Summer at the Lake Read online

  Praise for Summer at the Lake

  “His new romantic thriller is replete with his trademark steamy sex, complicated relationships, and left-leaning church politics…. Even lapsed Greeley fans should be glad to find another novel cut from the good Father’s customary cloth.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Praise for White Smoke

  “A book that provokes tears, laughter, anger, excitement, and also provides a framework for understanding the modern challenges of the papacy should be read leisurely. But I read it in one day. What fun! This is an outstanding book. It entertains, teaches, and touches profoundly.”

  —Rev. John J. Piderit, S.J., President, Loyola University

  “Andrew Greeley always writes a gripping novel, and his latest, White Smoke, is one of his best…. A well told tale. Definitely a good summer read!”

  —Chattanooga Times

  “An energetic, free-wheeling account…. Fascinating. At this point in his career, Greeley is a writer of such skill that he can combine religious philosophy and history with a commentary on modern Italy, papal finances, a love story, and a mild thriller and make it all work.”

  —The Arizona Daily Star

  “Greeley tells his story with charm and wit, and with more than a dollop of steamy sex…”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  For the Saint Angela Class of 1942, in gratitude for a magical golden reunion. Our classmates, Jane and Leo and Chuck, were there too. But since they exist only in the world inside my head and not in God’s world I was the only one who saw them.

  They loved the reunion too.

  Where’re the Catholic sun does shine

  There’s music and laughter and good red wine

  At least I’ve found it so

  Benedicamus Domino!

  —Belloc

  Summer is y-cumen in

  Ludè sing, cuccu!

  Groweth sed and bloweth med

  And springeth the wudè nu—

  Sing, cuccu!

  Awè bleteh after lamb

  Lowth after calvè cu:

  Bulluc streteh, buckè fereth,

  Meriè sing, cuccu

  Cuccu. Cuccu.

  Well singes, cuccu:

  Ne swik thu never nu!

  Sing, cuccu, nu! Sing cuccu!

  Sing, cuccu! Sing cuccu nu!

  —Friar Thomas of Hales

  Contents

  Prologue

  Patrick

  Leo

  Jane

  Memorial Day/Pentecost

  1978

  Leo

  1948

  Leo

  1978

  Leo

  Jane

  Leo

  Patrick

  Leo

  Leo

  Leo

  Leo

  St. John’s Night

  Leo

  Patrick

  Leo

  Leo

  Leo

  Leo

  Jane

  Leo

  Patrick

  The Thirties

  Jane

  Leo

  Jane

  The 1940s

  Leo

  Jane

  Patrick

  Leo

  Leo

  Jane

  Leo

  Fourth of July

  1978

  Leo

  Leo

  Patrick

  Leo

  Leo

  Jane

  Leo

  Patrick

  1967

  Patrick

  1978

  Leo

  1946

  Leo

  Leo

  Leo

  Leo

  1978

  Leo

  Leo

  Jane

  Leo

  1968

  Patrick

  1978

  Jane

  Leo

  1947

  Leo

  Leo

  1978

  Leo

  1977

  Patrick

  1978

  Leo

  Mary’s Day in Harvest Time

  1948

  Leo

  Leo

  Jane

  Leo

  1978

  Patrick

  Leo

  Jane

  Leo

  Jane

  Leo

  Jane

  Leo

  Jane

  Leo

  Jane

  Leo

  Leo

  Leo

  Patrick

  Leo

  Leo

  Labor Day

  Leo

  Jane

  Leo

  Leo

  Leo

  Leo

  Leo

  Leo

  Leo

  Leo

  Patrick

  Jane

  The Feast of St. Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and all the other Angels

  Leo

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Patrick

  He’ll meet her out on the road at the foot of the hill by the tree where the accident happened. The first time he’s seen her since my Ordination almost a quarter century ago. He says he’s just going out for a breath of fresh air, but that fools no one. He came back to Chicago to renew a love affair that’s been dead for thirty years. A second chance. They’ll probably mess up the second chance like they did their first chance.

  My best friend and the woman I’ve loved since she was in eighth grade.

  Obscene fantasies fill my mind, actions in which I’d never engage with her in the real world. Does she know how much I desire her? Does she know that my imagination now automatically undresses her? Women usually know, don’t they? She must know. Yet she glows whenever she is with me. So she does not object.

  Is it not my turn? Have I not taken care of her through the years? Did I not urge her to leave her sociopathic husband? Do I not have some rights in the matter? Have I not been a priest long enough? Is it not time to break away from the insane Church and its stupid cowardly leaders?

  The smell of blossoms is overpowering tonight, like the empty flower car returning from a cemetery.

  I had my turn too and I lost my own first chance. It’s only fair to give him his second chance before I take mine.

  If I’m really serious about leaving the priesthood and I’m not in some dumb mid-life crisis.

  It’s all fantasy isn’t it? Jane and I could never be lovers, could we? Surely not.

  Am I sure of that? I don’t know. I’d like to find out.

  Anyway I must give the two of them my best possible advice. They are entitled to their second chance without my trying to spike it. The Lake seems sinister and brooding tonight, dark and restless out there. Water. Baptism. The symbol of life and death and new life. It meant life for Leo and Jane once. Then death. New life? Maybe.

  What does it mean for me?

  Three times I might have possessed Jane—that evening here at the house, the day she told me she was pregnant, and that dazzling night in Rome. What I thought was respect overcame my desire. Now I wonder if I am a coward just like Leo, a wimp who is also an occasional hero.

  I can tell that I am still special for her by the way she smiles at me and the lilt in her voice when she talks to me. I’m not out of the running yet.

  Does anyone know how I feel? Even my preternaturally perceptive sister-in-law?

  I don’t know. Only once did she speak to me about my feelings towards Jane and that was long ago.

  Leo

  In those rare moments when I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I accepted the offer from the University and retu
rned to Chicago because I had heard that Phil had walked out on Jane. Finally. Yet I’ve made no attempt to see her until this improbable stroll on a May evening with the odor of spring so dense on the night air that it reminds me of the pungency of that luxuriant Brazilian rain forest I was in a couple of years ago, the smell of rapacious fecundity.

  Will I find her? Will she find me?

  Will the old magic still be there? Or, as seems more likely, will we find that at the age of fifty—almost fifty for her—we are not the same persons we were at the age of twenty? Will an encounter, even on a lovely and romantic night, dash cold water on the foolish dreams we had when we were young?

  That’s the likely scenario. Academic that I am, I analyze and reanalyze and come up with the same conclusion: You can’t go home again.

  But why else am I here but that I am trying to go home again?

  The place has changed, the road is paved now. The subdivisions are crowding in from the other side of the Lake. The streetlights are newer and brighter—old gaslights long since gone—but the road seems darker, perhaps because the trees are so much taller and the foliage so much thicker. The Old Houses have been remodeled and repainted and look faintly modern and commonplace instead of elegant and romantic as they once seemed to me. The glitter and the romance have vanished. Or were they ever here? Do not we humans spread a nostalgic sheen over the site of our adolescence and our first love and make it more dazzling in our memories than it ever was in reality? And don’t we thus run a risk of profound disillusion when we discover how ordinary it is when we try to come home again?

  She is likely to have changed too. Plain Jane instead of Magic Jane. Maggie, who is her ally, insists not, but she is a prejudiced witness.

  What if she hasn’t changed? What if it’s gasoline that gets poured on the embers instead of water?

  Will the fury and the guilt of the past come back to haunt us again? Or the ghosts that lurk on this road, the ghosts of dead friends? Can I have her, if I want her, without putting those ghosts to rest?

  Will I have to find out what happened that night?

  The last time I saw her was at Packy Keenan’s ordination. She already had two children and was probably expecting a third. She looked terrible. I was still trapped in my fury and was barely civil.

  When we meet tonight, if we meet, will I be anything more than barely civil? I feel the rage stirring within me again.

  Jane

  I know what I’m doing. Unless Leo has changed completely, he’ll wander towards the tree where our friends died and I’ll meet him there. He will be expecting me. He always was an incurable romantic even when the romance was with death.

  Only a few days before the accident, he had asked me to marry him, more or less. I didn’t say no, but like a fool I didn’t say yes either. I talked about a lot of foolish objections and problems with our families of which I didn’t even realize I was aware. Then on the day of my twentieth birthday I betrayed him. He never forgave me. Instead he ran out on me just at the time when I needed him the most.

  He’s the only one who thought he made a fool out of himself. The others all thought he was a hero. When I heard what he said at the jail, I was terribly proud of him.

  I would have married him before he went to war on a day’s notice if he’d asked me. He didn’t ask.

  What will he think of me? An old woman—almost fifty, worn out by an unhappy marriage, unable to satisfy her husband sexually, and unable to save two of her kids, and probably a third? I was pretty good-looking at twenty but that was long ago.

  Not counting doctors, three men have seen me naked—my husband who quickly lost interest, another man whom I unintentionally terrified before I was married, and Leo. He didn’t see much in that fragmented moonlight, but I think he liked what he saw. If he should get another look at me, will he still like me? Or will he be disappointed?

  Will he guess that I think a lot about ending my life? He always knew what was going on inside my head.

  He was so sweet at Packy’s Ordination, same gentle smile and so nice to young Phil and poor Brigie, my two lost kids. And as friendly to me as though we’d seen each other the day before. He didn’t look like a man whose soul had been torn apart by war.

  Maggie Ward Keenan, who thinks she knows everything, says that Leo and I should have a Catholic summer, one in which we allow the summer heat to rekindle the warmth of the love that once existed between us. She quotes a liturgy from some place about the bride being buxom and bonny in bed. Well I suppose I’m buxom enough but not very bonny in bed. Not much practice in a long time.

  I tell myself that my husband is wrong when he says that he fools around because I’m not very good in bed. But I wonder often whether maybe he’s right. Would I have been any better a lover with Leo?

  Or with Packy? If he had not been committed to being a priest I might have married him after Leo died. That night in Rome ten years ago we were so close…I must not think about that.

  Would I be any better with him if we made love tonight?

  Was that an adulterous thought? I would have confessed it a few years ago. Now I’m not sure that Phil and I were ever really married.

  Maggie quotes some poet called Friar Thomas of Hales about cuckoos singing in early summer. I don’t quite know what that means.

  Maybe she’s right about being Catholic. We do know in our hearts that our lover is kind of like God to us. I wish I could really believe that. I certainly was not God to my husband nor he to me.

  If I invite Lee back to our empty house, would he come? Should I try? Would You want me to?

  I bet You wouldn’t object all that much. I think You always wanted us to be together.

  The scent of the lilacs and the jasmine and the flowering crab apple trees reminds me of the scent of a wedding mass.

  Now I wish he’d never come back to Chicago. I wish I was not walking down the hill on this road with its terrible memories, hunting for him like a horny teenager searching for her latest crush.

  Leo was my first crush, even before my crush on Packy. I was his first crush too.

  I hope he likes me.

  Memorial Day/Pentecost

  O Light of surprise divine

  Keep in mind how short our time

  Our strength and will please renew

  Without Your help we are lost

  Useless fluff not worth the cost

  Our only hope lies in You

  Heal whatever may be ill

  Quicken that which may be still

  Soothe our restless, aching hearts

  Energize what may be old

  Warm whatever may be cold

  Bind us who have come apart

  Protect us in love with You

  Pardon all the wrong we do

  Grant us joy that does not cease

  Give us life’s last reward

  Bring us home to You, O Lord,

  Grant us everlasting peace

  Amen!

  ALLELUIA!

  1978

  Leo

  For a few seconds I was terrified.

  She had caught up to me under the streetlight. Materializing suddenly in its faint, leaf and branch obscured luminescence like a spirit floating in the summer darkness, a spirit from a past summer that I had conjured out of bittersweet memories, a phantom of lost opportunities come to haunt me and punish me for my sins.

  I was spooked only for a moment. Jane was never ethereal enough to be one of the fairie troop.

  She kissed me lightly on the cheek, a quick gesture of remote friendship and nothing more. Yet the kiss ignited an inferno of hope—the ever-lurking professor in my brain warned me, the most dangerous of emotions.

  Jane was not plain Jane; she was astonishing Jane and dangerous Jane. She was almost the effervescent young woman I had known three decades ago, unchanged in personality from the bubbling little toddler who had bounced down the street in our neighborhood and unchanged in physical appearance from the girl I had held in my arms unde
r the same streetlight in 1948. She wore a cotton print dress with a low-cut, square neck that could have been the same one that she had worn thirty years before. Her body seemed to have the same lithe athletic shape, primed for a tennis match. The pale light or perhaps deft makeup obscured the lines that time must have etched on her round, faintly freckled face. I saw in the dim glow of the streetlight that her brown eyes sparkled with mischief as they always had. Her curly brown hair was still a halo around her head. Her smile was as bright as ever and her laughter as contagious as ever. Jane, touched by time and the tragedy of painful marriage and loss of children, but triumphant over tragedy.