Miss Malone's Sins

By Jesse W. Thompson

Molly Malone, from San Francisco, goes to Iowa to learn something of her family's roots. After she graduates from the University, she agrees to teach for two years in the corn-fed town of Hoover with its generally bigoted eye on life and a particularly sharp eye on its teachers. Miss Malone breaks the mold.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jesse W. Thompson
• Release date: Aug 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311599650

Jesse W. Thompson

After service in the Navy during WWTwo, I finished college on the GI Bill, then went on to Luther Seminary in St. Paul for three more years; from there as a pastor to Fairbanks, Alaska, then to a tour of duty as a Navy chaplain in San Diego and the Far East, followed by pastorates in Washington, California, and Minnesota.The more I learned, the less I believed of the hard-nosed doctrines of most religions and the denominations within those religions. I resigned from active involvement as a minister.Through all the years, I wrote, traveled, studied, entertained, MC'd banquets at conventions, did a few TV commercials, some theater work, and I continue to read, to learn, and to write as the years fly by.

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Miss Malone’s Sins

Published 2015 by Jesse W. Thompson at SmashWords

© Copyright:2015 by Jesse W. Thompson

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This is a story; a work of fiction.

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Chapter 1

In Dublin’s fair city

The girls are so pretty,

I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone . . .

Favorite Irish Song

There was a wild colonial boy,

Jack Duggan was his name . . .

Ditto

The people we meet are the playwrights and stage managers of our lives. They cast us in a role and we play it whether we want to or not. We can’t see ourselves, but only what we think others see in us, and that’s what we act out.

Eric Hoffer

#

Miss Malone, in her black-silk pajama pants, sat in front of her mirror and brushed her ruby-red hair. At school, she wore it pulled tight and tied in back with a green ribbon and a folded braid. In her basement apartment at Aunt Ophelia’s, she gave herself relief and let it fall over her bare shoulders as she brushed it or twirled it about and with a toss of her head, sent it rippling through the air.

She searched for the rare strand flecked with gray. At 28, she had found three that looked suspicious. She dropped her hands into her lap and stared at herself in the mirror.

You have stayed too long, Miss Malone. You have stayed too long, and you must leave.

Miss Malone. She gritted her teeth. Get out, get out, get out. No more contracts. It’ll kill you if you don’t get out.

#

The next day, a dismal November Friday, Miss Malone as usual took her lunch sack to the Cave and perched on the front edge of the ferocious mohair sofa with its evil springs. If anyone let their full weight down, the wheezy cushions exhaled a damp odor of sweat and moth balls. Long ago, it should have gone either to the town dump or a museum, but banker Irving Goldstein had donated it and the school principal didn’t want to offend him by throwing it away.

Four of Hoover’s teachers sat at a chrome and Formica dinette set, smirking as they ridiculed the ads in Mrs. Wilder's copy of Iowa's Singles Searchlight, published in Des Moines. Mrs. Wilder taught girls' PE, girls' hygiene, cooking class, and 9th grade math.

These all sound like public announcements of private intentions, Mr. Gross said. Give us another one, Mrs. Wilder.

Listen to this one, Mrs. Wilder said:

SWM desires SWF. Likes horses and moonlight. Will develop other interests. Smoker and light drinker; not fast. Sincerity a must. Write: Whizzer.

Other interests? said Mrs. Ambaum, I can imagine.

Becky Ambaum, a cheerful and somewhat heavy woman, taught geography and social studies. Mr. Wren, the superintendent, had a voice that sounded like a rusty piccolo. A thin man with knobby elbows and a knobby Adam’s apple, he wore a purple shirt and a yellow bow tie that bobbed up and down when he swallowed. He called Mrs. Ambaum Mrs. Boombum. Bobby Hansen could do a perfect imitation of him.

He doesn’t say his age, said Mr. Gross, the principal. He taught algebra and geometry and coached football and basketball.

Age doesn’t make any difference, said Mrs. Wilder. Not if you’re sincere. She earned more snickers.

Miss Malone nibbled at her peanut butter and pickle sandwich, dropped its crust into her brown bag, and fired it at the waste basket. She leaned back and closed her eyes against the glare from the bare light bulbs that dangled from the ceiling on twisted yellow cords.

Miss Malone, in each of her six years as teacher of history and English at Independent High School in Hoover, Iowa, directed two school plays. She sat now, guessing at some way to keep Homer Goldstein, the town banker's son, from stealing the lead in Arsenic and Old Lace She squirmed and adjusted her position in that wicked sofa. The movement roused a handful of flies that had crawled between the cushions. Before she leaned back and again closed her eyes, she grabbed the fly swatter and whacked six of them.

Get a load of this one, said Mr. Gross:

Confirmed bachelor willing to take a chance. I’m fifty, fun, frivolous, foxy, and full of frolic. Like winter nights by the fire, and WHAT HAVE YOU? Write: Jason

What do you have! said Mrs. Wilder.

He sounds gross, Mr. Gross, said Mrs. Ambaum. She read another. "This one isn’t so funny. Listen:

SWF. Young widow, two children. Lonesome. Need friends under new circumstances. Open to ideas; enjoy most forms of recreation. Please write: All Alone

A lonesome widow, said Superintendent Wren. Hot stuff.

Yes a lonesome widow, Mrs. Ambaum said. And it takes nerve to make a public announcement of it. People use these ads as a way to make contact. The internet has lots of them also.

You ought to look at the ads in Craigslist some time, Mr. Wren said. You can find some really wild ones.

The bell rang for the one o’clock class. They rose from the table and ducked out through the door. Mrs. Ambaum touched Molly on the shoulder.

I’m awake, Becky, thank you.

Time to go, Becky said.

Molly opened her eyes and sat up, squinted at the glare from the bulbs and cussed them under her breath. Fridays she hated, and on this dead Friday in a dead November, she faced another dead weekend in a dead town.

She understood full well what it meant to be lonesome, and she wondered how her fellow teachers could laugh at the people who advertised in hopes to relieve their lonesome lives.

Curiosity also simmered in Miss Malone’s mind.

What kinds of people write those ads? What kinds of responses do they get?

#

The next morning after she brushed her hair, she rested her elbows on the dresser, folded her hands under her chin and closed her eyes. She took a deep, slow breath and raised her head, stood to her full height and for a minute studied herself. She picked up a hand mirror, examined the few freckles in her cheeks, then shook her head and said, No. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. You’ll just give them another one to laugh at.

She stepped into her kitchen, started a pot of coffee, and opened the newspaper, Hoover’s Weekly Moos News. She had picked it from her box at school late Friday afternoon and tossed it on the counter in her kitchen.

Mr. Wren had ordered a rack of mail boxes placed on the wall outside his office. He called it a convenience both for the mailman and for the teachers. It allowed them to pick up their mail at school. It also allowed him to check on their correspondence as he distributed it.

As usual, Molly skipped the page of Moos News that reported who ate supper where, who made a trip to Des Moines or Minneapolis, and who visited cousins in Omaha. The wedding picture of a former student and a young man from San Francisco caught her eye. She read the story of their wedding on a cable car, with clanging bells and all. She squashed the paper and jammed it in a waste basket.

With regret flowing through her, Miss Molly Malone fought the ache in her chest. She pressed her knuckles against the sting in her eyes and stalked the floor. On impulse, she grabbed a sofa pillow and threw it across the room. It knocked over a lamp. With this, she expected and soon heard the thump from upstairs of Aunt Ophelia’s heel on the floor above. Molly opened the door at the bottom of the laundry chute.

Yes, Auntie.

Aunt Ophelia’s voice whined down the chute. Molly, are you all right? Do you have company?

I’m fine, Auntie. No, no one’s with me.

I thought I heard you say something. Do I smell smoke?

No, Auntie, you do not smell smoke.

You’re not smoking are you?

No, Auntie, I’m not smoking. You know I don’t smoke. It’s coffee you smell.

What fell over? Did something fall over? You didn’t knock over the vase, did you? The pink one with the blue violets? It’s the one I got from Cyrus a month before he died, remember? He gave it to me just in time.

Molly knew the line; she curled her lips and wagged her head and mocked the words in rhythm. The one Cyrus gave me the month before he died. Ngnaa ngnaa ngnaa. The cuckoo clock began to hoot ten o’clock. Molly flapped her arms and stuck out her tongue and craned her neck and mocked the bird, the one that Uncle Cyrus gave Aunt Ophelia on their honeymoon.

Yes, Auntie, I remember.

It’s time to change vases, Molly dear. This week you can take the one Cyrus gave me on our tenth anniversary. The yellow one? With the flames?

Thank you, Auntie. You sharp-eared old skinflint.

A hundred times, Molly vowed to kiss off dear Aunt Ophelia. She rehearsed the scene, screwed up courage to leave, but never before with such sharp frustration.

Aunt Ophelia knew where each cup, saucer, plate, lamp, vase, in her whole house came from, when it arrived, and who gave it to her. Each week she stuck Molly with a different vase.

On Sunday afternoons, when Aunt Ophelia stopped down, Molly put the vase back on the stand. On week days, she kept it out of sight behind the old lamp, the one with the green shade that Aunt Ophelia got from Cyrus on their fifth.

Aunt Ophelia carried $400,000 in CD’s at the bank, remnants of her husband’s shrewd investments in commodities. The interest on these gave her four times more than she needed to live on, so she charged Molly only a modest rent and paid the heat and electric bills herself.

Molly had paid off most of her college debts, and Aunt Ophelia had dropped hints of lending her more to satisfy the debts in full. You could owe me, dear, instead of them, and you’d save money because I wouldn’t charge any interest.

This morning, Molly didn’t want anything to do with her money. The devil take Aunt Ophelia. The devil take Aunt Ophelia’s money.

Miss Malone decided to do what a few minutes ago she had told herself not to. Until the day before in the Cave, she had never given it a thought. Lonely people, running lonely ads. . .Is it possible? Could I meet an interesting man? Put some excitement in my life?

Overnight, the seed germinated and now, this Saturday morning, the blade sprang from the ground. Molly picked up the crumpled newspaper, smoothed it, and again read the story of the wedding.

She threw the paper aside, tied her hair back, pulled on a gray sweater, hitched on a blue wool skirt, pulled on her snow boots and coat and dashed outside and jumped into her red Mustang and lit out for Des Moines.

She would have used the phone to place the ad, but Aunt Ophelia also paid the phone bill and pestered her to explain every long distance call. Soon enough, the other teachers, if not the whole town, would know of her ad. She realized that. But she wanted to stall them off at least until she saw what kinds of responses she received.

Mile by mile, she asked herself, What can I say in the ad? What should I say?

#

Raised in San Francisco, Molly Malone had left ten years before to enter the University of Iowa. Her mother had come from Iowa and she wanted to learn something of her roots. For much the same reason, she decided to teach in Hoover for two years. Trapped, she stayed for six, and she had learned much more than she wanted to know about her roots.

She enjoyed the honest seasons, summer’s heat and thunderstorms, fall with its colors, and the blizzards of winter. Spring, the sudden lush growth, and the songs of robins and all the returning birds thrilled her. She soon learned that life in a small town in the Midwest consisted of much more, and much less, than a robin’s song after a rain or the rustle of oak leaves in the fall.

Five of the rare single men in town served year after year on the county school board. The town druggist and secretary of the board, Snod Baxter, a small man with a shiny bald head and a face full of whiskers, had never married. An amateur taxidermist, Snod filled the high shelves in his Rexall store with stuffed fish, pheasants, owls, two raccoons and a badger, and one blue heron, most of them smothered in cobwebs and showing bald spots or missing teeth. They made you sneeze. Snod came to board meetings with the smell of formaldehyde and glue in his whiskers.

Irving Goldstein, the local banker and richest man in this town of 1,154 people, served as chairman of the board. The postmaster and Aunt Ophelia also served on the board, along with the local Lutheran minister, Reverend Blunt, fresh from Wartburg Seminary, and the Catholic priest, Father Michael O’Malley, from the nearby village of Killarney. Both, though single, failed as prospects for marriage.

Two bachelor brothers, Darwin and Adelbert Schmidt, solid, decent, God-fearing and hard-working citizens, served on the board. Molly felt sure that neither of them had ever read a book. Morning and evening, they milked 60 Holstein cows and toiled at 400 acres of soybeans and corn. Most of the corn made silage in their two huge silos. They had over 100 acres of pasture, and each year baled the alfalfa from another 100 acres. Though polished and clean, they smelled like cows and sour milk. A suggestion of barn and manure mingled with diesel smoke from their tractors.

Each year at contract time, Molly argued with the superintendent, Mr. Theodore Wren, a narrow-minded, bigoted man. With his mouth, he could safely oppose what the town knew little about: blacks, women fibbers, as he called them, peace-marchers, homosexuals, and liberals of any sort. All these, with sarcasm and insult, he opposed.

The town supported him because he kept the kids in line, and because he made a good administrator. By this they meant that he kept teacher salaries down.

The kids liked Miss Malone. The girls respected and admired her. And the boys struggled to learn their lines in the plays. Usually, if a good looking teacher showed up in Hoover, she stayed one year and moved on. Molly Malone stuck it out.

As a rule, she wore boxy skirts and loose sweaters, blue or gray; at times a squarish blue jacket and skirt, never slacks or a pants suit of any kind, for these were frowned on and by unwritten law were not permitted.

Molly wanted out. And each year at contract time she fought with Mr. Wren. When she argued that she missed the excitement of San Francisco, he sneered, With all those queers? With all their diseases? With all those freaky rebels and freaky religions? Look how insulated and protected you are here, away from all that crud. Miss Malone, the school needs you. The town needs you.

#

On most of her trip to Des Moines, Molly drove faster than usual. As she approached town, she slowed. Initially, she wanted to say more, but the drive shrank most of her nerve. She found the office of the Searchlight and placed a simple ad:

SWF. School teacher, 28 years old.

Desires correspondence. Write: Shamrock

Run it for three weeks, she said.

She bought the current issue of the paper and four back issues and stuffed them into her bag.

As she started her return trip, snow began to fall. She hated to drive in it, but a few miles out of Des Moines, in spite of the snow that collected on her wiper blades, her nerve picked up and she turned around.

In for a penny, in for a pound. It’s a long trip, Molly dear. Make it count. Let it all hang out.

She hunted up the office of the Des Moines Register and in the personal column, ran the same ad, except that she identified herself as a lonesome school teacher and added tall and willowy.

Run it for six weeks, she said.

The woman who took her ad looked her up and down and smiled. Dear me, honey, if you put in a picture, you’d get more answers in a week than you could take care of in a whole year.

That evening, back at her computer, with the possible thought of running another ad, Miss Malone searched the personal ads in Craigslist. What she learned amazed her and kept her up until two o’clock in the morning.

It took a few minutes to feel her way through the details and find the ads. To learn more about the demographics of different cities, she turned to the City Data website for quick information.

The wide use of abbreviations at first threw her for a loss. She Googled abbreviations in computer speak, and the results gave her a thousand times more information than she could ever understand. She reduced her search to abbreviations in Craigslist personals. This brought her several posts in Craigslist that ran through the acronyms, with warnings of half-truths and lies, spammers, and other ghoulish possibilities.

Out of curiosity, she clicked through the ads by women who wanted men, W4M, and the ads by men who wanted women, M4W. Ads that included M4M or W4W puzzled her, but not for long. She soon realized that M4Ms and W4Ws were far more prevalent than anyone in Hoover might imagine.

She clicked into the personal ads of women in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York and found ads by the hundreds. She checked Des Moines and Minneapolis, smaller cities in the Midwest, and found ads similar to those on the coasts.

She did nothing like a scientific study, but she searched enough to gather distinct impressions. The site showed a number or disclaimers and warned that ads with pictures might or might not be actual pictures of the poster, and she at last guessed that perhaps 50 percent of the ads were genuine and not posted by crazies.

Even at 50 percent, it saddened her to think of all the lonely people in the world, women and men both, who were hungry for a friend, a companion, someone to talk with, to walk the beach with, go to a movie or just to meet for a cup of coffee. Hundreds, thousands, millions of lonesome people in the nation and across the world—craving a touch, a word, a smile.

Molly Malone, you’re not the only one in the world, my dear. You're looking at the human condition, the common denominator among all humans: It’s one long constant attempt to escape loneliness?

No matter the size of the city or where it was located, east or west, north or south, central or southern U.S., heathenish, unchurched cities or smack in the Bible Belt, the ads showed certain kinds of discrimination—if the preferences given by the posters were anything to go by.

Most ads wanted nothing to do with old people. This was understandable if a person wanted marriage and a family. Religious preferences were common. Many wanted a tall man, a fit or muscular man, and many declared that they were of average build, or plump, or curvy.

Tastes and interests of the advertisers ran the gamut, from art to museums and zoos, with beach walks, movies, hikes travel, eating out, a variety of pets and animal favorites, and fifty other desires thrown in. Many of them said I like fun as if anyone on earth did not like fun.

The number of ads on any given day made little sense, though the number rose toward the end of a week. Des Moines, with a population of 200,000, showed only a few ads per day instead of hundreds on the same day of the week like in Seattle. Seattle, with only three times as many people, showed thirty times more ads.

Los Angeles proper had close to 4,000,000 people, with millions more nearby, but still showed fewer ads per day than did Seattle, on some days fewer by half.

Denver, with 600,000 people, outran all other cities by far in the number of ads per day, with twice as many as Seattle, and more than Greater Los Angeles or all of mighty New York. Minneapolis and St. Paul, with a combined population similar to Denver’s, carried ten percent as many ads per day. This didn’t make sense.

None of the cities in the South ran as many ads as northern cities and nowhere near that of Denver or Seattle. Molly laid this to the influence of the righteous majority in the Bible Belt.

Those who posted in Seattle ran considerably younger than in most other cities, with an average of 26 years old. Los Angeles posters averaged 6 years older. Many said that were in their fifties and sixties. Those who claimed to be in their teens, 18 or 19 years old, were scarce, but that any showed up struck Molly as sad that anyone so young felt it necessary to advertise for a friend.

At last, at two A.M., fagged out and cross-eyed, Molly gave up on the search and put her computer and herself to bed. She ruled out the thought she might place an ad in Craigslist.

Tired as she was, she lay in bed and twisted until at last she fell asleep. No pleasant dreams of a Prince Charming disturbed her rest.

#

In Seattle, Jack Duggan used a soldering iron to burn his name into a slab of Western red cedar..

JACK DUGGAN, ESQ.

ATTORNEY

His secretary, Toots Gordon, eyeballed it and gave her approval. He nailed it beside the front door of his modest office on Westlake Avenue near Franco’s Hidden Harbor.

Only seven or eight things prevented Jack Duggan from becoming a rich lawyer. For one thing, except for his listing in the yellow pages, he did no advertising. He refused to chase ambulances. He took personal injury cases only when convinced that a victim of modest means had a legitimate complaint and was soon to get the shaft. These he took on a contingency basis, and if he