The Search for Maggie Ward

by Andrew M. Greeley

  I wanted to take her in my arms and make love to her all night long, I wanted to anoint her as my teacher in the art of love, I wanted to play with her marvelous body until the end of time—and she wanted me to believe in God!

  “Why?”

  “Is that your one question?”

  “No.”

  “All right. I’ll tell you why anyway.”

  “Doesn’t count against me?”

  “Be quiet and listen.… Oh, thank you very much. It’s wonderful!”

  She gleefully accepted her renewed brandy snifter from the waiter, who placed it in front of her as though she were Princess Elizabeth.

  So, as a matter of fact, did I gleefully accept mine, although I clearly did not rate in his book even the rank of faithful equerry to a magic princess.

  “You ought to believe in God”—she hesitated, looking for a reason and then rushed on—”because of the moonlight on those desert mountains.”

  Quick and resourceful. To my catalog of her virtues, I must now add that she not only sized up people and situations with an agile and penetrating intelligence, she was no mean debater.

  “Would it break my promise if I asked whether you were on the debating team in school?”

  “It certainly would. It would even break your promise to ask about asking.”

  “Then I won’t even ask about asking anymore.”

  “Better not.” She sipped the brandy and giggled. “Of course I was on the debating team.”

  “Tell me about the moonlight on the Catalinas.”

  “The moon bathes the whole world, the mountains and the desert, the animals and the humans, in white forgiveness.”

  “If there’s a moon, there has to be God?”

  “Right.” She leaned toward me, the enthusiastic debater about to score her point. “If there’s moonlight and coyotes yapping and owls hooting and the fragrance of the flowers here in the garden … and the touch of your hand”—she touched my fingers with hers—”and friendship and love and kindness and the stars, and”—she laughed—”chocolate sauce on ice cream and swimming pools after hot days in the desert”—she pushed my hand away playfully—”if there are all those good things in the world, must there not be God?”

  “What about Frank Stilwell?”

  “Who? Oh, the man in the story.”

  “No, the man in real life whose town you were afraid to visit. Is God responsible for Stilwell killing Morgan Earp? Or for Doc Holliday and Wyatt killing Frank? Or for Josie Marcus stirring up the whole feud by trading Johnny Behan in for Wyatt?”

  “You’re asking questions.”

  “Making arguments.”

  “I’m not innocent about evil, Jeremiah Keenan.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest you were. But your argument is. You don’t account for evil in the world. If your God is responsible for all the good, then He’s responsible for Josie Earp and Johnny Behan and Frank Stilwell too.”

  It was a freshman natural-theology argument in Western folklore terms, I acknowledge that completely. But I was responding to the traditional argument of Saint Thomas in high school religion class format, presented, I also admit, with considerable charm and enthusiasm.

  “I can’t account for evil.” She sighed and bent back into her chair. “But you,” she said as she jabbed a triumphant finger at me, “can’t account for good, not even your own wonderful personal goodness.”

  “So now I’m an argument for God against myself?”

  “You bet.” She nodded vigorously. “If there isn’t a God, how come there’s such a good man as Commander Jerry Keenan?”

  “I’m not that good.”

  “Yes, you are. Bad men I take for granted. A young widow finds out all about them in a hurry. A good man is a wonderful surprise.”

  “You’re forgetting what I tried to do up at Gates Pass?”

  “Dear God in heaven, Jerry, why do you pretend that you’re made of armor plate instead of human flesh?”

  There wasn’t much left of my armor-plated heart at that moment.

  We were both silent for a minute or two, alone with our own melted coronary muscles.

  “I don’t know what to do about you, Andrea King.”

  “What you should do about me is listen to my arguments and admit I’m right.” She laughed like a woman leprechaun.

  “From you the arguments are a lot more persuasive than from the ancient cleric who insisted I memorize them at Notre Dame a few lifetimes ago.”

  “I think that’s a compliment, but I’m not sure. If it is, thank you.”

  “It was, and you’re welcome. It comes free of charge with the Keenan white moonlight forgiveness service.”

  “You’re not being serious.” I saw her frown in the white moonlight as she finished her cognac.

  “Another one?”

  “You’d have to carry me to my room.”

  “That’s part of the service. We tuck our clients into bed.”

  “I bet you do. And you’re still not being serious.”

  “I am postponing it. Now let me think for a moment.…” I searched for a response that would be both honest and satisfactory for my lovely teacher. “Would you consider tonight’s lesson a success if I said you’d given me a lot to think about?”

  Even now I am rather proud of that answer.

  “Very clever.” She was both appeased and unappeased, a good condition in which to keep a woman.

  “But, since I am sincere about that answer, is it all right?”

  “All right.” She sounded dubious.

  “Now do I get to ask my question?”

  “If you want.”

  Had she really yawned?

  “I am keeping you awake.”

  “Yes, but ask your question.”

  “How come you’re so interested in selling me a God who you believe has suspended you, in your own words, Miss Teacher, between earth and hell? To rephrase the question, not, I hasten to add”—I finished my cognac, too—”ask another question, why are you working so hard in the cause of a God who has been cruel enough to reject you, a God who bathes everyone but you in white forgiveness?”

  “It’s different.” She sounded listless, beaten.

  “Tell me how.”

  “You’re not only a good man, Jerry, like I’ve been trying to tell you all day—has it really only been a day?—you’re a great man. You’re important. You’ll do wonderful things for many people during your life. I don’t matter.”

  “You’re crazy to think that.”

  “All right.” She was angry. “I’m crazy.”

  “I didn’t say you were crazy, woman.” My lawyer genes had clicked into operation, like auxiliary fuel tanks. “I said it’s crazy to think you don’t matter.”

  “Not like you do.”

  The cognac had addled my brain. “I won’t believe in a God who doesn’t think you matter.”

  “Very clever.”

  “At your service, ma’am. Is the argument over?”

  “For tonight.”

  The silent pause was longer this time. We both, I thought, had got to one another. In many different ways. Not a bad day by any means.

  She rose from the wrought-iron chair, rather unsteadily. “We both need sleep. Neither of us had much last night.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “You drove all night, didn’t you? Besides, you’re so old, you should get your sleep.”

  She weaved, a bit uncertainly, toward the door to the inn.

  I hadn’t told her that I’d driven all night. But it didn’t matter.

  “I’ll assist you,” I said as I took firm possession of her elbow, “to your room in the other wing.”

  “Lest I collapse on my face and sleep in the corridor like a fall-down drunk.”

  “A courtesy of our service.” I opened the door for her.

  “That will be nice.”

  It took us some time and much tipsy laughter to find the right corridor.

  At the d
oor of her room, in the dimly lit and suggestive pastel hallway, I kissed her forehead. She lowered her eyes. “Good night, Commander, and thank you.”

  “Thank you,” I said and prepared to depart, full steam astern, if you please.

  Instead I said, “I don’t think I’m finished kissing you.”

  She leaned back against the door and examined me meticulously. I put both hands on the door, surrounding her, so to speak.

  “Well?” She tilted her jaw.

  “I’m maybe not all that good at it. I don’t want to say too much and I don’t want to say too little. With the kissing, I mean.”

  That will give you some idea of what a bungler I was, Navy Crosses or not.

  “Up to me to make an evaluation, Commander?”

  “Right.”

  “You want my permission?”

  “No. Well … no. I’m going to kiss you whether you like it or not.”

  “Ah.”

  “You don’t seem ready to fight me off.”

  “You’re bigger and stronger.”

  “That’s true. But you could make a fuss.”

  “Who would hear me?”

  “Someone might.”

  I was making a terrible mess out of it. Or maybe I wasn’t. Her big blue eyes were soft and round—amusement, affection, anticipation.

  She put her arms around me. “Carry on, CAG.”

  Commander, Air Group. She knew I had been that too.

  So I carried on, gently at first, barely brushing her forehead and her cheeks, her eyelids and her earlobes, her chin and her nostrils. She put her hands, holding a tiny black purse, behind her back, the completely submissive slave.

  “Very clever.” She sighed.

  Then her throat and the back of her neck, her sweet-smelling hair, her shoulders, down one arm and up the other, then the route back, oh, so slowly, to her lips.

  “You’ve been practicing,” she said with a sigh.

  “Only imagining. Quality still passable?”

  “I think so … no final judgment yet.”

  I brushed her lips back and forth, hardly touching them at first. They tasted of cognac and coffee and chocolate ice cream, savors I wanted to hold forever. She sagged against the door, absorbing all the affection I had to offer. Her eyes were open but lidded, not seeing anything. My lips became more insistent, inciting, then forcing her to respond.

  She hesitated, and then matched me kiss for kiss, demanding as much as she was giving. Our lips burned into each other, our tongues tormented each other, our bodies locked in passionate embrace, her heart pounded against her tiny rib cage, her breasts thrust against my chest. I felt, or imagined I felt, hard nipples digging into me. We were rushing toward the rapids.

  She gently pushed me away.

  “Not too bad at all,” she said, trying to sound casual, but really gasping.

  “Grade, please.”

  “Well.” She put her finger on her chin in feigned thought, but her breasts were still moving up and down rapidly against her dress. “C plus.… no, maybe B minus.”

  “Witch.” I swatted at her rear, tightly girdled as I thought it would be, not hard enough to have any impact.

  She snickered. “You kiss better than you swat. Which is fine with me.” She took a key out of her purse, fingers still trembling, and opened the door to her room. “Now I think I’d better head for home port. Quickly.”

  Uncertain lover that I was, I could not leave well enough alone.

  “I’m sorry if I … I didn’t mean to … if you’re offended …”

  “Oh, Jerry.” She looked up at me with the adoring expression that so quickly melted my heart. “All you did was kiss me, very gently and affectionately, too. I’m not angry, only out of breath and a little bit overwhelmed. Good night,” she said as she bussed my cheek, “and thank you for everything.”

  I hesitated at the door as it closed and then gave again the command for full speed astern. If I had invited myself into her room and into her bed, she would not, I thought on that stern run, have resisted. But we had a whole lifetime ahead of us. Why should I rush her?

  I was, after all, trustworthy, if not completely trustworthy.

  I undressed and, clad in my shorts, sat down wearily at the table in my room. I had learned early in my resolution that if one intends to keep a journal—as I had since I sailed for the western Pacific—one must work at it every night, no matter how tired one is.

  So, my brain dulled from the Napoleon and the taste of Andrea’s lips and maybe from the ingenuity of her theology, I scribbled an account of the day’s adventure. It is next to my monitor as I work on this story. As is the picture I’ll tell you about later.

  As I wrote I paused often to look out at the full moon drenching the desert in Andrea’s white forgiveness.

  The moon, I thought, stands for romance and love. Or so they say. But if you were looking at it for the first time and had none of the background images our culture hands down about it, you might well think it sinister instead of reassuring or forgiving. It’s cold, unfeeling, deadly. No wonder the coyotes are howling at it. It is supposed to cause madness and bring out werewolves and vampires, demons and ghosts.

  Did it bring out Andrea for me?

  That initial gut reaction was still with me, not lodging with my intelligence officer who didn’t believe in ghosts, and completely disregarded by my poet/lover self who was, as you probably have grasped, completely enchanted.

  No, the gut suspicion about Andrea was deep in the soul of Jeremiah Keenan the wild, superstitious, frightened pagan Celt. Jerry the berserker, the guy who takes on DDs with fifty-caliber machine guns.

  Let me quote for you what the lover/poet wrote at the end of his journal that night:

  I’ve always thought women were confusing, but not complicated. Barbara was unpredictable because she did not value consistency in the slightest, not because there was any mystery about her. My sister Joanne is the same way. The only puzzle about her is how she can live with her own erratic emotions. But Andrea King is confusing because she is complicated.

  She’s bright, quick, more intelligent than I am. And probably more experienced in many ways too. Yet she is also an innocent little girl, almost untouched by the nastiness of her life. She’s modest and reserved and even secretive, but also sensual, frighteningly sensual maybe. She likes me, and at times even admires me, but she thinks I’m a funny if talented little boy.

  She’s witty and is at least as hot-tempered as I am. But when she drinks you in with her soft, warm blue eyes, you want to sleep in her arms while she croons lullabies to you for the rest of your life. She has an almost grim hunger for life, a passion for knowledge and experience and even power. An incredible will to live, given all that has happened to her. Yet she seems to think that she’s already condemned, already maybe even among the dead. She preaches God’s love to me, passionately, I would say, but doesn’t think God loves her.

  Any God that doesn’t love her is out of His mind.

  If you produce a creature like Andrea King and don’t fall totally in love with her, you don’t have much taste.

  Is that a prayer? My night prayers for this twenty-second day of July in the year of Our Lord, whoever He may be, nineteen hundred and forty-six?

  I don’t know but it will have to do for night prayers. I love her as I have never loved anyone else. I’ve only known her for seventeen hours. If You who have known her all her life, indeed all eternity if my teachers are to be believed, are not prepared to take care of her and protect her, then screw you. Or screw You, if You prefer.

  An incomplete but not inaccurate description, even from the perspective of forty years.

  There is, as must be obvious, one important point that escaped me completely. Partly because I had no real experience of women yet and partly because I did not comprehend the nature of my impact on others, particularly women, it did not occur to me that I might have touched something deep and passionate within her soul.

  Deep
and passionate and quite possibly dangerous.

  Only as I was falling into a happy, if slightly inebriated sleep, did I wonder who she thought had sent her into my life. If not God, then who else?

  Then came the dreams, not of my lovely Andrea, but of the men I had killed about whom I would never tell her. My own men.

  CHAPTER 7

  I WOKE UP WITH A HEADACHE AND A CHILL, THE FORMER from too much cognac and too many nightmares—and maybe from a little sexual frustration—and the latter from the air conditioner.

  “Pilots, man your planes,” I ordered myself, pulled on swimming trunks, grabbed a towel and stumbled down the corridor to the swimming pool.

  It was already hot and my friend was already in the pool, as grim-faced as I felt.

  “Good morning,” I tried.

  “Prove it,” she said, ducking her head back under water.

  “Did you sleep well?” I tested the pool with my foot. It seemed too cold despite the hot tiles of the pool patio.

  “No. Did you?”

  “No.”

  She stopped swimming and clung to the side of the pool, watching me anxiously. “Was it my fault?”

  “No,” I answered, honestly enough. “Disappointed?”

  She swam away in a huff, beating the water angrily. Ah, I thought, it’s going to be one of those days.

  I picked up her towel, so as to be ready with it when she decided that she had had enough swimming. A book fell out. Crime and Punishment. On my list to read someday. She was already seventy-five pages into it. Her night must have been as restless as mine.

  She rose from the pool, an adequately clad and still angry Venus.

  Like the dutiful servant I was, I wrapped the towel around her lovely shoulders and resisted, with considerable effort, the impulse to kiss the back of her lovely neck.

  I presented her with Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. Accompanied by the usual deep bow I reserve for grand duchesses.

  “Don’t get it wet,” she snapped.

  “Yes, my lady Grand Duchess,” I said with an even deeper bow.

  She glared at me as she stomped off, but I think there was a twinkle in her eye.

  I sighed with admiration for my virtue as I dived into the water, regretting that she had not seen my nearly perfect swan dive.