All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “And begin to grow old.” Did she read minds?

  “Real old-timer.” She smiled again; her teeth were fine and even, like her delicate facial bones. She was a natural beauty, needing neither makeup nor expensive clothes to strike at your heart.

  “The war made us all grow up too soon.” I pushed aside my plate of soggy pancakes. “I wish … I don’t know what I wish.”

  “I wish,” she said, and finished her coffee, “I had my husband back.”

  “Let me buy you a real breakfast.” I stood up from the counter and walked around to her other side.

  “That isn’t necessary.” She clutched her purse. “I’m not hungry.”

  I picked up her suitcase. Heavy, probably all her worldly goods. “Yes you are. I don’t have any … well, bad ideas.”

  She considered me very carefully, her eyes probing at my soul like a doctor’s exploring scalpel. “You do too, Commander, but you won’t act on them, will you?”

  “Not at the breakfast table.”

  “Nor with an enlisted man’s widow. All right, sir.” Yet another smile. “I’ll admit I’m starved.”

  Four times she had read my mind. I thought it odd, but not frightening, much less dangerous. Only later would I try to fit it into the whole strange picture of Andrea King, if that really was her name.

  We walked up Sixth Street and turned into Congress. Tucson was not much more than a small town in those days, thirty thousand people according to an old almanac I checked while I was thinking about this story. East of the railway there were blocks of adobe homes, slums for Mexicans. In the other direction stretched neat lines of bungalows with withered grass lawns—home designs transplanted from New England or the Middle West. Why would anyone want to live in this furnace? I wondered. Humid furnace at that. As I drove in at sunrise on Highway 86 I passed the sleepy red-brick University of Arizona. It would be on the bottom of my list.

  Yet the desert mountains all around—the Catalinas looming to the north, the lofty Santa Rita’s on the south, the Tanque Verdes to the east, and the Tucson mountains to the west—held my attention: barren desert mountains, not a bit like Fuji. But American mountains, thank God. And hence dear to a man who had decided after Yap that he would never live to see America again.

  The hotel was better than the railroad station. The tables were clean, the service friendly and polite, and a primitive form of air-conditioning was huffing away.

  “This town will never amount to much.” I held the chair for her.

  “Until they put air-conditioning in every home.”

  “That will never happen.”

  “How can people live in brick homes in this weather?” I sat next to her and picked up the menu.

  “Did you notice the homes with the walls all around them? I suppose that’s the Spanish emphasis on privacy.”

  “You wouldn’t have to wear much behind those walls.”

  “I bet they do.”

  She ordered orange juice, bacon and eggs, pancakes, and coffee and demolished the meal with quiet efficiency.

  “Not hungry, huh?”

  “Very hungry, Commander.”

  “Jerry. You’re?”

  “Andrea. Andrea King. Where are you going next?”

  “Down to Colossal Cave and over to Tombstone, then up to Phoenix, probably by way of the Superstition Mountains.”

  “What are those?”

  “Where the Lost Dutchman Mine is supposed to be. I’m curious.”

  “Yes. I know. Is that any relation to the Flying Dutchman?”

  “Who’s he?”

  “An opera about a sea captain who is doomed to roam the world forever without ever finding port.”

  “I don’t know much about opera.”

  But she did. And she hadn’t graduated from high school.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Phoenix. I know someone who thinks she can find me a job. Waiting on tables in one of the winter resorts. They call it the Arizona Biltmore.”

  “Can I give you a ride?”

  “I don’t think…” She considered me again, even more cautiously, over a fork of syrup-drenched pancake. “That would be very nice. I don’t have much money.”

  I was not a total innocent. She should have insurance and a pension. But the navy department was slow. She’d run out of the money she’d saved from John’s family allowance, which was sent routinely while he was still alive.

  I didn’t pry. It was none of my business why she had left San Diego or why she hadn’t been able to hold a job there. And the questions I asked about her background were gently deflected. She was from “the east”; she didn’t have any family; she didn’t know what she would do with her life. Probably try to finish school when she had saved some more money. No, of course, she didn’t mind if we detoured to the Cave and Tombstone before driving up to Phoenix. The job, she had been told, was waiting for her whenever she came.

  A thin but not improbable story. I was not inclined to question it. An hour before I was an ex–naval officer struggling with depression and wondering what point there could be in the rest of my life. Now I had a beautiful young woman to protect and care for.

  At almost twenty-four that is enough. Even if the young woman is smarter than she has any right to be.

  And even if there is something just a little strange, almost uncanny about her.

  That’s the right word. Uncanny. Andrea King was not quite of this world. In the back of my head even then I think I knew that. I did not want to pay any attention to what I knew.

  I glanced at the Arizona Star on the newsstand in the hotel lobby. SEVENTY-SIX DIE IN JERUSALEM HOTEL BLAST! I bought the paper. Zionist terrorists had blown up the King David Hotel. I no longer asked when the killing would finally stop. I knew it would never stop.

  “Why did they give you the Navy Cross?” she asked as we walked into the thick soggy curtain of heat on Congress Street.

  “Philippine Sea. I saved some TBFs that were in trouble. Zeros.”

  “Does that help?”

  “Some American women are not widows—if the TBF men made it through the rest of the war. Some Japanese women are.”

  Immediately I regretted the harshness of my reply. It did not, however, seem to bother her.

  “We didn’t start the war.”

  We turned down Stone, almost as though she knew where my 1939 Chevy ($799 FOB Detroit) was parked.

  “How did you know I got the Navy Cross?”

  “I guess,” she said, tilting her head to glance at me ruefully, “that I’m a pretty good guesser.”

  She stopped next to the battered blue car before I did.

  “Damn good guesser.”

  “Only car on the street.” She laughed for the first time, a pure, open laugh which hinted that long ago she might have been the life of the sophomore hops at her high school.

  A long, long time ago.

  “Yeah, but you knew the street.”

  She laughed again and waited till I opened the door for her. “Thank you.”

  Nuns, I thought. Catholic high school. I bet they expelled her when they found out she was married. Pregnant? Lost a child?

  I rolled down the window of the Chevy and turned to the sports section. The Cubs had lost again. A long way down from the World Series last year. Then the comics. Terry and the Pirates. Smilin’ Jack, Dick Tracy.

  I looked up. Andrea was smiling at me, a mother watching a funny little baby. Navy Cross and Smilin’ Jack. I suppose it was funny.

  Her smile quickly faded. “I had a miscarriage after John sailed. I don’t know whether my letter ever caught up with him. I hope it didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She nodded again.

  “God provides, Andrea,” I said weakly.

  “It’s not God I’m worried about.”

  We took the Benson road out of Tucson, across the harsh, brown desert.

  “My guidebook says that this was all cattle country till the end o
f the last century. Tombstone folded up because the silver mines flooded and the ranch land dried up.”

  She nodded, a favorite gesture, conveying appropriately different reactions. God, she was lovely. I was glad that she would be with me for the day.

  “Did you work in San Diego?”

  She’d been a waitress at the Del Coronado Hotel after it reopened. She was not very good at it. Couldn’t concentrate. Too many memories. Too much navy. She thought she should start over somewhere else. They had been very nice to her, but she couldn’t exist forever on pity.

  “I used to drink there occasionally. I’m sure I would have remembered you.”

  “After how many drinks?” Her laugh, I decided, was pure magic.

  “Touché. But you are the kind I would remember, even drunk.”

  “If we’re going to exchange compliments, Commander, I think I would remember you, too.”

  Young and innocent, but somehow experienced and wise. I thought I might just be falling in love with Andrea King.

  And I would have remembered her if I had seen her at the Coronado.

  So I didn’t say much on the road to Tombstone. Just short of Benson, U.S. 80 branches off from Arizona 86 and heads due south. We slowed down to twenty-five miles an hour on the outskirts of St. David.

  “Mormon town.” I glanced over at her. She seemed far, far away from southern Arizona.

  “Tell me about Tombstone.” She shivered. “It’s a frightening name.”

  I told her about the Earps and the Clantons, and the McClurys and the gunfight in 1881, all memorized from my guidebook.

  “How terrible.”

  Tombstone was even less impressive then than it is now. Wyatt Earp had yet to become a TV hero, and the old town had yet to discover it could squeeze a few extra dollars a year from tourism. I pulled up in front of the Post Office Café on the main street.

  “Want another cup of coffee?”

  She was staring out the window, seeing neither the Post Office Café, nor 1946 Tombstone.

  “Andrea?” I said gently, touching her arm, the first of what I was beginning to hope would be many touches.

  “I’m sorry … what did you say?”

  “Do you want a cup of coffee before we do the OK Corral?”

  “No … Commander … uh, Jerry … do you mind if I stay in the car? I’m afraid of this place.”

  She huddled against the door; her body was tense, her face tight with fear.

  “It’s just an old western ghost town.” I took her hand.

  “Please.”

  “Of course.”

  The OK Corral was a disappointment—just a yard next to a house. Reality so much more bland than story. But I explored Tombstone with a singing heart. A new challenge had entered my life to replace war, just as war had replaced flight training and chemistry and basketball. Pretty, haunted young women were, I told myself, the best excitement yet.

  She was still crouched against the door, now reading a book. All the King’s Men.

  “Good book?”

  “Very. About politics and corruption. I’m sorry if I disappointed you.”

  “The sights on this tour are an option. We’ll get you to Phoenix ’fore sundown, ma’am.”

  “Silly.”

  She was still terrified.

  Colossal Cave did not help any. If anything, the entrance frightened her more than the streets of Tombstone.

  “I can’t go in there. I’d die.”

  She sounded like she meant it.

  “You don’t mind waiting?”

  “Of course not.”

  The cave was dark and slimy and disappointing.

  “Not very scary at all,” I said as I climbed back into the car.

  “I would have died,” she repeated as she closed the book and laid it next to her—and between us—on the front seat. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s nice to have someone waiting.”

  She didn’t smile or nod. Still scared.

  She did get out of the car at the old St. Xavier Mission—the “white dove of the desert”—and walked into the church with me. She fell on her knees in the back of the dark nave and prayed fervently—like someone pursued by demons, I thought. Outside, she pleaded to be excused from visiting the tiny cemetery next to the church and scurried back into the steaming car.

  “What frightens you?” I tried to keep my voice soft and reassuring as I started the old Chevy.

  “Everything.”

  I didn’t pursue the matter.

  As we drove away from the mission, she grabbed my arm—first time and I hoped not the last. “Those clouds over the mountains!”

  Great black clouds were piling up behind the Catalinas; huge, ugly, threatening thunderheads building up strength for a mad rush down the side of the mountains and the foothills and a slashing attack on Tucson.

  “I’d hate to have to fly through them. But they’re only thunderstorms. Typical late-afternoon phenomenon here.”

  Her fingers dug into my arm. “Please…”

  I pulled over to the side of the road and turned off the ignition. “Please what, Andrea?”

  She turned her head and looked at me sorrowfully, tears forming in her eyes. “Please … do we have to drive through them?”

  “Not if you don’t want to.”

  “Leave me at the bus station. I’ll go to Phoenix tomorrow.”

  “Do you really think I would do that?”

  Her stiletto eyes considered my soul again. “No.”

  “There’s a wonderful old resort on the edge of the city, called the Arizona Inn. We could swim and have a decent meal … I forgot about lunch, didn’t I? … separate rooms, Andrea King, different wings of the Inn.”

  “I trust you.…” She hesitated. “I’m not proud enough to say no to a place where I can take a shower.”

  “I’m thoroughly trustworthy.” I patted her arm and started the car.

  “Not thoroughly, but sufficiently.” She laughed through her tears. “I’m sorry that I’m being a nuisance.”

  “I’m not.”

  Later when the storm had swept through Tucson, leaving big puddles on the street outside the Arizona Inn, I walked into the swimming pool area, a copy of the Tucson Citizen under my arm. Had to read the evening comics, too.

  Andrea King was already in the pool. She was neither a strong nor a skillful swimmer, but she cut through the water with the grace that characterized everything she did.

  I sat down on a deck chair and opened the paper, waiting eagerly for her to climb out of the pool. In a swimsuit, she would be sumptuous.

  And she was even more than that. Her rich, full womanly body, encased in a white, corsetlike strapless suit, demanded to be embraced and loved.

  A demand that I resisted with the mental note that my long vacation from sexual feelings was certainly over.

  “You take my breath away,” I admitted as she spread out a towel and sat on the tiles next to my chair. The loudspeaker played “Tenderly,” then “How Are Things in Gloccomora”—just for us.

  “A cliché, Commander, but thank you anyway … this is a lovely place. So few people. Summer, I suppose. That man looked like he thought you were crazy when you insisted on separate wings.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “Not really.” She shook water out of her hair. “Reading comics?”

  “Almost illiterate.”

  “You are not.”

  She leaned forward, arms around her legs, tops of her wondrous breasts pushed against the swimsuit.

  “I want to live, Commander.”

  “I should hope so.” I touched her shoulder, still wet from the pool. Her fingers took possession of mine, not so much to fend them off as to hold them.

  “If I were better educated, I could say it more clearly … now don’t tell me I’m smart. I know that. But I’m still uneducated.… I wanted to die. I still want to die most of the time. But inside me there’s something stronger that tells me I want to live, so
mething as powerful as the ocean or the sky.”

  “Will to live.”

  “I suppose. I’ve thought about killing myself.” Her hand relinquished mine and her fists knotted fiercely. “I’ve given up so often. John … the baby. But I can’t and I won’t and it’s almost not up to me.… Do I make any sense?”

  “Yes.”

  What would have happened if I had taken her into my arms then? I’ll never know. Not that it matters.

  “I won’t give up. I won’t quit.”

  “I know that.”

  “And you’re thinking about how much fun it would be to take off my swimsuit.”

  “I am not!” I felt my face flame, because of course I was.

  “Yes you are, and that’s all right, too. Except that wet suits are not so easy to remove. Now do your swimming and cool off.”

  So in the fading daylight, while she finished Robert Penn Warren’s book (which she had started in Tombstone), I struggled through a half mile and wondered who she was.

  And why, despite living in San Diego for a couple of years, her skin was so pale.

  At supper she wore a sleeveless white dress, matching white shoes, nylons, and a tiny gold cross at her neck. There was, I suspected, an iron buried in her cardboard luggage.

  The wedding band was still on her finger.

  We ate steak and pan-fried potatoes and drank red wine and laughed like two people who were falling in love ought to laugh. I have no recollection of what we said, so it could not have been of any moment. She was, I thought, a charming dinner companion. I had about made up my mind—after fifteen hours—that she was the woman for me.

  In her white dress, she seemed innocent, virginal. Innocent she might be, but virginal, of course she was not. She had slept with a husband, conceived and carried for a time a child, suffered twin losses. And was afraid of demons I did not understand.

  I do remember the conversation over our chocolate ice-cream sundaes.

  “I think, Andrea King, that God sent me to take care of you.”

  The big spoonful of chocolate-drenched ice cream stopped in midflight and then returned to its goblet.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not?” I tried to laugh it off. “I think it’s true.”

  “It is not true.” Her lips, normally generous, narrowed into a thin hard line. “I don’t want to hear it ever again.”