By Gary Topping–
(Editor’s note: a previous version of this article appeared in the Intermountain Catholic. Part one of this story is available here.)
Mary Bell and the McDougall family learned only that Bill had survived and was in a prison camp, but were otherwise almost completely devoid of contact with him. Mary began writing to Mrs. McDougall (whom she addressed as “Mother”) and to Bill’s sister Jean, and prepared to become, as she assumed she would, a member of the family if Bill returned home.
When he did return home after the war, it appeared that things would return to normal. He bought Mary an engagement ring, but they did not immediately make wedding plans because United Press temporarily assigned him to New York City and they agreed to a temporary separation. While there, a longer postponement became necessary because McDougall won a prized Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University. Nieman fellows have access to the Harvard libraries and any classes they wish to take, or indeed they may do anything they want for an academic year. While at Harvard, McDougall began writing the two books that narrated his Far Eastern experience and the POW years, Six Bells Off Java and By Eastern Windows.
It was apparently while writing those books that McDougall realized the claim that God had on his life, and the pull toward the priesthood became stronger. He announced to Mary that he wanted at least to try out life in the seminary. It turned out to suit him just fine, and he had to break their engagement. “The Mac you knew in Shanghai died in the Indian Ocean March 7, 1942,” he wrote. “Among the many mistakes he made was in trying to resurrect himself –– the old self ––in 1946, and live two lives. That is impossible. Although it may take a great effort of will on your part, you must bury him, and thoughts of him, so deeply that he can never be summoned back, even in dreams.”
Of course to Mary Bell this meant the end of the hopes and plans that she had cherished for the better part of a decade, and her reactions included a bit of everything: anger, grief, and, in her deeply rooted Catholicism, resignation to God’s will. “At least losing him to God,” she once said, “was better than losing him to another woman.” To read her many letters to him, which he saved and are carefully preserved today in the Diocesan Archives, is to ride a wild horse across the full spectrum of emotion.
For a while, even after she realized she had lost him to the priesthood, she kept pledging her everlasting love, even as she referred to him as “you who [have] denied me all the happiness I want in life!” When he reported to her that his Nieman year at Harvard had been “a lonely year for me,” she retorted, “Mac, as if loneliness was only your bitter experience! If your year has been lonely—at least, it was your free choice. You deliberately chose to wrench yourself away from me—and I tried hard not to struggle to keep you!”
And what of the rest of her life? The once wealthy woman who had had fine clothes, servants and vacation homes now had nothing, with little education and few professional skills to fall back on. Her large family, perhaps unwisely, accepted a token compensation from the Japanese government for confiscation of their business and properties. It was a pennies-on-the-dollar settlement that unfortunately precluded them from even suing for full compensation as other foreigners eventually were able to do. Accordingly, the rest of her life saw her working a series of poorly paid jobs, and although she dressed well and worked hard, she scraped to get by.
Mary Bell never married. In a weak moment, she succumbed to loneliness and had a brief liaison with a married man whom she had known in Shanghai. It led to pregnancy and the birth of a daughter, Clare, who is the source for much of the information in this article. Single parents were very uncommon in the 1950s, and she had to resort to a string of prevarications and obfuscations to conceal the fact. The father was absent from her life and the life of her daughter, which is probably just as well, for he went to prison on a political bribery conviction during the Nixon presidency.
McDougall, of course, went on to become Monsignor William H. McDougall, Jr., rector of the Cathedral of the Madeleine and one of the most revered priests in Utah Catholic history. He and Mary Bell were eventually able to settle into a fond but distant friendship, corresponding occasionally and even meeting once in San Francisco where she was able to introduce him to her daughter. But she carried a torch for him, the only man she ever loved, for the rest of her life. She died in 2000 of a brain hemorrhage, a sudden and painless death—one of the few blessings in a difficult life.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
