All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  But that ignores the point of view of a six-year-old for whom the experience of loving and being loved by someone your own age who is not a member of your family is the most intense phenomenon that’s happened in your life. You’ve forgotten or repressed the very early experiences with your mother and your father and have begun to tentatively probe the world beyond your house where there is a lot of rivalry, hostility, competition, and cruelty. Then you find somebody who just plain likes you and whom you like in return. If that person is a member of the other sex, mutual affection becomes, for a time, the most important reality in your life. You don’t even know that the name of what you’re experiencing is love, but you do know that the other person is on your mind always and you can hardly wait to see her when the new day begins.

  Because of my vivid memory of Jenny’s smile, I’ve carefully watched kids in the single-digit years and noted how powerfully they’re attracted to one another. Love is a dangerous, messy, demanding, unruly emotion at any age, even six. There must have been something special between Jenny and me. Most adults forget their single-digit love affairs, but I’ve never forgotten Jenny or rather the smile that my memory has created to remind me of her.

  For a couple of years all the time that we were not in school or doing homework or sleeping, Jenny and I were together. There were other kids around playing with us, but they were not important. Jenny and I raced both on foot and on our tricycles and then on our bicycles (she won, usually). She watched when I played softball in the alley and I watched when she jumped rope with her friends. When we moved out of the neighborhood at the end of third grade, I didn’t miss her at all. Perhaps the relationship was coming to an end. We were about at the age when kids swarm with their own sex anyway. When we moved back into the parish two years later—at the opposite end from where Jenny lived—I had no particular inclination to seek her out. Although we were in the same grade in grammar school, I don’t think we were ever in the same classroom until in the eighth grade when we sat at the feet of Queen Kong, as we lovingly called Sister Cunnegunda, with a notable lack of fairness, it seems to me, to the ape. By then I had forgotten how much I had loved Jenny. So I laughed at her with the rest, although with a troubled conscience.

  By the time we arrived at Queen Kong’s jungle we were living in different worlds—she in the world of “fast girls” and I in the world of the future seminarians. From a distance she seemed, with her blossoming young woman’s body, to be remarkably attractive, but my mother, who was almost as fond of Jenny as I was, said sorrowfully that she was afraid that Jenny was beginning to be “cheap.”

  My mother meant makeup, dyed hair, provocative clothes, gum chewing, and cigarette smoking. Jenny, she told me, had been a very sweet little girl and somehow the sweetness had been lost. “It would be awfully hard to stay sweet in such a sour house,” she remarked.

  I think, after that remark about Jenny, my guilt would have made me forget Jenny completely if I had not made a fool out of myself the last time we met. It was on the Washington Boulevard bus during the winter vacation from the seminary in 1949.

  I had heard her story the summer before, while playing basketball, ineptly of course, in the parish school yard. Danny Daley, the son of a police captain and a grammar-school classmate, was sitting with me on the ledge of the outside wall of the parish gym drinking Coke and discussing his future. Like so many of my other classmates, Danny had discovered two years out of high school that it was a mistake not to have gone to college and was trying to figure out a way to combine a full-time job and full-time school the coming fall. (Later Danny was wounded in Korea and came home to finish college and medical school on a government scholarship.)

  “It’s much easier for the girls,” he complained morosely. “They don’t have to go to college to be a success in life. They just have to marry a man who has gone to college.” (Ah, Daniel, you married a woman psychologist and your three daughters are all doctors, too. You lucked out in the changes, one of a fortunate few.)

  “Some of our girls have gone to college, haven’t they?” I asked, now thoroughly out of contact with my classmates.

  “A couple, though I don’t know why.” He laughed. “And of course Jenny Martin is in a special kind of school.”

  “Oh? I didn’t know Jenny went to college?”

  “She didn’t,” Danny said sardonically. “She’s in reform school. An accessory after the fact in a robbery. Some guys she was hanging around knocked over a delicatessen down on Taylor Street and she was in the car. Trust to Jenny to get caught.”

  “She’s in jail?” I asked in amazement.

  “A year and a day,” Dan said, losing interest. “My father says if her parents had stuck with her and got her a good lawyer, they’d have been able to cop a plea and she’d have ended up on probation, but they dumped her. If you ask me, they’re even more stupid than Jenny.”

  I’m sure that I had not thought of her since the warm spring evening on which we had graduated from grammar school and like so many of the other girls in the class she had wept through tears. I remembered my mother saying she was cheap and our laughter in eighth grade and the smile when we raced on our tricycles. I felt that I had to do something to help her and consoled myself with the cheap grace that Jenny and I had gone our separate ways, were traveling down very different paths, and that was that.

  On the Washington Boulevard bus, I would not have known that the young woman who said hello to me was Jenny if she had not smiled. Perhaps I romanticize that smile, too. A firestorm smile on a dark afternoon during a winter vacation from the seminary can be as easily mythologized as a smile in the early years of grammar school. But I am certain that the young woman next to me was very lovely, no longer cheap, certainly not a depraved exconvict. Indeed, if Jenny seemed to be anything at all that day in her knit gloves and shabby cloth coat and light blue scarf, it was a prim, docile, and, yes, intelligent young postulant in a religious order.

  She assumed that I knew her story. She did not seem ashamed or defensive. “It was a terrible place,” she said lightly. “People do terrible things to each other in jail, but I did manage to almost finish up my high school, which I wouldn’t have done on the outside.”

  I had no idea then what terrible things women might do to one another in jail. Now I know all too well and shudder for Jenny’s humiliation as well as admire her bravery for going back to the classroom.

  “You graduated from high school?” I asked. I realized how easy it would be to fall in love with this sad, brave, pretty young woman. Fall in love again, that is.

  “Yes, and I’m even taking junior-college courses at Wright at night. I live at home, and pay room and board, but it’s cheaper than if I lived on my own. I work in Carson’s basement during the day and go to school three nights a week. It kind of keeps me out of trouble.” And she smiled again, this time laughing at herself.

  “Are you doing well in college?”

  “Going into the exams last semester,” she said, smiling for the third time, “I had grades as good as those that you would get. Then I blew the exams and was lucky to end up with a C.” She sighed. “That’s better than the D’s and F’s at Prov.”

  I knew enough about psychology by then to understand that you turned A’s into C’s because you wanted to.

  “What’s it like at home?” I asked, I hope gently.

  And then all her anger and pain and frustration came tumbling out and a little stream of tears rolled softly down her cheeks. Home had been hell as long as she could remember. Her grandparents and her aunt insisted that she was a stupid wicked little girl. “Don’t you remember?”

  I didn’t remember.

  Jenny had lived up to their prediction, becoming first stupid and then wicked. Her father had left home, her mother had a serious heart condition, and the old folks seemed as strong as ever and now triumphant because Jenny had proved their prophecies right.

  “There was a counselor in the reform school,” she said thoughtfully, �
�who helped me to understand how all these things fit together. She was a wonderful woman. I’m sure I wouldn’t even be getting C’s now if it wasn’t for her.”

  “You ought to escape from that house, Jenny,” I said with all the brash confidence of a seminarian or young priest who knows the book answers to all problems and the human sufferings of none of them. It would be years before I understood that there are no answers.

  “I’ve thought of that.” She brushed a lock of hair back from her forehead. I noticed for the first time that her eyes were blue. Why had I not seen that before? “But I don’t know where to go or what to study or where to get the money.”

  “If you had A’s going into your finals,” I rushed on nervously, realizing now how much of a jackass I was, “then you’re not stupid, Jenny.”

  “I think that’s true.” She frowned as though searching for a word to complete a crossword puzzle. “I also think I’m pretty mixed up. My counselor in the reform school said I should see a psychiatrist when I went home. They’d throw me out of the house if I did that.”

  “I don’t know any of the answers, Jenny.” I stumbled badly over the words. “But you have to leave home and move away from Chicago, as far away as you possibly can.”

  The wisdom of Solomon, huh?

  She considered very thoughtfully, her blue eyes remarkably serene. “I want to be a counselor like Mrs. Holmgren, the woman who helped me. But how can I be that working in Carson’s basement and taking two courses in night school every semester, and without a penny left over after I pay my room and board?”

  “You can do it, Jenny, if you really want to badly enough.”

  Her blue eyes examined my face with unwavering curiosity. “I suppose you’re right,” she agreed.

  In those days we were taught at the seminary to avoid appealing and fragile young women and not to even think about bestowing upon them reassurance and affection. Not that I would have known how.

  When it came time for my first Mass, I tried, not too vigorously, to find out where she was living so that we could send her an invitation. Of course she didn’t come. Why should she, even if she had received the invitation.

  So the story of Jenny Martin and her magic smile ought to end, banished from my life and from our neighborhood without a trace, save a vague rumor that she was married to a West Coast criminal.

  Only the story doesn’t end there. I’ll tell you the rest of it without any attempt to find meaning. For in the life of Jenny Martin, God did not draw straight with crooked lines. He drew reckless comedy with madcap lines. I saw her smile just the other day as I was walking out of a university lecture hall in the San Francisco area. A tall, slender young woman with long honey-blond hair, a stack of books cradled in her arms, was waiting outside the doorway of the lecture hall, hesitantly, as though she wanted to say something to me but was afraid to do so.

  The young woman fit very nicely into the beige skirts and sweaters of a couple of decades ago that were in fashion again.

  “Nice talk, Father,” she said in the tones of hesitancy that indicate not the absence of poise but its presence.

  “Thank you very much,” I said. “I’m glad you liked it.”

  And then she smiled.

  “Jenny…” I stammered.

  The kid was delighted. “Actually, Jennifer, Father. My mother is Jenny. She says they didn’t have any Jennifers in her day. Will you come have supper with us?”

  I really can’t, Jennifer. I have to catch an airplane. I don’t want to intrude on your family. You must give my best to your mother. Tell her you smile just like she used to. No, I really can’t. Maybe the next time I’m in San Francisco …

  “Yes.”

  Her last name, it turned out, was O’Malley. We were to drive home in her Ford Escort. I remembered Betty’s story that Jenny’s husband was a criminal. What kind of a situation was I headed for? Jennifer admitted that her parents did not send her to invite me to supper but she seemed quite unconcerned about upsetting them. But would Jenny want me to meet her criminal husband?

  I regretted my impulsive yes. There had to be some way to back out, I thought as Jennifer unlocked the door of her cream-colored car.

  And then I realized this very self-possessed law student did not look or act like a daughter of a criminal family. She had Jenny’s smile but she was older and far more sophisticated than Jenny was the last time I saw the smile—less fragile, perhaps, than her mother as a young woman, but also more innocent. Betty’s information had to be wrong.

  “Are there other children in the family?” I asked Jennifer, trying to sound innocent.

  “You want all the poop before you get in the house, huh? That’s a good social scientist at work. Well, there’s my older sister Laura who’s an M.D. married to another M.D. and living across the bay and there’s my brother Bart who’s a lawyer working in my father’s firm and there’s me and there’s Petey who’s sixteen—my mom says he’s the only planned birth in the family—and then there’s my brother Joe who’s five years older than me; he’s the third child and sort of the black sheep in the family.”

  “Black sheep?” I asked.

  Jennifer giggled. “He really went wrong, Father. I don’t know what we’re going to do about him.”

  “What is he, Jennifer?” I asked, suspecting I was being put on and having a pretty good idea what Joe was.

  “Go on, you know what he is,” insisted Jennifer.

  “This archdiocese or a Jesuit?”

  Jennifer rolled her eyes in mock dismay. “My brother a Jesuit? No way, José.” She giggled yet again. “I mean some of my best friends are Jesuits, but would you want your sister to marry a Jesuit? Actually, he’s in the San José diocese with Bishop Pierre.”

  Jennifer parked her Escort in the driveway of an enormous old house on the fringes of Nob Hill, built after the fire. Her grandparents had lived here, she told me. “Petey and I are at home now and Bart and Susie, his wife, live down the street.”

  “Your father’s a lawyer, then?”

  “My father—no, that’s all right, I can carry the books myself—is a professional commissioner. After he stopped being U.S. attorney here he did a couple of terms in the state senate and then he decided he didn’t like that kind of politics anymore so now he serves on commissions for the governor and even two for the president. That’s why Bart and I have to go to law school.” She sighed in mock exasperation. “Someone has to keep the money coming in.”

  “And your mother?”

  She sighed again. “Mostly my mother is on committees. They’re both professional do-gooders, Father. She’s chairman of the Opera Board this season and on the acquisitions committee at the museum. Of course, she still does her counseling.”

  “I see.” But I didn’t see anything at all. The woman who presided over this enormous and elegant house which I was rapidly approaching could scarcely be my Jenny. Who was she? What would she look like? No way, José, would there be any connection between her and the little girl who used to beat me in tricycle races.

  “Was it bad, Father?” Jennifer asked, suddenly very serious.

  I wasn’t going to pretend that I didn’t know what she meant. “It was terrible, Jennifer. Worse than you could possibly imagine.”

  Jennifer nodded, as though she understood. “She’s one hell of a strong woman. Did the people who grew up with her realize that?”

  “I knew she was special, Jennifer,” I said truthfully enough.

  From the moment I had entered Jennifer’s Escort, I wondered what time had done to my Jenny. How had a half century changed her?

  “Hi, I’m Jenny,” said the smiling woman who threw open the door before her daughter put the key in the lock.

  As she embraced me, I knew the answer to my foolish question. Jenny hadn’t changed at all. Her hair was gray now, but the lines on her pretty face said character and laughter. And her body was trim, elegant, and a delight to hold, however briefly. She glowed with the radiant serenity that in
women of our years always means both frequent exercise and frequent, satisfying sex. Her glow was especially brilliant in the penetrating blue eyes that I’d noticed for the first time on the Washington Avenue bus, and in the slowly exploding smile that I’d loved for decades. My imagination had not begun to do it justice.

  “First time I’ve ever hugged you. I hope it won’t be the last. No way will it be the last! Jennifer, call your father and tell him to come home right now. We have an important guest for supper.”

  “He’ll geek out,” Jennifer sniffed.

  “I hope you don’t mind my coming unannounced … Jennifer said…” I mumbled.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Jenny kissed me again. “I’m glad she invited you. If I had any nerve at all, I would have invited you myself, fifteen years ago.”

  You touch the wellsprings of past memories very gingerly because there’s always the possibility that the elaborate house you’ve carefully built for yourself will fall apart. Of course, when the past reappears without warning and the house survives, you celebrate.

  So it was a festive dinner that night. Jenny, Bart, her strapping silver-haired handsome black-Irish husband (who had played football for USF in the old days when they were a power), Jennifer, vibrant and intense like her mother, and sixteen-year-old Petey, a young man with sparkling eyes and an even disposition, who looked like a carbon copy of his father. There was a cook and a maid and vintage Napa Valley wines and Abstract Expressionist paintings hanging in the dining room. Like her daughter, Jenny was wearing sweater and skirt, hers light blue, carefully calculated to match the color of her eyes. My Jenny had become a great lady, an authentic grande dame, an inhabitant of a totally different world from that of our west-side Irish parish in the 1940s but also totally different from the bastions of the west-side Irish even today.

  She entertained us while we ate with a comedy routine about the art museum, the opera, and “my son the priest.” The family had heard it all before but they laughed anyway. I had forgotten that Jenny made me laugh when we were children. At the end of the day I would recount to my mother the funny things Jenny had said and done and mom would say what a sweet little girl she was.