merely unaffiliated theists.
He would point out that Jesus, for many the most important person who ever lived, sought the company of those whom polite society avoided. He was there for those who needed Him no matter who these needy happened to be.
When the self-righteous dragged before Jesus a woman taken in the act of adultery, he prevented the mob from executing her. His closest companions were the blue-collar workers of that day: fishermen, a tax collector.
There was no class consciousness in His life in any sense. He could be found at table with anyone from the very wealthy to the poorest of the poor.
The next point needed to be presented cautiously. Tom Adams was not Jesus Christ. But it was his decision that was putting a financial facility at the service of those who tended to be forgotten, overlooked, ignored.
Nor was Al Ulrich a messiah. But he
While neither Adams nor Ulrich was any place close to divinity, nonetheless what they tried to do and what they did was good by nearly anyone’s standard.
That was Father Tully’s outline.
He turned to the assembled group. They were looking at him expectantly, attentively.
All except Barbara Ulrich. She seemed lost in thought.
“Good morning. My name is Father Zachary Tully. I am a Josephite priest from Dallas, Texas. I was asked to say a few words this morning.
“I did not know Al Ulrich well. We met but once. And that was last week. However, I am very well aware of what Al Ulrich and” — he inclined his head slightly in the CEO’s direction-“Tom Adams were attempting to accomplish in the midst of Detroit’s inner city.
“Their enterprise was not unlike at least part of the mission of Jesus Christ.”
To this point, Barbara Ulrich heard Father Tully. Then his image grew faint and her attention began to lapse.
It was all coming back to her.
Seventeen
Al Ulrich could have been her ticket to the promised land.
Barbara Ulrich gazed past Father Tully and contemplated her late husband.
How had she come from there to here?
It had all started with Daddy. Daddy and his damnable “love games.” Then the change she’d felt inside her. The mistaken diagnosis, partly due to her reluctance to reveal what she instinctively sensed to be her shame.
Mother prying the details from her in the hospital.
That sight! She would never, could never, forget the tiniest detail. The broken “doll” they had taken from her, its head crushed and shattered.
For a long while after the abortion, she couldn’t return to the normal world. There were dreams-nightmares. It was a mercy she never saw her father again, though his absence contributed heavily to the unnaturalness of her home life. Between that and the unconventional atmosphere it all added up to a deeply dysfunctional household.
Mother had a lovely home sans husband. So she no longer needed entertain her boyfriends in cars and motels. Barbara had to make room for “Uncle” Peter and “Uncle” Roy and “Uncle” Lloyd. And, as time passed, other similarly premised relations.
To give the devil his due, mother Claire made certain that none of her suitors ever got familiar with Babs.
It had not taken Barbara long to identify the sounds coming from her mother’s bedroom. Schoolmates were liberal in providing details of sex, adult style. Some of the information was imaginative fiction. Barbara’s experience with Daddy provided cold facts to straighten out in her mind the actual process of “lovemaking.”
She was a high school teenager. She was gorgeous. She would have nothing to do with boys. The boys, hormones raging, were all over Barbara-sometimes literally. She fought them off.
Claire Simpson was spared one of the curses of mothering a teenage girl. She never had to worry that Babs was being led down a primrose path to perdition. If anything, Mother was concerned that her spectacularly beautiful daughter was headed toward a cloistered convent without the benefit of organized religion.
Claire sent Barbara to a psychologist-a woman.
There was an immediate at-oneness between Babs and Dr. Hunter-or Joyce, as the doctor promptly permitted.
During therapy, Barbara was able to vent all her repressed hostility toward her father, and even her mother. As a direct result of therapy, Barbara became a far more well-adjusted teen. She attended mixed parties. Eventually, she even went on dates. Her one major fear was pregnancy. She knew that should she become pregnant and there was no miscarriage, the child would be carried to term and be born.
This led to a dilemma. In no way did Barbara want a child. A child was not part of any plan she could envision for the short or long term. Yet her memory of her involuntary abortion was so powerful she could never repeat that. If she became pregnant, she would have the baby she didn’t want. She strongly doubted that she could give up a child for adoption. So the master plan was:
This decision placed a considerable burden on both her and her dates. After all, the hormones were raging.
However, none of her dates could claim that he was unaware of the ground rules. If, driven by tormented testosterone, an attempt at intercourse was made, in effect it could only be labeled rape.
It was no surprise then that, among many of the boys in her graduating class, Barbara was known as the Virgin Queen.
However, she was making progress. After all, she was attending parties and going on dates. And that was more, much more, than she could have attempted before becoming the patient of Dr. Joyce Hunter.
In college she was able to relax some of her rigid rules of dating. She attended Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.
One eternally popular song, “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo,” was written about, this quaint city. It was sometimes known as Mall City, with the claim that it had preceded even Minneapolis with a downtown traffic-free shopping mall. If Mary Tyler Moore had launched her cap in Kalamazoo, things might have been very different.
As it is, Kalamazoo boasts a couple of colleges, a university, some hospitals, and lots of medical specialists. It is also the hometown of noted author and poet, James Kavanaugh.
The highly intellectual level of life in the Mall City prompted Barbara to reevaluate her own coed life. Was she shriveling her personality by not mixing more freely with her fellow students? She determined to wade a bit more deeply into the mainstream of campus life.
Which did not, in any way, mean that all barriers were lowered. She insisted on plenty of protection for her partners, as well as taking stringent precautions herself.
Had she been even a tad less glamorous and attractive, she would never have been able to enforce her prophylactic paradise. But even with all her caveats, her dance card was always full.
Still, she couldn’t see the point of it all.
Rarely did any of her partners seem at all concerned about her pleasure. Foreplay was fun. But the cataclysmic climax was for the gentleman. She could not dismiss the thought: there must be more to this than that.
Then one evening, she entertained a classmate in her on-campus dorm room. Gretchen was attending WMU on a basketball scholarship. They had helped each other on occasion. Barbara tutored Gretchen in her liberal arts courses; Gretchen helped Barbara create a regimen of exercise for herself.
This was an unusually peaceful time in the building, Gretchen and Barbara were among the few students not attending any of the many campus events scheduled for this evening.
