All About Women Read online

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  For Marilyn James who knows some of the worlds of these stories

  * * *

  A still life in my memory aflame,

  As a Van Gogh blossom, radiantly fresh,

  Unfaded by the claims of age and pain

  And the first quiet hints of lurking death.

  Girl and woman in delicate suspension,

  Deft painting in blue and golden glow,

  Perfection, promise in one dimension

  And a self that has only begun to grow.

  Now wife, mother widow, forty years have fled.

  Does your story, just begun, approach its end?

  Are your bright grace and promise already dead?

  Hope remains, distant rival, do not bend,

  By God’s love at fourteen you were not misled,

  We shall be young once more, we shall laugh again!

  Since the beginning of man the hours between the coming of night and the coming of sleep have belonged to the tellers of tales and the makers of music.

  —Anon.

  God made us because He likes stories.

  —Elie Weisel

  Our lives are the stories God tells.

  —John Shea

  In the Beginning

  To begin with, the title is a pun.

  If you have to explain a pun, you are already in trouble, as I learned from the title of my first novel. Some folks see in a pun some sort of dark conspiracy, and an explanation does not cure them of their suspicions.

  However, several of my friends and colleagues were baffled by the title. So, fully aware of the risk, I will essay an explanation:

  I do not purport to know “all about women.” I merely purport to have collected a group of my short stories, sixteen of which have been published in magazines with such disparate terms as “Women’s,” “Catholic,” “Mystery,” “Fantasy,” “Science Fiction,” and “Literary” in their names. Each story is about a woman, either as the protagonist or the antagonist of the story.

  I had thought of calling the collection Sacraments of Grace or Moments of Grace because in each story a woman either is or creates an opportunity of grace for another person or is visited by an offer of grace in the form of another person.

  The narrator in the last story, “Gilberte,” insists that stories are not video replays of reality but bits and pieces of life rearranged and combined not to tell what actually happened, or even what ought to have happened, but what might have happened. His observation is true especially of the story about himself and of the story he intends to write at the end of his story.

  The storyteller modifies the real in order to make it Real, that is to say, to tell a story which says something, however slight, about the meaning of the Real.

  As Frank McConnell puts it:

  You are the hero of your own life story. The kind of story you weren’t to tell yourself about yourself has a lot to do with the kind of person you are and can become. You can listen to (or read in books or watch in films) stories about other people. But that is only because you know, at some basic level, that you are—or could be—the hero of those stories too. You are Ahab in Moby Dick, you are Michael Corleone in The Godfather, you are Ric in Casablanca, Jim in Lord Jim or the tramp in City Lights. And out of these make-believe selves, all of them versions of your own self-in-the-making, you learn, if you are lucky and canny enough, to invent a better you than you could have before the story was told.

  * * *

  Or to express the same notion in different words, as Kathryn Morton wrote some years ago in The New York Times Book Review, “Narrative is the only art that exists in all human cultures. It is by narrative that we experience our lives. I would propose that … imaginative narrative … was decisive in the creation of our species and is still essential in the development of each human individual and necessary to the maintenance of his health and the pursuit of his purposes” (December 23, 1984).

  Narrative puts order into the chaos of life and meaning into its seeming absurdity.

  More than just showing us order in hypothetical existences, novelists give us demonstration classes in what is the ultimate work of us all, for by the days and the years we must create the narratives of our own lives … so you say reading a novel is a way to kill time when the real world needs tending to. I tell you that the only world I know is the world as I know it and I am still learning how to comprehend that. These books are showing me ways of being I could never have managed alone. I am not killing time. I’m trying to make a life.

  So to the question of whether my stories are autobiographical I always reply that they are pieced together out of the experiences of my life but do not replicate or merely re-present those experiences. Even those two classic authors of autobiographical fiction, James Joyce and Marcel Proust, notably rewrote the stories of their lives in order to tell a story about what they thought their lives meant.

  Many young writers fresh out of creative writing programs do not grasp the difference between the real and the Real. Hence they write autobiography in which, they hope, nothing has been changed. Thus they settle scores with parents, siblings, and lovers and hope for publication in The New Yorker. The only problem is that rarely is a videotaped replay of a young writer’s life experiences until twenty-five sufficiently compelling to hold a reader’s attention. That is frequently a blessing, because if the young writer should by some mischance write a story which would compel the attention of an ordinary reader, then s/he might become popular and thus be denounced routinely by book reviewers (frequently copy editors at the journal publishing the review) for whom popularity is a sign of failure.

  Novels and short stories are compulsively gleaned for traces of details of the author’s secret lives and loves, a rather bizarre form of voyeurism, it seems to me. One reviewer, basing his view on a dedication of a book (not the one he was supposed to be reviewing) to “Erika,” announced to the world that I had a sweetheart when I was growing up named Erika. On the west side of Chicago in the 1930s and 40s, an Erika? Come on. Mary Lous and Betty Janes and Margaret Annes, maybe.

  Or Rosemaries and Jennys and Julies and Lauras and Peggys.

  But Erikas? You gotta be out of your mind!

  (The real Erika was a colleague of mine at the University of Chicago, a professor emerita of human development, a German-Jewish refugee from the Holocaust, and a psychoanalytic hypnotist.)

  You will learn much about my attitudes toward women in these stories, should that subject interest you more than the stories themselves, which it shouldn’t. But you won’t learn much about the facts of my life. Did I sit on the pier of my family’s house at Lake Geneva with a young woman like Laura?
<
br />   We didn’t have a house at Lake Geneva. Was there a woman like Laura? Sure, but only in the world of my imagination.

  More or less.

  As a certain cardinal of Chicago who will remain nameless said to me when I told him that another character (Ellen in The Cardinal Sins) of mine was not real, “That’s a shame.”

  There was a child with a smile like Jenny’s but the woman in the story is a creature of my imagination made up to go with the memory of the smile.

  The Gray Ghost really lived and died, but Julie Quinn is a figment composed on a Sunday afternoon at Port Dickson, where, for some reason I cannot explain, I thought of him. Perhaps the narrator’s absolution is self-directed—healing his own guilt for the death of the Ghost.

  (When Roberta read the story, she was displeased with me: “Greels, why didn’t you introduce her to us?” Me: “Roberta, she was there only in my imagination.” I’m not sure I convinced her.)

  Monsignor Martin Branigan is based on Monsignor Daniel “Diggy” Cunningham, God be good to him, who was immensely proud, the funeral homilist said, of his fictional portrait. The people from his parish of “Saint Ursula,” however are products of my world, not God’s. They represent, if I am forced to say it in prose, the possibilities of Catholic life—as does the Clan Ryan.

  I hope Ms. Carpenter is like I imagine her.

  Even the real-life counterpart of Shanny Nolan, drawn more from life than most of the others, is necessarily abridged, edited, and transformed for the purpose of converting the real into the Real.

  While the real life Shanny and Ed are like all humans larger than life, these two young people are even larger. Hence their legitimate protest, “Father Greeley, why not a novel?”

  “Why not a library?”

  “That would be all right, too.”

  Is their story true? Are the other stories true? Only if you spell the word with a capital T. They are all True in the sense that they are told, like every story, to say something about what life means and about what possibilities for life are open to all of us.

  Tucson

  January 1989

  Jenny

  For most of my life Jenny Martin has been the memory of a smile. It begins slowly, hesitantly, a skier at the beginning of a run, not sure that it is safe to plunge over the edge. Then it picks up momentum, as the skier races down the slope. Then it explodes as though the skier spins in snow and sends up a cloud of white crystal that transiently harnesses all the sunlight of a cloudless day.

  Fragile and uncertain at the beginning, Jenny Martin’s smiles always ended in an explosion of white light and laughter, as on the day when our tricycles collided in front of the Baptist church and I met Jenny for the first time, a little girl who was amused, not offended, by a show-off little boy trying to bang up her tricycle.

  Or so it seems to my memory.

  “Hi,” said the girl who went with the smile. “I’m Jenny.”

  I will never believe that children don’t fall in love. I did. That very moment.

  Several years ago I was glancing through an album of childhood pictures my sister had assembled. One of the photos was of a birthday party when I was about ten years old. I’m sure that Jenny Martin was one of the little girls at the party. But I was not able to pick her out of the crowd of solemn-faced little girls with braided hair, none of them as pretty as I remembered Jenny. Such is the magic of dreams.

  I have supposed for decades that the smile I remember is more a creature of my memory than the smile of a real-life child. When we return to the neighborhoods in which we were raised, everything is appallingly small. Tiny patches of front yard confront our memories of vast lawns. Modest two-story houses like Jenny’s replace our imagination of gigantic, Victorian mansions. At first sight of the scrawny front yard and the decaying old house, we think that our neighborhood has changed. Then we realize that it is older but essentially the same. The neighborhood hasn’t changed. We have.

  So it must be, I have told myself oftentimes, with Jenny Martin’s smile. Just a little girl’s pleasant facial expression, nothing spectacular. But because it was the first girl’s smile that was ever directed at me, it has lingered in my memory and been transmuted into the dazzling smiles I see in movies or in television advertisements.

  Of course I knew Jenny when she was something more than just a little girl. Nonetheless, I assumed that my memory of Jenny’s smile on Garden Boulevard in the 1930s has been imposed on my memory of a troubled young woman with whom I spoke in the late 1940s. No, there could have been nothing all that special about Jenny’s smile.

  A few weeks ago I saw this smile again on two different women. If my memory played any tricks at all, it was to picture Jenny Martin’s smile as less than the reality.

  For many years Jenny Martin’s smile lingered on the periphery of my consciousness, not quite forgotten—it would never be forgotten—but still among my conscious reflections. Then, about five years ago, I encountered Betty Regan, the president of our grammar-school class, in the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis, County Clare, Ireland. To be candid, I did not recognize her. Affluence, motherhood, and age had not deprived Betty of all her attractiveness. She was someone’s cheerful, good-natured grandmother bubbling as she had so long ago, but not the dazzling brown-haired, brown-eyed beauty of our school days.

  Our reunion in the lounge bar of the Old Ground made its pilgrimage from enthusiasm to melancholy very quickly. Life had not been kind to many of our classmates. Divorces, suicides, alcoholism, financial failure, sons killed in Vietnam, others become drug addicts, a long litany of heartbreaks, disappointments, and frustrations. Life does not seem to have many happy endings.

  “Gosh,” Betty said, the bubbles gone out of her champagne. “I didn’t realize there was so much unhappiness. I’m not looking forward to our fortieth reunion anymore.”

  “It was a hard time to grow up,” I said. “A big leap from depression to prosperity and an even bigger leap from prosperity to the 1960s. We felt we were unlucky when we were growing up and then when we made our money and moved to the suburbs we thought we were very lucky, and then when our children turned against us, we realized how hollow our success was.”

  “Well, at least you don’t have any convicts in your class,” said her husband. “Two of my law-school classmates have done time at Lexington.”

  “We had one of those, too,” said Betty, with a faintly ironic laugh. “Remember her, Father? Jenny Martin? I think she was the dumbest kid I ever knew.”

  “As I remember her, she had a hard time. Stern old German grandparents, a father that played around, all kinds of trouble in the house.”

  Betty nodded thoughtfully. “Do you remember that time Sister Cunnegunda tore her apart? Wasn’t that a show and a half?”

  Well did I remember it. It was history class in eighth grade, the first year since the beginning of grammar school that Jenny and I were in the same room. We had moved away from her end of the parish four years before and she and her smile had drifted out of my young life. The subject was the history of Chicago and Jenny, as was her habit, was staring vacantly out the window, presumably watching the snowflakes fall.

  “Jenny Martin,” snapped Sister Cunnegunda, “you’re not paying attention.”

  “Yes, Sister.”

  “When was the city of Chicago founded?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know, Sister.”

  Sister Cunnegunda bore down on her like a battleship ramming a PT boat. I suppose she only asked Jenny a dozen or so questions but it seemed like a hundred. The last one was “Who’s the mayor of Chicago now?”

  Everyone knew, of course, that it was Edward J. Kelly.

  “I’m sorry, Sister, I don’t know.”

  “Do you know your own name?”

  “Yes, Sister.”

  “Then go to Sister Superior’s office and tell her your name and tell her how you behaved in this class.”

  “Yes, Sister.” Jenny slipped out of her seat and rushed towards th
e door, her face crimson, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “She may be the most stupid child I’ve ever had in my classroom,” Cunnegunda thundered after her.

  We reveled in Jenny’s humiliation. Every class needs a target, a class fool, a class clown, a class scapegoat. Usually it is an inarticulate boy who may make up for it by his skills on the football field. Poor Jenny couldn’t even jump rope well.

  And God help me, I laughed with the rest of them. Sister Cunnegunda tore her up and threw her to the sharks down in the principal’s office, and I laughed at my Jenny.

  As I try to recall her anguished face that day, it seems to me that she was pretty. Pretty girls are not usually targets of fury and classmate laughter.

  “Of course,” Betty bubbled on. “She was a nice kid. She always wanted to belong to the gang but never quite knew how. She flunked out of Providence in her sophomore year and never even managed to graduate from Austin High. You really had to be dumb to flunk out of a public high school.”

  “Dumb or scared,” said her husband, earning considerable respect from me for the observation.

  I knew that she had taken courses in reform school and finally won her high-school diploma after she was released. But I saw no point in admitting that I was at all interested in Jenny Martin.

  “Whatever happened to her?” I asked, in a neutral tone of voice.

  “Oh, she lives in California now. I think I have her address somewhere back home, so we can send her an invitation to the fortieth next year.”

  “Married?” I asked casually.

  Betty shook her head in disapproval. “She married, from what I hear, some sort of gangster type. I don’t suppose she’ll come to the reunion anyway.”

  Not many of us fall in love at six and stay in love with that person for the rest of our lives. So the love relationships of those whose age is still in single digits do not seem to interest psychologists. After all, such loves are shallow and transient, as one psychologist remarked to me when I asked him about single-digit love.