Summer at the Lake Read online

  “Are they still there?”

  “Jim and Marty Murray and Jimmy and Eileen? No, they’re not there. They’re in heaven with God. But the memories of what happened are still there, kind of floating around, though of course they died long after they sold the house to the Keenan clan.”

  “What kind of memories?”

  “Not bad, certainly not scary, just a little sad.”

  “Could we, uh, get in touch with them, with the memories I mean?”

  “Absolutely not!” She jabbed a finger at me. “Don’t even think of it!”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “They screwed around a lot, you know?”

  “The Murrays?”

  “All of them, except the Keenans of course. I think that all the women slept with Tino at one time or another. And Martha with Doctor Clare too. I’m not sure about poor Lizabetta. She didn’t have much willpower and those other two could have talked her into anything.”

  “Their husbands knew?”

  “Poor fools! No, of course not. They thought they were the great lovers.”

  “You figured this out.”

  “It was obvious from the first couple of weeks I was here.”

  “Tom and Mary Anne knew?”

  “I never asked them, but I assume they did. They didn’t miss much, either of them.”

  Then Laura and young Jamie Keenan (who was her age) forced me to join them on the Keenan Starcraft for water skiing.

  The plastic powerboats with their inboard/outboard motors are much less expensive and much easier to maintain but lack the elegance of the old wooden inboards. The Lake was crowded with boats on a holiday afternoon but Jamie and Laura, she in the most minimal of bikinis, gave a glorious performance on their slalom skis. My own exhibition on two skis was less than distinguished. Nonetheless Laura praised it as “not bad for someone your age.”

  “Isn’t Jamie Keenan, like totally gorgeous, Daddy?” she demanded as we walked up to the house together, “and would you believe that he’s going to be a priest!”

  “It runs in the family,” I said.

  “I guess so…I heard that you and Jane beat his parents again this morning.”

  “Jane?”

  “You know, Mrs. Clare.”

  “You call her Jane to her face?”

  “Sure, why not? She’s like one of the kids anyway.”

  “Is she?”

  “Totally.”

  “I guess she would be at that.”

  “Are you going to see her tonight?”

  “There’s some talk about going to the movies?”

  “To see a film? In town? Wow! Really!…Will you need the car?”

  “We’ll walk into town, like we used to do.”

  “Daddy!” she mocked me. “No one ever walked into town, not even in the old days, before the Big Change.”

  Laura claims to have read my prize winner five times and now to understand me “totally.” I doubt the five times, but I do not doubt the understanding.

  “It was kinda fun,” I said weakly.

  She laughed all the louder.

  Then we arrived at the Keenans’ screened-in porch on which thermopane windows could be placed in the winter. Gothic doesn’t have such porches, but when the Irish took over the Old Houses on the hills they promptly built additions without concern for the architecture.

  “Can we sit and talk, Daddy?”

  “Sure.” I felt my throat tighten as it always does when Laura wants a serious conversation.

  “I’m going to spend a week or so with Mom in Boston after I finish in New Mexico. Is that okay?”

  “Fine. If you want to. Any special reason?”

  “Well,” she wrapped her beach towel around herself as though a bikini, such as it was, did not seem appropriate for a serious discussion. “She really wants me to and I thought it wouldn’t do any harm.”

  “I’m sure it wouldn’t.”

  I tried to sound as casual as I could. Did I fear and hate my ex-wife as much as I felt I did at that moment?

  “See, she’s worried that you and that school over in Switzerland might prevent me from developing any of what she calls ‘feminist consciousness.’ So she wants me to meet her friends in Boston and go to a couple of meetings of her ‘consciousness’ group, you know?”

  Convert her daughter?

  “If you want to.”

  “Don’t sound worried, Daddy,” Laura pleaded. “That stuff’s all b.s. Maybe her generation needed it but we just laugh at it. Like, we’re feminists before we can talk, you know?”

  “I’m sure you’re right, Laura. Only don’t try to tell your mother that.”

  “I won’t…the real reason she wants me, Daddy, though she’d never say it, is because she’s so lonely. Her latest boyfriend has moved out and some of her students laugh at the things she says about men in her women’s studies class and she feels so horrible.”

  Just at that moment I did too.

  “I’m sure she does, Laura…”

  “She’ll never get over it, poor woman. But maybe I can ease the pain for a few days, you know?”

  “That’s wonderful, Laura. I’m proud of you.”

  Indeed I was; though she didn’t really understand all that she was saying, she had still put her finger unerringly on the truth about Emilie.

  “She wants me to call her Emilie, instead of Mom. She says Mom is a word that indicates oppression. Can you imagine that!”

  “You call Mrs. Clare Jane?”

  “Yeah but she’s not my mother.” She bounded out of the chair and toward the door of the house. “Not even my stepmother.”

  “Laura!”

  She ducked inside and dashed up the stairs to the bedroom floor.

  Then she turned around. “If she ever becomes my stepmother, I’ll reevaluate.”

  “Laura!”

  “Have a great time at the movies!”

  Patrick

  In my early years at the parish after ordination I saw little of Jane and Phil and less of Leo. The Clares live about as far away from our “box-on-a-slab” neighborhood as you could and still be in Cook County. She produced her first three children in four years. Lucy came much later—in 1963. I was in Rome for the Council at the time, so I didn’t baptize her, though I had introduced her older sister and brothers into the Church. Phil didn’t show up at one of the baptisms. From my mother and sister-in-law I heard all the stories about Phil’s infidelities. Yet the few times I did see Jane she was the old Jane again, cheerful, self-possessed, gorgeous. I wondered how anyone could cover up tragedy so effectively.

  Leo also seemed much better. He was burning up the political science program at the University and grinding out impressive scholarly articles. He never came near the Lake but had supper with us in River Forest a couple of times each winter before he left for California and I left for Rome. We never mentioned Jane.

  In Rome I was too much caught up in the euphoria of the Second Vatican Council and then the deliberations of the birth control commission to think much about my friends from the 1940s. I had lost touch with Leo after he went to California and learned of his marriage to Emilie only in a Christmas card. Mom phoned me in Rome after the first of the year to say with a sigh of relief that they hadn’t been married in Church. Like Maggie she had never quite given up the idea that somehow Jane and Leo would get together again.

  I never really did forget Jane. How could anyone ever forget her? But her life was settled and so was mine.

  The Council years were an incredible time. In the seminary we had come to believe that the Catholic Church would never change even in the slightest matter. Then, all of a sudden, the altars turned around, the Mass was said in English, we could eat meat on Friday, birth control and even clerical celibacy became issues that could be discussed freely. My Cardinal had me appointed to the Secretariat of the Council so I could keep an eye on the curialists who were trying to wire things behind the scene.

  “I would bet,” he told me, �
�on a Chicago Irishman from a political family any day to outsmart these Italian conspirators.”

  “So would I,” I agreed modestly.

  They were exciting days. The council was making history and I was in the thick of the battles on religious liberty and on the Jews, the two big issues for the Americans. Having written my dissertation on the Church’s restrained response to contraception in nineteenth-century France (“Don’t trouble the consciences of the laity.”), I had become the Cardinal’s close adviser on that subject too. So he had me appointed as a staff member to the small group of bishops who were supposed to be considering the subject of birth control after the Pope pulled the question off the Council floor—where if it were put to a vote, birth control would have gone the way of the Latin Mass.

  When the Cardinal died long before his time I waited anxiously for the appointment of his replacement. I told myself, mistakenly as it turned out, that for most parish priests it really didn’t matter who the Archbishop was, but for someone like me who had more or less stumbled into the highly controversial subject of contraception it would make an enormous difference whether I had the support of my own bishop.

  At the final session of the Council, the new Archbishop, short, fat, ugly, and boisterous, came to live in the Chicago House, a not particularly modest palazzo on the Via Sardegna, which was where I had a small room up in the attic. After a couple of nights at dinner with him, I realized that the worst had happened to Chicago. He was an immensely clever political operative, but he was crazy—in addition to being a compulsive eater and drinker.

  After he consumed several Old Fashioneds and half a bottle of wine, he’d begin to tell stories in which he was always the protagonist and the hero. Sometimes they were stories that someone around the table had narrated the night before. We would glance at each other nervously and then look away.

  How could they do this to us, I wondered.

  “Now what are you doing here in Rome, Pat?” he would ask me every other night, sometimes more sober than other times.

  “I’m on the Secretariat for the Council and on the staff of the birth control commission,” I would always reply.

  Sometimes he’d say, “That has to change, no doubt about it. The Pope himself told me that.”

  And other times he’d say, “I heard from the Pope that the commission is going to be disbanded. Can’t change on that one.”

  He’d always add, “I won’t leave you here in Rome indefinitely. A priest should be in a parish or he forgets what his stole looks like.”

  “I hear English-language confessions every weekend in St. Peter’s,” I would say.

  I don’t think he ever heard me.

  “He’s going to order me to come home after the Council is over,” I said to Bernard Häring, a Redemptorist who was already one of the influential members of the commission.

  “This is what you do,” he said to me, winking broadly. “For the last week before he goes home, do not appear at the supper table. Do not let him see you in the house. He will forget about you. He resents any priests in his Archdiocese who gets any attention on any subject. So for a while you must be invisible, eh?”

  “Birth control is not a subject, Father, on which it is possible to be invisible for long.”

  He rolled his eyes. “We will win this time,” he said, “the Pope is looking for grounds for a change. We will find it for him.”

  He could not have been more wrong.

  Leo

  “I bumped into Dickie the other day.”

  We were walking down the road into town, holding hands as we had done so long ago. All the summers of the 1940s were just one summer. This was not the sixth or the seventh summer we had held hands on the same road. This was our second summer. A Catholic summer. A possibly numinous summer of a second chance.

  She had not resisted when I took her hand. Now it rested compliantly in mine, already a partial conquest, a partial surrender.

  The road had been paved, the trees were higher, the farms that had been on the left side as we had strolled into town were now upscale subdivisions. The twenty-minute walk seemed much shorter than it once had. Yet in the dark I had once loved so much, the same laughing, effervescent woman was next to me.

  And the same popping Fourth of July firecrackers were exploding all around us.

  Should I put my arm around her shoulder?

  Not yet. I was not a callow lad, inexperienced in the arts of seduction. One must proceed slowly, judiciously.

  Big-time experienced lover indeed. About the craft of pleasing women I knew nothing. Astonishingly, however, she seemed pleased with me.

  “Same old Dickie, huh?”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “You were the one who wrote the book on the big change. Don’t you believe your own theory?”

  “You read my book?”

  “Don’t seem so surprised. Of course I read your book. When an old sweetheart wins the National Book Award you have to read it.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I loved it, naturally. Isn’t Dickie the perfect example?”

  “Unbelievable. He offered us a chair in Irish studies in honor of Herbie. I don’t know how seriously he meant it.”

  “Wasn’t that sweet?” She sounded very proud of her brother. “Oh, he meant it all right.”

  “None of you used to believe in education.”

  “Except for men and professionals…OK, we changed. Nothing like prosperity and for my brothers the right wives to straighten you out…did you talk about me?”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “I don’t know, I just thought you might.”

  She was wearing white shorts and a green and gold T-shirt, which announced to the world that Clare Travels Shamrock tours would take you to the real Ireland. She smelled of very expensive scent, a good deal more expensive than a T-shirt and shorts or a night at the movies merited.

  “He seems very fond of you.”

  “They always were fond of me. Protective too. Maybe not protective enough…do you remember how you made me go to college?”

  “I didn’t make you go to college, Jane. I can’t remember ever talking about it.”

  “You don’t remember the day in the Rose Bowl down on the municipal pier when I was working there…”

  “I guess I forgot that you worked there.”

  “You held my hands real tight and pulled me half-way over the counter and ordered me to take the Rosary College exam…you don’t remember that?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Then you went back to the Keenans’ and told Tom Keenan who was on the board of Rosary to tell the nuns that if I won it they should give it to me even though my family had money.”

  “I’m sure I never did anything like that.”

  “Yes, you did. I asked Tom years later and he said you did.”

  She stopped in the middle of the road and, heedless of oncoming cars, kissed me briskly. “You were wonderful, thank you so very much! And get out of the way of that car!”

  We resumed our stroll. She was mine tonight if I wanted her. The kiss was in invitation.

  I am objectifying her with my lust, I reprimanded my hunger.

  No, I responded. I love her and want her.

  How can you tell the difference?

  I don’t have to.

  “I can’t imagine that I interfered in your life that way.”

  “You did and it was wonderful…I suppose you never wondered about me and my family.”

  “I couldn’t help but wonder. Everyone did.”

  “For most of those years I was ashamed of them. I knew what people thought even when we were in grammar school: The Devlins were loud, vulgar crooks. I didn’t believe all of it and I loved my family, Mom especially before she changed. So I became very good at pretending that I was your all-purpose cheerful kid. I learned how to pretend early. God knows I’ve needed that skill during my marriage. Good old happy Jane!”

  “It wasn’t all pr
etense, not when I knew you.”

  No…not all of it. Maybe all the singing and dancing and laughing is in my genes. But I inherited it from my mother, then she lost it all. She…well she became an alcoholic monster of whom we were all afraid and who could make us do anything she wanted. I did have good times, especially here at the Lake.”

  “I think I can recall that, Milady.”

  “Shut up, Lunkhead!”

  “You were a fairy princess trapped in a castle by a wicked witch.”

  At that sally she didn’t laugh. “Something like that,” she said finally.

  A metaphor from which I should stay away.

  We were quiet for a few minutes, happy with the memories of the good times.

  “When I was a little kid I was so proud of my father because he had started out without any money and made a lot. Then I found out what people were saying, maybe when I was in sixth grade, and cried myself to sleep for a week. Then the Jane act started. It’s gone on ever since.”

  “But your brothers changed?”

  “Like I say,” and her laughter, never far from the surface, bubbled back, “I read your book. Sure they changed. And I understood that a lot of rich Protestants up here got their start the same way and changed the same way. If my poor mother had lived a little longer, she might have been granted the acceptance she wanted. Then she might have sung and laughed again. I know…anyway I stopped being ashamed of them and started being ashamed of my husband. There was a time, I suppose, that I covered up for both.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “They say that the adult children of alcoholics are unable to tell what is real and what isn’t. My father wasn’t an alcoholic exactly, though by the time Mom died he was not far from it. But sometimes I’m not sure what is real.”

  “Have you ever talked about this to anyone?”

  “Nope, Lunkhead, this is the first time. Not even to Maggie. I thought I’d better explain some things to you. I was faking most of the time.”

  “No, you weren’t, Jane. You were yourself most of the time. Still are.”

  “You think?”

  “No question.”

  “I hid a lot.”