All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  And who’d have to pull her off before she killed the big kid?

  You got it. Little Eddie Nolan.

  I was a little punk then. But quick.

  I had to be.

  ’Course if the big punk caught up with me, Shanny would charge back into the fray. Two against one, we Irish twins were pretty good.

  Kind of violent, huh?

  Well, you see what the priest meant when he said pirate queen. But you know, it worked. The word went out to leave Jimmy alone and people sure did.

  And pretty soon parents were telling their kids what a wonderful girl that sweet little brown-eyed Nolan child is. She loves her handicapped little brother almost as though he were a real child.

  Lucky they never said it that way when Shanny was around because Jimmy was a real child as far as she was concerned.

  And all the rest of us, too.

  I found him dead in the bedroom in our house at the lake on Easter Monday morning. The priest goes that no time is a good time to die but Easter is the least bad time. He also goes that we must now think of Jimmy as more alive and more mature than any of us. Why, he’s like, he even knows more than Shannon does.

  We all laughed, but I’m not sure Shanny thought it was as funny as the rest of us.

  It was hard at the wake and funeral because a lot of people would go how fortunate we were to be free of Jimmy. Shanny, acting real grown-up now, would respond that we thought we were fortunate to have him with as long as we did.

  “I was so mature,” she’s like to me later, “that I’m disgusted with myself.”

  “I guess we’re growing up, sis.”

  “Gross!”

  The priest told us that we would mourn for about a year just as we would if any member of our family died. I guess some of us did some pretty odd things that year. But we’re all right.

  Mom and Dad were pretty worried about Shanny, which shows how geeky parents can be.

  “Maybe it was too much a burden for such a little kid to carry.”

  “Ha,” the priest goes. “No way Shanny gets points for a deprived childhood. Not with the wrestling team still hanging around.”

  “But what will happen to her?”

  “She’ll find some lucky guy at whom to direct all that passionate affection.”

  And to Shanny he’s like, “And the guy better be at least as strong-willed as you are.”

  “No way I’m going to marry a creep or a wimp.”

  “That guy you had around last summer…”

  “Well, I got rid of him, didn’t I?”

  So how’s Shanny a problem to me now?

  If you have to ask that question, you don’t understand my story. You totally don’t understand it.

  I’m going to Shanny’s college next year, right?

  And she has this need to take care of someone, until she finds Mr. Strong Will, right?

  So who’s she going to take care of and protect from all the six-packs and all the chicks who will throw themselves at his feet?

  You got it, folks.

  Everyone’s favorite Irish twin: poor little Eddie Nolan!

  Martina

  Martina, I thought as I considered her latest victim’s tearstained face, needed periodic fixes of hate the way a vampire needs blood.

  “It isn’t fair, Father. I’m innocent,” the victim pleaded. “I didn’t do it.”

  Ah, but she did, you see; there was no appeal from Martina Condon’s guilty verdict.

  “Joe Condon says they will be forced to pull Coady Anne out of Regina and send her away to boarding school for her senior year. Your remarks on her sex life make it impossible, Joe says, for the poor kid to show her face either at school or here in the neighborhood.”

  “It isn’t true,” Linda sobbed, “I never said a word.”

  I had to put the charge on the record. I would have to face the Condons later in the day. I wanted Linda’s explicit denial of the allegation that she had conspired to prevent Coady Condon from becoming president of the parish High Club.

  It all sounded vaguely like an FBI scam—“allegation,” “conspire.” Such is the Catholic Church as the twentieth century lurches toward an uncertain conclusion.

  Linda Meehan, our youth minister, was an intense, stringy young woman in her middle twenties. She would have been an intense stringy young nun thirty years ago. But in these days, dedicated young people calculate, reasonably enough, that the Church can lay valid claim to only part of their lives. Linda was not completely unattractive and doubtless would leave us in another year or two to begin the process of creating future teenagers who would harass another generation of youth ministers. On the whole a much better outcome for the Church than that she should stay in a religious order all her life, a bitter woman who had burned out in the teenage ministry at twenty-seven.

  “Even if you had conspired to keep Coady Condon from being elected president of the teen club, it would not have necessarily been wrong. Why I remember…” I cut short my recollections of rigged parish elections in ages past. First of all, pastors ought not to indulge in too much reminiscing or they will be thought on the high road to senility. Secondly, in the new, nonclericalist, democratic Church of the era after the Vatican Council, one did not rig parish elections.

  Or at least one did not admit it, not even, as the Scripture says, in the quiet of the closet.

  “I would have been perfectly happy to work with her. She’s a sweet girl. There never was much chance of her winning. Even if I didn’t want her as president, I would not have had to say a word against her. I certainly wouldn’t have raised any questions about her … her sexual behavior. There isn’t any, Father, I’m certain of that.”

  “So her mother tells me,” I replied dryly.

  “What did I do wrong, Father?” She dabbed at her eyes with a crumpled tissue. “Martina and I were such good friends. How could she possibly suspect I would conspire against poor Coady?”

  Somewhere far beyond the boundaries of the parish and beyond the knowledge but not the curiosity of the members of the teen-club, there was a boy whom Linda allegedly dated with some regularity. (“George” by name if you were to believe the teen-club gossip.) Linda was not slaking all her needs to love and be loved with the parish adolescents.

  “I’m afraid that was your mistake,” I said as gently as I could.

  “Martina didn’t seem to make any demands.”

  “That’s part of her game.”

  It might not seem like a very important game. Is there a church in the country without mothers who push their children beyond the kids’ competence or popularity? All right, there were some special twists to Martina’s game. But after one term as a pastor in a modern Catholic suburban parish, the demitasse tempest of l’affaire Coady Condon should be no challenge to me.

  True enough, if I were willing to offer Martina the head of our youth minister on a silver platter.

  Penny ante? Especially since Linda was not likely to want to renew her contract a year from now? Couldn’t the pastor have a nice little talk with her and suggest that she might want to take a sabbatical after Christmas—with pay, of course?

  Sure it would be easy—if the pastor had no character at all (like a bishop). But, while I can compromise with people till the day before the Last Judgment, I was not about to let Tina Condon win this one.

  So much time has to be spent fending off disaster, even if it’s only one small disaster.

  “Mr. Condon…” Linda began.

  “Always agrees with her. Tell me about it. What kind of a father is it who won’t stand up for the rights of his children?”

  “He’s such a nice man.”

  “Nice men are especially likely to believe their wives.… Tell me, Linda”—I don’t think I sighed too loudly—“have you become good friends with another couple in the parish lately? Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

  In the old days when I was a curate (not an associate) only the pastor was permitted to have friends
in the parish.

  “No, Father, not that I can … well, there’s the Kellys, but Tina introduced me to them.”

  “That figures. You see”—I did not want to sound like a cleric whose two courses in counseling at Loyola cause him to think he’s as qualified as Freud—“the Kellys were a test. If you liked them more than the Condons, you were already on the way to disloyalty.”

  “But I don’t…”

  “You don’t understand the game, Linda; you were certain to like them more, no matter what you did.”

  “I couldn’t win?”

  “You’ve got it.… Is that boy we never see really called George?”

  “No.” She flushed an appealing shade of crimson, which persuaded me that whatever his name might be, he was a lucky young man. “That’s the kids’ name for him. I won’t tell them his real name. It protects a part of me from their curiosity. His real name is…”

  “Consider me one of the kids. Call him and tell him he owes you a supper tonight. Okay?”

  “Sure.” She continued her appealing crimson blush. “No problem.”

  “I’ll worry about it for a while. We’re not going to feed you to the wolves, Linda.”

  When I had come as a new pastor, I was not well received. Some of the old-timers resented the fact that I had replaced the founder (one of the better prelates of the middle nineteenth century). I was also an uncertain quantity to most everyone else. Martina Condon quickly made her move to “adopt” me. Since she was intelligent and generous with her energy and her concern, and her husband was likable and fun to argue with, I was tempted. Some residual instincts of Irish political sophistication, inherited from both sides of the family, made me hold back from the obvious offer of support, consolation, and admiration.

  “Wait and see” was my mother’s favorite expression. I waited, I saw, and I decided that I would get along much better with the Condons if I kept a wary distance from them. It was a wise choice. I had not quite made it sufficiently into her orbit to be accused later of disloyalty.

  Her hates were not ideological but maternal. Her mother love was a ticking bomb. She did not feel that she was a good mother unless she were hacking with her broadsword those who were seeking to assault her children. Since, despite an M.A. and considerable intelligence, she had elected to define motherhood as a career and the source of her worth as a person, it was necessary to swing the broadsword, early and often, as we used to say in Chicago politics.

  So, while I was the boss (which along with a dollar will get you a ride on Mayor Harold’s subway) and held the cards and while I would not sacrifice poor Linda, who had more than earned her keep, I looked forward to a battle with Martina Condon much as I would to combat with a saber-toothed tiger whose cubs I had carried off.

  Some of the junior boys were at the parish basketball court, a place they could be found during the autumn months at any hour of the day or night. I offered to engage them in a game of twenty-one. They dared not refuse. After all, I am the pastor, and as I told them, if I couldn’t play I’d take up my court and go home.

  You have to be either dedicated or unbalanced to enjoy teenagers, especially junior boys. Whether I am either or whether it is merely flattering to my morale to rout them at twenty-one (standing six feet three helps) is a matter which need not detain us at the moment. I was on an intelligence mission.

  “I hear the High Club election is disputed,” I said as I missed a jump shot that ten, well, no, twenty years ago would have been little more than a lay-up.

  “Goofy Mrs. Condon,” said one of the animals, hitting a shot which was deliberately fired from the same spot where I had shot and missed.

  “Is George really a nice guy, Father?” The second animal fed the ball for a lay-up to his fellow. “I mean, poor Linda, she doesn’t need a geek boyfriend when she has to put up with Mrs. Condon, and”—his voice turned into a fair imitation of Tina’s—“poor sweet little Coady Anne.”

  “George,” I said firmly, tossing the rebound to the second animal, “is no geek.”

  Their blood drenched with reproductive juices, these animals were normally capable of considering a girl only in the most explicitly clinical aspects of her body. Concern for Linda Meehan as a person demonstrated that (a) emotional maturity was catching up with the reproductive juices in this collection of barely domesticated beasts, and that (b) Linda had succeeded in her mission with them, maybe better than she realized.

  “Mrs. Condon,” continued the other, “is an airhead.”

  “But still, Coady had the same right to run as anyone else.”

  “Poor sweet little Coady”—he sank his third jump shot—“couldn’t attract freshmen to a strip show.”

  “Really major,” agreed the other.

  “I mean she’s all right, kinda cute, if you like them little, but no way she’s going to win a High Club election.”

  “The sophomore animals would run all over her, poor kid.”

  “So why should Linda bother? Everyone thought it was a joke, like Mrs. Condon pushing poor sweet little Coady into running when she’s going to get creamed. Right? Patty O’Hara would win by tons of votes if she was running against Miss America. Right?”

  Right, indeed.

  Patty O’Hara would cream the Archangel Raphael in an election.

  They would have denied an anti-Coady fix in any event. Linda was one of their own, and like Mafia dons, priests, and surgeons, teenagers stood by their own. A solemn high and serious denial would have confirmed Tina’s charge. The denial I heard, touched with ridicule and cruelty, supported Linda’s story. As I had expected. Did Linda with maybe a twitch of her lips at the mention of Coady’s candidacy (perhaps at the thought of poor sweet Coady confronting our sophomore animals, who were especially animalistic this year) give perhaps a basis, as thin as angel-hair pasta, for the charge?

  Maybe. But finally so what? In Tina Condon’s world Coady would be cute as teen-club president, just as she was cute in the designer clothes that she wore when she was ten. In the world of the electorate only a space cadet would think that Coady had a chance to win. Her candidacy deserved to be treated respectfully but not seriously. No one can be held responsible for an occasional twist of the lips or a functional equivalent thereof.

  Back in the store, that is, the rectory, I turned on the evening news. There were problems in South Africa, Lebanon, Yemen, and city hall. And I was barely restraining the forces of chaos in my neighborhood over a teen-club election.

  There is no proportion, a wise person (tell you the truth, I don’t remember who it was) once remarked, between the importance of a prize and the passion with which it is sought.

  When Joe Condon had phoned me before my conversation with the youth minister, his tone had been sad and troubled—not angry or reproachful. Indeed, his posture was that it was all over and the die had been cast.

  “We’ve decided that the best thing to do, Father, is to pull poor Coady out of Regina and send her for her senior year to a boarding school in California. I’ve spoken to the nuns out there, and they tell me she should have no trouble catching up with the work.”

  The call was my first hint of the controversy. But by assuming that I was well informed, Joe was indicating that he took for granted my acquiescence in the injustice and calumny. He was demonstrating that he and Tina were prepared to be good sports about it all, even though their hearts were breaking.

  “Well, after what Linda Meehan did, it seems to be the best choice for everyone; Coady, Linda, you, everybody else. We certainly don’t want to be a parish problem all year long.”

  You betcha.

  I had been through annual sessions with the Condons and knew the scenario by heart.

  The first time it had been the O’Connells. Joe and Tina appeared at the rectory door, a solemn if mismatched couple: Joe, tall and lean, in sport clothes perhaps more suitable for spring than for mid-September; Tina, as slight as an injured sparrow, in subdued colors appropriate for a sparrow.

>   Tina was well named, a little woman with a small body and small bones, doubtless cute like her daughter when she was young, and hardly ugly now—a kind of well-groomed, well-turned mouse at first impression.

  Okay, as the animals had said on the court, if you like them small, which, to be honest, I didn’t.

  The conversation about the O’Connells was not hard to remember because I had heard it several more times, with minor variations, since the first episode.

  Joe: We’re worried about the O’Connell children, Father. There’s nothing much we can do about it, since we’re not friends with them anymore, but maybe you can have a talk with them about the kids.

  Me: (knowing the O’Connells had been good friends of the Condons, maybe even gone on a vacation with them) Oh?

  Joe: I don’t understand much about such things, I didn’t graduate from college, you understand, but when kids grow up in an atmosphere of constant deceit, you have to worry about whether there’s any chance for the kids to achieve full maturity.

  Me: Oh?

  Tina: What does an atmosphere of deception do to children, Father?

  I went along with the game, explaining about psychopathic personalities and their impact on children. It was a mistake, because I had permitted myself to be dragged down a long, intricate, and convoluted path at the end of which it was assumed that I had accepted their diagnosis of the O’Connell family: Mrs. O’Connell was a psychopathic personality and her husband was afraid of her.

  I was never told exactly what the O’Connells had done. It was somehow assumed that I knew the whole story before Tina and Joe showed up at the rectory and thus it was unnecessary to provide me with the details.

  “What exactly did they say about your boy?”

  “We wouldn’t want to repeat it, Father.” Tina was always calm, cool, rational—the utterly self-possessed mother dealing sadly but realistically with betrayal and attack.

  What was I supposed to do?

  The explicit agenda was that maybe I could have a talk with the O’Connells—not about reestablishing the friendship (the O’Connells had already tried and been briskly rebuffed, without ever, I would learn, being given a formal description of the charges against them)—but about the dangers of deceit, described always in the abstract, to their children.