I SHOULD HAVE CHARGED INTO THE LANTERN ROOM AND carried her off?
I should have listened to the message in her smile at the door of her flat and ignored all other messages?
I should have accepted her at her word that she was in Chicago because she wanted to be near me?
I should have realized that the only reason for her to walk down Lathrop was that she wanted to be caught?
As my friends in New York would put it, what can I tell you?
Yes to all four questions.
Moreover, I could have acted on such responses without ever dishonoring Father Donniger’s wisdom on how to treat women.
As is transparent to me after six decades of life and doubtless to you after a hundred and twenty thousand words, I am a bit of a Hamlet.
Put me in a situation where there is no time to think, where I am constrained to act on instant instinct—air combat, a courtroom, the floor of the Board of Trade, an attack by a nasty panelist at a professional meeting, the final phase of negotiations with a publisher—and I’ll perform superbly. Give me time to think and I’ll very likely think too much. Perhaps I was searching for Romance and Adventure in 1946 because I was looking for a life in which I could rely on instinct instead of thought.
Perhaps it is a result of growing up in a family that seems to have flourished not only economically but emotionally. Maybe I’ve never been hungry enough, in a number of different senses of that word, to take chances when there is time to reflect on them.
This thin-bloodedness, if you will, is my tragic flaw, and I’ve had to contend against it, with varying degrees of success, all my life.
It is precisely at those times when I begin to see all sides of a question and stumble into the endless and bottomless swamp of analyzing the questions to death, that the demons begin to return, in one form or another, and the horror becomes partially unchained.
In Tucson, when I offered to buy breakfast for the pathetic little serviceman’s widow, at Picketpost, when I compelled her to perform my sexual initiation, I was acting on instinct and acting wisely.
That night at the door of her apartment, when I did not lift her into my arms, chenille robe, flannel pajamas, and all, and cart her off to River Forest, I was acting reflectively and stupidly.
Even my wife, who has insisted through the years of our marriage that I am too hard on myself, admits the validity of my self-analysis. Characteristically, she defends me against it.
“You’re a thoughtful man,” she argues, “so you think. What’s wrong with that? Maybe you do worry too much sometimes, but that’s part of being you. I prefer that sort of man to someone who is merely a bundle of conditioned reflexes. And if that girl really wanted you, she ought to have known that she would have to take the final step toward you.”
In any event, as the first postwar year turned into the second, I was deeply involved in analysis and reflection in re Maggie Ward.
Maggie would not join our quiet family New Year’s party. She had promised the night to Wade. I drank too many beers, far too many, and woke up in time to listen to the Rose Bowl game.
Illinois beat UCLA 45–14. A Big Ten victory—that will show you how long ago 1947 was!
The next morning I actually rode the El down to Loyola to spend a couple of hours in the law-school library, studying civil procedures. After lunch I strolled over to the Drake to talk to Maggie. My rival was with her.
He was a jerk.
Wade McCarron was about thirty, taller than me, broad-shouldered with receding blond hair and a developing potbelly. Like many other big men who are beginning to go to seed because of an excess of food and drink and a deficit of exercise, he compensated by sucking in his gut and pushing out his chest.
Maggie introduced us in the lower lobby of the Drake, without a flicker of emotion. We established that Wade was from Tennessee, had served in the Marines on Guadalcanal and Iwo, rising from the ranks to become a bird colonel, and that he had made a lot of money on the Board of Trade. We also put on the record his dislike of navy flyers who had done nothing to support his troops on the ground.
“The young lady says she doesn’t want to see you anymore, fly-boy,” Wade McCarron informed me. “If I were in your position, I’d pay attention to her.”
I didn’t take him seriously. He was a crude blowhard, a pathetic loudmouth. At most he was another one of Maggie’s strays.
“Where did you folks spend New Year’s Eve?” I asked, pretending that we were engaged in a casual, friendly conversation.
“Colosimo’s,” Maggie said coldly. “It was very interesting … and you made a promise,” she added coldly. “I told you that I didn’t want to see you anymore and you agreed.”
“Typical spoiled navy brat,” McCarron snarled. “I won’t warn you again, punk.”
“I have an appointment with Dr. Feurst this afternoon,” I said to Maggie, ignoring her escort’s silly bluster.
“I gave you permission to see him.” She wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I’ve kept my promise; why don’t you keep yours?”
“Because he’s a no ‘count hound dog, hon,” the ex-colonel informed her, in a voice that had taken on a mountaineer’s accent. “He needs a good whupping.”
“I will not stand here while you two men humiliate me with your tough talk, I do not intend to be late for class.” Maggie stalked away.
“First you get whupped, worm.” He tried to sound mean. “Then you get killed. Clear?”
“I’m terrified.” I turned on my heel and walked out. Maggie had a certain taste for losers. What was she up to?
I pondered that during the brief walk back to Loyola and concluded that she thought Wade was safe because she would not fall in love with him and I was not safe because she was already in love with me.
I fed a stack of quarters into a public phone in the Lewis Tower’s lobby. My friend at the Bureau of Personnel told me enthusiastically that they were much better organized now. I rejoiced with him and posed my new question. He must have had the material on his desk: no officer named McCarron had fought on Iwo. And after a few seconds’ search he added that no one with that surname had been on Guadal either.
I thanked him, told him to forget about Andrew Koenig and check on a recruit named Wade McCarron from Tennessee.
Maggie’s current stray was not only a loudmouth, he was a phony.
That fact did not make him any less dangerous, a truth that should have been self-evident.
I worked out the scenario in my head as I ambled down Michigan Avenue to the 50 East Washington Building, even then an aerie for shrinks. Dr. Feurst, however, was not an eagle but an elf, a Jewish elf from the Schwarzwald, a bald, vest-pocket Santa Claus with a propensity to massacre English syntax as his laughter indeed shook his belly like a bowlful of jelly.
“Ya, gottdammit, vatdahell, young fella,” those phrases in various orders served as punctuation marks for his discourse. “She vill neffer get over vat hast been done to her. Vat you dink? Psychological problems are like da common cold? Vatdahell?”
“I shouldn’t try to persuade her to marry me?”
“Vatdahell, young fella.” He pounded his belly as if he were weak from laughing at me. “Gottdammit, absolutely not, nein?”
“Absolutely not what?” I did not want to like this mad little character, who even put his finger next to his nose when he talked, as did the real Claus.
“Gottdammit, vat’s wrong vit you, young fella? Don’t you understand plain English? You should absolutely not abandon your—ha!—chase of da young voman? She make fine bride, nein?”
“She won’t recover from the, uh, traumas of her life, but I should still try to marry her?”
“Iss contradiction? Gottdammit? Iss attractive, iss smart, iss brave. Vhy not marry her? So you don’t have any problems, ya?”
“As I understand you, Doctor”—I was laughing with him now, despite myself—”you’re saying that Maggie’s losses will always be with her and will always shape her personality, but they won’t prevent her from being a good—and happy—wife and mother?”
“Gottdammit, young fella, vat else I been saying all dis dime, nein? Except she vant them get in da vay. Iss always possible. Iss healthy young voman, ya? But can do unhealthy dings, nein?”
“She loves me, I dink, uh, think. No, I know she loves me. But she wants time to work out her problems with you and to attend college.…”
“Vatdahell, young fella, you make wife stop seeing me?”
“No.”
“Gottdammit, you make her stop going school, stop ruining pretty eyes on all dem books?”
“Certainly not.”
“Zoooo?”
“Sometime maybe but not indefinite?”
“Vhy you keep repeating vat I already say? You vant be celibate like brother? Ha! So you don’t vait forever, ya, nein?”
“I see.” I didn’t, but I should have.
“Zoooo, gottdammit, you someday make her choose like mature, pretty young girl, ya? But don’t manipulate … iss werra bad, werra terrible, nein?”
“Manipulate?”
“Yah, sure. Gottdammit. Misses father, nein? Nice man, veak man, ya? She takes care of veak man. You iss not veak man. Don’t pretend you can’t live vitout her, gottdammit?”
“Yah.”
“Freedom!” He leaped to his feet, an elf celebrating liberty. “Ve must all respect everyone’s freedom. Dat is vat you fought for, nein? Even the freedom to make our own mistakes, gottdammit, young fella. So you respect her freedom even to make her own mistakes, even tragic mistakes. Yah? Nein?”
“Don’t exploit her sympathy and let her make her own mistakes.” That’s the wisdom with which I came away from Dr. Feurst’s office.
Unexceptionable wisdom. After decades of trying to practice the granting of such freedom to those I love, I know that such a grant is not incompatible with pressure on the beloved, up till the very last second. I suppose I should have known it then. Perhaps I did not want to. Perhaps having found Dulcinea, I was now discovering that I didn’t want her. Certainly the notes in my journal that night, so different from the two conversations I wrote in my story notebook—housed in Maggie’s Florentine-leather Christmas present—suggest that I was beginning to think that she was not, after all, worth the candle.
But first I must record the third conversation, the only talk my father and I ever had about sex.
We met by accident at the Lake Street El station. The temperature had risen to the upper twenties, a promise perhaps of spring still far away. We walked home down neatly shoveled sidewalks and past snow-covered evergreens and Christmas-lighted windows—no picture windows in River Forest.
“Are you in love with that little girl from Philly?” he asked abruptly in his “friendly witness on the stand” courtroom manner.
“I think so.”
“Are you going to bed with her?”
It was the first hint I had ever heard from his lips that men and women engaged in such activity.
“No … I did in Arizona.”
“That’s an important part of marriage,” he went on, as though my previous reply had no effect on his line of questioning. “More important than the priests and nuns seem to know. It gets even more important as the years go on. Not less, despite what you might have heard. At least it should.”
“I would hope so.”
He glanced at me with a satisfied smile. “It isn’t easy. Women aren’t prepared …” He sighed. “Neither are men, for that matter.”
“Margaret was married before, you know.”
“I’m not sure that makes much difference. Under the circumstances.”
“She’s a remarkably determined young woman.”
He glanced at me again, understanding my answer to mean that Maggie had proved a promising bedmate in Arizona.
“It’s a thing you can’t afford to let yourself give up on. Women’s needs are different, but not completely different. You need patience and persistence. The persistence is more important, especially when you find yourself tiring of patience and try to persuade yourself that sex isn’t important because there are other glues holding your marriage together—kids, home, plans. Then you really have to be persistent. And not worry about making a fool out of yourself. It’s like hitting a home run with the bases loaded and two outs in the ninth.”
“I understand.”
“Some people are more fortunate than others. They establish patterns early. But still they have to keep at it.”
“I understand.”
“Your mother is a remarkable woman,” he continued, his eyes darting nervously. “I’m sure you see through the mask of vagueness she wears sometimes.”
“Sure.” I hadn’t seen through that mask very often.
“Most of our friends think I am the dominant one in the family.” He shoved his hands firmly into the pockets of his overcoat. “You doubtless perceive the truth—that she is the stronger of us two and influences me far more than I influence her.”
“Certainly.” I had not perceived that at all.
“Even in this matter,” he stated, turning an even darker shade of red, “while I may have been the more, uh, forceful at the beginning, we have reached a certain balance now; indeed I sometimes think to myself—though I would never say it directly to her—that even here she is in fact often the leader.”
I often ponder that revelation when folks who grew up after 1960 think that they have discovered for the first time that women like sex.
“I understand.”
“What do you understand?” he demanded irritably.
“That you and Mom have a great sexual relationship.”
“Do you? I wondered whether kids notice.…”
“Oh, yes.” A lot of pieces of a puzzle that I had never noticed before fell into place: the closed bedroom door on Saturday mornings, sounds of muffled laughter, smiles over secret jokes, extra affection in a “good-bye” kiss in the morning or a “hello” kiss in the evening. All part of the ordinary environment of our life, no more requiring special explanation than did breathing.
Good for them, I say, even forty years later.
“The matters of the, uh, bedroom can hardly be kept totally secret,” he murmured, averting his eyes from mine, “they do tend to pervade the rest of life”—he laughed nervously—”don’t they? Yet you can hardly talk about it, much less explain it to your children, can you? Or ask them if they comprehend the, hmmm, intensity that is involved and the way it soothes other … problems.”
“Even Maggie noticed.”
“At Christmas?”
“At the dance.”
He laughed, both embarrassed and complacent. “The young woman would be burned as a witch in another century.”
“Definitely.”
“She’s precious, son. A gold mine.”
The Dutchman’s mine?
“She’s had a rough life for one so young.”
“All the more reason to tread carefully. And be patient.”
We had arrived at our Dutch Colonial house, so the conversation was over. Sex had been mentioned explicitly, once and by me. But my father had pretty much told me the story of his marriage-long love affair with my mother. I loved them both at that moment as I had never loved them before.
“Dad …” I blurted.
“Yes?” He sounded irritable again, displeased that the awkward topic had not been finished.
“Well … if my wife is as beautiful and wonderful as yours”—Maggie Ward had loosened my tongue—”I don’t think I’d be able to keep my hands off her either.”
His bushy white eyebrows shot up in delight. He pounded me on the back.
“You indeed are my son.” He laughed. “Never a doubt.”
Did he add “And be persistent” at the end of the conversation? Given his own fondness for Maggie Ward, I can’t believe he did not. But I didn’t record it in my story notebook.
And did he recount our conversation to Mom, perhaps in bed that night? Then I didn’t think so. Now I’m certain he did. And I’m sure they both laughed at me, quietly and affectionately.
As I consider my record of this conversation in the now dry and cracked “storybook” Maggie Ward gave me for Christmas in 1946, I am convinced that my mother and father are together again, still deeply in love, in heaven or, as my son Jamie the priest puts it, “in that which is to come.” I still ponder their lifelong love affair. What rhetoric, what vocabulary did they have to talk about their love? Or did they talk about it? And how did they know at the beginning of their romance that they were well matched? Or did they?
Were they just lucky? Or was there some instinct that possessed them both?
“You can’t figure out everything,” my wife says. “You were the lucky one to be born from such a marriage.”
Amen to that.
My journal that night was devoted entirely to the pros and the cons in re Margaret Mary Ward.
The cons were pretty strong.
She’s eighteen years old, the age of a freshman in college, a girl who would have graduated last June from Trinity. If she had grown up in River Forest, I would not date someone that young, no matter how pretty she might be. She is erratic and unpredictable and heavily burdened by the losses in her family. They are not her fault, but she will still bring them with her to marriage. As Dr. Feurst said, she will mourn for them as long as she lives. She is a fascinating lover, but I must not permit sex to blind me to the problems she has.
Dulcinea sought is much safer than Maggie Ward found.
I did not add what was also the obvious truth: her vitality and determination, her sensuality and passion, scared me.
That night I dreamed again about Hank and Rusty and the other men whose bunks were empty after missions on which I had led them.