The Girl in the Green Raincoat

Chapter 7

Tess Monaghan did not always appreciate her parents as much as she should. Who ever has? In her childhood, her mother was… well, a mother, an obstacle to be surmounted. Judith Monaghan also had an unfortunate predilection for overmatching. Shoes matched purse matched dress matched earrings matched bracelets. A secretary at the National Security Agency, she insisted she could never speak of her job at home, hinting that she was privy to too many secrets.

But as Tess moved into her thirties, she began to discern that her mother’s wardrobe was the result of a fiercely misdirected energy. Born a mere decade later, Judith Weinstein Monaghan might have been given a chance to apply her impeccable sense of organization to… well, whatever NSA did. (Despite reading The Puzzle Palace, Tess was still fuzzy on the details.) Meanwhile, growing up with a maybe-spy for a mother had the happy bonus of sharpening Tess’s wits, teaching her to be a much more sophisticated sneak.

As for her father, Patrick Monaghan, the world’s most taciturn Irishman, Tess had once yearned for him to be everything he was not-voluble, dashing, a literary bon vivant who held forth on the work of James Joyce. If she wasn’t such a snob then, she might have noticed she’d been graced with Wonder Dad, who could fix or build anything. Instead, she had taken it all as her due-the sturdy, safe tire swing that drew the neighborhood children to her house, the gleaming bicycles on Christmas morning, which her father put together swiftly and quietly, without any profanity-laden outbursts to waken a sleeping girl from dreams of Santa. He had, in fact, contributed much of the work to this sun porch where she now spent her days. Now Tess was thrilled to have a father who could wield a hammer. She didn’t need to talk about Joyce. The fact was, she really didn’t have a lot to say about Joyce, and there were always things that required fixing.

Today, her father was installing a dog door on the lower level, while one of his old cronies finished securing the perimeter with invisible fencing. These additions were for the unwalkable Dempsey, who had taken to relieving himself almost exclusively in the porcelain chamber pot, which meant that Tess was often trapped for hours in a room that smelled of dog urine. The hope was that Dempsey could be trained quickly to understand how far he could roam in the yard without receiving a mild shock, via the radio transmitter.

He did catch on quickly. But to everyone’s dismay, Dempsey seemed to enjoy the sensation. He threw himself at the boundary again and again, yelping in outrage and pain, yet never trying to leave.

“Dog’s a little strange,” said Tess’s father, watching the scene through her window. He was not only taciturn, but given to understatement.

“He’s testing himself,” Tess said. “Notice that he doesn’t try to leave. I thought he’d made a run for it, head back to Blythewood. He’s letting us know that he’s here on his own recognizance.”

Dempsey, satisfied that he had shown the fence line who was boss, trotted through his new door and clacked upstairs to the sun porch-where he promptly squatted over the chamber pot and relieved himself.

“I brought you a gift, by the way,” her father said.

“Something for the baby?” Tess asked warily. Her father was having a hard time with her decision not to prepare in advance. He wanted to buy a crib and a stroller, build a toy chest and a changing table, paint the spare bedroom. And, in time, she wanted him to do all those things. But not yet.

“No, this is for you.” He went to the living room and returned with a large flat package, wrapped in newspaper and string.

“The sign from the Stonewall Democratic Club!” Tess’s delight was quite genuine. Stonewall, now shuttered, was a storied place in the history of Baltimore-and the Monaghan family. She remembered riding her tricycle there. More correctly, she remembered being told that she had ridden her tricycle there. In her memory, it was a land of knees and cigarette smoke and impenetrable grown-up talk, which she tolerated because Harry “Soft Shoes” McGuirk himself, the b’hoy of b’hoys-a b’hoy being the man who gave muldoons their marching orders-would take pity on the restless child and buy her a Coke.

“How did you come to own this?” she asked, as amazed as if her father had procured a Picasso. Tess collected Baltimorebilia, although she was in denial about it. Her office held the neon “It’s Time for a Haircut” clock from a Woodlawn barbershop, and she kept her spare change in a miniature model of a Baltimore Gas & Electric truck. She had even begun to acquire old grease tins from the sausage company, Esskay, that had lent its name to her racing greyhound. The sane one, as she now thought of Esskay. The greyhound had once been her problem child, but everything was relative.

“We need to adhere to a strict don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy on that issue,” her father said. “That way you’ll have plausible deniability.” Adding, at his only child’s shocked expression: “It was just sitting there, for the longest time. What was I supposed to do?”

“Walk on by?” But Tess knew she wouldn’t have, either. “I’m so glad you… availed yourself of it. After all, you and Mother met there.”

“What?” He was genuinely puzzled. “Who told you that?”

“I don’t know. Mom? Aunt Kitty? The campaign of ’sixty-six, right? You both worked for the Democratic candidate.”

“We worked on the primary campaign of Carlton Sickles, yes. But that’s not where we met. We met at the Westview Drive-in the year before. I’m not good on dates, but it was coolish. She wore a lemon-yellow cardigan, only it was pinned to her shoulders with this little chain, with butterflies on either end.”

He fluttered his hands along his collarbone, trying to evoke the singular magic of it all. A sweater, moored by butterflies! He made it sound as if Judith Weinstein, as she would have been known then, had been dressed by a coterie of talking woodland creatures, like some princess in a Disney film.

“Are you saying you fell in love at first sight?” This did not fit with what Tess thought she knew of her pragmatic, down-to-earth parents. Love at first sight was for passionate kids. But then-her parents were kids at the time.

“I bird-dogged her,” her father said proudly. “Snaked her away from her date. Not that night, but later. She was really interested in politics-your uncle Donald had worked on the Kennedy campaign in ’sixty, was recruiting volunteers for the city council races, so, yeah, it must have been spring ’sixty-five-so I pretended to care, too.”

“Pretended to care?” Tess was scandalized. Her father’s political life had defined him, as far as she knew.

“Oh, eventually I did get caught up with it, but that was more Donald’s influence. That night I met your mother, I just wanted to find a way to keep her talking to me. So I told her, yeah, I’d love to volunteer, stuff envelopes, knock on doors, do whatever I could. I figured that would get me more time with her.” His fair skin flushed with the memory. “What a way to go.”

“Politics?”

“The movie that night. It was What a Way to Go! With Shirley MacLaine. I always liked her. We almost named you Shirley.”

What’s in a name? Only everything. Tess tried to imagine the life and times of Shirley Monaghan. Who were the famous Shirleys? Shirley MacLaine, Shirley Jones, and-oh God, Shirley Booth. Shirley was Noel Airman’s code, in Marjorie Morningstar, for the first generation of Jewish American Princesses. All things considered, she was happy to be Theresa Esther, mouthful though that was.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.”

“Oh, it’s great,” her father said. “Actually, I watched it on television a couple of years ago, and it didn’t hold up so good. But I still love it. Shirley MacLaine is this woman who wants to marry for love, see? And her mother is pushing her to marry the local rich guy, played by Dean Martin. Remember Dean Martin?”

“Yes, there’s a channel on cable that appears to be devoted to selling his show on DVD.” These were the kinds of things one learned on bed rest.

“Anyway, she marries Dick Van Dyke. But he becomes obsessed with getting rich, showing Dean Martin that he has a real work ethic, and he drops dead of a heart attack, leaving her a wealthy widow. Then she marries Paul Newman, a starving artist who ends up getting rich and being strangled by his own painting machines-”

“Painting machines?”

“Yeah, they paint in time to music. Also there was a monkey.”

Also, there was a monkey. This struck Tess as the most trenchant bit of film criticism that she had ever heard from her father, something that could equal Andrew Sarris’s auteur theory. She would run this past Lloyd, the film student, the Tess Monaghan theory of awfulness in movies, summed up by one line: Also, there was a monkey.

“Then she tries to change her luck by marrying a rich guy, Robert Mitchum-did you know he hit on your aunt Kitty, when she was all of fourteen, one summer at Ocean City?”

Wake up, Tess said in her head, experimentally. It was something she did when her dreams were disturbing, or simply too weird. Wake up! Apparently she was conscious.

“But he gets kicked in the head by a bull, when he tries to milk him-he’s drunk, you see-so she marries Gene Kelly and he gets, I think, literally torn apart by his fans, so that’s where she is when she goes to the psychiatrist and he walks in and, bam, she finds love at last.”

“With the psychiatrist?”

“Dean Martin. He’s the janitor.”

Tess phrased her next question carefully. “And you liked this movie?”

“Honey, it’s the movie I saw the night I met your mother. If it had been one of those Annette Funicello movies, or one of those gory movies by, you know, that guy-”

“Herschell Gordon Lewis?” she ventured.

“Or Mary Poppins, anything. It could have been a two-hour test pattern and I would think it was the greatest movie ever, because I was sitting in the backseat of a Dodge Rambler, stealing looks at this girl. She ate popcorn so dainty. She never dropped a piece. Everyone-I mean even the Queen of England-drops a kernel or two. My date that night dropped a lot, ended up with hulls in her teeth. Not your mother.”

“Marriages have been made on less,” Tess said, meaning it. Still, it bothered her that she had been walking around-back when she was allowed to walk-believing that she was formed in the crucible of local politics, a legacy of the Stonewall Club. What a Way to Go! at the Westview Drive-in was a bit of a comedown. “You did go to Stonewall, right? You pretended to be interested in politics to snag Mom, and the lie became true.”

“The lie became true,” her father agreed, “although we would have been meeting over on the East Side then. That was Donald’s turf, in the day. We worked on the primary. We didn’t have the heart to campaign after Sickes lost to that nut job Mahoney in the primary. And Maryland ended up sending Agnew to the State House.” Her father looked sadder than he did when he thought about the Colts leaving Baltimore, and Tess had always assumed that was the nadir of his adult life. “That was a bad year, ’sixty-six.”

“Because your candidate didn’t get the nomination?” Tess asked.

“Because we believed in something and we lost. We were young. Kennedy’s assassination had been hard on us, but we were teenagers, then. In ’sixty-six, we still thought if you worked for the right guy, you won. Then Mahoney, that kook, that every-home-a-castle guy, got the nomination, and it all fell apart. I didn’t vote in the general in ’sixty-six. Then in ’sixty-eight, Bobby Kennedy was killed. The fact is…” His voice trailed off.

“Dad?”

“I didn’t vote for almost forty years, not until 2004.”

Tess could not have been more scandalized if her father had confessed an addiction, or even an affair.

“You were an active member of the party. You did get-out-the-vote. For all I know, you distributed walk-around money.”

“There was no walk-around money,” her father said, the denial still automatic after all these years. “Besides, none of that stuff means I had to vote.”

“So in 2000, 2002-”

“It’s not like there’s a lot of suspense, electoral collegewise, with Maryland. I campaigned for KKT, in 2002.” Tess recognized the shorthand for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who had run unsuccessfully for governor. “She sang show tunes on the bus. Oklahoma! Let me tell you, that was a labor of love. And she lost. First Republican in the State House since Agnew in ’sixty-six. But that one, the 2002 race, didn’t hurt. I was old then. Older, at any rate. Too old to get my heart broken, because I didn’t put my heart in it anymore.”

Her father, ready to leave, first emptied Dempsey’s bedpan, then asked where she wanted the Stonewall sign. Tess said it was better suited to her office, where it could share the wall with her neon “Time for a Haircut” clock. He patted her shoulder, uneasy around her belly, then left her to absorb all that she had learned. Her parents had met not at the Stonewall Club, but a local drive-in, while Shirley MacLaine tried to find love. Also, there was a monkey. Her father, who had always teased her mother about her coordinated outfits, remembered exactly what Judith wore that night, down to the butterfly chain securing the lemon-yellow cardigan at her shoulders, while nary a kernel of popcorn fell, or got stuck in her teeth. Had her very existence relied on that detail? She had seen her mother eat popcorn, and did not recall it as an extraordinary feat.

And Tess had almost been Shirley. Could a name change one’s destiny? She could not imagine Shirley Monaghan sitting here, with a problematic pregnancy and an even more problematic dog, who was gnawing on something in his crate, possibly his own leg. Shirley Monaghan would probably be knitting booties right now, or making her in-utero progeny listen to Mozart.

Tess Monaghan, by contrast, was trying to figure out how to have another go at the man she now thought of as the Bluebeard of Blythewood Road.