Molly Malone's Love Story

By Jesse W. Thompson

Molly Malone, from San Francisco, traps herself in a small town in the middle of Iowa's cornfields where she teaches high school. She years for boats, water and the mountains of the West. Where she lives, the chance for romance, or a husband, falls a thousand degrees below zero. She runs an ad "for correspondence." It lands her in trouble with the school board, but it gets results.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312535817

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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Molly Malone's Love Story

Molly Malone’s Love Story

Published 2014

By Jesse W. Thompson

ISBN  978-1-312-53581-7

 Copyright Jesse W. Thompson

Standard License

Here you have a story, a work of fiction.

Any similarity or resemblance to, of, or about names, persons, places, things, stuff, or events, comes as happenstance, accident, coincidence, and rises from the author’s imagination in fictional usage.

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 Dugan 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

SWF, 28, School Teacher, Desires correspondence. Write: Shamrock

SWF 28, Lonesome School Teacher, Tall and Wil­lowy, Desires correspondence. Write: Shamrock

MOLLY MALONE’S LOVE STORY

A Story

By

Jesse W. Thompson

MC900296346[1]

Chapter 1

Public announcements of private intentions, she heard Mr. Gross say. The women with him snick­ered.

They sat at a chrome and Formica reject from a second-hand store, smirking as they ridiculed the ads in Mrs. Wilder’s copy of the Singles Searchlight, published in Des Moines. Mrs. Wilder taught girls’ PE, girls’ hygiene, cooking class, and 9th grade math.

Listen to this one, she 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, I bet, said Mrs. Ambaum. Becky Ambaum, a cheerful and somewhat heavy woman, taught geography and social studies. Mr. Wren, the superintendent, a thin man with knobby el­bows and a knobby Adam’s apple, wore a purple shirt and a yellow bow tie that bobbed up and down when he swallowed. He called Mrs. Ambaum Mrs. Boombum. Bobby Johansen could do a perfect imitation of him.

He doesn’t say his age, said Mr. Gross. Mr. Gross, the principal, 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, as she heard their snickers, wondered how they could laugh at lonely people. In the lounge where teachers relaxed, The Cave, at noontime on a November Friday, she sat off to the side, slumped in the town’s gracious gift to the teachers, a ferocious mohair sofa with evil springs that long ago should have gone to rest in the town dump. Hard as the cushions were, whenever anyone sat on them, they exhaled a damp odor of sweat and moth balls.

Miss Malone, for five long years had been the teacher of history, civics, and English at Independent High School in Hoover, Iowa. On the side, in each of those years, she also directed two school plays.

She 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 of bare light bulbs that dangled from the ceiling on twisted yellow cords.

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. Some 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 Craigslist some time, Mr. Wren said. You can really find some wild ones adver­tising in Craigslist.

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. She 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.

But now, curiosity simmered in Miss Molly Malone’s mind.

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

Chapter 2

The next morning, in her black silk pajama pants, she sat brushing her deep ruby-red hair. Weekdays 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 the luxury of draping it 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 fingered through her hair, searching 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 into 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.

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, then stood to her full height and for another minute stud­ied herself. She picked up a hand mirror, studied the few freckles in her cheeks, studied her profile, then shook her head and stepped the two steps into her kitchen. She poured a cup of coffee and opened Hoo­ver’s Weekly Moos that she picked from her box at school.

As a convenience both for Horace Axelman of the Post Office and for the teachers, Mr. Wren claimed, the rack of mail boxes provided in the hall outside his office allowed the teachers to pick up their mail at school. He sorted the mail. It gave him the chance to check on their correspondence.

As usual, Molly skipped the page of news of who ate supper where, who made a trip to Des Moines or Minneapolis and whose aunt visited from Omaha. The wedding picture of a former stu­dent and a young man from San Francisco caught her attention. She read the story of their wedding on a cable car, with clanging bells and all, then squashed the paper and threw it across the room.

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 her lamp. With this, she expected and she 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.

I’m only playing a part, Auntie.

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 the year before he died, remember? He gave it to me the year before he died, remember?

Molly knew the line; she curled her lips and wagged her head and mocked the words in rhythm. The one Cyrus gave me the year 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 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. During the week 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 profits from his shrewd investments in farm commodities. The inter­est on these gave her four times more than she needed to live on, so she charged Molly but a modest rent, and she paid the heat and electric bills. The living expenses came to more than Molly had hoped, but she still paid most of her college loans.

But this morning, the devil take Aunt Ophelia. The devil take Aunt Ophelia’s money.

And in the strength of her feeling, Miss Malone decided to do a thing that until the day before when she eavesdropped in the lounge, she had given no thought. Lonely people, running lonely ads. . .could she meet an interesting man? Put some excitement in her 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 her ad, but Aunt Ophelia also paid the phone bill and in­sisted on an explanation for 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 taught for five, and she had learned too much, more than she wanted to know about her roots.

She enjoyed her first taste of honest sea­sons in Iowa, the summer heat, thunderstorms, and the blizzards of winter. Spring and the song of robins thrilled her.

But 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 few 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 smelling of for­maldehyde and glue.

Irving Goldstein, the local banker and richest man in this town of 1,154 people, not counting Miss Malone, 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 ever read a book. Morning and evening, they milked 60 Holstein cows, and they toiled at 700 acres of soybeans and corn, with much of the corn going into silage in their two huge, dark blue silos. They had over 100 acres of pas­ture, and each year baled the alfalfa from another 100 acres. Though polished and clean, they came to board meetings smelling like cows and sour milk, with a light suggestion of barn and manure smell mingled with the taste of diesel smoke from their tractors.

Each year at contract time, Molly argued with the superintendent, Mr. Theodore Wren, a narrow-minded, bigoted man. Here, with his mouth, he could safely oppose what the town knew little about: blacks, women fibbers, as he called them, peace-marchers, homosexuals, 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 a 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 Molly argued that she missed the excitement of San Francisco, he sneered, With all those queers? With all their dis­ease? With all those freaky rebels and freaky relig­ions? Look how insulated and protected you are here, away from all that crud. Dear Miss Malone, the school needs you. The town needs you.

#

During most of the drive to Des Moines, Molly drove faster than she dared. As she approached town, she slowed. Initially, she wanted to say more, but the long 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 began checking 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 search through the maze of details to find what she wanted in Craigslist To learn more about the size and 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 looking for men, W4M, and the ads by men looking for women, M4W. She clicked into the personal ads of women in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. She found ads by the hundred. 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. After reading that ads with pictures might or might not be actual pictures of the poster, and reading a frightening number of disclaimers and warnings, she guessed that perhaps 50 percent of the ads were genuine, 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 or go to a movie or just to join 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─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., relatively 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, and she felt that this was understandable if a person wanted marriage and a family. Religious preferences were mentioned. Many wanted a tall man, a fit or muscular man, and many advertisers declared that they were of an 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, hiking, travel, eating out, a variety of pets and animal favorites, and fifty other desires thrown in. Far too many of them, she felt, in one way or another stated 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 the 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 as in Seattle. Seattle, with only three times as many peo­ple, showed twenty to 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 have a combined population similar to Denver’s, but only 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 wondered if the influence of the righteous majority in the Bible Belt ac­counted for this.

The ages of those who posted in Seat­tle ran considerably younger than in several other cities, with an average of 26 years old. Los An­geles posters averaged 6 years older, with con­siderably more saying they were in their fifties and sixties. Those who claimed to be in their teens, 18, 19 years old, were scarce, but that any showed up struck Molly as sad that anyone so young al­ready felt it necessary to turn to advertisements to find a friend or companion.

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 of placing an ad in Craigslist.

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

Chapter 3

With a soldering iron, Jack Dugan burned his name into a slab of Western red cedar and nailed it beside the door of his modest office on Westlake Ave­nue near Franco’s Hidden Harbor.

JACK DUGAN, ESQ.

ATTORNEY

On a typical, quiet Friday afternoon, he had played solitaire for a half hour when his secretary, Sally Gordon, challenged him to a rubber of cribbage. They each won one game and now in the third game, Sally forged ahead. With a couple more good hands, she might throw Jack a skunk.

Only five or six things prevented Jack Dugan from becoming a rich lawyer. For one thing, except for his listing in the yellow pages, he did no advertis­ing. Neither did he 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 did win the case, he took just 20 percent of the award unless it went to trial, when he upped it to thirty percent.

Divorce cases he rarely took, having learned both from cases he handled and from Louis Nizer’s book, My Life in Court, that these were often the nastiest court cases of all. Jack Dugan preferred to avoid the bitterness of such scenes. He drew wills for clients, handled some tax cases, consulted with a few clients and their investments, and advised on mat­ters of community property.

In the cribbage game, he avoided the skunk-hole by three pegs and paid Sally a quarter instead of the dollar a skunk would have cost him. She dropped the quarter in a cup and said, It’s Friday night, Jack. You ought to go out and look around.

Jack smiled. "No, I don’t think so. I don’t want to go sniffing around to meet anybody in a bar or some meat market. I’m not that desperate. Yet."

"Just because you go out and