The Widow's Mate

by Ralph McInerny

  “Wow,” he said, looking around.

  “You like it?”

  “What are you, an heiress?”

  “Ha.”

  He told her he was an orphan; she told him her own condition was not much better. Her affair with Wally had erected a huge barrier to her past, and she had stopped seeing her widowed father, who was the only close relative she had.

  “Who will give you away?”

  She looked at him. He waited. “Someone already has.”

  “Who?”

  “Me.”

  “To whom?”

  “You.”

  So three months after her arrival in San Diego, she became Mrs. Gregory Packer. They honeymooned in Taos. When they returned, he got a job managing a driving range.

  “You can be the financier,” he said.

  By then, she had told him of her portfolio, of course. How ironic that it provided the security for their marriage—all those investments she had made under Wally’s direction that were to have been the financial foundation on which she and Wally would build their life together.

  “I feel like a gigolo.”

  “No you don’t.” And she tickled him.

  * * *

  Two years later she would look back on that idyllic period when she and Greg were newlyweds with awed horror. She came to regret telling him of her investments.

  “Wally sure set you up,” he said.

  At the time, it didn’t occur to her that she had never told him about her affair. She had described Wally as her broker. Even so, it was the first seed of doubt.

  Greg became obsessed with her investments. The first time he suggested that the portfolio should be in both their names, an awful doubt began in her. His behavior increased the doubt. Her refusal made him surly and then abusive. After the first time he actually hit her, she locked him out of the apartment. Of course, he had a key, but that could not remove the chain and inside bolt. He beat on the door, and she covered her ears. It was awful. She was frightened of him now, truly frightened. She had never before been struck by a man, and this was her husband. When the noise stopped and he went away, she sat in an unlit room and asked herself what kind of an idiot she was. First she had been betrayed by Wally, and now she had married a monster who had been a boyhood friend of Wally’s. Some hours later, when she was packing his things, determined that she would never again be exposed to Greg’s abuse, she found the folder of clippings from Chicago papers. She sat on the bed and went through them. They were all about Wally and his disappearance. Sandy stared unseeing at the wall. Suddenly all the events of her meeting Greg took on a new and sinister aspect: their seemingly accidental meeting, their swift courtship, his interest in her investments. The worst thought of all was that Wally had told Greg of her. Had he suggested that Greg might play the role meant for him?

  At two in the morning, she left the apartment, making two trips to her car in the garage below the building. As she put things in the trunk, she could scarcely breathe, half fearing that Greg would leap out from behind a parked car, but she got away and drove to Anaheim, where she stayed in a motel. The next day she sold her car and bought another and then drove north to Oxnard. The main thing was to sever all ties with the man she had married. She thought of using her mother’s maiden name, but it was easier, if risky, to resume her own. How like Wally she had become.

  * * *

  As the years passed, Sandy felt she was putting in time in purgatory. No one who knew her would have understood. She began as a secretary in a brokerage and swiftly moved up the ladder. She had the Midas touch, and with respect to her own investments, it seemed almost a curse. The thought that amassing money was a silly objective would have been heresy in her Oxnard firm. Her marriage to Greg came to seem an unreal interlude. She did not divorce him, of course; that would have brought them together again. Wally? He, too, became a distant memory. Sometimes she thought that she had become a kind of nun. Religion had become her main consolation.

  From time to time, she bought a Chicago paper, but she learned of Wally’s death and the discovery of his body in one of the cement-mixing trucks his father owned from a news site on the Web. She might so easily never have learned of it. When she did, the kind of thoughts she had had when she discovered all the clippings about Wally that Greg had collected began again, more sinister still. Those thoughts would not go away. Of course, she had read of Greg’s difficulties with the woman who owned the driving range he managed. The difficulty was smoothed over when he married her, making him a bigamist. From time to time, she ran a check on Greg, using Lexus, but his name never came up in connection with Wally’s death. Greg’s conviction for stealing from his Loop employer seemed in character. After he completed his term in Joliet, he no longer figured in Lexus.

  But the discovery of Wally’s body, nearly ten years after he disappeared, created the greatest mystery of all. What had he been doing during all those lost years? Why had he not joined her in San Diego? Not even time could make the hurt of his abandonment of her go away. So she had returned to Chicago.

  Tuttle’s secretary suggested that the lawyer come to her, and she named a coffee bar in Water Tower Place.

  7

  After all the years as a single mother, Edna found adjusting to Earl’s release from Joliet difficult. So did he. Each of them had become used to life without the other, to solitude. Her work at the St. Hilary senior center, begun as a kind of therapy, had become a welcome and satisfying daily routine. Earl got a job as a driver for Flanagan Concrete and began the slow recovery from years of confinement. He tried to tell her what being free meant. She listened and had some inkling of the contrast. He could actually live his life as he wanted. What he wanted was to be with her and the kids, and a routine; the job at Flanagan’s provided that. It sounded boring to Edna, but what did her job at St. Hilary’s seem to him?

  A remark of Marie Murkin’s made her realize that Earl was working for a company connected with the Queen Bee, the Widow Flanagan, and until she learned that Melissa had no involvement in the company, Edna kept aloof from the dazzling new addition to her wards. Of course, the man she called Lothario, Greg Packer, kept the Queen Bee busy. When Marie told Edna the story of Melissa’s husband, Edna felt a surge of sympathy for the attractive and still youthful widow. She supplemented Marie’s knowing remarks with a study of back issues of the Tribune.

  When she talked to Earl about it, he fell silent. “Don’t get too curious,” he advised.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a variation on the concrete overcoat.”

  She didn’t understand. He explained, cryptically. The mob? Of course, she had heard of the Pianones. They were part of local lore, but it had always seemed a romantic exaggeration to Edna. She had even met Peanuts Pianone, the member of the family who was on the police force and always hanging about with Tuttle. Suddenly Melissa became for Edna a tragic and fascinating person, but it was rare when she found her apart from Greg Packer. She asked her to come up to her office for tea.

  “This was the principal’s office,” Melissa said, standing in the doorway. “Sister Ellen Joseph.”

  “You went to school here?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought that possible. When was that?”

  Melissa lowered her head and smiled. “You can’t expect me to answer that.”

  Melissa marveled at the fact that Edna actually brewed tea, no tea bags.

  “This tea set was a wedding gift.”

  “So you’re married?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Edna wondered what the old people made of her. They would have known of her kids, of course, but for years there had been no husband in evidence. Earl’s return had given her an advantage over Melissa but did not alter her sense that the two of them had known difficulties most women are spared.

  Melissa tasted her tea and looked around the office. “How nice it must be to work here.”

  “I like it.”


  “But all us old people.”

  Melissa did show age, up close, but this did not alter her beauty.

  “You and Greg Packer must be the youngest of those who come regularly.”

  “Are you fishing for my age?” She asked it with a smile. Edna knew her age, though. It seemed an unfair advantage to know as much about Melissa as she did, but how many people have their troubles trumpeted by the media, not once but twice?

  Edna learned that Melissa and Greg had been students in the parish school at the same time. “My husband, too.”

  When the conversation was brought to the point that Edna had hoped for, she found she could not pursue it. “And you remained in the parish.”

  “Well, I’m back. My father-in-law didn’t want to sell the family home when he moved to Chicago and suggested I take it.”

  “And you did?”

  “Sometimes I regret it. All the memories.”

  Again Edna would have liked Melissa to pour forth those memories, and again she did not pursue it. Perhaps, when they got to know one another better, Melissa would tell her—but her own curiosity repelled her. How would she have reacted if people had pressed her on what had happened to Earl? “It bothers me that there is really so little for people to do in the center. If you have any ideas…”

  “Don’t change a thing! It’s perfect as it is. There is more than enough to do, but it is just being here that is the main thing.”

  It was odd to think of this lovely woman with all the money in the world describing the Spartan offerings of the St. Hilary parish center as perfect. Edna was pleased. It confirmed her belief, born of experience, that the elderly did not want to be organized and hustled about and entertained. Bridge, shuffleboard, and mainly conversation, the exchange of memories and gossip, were entertainment enough.

  “I feel I’ve had an interview with Sister Ellen Joseph,” Melissa said when she finished her tea.

  “Did that ever happen?”

  “Oh, Greg Packer had more experience of that. He was the class rowdy.” She said it with a burst of affection.

  “Have you two kept in touch over the years?”

  “Oh, no! He just popped up out of the past. I didn’t really remember him. He didn’t like that.”

  “Men are vain,” Edna said, accompanying Melissa to the door.

  “Like women.”

  It seemed a gentle scolding.

  That first tête-à-tête left Edna full of admiration for Melissa Flanagan. She never referred to her as the Widow Flanagan again. The total absence of self-pity stirred Edna’s sympathy. Melissa, she felt, was a kindred spirit.

  8

  Father Dowling got the story of Melissa Flanagan’s husband from Marie, from Amos Cadbury, and from Phil Keegan, and the result made him ponder the nature of history. Accounts of the past are always built up from such sources. Marie was the perceptive onlooker, Amos had been a participant, and Phil represented the official, impersonal point of view. There were also the newspaper accounts, the least reliable of all because of their pretense to being neutral dispatches from outer space. He had been brought photocopies of these by Bill Kenner, a parishioner and longtime editor of the Fox River Tribune.

  “It’s all on the Web,” he had said when Father Dowling first asked if the Flanagan case had been a big story.

  “I don’t use a computer.”

  Kenner sighed. “I envy you. The damned thing has ruined journalism. We’re doomed anyway, you know. Circulation dwindles because any idiot with a computer has instant access to raw news twenty-four hours a day.”

  “The newspaper business has changed during your time?”

  “Changed!” Kenner was a spindly man with gray hair that sat on his head like a doily and brown eyes that seemed to emerge from purplish pockets. His mustache looked like an oversight, but he was constantly stroking it with thumb and index finger. His anger softened. “Father, did you ever see a linotype machine?”

  “I don’t believe I have.”

  “Oh, you couldn’t now. They’ve all gone to wherever linotype machines go when they die. It was a lovely machine. Whenever I regretted going into journalism, I would go down and watch the linotype operators. It’s all computerized now. Including the prose. No one has to know how to spell anymore. The computer does it for you.”

  There was more. They were seated on one of the benches that lined the walks of the parish grounds that led to the church or the school, this one in the shade outside the sacristy door. Kenner had not yet handed over the large envelope he had brought for Father Dowling, which looked crammed full. It seemed only fair to let him lament the changes in his profession. Kenner was in his early sixties and like some priests of that age apparently thought that the golden age in which he had begun had been replaced by one of lead—or of the plastic computers are housed in.

  “But I’m raving.” Actually Kenner spoke in the measured dirgelike tones of a sincere mourner.

  “Didn’t Mark Twain have something to do with the linotype?”

  “The poor devil backed a rival that couldn’t compete with it. He lost his shirt. Imagine, he began setting type by hand and ended wanting to mechanize the process.”

  Kenner fell silent as if, like the seminary chaplain, he had just announced a point for meditation and long thoughts were called for. Then he straightened on the bench and began to beat his knees with the envelope he had brought. “It’s all here. Strange case.”

  “So it seems. From what I’ve heard. That’s why I wanted the newspaper accounts.”

  “All the news that’s fit to print.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The reported story is only the tip of the iceberg.”

  Father Dowling waited.

  “Freedom of the press? Ha. People talk as if newspapers were owned by the public. They’re private enterprise, Father, and they subsist on advertising and local support, generally. Of course, all that introduces constraints. College journalists regularly complain because the administration, which owns the student paper, exercises restraint. They seem to think this is a violation of the divine order of things. Wait until they get a real job.”

  “Your advertisers interfere?”

  “Oh, they don’t have to. We anticipate their interference. This story should tell you what I mean.”

  Kenner actually looked over both shoulders and leaned toward Father Dowling. He whispered the word. Had the four syllables of the name ever been enunciated more distinctly? “Pi-a-no-ne.”

  “Ah.”

  “After you read this stuff, if you want to talk about it, let me know.”

  * * *

  They parted, and Father Dowling went back to the rectory and his study. He put the envelope in a desk drawer, lest it draw the curiosity of Marie Murkin. No need to tell her that he wanted to learn as much as he could of the strange events that had involved parishioners of St. Hilary’s. All the more so now that Melissa Flanagan had become a regular at the parish center. Thus far, his meetings with her had been brief and ceremonial, the pastor acknowledging the return to the parish of an old parishioner. Perhaps he seemed a novelty to her. Her memories would be of Franciscans.

  Nothing in her manner would indicate that she had been through such a series of horrible events. Father Dowling had detected in the accounts of the disappearance of Wally Flanagan the scarcely concealed suggestion that one more disgruntled spouse had decided to light out for the territory (he was rereading Huckleberry Finn). Accounts of the frantic wife’s speculations as to what dreadful things must have happened to her husband, enclosed in double quotation marks, underlined the skepticism with which the jaded media regarded her explanations. It was the fact that she had not been left destitute—far from it—that obviously puzzled reporters. Apparently Wally Flanagan had not understood the protocol for deserting husbands. It seemed clear that he intended to start over someplace else from square one.

  “Not exactly,” Phil Keegan said when they talked about the case during lulls in a Cub
s game.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He had a girlfriend.”

  “That’s not in any of the stories.”

  “Cy found out about it, and he wasn’t likely to feed it to a reporter. He ran into Flanagan and his popsy in a Loop bar.”

  “He actually met her?”

  “It was the lead he pursued, but it led nowhere.”

  “So he must have learned her name.”

  Phil nodded, but he was distracted by the game.

  “What was it?”

  “Cy would remember.”

  “Sandra Bochenski,” Cy said later, as if Father Dowling’s question were the most natural in the world. But when had Lieutenant Horvath last shown surprise?

  “And you tried to trace her.”

  “I was told she had relocated to San Diego.”

  “Who told you?”

  “The doorman of the building in which she lived on the Gold Coast. She might have been just feeding him a story, but you never know. If that was the plan, he never got to California.”

  An eloquent Hungarian silence. They both seemed to be thinking of the mangled body that had been discovered in the cement mixer of one of the Flanagan trucks.

  “But that was years after he disappeared.”

  Cy almost smiled, as if Father Dowling had hit on the important point. The real mystery lay there, in the years between the disappearance of Wally Flanagan and the discovery of his mangled body.

  “Any idea what he did during that time?”

  “It makes you think, doesn’t it, Father?”

  It did indeed. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a tale in which a man deserted his wife and lived for years just blocks away, undetected. Had Wally Flanagan spent those unaccounted-for years in Fox River?

  Cy didn’t think so. “Unless he became a recluse, he would have run the risk of discovery.”

  “It’s too bad you can’t pursue the matter.”