Summer at the Lake Read online

  “This time they’re going to do it.”

  “I sure hope so.”

  “You going to show me a picture of this kid of yours?”

  “You bet.” He pulled out his wallet and produced a snapshot of a pretty blonde woman and a five year old who seemed a carbon copy. “Laura! The woman of course is her mother Emilie.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Forgive me for asking, but is the little girl baptized?”

  “Sure she is! We’re both Catholics, even if we weren’t married in church. She’s in a Catholic school in Santa Barbara.”

  “Not married in church?”

  “Yeah.” He frowned. “Emilie didn’t want a church wedding and at that time I was angry at the Church like everything and everyone else so it didn’t make any difference to me.”

  “Now?”

  “Since I’ve been taking Laura to Mass I find I kind of miss Communion and I’d like to straighten things out. Emilie is less enthusiastic about it than I am.”

  “I see.”

  “She’s a brilliant young woman, Pack. First-rate mind. Finishing up a book based on her dissertation. Pareto and Gramesci. Having a hard time with it. But she’ll knock it off this year and the department will give her tenure. Then it won’t be so difficult for her to be a mother and a scholar.”

  He had said not a word about how much he loved her. Rather he seemed to be apologizing for his wife and answering questions I hadn’t asked.

  Not good at all.

  “Isn’t Santa Barbara a step down from Stanford?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “You can do good work anywhere and it’s beautiful country. They made an offer for the two of us and that’s important when you have a two-scholar family. It’s not that places like Harvard aren’t chasing me.”

  Not good at all, at all.

  As we were leaving the restaurant, huddled under my umbrella because the autumn rains had come to Rome, he said, “Do you mind if I stay in touch with you, Packy? I mean more than before? It’d be nice to be able to talk to a priest once in a while. To say nothing,” he laughed, “to the best friend I ever had.”

  “Be my guest.”

  I wasn’t quite as ecstatic in my room on Humility Street after my meal with Leo as I had been with Jane. But nonetheless it had been great to see him.

  I was also a little uneasy. In two weeks I had become the confidant of both Jane and Leo, neither of whom it seemed were happily married. The final chapter of their story perhaps remained to be told.

  I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be the storyteller.

  1978

  Leo

  I awakened in the middle of the morning, shivering from the cold wind that had pushed its way into my room. I bounded out of bed to close the window and, pushing aside the shutter for a momentary peek, saw that an unexpected rain storm had swept across Wisconsin and was pelting the Lake, what one could see of it in the mists and the low-lying clouds. A good morning to sleep in.

  I had put on swim trunks and a University sweatshirt, not the one with the names of our Nobel Prize winners on it, shaved (as the proper provost should), and groped my way downstairs to the table where the woman of the house and her aides (sons and daughters) would have laid out the breakfast buffet. As I had expected that worthy was drinking coffee and reading a psychological journal. Trim and fresh in a pink sweat suit with matching ribbon, Maggie was an attractive early morning picture.

  The breakfast room was at the opposite side of the house from the “ballroom” and offered an equally dramatic view of the Lake. Now the only view was of clouds and rain and spray.

  No matter what the time of the day or night, Maggie Ward Keenan was always perfectly groomed and impeccably dressed, always a lovely little dish—a very chauvinist reaction, I admit, to such a distinguished scholar and clinician.

  “Thunder wake you up?” She had poured my coffee with her eyes on the coffeepot.

  “Didn’t hear it.”

  “Help yourself,” she had glanced up at me and added with an amused smile, “to our modest brunch.”

  The smile said in effect, you’ve been lusting after me since the first time you saw me thirty-one years ago and I’d be disappointed if you didn’t—just keep it respectful.

  “Yes ma’am,” I had said aloud.

  “What are you reading?” She had nodded at the book in my hand—Laura had explained with long-suffering tolerance to young Jamie Keenan that her father was an academic and hence always carried a book lest he waste a moment of precious time.

  She had it wrong. In fact, it was merely a pretense that I was a serious person, a fact of which I have never quite been convinced.

  “William Manchester’s American Caesar.”

  “Any good?”

  “He leans over backward to be fair to the bastard. Good technique because the result is all the more devastating. When I finally came home and heard about the grand reception the country gave him after Harry Truman finally fired him, I was astonished.”

  “And furious.”

  “And furious. And sick to my stomach.”

  “Are we getting close to writing that book on Korea?”

  “Yes we are, Doctor.”

  “I hear you reenacted a bit of it last night, Captain.”

  “Does everyone know?”

  “Bet on it. The other children are doubtless asking Laura, such a wonderful young woman by the way, what her father is really like.”

  “And she’ll say he never talks about Korea.”

  “Doubtless.” Maggie had put aside her journal, buttered a roll for me, and turned her full attention to the morning’s first client. “And the rest of your eventful date?”

  Packy had arrived just then and, as I had often seen him do, he had lifted his adored sister-in-law out of her chair, spun her around in the air, kissed her, and then deposited her back in the chair.

  “Woman of the house,” he had announced, “good morning!”

  Flustered and pleased, as she always seemed to be by this greeting, she said, “Thus does the celibate male prove his superiority by reducing the woman of the house to the role of an amusing girl child.”

  “Which she is,” Pack and I had said in unison.

  “Don’t you dare try that,” she had warned me.

  “That’s an invitation, woman of the house, that before the end of this remarkable summer, I will surely accept.”

  “Nonsense…Monsignor, your brother is still a slugabed. If you want to play golf with him, you will have to roust him out yourself. Our mutual friend here will play mixed doubles with his daughter and my youngest son. The rain will clear away within the hour and it will be a pleasant if somewhat cool evening for our little party on the deck.”

  So it had been decided by our matriarch with the pink ribbon around her ponytail and so it was.

  Just as I was leaving the breakfast room—or “brunch center” as it was called—Judge Keenan appeared. His kiss was not as wild as his brother’s but infinitely more serious: a touch of lips that told of a life of love, tragedy, conflict perhaps, sweet reconciliations, and passion that would never end.

  I pitied myself that I did not have an extended family or even really a family such as the Keenans with their delicately balanced and powerful network of affection.

  My siblings had scattered to the far corners of the country to escape our mother. Now that both my parents were dead I was the only one in Chicago and none of the others were ever likely to return. All of them would be absolutely uninterested in a visit from me. I was still the outsider.

  In the course of the tennis I discovered that it had been an age-old custom for the Clares to gather with the Keenans on the latter’s boathouse deck to watch the fireworks display from the Club, just down the shore. So I would see her again.

  Later we gathered on the deck over the Keenan boathouse, wearing sweaters or sweatshirts because it was a pleasantly cool evening, watching the fireworks display from the Club. I did not particu
larly enjoy it. Jane in tight fitting white slacks and equally tight fitting white sweatshirt was sitting on the bench next to me: Somehow in the darkness, my hand had found its way to her long and lovely thigh. And somehow she did not banish it, though she did gasp softly a couple of times as, inspired by the spectacular illuminations in the night sky, my ministrations became briefly more intimate than they had the night before.

  Then the kids—Lucianne and Jamie Keenan especially—deftly turned the conversation to my exploit at the Bijou the night before and Jane’s long and lovely leg disappeared from my immediate environment. She had not, however, changed her seat but merely shifted away from me—temporarily, not permanently, out of reach.

  Later, when the show was over and the yellow lights on the deck had been turned on, Packy nodded towards a quiet corner.

  “I talked to the old fella this afternoon.”

  “Oh?”

  I noted that Lucianne and Laura were in an animated conversation with Jamie Keenan and another good-looking lout called “Roger”—last name not given. Another seminarian, I presumed.

  Despite big changes, some things don’t change.

  “He sends his best. Will be happy to see you again when they come back as soon as Mom’s art festival is over and tell you what he knows.”

  Fleetwood Mac was blaring again as they had all afternoon. If it was them. One rock group sounded pretty much like any other to me.

  “How much does he know?”

  “Typically, more than he’s telling me and less than he lets on. He did say that the State Police got some of the money, which may be his source, an old cop rumor.”

  “Why would the Murrays permit a cover-up? Their kids were killed, their family wiped out for all practical purposes.”

  “Because they were afraid of the truth, which might have been even more horrible.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Do you still think Phil might have been involved?”

  “Not any more. I can’t see him as bright enough to organize a conspiracy.”

  “Don’t underestimate his shrewdness. He won the woman, you know.”

  “With the help of the People’s Liberation Army, but I take your point…did your father say where he thought the money came from? That was a lot of hard cash in those days, maybe worth three million in today’s shrinking dollars.”

  “He hinted that he knew, but he didn’t tell me anything. You’ll have to pry it out of him yourself. And don’t figure that he knows more than he does.”

  “How do you know how much he knows?”

  “That’s the problem. About any subject.”

  “It will be an interesting conversation.”

  “One more thing.” Packy glanced out at the moon bathed waters of the Lake. “He said to be careful. That wasn’t Tom Keenan being wise, it was an honest statement about present danger.”

  “What could be dangerous? Almost everyone who was involved is dead.”

  “It was a serious warning, Lee. I told him what the prize was and he said that she was probably worth it, but you still should be careful.”

  “Probably?”

  “His word.”

  It sounded like one of Tom Keenan’s beloved mysteries.

  “Why didn’t you guys stop the marriage?” I blurted a question over which I had agonized for a quarter century. “There must have been other men she could have married.”

  Packy was quiet for a moment.

  “We tried—Jerry and Maggie and I and my parents in their own way. She didn’t hear us, Lee, simply didn’t hear us. She didn’t hear a thing from the time your death was announced until her first child. Oh, she kept up the Jane front. But there was no one home in her head or her heart.”

  “Strange.”

  “Not so strange. Long-term trauma is what Maggie called it. Maybe not over it completely yet. Your death has been the big event in her life.”

  “I didn’t die,” I said again.

  “For her you did.”

  “I’m alive now. For her.”

  “I’m not sure she believes that yet. One more thing,” Packy hesitated. “Little Phil was born six months after the wedding…I mean the wedding had been scheduled for at least six months, so it wasn’t a shotgun marriage. I guess our old friend couldn’t wait.”

  “The bastard!” I said. “She was an emotional wreck and he virtually raped her!”

  “I quite agree,” Packy responded, his normally serene face wreathed in an angry frown. “Whatever has happened to him since, he richly deserves.”

  Packy’s rare lack of charity inspired me to vent my own feelings.

  “In spades…Dickie told me that he was chasing on their honeymoon.”

  “Everyone knows that.”

  “Why did Jane wait so long to toss him out?”

  “Old-fashioned Catholic, trying to make the best of a mistake. Thank God she’s learned finally there’s an upper limit.”

  “Just at the time I’ve appeared on the scene to claim my belated prize.”

  “You might say that,” he grinned happily, “you might say just that.”

  I bade my good-byes to the prize as she and her brood prepared to leave.

  “I hope I see you again, Lee,” she said as she brushed her lips against mine, “before the summer is over.”

  “You can count on it, Jane.” I hugged her fiercely. “You’ll see me again.”

  I thought I saw—or perhaps only imagined I saw—Lucianne and Laura grinning happily.

  1946

  Leo

  “You want to go down there, Lunkhead?” Jane asked.

  I gulped. We were at the edge of the road looking at “Skinny-dip Beach” just barely visible through the trees.

  “Huh?”

  “There’s no one there.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I think,” she said virtuously, “it’s an experience everyone should have once while they’re growing up.”

  “There’s not much light,” I observed, “just the moon once in a while through the clouds.”

  “Do you want more light or less?” she laughed.

  “Both.”

  She laughed again and darted through the trees. Not altogether sure that this was a good idea, I followed less rapidly.

  It was the summer of 1946. Jerry Keenan had returned from the wars but not yet to Chicago. He was looking for “a girl he found and lost,” Packy explained. Packy himself was about to enter his fifth year at Quigley Seminary, the last before he was swallowed up by the major seminary at Mundelein in which, in those days, seminarians were incarcerated for seven years. Jim Murray, his worried frown deeper than ever, and Phil Clare, his bland smile, more bland than ever, were both at Notre Dame. Jane had graduated from Trinity and, over strenuous objection from her parents and brothers, had entered Rosary College. Eileen and Angie were about to enter their last year of high school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. I had finished my first year of college and had put in my required six weeks sweating in the sun at Quantico where Naval ROTC units did their first summer duty before embarking on ships in their second year—an adventure I dreaded because of my queasy stomach.

  When I came home from Quantico, I was in a somewhat different position than I had been before. The Navy paid me a salary. I had money of my own, which my mother could not confiscate from me. I didn’t have to push a lawn mower any more. I could buy a beat-up 1939 Ford of my own. I could spend as much of the month of summer vacation that was left to me as I wanted to at the Lake without having to explain my behavior to anyone—least of all to the elder Keenans who were happy to have me around the house even when Packy wasn’t there.

  The only price I had to pay for this freedom, for such it seemed to me then, was that the United States Navy would own me for a couple of years, how many not clear, after my graduation. Most ROTC programs had been absorbed in officer training programs during the war. The services, not sure how many officers they would need in the postwar world, opened new programs
up and closed them down with dizzying rapidity. The one I joined at Loyola, for some strange reason managed to survive. I was able to stay in by agreeing to choose the Marines as my branch of service when I would graduate and receive my commission.

  My mother had not really forgiven me for leaving the seminary. She insisted that there was not enough money to pay for my college education and at the same time send my younger siblings to “good Catholic high schools.”

  There was even then either enough money or the promise of it to refute that argument and my father tried, unsuccessfully as always when money was the issue, to overrule her. But I wanted no part of family support. ROTC and the United States Marine Corps promised me freedom from the family, a life in which I could finally call my own shots all the time and not merely when I was with the Keenans at the Lake. I would receive a free college education and earn G.I. bill benefits for my graduate school education in political science. (Without even knowing what it was, I had chosen that as my field.) In return the Government would merely require two years of service from me. Well, maybe four.

  Everyone knew that there would not be another war for a long, long time.

  If ever.

  It turned out to be three years in the service, two and a half in a POW camp. I paid also with two of my fingers and a lifetime of bad dreams and intermittent rage. On the other hand I also have a lifetime pension and a lot of experience of human nature, including my own—stubborn, stubborn, stubborn for all my phony professorial wit and charm.

  Mean too.

  A reasonable exchange? Today I think I probably ended up with more gain than loss, though if I had known in 1946 what I know now I would not have made the deal.

  It is kind of interesting to watch the old sixteen millimeter film that my adoring sister Megan made of my funeral Mass, especially of Jane’s agonized face as they sing “my” Ave and then Panis Angelicus. For years I would not watch it. More recently I have had it transferred to video tape. Some day I will show it to Laura.

  I watch it every once in a while. Just to remind myself that I live on borrowed time. Even if it had not been for Korea, that would still be true, but a film of your own funeral, or more precisely, your own memorial Mass kind of makes the point, doesn’t it?