Summer at the Lake Page 10

  “Carbon copies of their father,” my mother would snort.

  “They’ll end up in jail,” my father would predict.

  Dad was wrong, none of the Devlins ever went to jail, though later they escaped it by the skin of their teeth and, it was said, because of liberal bribes paid to police, prosecutors, and judges.

  How did recent immigrants become rich in such a short time and especially during the Great Depression?

  They came with some money, according to rumor stolen from the funds of one of the military groups in the Irish Civil War. They bought a coal company that was on the edge of bankruptcy and turned it around by hard work, political bribes, and violence—usually with fists—against their competitors. They made deals with the city government and the unions and won big contracts both from the city and from companies that were afraid of having their windows smashed and their employees beat up. They branched out into gasoline stations and bought two restaurants, and took over a couple of “family taverns” in another neighborhood (lower on the social scale than ours) all of which ventures were successful even in the Depression because many people thought it prudent to buy their gas and their dinners and their booze from the Devlins.

  Maybe some were charmed just a bit by Ita’s songs and laughter, bubbling enthusiasm, and reckless good looks. But, if they weren’t, there were other reasons to keep the Devlins happy.

  They bought one of the largest houses in the parish and wore expensive clothes (which, it was said, did not fit them). The whispers of the late thirties said that they were second only to Doctor Clare’s family as the wealthiest parishioners. And the Clares spoke to none of the rest of us.

  Most of us didn’t like the Devlins very much, though some of us (not my family) admired their fierce competitiveness and envied their success.

  “No matter how much money they have,” Mom would comment, “they’ll never be anything but Shanty Irish. Crude, rude, and uncultivated. Not a bit of respectability.”

  “They are totally lacking in refinement,” Dad would agree. “Money can’t buy cultivation.”

  “Or manners.”

  “Or good taste.”

  His first observation was certainly true then. I’m not so sure that the latter was true, then or now. As a University officer I must concede that if you give enough money to us we are perfectly willing to certify you as respectable, no matter where your money comes from.

  The idea that, contrary to all the facts, the Devlins might be respectable gained currency in 1940 when they bought a house at the Lake at the end of the road and not far from Clares. Apparently the Clares even spoke to them, adding to the cachet of respectability.

  My mother dissented. “I don’t think the Clares are all that fancy either.”

  A month or two before she would have said just the opposite. Bad money, it would seem, does drive out good money.

  The parish was of mixed mind about the fights that Herbie, Mickie, and Dickie seemed to be in almost every night after they graduated from our grammar school. The joke was that some cops both in Chicago and Oak Park were getting rich on bribes paid to bail out the “three stooges,” my contribution to parish vocabulary.

  They heard the rumor that I was the source of the label and sought pretexts to pick fights with me. With one exception I responded by the same tactic the X Corps would use at the Chosin Reservoir. I redeployed to the rear—in other words, ran like hell. Since I was faster than the Devlins, they never did get a chance to slug me. Later at the Lake, they would have loved to have found me without Packy Keenan in tow (I was, in fact, usually in his tow). But they were afraid of Packy’s dangerous right fist, as was anyone with some amount of sanity. After a year or two of coming to the Lake I was as big as they were and arguably twice as mean—I had become very mean as soon as I had the strength to back it up—they avoided me. Then they stopped coming to the Lake except on weekends, because their mother insisted they weren’t working hard enough.

  For all their pugnaciousness, the three Devlin sons were in no hurry to join the military after Pearl Harbor. They waited till the draft caught them and then never left the United States, though in later years they would brag about their military accomplishments. Herbie, the oldest and the dumbest, was reported to have a particularly cushy job as a personnel clerk at the Navy Department, shuffling files. Despite the super-patriotism of their father (“Teach them yellow bellies a lesson!”) he and his sons flourished on their own little defense industry, the black market: “We didn’t have a chance at prohibition so now we’re entitled to catch up on with the Dagos,” Joe would explain to anyone who would listen. “If we don’t take the money, someone else will.”

  Then came Jane Devlin, the distantly worshipped goddess of my youth, arguably of my whole life. How that family produced Jane is a genetic mystery. There is a tendency, I believe, to glamorize the lovely young women with whom we grow up. When we look at graduation pictures many years later, we discover that while they are attractive enough, they are not as extraordinary as they seemed to us when we were all young together.

  Even granting that propensity, Janie was still special. One looks at our class of 1942 picture, suspecting that she will seem merely pretty and discovers that, no, the memory is correct, she is radiantly beautiful; tall, slender, neatly shaped, lovely round face about to burst into laughter, tightly knotted curls—nothing unusual about the components perhaps, but a devastating package. She exudes a vivacious allure that seems ready to jump off the yellowing photo and tempt you, make you laugh, enchant you.

  I remember the day they took the picture. Janie found it difficult to stand quietly in one place and be silent for more than ninety seconds. With some help from Chuck O’Malley who knew when and how to play the straight man, she kept all of us, including the photographer, the nuns, and the Monsignor in laughter through the whole hot, uncomfortable session.

  My mother glanced at the picture and then tossed it aside abruptly. “They ought not to let that Devlin child in the picture with respectable children. Look at her. She’s the spitting image of her mother.”

  I looked at the picture and saw no resemblance. Now I realize that the resemblance was strong though Jane was already taller than her mother and, as they would have said then, “much better developed.”

  “She’s an attractive little thing,” my father said.

  “Attractive is as attractive does.”

  Jane got away with her games. No one in authority ever begrudged Janie her energy or her wit, her quick tongue or her animated disregard for rules. S’ter (whoever might be S’ter in a given year) would perhaps try to be angry at Janie’s mischief but her outrage when Janie took the class away from her would always melt in laughter.

  “That young woman will never amount to anything, not with a family like hers.” My mother would insist. “She’ll end up a tramp.”

  It was not the common opinion. The parish adored Janie and conveniently covered up her origins. Jane was never disloyal to her parents or brothers. Rather she seemed oblivious to what they did or what the rest of us thought about them, although she seemed to adore her mother—if one were to judge by the way she hung on her every word when they walked home from Mass every morning.

  “Seemed” is the operative word here. Janie was a “deep one.”

  “Someday, Jane Devlin,” one of the S’ters said, “I’ll figure out what really goes on inside of that bright little head of yours.”

  “It’s empty, S’ter. Just the other day you said I was an empty-headed lame-brain.”

  We all laughed. Janie was skillful at remembering just what S’ter said and using it in repartee against her.

  S’ter flushed but was not angry. “That’s true too.”

  Janie was by far the brightest kid in the class, even brighter than Chuck. She may also have been the deepest, though that judgment reads back into an earlier time evidence that I subsequently acquired.

  So she seemed in those days to have everything—looks, brains, money,
popularity. Everyone in the parish seemed to know her and like her. Jane Devlin was our radiant princess of whom we all were proud. If any of the other kids felt envy toward her they were smart enough to keep it to themselves.

  Too good to be true?

  Surely. But allowing for all the facts, still pretty damn good.

  There were edges of sadness around her even then. Her brothers had all gone to Fenwick—judged in those days to be the elite Dominican school—for their first year in high school and were summarily ejected before their freshman year was finished. Thereupon they went to St. Philip’s or St. Mel’s—middle and working class institutions—where they did not last the second year. They “finished up” at Austin, though it is doubtful that any of them ever graduated. Joe and Ita had their doubts about wasting money on a girl’s high school education and announced that what was good enough for their sons was good enough for their daughter. Wave the flags for Austin High, boys.

  Horror swept the parish. Our luminous heroine deserved better. Sister Superior spoke to Joe and Ita in vain. Then she spoke to the Monsignor. He laid down the law in the firm tone of a west of Ireland canon. All right, Jane would go to Providence High for two years. After that the Devlins would determine whether any further education, Catholic or public, was worth the money. They told the Monsignor over and over that they could never understand why Americans wasted money on the education of young women whom, after all, God had designed to be wives and mothers.

  The Monsignor, to give the devil his due, did not back down. It was Trinity, a women’s Fenwick, and not Providence, and for four not two years. Trinity was a school for spoiled rich kids, the Devlins replied. The Monsignor denied that myth and insisted. Trinity was to some extent college preparatory; Jane should have a chance to go to college. Beaten but sullen, the Devlins withdrew.

  The battle was not a private fight: the Devlins had two levels of speech—loud and louder still. The whole parish listened with dismay.

  “No matter how much money they have, they are cheap and disgusting,” my mother said often during those tense days.

  “He’s a gombeen man,” my father agreed.

  I think they accurately reflected the sentiments of the parish at the time of the controversy.

  Through it all, Jane said not a word. Nor did anyone dare ask her. Her serenity and laughter were undisturbed.

  “It’s almost like she doesn’t know it’s happening,” Chuck O’Malley said to me.

  “She knows.”

  “She doesn’t show it.”

  “It’s called class.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s got enough for the whole family.”

  “Yeah,” he admitted.

  In those days I did not wonder about how much energy went into denial mechanisms or what the psychic costs of denial might be.

  I worshipped her from a great distance the very first day of first grade. I doubt that we ever spoke to one another, save perhaps for a “Hi” when my crowd and her crowd would, through some miracle of providence, emerge from the local movie house at the same time. She barely knew I existed. Moreover my mother had forbidden me to have anything to do “with that little Devlin snip.” Such a prohibition would have had little effect, in all honesty, if Janie Devlin didn’t scare the hell out of me.

  My worship turned to desire, pubescent lust I suppose, as we progressed through grammar school.

  A boy knows that the bodies of his girl classmates are different from those of adult women. He even realizes at some theoretical level that the girls will eventually mature into women, but the wonder of that phenomenon when it comes overwhelms him (as will the transformation of his daughters many years later). The typical boy hides his astonishment behind crude obscenities, which are perhaps his only escape. The girl becomes an object to evaluate in foul and clinical detail, a response to the terror of womanly sexuality, a terror some of us never outgrow.

  I’m sure we were especially astonished—and delighted—by Jane’s transformation from cute girl to devastating woman. But so great was our awe of her that we kept our dirty thoughts to ourselves. Since I planned to be a priest I went to none of the eighth grade parties in 1942, just at the time when the United States was turning the tide in the Pacific War at Midway Island. Even if I had wanted to attend the parties—and I’m sure I did—Mom would not have permitted it.

  “Why should a future priest want to engage in such immoralities?”

  The report on Jane from the parties was that she was a great kisser, but you couldn’t go any further with her. I felt proud of her. She continued to fill my dreams, as I’m sure the dreams of every male between thirteen and eighteen in the parish.

  It was during that summer that I told off one of the Devlins for the first time. Dickie, the youngest and a couple of years older than us, cornered me and warned me about Jane.

  “Don’t you dare even look at her, punk, do you understand me?”

  As best as I can remember, I replied something on the order of, “Fuck you, asshole!”

  I almost never used that kind of language.

  Oddly enough he backed down. So bullies are really cowards, I reflected. Interesting.

  I continued to look at Janie from a safe distance, especially at Mass every morning. No matter how late the party she always managed to be at Mass. As a future priest, awakened by my mother, I too was there every day. I was sure no one woke Jane. I managed to sneak out the side door and avoid conversation with her. I fear, however, that she rather than God was my main interest at Mass. Dear God, I’m sure I prayed, she is so lovely!

  As every academic must, I have struggled through some of Marcel Proust. I am well aware of the dangers in trying to search for times lost. Or, as we say in my discipline, the dangers of selective perception. How different was the reality of my early maturity from what I have described? I have no idea. Maybe someday I will be able to ask Jane how she remembers me. It might be a very risky question, however.

  My later love for her surely blurs my recollections of her at thirteen, going on fourteen. Perhaps I add a glow to Jane Devlin that was not there, or there only in my mind. I think, however, the general impression I have tried to convey is accurate. My friends from that era have similar memories, complete with glow. Especially Packy Keenan who was at least as much in love with her as I was.

  I wonder if he still is, not that it matters.

  I thought I would never see her again after the summer of 1942 was over. She went off to Trinity (and great success there) and I to the seminary.

  I would see her often during the early 1940s by pure alphabetical chance. My first day at Quigley I met Patrick Michael Keenan, an event that perhaps changed my life and one that certainly guaranteed that I would encounter Jane Devlin many times in the next six years.

  Jane

  I promised myself that I would not break down at grammar school graduation. In seventh grade I was disgusted with the hysterics of many of the girls after they had filed out of church. My mother thought the weeping girls were a disgrace. “No refinement.” I wanted to be refined, though my efforts at “acting like a lady” were usually unsuccessful. I warned my classmates that we would not do the same thing. We would instead rejoice that we were finally out of Saint Ursula and free from the nuns. Only babies were sad about getting out of grammar school. I was not the first one to break down. But when others began to weep, I couldn’t keep myself under control. The graduation ceremony was heavy, sad, poignant. The friendships of all those years would have to end. We would never be together again as a class. It wasn’t graduation that made us melancholy, it was growing up. We wanted to be kids forever. The boys could pretend to be tough. We girls knew more clearly than boys that graduation was a sad event. So we wept.

  Pain welled up from the depths of my soul, pain of which I had not been aware. It surged to the surface like a flood rushing out of control. My discipline disintegrated and I collapsed into hysterical sobbing.

  Later I would read and comprehe
nd the bittersweet lines written about a girl named Margaret, “It is the blight man was born for / it is Margaret you mourn for.”

  Then the boy with the red hair and the beautiful and gentle green eyes came up to me and put his arm around my shoulders. Not Chuckie who was consoling Rosemarie who hadn’t even graduated. But Leo.

  “It’s all right, Janie,” he said. “It’s all right. Cry your eyes out. Most of us wish we could cry the same way. Don’t worry, you’ll have a long and happy life and eighth graders of your own.”

  Even in memory that insight seems staggering. His prediction was wrong, however: there has been little happiness in my life.

  “Thank you, Lee,” I leaned against his solid shoulder. “I’m glad you understand.”

  So I was free to draw back from hysteria and control my weeping.

  Smiling like I was a daughter of whom he was proud, he kept his arm around me till my tears had trailed off into sniffles. He offered me a handkerchief to dab at my eyes.

  “Thank you,” I said, smiling up at him self-consciously.

  “My pleasure,” he laughed. And we both laughed together.

  He ignored my brothers who were glaring at him and, I thought, winked at Father Raven, who was beaming.

  “You’re so grown-up, Lee,” I sighed.

  “I have a long way to go to catch up with you, Janie,” he replied, squeezing my shoulders and then releasing me.

  So it ended.

  If it ever ended, which it probably had not and never would.