All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  She was embarrassed by my inspection, but no way did she turn or blush. “I know what it’s like to want to run away,” she said simply, “but it’s up to you, Peter Murphy. If you want to press charges, you are perfectly within your rights.”

  “What made you think it might be that house?”

  “That bodacious ole tot’m pole. I sez to myself, Cindasoo, suppose you’re thinking ’forehand that you’d be out on that wicked lake and are looking for a sign that you’ve come to the right beach late at night; what you goin’ to be searchin’ for? And I sez back, Cindasoo, happen you remember about that ole pole and the cave house under it. And then I’d say, Cindasoo, why not hide for a few days in that ole cave, ’specially since that gollywhooper of a pole will tell you whar it is, in the stone dead a-night.”

  “So you dressed up all fancy in that expensive swimming thing just to come to tell me I ought to give people another chance and to explain how you solved the mystery?”

  She drew a very long breath, a movement which made my eyes pop and my heart leap. Again the mountain-hollow shrewdness in her face. “No, Peter Murphy, suh. I got all gussied up in this wicked thing to see if you’d give me another chance. I lost my nerve the first time.…”

  It was a pretty amateurish kind of kiss, both of us being scared stiff, but she felt even nicer in my arms this time. We both knew we were crossing an important line in our lives.

  I’d held young women in my arms before. But none whose little heart pounded so fiercely against her ribs till I soothed it into serenity. And none whose offering of her whole self was so filled with trust.

  The kind of trust which hog-ties you with respect and reverence.

  “My mammy done warned me,” I lied, “about green-eyed mountain critters that hog-tie you with trust.”

  She just giggled and snuggled closer.

  “I think we’re in love, Cindasoo.”

  “Shunuff,” we said together.

  Peggy

  “We can’t permit outsiders to be buried from St. Finian’s. The priests would have to spend all their time at wakes and funerals.”

  The handsome young priest’s gray eyes were expressionless, his voice cold, his thin lips implacable under a trim mustache. At first Peggy was glad that the priest who came to the rectory office was young. Perhaps he would say something which would free her from numbness and permit her sentence of suffering and grief to begin. Now he sounded like the old monsignor in the parish where her mother grew up who would not permit a priest friend to say her uncle’s funeral when he was killed in the Second World War.

  “This is our parish, Father,” she said, struggling to climb out of the pit of numbness and to sound like the rational adult and the dedicated Catholic she was. “Our children went to school here, they were married in the church, Dick was on the parish council, I was president of the Altar Guild, we chaperoned High Club dances.…”

  Dick loved the High Club as much as the kids. It was impossible to link the cold body next to her in bed that morning with the gregarious idol of several generations of sophomore girls.

  Father Reid smoothed his mustache with tender affection. “You don’t live here anymore.” Dressed in a brown and white sport shirt and brown slacks, both fitting him perfectly, the priest looked a bit like a broad-shouldered, big-handed Richard Gere. He spoke in short, terse sentences, none of which had hinted at sympathy. “The Cathedral is your parish. Your husband should be buried from there.”

  “Can we see the pastor?” Rick, her second child and first son, a bantam-weight lawyer, even more of a brown-haired freckle-faced street fighter than his father, spoke for the first time, probably to cut off his wife Deirdre.

  “The pastor is away. I’m the administrator.”

  “How old are you, Father?” Deirdre, small and fiery like her husband, had been uncertain about the Walshes at first. It had taken Peggy a long time to win her over. Now her loyalty to Peggy was more intense than that of her own daughters and they were fiercely loyal women.

  “Thirty. What does that have to do with it, Mrs.… er—”

  “Walsh.” Rick was on his feet, jabbing his finger at the young priest as though he were a criminal on the witness stand. “If you had bothered to listen, Father, you would have remembered that she is my wife and our name is Walsh. Her point is that we are the same age and that I have had to work for every bit of income and prestige I have. You’ve been handed it all on a platter. You mean nothing—”

  “Rick,” Peggy pleaded. He and his father had always battled, often—especially since Rick had married and graduated from law school and there was nothing serious to fight about—for the pure love of battle. Now Rick’s love and grief were coming out the only way they could. If only I could grieve, too, she thought. Any emotion would be better than this awful emptiness.

  “Leave him to me, Mom.” He balled his hands into fierce little knots. Deirdre’s were already white from the pressure of squeezed fingers. “A lot of my father’s money is in that new church, Father, and a lot of his life went into this parish. His funeral Mass—”

  “Eucharist of the Resurrection.” Deirdre’s propensity to interrupt was uncontrollable. Somehow Rick seemed to like it.

  “Right, Mass of the Resurrection will be from St. Finian’s, if I have to go to the cardinal himself. Do you understand?”

  If Father Reid understood, it did not show in his expressionless eyes. “The Cathedral is his parish. The funeral Mass will be there.”

  I don’t care where it is, Peggy thought. What difference does it make? He was never sick a day in our thirty-two years of marriage. Now he’s dead and I don’t care whether I live or die.

  “You want to bet?” Rick’s eyes glowed with the joy of combat.

  “You’ll lose,” Deirdre told Father Reid, her tiny, pixie face hard with anger.

  I always tried to moderate Dick’s fire, Peggy reflected. She’s so different. Why does she egg Rick on?

  As they left the rectory, she realized that Rick was not his father and that Deirdre probably knew what she was doing. Theirs was a happy if turbulent marriage. Briefly she envied Deirdre because she still had a husband. Then she dismissed such feelings as absurd. If only she could really cry instead of sniffling into a tissue.

  She felt proud of her children for their loyalty and courage. Slim, erect kids, pale skin, snapping blue eyes, brown hair, bristling Irish wit, the four of them looked like they had been stamped out of the same mold; yet each was different: Ellen, the oldest, a radical, Rick a fighter, Nora an imp, and Brendan, the youngest, still at Notre Dame, a dreamy mystic. Perhaps, she sometimes thought, a priest.

  As they entered Rick’s Volvo she glanced around the St. Finian’s schoolyard. Four June Sundays in twelve years they had stood in that yard as their children, maroon and white ribbons blowing in the breeze, squinted against the sun and the flashing camera bulbs. The Walsh kids were so important, bright, athletic, articulate, often troublemakers, too, that it would have been impossible in those days to imagine a time when St. Finian’s would not remember them.

  Time passes so quickly. Now it would drag. Thirty more years on the average, she had read aloud from the paper to Dick just the other day. Thirty years of loneliness.

  How soon could she begin to mourn? Would she fall apart like so many widows did in the year assigned to mourning? And then emerge from grief, silly and a little like an overaged adolescent? She had worried about that before, as an abstract possibility, not something she would have to face so soon.

  Somehow it was decided that Deirdre (never, but never, to be called “Dee Dee”) and Rick would stay with her while she bought a mourning dress, made arrangements with the undertaker, and had her hair done. Ellen and her husband Steve would return to St. Finian’s after Rick made his phone call to the Cathedral, whose rector, Monsignor Ryan, had the cardinal’s ear.

  “They’re less likely to gloat,” Deirdre remarked philosophically. “More conservative, too.”

  She and D
ick had not done too badly with their children: Ellen, who had matured during the Vietnam War, had lived with Steven for a year before they were married and had used drugs. Now she and her husband were determined Catholics, possibly more conservative in their plans for raising their three children than her parents had been. Three marriages, all to Irish Catholics, six grandchildren, and one, maybe even two more on the way. What a pity Dick would not be around to enjoy their teen years as he enjoyed the adolescence of his own.

  “It will be more fun,” he had joked, “because I won’t have any responsibility at all.”

  “Not that you took all that much with your own,” she had sniffed. “They were your children till they got into trouble, then they became mine.”

  He had laughed, as he always did when she scored a point, and swept her into his arms.

  They had their share of troubles, though their relationship had not been as volatile at its worst as Rick and Deirdre’s was at its best. It was hard for either of them to stay angry for very long. Neither had much control of their sense of the absurd or their propensity to succumb to laughter at the height of a quarrel.

  The days of laughter are over, she thought as she escaped the purgatory of the hair dryer. Now begin the days of grief.

  The thought of purgatory caught her up short. She had yet to pray for Dick. No prayer, no tears. Dear God, have I lost my faith as well as my husband?

  Rick won his argument, as she was sure he would. The Mass of the Resurrection would be offered at St. Finian’s. Father Reid would say the Mass and preach and lead the service at Crawford’s Funeral Home, near the church. “It’s for the best, Ricky,” Ellen insisted. “He does represent the parish, and how can we choose among all our priest friends?”

  Rick looked like he wanted to argue, as he almost always did. Then he glanced at his mother and said ruefully, “Thank heavens there’s one mature kid in the Walsh clan, huh, Mom?”

  “Last one they thought would make it.” Ellen grinned back. They all laughed.

  “You’ll laugh at your own wake,” Peggy had often said to Dick.

  His wake, like her own widowhood, had never been anything more than a joke. Now it was real. And, yes, the Walshes would laugh. Tears would come later.

  Most of the bad times stopped when Dick gave up drinking. “Not quite an AA yet, but it wouldn’t take long,” he said after he had piled up their Olds coming out of the country-club parking lot. “We have to learn from everything that happens to us”—crooked grin and a precinct captain’s wink—“especially the disasters.”

  Death was a disaster. What did he learn from that? What did she learn? That she could be calm in the face of tragedy? Call the emergency number, call the Cathedral rectory, call your oldest, do all the right and reasonable things, even though you knew the man whom you adored more every day had died in his sleep next to you?

  Wonderful learning experience.

  Rick probably didn’t even realize that he was driving the Volvo by their old home. Deirdre’s quick intake of breath indicated she knew. Peggy touched her hand reassuringly. I won’t break down now. Would that I could.

  Something had died the day they moved out of that house; a quarter century it had been home. They both agreed that sentimentality shouldn’t keep them in a place which was too big after Nora and Ed married. Besides, they both had always planned to move back downtown. Just the same, they cried the day the deal was signed.

  Their new life in the city had lasted only two years, just long enough for her to begin to like it. Now there was an empty apartment and an empty life. What will I do when the worst of the grieving is over?

  The first few moments at the wake were the worst. She stood mute at the side of the wooden casket—Dick’s specific instructions—assaulted by the terrible sweet smell of memorial flowers. She did not recognize the stranger in the casket. Those purple lips were not the ones which had kissed her when they necked and petted shamelessly on their first date. That was not the body of the man with whom she had mated, at first awkwardly and without pleasure and then with graceful passion through the years. Her husband was somewhere else. Taken from her, perhaps forever.

  “A real Irish wake,” Brendan said as the long line of mourners filed past the first night. “Dad would love it. He always said the wakes were happier than the weddings.”

  “And with good reason.” She giggled despite the terrible pain beneath the numbness. I’m laughing at your wake, darling, the way you wanted me to.

  “Terrible people, the Irish,” Brendan continued like he was a wise old man instead of a heartbroken twenty-year-old. “Did you know that they used to screw in the fields while the wake was in progress? That’s why the Church in Ireland finally banned them.”

  “Brendan,” she said in the tone of mild reproof she used when anyone in the family used improper language.

  “It meant something important.” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “It meant”—his voice choked—“fuck you, death.”

  The young man slipped away from the line, so quietly no one noticed. To break down in the men’s room. He can mourn and I cannot. It will come, it will come, and I will think that it will never end.

  Fuck you, death.

  That night she dreamed that it was all a nightmare and woke up sure that she could touch Dick’s hand next to her. When she felt nothing but an empty bed, the pain became worse. She thought she would lose her mind for a few moments of wild delirium. Then, sanely and reasonably, she went to the bathroom and took a pill the doctor had given her. She must have a few hours’ sleep to be ready for the second night of the wake.

  That was the night the priests came; she thought, Have we known so many of them in our marriage? Jesuits from Loyola, Holy Cross men from Notre Dame, the priests who had served at St. Finian’s, the priests who were important to the kids, the pastor of the parish in which Nora and Ed lived, even Monsignor Ryan from the Cathedral, a funny-looking, confused little priest with lovely blue eyes and the kindest smile she had ever seen.

  Joe Stack, who went to grammar school with her and on whom she had a crush before he went to the seminary, came with his wife, an angry, hateful ex-nun who hardly seemed able to contain her joy at Peggy’s bereavement.

  Joe looked haunted and old. He had not been happy as a priest; they had said it was his mother who had the vocation, not Joe. He did not seem any happier now. Peggy shivered slightly. No matter how bad your predicament might be, someone else’s was always worse.

  She wondered where Father Reid was. The new wake services were beautiful. Nora had brought her guitar and rounded up her friends from the days of the teen choir to sing the psalm. When the Walshes were not laughing, they were singing. “Mrs. Walsh,” her children’s friends used to say, “is really excellent on the piano, she can play, like everything!”

  Mary Anne and Jim Foley, her kid sister (a year younger) and her husband, stood next to the family. We had so much fun when we doubled-dated in high school. How does it slip away so quickly? I was a kid, then a wife, then a mother, then a grandmother, now a widow. I don’t feel any older than when I was a kid. That was only yesterday.

  “Father Reid’s here.” Mary Anne touched her hand.

  The young priest was strikingly handsome in a clerical suit which had to have been tailor-made to fit so well. He cut to the head of the line, so swiftly that no one seemed to have noticed he was in the room.

  “At least he wore his Roman collar,” Rick said in a stage whisper.

  Nora, energetic as always, bounced up to the priest, prayer card in one hand, guitar already in the other. One of those preceremony conferences with the priest in which the new clergy received their marching orders from the new laity.

  Father Reid, expressionless, impassive, raised a massive hand to decline the card, knelt at the casket, and began the “Our Father” in a resonant baritone voice. The hubbub of the funeral parlor declined gradually as mourners began to realize that prayers were being said.

  “A decade of the
fucking Rosary,” Rick protested.

  “Shush,” his mother replied in a tone which the kids knew meant they had better behave.

  After the final “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him,” Father Reid shook hands solemnly with each member of the family, speaking not a word of sympathy to any of them, indeed not a word of any sort. Then, as quickly as he had come, his broad shoulders went through the doorway and out into the air of the early spring suburban night.

  “Bastard,” Nora exploded through her tears.

  They were all crying, even the spouses. Why was she the only one without tears?

  “He’s like a lot of the young ones we’re getting,” Ed said as he held Nora tightly against his massive chest. “All they care about is the status that goes with the office. People don’t matter to them anymore.”

  Ed and Nora always spoke about the Church as though they were running it. “A lot of the young ones we’re getting.” If ever the Church permitted a husband and wife to exercise a joint priesthood, those two kids would be at the head of the list of applicants.

  “We must pray for the poor man,” Peggy said tersely, signaling them that there would be no more discussion of Father Reid.

  Ellen, as always, had to have a final jab. “He has a sociopath’s eyes.”

  Before she could reply to Ellen’s last word with a last word of her own, Peggy noticed that the murmur of noise at the entrance of the funeral home had suddenly grown louder and more cheerful. A short, white-haired priest, with a wide chest, thick glasses, red face, and penetrating voice had appeared and was already working the wake the way Mayor Daley did when he was alive.

  “Mugsy Branigan!” exclaimed Ellen.

  “All the way from Florida.” Nora’s tears were turning into laughter.