Summer at the Lake Read online

  I didn’t mind working. I liked my job at the Rose Bowl soda fountain on the municipal pier right next to where the boats docked. I liked my cute pink and white dress with its very short skirt; I liked mixing sodas and malts; I liked gobbling the ice cream myself; I liked the fountain with its gleaming marble-top tables and its big mirror and its pink and white walls and its smell of chocolate; I liked the customers—boys and girls and kids my own age and the servicemen and their dates, and older people who brought back a little of their own youth by buying ice cream after the movie; and I liked to make the customers laugh, especially those who were ready to complain because they had to wait for service.

  Lunkhead! I screamed at the customer who had ordered the huge malt.

  If he were up at the Lake during the week, which was not nearly often enough to suit me, he would often drop in to keep me company when business was slow, sometimes with Amadon and sometimes not.

  Amadon would certainly be a priest.

  We don’t serve disreputable looking people here. This is a high class soda fountain.

  High class help. And give me four cookies with the malt.

  I did as I was told. On the house, I said when I put the huge concoction in front of him.

  You’ll spoil me…why so glum, chum?

  I’m not glum, you’re the moody one.

  You’re glum.

  I’m thinking about graduation next year.

  So you’ll go to college.

  There’s no point in a girl going to college. She doesn’t need it.

  Bullshit.

  Don’t be vulgar. Ma wants me to work for the company until I get married. She says it won’t hurt me to learn how the real world works before I settle down and have a family.

  Go to college, Jane.

  I can’t. My family won’t pay for it.

  Win a scholarship to Rosary.

  They won’t give me a scholarship because they think my family has a lot of money.

  Try for it.

  Even if I win it, Pa and Ma won’t let me take it.

  Tell them that the Clares won’t let their son marry a woman who hasn’t gone to college.

  I’m not going to marry Phil Clare!

  Regardless! If you put up a fight your folks will back down, won’t they?

  Maybe.

  He didn’t realize how terrible my mom had become.

  He leans across the counter, grabs both of my hands, and draws me so close that I can feel his breath, scented with Pepsodent, on my face.

  Damn it Jane, he says, take the scholarship exam and go to college.

  My legs turn to water, as they usually do when his fierce passion erupts. I can’t argue with him. All I can do is agree.

  I don’t want…

  Yes you do. Some of the time anyway. That’s why you’re glum.

  His gorgeous green eyes absorb me, depriving me of all resistance to him and all protection against him.

  In my fantasy I think again how wonderful it would feel to be naked for him.

  You’re hurting me, I try ineffectually to pull away.

  No I’m not. Take the exam, do you hear me? Then smile at me like you do at all the other customers.

  Oh, all right!

  I glance around quickly to make sure the Rose Bowl is still empty and then kiss him. He holds my lips with his and then releases me.

  I bet you kiss all the customers that way.

  Only stupid little boys!

  I know what he will do. He will talk to Mr. Keenan who will talk to the nuns at Rosary and, if I win the scholarship, they’ll give it to me. So I can go to college if I want.

  But I’m still not sure that college for a girl isn’t a waste of time. Ma says it is and ma is always right.

  Well, no she isn’t always right, but we have to act like she is or she breaks up furniture and throws statues and vases at us.

  Leo

  My father, already embarked on the real estate business that would bring him affluence of which a few years before he would not have dreamed, took my departure from Quigley philosophically, as I knew he would.

  I had left the seminary at the end of the summer of 1945 because I said that I felt that I didn’t have the personality required to be a priest. The Rector, who liked me, insisted that I did too have the personality, and that I was a natural leader with people.

  I’m not sure he was wrong. People have come to me in search of help since my first year as an assistant professor. The real reason for leaving, however, was that the vocation was my mother’s, not mine. I admired priests, but I had no desire to be one. Jane had nothing to do with it. Otherwise I would have phoned her as soon as I quit.

  “If you’re not cut out for it,” Dad said, “then you’re not cut out for it. There are too many unhappy priests. Better that you find out that it’s not for you now instead of then.”

  My mother wailed for days. She had made so many novenas, she had prayed so hard to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, she had made so many promises to the Virgin Mary. I was breaking her heart.

  My brother Pete was ordained in the middle sixties and left to marry a nun two years later. Instead of my mother complaining about a broken heart, she protested about the “silly rule that priests can’t marry.”

  The world changes.

  “Well, the war’s over,” she said to me when she finally dried her tears. “At least you won’t have to go into the service.”

  I suppose that one of the reasons I signed up for the ROTC at Loyola was so that there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind, which meant of course my own mind, that I had not been a draft dodger in the seminary.

  It was not the wisest decision I ever made.

  Fourth of July

  God wants to be thought of as our Lover.

  I must see myself so bound in love as if everything that has been done has been done for me.

  That is to say, the Love of God makes such a unity in us that when we see this unity no one is able to separate oneself from another.

  —Julian of Norwich

  1978

  Leo

  “Hiyah, Mr. Provost, great to see you again!”

  The man who extended a massive right hand to me was tall, trim, and quite bald. He wore a suit that had been carefully made to fit his solid athletic shoulders. His handsome, cheerful face shone in a happy grin.

  A distinguished contributor to the University, I assumed. I’d better pretend to know him.

  The President should be dealing with such folk, but since I was a native Chicagoan and something of a hero returned to the city, a few folks, including the very distinguished contributor for whom I was waiting in the dark, oak-paneled, prestige-heavy lobby of the Chicago Club, wanted to see me.

  I didn’t like that part of the job, but it went with the territory.

  “Nice to see you again.” The face was vaguely familiar.

  “Missed you at the Lake on Memorial Day. I hope you’re going to be up on the Fourth.”

  “I will try to make it. I’m not sure Jerry and Maggie will have room for me.”

  “It’s a big house. Didn’t the Murrays own it before the Keenans bought it back in 1930?”

  “I guess so. That’s when the Murrays thought they needed an even bigger place. It doesn’t seem to be haunted.”

  “If herself says it isn’t haunted, then it isn’t.”

  Maggie, who was something of a psychic, had never said that it wasn’t haunted. But the terrible events that befell the Murrays occurred long after they had sold the house to Tom Keenan and moved out.

  In fact, I was of mixed mind about the Fourth—hungry to see Jane again and wary of my own hungers.

  “Everyone sure is proud of you. First Catholic to be Provost of the University. That’s some accomplishment. We all knew you’d make it big.”

  Then I knew who it was, Dickie Devlin, Richard Mulcahy Devlin, the very same one who had warned me off his sister on our grammar school graduation night.

  “It sounds a lot bet
ter than it is, Dickie; there’s not much money in being a college administrator.”

  “Hell, it’s not the money that counts.”

  I felt like I was on a merry-go-round running out of control. This could not be Dickie Devlin.

  “I suppose not.”

  “Look, Mickie and I haven’t given anything to that place because we thought it was anti-Catholic. I guess it isn’t, huh?”

  “No, Dickie, it’s not, never was really. Some of the faculty may have been, but the school isn’t.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ve been thinking of doing something in honor of Herbie…he died, you know, too much booze for the liver, didn’t quit soon enough like I did…so what would it cost for a chair or something out there?”

  The merry-go-round would never stop. Never.

  “A million.”

  “That’s not bad.” He played with a very large diamond on the index finger of his hand. “Could we name it after Herbie?”

  “Certainly. Or perhaps name it after your parents in his honor.”

  We had named chairs after far worse bandits.

  “Yeah, that would be a great idea…What would it be in?”

  Was this thug, former thug, whatever, actually going to write me a check for a million dollars?

  “What about Irish history?”

  “Yeah, Ma and Pa would have loved that. I’m named after Dick Mulcahy, General Richard Mulcahy, you know, and Mickie, well, he’s named after the Big Fella, Michael Collins himself…Well I can’t say for sure till I talk to Mickie, but I think we can hack it. If I don’t see you at the Lake over the Fourth I’ll give you a ring.”

  And I must call the zoo to see about other leopards who had changed their spots.

  “You hear about that asshole Phil?”

  “I hear he wants a divorce from Jane.”

  “Yeah, that too. Can you imagine anything so stupid? I mean we tried to hold things together for the kid’s sake, little Lucy, you know but what the hell, Janie’s had it and I don’t blame her. He wanted the divorce and he fooled around on their honeymoon.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s going to be final next week. We’ll keep him on the payroll for old time’s sake, but he’s finished as far as I’m concerned. I think poor Jane might have taken him back if it wasn’t for this latest business.”

  “Latest business?”

  “Yeah, the insider trading thing. It’s all in today’s Wall Street Journal. It’s bad enough to get caught doing that kind of stuff these days. It’s even worse when you look like an idiot because you didn’t make any money doing it.”

  “Will he go to jail?”

  “Nan,” Dickie shrugged his huge shoulders, “he’ll walk. All the Feds want is his testimony. What really pisses me off is that he involves Janie. She took it pretty hard, poor kid.”

  “He involved her?”

  “Typical asshole move. Says he didn’t intend to do anything wrong. Just meant to help people.”

  “If I remember Phil, that’s probably true.”

  “Yeah, but, tell you the truth, Lee, that wears thin after a while, know what I mean?”

  “Indeed it does…will Jane be charged?”

  “Not likely. The Feds are into harassing these days. But she doesn’t need the aggravation, poor kid.”

  “I agree.”

  “Those were great times we had in the old days.”

  “They certainly were.”

  I could not remember a single encounter with Dickie at the Lake, not a one. I did my best to stay out of his path. Never pick an unnecessary fight.

  “Well, she’s rid of him at last, thank God. Monsignor Packy says there’ll be no trouble about an annulment. Practically all of them are granted these days, which I think is really an improvement, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t need one myself,” I said answering his indirect question. “My wife didn’t want to be married in church. Then it wasn’t important to me. Now it is.”

  “Yeah, well I always thought Janie would marry you instead of him. It would have been a lot better.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But you were dead.”

  “So I was.”

  “Hell, I went to your funeral mass. Never saw so many tears in all my life, especially when they sang that Ave Maria you liked so much at the end of the Mass.”

  “So I’m told.”

  I had never liked any Ave all that much.

  “Well, I gotta go over to the Chicago Athletic Club for my workout. You’d think they’d build a gym in this place wouldn’t you?”

  “It wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

  “See you at the Lake maybe; and I’ll be in touch about that chair, know what I mean?”

  I thanked him, we shook hands and I collapsed into a couch, still reeling from my carnival ride. Jane’s brother had just offered a chair to the University and his sister to me. I was trying with great difficulty to rewrite time lost to give it a different meaning and he had done so effortlessly. Too accurate a memory of time lost is not always an asset.

  I’d written a book about the years from 1945 to 1965 called The Big Change. It was not too popular when it first appeared after Nixon had been tossed out. It was not fashionable in that era to suggest that anything good had happened before 1965. But now my argument that the era after 1965 was the logical outcome of the enormous social and economic changes in the “postwar” era had become fashionable. I suppose it will become unfashionable in a few more years as a new generation of assistant professors struggle for tenure. I had said that the “postwar” era was the most revolutionary since the time of Andrew Jackson. But that was a global perspective. I didn’t expect Dickie Devlin to be part of that revolution.

  If it’s wonderful how a little money can change a person, it is even more wonderful how a lot of money can change him.

  I reflected on the half century of my life. When I was in grammar school we all seemed poor, except the Devlins and the Clares. Then came the war and the years afterward and we spent our time catching up on all the things we missed in the Depression. When Kennedy was inaugurated we were convinced that the American “know-how,” which had won the war, would solve all the social problems in the country and the war. Then came Vietnam, the assassinations, the riots, anti-war demonstrations, Cambodia, Kent State, protest marches, Woodstock, the Days of Rage, Watergate, the Nixon pardon, the Arab oil embargo. All the institutions of our society seemed to disintegrate. There was no credibility left. One of my younger colleagues, a self-proclaimed radical with a thousand dollar stereo system in his apartment told me five years ago that the revolution had already occurred and that in a few years the whole of American society would fall into the hands of his generation to remake.

  I told him that much more likely there would be a dramatic turn to the right because the ordinary folk thought that he and his kind were dead wrong.

  Now I think we both were correct. Most of our institutions have lost a lot of their credibility, but no one is going to change our society very much. So the revolutionaries continue to pile up consumer goods and the radicals talk radicalism and make a lot of money and the rest of us combine suspicion of institution with personal success working for the institutions.

  Roaring twenties all over again, maybe.

  So Leo T. Kelly, snot-nosed poor Irish Catholic kid from the West Side becomes Provost of the University, thinks of buying a summer home at the Lake, and eats lunch at the Chicago Club.

  If I try to do a sequel to The Big Change, it will be a much more complicated book.

  “You look dazed,” the smooth, impressively scented CEO said to me.

  I looked up, startled. “I just encountered someone from my past who represented perfectly my thesis about change after the war.”

  We ascended the spectacular staircase with the polished brass rails to the second floor lobby overlooking Michigan Avenue, a room fit for a Presidential Inauguration Ball.

  “World War II?” He was six or seven years older
than I and had fought in the war. “Whole different world after the war. Kids today don’t understand that. You look like you need a drink. It must have been a hell of an experience.”

  “It was and I do, even if it’s only twelve-thirty.”

  I had two Jameson’s and thanked heaven I had come downtown on the South Shore instead of driving. Back in my office, I was just barely awake for the tenure conflict meeting that awaited me. The unread Wall Street Journal lay on my desk through the whole interminable meeting, a torment to my already numb powers of concentration.

  The Provost’s office at the University, large, dark, opulent, elegant, is designed I think to recall an office in Oxford or Cambridge, something set up in Good King George’s time. Actually, the administration building, a solid gray block, is New Deal-ugly in design, perhaps the least handsome building on the University’s main quadrangle. As soon as you leave my office, the impression of old wisdom and reverent respect for university traditions disappears into what could be a corridor in an aging hospital or a somewhat run down hotel.

  Nonetheless, my office is not the proper setting for a noisy fight because the drapes and the carpets and the wall hangings absorb the voices of the shouters, who, to be effective, must set the Provost’s teeth on edge like a ruler on a blackboard, instead of almost putting him into an alcohol induced nap.

  The case was a repeat of Emilie’s and typical of many other tenure fights we have in the universities these days. It was easy to decide in a certain sense because the merits were clear; only political pressures created a problem. When the merits are in doubt, the problem is much different for it involves truth and not mere prudence.

  The young woman was a Berkeley Ph.D. in psychology. She was apparently a good teacher, popular with students, and untiring in her work for them. She was also a radical political activist in a wide variety of causes. These activities would not have been a serious problem (save for some senior busy bodies in the Social Science Division) if she had any modestly impressive publications. If you are going to be a radical, I had always said, that’s fine so long as you publish too. But this woman had produced less than my former wife. She had organized enough support for herself in the Department to get a one vote majority in favor of a very weak report for promotion and tenure. These kinds of recommendations are a sign to the University that Department is afraid to say “no” and expects the Dean to do so. Our Dean promptly did so. When the professor’s “activist” supporters screamed at him, he did what Deans do, he set up a review committee, which of course came through with the expected support of the Dean—thus responsibility for an unpopular decision is spread around and there’s no one on whom to focus blame.