The Search for Maggie Ward

by Andrew M. Greeley

  He was not fooled.

  “This is going to be it, bro; she’ll be there. A Maggie Ward belongs at the Lantern Room, in the middle of all that pink and green and the nice old ladies and the wide-eyed tourists and the giggly high school girls.”

  “There aren’t many tourists a couple of days before Christmas,” I said with a pretense at sourness.

  We parked in the lot where the John Hancock Center is now and hiked down Michigan Avenue against the north wind to the Drake. The Magnificent Mile was not magnificent yet. State Street was still “that great street.” North Michigan was still a kind of a gap between the Loop and the Gold Coast. Before the Bridge was built in 1920, Pine Street, as it was then called, was a neighborhood of breweries and soap factories. Then, after the Bridge was opened, it began to expand slowly with the construction of the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower, which stood as sentinels on the riverbank. At the north end the Drake and the Palmolive Building (with its Palmolive beacon designed to guide planes across the Lake—the Lindbergh beacon before he became identified with the political right) told you that you had arrived at the Gold Coast. In between there were a few hotels that did not compare with the Palmer House or the Stevens, but were useful for proms, one- and two-story buildings with shops that were beginning to be fashionable, parking lots, the Fourth Presbyterian Church, and an occasional apartment building, like the gracious old queen mother, 900 North Michigan.

  Cardinal Stritch could have bought the block east of Quigley Seminary just before the war for a hundred thousand dollars. In 1946, Saks Fifth Avenue opened a shop in what had been a record store on that site and is now the Crate and Barrel. The Magnificent Mile had begun, as anyone who thought the Depression might not last forever would have guessed.

  Even now the Drake is a stately old hotel, not at all a place to be ashamed to admit is your Chicago address, despite the proliferation of luxury neighbors all around—Mayfair Regent, Ritz-Carlton, Tremont, Whitehall, and soon Four Seasons. It was, as I pointed out to my wife on our wedding night as we rode up to our suite, the only hotel I knew that had couches in its elevators. She wondered if that was a suggestive remark. We laughed at that comment all the way to our door.

  If it was not on our list of windmills in 1946, the reason was that it was a bit too formal and stiff for the youthful trade, the unmarried young men and women and perhaps the recently married, who would soon spill over from the Loop into the new night-life district that was beginning to take shape on Rush Street.

  Perhaps you looked forward to living in an apartment in the Drake when you retired. You might entertain important guests from out of town there. You might bring your family for supper there on special occasions, particularly when the children were partially civilized, so they could experience a touch of gracious living. You might well spend your wedding night there—as my wife and I did. But it was not a place you went to be entertained.

  Packy and I ducked in out of the cold through the Walton Street entrance, checked our overcoats and climbed up the stairs to the massive oak-beamed lobby, which always seemed to me to be ready for the arrival of the Queen Empress. Today it was the Queen Empress at Christmas: the lobby was festooned with wreaths, colored lights, and a massive Christmas tree.

  Humbug, I thought bitterly to myself—I was in the unhopeful minute.

  “Come on,” Packy urged me. “It’s exactly the same food as the Camellia Room and you get a view of Michigan Avenue. And they have waitresses, pretty young ones, as I remember.”

  “You go in and check it out,” I told him.

  “What are you going to do for breakfast?”

  “I’m not hungry. She’s not there, I feel it in my bones. Check it out, then come back and we’ll go over to the Pearson or some less elaborate place and have a cup of coffee and a piece of toast.”

  “With jam?”

  “Don’t be an idiot! Now check it out.”

  “All right, all right. These jobs can’t be rushed.”

  Packy disappeared into the refined pastels of the Lantern Room in which soft music from a violin and a piano mingled with the discreet clinking of silverware and china.

  I found a comfortable chair at the other end of the lobby and resolved to sleep for a few minutes. I closed my eyes, but my heart was thrashing away too rapidly for me to keep my eyes shut, much less snooze.

  Packy stayed in the Lantern Room for at least a thousand years.

  The bastard was eating breakfast.

  Finally he emerged, all six feet four inches of handsome, virile blond. With a grin on his face as wide as Lake Michigan.

  He glanced around the lobby, searching for me. Then he caught my eye and lifted his thumb upward in a sign of victory.

  It can’t be true.

  “She is even more beautiful in person,” he raved, “than in your picture, even if she is fully dressed. You think at first, well, she’s okay, pretty even, but nothing to brag about. Bring her home to Mother for Sunday dinner, fine, but don’t boast to the guys at the corner about her. Then you take another look and you know you’re watching undiluted radiance.”

  “How do you know it’s Maggie?” I demanded frantically.

  “Huh?” He seemed surprised at my question. “Oh, that’s easy. I asked her what her name was. Sure enough, it’s Maggie.”

  CHAPTER 35

  “LET‘S GET OUT OF HERE.” I TURNED AND WALKED RAPIDLY, no, ran toward the steps to the lower lobby.

  “What?” Packy trailed behind me, Sancho dragging the unwanted lance.

  “I don’t want her to see me.” I ran down the steps, jumped in front of an elderly man, and plunked our checks and a dollar bill—a massive tip in those days—in front of the hat-check girl.

  “I don’t think she will rush out of the Drake, to tell you the truth.” Sancho was decidedly in no hurry.

  “I’m taking no chances.” I tossed him his coat and slung mine over my shoulders. “Let’s hurry.”

  Outside, the wind howling at our backs, I searched for the question that had been hammering at my brain and found it again.

  “How did you find out her name?”

  “That was easy.” Sancho/Sherlock was rushing to keep up with me. “I spotted her as soon as I entered the room. You could hardly miss her. She seemed to be working the tables by the window, overlooking Michigan Avenue—that’s where you put your best waitress—and so I saw a family leaving a table and I asked if I could have it because I liked to watch people walking against the wind and the hostess thought I was kind of funny and so I got the table.”

  “And?” We were already at the parking lot.

  “And this lovely young thing smiled at me and said good morning and asked what I wanted. I said orange juice, pancakes with maple syrup and bacon—two helpings—and tea.”

  “While I’m starving.”

  “But Watson,” he protested as he jumped into the car. “Quick, turn on the heat. As I was saying, Watson, the game was not only afoot. She was right there. So she brings me my tea and I smile politely, not flirtatiously, mind you, and thank her and she smiles again.”

  “I bet not flirtatiously.” I used too much choke on Roxy who, in protest, refused to start.

  “So she does an excellent job of feeding me my breakfast and I smile again and ask her if her name is Patricia Anne. She blushes a little—boy, her skin is pale, isn’t it? But she’s luminous when she blushes. And she says I’m miles away. I say that I like to try to link up Irish-American names with Irish-American faces and would I win a bet with Mary Louise.”

  “Saints preserve us, as Mom would say.”

  “Well, they may have to from that young woman. She blushes even more and says maybe I’m getting a little closer. I have one of the two names right. So I try Mary Anne and am rewarded with a laugh, a happy-enough laugh, though her eyes looked tired. Okay, says I, what about Mary Margaret?”

  “Is she being taken in by this?”

  “Mostly. When she comes up to the table for the first time,
she looks at me kind of dubiously like she has seen me before. But by the time we’re playing the name game, she’s convinced I’m far too handsome and charming to be any relation to this drip Jerry Keenan … try the car again.”

  Roxy, as cold as we were, decided it was time to get out of the lake winds. We chugged dubiously down Michigan Avenue and turned right onto Chicago Avenue.

  “She tells me I’m doing pretty well but I have the names in the wrong order. I leap in and say, right, Margaret Mary, Peggy for short. She is horrified. She hates the name Peggy, it is so common. No, she’s Maggie. I observed that it’s a very pretty name and certainly not common in Chicago as far as I know save in the Herald Examiner comics, but I thought it was a common name in Brooklyn. Now she pretends to be really hurt. Brooklyn, she insists, is a VERY common place. Boston, I guess. Not at all. Nose slightly up in the air—we’re enjoying the fun now—Philadelphia!”

  “Brilliant, Holmes.”

  “Elementary, Watson. Now would you please turn on the heater?”

  “All right, all right.” I wasn’t at all cold. “How did she seem?”

  Packy considered carefully. “When she was serving me she was, how to put it, ‘professional’ I guess is the word—friendly, hiding behind a mask. Then, when we began to joke, she became very animated, the kind of woman you’d want to pick up and carry out with you.”

  “You would.” I skidded to a stop in front of a red light at Halsted.

  “Nope. Anyone would. Then, when I said good-bye and left, I stole a fast look at her eyes. Sad, lonely, haunted. God knows with reason. But …” He hesitated, drummed his fingers on the ice-coated window on his side of the front seat, and spoke very slowly, “But, Jerry, she’s no ghost. She’s alive and she wants to live.”

  “She said that to me at the Arizona Inn.”

  “Why the quick getaway?”

  “I have to figure out what I should do.”

  “Bring her home for Christmas. I bet she has nowhere to spend the day.”

  Wasn’t that what I planned to do?

  “I don’t want to make any mistakes.”

  “It’s not my game, but I thought mistakes were inevitable.”

  “I’ve fouled up before with her. I have to figure out what comes next.”

  “Sancho only carries the lances, his is not to reason why. But you’ve been searching for this glorious dame since August; you find her, and then you run.”

  “Damn it, Pack, I said I have to plan my tactics.”

  “It’s hesitant tactics like that which almost lost the war for us, Commander. What has happened to those good old navy instincts?”

  I had to admit it was a fair question.

  Loyola was closed for Christmas vacation. I should have been studying for exams. Instead I thought about Maggie all day Monday, December 23, carefully, shrewdly, dispassionately. What had happened to my instincts was an inexcusable misinterpretation of Father Donniger. Maggie was still in pain. I must be careful not to hurt her more.

  What I finally did that evening was what I should have done the day before, but it was more carefully planned out and hence inadequate.

  About seven-thirty, I looked into Packy’s room. He was reading Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.

  “I’ll see you later, Pack.”

  He glanced up. “No spear-bearer tonight?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Good luck.”

  “I may need it.”

  “I doubt it. If you don’t brighten up this house with her on Christmas Day, I may never forgive you.”

  “I sure as hell intend to try.”

  I waited in the lobby of the Drake till the restaurant closed, collected my Wehrmacht coat, which, over my pinstripe suit, made me a different person and hung around near the door the help at the Drake used to exit. I pulled my stocking cap down over my ears, partly for disguise, but mostly to keep warm. I waited for several millennia, though my watch said it was only a half hour. Several other young women left the hotel, but I was restrained this time—no staring into astonished faces. I would know Maggie’s walk.

  And I did. She walked briskly, as the cold demanded, but also as if she were carrying a heavy burden in addition to the small purse and paper shopping bag.

  She crossed Michigan on Walton, walked by the 900 North Michigan apartment building and, scarf pulled tightly around her head and thin cloth coat buttoned to the top, hurried through the cold and lonely darkness across Rush and State and Dearborn, around the top of Bughouse (actually Union) Square in the shadow of the Newberry Library to the Clark Street car stop.

  I walked twenty or thirty yards behind her, trying to silence the hobnaillike thump of my combat boots on the snow. But Maggie didn’t seem to be listening, either because she was too tired or because she had made her peace with the dangers and refused to worry.

  It was a long wait for one of the new, streamlined Clark Street cars, which had already been named, not inappropriately, Green Hornets. I huddled in the door of the library, noted that we were again under the light of a full moon, and tried to keep my fingers from falling off.

  Maggie reached in her shopping bag, produced a book, and under the streetlight on Clark Street on December 23, no, it was already Christmas Eve, 1946, calmly read while waiting for a Green Hornet.

  When the car finally came, she closed the book around her finger, paid the conductor the required seven cents, walked halfway up the almost empty car, sank wearily into a seat.

  I followed her, again noisily and clumsily, sat a couple of seats behind her, and strained my perfectly good aviator’s eyes to see what she was reading.

  Carlo Levi. Christ Stopped at Eboli.

  Unquestionably an intellectual. Now if she only proved to be a Democrat.

  We got off at North Avenue, crossed the street, and boarded the ancient red streetcar that would branch off from Clark and go up Lincoln. It was much colder inside the car than in the toastywarm Green Hornet.

  Maggie was too absorbed in her book to notice the highly suspicious young man who was following her.

  There were only two other people in the car—aged cleaning women returning from their jobs in Loop office buildings. I felt sad for them too. But, unlike my Maggie, they probably had families with whom to celebrate Christmas, not merely painful memories.

  The car moved rapidly through the winter night. We crossed Halsted, then Fullerton, and chugged by the grounds of McCormick Theological Seminary. Maggie returned Carlo Levi to her shopping bag, walked, a little less briskly, to the front of the car, and spoke to the driver. He stopped at the next corner, Sheffield, just north of Wrightwood. I moved to the center door. Maggie got off and turned automatically up Sheffield. I followed behind her as an Evanston El train roared by on tracks behind the two apartment buildings on our right.

  Now the neighborhood is at the heart of near-northwest-side yuppiedom. Then it was a German and Swedish ethnic community, not quite yet picturesque, fading off into the edges of poverty, but still stable and safe, though perhaps not perfectly safe for an eighteen-year-old girl in the early hours of the morning. The northernmost finger of the Chicago fire had reached into the neighborhood, eliminating all but a few of the wooden buildings. The sidewalks were raised later as part of the city’s struggle out of the swamp of mud on which it was built, but first floors below ground level and second-floor entrances remained as relics of the swampy days at the turn of the century. Even many of the post-fire stone three-flats with pointed roofs, evidence of the German influence, had second-story entrances.

  Then it was an ugly neighborhood, now we think it has character.

  Halfway up the block, Maggie turned into a wooden pre-fire three-flat. She climbed up the stairs, opened the second-floor entrance, and went in. That meant she lived on either the second or the third floor. First-floor residents would walk down to the entrance on the old ground level below the sidewalk.

  My brain roaring with a noise louder than a thousand El trains, I wal
ked by the house, turned short of the corner of Shubert Avenue by a church which, I noted, was Saint George’s Greek Orthodox, returned quickly to her three-flat, and climbed the slippery wooden steps. There were four apartments on the third floor, small, small flats. Next to one of the doorbells, neatly printed, was the name for which I had been searching since August—”M. M. Ward.”

  I must have hesitated five minutes, shuddering with the cold, before I worked up enough nerve to push the buzzer.

  “Yes?” she replied promptly, still wide awake.

  “Andrea King?”

  Total silence.

  “Or should I say Margaret Koenig?”

  More silence.

  “Would Maggie Ward do?”

  “Go away.”

  “I will not, even if I freeze to death.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “You don’t have to talk to me. I must return some money to you.”

  “Money?”

  “I don’t take loan-shark rates. You only owe me a dollar and a half interest. I figure I’m entitled to a fifty-cent service charge. So I have eight dollars to return to you. I don’t want it on my conscience when I receive Communion at midnight Mass tomorrow. No, tonight.”

  The buzzer rang.

  CHAPTER 36

  THE DOOR OPENED SLOWLY, A PIQUANT ELFIN LITTLE FACE peered around the corner, over the chain. When the face saw me it exploded with more joyous light than all the Christmas trees in Chicago put together. I would remember that joy in the disappointments of the next month and for the rest of my life.

  Oh yes. Your rating, Michael, Seraph, Wars in Heaven, was right. So was Father Donniger.

  Quickly the face turned somber, annoyed, displeased at the interruption.

  “Here’s your eight dollars, Maggie. Should I call you that?” I asked humbly. “I’m not sure what name to use.”

  “How did you find me?” She didn’t take the eight dollars.

  “Postmark on the envelope.”

  The little-girl face squinted in a skeptical frown.

  “The United States government always tells you with a stamp on an envelope from what town or city a letter is mailed.”