Free Sham Rock by Ralph McInerny Page B

talk about her Catholic girlhood, of graduating from St. Mary’s College. City boy that he was, he thought that the college’s location in Indiana would be as exotic as the fact that it was Catholic. How few native New Yorkers there are, though, and they have to come from somewhere, and why not from Indiana?
    â€œAn all-women’s college?”
    â€œAcross the road from Notre Dame.”
    She had trilled on about the wonderful odds for a St. Mary’s girl with the seven-to-one ratio of male to female.

    â€œEven so, you didn’t marry one.”
    â€œHe got away.”
    Little bleats of incredulity whenever she mentioned this. Mame Childers not getting anything she wanted? Impossible. It became a line in her standard repertoire. Repetition altered her memory of those days, and she could half believe that it was she rather than Beth Hanrahan who had been such a great hit on the campus across the road. Of course, Beth had been an actress, on and off the stage, and her role from junior year on had been that of the perplexed Venus trying to decide between vying suitors. Dave Williams had been one of them. Mame had actually thought, If Beth discards Dave, he’s mine . Seconds.
    Dave Williams had to think, or maybe that was a pretense, when Mame mentioned Beth Hanrahan.
    â€œDavid, she was wild about you. Of course, we all were.”
    How manipulable men are, particularly hardheaded practical men. Take them away from business and they were like boys again.
    So it had begun, a Manhattan romance, plays, concerts, eating out, talking, talking. Well, Dave talking. Silence, a listening silence, is the great seducer.
    She explained why Wilfrid didn’t matter. “We were never really married, Dave. Not in our sense.”
    â€œWill you marry again?”
    â€œI haven’t been asked.”
    Bold that, but he was remembering something. He had it. “Dr. Johnson said that to marry again is the triumph of hope over experience.”
    â€œWhat did he know?”
    â€œWell, he didn’t marry again after his wife died.”

    An observation, a policy statement, a muted warning off? Mame couldn’t tell.
    â€œHow much you know, Dave.”
    â€œNotre Dame ’89.”
    She put her hand on his. “St. Mary’s ’89.”
    It might have been a ceremony. That night he came home with her. “Mame,” he began, when they were in the elevator. She put her fingers on his lips. He kissed them away. Later he said, “I don’t go to bed with all my clients.”
    â€œIs that how you think of me, a client?”
    Still later, looking at him asleep beside her, she thought, well, it had taken time, but at last she had edged out Beth Hanrahan.
    â€œWhere did you live when you were married?” he asked at breakfast.
    â€œHere.”
    He just looked at her. Was he thinking that he had taken Wilfrid’s place, in the same bed … No one else had ever done that. Her few lapses had been in far-off places where they hadn’t seemed to count. It was a mistake to bring him here. She saw that now. Dear God, what would Wilfrid think?
    â€œI spent a year redecorating,” she lied.
    It hadn’t helped. Maybe in “their” sense she had never really been married, but he had the look of an adulterer, not a lover. She never made that mistake again. She began to speak of putting the apartment on the market.
    â€œYou’d just have to buy another.”
    â€œMaybe I would settle down in the place in Connecticut.”
    The next time they went there, but it was almost as bad. The one thing Wilfrid had resisted, unsuccessfully, was letting her have the place in Connecticut. It had been far more his than theirs. He had
spent weekends doing maintenance, fussing around the property, directing old Fitz as the grumbling caretaker trimmed trees, made flower beds, painted the little cabin that had been Mame’s special place. It was fifty yards from the