All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “I’m sorry, Sister.” Peggy Walsh, like a high-school sophomore who had broken a vase in the chapel sacristy, was preparing to dissolve into hysterical tears.

  Paula pressed her finger on the phone button, cutting her line to the reception desk, lit another cigarette, and savagely punched the second number. The woman who answered asked several questions for a “friend” who had been the victim of sexual harassment. Paula accepted the fiction just as in years gone by she would have listened to a troubled teenager who asked questions for a friend who thought she was pregnant.

  She glanced at the next message. God Almighty, a call from Lilian Majewski at the U.S. attorney’s office, five o’clock yesterday afternoon! Urgent! I was still here.

  Frantically she punched Lil’s number. Too late. She was in court. An opportunity lost for a plea bargain which would save a bright black woman from a term in prison on a federal narcotics charge.

  “Ms. Walsh,” she snapped into the phone. “I was here when Ms. Majewski from the U.S. attorney’s office called. Why didn’t you give me the message?”

  “I don’t remember.…” A voice rent with terror. “I think I rang your office.” Like a little kid trying to find an excuse for a shattered cream pitcher. “You didn’t answer.”

  “I told you I was stepping into Mr. Foley’s office and that I was expecting Ms. Majewski’s call.”

  “I don’t remember. I’m terribly sorry, Sister, I guess I’m confused.…”

  “There is a black woman about the age of your younger daughter who will go to prison because of your confusion.”

  She cut the line and strode down the corridor to Foley’s office, reflecting that the corridor would be more appropriate for a luxury hotel.

  “Jim, I am moved by the pain in her eyes. I feel terribly sorry for her. But this simply cannot go on.”

  She told him about the two phone messages.

  “She and Dick were so much in love.” He drummed his pen on the blotter thoughtfully, as he always did when faced with an unpleasant decision. “Their romance lasted from their first date for thirty-four years till the day he died.”

  “She’s your wife’s sister. I don’t want to have to bring it up at a meeting, Jim.” Somehow women and especially women religious still had to draw the firm line, as in the old days in the parish when pastors turned soft on undisciplined children. “One woman will go to jail. Another may never bring her case to court. It’s too high a price to pay.”

  “You can still work out a plea bargain with Lil.” His pale brown eyes turned away from her. “It’s not settled yet.…”

  “That remains to be seen. My point is that we can’t continue to take such chances.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” He ran his hand through his sparse hair. “I’ll talk to her. Let her down easily. You don’t mind if she finishes up the week, do you?”

  “That’s on your conscience,” Paula said firmly. “I won’t raise the problem at the partners’ meeting until next week.”

  “Thanks, Paula.” He folded his hands and stared at them glumly. “I appreciate that.”

  If you really wanted to raffle off your wife’s useless sister, you should have stuck to your guns, Paula thought. You’re too weak even to do that. Why do the great male trial lawyers become wimps when they deal with women?

  “She wears a mink coat to work, Jim. A receptionist in a coat that even the women partners could not afford.”

  He nodded, not looking up from his hands. “I asked her about it. She says it’s the only decent winter coat she owns. She was going to buy a new cloth coat with her next paycheck.”

  Such a statement was too absurd to merit a reply.

  “She graduated summa cum laude from high school,” he continued, the softness of his lean face hinting at nostalgic adolescent fantasies.

  “And was doubtless sodality prefect, too, Jim, but that was forty years ago and irrelevant to a gatekeeper position in our firm. We can’t deprive some smart young black woman of employment because Ms. Walsh was once a sodality prefect.”

  “She went back to college after the kids were raised to get her degree.”

  “It was not in professional competence at a law-office telephone.… Jim, I repeat that I feel sorry for her, but that phone is a critical gate and she’s an inept gatekeeper.”

  As she had said during her interview on Channel 5, why must I devote so much of my ministry at this firm to challenging the flabby conscience of my self-described liberal male partners?

  “Some of our clients”—he wouldn’t look at her as he made his final, frivolous plea—“say that her smile out there brightens their day.”

  “Men clients?”

  “As a matter of fact…”

  “There’s nothing behind that smile, Jim. You know that as well as I do.”

  “Well … maybe. Warmth, I suppose…”

  “We are not”—she rose decisively from her chair—“in the warmth business. We practice the law in these offices.”

  “You’re right, of course.” He sighed wearily. Jim Foley could be forced to follow his conscience but never gracefully, like the adolescent boys who used to perform in her high-school plays but were too interested in flirting with the girls to learn their lines.

  With considerable difficulty she persuaded Lil to reopen the plea-bargain negotiations. Then, at the end of the day, she rode down on the elevator with Ms. Walsh. The receptionist carried her potted mum, wilting as was her frivolous and empty existence. Paula noticed that the woman’s mink coat had seen better days and felt a pang of sympathy for her. Despite a lifetime of effort to please men with her pretty face and a nice figure and instant submissiveness, Margaret Jane Walsh would return to an empty and lonely apartment, alienated from her own womanliness. Paula, on the other hand, would go back to warmth and support, a nutritious meal and a bottle of good wine, with her sisters in the commune, an authentic community of the sort the religious life had promised in the past but never achieved. Perhaps it was not too late to touch the sleeping consciousness of Margaret Walsh.

  “It must be difficult for you to adjust to the idea of a sister working as a lawyer,” she said in her woman-to-woman voice.

  “You do a lot of good helping those poor girls.” Peggy’s greenish blue eyes looked up at her, apparently surprised at the offer of friendship. “I think that’s wonderful.”

  She sounded like a high-school senior twenty-five years ago who was about to say that she thought she had a religious vocation.

  “The religious life has changed a lot since you were in high school.”

  “I’ve often wondered what happened to Sister Mary Inez.” Peggy shifted the mum from her right to her left hand. “She taught me in seventh grade.”

  “I believe she’s living in our golden years center.” They stepped out of the elevator into the white marble lobby. “The poor woman lives in the past.”

  Peggy nodded thoughtfully. “She seemed very unhappy even then. I remember once we were supposed to serve at a mothers’-club tea. I wore an apricot dress with white trim. My mother thought it was very nice. Sister lost her temper. She said I was putting on airs and couldn’t help at the tea. I went home in tears. Mom said Sister hated me because I was pretty.”

  “That wouldn’t happen anymore.” Paula adjusted the shoulder strap on her heavy cloth briefcase. She always felt embarrassed when someone told her about what a foolish woman had done a long time ago. “We must sympathize with poor women like Sister Inez. They lived under terribly oppressive conditions.”

  “I’m sure.” Peggy seemed hardly to have heard her. Like Jim Foley earlier in the day, she was lost in memories from the past. “I’ll never forget the hard, angry light in her eyes as she ridiculed my dress.”

  “Poor woman,” Paula repeated, wishing she hadn’t started the conversation and looking for an excuse to escape. Was there not, after all, a statute of limitations on offenses committed by frustrated and exploited women long ago?

  Peggy tu
rned toward her thoughtfully and considered her the way she would stare at a creature in the primate house at Brookfield Zoo.

  “I’m afraid I have to run.…” Paula tried to escape the woman’s searing eyes.

  Another elevator opened and disgorged a swarm of men, automatons rushing blindly for their commuter trains; Peggy whispered something softly.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t hear you, Ms. Walsh.” Wishing she had a cigarette, Paula leaned closer.

  Peggy’s brow knotted in a frown as though she were trying to work out the final word in a crossword puzzle.

  “Your eyes, Sister, are just like hers.”

  Deirdre

  She would not have been so angry, if his mildly lecherous flattery had not slipped underneath her armor of grief and self-pity and wounded her with a stab of pleasure. Delight, guilt, remorse, fury—she was conscious of the shameful infection as it coursed through her soul.

  Fury more at herself than at him.

  “What’s so amusing?” A light question as she walked across the waiting room of the law firm to her desk, trying to hide her embarrassment at his frank assessment. I must not lose my cool. Be self-possessed, aloof, but courteous.

  At first he never smiled when he came into the firm. It took her two weeks to persuade him to move his lips a little—part of her job, she felt, was to bring a bit of brightness and cheer to the clients. She had learned the skills of a darting shaft of sunlight slowly at first; she did not often feel like she could be sunlight for anyone. Now she was a competent professional receptionist, she could make almost anyone smile. Not very sophisticated or complex competence, but a beginning.

  Dan Carlin, lean, silver-haired, saturnine, somber, was a special challenge. He did not have much to smile about, poor man. After two weeks she managed to extract a faint movement of lips from him. “Good morning, Mrs. Walsh. Do you think the Bears will win next Sunday?”

  “Good morning, Mr. Carlin. Have I been wrong yet?”

  Then the twitch of lips. “Infallible, except for Miami.”

  “I don’t claim expertise on Monday-night games.”

  Then another slight twist of lips. Twice in one morning. I’m making progress.

  Now he’s staring at me like he wants to chain me with his eyes and smiling like a father watching a two-year-old daughter totter across the room. I’m scared and flustered. Have I overdone it? Does he think I’m flirting?

  “Since you ask, you’re amusing.”

  Carefully she placed the stack of computer output on the desk—half of her time now was devoted to an unofficial role as the firm’s business manager—and turned to face him.

  “Oh?”

  “Very amusing.” His appraisal seemed respectful, gentle, considerate—like that of an elderly priest for a daffy teenage girl. How could a wife walk out on a man like that after twenty-five years?

  Flushed with a warmth she had not felt for a long time, she sensed her defenses slipping away; she liked being appraised by him. “In what respect, Mr. Carlin?”

  “Well, to begin with, Peggy”—he spoke softly, slowly, considering every word carefully—“you’re very generous with yourself.”

  “What does that mean?” She reached for her grief, shock, and anger—the thick, familiar cloak of protection under which she had huddled for more than a year. It eluded her. I’m naked like in a nightmare, a very nice nightmare. I don’t want this to be happening, but I can’t stop it.

  “It means”—he considered his slender strong fingers, the hands of an All-American (honorable mention) basketball player thirty years ago, before he turned to the Mercantile Exchange and made his money—“that your compassion for others despite your own grief is enough to make a person want to cry.”

  Oh, dear God, he’s going to proposition me. And it won’t be ugly or disgusting like the others. I went too far. He does think I was flirting.

  Was I?

  “It’s an epidemic, Peggy,” Nick Barry had said to her. “Women her age realize they are getting old and think they have little to show for their life. The husband is an important person in the big world, sometime president of the Merc, and they’re no one, not in their own little world, now that the children are all raised. They need somebody to blame; the husband is a perfect target because he is the closest target. Even if, like Danny, he has encouraged her to develop her own talents. So they walk out because they want to live ‘a life of their own.’”

  I never felt that way, she had thought. I didn’t want a life of my own. I have one because God took my man away. I live by myself in a cold inhuman skyscraper and shiver and cry myself to sleep every night.

  At least she didn’t complain about it aloud; she’d learned through the months that no one liked a widow’s rage or self-pity. The cold doesn’t leave you, but you pretend that it does so you won’t be a bore.

  When Sister Paula had tried to fire her without consulting the other members of the firm, she had stood her ground firmly but without anger or self-pity. She felt certain she would lose. Sister Paula was a partner, she a receptionist. Somehow she had won. Poor Sister stormed out of the office shouting words a nun should never use.

  “That’s very kind,” she stammered in response to his praise. “Grief ought to be absorbed inside instead of being imposed on others.”

  That’s right, take refuge in platitudes when you should pick up your stack of computer paper and retreat, with calm dignity, somewhere else, anywhere else.

  “And you’re so wonderfully lovely, too.” It was his turn to stammer; he was losing his cool as his emotions raced ahead of his words. Poor man. I have led him on. I didn’t mean to. At least I think I didn’t.

  Their firm did not handle divorce cases. Nick Barry, who had played basketball with him long ago, was rearranging Dan Carlin’s estate planning now that the divorce and annulment were out of the way, a process which she thought was being deliberately prolonged so Nick could keep an eye on his anguished and confused friend.

  “You must have swallowed the blarney stone when you were in Ireland.” I could escape the anguish that’s coming if only he didn’t look so happy. He’s going to speak words that we will both regret for a long time.

  “So when you caught me looking amused”—he strove to be smooth, casual, relaxed, and was not quite successful—“I was pondering the very pleasant subject of how … how elegant you would look with a lot less clothes on.…”

  She was swept up in a wave of shame, sweet, languid, enervating delicious shame. And the first distant hint of sexual arousal, as her body strove to remember long-unused reactions. She realized how useless her armor had become. Her firm resolution to avoid sexual involvement for the rest of her life disappeared. “Grandmothers don’t date,” she had firmly told her daughters. “Why can’t I take a vow to be a consecrated widow?” she had demanded of the priest at the Cathedral.

  The young man merely laughed. “You’re not the type, Peggy. Not the type at all.”

  He’s been stripping me in his imagination was her first thought. And I’m delighted that he likes me was her second thought. Dear God in heaven, where is my anger? I am too old and I’ve suffered too much to be inspected this way.

  “Do you think that is an appropriate comment, Mr. Carlin?” Her voice was shaky and her hands trembled as she snatched up the computer output and hugged it protectively to her breasts.

  He had blurted out his praise of her sexual appeal; already a grimace of regret twisted his face. “I’m sorry if I’ve been offensive. I didn’t mean to—”

  “Do you think it proper to strip women mentally in a law office?” She had found her anger at last.

  “Only breathtaking ones”—he tried to grin—“and only with the greatest admiration and respect.”

  “So you turn only some of us into sex objects?”

  Thank God for feminist rhetoric.

  “I don’t think you’re a sex object, Peggy.” He was staring at his fingers again. “And I didn’t mean to be offensive. It sort of
slipped out.”

  “It’s called sexual harassment.” She spat out the words; now that she had controlled her pernicious self-satisfaction, she was truly furious. “Do you think a man of your age should be looking at a woman like … like she was so much meat on hoof?”

  Dear God, I sound like Sister Paula.

  “Am I a dirty old man, Peggy?”

  He looked so sad that she thought her heart would break for him. Poor dear, lost man.

  “You sound like one.”

  “I don’t consider you meat on hoof; men admire women like you, Peggy.” He twisted his hands miserably. “If I didn’t desire you, I’d be old and dead. My imagination isn’t dead quite yet.”

  She almost said that she wished she was fat and ugly. But she held back the words. First of all, they weren’t true. Why then would she be working out for an hour every day? Secondly, there was enough Irish superstition in her to consider the possibility that as punishment God would grant that wish.

  “I believe the old name for that, Mr. Carlin, is lust. And the new name is objectification. Under either name I find it repellent.”

  He smiled sadly, touching her wildly erratic heart. “Neither seem to be accurate names for what I feel, but please forgive me anyway.”

  “All right,” she said grudgingly, trying to think of an excuse for running. Then to make sure that he did not think she was weakening: “I trust there will be no more propositions in this office.”

  “Was I propositioning you?” He gazed out the window at the Merchandise Mart across the street. “I don’t think I was. Well, maybe I was at that. Not a bad idea, actually … Could I make peace”—his eyes returned to her, hurt, contrite, and still fascinated, even resolute—“at dinner tonight?”

  “Certainly not.” She fled down the corridor to the women’s room, where she could sob in relative privacy. And be secure from the possibility of changing her mind.