All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

The standoff was resolved by the push of parents, who were not bound by the wishes of Mother Superior and rushed for the church door—despite the outraged cries of the hand bells.

  Peg simply ducked around the War Admiral, snatched up one of the First Communion tots, and followed by Rosie, who had seized the other tot, raced for the church door in the midst of a crowd of parents.

  I still have the prints—on my desk as I write this story. Peg was not to be stopped.

  God may not have been sufficiently afraid of the War Admiral to hold off the rain. But He (or She, if you wish) was enough enchanted by Peg to stay the shower until the crowning party had pushed its way into the shelter of the church.

  Peg reassembled her crew in the vestibule at the foot of the steps leading to the basement church, waited till everyone was inside and then led the crowning party solemnly down the aisle toward the altar.

  The nuns were too busy pushing and shoving kids and glaring at parents in a doomed effort to restore the “ranks” to cope with a determined young woman who knew exactly what she intended to do.

  Peg would have made a good mother superior in her own right.

  Doubtless given a signal by John Raven, the organ struck up a chintzy version of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance,” an exaggeration if there ever were one for this scene.

  Only about half the school kids were soaking wet when they finally struggled into their pews. The War Admiral’s determined efforts to restore order had deprived the kids of the “sense to come in out of the rain!”

  If S’ter says you stay out in the rain, then you stay out in the rain.

  The nuns all had miraculously produced umbrellas from the folds of their black robes and had stayed dry, if not cool.

  When the Admiral and her aides could turn their attention to the crowning party, Peg had herded them safely to the front of the church, where they waited patiently under the protection of Monsignor Branigan and Father Raven—and naturally in the presence of your and my favorite redhead photojournalist.

  I still laugh at the pictures of the nuns turning misfortune into calamity.

  Monsignor nodded to the younger priest, who strolled over to the lectern which served as a pulpit and began, “To make up for the rain, we will have a very short sermon. My text seems appropriate for the circumstances: ‘Man proposes, God disposes’—I almost said ‘Sister proposes, God disposes!’ ”

  Laughter broke the tension in the congregation and drowned out the clanging hand bells. We were no longer wet and angry; we were wet and giddy.

  I could imagine Mom and Dad arguing whether Father Raven had gone “too far.” Mom would giggle and lose the argument.

  The air was thick with spring humidity, girlish perfume, and the scent of mums, always favored by the War Admiral because, as I had argued, they reminded her of funeral homes.

  The crowning party fidgeted through the five-minute-and-thirty-second sermon. Eighth-grade girls were too young for such finery, some of them not physically mature enough to wear it, and all of them not emotionally mature enough.

  Peg, however, looked like a youthful queen empress, albeit a self-satisfied one.

  And Rosie?

  She was shaking nervously and deadly pale.

  And, yes, I’ll have to admit it, gorgeous.

  She kept glancing anxiously at me, as if I were supposed to provide reassurance.

  I ignored her, naturally. Well, I did smile at her once. I might even have winked, because she grinned quickly and seemed to calm down.

  The sanctuary of the “basement church” was in fact a stage. The statue of Mary had been moved for the event to the front of the stage on the left (or “epistle”) side. A dubious stepladder, draped in white, leaned against the pedestal. Of all those in church, only the statue was not sweating.

  After the sermon it was time for the congregation to belt out, “Bring flowers of the rarest from garden and woodland and hillside and dale,” as I remember the lyrics. Rosie bounded up the shaky white ladder, still the rushing timber wolf. The ladder, next to my shoulder, trembled.

  Anyone who attended such spring rituals in those days will remember that the congregation was required to sing two times, “Oh, Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today, queen of the angels, queen of the May!” During the second refrain, much louder than the first (which itself was pretty loud), the ring of flowers was placed on the head of the statue.

  I had been charged to take “a truly good picture, darling. For her parents, who won’t be able to come.” Given the state of flashbulb technology in those days, that meant I had one and one chance only.

  Just as Rosie raised the circle of blossoms, I saw an absolutely perfect shot frozen in my viewfinder. I pushed the shutter button, the bulb exploded, the ladder swayed, and Rosemarie Helen Clancy fell off it.

  On me.

  I found myself, dazed and sore, on the sanctuary floor, buried in a swirl of bridal lace and disordered feminine limbs.

  “Are you all right?” she demanded. “Did I hurt you?”

  “I’m dead, you clumsy goof.”

  “It’s all your fault,” Peg snarled, pulling Rosie off me. “You exploded that flash thing deliberately.”

  I struggled to my feet to be greeted by an explosion of laughter.

  What’s so funny? I wondered as every hand bell in every nunnish hand in the church clanged in dismay.

  Then I felt the flowers on my head. Rosie had crowned not the Blessed Mother, but me.

  Even the frightened little train bearers were snickering.

  I knew I had better rise to the occasion or I was dead in the neighborhood and at Fenwick High School.

  Forever and ever.

  Amen.

  So I bowed deeply to the giggling Rosie and, with a single motion, swept the flowers off my wire-brush hair and into her hand. She bowed back.

  She may have winked, too, for which God forgive her.

  These days Catholic congregations applaud in church on almost any occasion, even for that rare event, the good sermon. In those days applause in the sacred confines was unthinkable.

  Nonetheless, led by Monsignor Branigan and Father Raven, the whole church applauded.

  Except for the nuns, who were pounding frantically on their hand bells.

  Rosie looped the somewhat battered crown around her fingers and joined the applause.

  Then someone, my mother, I’m sure, began, “Oh, Mary we crown thee with blossoms today.…”

  Rosie darted up the ladder just in time to put the crown where it belonged. As she turned to descend, the ladder tottered again. I steadied it with my left hand and helped her down with my right.

  She blushed and smiled at me.

  And owned the whole world.

  There was, God help me and the bell-pounding nuns, more applause.

  Rosie raised her right hand shyly, acknowledging the acclaim.

  The monsignor stepped to the lectern.

  “I think we’d better quit when we’re ahead.”

  More laughter. Oh Lord, we were giddy.

  “Father Raven, who has better eyes than I do,” he continued, “tells me that the rain has stopped. So we’ll skip Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament and end the service now, with special congratulations to the May crowner and her, uh, agile court. First, we’ll let you parents out of church, then our bright young altar boys will lead the schoolchildren out, then, Chucky, you can lead out the wedding—uh, crowning party. It won’t be necessary for the children to go to their classrooms. We want to get everyone home before the rains start again.”

  It was a total rout for the War Admiral. To dismiss the kids from church without requiring that they return to their classrooms was to undo the work of Creation and unleash the forces of Chaos and Disorder, indeed to invite the gates of hell to triumph against the Church.

  The clanging hand bells displayed a remarkable lack of spirit.

  Afterward, back in our apartment, the sun shining brightly again, Mom insisted that I was hero of the
day. Peg did a complete turnaround, a tactic at which she excelled, and told everyone that “Rosie would have been badly hurt if Chucky hadn’t caught her”—a generous description of my role.

  Dad, returned from Washington in time for the show, affirmed that at last St. Ursula’s had a real pastor.

  “Joe Meany is now in his grave permanently.”

  “And War Admiral has been put out to stud,” I said.

  I was old enough to know vaguely what that meant.

  My prediction was accurate. The following year Sister Angela Marie, even older, it was said, than the War Admiral, appeared at our parish and governed with happy laughter instead of a hand bell.

  In the midst of the festivities I wondered whether in my eagerness to freeze what I saw in my viewfinder I might have brushed against the ladder.

  And what was the instant I captured on my Plus-X film?

  That night, when the apartment had settled down, I crept off to my makeshift darkroom in the basement of our building. After developing the film and exposing the paper, I watched the magic instant come up in the print solution.

  What I saw scared me: two shrewd young women, one of them recognizable as a marble statue only if you looked closely, making a deal, like a buyer and seller at the Maxwell Street flea market. Rosie was about to offer the crown in return for …

  Well, it wasn’t clear what she expected from the deal. But she expected something. No, she was confident she would get it.

  I hung the picture to dry, thought about claiming that the film had been ruined, and then reluctantly decided that I wouldn’t get away with it.

  “You could call the picture,” Mom would say, “the way Time magazine does, Rosemary and friend.”

  None of them would see the deal being consummated in the photo. They would say that it was all in my imagination.

  After the ceremony that afternoon, my friends from Fenwick had demanded to know whether I had “copped a feel” when “Clancy” was on top of me.

  “Nothing to feel,” I insisted, with notable lack of both honesty and loyalty.

  “What was she like?” they demanded with horny insistence.

  “Heavy,” I told them.

  Now, as I watched a second print materialize in the solution, I admitted in a deep, untended, and secret subbasement of my brain that the sensation of Rosie’s body on top of mine had been so sweet that if the ever-vigilant Peg had not pulled us apart, I might have been content to remain there always.

  Brigid

  I knew we were in for trouble when Biddy, my youngest, announced at the dinner table the week before Christmas, “I don’t care, I think Willie Gault is cute!”

  The other three kids were never quite your classical stereotypical teens. Fifteen- year- old Brigid Elizabeth made up for them.

  “Is he a rock star, dear?” I said absently, thinking about a teenage client I had listened to for a sick fifty minutes earlier in the day, a frustrated rock groupie.

  “Mo-THER! He is a wide receiver!”

  “Along with Dennis MacKinnon and Ken Margerum,” her aunt Trish, an inseparable ally, who is also fifteen and was “eating over,” explained. “They’re all cute, but Willie Gault is the cutest.”

  “Chicago Bears, dear,” whispered my husband Joe (alias “the pirate” because he looks so fierce when he wears a beard). “You know, the football team.”

  I should have seen the possibilities for acute family crisis even then. But I was still preoccupied with my would-be groupie.

  “Of course I know the football team.”

  Joe is a psychiatrist, too; though there’s nothing wrong with that. Necessarily.

  “Willie Gault,” Brigid Elizabeth went on implacably, “is responsible for the Super Bowl Shuffle.”

  She and Trish are often thought to be twins, black-haired, black-eyed pixies, with cute little teenage figures, and lovely faces when they’re not in motion, which is practically never. The complexity of our family structure confuses people because, of course, Biddy must call me “Mom,” or when she’s impatient with me, which is practically always, “Mo-THER,” while Trish, as my half-sister, addresses me as “M.K.” or “Mary Kate” as in “M.K., you don’t know what the Super Bowl Shuffle is!”

  “I am not unaware that the Bears are in the play-offs,” I said with as much dignity as a decrepit square, ’cuse me, geek, can muster.

  “Along with the Foxboro Patriots,” said my husband. “And the Anaheim Rams and the Irving Cowboys and the East Rutherford Giants.”

  Joe and I met a couple of centuries ago when he was a resident at Little Company of Mary Hospital and I was a medical-school clerk. We did not get along from the first second we met and fought furiously every hour of my six weeks in the program.

  “Miss Ryan,” he shouted on my last day, just a week before Christmas, “you create the kind of sexual tension which can only be resolved on the marriage bed.”

  “All right, Dr. Murphy.” I gulped.

  “That was an acceptance?” He backed off warily.

  “That was a proposal?”

  “I can’t believe my good fortune.” The poor dear sweet man was so terribly flustered that I knew I’d love him forever and ever.

  “I’m the lucky one,” I said. It was the first nice thing I ever said to him. And the wisest thing I have ever said.

  We didn’t kiss till after dinner (at The Club—the Beverly Country Club, of course) that night.

  So here we are, a silver anniversary later, and we’re still resolving that tension and Christmas is coming and Biddy is complaining that I don’t know about Willie Gault, and damn fool Irish Catholic sentimentalist that I am, I wanted to cry.

  “I’ll go next door and get Daddy’s tape.” Trish was putting on her St. Ignatius jacket. “You gotta watch it, M.K. Really!”

  “When Ned Ryan buys videotapes of football players,” Joe observed, “we may be witnessing a phenomenon.”

  “But the kid’s too young—”

  “Archetypical.”

  Joe is a Jungian and I’m a Freudian, which makes for an interesting relationship, not to say an interesting love life.

  So, Joe’s arm around me, I watched, with, I admit, some interest, Willie Gault, Jim McMahon, Sweetness Payton, and the rest of them cavort before the camera with notable lack of talent. My half-sister and my daughter explained who each of these players was, including such characters as “Otis” and “Samurai.”

  “Who is that poor fat boy without the teeth?” I asked. “The one they call the Fridge.”

  “Mo-THER!” screamed my daughter.

  “Mary KATE!” yelled my half-sister.

  They endeavored to explain.

  “But if they have a, uh, running back like Mr. Payton, who is the best ever, why would they need that poor boy to score touchdowns?”

  The kids hooted.

  “You haven’t seen him in the McDonald’s ad?”

  “Or with all those Cokes.”

  “But can’t he afford to get his teeth fixed?”

  “Poor,” my pirate said, “he no longer is.”

  We were, I began to suspect, about to experience a phenomenon.

  I suggested that on the phone the next day to my youngest full brother, the Punk. Who is a monsignor. There’s nothing wrong with that. Necessarily.

  “The possibilities are awesome,” he intoned solemnly. “The capacity for madness in this city, if they make it to the Super Bowl, is beyond estimation. The last time we won a World Series, to which the Super Bowl can be fairly compared, was, as you may remember, 1917. They have taken away from us Chicagofest, the World’s Fair, a doomed stadium, and almost everything else of which an urban populace may be proud. We can barely hold on to an overage submarine. Mark my words, good sister, Thermidor is coming.”

  “I may be your older sibling, but I was not here in 1917. But then, neither were the kids. Biddy and Trish.”

  “Appalling.” He sighed with relish and approval. “Fridge as Bruce Springsteen.”
/>
  “It goes like this.” I began to sing.

  “This is Speedy Willie and I’m world-class

  I like runnin’ but I love to get the pass,

  I practice all day and dance all night,

  Now I’m as smooth as a chocolate swirl,

  I dance a little funky, so watch me, girl,

  There’s no one here that does it like me,

  My Super Bowl Shuffle will set you free.”

  “Brigid, Patrick, Comumcille and all you holy saints of Ireland preserve and protect us,” my brother prayed.

  “So please don’t try to beat my hustle,

  ’Cause I’m just here to do the Super

  Bowl Shuffle.”

  “You perceive the problem, of course.” Blackie was now being really serious, a rare enough event. “With the old fella, I mean.”

  “No, I don’t. What problem? Ohmygod, Punk, you don’t think he would, do you? We’ve kept it a secret for so long.”

  “He has a streak of stubbornness which I alone of the eight offspring seem to have escaped.”

  “But the grandchildren.” I ignored his falsehood. “And poor Trish. They all adore him. We can’t let them find out.”

  “None of us is perfect.”

  “They think Grandpa Ned is perfect. We can’t let them know about such a terrible character defect.”

  Blackie sighed noisily. “It may be out of our control.”

  “You talk to him. He identifies with you.”

  “It might make him worse.”

  “There’s that.”

  Our father, Ned Ryan, is one of Chicago’s grand old men, though he resolutely refuses to act like he’s old. An apparently quiet little lawyer with snow-white hair, leprechaun blue eyes, and a gentle bass voice, he has mellowed a bit through the years, but he’s still the kind of person who, when blown off the Arizona at Pearl Harbor, swam back to help rescue his gun crew, and then at Leyte led a group of pathetic destroyer escorts in a charge against Japanese battleships, which scared the Japanese admiral into turning tail and running. As my mother, Kate Collins Ryan, God be good to her, would say, “Your father may have backed away from a fight once or twice in the years I’ve known him, but I can’t quite remember when.”