“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 trut
h—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.
CHAPTER 40
THE NEXT MORNING I WAS SUFFICIENTLY UNCERTAIN ABOUT the conclusion in my journal to leave the Loyola library long enough to corner Maggie at the Drake and invite her to go to the movies that night.
“We’ve never had a proper date,” I argued.
Perhaps I wasn’t sure I wanted the found Dulcinea anymore, but I wasn’t quite ready to give her up yet either.
“I’m working.” She gestured at the nearly empty Lantern Room—its red walls and black screens in a less dignified hostelry than the Drake would have suggested that it was a bordello (not that I knew about the inside of a bordello).
“I thought we might see The Razor’s Edge, it’s one of the top ten.”
“You made a promise.” She continued to arrange silverware without looking at me.
“Or Open City. The New York Times listed it as one of the ten best.”
“I said you made a promise.” She banged a fork into place.
“Yeah, but I didn’t intend to keep it. All’s fair in love and war.… speaking of war, Razor’s Edge is about the trials of a war vet. It might help you to understand me.”
“I’ve already seen it with Wade.” She bustled to another table. “I can’t imagine a vet more different from Tyrone Power than you.”
“I’m better-looking?”
“Please, Jerry, my boss is giving us dirty looks.”
“Humoresque? Road to Utopia with Bing and Bob?”
“No!”
“I remember the way you smiled at me when you opened the door to your apartment.…”
“Please!”
“All’s fair—”
“This is neither love nor war. You’re becoming tiresome.”
So I went to Open City by myself that night, after finishing my review of civil procedures. I encountered Maggie and Wade as I was coming out of the old Studio on Chicago Avenue, replaced now by what Biddy calls the “Needless Markup” (Neiman Marcus) Building.
“Jerry, please!”
“I’m innocent!” I pleaded. “How would I know you were coming here?”
“You’re asking for it, fella.” Wade was playing his tough-mountaineer role to the hilt.
“It’s a free country, hillbilly,” I snarled back.
It might have been wise for me to tell him what I knew about his war record then. I guess I didn’t want to embarrass Maggie.
We both loved one another. Each of us wanted out of the relationship for reasons of our own. But neither of us was able to let go. Maggie, to give her credit, was better than I at acting as if the affair were finished.
“Leave him alone, Wade; let’s not be late for the film because of a man who won’t keep his promises.… And I repeat, Quixote, this is neither love nor war.”
“Don’t worry about him, hon.” Wade glowered at me. “He’ll leave you alone.”
“Anytime, hillbilly.”
I shouldn’t have said that.
“She is afraid to risk herself,” I wrote in my journal that night. “We come to the moment of truth and she doesn’t have enough truth.”
But Jerry Keenan was
not afraid to risk himself at the last minute, not at all.
Loneliness and sexual need force most lovers out of those moment-of-truth fears. Wade McCarron was her insurance against such a surrender to the fate of our species.
He was more dangerous than I realized.
He and his thugs caught me the next night, in a snowstorm, just outside the Forest Avenue El station. I was as unprepared as Admiral Husband E. Kimmel had been at Pearl Harbor.
The thugs held me while McCarron beat and kicked me.
On one track of the dual-track tape in my head, I was back in the Dutchman’s ghost town, fighting off the demons. “Take that, you fucker, and that,” McCarron repeated with monotonous lack of imagination. “And that, fucker, and that.”
Only he wasn’t McCarron anymore; he was Jacob Walz, the Dutchman.
I remembered that McCarron had promised a beating the first time and death the second time. So I wasn’t going to die, unless he overdid it by mistake. Only it wasn’t McCarron, it was the Dutchman and two of his demons.
Where the hell was Michael, seraph?
I kicked at Walz, missing as he ducked, but he kept his distance. I kept kicking until the pain became too much. I then merely endured, thinking of the souls in purgatory, as I had been taught to do in the dentist’s chair.
And of the place in hell to which I would send Wade McCarron, no, Jacob Walz.
Even after my defensive kicking had been routed by pain, he was careful not to get too close. So I kept all my teeth.
Groin, stomach, chest, face, McCarron pounded away relentlessly. But not very skillfully. He was, I thought contemptuously as I struggled with the two hoods, a powder puff.
Too much time in the saloons in Phoenix talking about your lost mine.
But given enough time, even powder puffs can hurt you.
“Looka that, boys, he done vomited on me. Fucking rich fly-boy got no manners. Mebbe I should teach him some.” His fist crashed into the side of my face. I tasted the sharp, salty tang of blood.
Never let a Zero get on your tail with the sun behind him.
I’d find him in one of those Phoenix saloons and beat the shit out of him in a fair fight.
The Search for Maggie Ward Page 41
