management, which saw a chance to let the government break the union. Truman sought an injunction against the strike on the grounds of a national emergency because the country was still technically in a state of war. Brownouts were ordered in the cities to conserve coal, railroad schedules were cut to the bone, someone banned Christmas-tree lights, headlines told of seventy thousand jobs being lost in Chicago and that the recovery might be delayed or permanently impaired.
Every frustration in the country was turned on the miners and their dark, foreboding president.
Few blamed the mine owners, who would not negotiate in good faith; or the government, which by interfering in the collective bargaining process excused the owners from negotiation.
The courts sustained the injunction. The union was fined heavily. The strike ended. We had lights on the Christmas trees. Truman had proved he was a bigger man than John L. Lewis. And the nation, having done in the miners, reveled in its victory over men who, as my dad said, had the toughest and nastiest job in the world.
Most historians on that era will tell you today that there was no justification for the injunction, that the Supreme Court, as always following the election returns, had violated the Constitution, and that, in a crowning irony, the mine owners the following year, riding the boom then like most everyone else, gave Lewis and the miners virtually everything they wanted.
The coal strike of 1946 revealed the dark, peevish underside of what my generation now calls the postwar world, just as the McCarthy (Joseph, not Eugene, I have to say to the younger generation) episode would emphasize it again a few years later. Having clawed our way, as we thought, with our fingernails to the beginnings of a better world than we had thought possible during the Depression, we resented those who might share it with us and those who seemed to challenge it ever so slightly. If the unions had been destroyed by the anger of 1946 or by the subsequent Taft-Hartley labor law, a largely ineffectual attempt to repeal the Wagner Act (my father called T-H hell for unions, purgatory for management, and heaven for lawyers), working men and women would not have had the money to join the rest of us in the demand for more consumer goods, the boom would have busted and the depression would have returned.
I was giving some of my attention to politics. I was wondering about Kate, worrying about Maggie, pondering what I should do with my life. Still, it was hard to live in our house and not learn a lot about politics from listening to my father talk to—”lecture” might be a better word—my mother, and from his occasional conversations with a much younger lawyer, Ned Ryan. In later years when I began to study seriously, more or less, that period, I was pleased to find that the instincts and prejudices that I had picked up at home were fundamentally good ones.
You must not judge the postwar era by the ‘46 election or the coal strike or the McCarthy witch hunts. Truman was reelected. McCarthy was swept from power in 1954 when the Republicans, having won the Senate back in 1950, lost it again to the Democrats. He never had, not even at the height of his popularity, the support of a majority of the American people. The unions did survive. Higher education for women and for blacks did win almost unchallenged approval.
The expansiveness, the optimism, no, I’ll use the right word, the hope of 1946 was too thin to permit many of us to be tolerant.
That would take another quarter century.
Ned Ryan was a West Sider who had committed the unpardonable crime of moving to the South Side when he came home from the war with the Medal of Honor for fighting off a Japanese battleship at Leyte Gulf with a broken-down DE squadron.
“While you and your friend Bill Halsey”—he would wink at me—”were way up north chasing carriers without any planes on them.”
Ned was short and my father was tall. He was thin and my father was hefty and solid. His hair was black, turning silver already, my father’s was silver turning white. But they were both Irish political lawyers of the old school (a school to which I belong, I am happy to say, and my own son after me): shrewd in the ways of street politics, heavy with political clout, impeccably honest, and politically liberal.
They both were especially unhappy about Daley’s loss.
“Has anyone ever said he took a thing?” my father demanded.
“And how many state senators courted their wives by attending the opera?” Ned asked.
“What would you say of a navy flyer who takes a girl to the opera?”
“Would it be a sign of true love?”
I ignored their winks. The family loved Kate.
“And how many politicians read Dickens to their children at night and history books to themselves after the kids fall asleep?”
“How many know that Dickens is anything but the name of a street on the North Side?”
“And who Goethe is?”
They both laughed. They pronounced the German poet’s name as it is to this day by the Chicago Irish, “Gay-thee.”
“Well, don’t they say he’ll not die in the State Senate anyway?”
“Is that what they’re saying?”
The “they” in these conversations were never specified.
There was a pause while Dad refilled both their glasses and went into the kitchen to fetch me another beer.
That’s right, he got it for me. I do the same for my sons. And daughters.
Sometimes, anyway.
“They say Russell Root”—Ned sipped his small glass of Jameson’s, straight up—”will run against Ed Kelly next April, now that the machine is dead.”
“Do they now.” My father preferred single malt Scotch. “Well, I hope so. But do they say that it will be Ed again? Hasn’t he had his turn?”
“Don’t you hear that?”
“Why should I be hearing that?”
I was playing with Ned’s two-year-old son Johnny, a cute, wide-eyed little punk with a fey smile.
“Well, would you be hearing,” Ned went on, “I wonder, that Jake Arvey is thinking of running Marty Kennelly on a good-government ticket?”
“Don’t they say that Major Douglas is our good-government man?”
“But wouldn’t he make a grand senator?”
“And what do you think of Marty Kennelly?”
“Doesn’t everyone say he’s an honest man? And wouldn’t an honest man make a fine mayor?”
“Even if he’s so honest that he doesn’t know all the ways to be dishonest?”
“And would leave the city to the gray wolves?
“And isn’t that what the gray wolves want?”
I made a paper airplane for Johnny and threw it into the air with a great roar, not at all like a Pratt & Whitney, if the truth be told.
“And who will he be facing in 1948 with Major Douglas running for the Senate?”
“Would we be so lucky to get that little fella from New York again?”
My father sighed. “Do you think we could ever be that lucky? Would the American people ever vote for a man with a mustache who looks like a doll on a wedding cake?”
“They never would,” Ned Ryan ended the conversation as Johnny threw the plane back to me with a roar that did sound remarkably like a Pratt & Whitney.
My father was never more right in a prediction.
Ned is still alive. And his son, Father Blackie to all, is the rector of Holy Name Cathedral. He still throws paper airplanes at me. My wife and I have an apartment in his parish (in addition to our house in River Forest. “Why go home when you’re downtown at nights?” she asks not unreasonably; besides, apartments in the Near North are useful for orgies). When he sees us coming he makes an airplane out of the first Catholic publication on which he can lay his hands and whooshes it at us with a sound still very much like a slightly asthmatic P & W.
You may think I made up the question-laden dialogue between Dad and Ned Ryan, as my son the priest (Jamie) says Saint John made up most of the great lines Jesus has in the Fourth Gospel. But I did not.
I wrote it down that night. I’d begun to write stories.
She will haunt me the rest of my life if I don’t.
It was Maggie haunting me, I’m sure, that forced me to ride on the El with Packy that night to find out what the Catholic Workers were up to.
We had three cars at the house—Dad’s old Lasalle, a twin of Ned Ryan’s, Mom’s new white Olds convertible (in which with her perfectly groomed silver hair and well-maintained figure she attracted considerable attention, which flustered and pleased her), and my Roxinante. Still, in those days we routinely used public transportation. The El was a quick and convenient way to ride downtown or to Loyola and Quigley. Who needed a car? On an elaborate date with Kate, I’d clean up Roxinante and pick her up in the car; but neither she nor any other girl would complain about an El- or streetcar-ride to a movie or a nightclub.
Cars were nice, particularly on weekends, but you didn’t need them yet.
My memory of the El rides in 1946 are shaped by two images—darkness and worried faces.
The whole year indeed is “dark” in my recollection. Perhaps I was used to the relatively equal length of day and night in the tropics or to year-round daylight savings time during the war, with yet an extra hour of “war” time added during the summer. Or maybe I had been spoiled in sunny San Diego and had forgotten about the dreary Chicago winters.
Or possibly my life was dark because a light had gone out of it.
And the faces on the El—so many grim, anxious, worried faces of working men and women—some black, mostly white, faces worn out permanently by the anxieties of the Great Depression, faces in which the budding national optimism had yet to make an impact, faces that would haunt me for the rest of my life.
You don’t see such faces anymore except in the housing projects and in the first-class sections of jets on Monday morning and Friday afternoon, the faces of salesmen and executives for whom the rats in the rat race are running too fast.
On the El during those dark late afternoon rides, I vowed I’d fight poverty and fear in the life that was still ahead of me. I don’t know whether I’ve won any of those battles, but I didn’t quit either.
Beyond River Forest there were only two suburbs that mattered—Maywood, a working-class community to the southwest, and Melrose Park, an Italian-American town to the northwest. Farther west there was only forest preserve, farmland, and an occasional town, and eventually the string of small municipalities strung along the Fox River Valley.
There was, I thought that night as I read Dorothy Day’s memoir From Union Square to Rome, a lot of land out there that could be filled up with houses. Maybe I could invest in the future and in homes for vets like Dana Andrews by buying some of that farmland and making it available for construction.
The next day, on a pay phone from Loyola, I called the trust officer who handled my money and told him to put it all in land west of Chicago, “where homes can be built.”
He congratulated me on my wisdom and assured me that I would make a lot of money.
I thought about his remark when I had hung up. I didn’t want money. I wanted to cooperate in the building of houses in which families could live in decent comfort.
It was the best investment decision I ever made, even with my insistence that we would only sell to developers who would build “good homes.” And I had been reading a Catholic Worker book when I made it.
There were a lot of ironies in the fire in 1946.
In the meantime I went a couple of nights a week to the Catholic Worker “house of hospitality,” helped in their soup kitchen, read their paper, argued their positions, and learned firsthand about poverty, incurable, helpless poverty.
It meant I missed Fred Allen and Bing Crosby and Bob Hope (not Jack Benny, because he was on the radio for Jell-O on Sunday night), but I didn’t miss them very much.
Kate came with me sometimes and was even better at kindness to the poorest of the poor than I was.
“I’m learning more from you, Jerry Keenan,” she said as she hugged me fiercely one night, “than from all my professors in college put together.”
She didn’t pull away from my hand on her breast—outside her dress, of course.
I am falling in love with this lovely girl, I told myself, and it isn’t fair to her. She’s willing to take the risk of competing with a haunt, but she’ll lose.
Until I get the damn haunt out of my head.
I was confident that the damn haunt was not in hell and would never go there. Purgatory? What had she done to deserve that?
So what was left?
Can’t you leave me alone? I demanded.
The vets, a few years older than I was, who had founded the Chicago Catholic Worker house, were not pacifists like Dorothy Day. They hated war as I did, maybe not as much because I was the only one of them who had seen combat. Politically they were liberal Democrats, as I was—and surprised to find that someone from River Forest might, on a few issues, like unions, be more liberal than they were. Religiously they were disenchanted Catholics, the two leaders former seminarians who had attended Quigley before the war and had been active in a Catholic Action movement called CISCA in the thirties. One of them went on to edit a pervasively snide and snobbish Catholic (mildly) left-wing journal. The other later worked for The New York Times, wrote Kennedy’s Houston speech on religious liberty to Protestant ministers, which probably won the election for him, was active at the Second Vatican Council, and left the Church to become an Anglican after the birth-control encyclical in 1968. He still wanted to be a priest, it was said, and the Anglicans would ordain him. He died a deacon, just before his ordination to the priesthood.
In 1946 I would not have imagined such an event. At that time, I could have seen him becoming a Communist or an atheistic socialist like Michael Harrington (also a product of the Catholic Worker movement), but an Anglican?
As Packy put it, “Will he become a Republican?”
I learned a lot from the Catholic Workers in the postwar years, most notably the connection between my religion, to which I was returning as slowly as possible, and my political instincts.
Was Maggie Ward really responsible for awakening this social concern, which remains with me to this day? After all, she had never discussed social problems with me, and she might even have been, God forbid, a Republican.
Loving Maggie, even if only for a day or two, had opened up my soul to the world and made me sensitive to emotions of which I had never been aware before she squirmed her way into my life. I would never be the same.
CIC or the seraph or whoever was right. She would be part of my life forever, even if I could never again take her to bed with me.
Eventually, I told myself, she will be only a pleasant and inspiring memory, not a sexual obsession. In the long run.
As Lord Keynes had said, though I didn’t know it then, in the long run we’ll all be dead.
I also met Dorothy Day, who was, as the Catholic Worker people insisted, a saint. The only other person like her that I have ever encountered is Mother Teresa, and the only way I can describe both experiences is to say that they were encounters with radiant goodness. Humans qualitatively different from the rest of us.
I expected to be pushed toward agreement with her own vision of the movement. In fact, we hardly discussed the Catholic Worker. And I did not have to defend my affluent background, as I did with some of the Chicago movement members. I don’t remember much of what we did talk about, except that it was about God and service to others. Miss Day led by example and inspiration, not by indoctrination. It is the way with saints.
One sentence does stand out, and I didn’t have to write it in my journal or in the pile of little dialogues I was recording: “It does not matter where we come from or who we are. It only matters who we become by the ways we love others.”
I quote that dictum often to my kids, even today. I ask my wife if I am boring them. “Certainly not,” she replies, hugging me passionately, which she is apt to do at odd times, even when we’re fighting. “They’re telling it to their kids too. And if it does bore them, too bad for them. They should hear it anyway.”
On the ride home that night on the Lake Street El at Halsted, I could have sworn I saw Maggie on the opposite platform. Seeing her again was like an explosion, like ice floes breaking apart. I left the train at Loomis, crossed over to the opposite platform, and rode back to Halsted. The young woman who I thought was Maggie was still waiting on the platform. Not Maggie, not even pretty.
Idiot, I told myself as I descended the stairs and crossed over to the westbound platform. Lovesick, haunted idiot.
(It was quicker to ride downtown on the subway and hike from Forest Avenue at the end of the El ride to our house than to take the North Avenue streetcar straight west. I am convinced that there are still North Avenue streetcars wandering west, even though buses replaced them decades ago.)
It was a great year for songs, Carousel and Brigadoon had both spawned hit tunes, “Don’t Fence Me In” and “Swinging on a Star” were still popular. “Tenderly,” “Come Rain, Come Shine,” “The Gypsy,” and “Doing What Comes Naturally,” were the songs of the year in addition to those I’ve already mentioned. The songs wore better than the films, some of them became standards as the years went on.
“Tenderly” was our song—Kate and mine. It made me wonder whether Maggie and I had a song which was ours.
“Ole Buttermilk Sky” in the train station?
The Cook County Forest Preserve District had thoughtfully maintained Thatcher Woods on the west end of River Forest, just a block away from Trinity.
The night after I met Dorothy Day, with “Tenderly” playing softly on one of the music stations, I was kissing Kate’s naked breasts in the front seat of Roxinante, ignoring the restraints imposed on me by the gearshift.
There were pretty, fresh young breasts, all the more delectable because I was sure that I was the first man to see them naked or to kiss them.
Caution and maybe fear finally stopped us.
And my inexcusable comparisons between her breasts and Maggie’s—the ghost was a jealous lover.
“I guess we should stop.” Kate sighed and rearranged her straps (two sets, because the slip was a more extensive garment in those days) and her satin cups. “You are quite good at this sort of thing, Jeremiah. I’ll always have pleasant memories of how good it can be.”
I zipped up the back of her dress. “I’m sorry if I went too far.”
“Nonsense,” she said briskly. “I didn’t try to fight you off, did I?”
“No.”
“I can’t think clearly,” she said as she turned off the radio, “with that song playing.”
“I’m glad.”
“So am I.” She laughed. “But we should think clearly for a minute.”
I knew what was coming.
“We are becoming, I believe the word is”—she laughed again, not in the least nervously—”involved with one another.”
“You’ve noticed that?”
“I have.” She touched my jaw. “And I don’t mind in the least. I am not in any rush to marry—”
“First date that hasn’t talked about furniture.”
“Be quiet, please.” She put her hand over my mouth. “On the other hand, we are both kidding ourselves if we think we’re not stumbling in that direction.”
“Those are supposed to be my lines.” My mouth escaped from her hand, but was quickly recaptured.
“I think I could probably go to bed with you,” she went on calmly, “with less guilt feelings than you could take me to bed. That’s not the point. The point is that we are both sufficiently Irish Catholic as to figure that we’d have to marry. Right? Don’t answer. Just nod your head.
“Okay. I could get ready to marry if it came to that. Could you? Just shake your head. See? It’s not only that you have to resolve your Maggie problem. You also must figure out what you’re going to do with your life. Stop struggling.” Her eyes turned teary. “You shouldn’t try to settle that question just because you find that you’re stumbling into marriage, right?”
I nodded agreement and she released my mouth.
“So I’m not saying we’ll break up and I’ll certainly not let you out of taking me to that Benedictine ball—”
“Bachelors and Benedicts,” I corrected her.
“Right. But nothing steady or nothing heavy from now on, are we agreed?”
It was a breakup, a friendly one. And we would date occasionally. But the romance was over.
And I felt like a prize fool. How can anyone give up an intelligent, generous, lovely young woman like Kate because of a haunt?
But give her up I did.
Well, I thought to myself that night, if I do go to confession on the law-school retreat—which started the next day—I wouldn’t have to confess that I was still in the “occasion of sin.” As if someone like Kate were really in God’s mind an “occasion of sin.”
I had learned a few things in my pilgrimage away from the Church and back. Like who God was.
And while I still didn’t much like Him, I had to admit I was caught in the chance metaphor I had dredged up from my unconscious in Globe to persuade Andrea that she was not damned.
God felt about me the way I felt about Maggie. Or even the way I felt about Kate.
“That is flattering,” I told Him, “but You sure do have a strange way of showing Your love.”
It would seem even stranger after the bombs the retreat master dumped on me, a retreat which, incidentally, nearly caused my expulsion from law school.