I gave up.
A couple of hours later we were riding to the airport after a quiet tour of the city in which, to tell the truth, there was not much to see. “One more question, Arnie,” I said tentatively. “You said at breakfast this morning that you had hoped that … the … phenomenon wouldn’t happen last night while I was in the house. Why didn’t you play it safe and put me up in a motel? You wanted it to happen, didn’t you? She wouldn’t have appeared unless she knew you wanted her to, would she?”
Arnie didn’t take his eyes off the highway. “I guess I did … maybe I wanted you to hear my side of the story … in case … well, I figured maybe you’d write it down and people in the future might understand.…”
As I walked up the stairs to the 737 I wondered how someone could grow up in the city and be a priest for a couple of decades and not see pictures of Mary Jane Rafferty. I guess they were in the hospital and the college anyway. Chancellor of the diocese, vicar general, president of the priests’ senate; he must have read some history books or at least have heard stories. When he moved into Jimmy Sander’s old house, he would have stored up a lot of imagery, only Arnie didn’t seem to be the kind with that sort of imagination. Still …
I read in the paper last week that the old rectory had burned down on a cold winter night. The pastor escaped with minor burns and was in Rafferty Memorial Hospital recovering from “exhaustion.” It wasn’t Arnie, of course. He’s a bishop in the southwest. A lot of people think that when St. Louis comes open next year Arnie will get it … and the red hat shortly thereafter.
Julie
“Roberta, who’s that woman by the table at the end of the pool?”
“You mean the handsome one with the red hair and the green swimsuit?”
“Um.”
“That’s Julie Lyons. Her husband is an oil-company vice-president type up at Kuala. They have a cottage on the strait and usually come down on weekends. Lovely woman.”
“Um.”
We were at the Port Dickson Yacht Club, once the symbol of white imperialism and now as racially mixed a place as you could find anywhere in the world. Indians, Malays, Chinese, Dutch, English, Swedes, and an occasional south-side Chicago exile like Roberta bumped elbows at the bar without a second thought. Under the clear tropical sky, children of black, brown, and white colors and lots of mixed hues jumped in and out of the delightfully cool waters of the pool. Others scampered across the wide beach to watch the scores of shining sails crisscross the gleaming blue wavelets of the Straits of Malacca. British imperialism was gone, but the good life on a Sunday afternoon at Port Dickson was better than it had ever been in the days of the empire, if, of course, you had the money to join the club. Almost as good as an American country club, I reflected, and a lot more colorful.
Roberta sipped her gin and bitter lemon and noticed that my eyes were still fixed on Julie Lyons. “Would you like an introduction?” There was a frown in her voice.
“Not necessary, Berts, the lady and I have known each other for a long time.”
“Old friends?”
“I didn’t say that.”
I saw Julie against a very different waterside background, much less romantic than the carnival colors of the Straits of Malacca: a small Wisconsin lake, a tiny fringe of beach, an old pier, a few drab trees. She was wearing a green swimsuit then, to match her eyes, I guess, and with her was Terry Dunn. For one frightening moment I saw Terry Dunn standing beside her now, here at Port Dickson, then that disorienting mixture of past and present quickly faded away.
We were sophomores in high school; Terry and Julie were recounting with great glee his religious experience at the Baptist church the previous week. In that pre-ecumenical era our Protestant neighbors were fair targets for anything. The little redhead was no longer little and now filled her swimsuit quite adequately. Even though we had a big fight that day, I felt kind of sorry for her. She would soon leave Terry behind. It was the end of her childhood. She and Terry came to a parting of ways in September, she insisting that it was time for her to “grow up” and Terry solemnly swearing that he would never grow up.
Terry Dunn. Terry Dunn. How can I make him real for you? His lightness, his grace, his contagious laughter, his manic imagination. We used to say of him with some defensiveness that he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. His mischief, we argued, never really hurt anyone, not so long as you didn’t mind an occasional broken window or a couple of hours rearranging your house after you were a victim of one of Terry’s raids. Our parents thought he was terrible, but even they had to laugh at the “Gray Ghost’s” exploits. Terry Dunn, at that age, was the kind of person who made you laugh even when you wanted to be angry at him.
His pranks started in the last year of grammar school when we had tired of summer softball. He suggested to the rest of us that it might be fun to break into Kraus’s grocery store on Division Street and “rearrange” the place. I resisted, but the others went along. When Herr Kraus, as Terry called him, came in the next morning, he saw that his canned goods were as neatly arranged on shelves as they were the previous night but on different shelves. The poor man thought he was losing his mind, sat down at his counter, and wept for an hour. Then he got furious, and then Herr Kraus, who was a good guy, laughed for three straight days.
On his cash register, he found a neatly printed card: “Compliments of the Gray Ghost.” The era of the Gray Ghost and his band had begun.
They took dangerous chances. “Breaking and entering” was a crime; however benign their intent, they could have all ended up in reform school. They never were caught. The victims were not people who would be told by those of us who knew.
Apartments were raided and furniture rearranged. Vacationers came home to find that clothes had moved to different closets and drawers. Statues from the church appeared in the vestibules of private homes. The pastor found St. Joseph waiting for him inside the sacristy door one morning. The organist encountered dead mice on her keyboard. Scanty underwear (well, by 1940 standards) showed up on convent clotheslines. St. Teresa appeared on the altar of the Lutheran church. Democratic posters blocked the windows of the Republican ward office and vice versa. Sister Superior wrote obscene notes to the pastor and vice versa. Hearses pulled up at parties. Singing telegrams came in the middle of the night. Christmas cards arrived from the king, the pope, and the president. The oddest people sent each other valentines.
The Gray Ghost was on the loose.
Mostly, the Gray Ghost was four people: Terry, Tony McCarthy, Ed O’Connor, and Julie Quinn. At that time a tiny, grim-faced redhead, she was the worst of the lot because she egged the others on. I was left out; Julie correctly decided I was a coward.
She was the driving force; Terry the imagination. I can still see him, his pinched little face, framed by wiry, black hair, his darting leprechaun eyes, his wickedly grinning mobile mouth. The Gray Ghost’s raids were the high point of Terry’s life. I was useful, I guess, because I was the appreciative audience he could share it with afterward.
It went on for three years; they were not greedy; a raid every couple of months, carefully planned and daringly executed. Many of their victims were not amused. I guess there was a touch of cruelty about some of what they did. Most of us thought that they made up for it by their flair, their wit, and their imagination. They danced lightly through the neighborhood, dangerously close to the flame, perhaps, but at least they danced.
The police must have found a pattern. I suspect that some of the neighborhood cops knew from the grapevine who was involved. They laid off, perhaps figuring that there were worse criminals on the loose. Certainly the Protestant church raids did not offend the police one bit.
One of the congregations of what we now call our separated brothers had a revival tent on Division Street in the summertime, with prayers, preaching, conversion, and tongue-speaking going on every night. We used to hang around in the back some of the time because it seemed great entertainment, little realizing that we woul
d see the same kinds of goings-on in Catholicism in twenty years. One hot, sticky evening with the acrid smell of the stockyards riding strong on the south wind, Terry decided to “get converted.” At the personal testimony time of the prayer meeting, he rushed down the aisle, and in a thick Irish brogue announced to all that he had been a terrible sinner and had lived a life of drunkenness, lechery, blasphemy, and idolatry. Our separated brothers and sisters were so delighted that it never occurred to them that this fifteen-year-old hadn’t had enough time for all the sinfulness he confessed, unless he had started out at two and a half. Terry then led them through a session of hymn singing, shouting out in his rich off-key Irish tenor voice their favorite songs with enough caricature to send us into peals of laughter, but not enough to make them anything more than slightly uneasy.
At the end of the service, after the preacher gave thanks for the conversion of this “papist sinner,” Terry grabbed the microphone one final time, shouted to the multitude, “God damn you to hell, all you Protestant bastards. Long live the pope!” and ran full speed for the door of the tent and the safety of the summer night. In the back, we all scattered with equal speed. Our separated friends followed vigorously, but they were not nearly fast enough. After that, there was hardly a minister in the neighborhood who didn’t have a sincere questioner or a loud heckler or several off-key singers in his congregation. Apparently, the ministry didn’t communicate with each other because none of them was prepared to give chase when Terry and the gang took to their heels.
It was this unecumenical activity which finally brought the career of the Gray Ghost to an end. There was some very important function at the local Missouri Synod Lutheran congregation. Terry and Julie got a chorus of thirty papists to stand across the street singing hymns to the Blessed Mother all evening long. The police were called, but in 1942, what Irish cop was going to put kids in jail for praising the Blessed Mother?
The Lutheran pastor went to see the monsignor in solemn high procession, an unheard-of event, and the monsignor, who knew nothing of the exploits of the Gray Ghost, gave the young curate strict instructions to “stop that blasphemy.” The young curate knew all about the band of the Gray Ghost, but had minded his own business. Now, he laid down the law.
Though Julie wanted to go on, soon afterward, she decided that it was time to be a dignified young woman instead of a tomboy. Terry was not a presentable boyfriend she could bring to school affairs. She was now at the stage of adolescence (junior year) when she was three or four years older than her male contemporaries in poise, sophistication, and interests. There never had been anything “romantic” between her and Terry as far as we know, so it was not a “breakup,” but the passing of a phase in life.
Now, Julie was a tall, strikingly beautiful girl with long red hair and flashing green eyes. She and the others were on their way to adulthood. Terry was still a kid, hanging around the pool hall, the softball field, the basketball courts. They worried about dances, parties, proms; he worried about getting a couple of bottles of beer. He found a group of older guys who were interested in the same kind of thing and settled down to the life of the permanent adolescent, which was possible in those days before you went into the service. He managed to make it through high school, though only barely. The war came to an end. While Tony and Ed and Julie went off to college and I to the major seminary, Terry started to work for the city like his father before him, caught in a swamp of failure before he had a chance at anything else in life. Terry’s family were slovenly shanty Irish; his father, a huge, fat, brawling character, worked for the sanitation department and was drunk every night of the week. His mother, from whom Terry inherited his physique, was a shrewish, wispy little woman who sighed in every second sentence. There were vague, slatternly grandparents, aunts, and four younger sisters hanging around the back of their house. In grammar school, kids don’t notice those sorts of things, but in high school they got finely tuned into social-class distinctions. We knew that Terry didn’t quite belong and never would. The Gray Ghost exploits were the peak of his career. He drank more and more and drifted out of our lives. A soul in purgatory.
He was in church every Sunday, dressed uncomfortably in the suit and tie his mother made him wear, though sneaking out early for the cigarette which he desperately needed. He played softball and bowled in the parish league and helped the young priest at all the carnivals. He even worked at night as a janitor when Mr. King, our perennial parish janitor (they had not yet been promoted to engineers) was on vacation. Being part of the church was, I guess, some sort of compensation for being excluded from the crowd of his old friends. “He’ll die young,” my mother predicted. He usually came by our house when I was home on vacations. I was something of an outcast. Julie never liked me much and was abusively angry that day on the beach at Twin Lakes when I foolishly suggested that Terry belonged in the seminary. In those days in our neighborhood, if Julie wrote you off, you were written off.
One summer night Terry and I were sitting on our back lawn having a long, aimless conversation (we lived on the corner, so the back lawn was an ideal gathering place). I remember it quite well because it was the strange, haunted week when both the old monsignor and the young priest died within two days of one another.
“Terry, you should go to college.”
“Ah, they’d never let a dumbbell in, besides what’s the point, I’ll get my union card next year and I’ll make good money.”
“You’re not dumb. You just didn’t study at Philip’s” (St. Philip the Servite High School, now defunct).
“It’s too late.” He chewed nervously on his cigarette. “If I had thought two years ago that we weren’t going to have another depression right away, I might have given it a whirl. With some of the mutts that are getting higher learning, though, sure, someone has to do the plumbing,” and he went into the Irish brogue to which he always fled when he was uneasy.
My mother had long ago foretold that “Terry Dunn will have a nervous breakdown someday.” He had always been “high-strung,” but you didn’t notice that sort of thing when you’re a kid. Now, the nervous movements of hands and feet, the chain-smoking, and the puffing of his face from too much beer told you there was something a little different about Terry.
“The world is changing, Terry. There isn’t going to be another depression and everyone is going to go to college. You should give it a try, even in night school.”
He was silent in the warm darkness. “You worried about me trying to soak up all the beer on the west side?”
“I’m worried about your talent going to waste!”
Again a long silence in the patient night. “I guess you’re right. Maybe the Gray Ghost ought to go to Mayslake this weekend and get his life squared away.” He had gone to the retreat house every year since he was sixteen. After each retreat, he went on the wagon for a while. In those days, Mayslake offered a brisk, locker-room masculine Christianity. “That’s a heck of a good idea,” I said, though I had seen this therapy fail before. There was yet another silence in the night, then an embarrassed, “You’re a great pal to worry about me.” I’d swear that there was a sob in the Gray Ghost’s voice.
Terry came home from that weekend and announced that he was going to be a priest. He joined the Franciscans and was off to their college within a month. I knew the strains of life in the seminaries in those days and wondered why the Franciscans had not done any checking on Terry’s psychological background. At that time a lot of us didn’t believe in psychology.
He lasted longer than I thought he would—eighteen months—and then he came home with a bad ulcer, trailing behind him rumors of a “nervous breakdown,” just as my mother had predicted. He kept away from me in our January vacation. By summertime, he was back working for the city and seriously pursuing his campaign to dispose of all the beer on the west side. I didn’t hang around the ball field much that summer, mostly because I didn’t want to embarrass him. I was not far enough in life to smell doom. At twenty-two, T
erry already had the stench of it.
Then, he went to Mayslake again, took the pledge, and tried once again to get “squared away.” He enrolled full-time at Loyola, worked an evening-watchman job for the city, gave up drinking and smoking, lost weight, kept his hair cut, and acted like a bright young man in a hurry. I saw him briefly during our January vacation; the light was back in his eye. He looked better than he had since the sophomore summer at Twin Lakes and was getting A’s in all his courses. He was already talking about law school and a career in politics. His fingers were reaching eagerly for his passport to suburbia. The word was out in the neighborhood that Terry Dunn had finally “straightened himself out.” Even my mother admitted that he had really “pulled himself together.” He went to double-semester summer school so that he could make it into law school a year from September. I barely saw him at all that summer. He was dating Julie Quinn, much to everyone’s amazement and to the anguished dismay of Dr. Quinn and his wife. The Quinns hated to see the daughter of the neighborhood’s richest family waste herself on an alcoholic shanty Irishman. The neighborhood said they were great for each other. They drove by one night in her white convertible when I was walking home from church. In those days, even college types rode the bus on dates, unless they were well off. “The Gray Ghost rides again,” he shouted. We talked for a few moments, Julie impatient and not liking me any more than she ever did.
They were engaged at Christmas, the wedding was scheduled for June. He had a law-school scholarship and a job. She was going to teach school at St. Ursula’s. My mother thought they were both crazy.
I was invited to the wedding. I half suspected that Terry would turn up on the doorstep one night with cold feet. Better, I thought, for him to take the initiative.
It was Julie who came. Ten days before the wedding, I was in the house alone, reading Joseph Conrad; the doorbell rang, and to my dismay, the white convertible was in the front and the redhead at the door. She was cool and elegant in a white dress with a thin red belt at her waist, tall and slender on her high heels.
All About Women Page 7
