Summer at the Lake Page 21
Anyway I was now on my own and would, I said proudly to my family, work to earn my own living for the rest of my life. I don’t know whether that was an accurate prediction because I’m not sure whether being a professor is work.
So I turned up at the Lake in the August of 1946—without my uniform of course because even as a Marine I was not much of a militarist.
My first stop after checking in with the Keenans had been the Rose Bowl—so I guess I must have known about Jane’s job.
“Lunkhead! Is it you?”
She had thrown her arms around and hugged me fiercely.
“You really have changed! What have they done to your hair! Gee, you’re really strong! How long will you be here! That Ford out there really isn’t yours, is it? Want a malt!”
“You bet, the bigger the better!”
I had seen her at Mass in Chicago before I left for Quantico. Yet she seemed to have changed astonishingly in a few months. Even in the “cute” soda jerk uniform, she looked like a full-grown woman and an incredibly beautiful one.
“Cute,” which was synonymous with “adorable” in Jane’s lexicon, meant a pink and white dress with a very short skirt, a very tight bodice, and two open buttons—the last being her optional modification.
She took my breath away. She did every time I saw her for the first time at the Lake. But this summer she was something really special. We were all growing up. Or at any rate getting older. I wasn’t sure that I had liked that.
That summer, though I was only eighteen, I had begun to think like an adult, as had the men of the same age born a few years before me during the war. A year of college and six weeks at boot camp had not made a man out of me by any means, but I was at least addressing questions from which the seminary had protected me.
Such as: when would I marry, what kind of a woman would I want to marry, where might I find this woman.
In that embrace in the Rose Bowl, for the first time I had begun to think that the woman I might marry was the girl down the street, now turned elegant woman in my arms.
It seemed at the moment like a very good idea. It was moreover an idea that changed the ambiance of that summer and the two that were to follow.
None of the others was around, but they’d all be up on Friday night and we would have a great time this weekend.
And she would give up on “Lunkhead,” she informed me, except sometimes, if I would give up on “Milady.”
“OK, except sometimes.”
She howled at that and offered me yet another large malt, which I could hardly refuse because she said it would be on the house.
“Take me to a movie tonight?”
“What is it?”
“Does it matter with me for a date?”
Instead of answering like I would have only the previous summer that I would not go to a rotten movie even if Linda Darnell was my date, I replied, “Not really.”
“Hey you have changed…it’s called ‘Death Takes a Holiday.’ ”
“Never heard of it.”
“1934.”
“Ugh!”
“It’s supposed to be real good.”
“Well, at least it’s not ‘Girl of the Limberlost.’ ”
The Bijou, then as now, did not book the most recent films. In those days we said that there was a rule of thumb that they would never present anything made after 1940. “Girl of the Limberlost,” surely one of the first “talkies,” was an annual. We all knew the lines by heart and acted out the roles.
So we had made a date for the evening. She would walk over to the Keenan house and collect me and we would walk to the Bijou. She didn’t believe in people our age driving to the movies. I could pick her up and drive her home after work, however. Coming home from work was a different matter, I was assured.
Once again, I was not permitted anywhere near her family.
That night Jane wore a pale green light summer sun dress—high neck, low back—instead of her usual blouse and shorts. She seemed to me more dazzling than ever, an almost uncanny contrast to the eerie film. The movie, which you can still see occasionally on television, is now a kind of classic. Death wants to be loved and comes to earth to find out why he is not loved. Then he falls in love. It is a comedy of sorts but with some wry comments on the human condition. We had drifted over to the Rose Bowl after the movie in thoughtful reflection.
Jane did not smell any longer of chocolate and stale milk and cigarette smoke and sweat. Rather she smelled like the state forest after a fresh rain, mysterious and magical and enchanting.
Midweek in August, the soda fountain was not crowded. Everyone in the place, however, knew Jane and she had worked the room like a precinct captain, smiling, patting on the shoulder, punching in the arm, a word of greeting for everyone. She had always done that and I had never noticed. Now I noticed and approved. The jukebox, as best as I can remember, was playing “It Might as Well Be Spring” from State Fair.
That night I would have approved of anything Jane did.
“I’ll get even fatter if I keep eating these things,” she had said as she settled down with her malt. She glanced at me. “You on the other hand are too thin.”
“You’re not too fat, Jane,” I had permitted my appraisal to linger as I considered her.
She had blushed and lowered her eyes. “You shouldn’t look at me that way, Lee.”
“Why not?”
“Well,” she had concentrated on her malt, “of course you should, but not quite so obviously.”
“I don’t know if I ever did tell you how beautiful you are,” I had mumbled, “but if I did you’re twice as beautiful now.”
It was not a very creative gallantry, but I was not used to being gallant.
She had blushed again and covered my hand with hers. “You’re such a sweet boy, Lee, really you are.”
I drifted upward on a fluffy pink cloud.
Then, while Bing Crosby crooned “Ole Buttermilk Sky” on the dilapidated, pre-war jukebox, our conversation had turned serious.
“We’re both going to die someday, Lee.”
“Not for a long time.”
That exchange would stick in my head during the two years in the POW camp.
“But eventually.”
“I suppose so.”
“What do you want to do with your life?”
“I want to be a good professor of political science.”
“I’m not sure what that is exactly but I just know you’d be good with college kids.”
“I hope so.”
“You’ll marry eventually?”
“People do.”
“When you’re a stuffy old man?”
“As soon as I find the right girl.”
That seemed to satisfy her.
“And what will you do, Jane?”
She shook her head. “What does a woman do? Marry, have kids, be a good wife and mother.”
“You sound like that’s not enough.”
“I’d like to do something else too. Write stories maybe.”
I tell my classes that if one does not want a civil rights movement in the sixties and a woman’s movement in the seventies, one does not send blacks and women to college in the forties and fifties. Looking back on that conversation, Jane Devlin was already some kind of proto-feminist.
“Write stories?”
“Mystery stories, like the Bobbsey Twins or Nancy Drew.”
God or an archangel or someone of similar clout must have intervened to prevent me from making fun of the idea that she could be a writer and that she thought such stories for girl kids were literature. After four years at a Catholic high school.
Instead I had managed to say, “That would be a lot of fun.”
“Or maybe G.K. Chesterton…do you know who he is?”
“Sure. We read Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man in the seminary.”
“I never heard of them. I saw a paperback of some stories about a priest named Father Brown in the Dime Store and so I bought it
. They’re wonderful. I have all the books now.”
“I’ll have to read them.”
“I’ll lend them to you.”
Nancy Drew and G.K. Chesterton!
“I suppose it’s a silly dream,” she had continued, “but I’d really like to write stories…do writers make much money?”
“Some of them make a lot of money.”
“Good!”
It was our first serious conversation. Jane was not only beautiful and smart, she also had a serious streak. What more could one want of a woman?
“Are you afraid to die, Lee?”
“Death is on your mind a lot tonight.”
“It’s not just the movie.” She had finished her malt. “I think about it a lot.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just do. I’m not exactly afraid of it, but I don’t think I want to die. Yet sometimes I wish life was over already. Do I sound crazy?”
“You never sound crazy, Jane.” It was my turn to put my hand over hers. “You sound thoughtful and intelligent.”
“Is this ever a good night for me to collect compliments!” She had become her laughing self again. “Come on, Lunkhead, lets go home—unless you want your fourth malt today.”
“No, Milady.”
“Oh, oh! I slipped. I’m sorry.”
The jukebox announced that it was “A Grand Night for Singing” as we left the Rose Bowl. It was indeed.
She had chattered happily as we ambled down the dark road toward the Old Houses. Angie Nicola and Jim Murray were really “serious about one another”; Phil was drinking too much again and not doing well at Notre Dame; he was taking summer school classes at “the pier” (Navy Pier, the site of a state college, which would eventually become the University of Illinois at Chicago); Eileen was dating a couple of different boys but she wasn’t serious about them; Packy was still Packy, working in a Negro parish on the South Side this summer.
“Isn’t he wonderful, Leo? I mean I think he’s a lot like Father Brown, so good and so wise and so kind. Isn’t he?”
I had agreed. Later when I read the Father Brown stories for the first time I saw no resemblance at all. No one could have looked less like Chesterton’s detective than Patrick Keenan. Still later when I reread them, I realize that there was indeed a similarity.
“Won’t he make a wonderful priest! I’m so happy that he’s going to be a priest, aren’t you?”
“You bet.” I put my arm around her waist. “Eliminates a rival.”
“Silly!” She snuggled close to me. “We’re not playing the rivals game.”
“Not yet.”
“Not for a long, long time.” She had paused. “Besides, you don’t have any rivals.”
A commitment? A promise? An invitation?
“I am glad to hear that.”
She slipped out of my grasp, perhaps feeling that she had said too much.
Then we had come to “Skinny-dip Beach.”
I caught up to the silhouette just as it discarded what might have been a panty and dove into the water.
“Come on, fraidy cat,” she shouted. “The water is great!”
With considerably less enthusiasm, I undressed and dove in after her, a tense mixture of curiosity and embarrassment.
It was too dark to see anything except shapes and outlines. We were both clothed in the night.
I stood on the muddy lake bottom, looking around for her.
Someone emerged from the water next to me in the glow of a brief shower of moonlight—a sparkling Venus arising fully formed from the foaming sea, and, rather less serene than Venus, pulled me under water. In return I wrestled her under with me. Our play was uninhibited yet cautious, neither of us wanting it to become something else. Finally, panting and laughing, we climbed up on the decrepit old pier at the end of “Skinny-dip Beach” and lay next to one another. We both became quiet, closer together than we ever had been yet alone with intimate thoughts to which we could not give word and which we would not have expressed even if we had the vocabulary.
I began to sing. I don’t remember the songs, but I suppose I must have sung “Always” and “How Deep is the Ocean” because those were our songs that magical summer. Jane hummed along with me in an off-key accompaniment. We were alone in the world. No one and nothing else mattered. The moon appeared intermittently, cast light like angel wings on her, and then, as if shocked, rushed back behind the clouds.
She put her hand on my chest. I rested my fingers on her belly. Neither hand moved from its appointed station. When the moon made one of its quick appearances, I saw that her hair was slicked down on her head and her body wet with sparkling diamond water drops. The whole world belonged to me that night and all the joy and the love and all the laughter. It was an erotic experience all right but a religious one too. The cool water, the warm night, the naked girl told me in terms so vivid that I would never forget them, not even on the coldest nights in Korea, that life was good and love possible.
“Fun,” she said.
“You bet.”
“I like being wicked,” she sighed.
“Mildly wicked.”
“Of course.”
“I like you mildly wicked.”
“Me too. I mean I like you when you’re mildly wicked.”
We both had a fit of giggles.
“We’d better go home,” she sighed on the pier.
“Yep.”
She stood up and dove into the water. For a brief moment I saw a wonderful womanly outline against the clouds.
On the beach we shivered. “Should have brought towels.”
“Especially since you planned it all along.”
“I did not…Oh, Lee!”
I had taken her naked body in my arms and pressed it against my own for a quick instant and kissed her decisively if briefly.
For that interlude of a few seconds I thought I was in paradise.
Why did we not make love then and there? We were Irish Catholics and it was 1946. But even if the circumstances were different that was not the point of the event. Sexual love would come later. This was a promise, chaste but erotic, not only of sex but of something even more wonderful that might lurk beyond it, a love stronger than death.
“Wow,” she breathed as I released her. “I think we’d better get dressed now.”
“Good idea.”
“Hook my bra for me?” she asked a few seconds later.
“Delighted. I’ll button the back of your dress too.”
“Thank you very much.”
My fingers trembled only a little as I performed these delicate tasks.
Back on the road, she said, “That was very nice. I’m not sure what we did or why we did it, but it was really great.”
“Sure was…Maybe we can do it again.”
“Maybe,” she hesitated, “but not very often.”
“Only once more.”
“All right.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
It is a promise on which I have yet to collect. But I haven’t given up on the possibility of demanding that she redeem it.
Leo
“I’m worried about him, Lee,” Angie Nicola sighed, the movement in her luscious breasts sending a shiver through me. “He’s so serious, so…”
“Melancholy?”
“That’s right. His heart just isn’t in the fun we are having this weekend or any other time. He pretends to be part of everything. But his mind is far away somewhere else thinking about God and death and other depressing things like that.”
Like her mother, Angie wore two-piece swimsuits. While they were nothing like the bikinis of today—in fact they were solidly constructed girdles and bras—they still revealed a lot more than did other swim fashions, particularly when the woman in question, like Angie, combined a china figurine delicacy with a succulent body.
The white outfit with lace trim she was wearing that day hinted at lingerie, which made her all the more appealing.
That night, while we were sitting on the deck, I asked Packy about Iris Clare.
“I think she’s just a lonely and unhappy woman who tried to drown her misery in drink. Now that she’s given it up, she acts a little strange.”
“Why is she so lonely and unhappy? She has a rich husband and all the possessions a woman could want. She’s beautiful and men admire her. What’s missing?”
“I don’t think,” Pack chose his words cautiously, “that Doctor Clare pays much attention to her. She was a pretty nurse from down-state that he married at the same age that his father and grandfather married pretty nurses. Philly is his world and vice versa. It’s like the wife and mother doesn’t exist—a decoration in the house of which you must be careful, nothing more.”
“That’s what your parents think?”
He laughed. “I couldn’t make that up myself, could I?”
“You agree?”
“Pretty much. She’s a bit of a tease, but she doesn’t mean anything by it.”
Having left the seminary because I didn’t want to have to deal with people and their problems, this was my summer for dealing with people and their problems. Phil was worried, in a sincere but stupid kind of way, about his mother’s infrequent Mass attendance. I reassured him that it might be a different matter for converts than for cradle Catholics—especially, as I did not add, if one became a Catholic because one wanted to marry Doctor Philip Clare.
Then one night in the forest while we were drinking beer, he asked me another favor after he had explained at great length how his father and Mr. Murray and Mr. Nicola were going to make big money in the upcoming economic boom from a shopping plaza they were planning in a northern suburb of Chicago.
When he had explained to me that a shopping plaza was a group of stores around a big parking lot, I told him that it might be a good idea but it would never work—which goes to show you what a brilliant prophet the future author of The Big Change really was.
The favor? Would I please ask Jane for him if she would mind becoming engaged the following Christmas? He knew she loved him and wanted to marry him and would I mind kind of breaking the ice?