All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  There must have been fifty people in Ed Ryan’s house when I arrived. Ed and Helen and Chantal, the oldest child of the second family, greeted us at the door, the gentry admitting the rest of the village.

  Blackie was fumbling around at the temporary altar next to his late mother’s grand piano. Eileen, who is a lawyer married to Red Kane, the columnist, and is the official family musician, was thumbing through sheet music.

  Caitlin materialized next to me. “Know what, George? Chantal Ryan is my aunt and she’s only a year older than I am.”

  “No!”

  “Yes!” Giggle. “Do you love Lisa?” Another conspirator.

  “Everyone does, Caitlin.”

  Lisa stood at the far corner of the room in her white knit minidress, fighting back the tears. By the time Blackie had himself organized, there must have been two hundred people crowded into the house, including the two curates, a half dozen of the nuns, and with her usual ability to adjust to the inevitable, my mother.

  “Now let’s see,” Eileen said in her best courtroom voice. “We should keep the carols simple. ‘Adeste’ … slowly please … at the beginning. ‘The First Noël’ at the offertory. ‘Silent Night’ at the end. And … hmm…” A small smile. “How about ‘O Holy Night’ at Communion? Could you lead us in that Lisa, dear?”

  The poor child could only nod.

  Blackie never fumbles and bumbles when he preaches. “Today is the feast of light. We celebrate the return of the sun. The coming of the Son of God, the light of the world which the darkness can never put out. We also rejoice that in his love we, too, have our own light to shine on the lives of others, each in our own way, light essential, light indispensable, light glorious. In the power of God’s love and in the power of our own love for one another, our light, too, will never be put out. We celebrate especially the light of those to whom God has given extraordinary gifts for bringing light and laughter and love to others. We promise that we will cheerfully cooperate in God’s efforts to see that their special light is never put out.”

  So there. Lisa surrendered finally to tears. Caitlin, standing next to her, held her hand in mute adoration.

  At Communion time she sang “Cantique de Noel” like she had never sung it before:

  O Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining;

  It is the night of the dear Savior’s birth.

  Long lay the world in sin and error pining,

  Till He appeared and the soul felt his worth.

  A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices,

  For yonder beams a new and glorious morn.

  Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices

  O night divine, O night when Christ was born

  O night divine, O night divine!

  Led by the light of faith serenely beaming,

  With glowing hearts by His cradle we stand;

  And led by light of stars so sweetly gleaming,

  Here come the wise men, from the orient land.

  The King of Kings thus lay in lowly manger,

  In all our trials born to be our friend.

  He knows our needs; to our weakness, no stranger.

  Behold your king! Before Him lowly bend.

  Behold your king! Your king, before Him bend.

  Need I say that there was hardly a dry eye in the room? Even Blackie had to polish off his thick lenses. Fortunately, I was wearing my contacts still.

  I didn’t have a chance to talk to her after Mass because there were so many people wishing her well (my tearful mother, of course, among them). I did hear Lisa remark to Red Kane that there were a lot of cougars in the canyons of Los Angeles. I don’t know whether I was supposed to hear that. Probably.

  I am, as you have doubtless noted, a cautious, careful man. An assiduous, if computerized, bean counter. I did not reach a decision till New Year’s Day, almost a week after our shooting star went away.

  The decision was obvious. There was no room for George the bean counter in the life of a woman like Lisa. That, sadly, was that.

  So, on Twelfth Night, I called Blackie from O’Hare to tell him I was flying to Los Angeles.

  “I want to see,” I told him ruefully, “what can be done about reducing the cougar population in those canyons.”

  Cindasoo

  “P.O./3d C. S. McLeod of the Yewnited States Coast Guard, Michigan City Station, suh. I’m a-searchin’ for two bodies. Have you noticed any unusual bodies on the beach, suh?” The voice was exhausted, the body was short, the green eyes were weary, the face was pinched and red, the navy blue jacket and jeans were soaking wet.

  I was about to tell the waterlogged kid on the doorstep that I didn’t want to buy any magazine subscriptions when the phone rang. It was my mother, wondering whether I had finished my term paper—left over from summer school and required for graduation next summer.

  “The coast guard is here looking for bodies,” I said, trying not to sound too groggy. “I’ll call you back.”

  “Your mammy?” A green eye considered me with more shrewdness than seemed appropriate.

  “You know what mothers are like.” I shrugged.

  “Shunuff.” The kid, dripping wet, edged into the kitchen of our beach house, a businesslike walkie-talkie bulging out of a blue jacket pocket.

  I made one more effort to clear my head from the effects of the previous night’s six-packs and said, “Bodies?”

  “Yassuh,” responded the kid forlornly. “I’ve been a-ramackin’ the whole beach since five o’clock this morning. But I can’t find none nowheres.”

  “Smack dab out of bodies?” I said, showing off the course in American dialects from last year (and an A at that).

  The thin shoulders straightened up, like an undersized line backer bracing for a blitz.

  “I’ve been instructed to interview civilian residents to ask if they have observed any bodies.” The high-pitched voice was pure redneck; the short, cropped auburn hair was dripping water, as were the navy blue jeans and jacket, on our kitchen floor.

  “I’ll make you some coffee,” I said. “No, I haven’t seen any bodies. How do you folks expect to find bodies with twelve-foot waves wiping out the beach and rain pouring down for three straight days? It’ll just be a chance if you uns find any bodies.”

  “I know all about the rain, suh,” said the weary redneck voice, in perfectly grammatical Standard English. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  I gestured toward the kitchen table and then made a remarkable discovery as the redneck coast guard sank into a chair by the table. Maybe it was something about the set of the thin, tired shoulders. Anyhow, I tightened the belt on my blue terrycloth robe. The coast guardsman was a coast guardswoman. Or maybe I should say coast guardperson.

  “What’s this about bodies?” I asked, putting the teakettle on to boil. Whatever gender, the best I could do for the Department of Transportation on a gray rainy day in late September was instant coffee.

  “A civilian craft ran out of fuel just before the gale blew up three days ago, suh.” The green eyes watched the teakettle hungrily. “There were five people aboard. Three stayed with it and two elected to swim for shore. The three came aground in the craft the day before yesterday. No trace of the other two.”

  I found some donuts in the icebox. One of them disappeared as soon as I put it on the table. “Craft, fuel, elect, civilian”—they’d taught this teenage redneck waif to use coast-guard talk. I wondered if she’d ever seen a body when Lake Michigan finished with it.

  “You certainly don’t figure to find any bodies in waves like those?” I gestured at the ugly white walls sweeping in at the front of our dune.

  Now, as my mammy, Dr. Mary Kate Ryan Murphy, the distinguished psychiatrist, would note, I am at that age in life when anyone of similar age and with a certified set of female reproductive organs excites libidinal interest. So I was libidinally interested in C. S. McLeod, P.O./3d, Yewnited States Coast Guard. Mild libidinal interest. Like wondering what she’d look like if she was
not wearing her vast jacket.

  She compressed her thin lips. “May I call my base, suh?” she asked.

  “Yas’am,” I agreed. I’m an anthropologist, not a linguist, but placing redneck talk is a kind of a hobby. “Southwestern West Virginia, isn’t it, way up in the hills?”

  I was rewarded with a faint, crinkly smile for my efforts.

  “Stinkin’ Creek, suh,” she returned to Appalachian English. “Brown’s Holler, tell the truth. Ah joined the coast guard to get shet of the mountains and see the world out yonder.”

  “Is Michigan City, Indiana, any better than Stinking Creek, West Virginia?”

  “Yassuh.” She removed her walkie-talkie. “Not much, though … Mobile one to base, mobile one to base. Can you read me, base? Over.” She turned away from me, her neck actually turning red.

  Reevaluated from the perspective that she was a coast guardswoman, C. S. McLeod could be rated cute, even pretty, possibly beautiful, but that would be going too far before I had more data.

  Base didn’t read her until she had fiddled expertly with the machine. Then base came through loud and clear. “That you, mountain flower? Where the hell you been? Over.” That voice was pure New Orleans black.

  “Roger, base, this is mobile one. I have been interviewing a civilian resident in a home on the beach, the first civilian I’ve found this morning.”

  I put the coffee in front of her. Again the wry, crinkly smile. Definitely kind of cute. Arguably gorgeous. Short even for a woman, but not too short. Take off the jacket, kid.

  “He reports seeing no bodies.”

  “Roger, Cindasoo. Call the CO in Cleveland on the phone; he’ll give you more instructions. Over and out, mountain flower. Stay dry.”

  She sighed and put down the walkie-talkie. “May I use your phone, suh?”

  Somehow another donut vanished. She was gratefully sipping the coffee. I nodded my head.

  She called collect and asked for the CO. “McLeod here, suh. I have been patrolling the beach since five. Yes, suh, I am very wet. I have found one civilian resident who I am interviewing … yes, suh, a young man about twenty, football-type ape with red hair. Just out of bed, good-looking in a shanty Irish sort of way … suffering from a hangover.…” She flashed the damn crinkly grin again. “No, suh, not my type at all. My mammy done warned me about you Irish papists. Said you were no-’count and shiftless.” The lips tightened. “Yes suh, yes suh … Suh, do you want me to continue the patrol to New Buffalo? Yes suh … I was afraid so … yes suh, shunuf, I’ll try to stay dry.” She hung up with another sigh, kind of like the one patented by my uncle, Blackie Ryan the priest.

  “Pete Murphy is the name which goes with the shanty Irish hangover,” I said, putting the final donut in her open mouth.

  “And James McCarthy is the name of that damn male chauvinist hound dog who is my boss,” she mumbled through the donut. “All you Irish are alike.”

  I said something nasty about how a teenage punk coast guard rating from out of the hills couldn’t hide the fact that her ancestors were Irish, too, an’ they probably came over after Culloden Moor an’ left the true Church.

  She replied, unzipping her jacket, that her ’uns had been in Stinkin’ Creek thirty years ’fore that Dan’l Boone fella came over the hills. They were shunuf Americans, not biggety ’mgrants.

  I complimented her on her study of the drinking subculture of the Irish papists but asserted that we hadn’t invented moonshine.

  Underneath the jacket, as best as one could observe through a heavy navy blue sweatshirt, she was more than presentable. I exercised the horny male’s right to fantasize about helping her out of the sweatshirt.

  She countered in kind that if you have to live with hound dogs you study their moods. I remarked that Michigan City must seem like paradise compared to the mountains where they had sure enough hound dogs. She said, her green eyes shooting fire, that the real hound dogs were better than the human kind, grinned her crinkly grin, which was kind of growing on me, and put out her mug for more coffee.

  “Why the rush to find those bodies, Cindasoo McLeod?” I asked, deciding that they were nice young breasts and that she probably could be considered beautiful. “If they wash in at all, it will be after the storm stops.”

  She was serious again. “Have you seen anyone on the beach at four o’clock in the morning, Mr. Murphy, suh?” The title was not ironic. They sure enough trained her to be polite.

  “Dead or alive?” I asked, intrigued.

  “Alive.” Her eyes were now fixed on my face.

  Oh, my God, a redneck girl detective. “Sorry, Cindasoo McLeod, girl detective, ma’am, but I’m usually sleeping off my hangovers at four o’clock in the morning. What night?”

  “Monday night. The woman in the house with the blue gazebo was interviewed yesterday by one of our personnel. She ’lowed that she woke up precisely at four o’clock and thinks she saw two subjects on the beach.”

  So that was what she had to ask the CO about. “And they fit the description of the people who didn’t make it to shore?”

  She nodded. “Do you know a varmint from Long Beach named Harold O’Connell?”

  “Was Harry the one who drowned?” I asked, embarrassed at being out of touch with the news. “I’ve been doing a term paper.…”

  “Keepin’ yah poah mammy happy? … Would you recognize this varmint if you saw him on the beach at four o’clock in the morning?”

  She was boring in like a truck. This Cindasoo McLeod, girl detective, was something else. She’d checked me out, too, the little imp. And decided that she could play her cute li’l redneck game for all it was worth.

  I found another box of donuts. “Okay, mountain flower, let’s have the whole story from the beginning. The CO told you it was all right to fill me in. Play it straight and I’ll help.”

  The eyes narrowed and the sweet little face peered at me for a moment of raw shrewdness. I guess I passed the test, though I’d hate to have been a varmint up in the hills that she was going after with a squirrel gun.

  She shrugged her thin shoulders. “My name is not ‘mountain flower,’ despite what that black trash J. G. calls me. This ridge runner Harry O’Connell is in slathers of trouble with his father-in-law. He done red off from the family brokerage firm with a whole heap of money—more than a half million dollars in negotiable securities. He also done committed adultery many times with a nurse he met at the hospital when his last littleun was born. His father-in-law done told the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago. They were going to drop in ’n’ talk a mite with Mr. O’Connell on Monday morning. Then he hears the powerful bad news that Mr. O’Connell and this here scarce-hipped nurse drowned on Sunday afternoon. Name a Moira Walsh. Typical no-’count Irish papists.” She grinned at me. “No one done found the securities neither.”

  “So the guess is that they are on their way to South America?” I said wisely, and then as an afterthought, “And I’m infinitely more virtuous than Harry.”

  She ignored my defense and returned to SE, excepting she always pronounced “United” as “Yewnited”—the correct way I suppose she would have argued. “The United States attorney’s office was very anxious about our finding the bodies. When one of our personnel interviewed Mrs. Blue Gazebo yesterday, Commander McCarthy, using his native wit, thought that maybe the good old Northern District of Illinois was sure enough not telling us everything it ought to. So they allowed finally as how death by drowning was mighty convenient for Mr. O’Connell and Ms. Walsh. So this refugee from the hills and the hollers is likely to catch her death of cold unless, please suh, you give me some more coffee.”

  I was beginning to think it might be a good idea to fall hopelessly in love with her. For her part, less romantically but more realistically, Cindasoo McLeod was trying to make up her mind whether she liked me. She wasn’t much to look at, a little tad all bundled up in her sweatshirt and jacket again, but I wanted her to like me. Anyhow, I gave her the coffee. She eyed me specula
tively. I thought maybe I passed another test.

  “Why would they hang around the beach, Cindasoo McLeod? Why not head for South America right away? Should not the Northern District have the feds watching airports instead of wilted mountain flowers slogging through the sand?” Okay, I was walking on thin ice. She didn’t seem to mind. Hell, the race keeps going because people our age size each other up. I wished she’d take off her jacket so I could do some more sizing. I sat down across the table from her.

  “It’s the wilted mountain flower’s own fault. I observed to Commander McCarthy that if I were running away with a half-million dollars, I would lie low for a long time before heading for an airport, even if I had staged a drowning. So I would go to ground, uh, take refuge quite near the place where I landed on the beach, and stay there until…”

  “A snowstorm covered my tracks.”

  “Uh-huh. Anyhow, the commander, whose father was one of your corrupt Chicago cops, said I was in the wrong branch of government service, that I had a mind like a corrupt cop, and would I like to patrol the beach and interview residents to establish my theory? He then arranged for it to rain for three days.…”

  “Why did you leave West Virginia and join the coast guard, Cindasoo McLeod?” I asked, wondering what she thought about sitting at a kitchen table with a man who was twice her height and weight (well, almost), wearing only a battered blue terrycloth robe.

  “Personal questions are irrelevant to my patrol responsibilities, Mr. Murphy,” she said primly. Then, relenting, she added, “The coast guard guarantees to keep you away from mountains after you’re out of junior college. Now I must continue my patrol. Thank you for the refreshment.”

  She stood up, hunched her shoulders like she was going out on a raccoon hunt, and eased toward the kitchen door. I’d scared her. Damn.

  “Can I come help? I’ve always wanted to be a detective.” Lame, but the best I could do on the spur of the moment.

  “You’re not authorized government personnel, Mr. Murphy, suh. If you saw Harry O’Connell anytime since Monday night and could tell me…”