The Search for Maggie Ward

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Doubtless you are not as sensitive to these matters as she is,” he said as he began to scribble on a square piece of scratch paper—a neatly cut quarter of a sheet of mimeograph paper, “but, like her, you are open to influences and power we only dimly understand.”

  “Is she alive or dead?” I almost screamed at him. “Will I ever see her again?”

  “Hmn …?” He handed me the paper, on the reverse of which there were duplicated notes, in Latin. “Here is a list of books by Father Thurston, which may be of some help to you. He has made quite a study of these matters and has followed closely the research done at Duke University.”

  “Is she alive or dead?” This time I did scream. “Will I ever see her again?”

  “My very dear one”—smiling benignly, extending his arms as if in benediction—”doubtless she is alive and doubtless you will see her again … either in this world or the next, who can say.”

  “Is she in hell?”

  “Even you don’t believe that is possible, my dear.” He continued to beam cheerfully at me. “Good angels don’t come from hell, do they? And surely she was a good angel for you, was she not?”

  “I committed sexual sins with her!” I wanted to disagree with this intolerably merry man.

  “We must denounce sins of the flesh for many and good reasons, my dear.” Again the dismissive wave. “But I do not think God was very angry at either of you. You both were young, you were lonely, you needed affection and love; God had other goals for you both, surely he was tolerant of what almost inevitably had to happen in pursuit of those goals. He delights, to tell you the truth, my dear, in using crooked lines, even very crooked lines, to draw straight.”

  “What picture is he drawing for me?” I demanded hotly.

  “Who is to say, my very dear one, who is to say?”

  “What happened out there, Father?” I felt myself slump back in my straight-backed wooden chair (also standard Jesuit medieval-torture issue). “What the hell happened?”

  “Before I entered the Society, my dear,” he said as he put his hands behind his head expansively, “I was trained as a physicist. As a philosopher and now a theologian I have always had some slight interest in these diverting little events. So other members of the Society from other provinces and occasionally even a prelate of the Church will consult with me on such phenomena.”

  “We’re not the only ones it happened to?” I was disappointed, to tell you the truth.

  “You know Hamlet? More things under heaven, Horatio, than your philosophy dreams of? We live, my dear child, in a universe filled with wonder. My colleagues in physics are now ready to admit that ours is a mysterious and open cosmos which we will never completely understand. The more we know about it, the more we know that we don’t know. You and your Maggie share acute perceptive faculties, you were both under enormous strain because of recent events in your life, you stumbled into a place where there were powerful, what shall I say, residual traces of evil. You did battle with that evil. Perhaps you did not win completely, but surely you did not lose.”

  “No,” I said firmly. “They didn’t beat us.”

  “So you may have to fight them again, more likely in this world than the world of imagination, which is also a real world, my dear.”

  “I’m kind of dizzy by now, Father. I don’t think there are many men who would believe my story.”

  “Well.” He beamed enthusiastically. “I did not sprinkle you with holy water, like that poor Irishman, did I? They drink too much, you know.”

  I was prepared to forgive him his stolid German bigotry.

  “You know of other people to whom this has happened?” I still couldn’t accept the fact that we were not unique, a fact that was now encouraging.

  “That is why I did not sprinkle you with holy water. Yours is a most reward—most interesting case, but, my dear, the forces of good and evil which lurk in our cosmos, of construction and destruction, are locked in combat, in a war in heaven.” He scribbled on another sheet of paper. “Always we are involved in that war, on some rare moments of peril and grace, much more explicitly than is normal.”

  “I see.” My heart was pounding. This dialogue would be written down during the next conference. It was too good to miss.

  “This is the name of an English author, unfortunately too little known in our country. He has written a novel called War in Heaven which you might find helpful.”

  The name on the paper was “Charles Williams.” He is still too little known.

  “Should I keep on searching for her, Father?” I asked at the door of the small, stark office.

  He shook my hand energetically in his massive Teutonic paw. “I should perhaps advise you, my dear, to forget her and get on with your life.” He smiled as if blessing me. “I know that such advice is futile and perhaps even incorrect. You will never stop searching for your Maggie Ward. She is a suggestion of another world, a touch of the numinous, the wonderful, the surprising. One never forgets such hints of grace as long as one has a hunger for the numinous. No, you will always search for her.”

  Maggie Ward as grace, how about that!

  For a moment I could imagine him with wings, a five-star admiral’s uniform, and a BAR cradled in his arms.

  Even in 1946 the Church and the Jesuits were not nearly so rigid as many of us thought. A complex, faintly daffy man like Father Donniger could be an angel of freedom for a haunted young man—even if he could not promise that the haunting would ever end.

  In the next few days I devoured the books of Herbert Thurston, S.J., and Charles Williams. I found that there was a reasonable explanation, as outlined by Father Donniger, for what had happened in the Superstition Mountains. Reasonable, if not altogether rational.

  My pain over the loss of my Maggie did not abate, but now it did not seem a lunatic pain.

  The retreat master’s words on tenderness caused me to be more tender and hence more passionate with Kate.

  His words on the continuing search for Maggie Ward caused me to accept her decision to break up.

  On Sunday, December 8, 1946, I went to Mass and received Holy Communion for the first time in two years, much to the delight of my parents and my siblings. I had already started to turn my dialogues into little stories.

  The week before, as I found out the next morning, when I came down off my retreat high, the Cardinals had beaten the Bears 35-28.

  December 15 would be the playoff with the hated New York Giants. It would be a day which, for many reasons, I would never forget.

  CHAPTER 32

  THE WEEK BEFORE THE BEARS PLAYED THE GIANTS, I SAW Maggie Ward in a snowstorm on Maxwell Street.

  Maxwell Street was what we would call today a flea market in the heart of the first West Side Jewish “ghetto” (described a little later in the sociological classic by Louis Wirth), a middle-eastern bazaar a few blocks west of the Loop. You could buy almost anything your heart desired—clothing, food, jewelry, furniture, appliances—in its wood and canvas sheds and on top of upturned wooden crates on the curbs and in the gutters. The only provision was that a buyer must be prepared to haggle over the price with the seller, often a frail old man in a battered cap that made him look a little bit like an ancient Leon Trotsky. You would ruin a bearded Maxwell Street merchant’s day if you accepted his asking price. The hard-fought bargain was the heartbeat of Maxwell Street life.

  I could afford to buy my clothes at Marshall Field’s or order them made to my specifications from a tailor. Neither was nearly as much fun as a couple of hours of glorious haggling with the shrewd old merchants of Maxwell Street, whose beards and accents I often suspect were carefully maintained as essential components of the game.

  I had decided in early December that my clothes were not “funky” enough, as my kids would have said. The appropriate style for a vet was GI surplus—khaki slacks, an “Ike” jacket with an insignia from another outfit, a fatigue shirt, combat boots, and maybe a Wehrmacht great coat for the winter.

>   My San Diego civilian sport clothes were distinctly unfashionable.

  I argued with CIC that it was all right to accept the fashion self-consciously as long as I bought my new apparel on Maxwell Street. He did not dispute the point.

  I found everything I wanted on that December day with thick snow flurries and an ominous gray-white sky that threatened blizzard. I hoped it would be a fierce storm because I hadn’t seen a good Chicago blizzard in three years.

  When the flurries finally turned into a storm, I was trudging away from Maxwell Street on the already slippery sidewalks, my treasured new garments draped over my arms—you expect gift wrapping, maybe? I was not quite certain where I had left Roxinante. I finally found her on Halsted Street. Just as I was unlocking the door, I saw the woman, waiting to board a Halsted streetcar, at the corner a quarter block away.

  I tossed my purchases into the backseat of Roxy and ran to the corner, knowing in the back of my head that I was playing games with myself, just as I had in my wild race around the West in August.

  I reached the red car as it began to move, grabbed the handle on the running board, and pulled myself up to the platform. My heedless momentum pushed several elderly Polish and Jewish women shoppers into the conductor, who dropped a handful of dimes he was putting in his money changer on the wet platform. (Fare was seven cents at the time.)

  “You’d think he was chasing a girl,” a Jewish woman remarked to a Polish woman.

  “Ain’t it?” the other replied.

  “Her name is Maggie,” I told both of them with what I hoped was my most pleasing smile.

  “So why shouldn’t a young man chase a girl?”

  “Ain’t it?”

  I apologized to the irate women, picked up the dimes, apologized to the furious conductor, paid my own fare and, feeling like the proverbial bull in a china shop, shoved myself into the main section of the crowded car and toward the motorman’s platform in the front.

  There were only three young women in the whole packed mass of humanity, one of them remarkably attractive with a round face, high cheekbones, Slavic fashion. She smiled, more in amusement than in offense, at my intense stare.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled.

  “Not the right one?”

  “Worse luck for me.”

  She laughed, but, virtuous young person that she was, she turned her head to inspect the blanket of snow that God was dropping on our city.

  I got off the front of the car at the next stop and fought my way through the wind and the stinging back to Roxy. I’d made a fool out of myself. Worse than that, I knew I was making a fool out of myself when I was doing it.

  All my life I would pursue her, Father Donniger had said.

  Twenty-five years from now would I still imagine that I saw her in, say, the Piazza di San Marco in Venice?

  I started my Chevy and told myself that the only thing worse that could happen would be for the Bears to lose to the Giants on Sunday.

  It was not an especially good year for Chicago sports fans. The Cubs had gone into the first phase of their half-century tailspin. Notre Dame had achieved nothing more than a 0—0 tie in its first attempt at revenge against Army for its wartime humiliations by the service academies. Ray Meyer was trying to put De Paul together after the loss through graduation of George Mikan. Mikan in his turn was trying to break his contract with the Bears so he could join the Minneapolis Lakers (ever wonder, young folk, where the LA franchise got its name?). The Hawks were not much. The Cardinals had beaten the Bears, but they weren’t worth much either, although they had great young talent and rumor was it that Charley Trippi would play for them next year. (And the Cards, known happily in the precincts of Comiskey Park as The Big Red, would field the greatest backfield ever—Trippi, Elmer Angsman, Pat Harder, and Paul Chrisman—and win their only championship.)

  The Illinois basketball team, called the Whiz Kids when as five freshman they had won the championship, were back but their fire was gone. The Chicago Rockets in the new All America Conference—engineered by the sports editor of the Tribune—were both an athletic and financial disaster. The new conference had, however, skimmed off some of the best talent of the prewar Bears on whom age and service had also taken their toll. We had easily won the Western Division, but the Giants had robbed us of championships at other times, most notably in the famous Gym Shoe Game of 1934 (after a 13-0 season).

  It was a lot easier to worry about Sid Luckman’s passes than to worry about making a fool of myself on another streetcar.

  The All America Conference, dominated in its brief existence by the Cleveland Browns with Otto Graham’s passing arm and Lou Groza’s toe, was a flop. The Browns, the Forty Niners, and the Dallas Colts were absorbed into the NFL (the last, who had been the New York Yanks and the Boston Yanks, would later become the Baltimore Colts and finally, in total ignominy, the Indianapolis Colts.)

  The world struggled on, unpromisingly. Europe was in desperate financial trouble. Communism was threatening Greece and Turkey. Phil Murray had been re-elected president of the CIO, but a Communist faction led by general counsel Lee Pressman dominated the board. There was a brief leftist general strike in the San Francisco Bay area. The Baruch Plan for international control of all atomic weapons was rejected by the Russians. Ma Perkins, the last of the Chicago radio soaps, decamped, like Phil Donahue forty years later, for New York. General Marshall had returned from his failed peace mission in China. Rumors persisted that Harry Truman was about to resign and turn the country over to the Republicans. In the State Department, Dean Acheson was preparing memos that in February would lead to the Marshall Plan for the financial salvation of Europe and the Truman Doctrine for the defense of Greece and Turkey—twin schemes that would save Europe but make the Cold War official. The travel sections described how you could spend a week in Miami on ten dollars a day. Walter Winchell sounded more glum each Sunday night before the Dear John radio program. You could fly to New York for $32 on United Airlines, which would also deliver airmail editions of The New York Times to you every morning. The Times had just revealed that many German rocket scientists had secretly been spirited out of Europe and were working on American projects, including one Werner von Braun. Princess Elizabeth was reported to be “virtually” engaged to some Greek Prince—and down the drain went my chances to be Prince Consort in England!

  Finally—some things never change—the Celtics were dominating professional basketball.

  A picture on the front page of every paper in the country summed up the mood of the nation: a grimly determined woman standing in front of a bus, staring down an angry bus driver. He had slammed the door in her face. Like everyone who ever experienced such rudeness from public transit, she felt the impulse to stop the bus from moving. Unlike the rest of us, she acted on the impulse, walked in front of the bus and refused to move unless the driver opened the door. Neither would give in. The standoff lasted for hours, till the bus driver was replaced and the woman, name unknown but a national heroine, stalked away.

  Irritable times to be haunted by the memory of a pretty young woman whose picture I stared at, door to my room locked to fend off Packy, every day.

  I hadn’t started to think about Christmas shopping; law school was insufferably dull; baiting Hennessey was no longer fun; I missed Kate only a week after breaking up.

  What was there left besides the Bears?

  Pro teams in those days carried only thirty-three players. Center Bulldog Turner played linebacker on defense, quarterback Sid Luckman and halfback George “One-Play” McAfee played safety on defense. At the end of an eleven-game season in mid-December they were all pretty battered. How could we possibly win? Especially in cold weather?

  The weather turned mild, the snow melted, and win we did, not gloriously but effectively, 24–14. The key play was a touchdown run by Luckman—the last of the Jewish quarterbacks—called “twenty-two bingo keep it.” Today we’d describe it as a quarterback draw.

  So the Bears began their
downward slide, winning only one more championship (also against the Giants) until a crazy, complex, courageous Mick named Jim McMahon emerged forty years later, our first effective quarterback since Luckman.

  After the game I turned off the radio in my room and settled down to the stack of mail—I was carrying on a correspondence with many of the men in my squadron and with the widows and parents of some of those who had died. Because I was the “old man,” I was supposed to be a source of wisdom. I would let the mail pile up for a week and then organize myself for the agony of replies. On Saturday I had opened the envelopes and stacked the folded letters in a neat little pile. I then threw away any envelope that didn’t have a return address, lifted my small Underwood portable to my rolltop desk, and began work on the first letter.

  I had typed responses to the first two letters, opened the neatly folded third item on my stack, and stared in astonishment at its contents.

  I must have gazed at it a long time. Later, when Packy bounded in from a pre-Christmas choir practice at Quigley, he found me holding an unmarked sheet of lined notepaper in one hand.

  And eleven ten-dollar bills in the other hand.

  CHAPTER 33

  “THERE‘S ELEVEN BILLS HERE.” PACKY HELD UP THE MONEY. “Your ghost girl pays interest.”

  I had told him the whole story of Andrea/Maggie, leaving out only the details of our lovemaking—lest I shock his youthful, seminarian ideals. Or make him think less of Maggie.

  “I prayed at her grave,” I muttered, still overwhelmed.

  “She does look a little ghostly, to tell the truth,” he said as he picked up the enlargement I had made of the slide, “but gorgeous ghostly. And you slept with her … as I said, bro, you astonish me! Make me kind of envious too.”

  “You’re going to be a priest!”

  “Doesn’t mean I give up fantasies.” He turned the picture to consider Maggie’s misty bare shoulders from another angle. “Well, I suppose we have to find her, right?”

  “We can’t find her, Pack,” I said wearily, schoolmaster to slightly retarded student. “I told you she’s dead.”