All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Can I come in and talk?” she asked shyly, then groping for confidence. “The one night I hoped to find you on your damn throne in the yard, you have to be inside.”

  “Beautiful women can always come in,” I said gallantly.

  Her green eyes flashed at me. “You’ve changed.”

  I didn’t offer her anything to drink, mostly because I forgot to.

  “I have to talk to someone.”

  “Cold feet?”

  “I’m scared silly. I love him so much and yet…” Tears began to pour out of those green lakes. She fumbled for a handkerchief.

  “Julie, it’s great to see the band of the Gray Ghost together again.”

  The impish grin from the old days came back. “We’re really so good together. I steady him down and he makes me laugh. He’s such a great person … of course, I don’t have to tell you that, so kind and gentle and … and…” Now she was sobbing. For an errant moment, I thought it would be very nice to have such a woman sobbing for me. I made a big leap, much more than I would do in later days in the rectory.

  “You’re not sure that saving a man is a good enough reason for marrying him.” She fought the sobs.

  “Is that what the neighborhood thinks? My mother says that’s what I’m doing … I don’t know … whether … What do you think?”

  I chose my words as carefully as I could. “I haven’t heard anyone say that. I’m not sure you’re the martyr type, Julie. He is a reformed alcoholic; that’s a big risk.”

  She flushed with anger. “You call yourself a friend?”

  “I’m simply stating the facts. You’re taking a bigger risk than if he didn’t have his record. If you win, you win big … if not … anyhow, you wanted to know what I think.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re right. I know it’s a big gamble. That crude, vulgar family of his…”

  “Shanty Irish,” I said.

  “If only I could know the future. I care about him. I love him. I want to be with him forever. I’m frightened. I don’t want to hurt him.”

  “And hurt yourself in the process.”

  “I don’t care about me.”

  “Sure you care about you. What happens in church next week might ruin your life.”

  “I don’t want people to say that I’m a spoiled, selfish brat.”

  “Better to say that than to say five years from now that you were a blind fool.”

  The tears stopped. She was cool and composed. Those shrewd green eyes glinted at me. “Are you telling me not to marry him?”

  I felt very tired. “No, Julie.”

  “The argument for him…” She leaned forward intently from the edge of her chair, hoping for some sign from heaven.

  “He loves you. You’ve given him a new hope in life. He’s been on the wagon for almost two years. You’re happy whenever you’re with him. And cold feet come before every marriage.”

  Our old living room lit up in the radiance of her smile. She stood up. “Thanks, you’ve been a darling. See you at the wedding.” As she left in a swirl of white dress, she gave me a hasty kiss on the cheek. Lucky man, Terry Dunn, I thought.

  At eleven, a week from the following Saturday, I was in the old basement church with a thousand other people, the altar awash in roses, the sanctuary filled with clergy for the solemn high nuptial Mass of Julie Anne Quinn and Terrance Michael Dunn. The twelve men in the wedding party looked uncomfortable in their stiff summer formals. The ladies of honor were awkward, if lovely, in their tight rose dresses, chosen, I’m sure, to match Julie’s hair. All of us were eagerly awaiting the march of the lovely bride down the red-carpeted aisle.

  Only she never came.

  Terry went on a two-week binge, did not graduate from college, never tried law school, and went back to work for the city. He soaked up all the beer on the west side and began to work on the north-side supply. He was a chronic alcoholic by the time of my first Mass, which he was not able to attend because he was in the hospital drying out.

  The Quinns moved out of the neighborhood in disgrace and bought a home in Lake Forest. And until that day at the Yacht Club, I never saw Julie again.

  Terry was dead at thirty of a liver ailment, they said. I didn’t have a car (we couldn’t own one for five years after ordination in those days). I made it to the wake on public transportation the final night. I knew I would not be able to get from Beverly to the west side for the requiem mass the next morning.

  His mother, now white-haired and frail, gripped my hand tightly when I offered my sympathies. I didn’t recognize the Gray Ghost in the casket; he looked as though he were sixty years old.

  “It was that redheaded bitch who did it to him,” she screeched at the top of her voice, causing everyone in the funeral home to jump with dismay.

  While a cold November rain fell on the tiny knot of mourners, the Gray Ghost was laid to rest in Mt. Carmel Cemetery the next day. None of his band were at the grave side.

  I stirred out of my reverie. A long way from Mayfield and Potomac to Port Dickson. Did Julie recognize me after all these years? Probably not. Even if she did, would she want to talk to me? Probably not.

  Derek, Roberta’s husband, came back with the children. The sun was sinking toward Sumatra. The expatriates at the swimming pool were clinging to the last splendid hours of a Port Dickson weekend.

  “A bite to eat?” asked Derek.

  I made a decision. “Give me a couple of minutes. I want to make peace with someone.” Julie was momentarily alone. I picked my way through swarms of dashing, shouting kids and stood above her. She did not look up from the book she was reading. While I watched and waited, wondering what I could possibly say, she sipped from a half-empty gin and tonic glass.

  Roberta had understated it: Julie was not merely handsome; she was beautiful—body still firm beneath the formfitting green swimsuit, legs still trim, red hair still bright, shoulders still thrown back in defiance. Time had touched her gently.

  Roberta had said she was happily married. Durable beauty and a happy marriage—not everything in life surely, but more than enough. There were, I felt sure, no demons to be exorcised, no guilts to be healed. Why bother her?

  Maybe because I was a priest.

  “Hi,” I said creatively.

  “I hoped you wouldn’t recognize me.” She lifted her head; the green eyes were filled with tears. “Have you finally forgiven me?”

  What can one say except benediction? “Nothing to forgive, lovely lady. You did the right thing. It never would have worked.”

  “I loved him,” she choked. “I really did love him, please believe that. I was afraid. I lost my nerve. My family kept telling me that he was incurable. I finally believed them.”

  I listened.

  “My life has been happy. I purchased my happiness at the cost of his suffering. I’ve never been able to forget that.”

  I repeated my previous words, not sure myself how true they were. “It never would have worked.”

  How much of a gamble can you demand of a young woman? How much of a long shot can love endorse?

  Her neatly carved face twisted with anguish in the golden rays of the setting sun. “How do you know? How can I know? How can anyone ever know?”

  “You haven’t forgiven yourself then?”

  “I have no right to. I killed him.”

  Maybe. Maybe not. The Founder had said let the dead bury their dead. I was a priest for the living.

  The sun eased down into the Straits of Malacca. I wished the Gray Ghost was there at Port Dickson to bring light and laughter into her haunted face.

  I sat down next to her, a priest about to hear a perhaps unnecessary confession and give long-overdue absolution.

  Lisa

  Catch a falling star

  Put it in your pocket

  Save it for a rainy day

  Catch a falling star

  Put it in your pocket

  Never let it fade away

  There were mixed emotions in the neighbo
rhood at the news that Lisa was coming home for Christmas. “Yeah,” said Blackie Ryan, who had gone to school with her and dated her occasionally, “a mixture of envy and resentment. The neighborhood doesn’t need a star at Christmas time.”

  Blackie, a cherubic little man with kindly eyes blinking behind thick glasses and a “Father Brown” manner which is not altogether accidental, was being imprecise. In fact, most of the people in the neighborhood couldn’t have cared one way or another. Way behind on their Christmas shopping and uninterested in stars anyway, they had only the dimmest idea who Lisa Malone was or that she had once lived in the neighborhood. Some of the quiet people were kind of happy that our own celebrity would be home again. The rest of us, the self-anointed arbiters of the taste and the keepers of the conscience of the parish (people like my mother), were outraged.

  Either Lisa would come home as a movie and TV superstar and would be denounced as “putting on airs” or she would reappear as the same old Lisa and be condemned for trying once more to win our affection and respect, something that we would never give her.

  “She has three strikes already,” Blackie went on dourly. “She had the effrontery to pursue a career, the shamelessness to choose a career in Hollywood, and worst of all, the unforgivable audacity to be an enormous success. The woman is intolerable, there is nothing else to be said about it.”

  There were those who would have said that the neighborhood was none of Blackie’s business, since he had been ordained and assigned to a working-class neighborhood in Jefferson Park (“That’s the end of him,” the Ryan-haters in the neighborhood said with a sigh of relief, premature as it turned out). In any event, his assessment was correct: our shooting star blazed a dazzling trail across the Christmas sky over the neighborhood, flicking out sparks of light which touched a lot of us, and then streaked away for Los Angeles, her brightness undimmed but some of the luster of her innocence forever lost.

  It might have been better, all things considered, if she had descended on the neighborhood with a limo, a chauffeur, a maid, a mink coat, two French poodles, a press agent, and several trunks full of clothes. Even my mother would have been impressed, although offended. Lisa elected to return as the same old Lisa, riding the Rock Island (still called that even if it is owned by the RTA) in brown slacks, sweater, scarf, and beige cloth coat, wearing no makeup and carrying her own garment bag, a pretty young woman returning for Christmas, perhaps from graduate school. We met at the end of the car as we prepared to exit at the Ninety-first Street Station.

  “You can’t hide from me behind those horn-rim glasses, George.” A brush of lips against my cheek. “Not married, I see. Wouldn’t be working on Saturday if you were. Poor Lou Anne. You look very proper and conservative and successful. And nice.” Second quick kiss.

  Somehow, while I was recapturing my breathing mechanisms, her garment bag was transferred to my custody. You’ve seen her on TV, of course, so I don’t need to go into many of the details of what took my breath away. Lisa looked like a young woman in an ad for the Irish Tourist Board, maybe a little bit too voluptuous for the Church-sponsored tours, but perfect for attracting young American men to Irish universities: short ebony hair, skim-milk skin (she hated suntan), dancing hazel eyes, a glowing impish smile which lighted a delicately sculpted face, and a figure which for all its obvious appeal also hinted at fragility that needed to be protected. “Chaste Irish Catholic eroticism,” said one of the reviews of her first TV special (“Lisa!”) earlier that year. “Sugarcoated sexuality,” sneered another.

  Those of us who knew her would not have argued with either description, but we would have rejected any suggestion that her screen image was different from her private image. She could not pretend even if she wanted to. She stole her first big feature film, A Time Without Tears, from the leads simply by being Lisa for the audience—funny, cute, energetic, and incorrigibly if subtly graceful. In the bedroom scene, without most of her clothes (to the deep offense of my mother and her friends, although Lisa was overdressed by the standards of many films), Lisa, as the ingenious if innocent virgin, blended grace and comedy into an irresistible combination.

  “Shameful,” clucked the neighborhood.

  “Lisa!” exclaimed those of us who knew her.

  So to be kissed—twice—by such a person on a snowy Saturday early afternoon in December was an experience not lightly to be dismissed. Twice.

  “Lou Anne was tired of waiting. And I work for Arthur Anderson, not my father. But I am an accountant and I still live at home. So, unlike you, I’ve only partly broken with the neighborhood.”

  “I haven’t broken with the neighborhood.” She accepted my hand for help down the steps of the train. “Why would I want to do that? I’ve gone away for my education and career. This is still home and always will be. Why not?”

  Indeed, the same old Lisa, blithely oblivious to the more mean and nasty human emotions. She was not coming home for this Christmas of 1970 either to impress us or to win our affections. She was coming home because it was home and because it was Christmas.

  “I suppose you must find Los Angeles’s Beverly Hills much more interesting than Chicago’s?” I held her arm tightly, lest she slip on the ice of the station platform. Large flakes of snow were drifting lazily across the little park, touching the black hair which escaped from her scarf.

  “Oh, I don’t know, there’s a lot of cougars in those canyons and I don’t mean Mercury Cougars either. Mary Kate Ryan Murphy said she’d meet me”—the merry laugh which charmed her film and TV audiences—“as if I didn’t know where the Ryan clan lives.” She glanced around the station.

  A small girl child appeared; she was perhaps ten, with a blond ponytail, piquant face, and vast blue eyes.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Malone,” she recited from memory as if repeating an elocution-class exercise. “I’m Caitlin Murphy and my mother said that I should meet you and that she had patients till three today because all the sick people are sicker at Christmas and that you’re welcome home and that…” She sniggered as breath and memory failed her.

  “That you should lead me home.” She kissed the child on the forehead. “I remember you when you were two years old, Caitlin. My, you’re so grown up. You know George? He’s big because he played football, but he’s nice. He kind of carries my garment bag and fights off cougars, middle-western ones that is. Can he walk home with us?”

  Caitlin considered me dubiously and then sniggered again. “Okay, I guess.”

  Lisa took Caitlin’s little mittened hand and Caitlin took mine. We walked the two blocks to the Murphys’ house (Joe Murphy, Mary Kate Ryan’s husband, is a psychiatrist, too) singing that Santa Claus was coming to town and praising Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

  “My mommy says your best carol is ‘O Holy Night.’”

  “All right, Caitlin.” Hands on her hips in mock exasperation, with the snow falling harder and darkness descending rapidly on the tree-shrouded houses with Christmas lights already shining in the windows, a woman hailed recently as the hottest young actress in Hollywood, sang Adolphe Adam’s “Cantique de Noel” for a ten-year-old worshiper and a twenty-eight-year-old cougar fighter. At that magic moment the latter would have quite willingly taken on a pride of saber-toothed tigers for her.

  “I certainly hope that nonsense isn’t starting again,” my mother commented fifteen minutes later when I arrived home, such is the speed at which scandalous news travels in our neighborhood. I had long ago learned simply to not reply to such comments.

  When pressed with the accusation that I had once dated Lisa Malone, my mother would smugly reply, “I put a stop to that nonsense in a hurry.” Lou Anne Sprague’s father is my father’s partner, and on the day she was born, my mother began to make the plans for our wedding. It was possible that I might marry someone else, but unthinkable that it be “Mary Malone’s affected little brat.”

  My mother is very good at taking credit for whatever happens. I did come home from Notre Dame to dat
e Lisa occasionally in her senior year (I’m two years older) and we went out often both in the neighborhood and at Grand Beach the summer after she graduated. (Blackie was bound for the seminary by then.) No one ended it, however; Lisa and I simply drifted in different directions. I was a bookish, shy accountant-in-the-making, with musical tastes which ran to the classical and the serious, and she was a comic-opera comet already exploding toward her place in the starry firmament.

  I noticed her for the first time when I was in fourth grade and she in second grade. She sang the “Ave Maria” for the May Crowning that year (“No second-grader has ever sung at the May Crowning before,” the other mothers complained bitterly). She seemed to me then to be an incredibly pretty little girl with a sweet smile and a lovely voice. I fell in love with her on the spot. Remove the word little from the last two sentences and I don’t suppose much has changed.

  It occurred to me as I went up to my room and began to read a computer magazine (there were only a few in 1970) that she must have known that I did not marry Lou Anne. I was sure that she and Blackie Ryan kept in touch with each other. Indeed, there were vague hints among the Ryans that he had helped her with a drug problem four or five years before. The headlines had said, CHICAGO STARLET IN DRUG AND SEX BUST. It turned out that she hadn’t been involved in the sex and that there were no drug charges filed against her. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” my mother insisted.

  Blackie had flown to Los Angeles during his summer vacation, and one had the impression that the Ryans all heaved a sigh of relief upon his return, not for Blackie, but for Lisa.

  So why was she pretending to have only just discovered my bachelorhood?

  I thought as I went to sleep the night she sang for me and Caitlin in the snow on Glenwood Drive, that our little scene would make a great setting for her next special. It would be pleasant, I admitted in my last conscious moment, to have a daughter like Caitlin.