Summer at the Lake Page 23

  “All right, Roger, I’m coming,” she said to her impatient date.

  “Nice to meet you Roger,” I said pleasantly.

  He glared in return.

  Somehow I didn’t think Roger would be lucky enough to have another date with Angie.

  Phil’s little sister was named Norine, for reasons that escape me.

  Why a child? Was it just an accident or did she want a memory of her sweaty summer afternoons with Jimmy Murray?

  Women like her, Mary Anne Keenan would say the following summer, don’t have accidents.

  I couldn’t be sure that Jimmy was the father. Maybe there were other men that summer. But maybe there were not.

  The child, born just before Packy graduated from Quigley in June of 1947—what has happened to her?

  She’s an M.D. now, just like her putative father, and is a medical missionary nun in Central America.

  Who says God isn’t a comedian?

  Or comedienne.

  1978

  Leo

  “I suppose you wonder why I belong here instead of the Chicago Club, where I understand the University sends you, or maybe the Mid-America Club.”

  “Or the Chicago Yacht Club, they have the best pastry table in town.”

  “Oh, I belong there, but I thought you’d like the cinnamon rolls here. I see that you do.”

  He gestured at the roll in my hand and revealed a large diamond ring on his right hand, the kind that affluent political lawyers always wear.

  “You have a great memory, Tom.”

  “Not all that bad for pushing eighty…anyway I joined the Union League just to see all those conservative Republican bastards wince when I come in the dining room. It does my old heart good.”

  “A lot of Irish Catholics from the commodity markets, I’d wager.”

  “I have no personal objection to gamblers!”

  Tom Keenan was still several years away from eighty and wore his seventy odd years very well indeed. Despite a barely visible quiver in his right hand, he was trim and alert and did not wander in his conversation—though since he was always an opaque Irish political lawyer it was sometimes hard to tell. Mary Anne, whom I had seen when the Keenans threw a party to welcome me back to Chicago, was still a striking woman, not the erotic beauty I had first seen in 1942 but still appealing.

  Did they still make love, I wondered.

  Probably.

  I prayed that they did. Maggie would tell me that it was a good Catholic prayer.

  “Hope you don’t mind a breakfast meeting, but I wake up pretty early these days.”

  “Not at all. I have a full day at the University.”

  “Seems like we’re always moving from one condo to another—Taos, East Lake Shore Drive, and then up to our coach house at the Lake next door to Jerry and that little witch he found back in ’47.”

  “Where’s the best service?”

  “At Maggie’s Motel,” he guffawed. “Thank God Jerry married a good cook.”

  “And an impeccable housekeeper.”

  “Obsessive-compulsive she calls herself. Mary Anne isn’t that way by a long shot.”

  “Most Irish women aren’t.”

  “For sure.”

  Joan had married, to everyone’s initial dismay, a young actor and moved to Los Angeles (Beverly Hills to be exact). He has enjoyed a remarkably successful career and they have produced four children and live now in Taos to escape the Hollywood scene.

  “Well, it’s about one such that we’re supposed to talk…have another cinnamon roll. They’re good for you.”

  “I doubt that…How much did Iris Clare sleep around?”

  Tom raised an eyebrow, not to indicate surprise—nothing I might say could, as a matter of definition, surprise him—but rather to suggest that my question might be an odd way of beginning.

  “A fair amount I suppose.”

  “Was Doctor Philip Clare Sister Norine’s father?”

  “I doubt it…do you know who her father really was?” He raised both eyebrows and put down his coffee cup.

  “He’s dead.”

  We were both silent.

  “I’m not going to tell anyone,” I added. “Maybe one more person, but I’m not sure about that.”

  “That’s good,” he smiled expansively. “I didn’t think you would.”

  “Does Norine know?”

  “I doubt it. No need. Poor old Phil adored her, even more than the son he so desperately wanted. You see, Lee, his father and his grandfather before him were doctors too. The grandfather served in the Union Army in the Civil War, the father went up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt, Phil quit medical school to join the army in 1917. Unlike me he never made it to France. He wanted, the worst way, for a son to keep the family tradition of medicine and military service alive. But he could see that young Phil wasn’t cut out for either…”

  “He played at being a soldier during the war.”

  “And acted like a war hero afterwards…but as I was saying Phil rolled with the punch. He never blamed young Phil for not being what he wasn’t. So he ends up with a daughter who is an M.D. and a nun and a missionary and he’s proud of her.”

  “And a grandson…”

  “No thanks, no more coffee. Mary Anne permits me only two each morning. Decaf after that. But I’ll have another glass of grapefruit juice, please.”

  “I presume he wasn’t Phil’s father either.”

  Tom shifted uneasily. This kind of cross examination did not appeal to his Celtic legal soul.

  “I don’t know that to be true.”

  “Not for sure.”

  “Right,” he smiled back in his own world of indirect and allusive conversation. “Boy didn’t much look like his father did he?”

  “No.”

  “You just figure this stuff out?”

  “I knew about Norine back when it happened.”

  “Did, huh?”

  “Yep…I guessed about Phil only recently.”

  “How does this fit in with your pursuit of the lovely Jane?”

  “I’m not sure. I knew something was wrong back then. Iris’s love affairs might not have anything to do with the accident. That tragedy, however, is and has always been a problem for Jane and me. We’ve got to crack that mystery open.”

  “Why?”

  I hesitated. Better not tell him I was trying to remake the past by reinterpreting it.

  “We both feel responsible for their deaths.”

  “Leave it,” he said firmly.

  “Why?”

  “No good will come of it. Neither of you were in fact responsible. Let the dead bury their dead.”

  I paused. It was solid advice.

  “I’d like to, Tom. I can’t. What happened that day?”

  “If I knew I would have done something about it long ago. It was our car, after all. I could see what it was doing to you two and Packy and poor little Angie. I had my hunches and my suspicions but nothing more than that.”

  “It was real money?”

  “That’s what the retired State Police Captain told me. He said some of the cops got a hefty cut of the money. He didn’t know who made the decision or where the rest of the money went.”

  “Someone pretty powerful…more powerful than anyone we know,” I murmured.

  “Probably. At least powerful in the world of people who can do those sorts of things.”

  “Any leads for me to follow up?”

  “You’re not a detective. Pretty smart scholar and able administrator. If you really want to reopen the past, hire a pro.”

  “I might do that eventually.”

  “About Iris?”

  “Yes?”

  He frowned, unwilling to say anything evil about the dead.

  “Well, some people thought she was a…what’s the word that cute little witch from Philadelphia uses?”

  He knew damn well what the word was.

  “Nymphomaniac?”

  “Yeah. But, you know, I don’t think
that she was, not really. Just a beautiful and lonely woman with a lot of time on her hands.”

  “Time and money.”

  “Fair enough. She must have loved old Phil back there in those days after the war, our war, I mean, the first one. She became a Catholic for him, though she never did take it seriously.”

  “Did she come on to a lot of men?”

  “The women folk said she did. Even Mary Anne. I said they were just guessing. And that flirting doesn’t mean necessarily that you’re sleeping around, if you see my point?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I used to say she never tried to seduce me. And Mary Anne used to laugh at that. Kinda hurt my feelings,” he grinned amiably, “not that my hands weren’t already pretty full—in a lot of ways, I guess.”

  A discrete allusion to his wife’s well-developed breasts. From a man of his generation? Why not?

  “Still are.”

  “That’s for sure…I don’t say this to many people,” he glanced around to make sure that there was no one near him, “but I don’t think you’ll be shocked or surprised: there is a certain kind of woman a man can’t keep his hands off, no matter how old he or she is. Matter of fact the woman only gets more tempting as she gets older. See my point?”

  “I’m glad to hear it’s true. It gives me hope.”

  “Did Iris go after you?” He abruptly turned away from the personal revelation, but not as though he were embarrassed by it.

  “No. Kind of hurt my feelings too. Nor Packy.”

  “She wouldn’t have tried it twice with that one…but, as I always said, she was more to be pitied than blamed.”

  “I’m not blaming.”

  “I know. You’re just trying to reinterpret the past. Not a good idea.”

  Shrewd old guy had figured out exactly what I was up to. He probably had me figured out too.

  “How do Phil and Sister Norine relate to one another?”

  “She’s seen right through him since she reached what we used to call in the Catholic Church the age of reason. She’s one of those modern nuns, Lee, thinks a woman has the right to a divorce if she’s being pushed around. I can’t say she’s wrong either.”

  “So she supports Jane?”

  “Best she can from Central America.”

  Jimmy’s child a missionary nun! Yeah, God was definitely a comedienne, though one with a strange sense of humor.

  It was time, as I circled round and round the questions, to return to the accident. Or murder as I had always thought it was.

  “I understand…do you have any idea where the money came from?”

  “Who usually has that kind of money?”

  “The Mob?”

  “Who else? And some of their rich friends in the banking world. Most of the Chicago banks have a connection into the Mob. It’s good business.”

  “What were they doing shipping the money up to the Lake?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Who puts geographical limits on them?”

  “And what was it supposed to be for? To whom was all that money being delivered—and in your car?”

  “That’s the big mystery, isn’t it?”

  If he understood the mystery he was not about to tell me.

  “I’ve always wondered,” he continued, “why the police were not more interested in the fact that it was our car. But no one asked me any questions about that, except about the brakes.”

  “Cover-up?”

  “Sure looks that way.”

  “Either Phil or Jimmy or both were acting as couriers.”

  “Sure looks that way. Maybe they didn’t know what was in the metal box.”

  “Maybe, but still why use them?”

  “Good question. They had professional couriers even in those days. Not the art that it is now…there’s too much water over the dam, Leo. You’ll never crack that one. I know—I tried and couldn’t get anywhere. Not even with my friends on the West Side who had friends, if you see my point. And I’ve had a little more experience poking around in mysteries than you.”

  “I understand. But why did the Murrays not try to find out what happened?”

  “That’s easy. They thought it was a terrible accident and no one had cause to tell them any different. Maybe they didn’t have to pay for the money that was lost. They fell apart after it; they were never up to asking any hard questions, poor people. Like I say, give it up, Leo.”

  “Maybe I will eventually, Tom.”

  He sighed heavily as if he understood. “Well, she’d be a good woman to spend the rest of your life with. She never was properly married to that fella. He didn’t know what marriage meant.”

  “I mean to have her,” I said firmly—and with more confidence on that subject than I usually felt.

  “I suspect you will, I suspect you will. Be a good thing too.”

  I snatched another cinnamon roll.

  Tom Keenan was watching me intently. “You knew, of course, that you weren’t supposed to go to Korea!”

  “What!” I dropped the roll.

  “I had a little experience as a shavetail lieutenant of infantry in the old A.E.F. during the Great War as the Brits call it, Chateau Thierry. I couldn’t see you as that kind of Marine at all—which just goes to show you how wrong an ex-officer can be, if you see my point.”

  “I was a lousy line officer.”

  “That doesn’t seem to be what anyone believes except you. Anyway, I thought I could ask a few questions in certain places. Maybe, I say to myself, even the Marines will recognize that this guy can talk fluent French and Spanish…”

  “Not really fluent.”

  “Better than most of them…and he should be either in Washington or at some embassy instead of commanding a platoon.”

  “At Inchon and Wonsan,” I said, mentioning the X Corps’ famous landings, “I didn’t do a thing except get seasick. My sergeant had to take over. Then up at the Chosin Reservoir…I was only a platoon commander for a few days.”

  “And got all your men out. I see you’re wearing that little blue medal with the white stars. About time I’d say. Part of your life…well, like I say,” he fiddled again with the large diamond on his right hand, “I was wrong about that but I say to these friends, are you going to send that bright redhead off to the Western Pacific? And they say we need people like him in Europe more than out in the foxholes. If you take my point?”

  Impulsively and without knowing the reason why, I had put on the ribbon that morning.

  “When was this?” I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

  “Maybe July 1950. After Stalin’s guys crossed the 38th parallel.”

  “In August I was on a C-54 headed for Japan. In September I was on a LSV off Inchon.”

  “Something changed, huh?”

  “Something changed…They knew about the landing in Washington when you talked to them?”

  “They weren’t sure. MacArthur carried that out pretty much on his own, if you remember. Give the devil his due.”

  “He was lucky.”

  “Very. Anyway when I find out from Packy that you’ve been shipped out I call my friends and ask them how come. They say there was a change in plans.”

  “Ah.”

  “I think to myself someone changed their plans.”

  “Who?” I whispered. “Who could possibly have done that?”

  “Someone, son, who wanted you in a position where you might well get killed, if you see my point?”

  “Who would have wanted to do that to me?”

  “Who would have gained?” he asked.

  “Philly I suppose. He wanted Jane. But he didn’t have that kind of clout.”

  “Maybe his father did.”

  “But the doctor didn’t particularly like Jane, or so I was told.”

  “That seemed to be the impression around the ‘Old Houses.’ Terrible family. Not suitable for a high class kid like young Phil.”

  “I can’t…I can’t quite believe it.”

  “I wasn’t t
rying to use my influence to keep you out of the fighting. Mind you, I might have if it had come to it. But it seemed that you were all right. Shows that you shouldn’t mess with God. If you weren’t there at the Reservoir your whole platoon would have been wiped out.”

  “Half of them were killed later anyway,” I said, my tongue tight and my lips thick.

  “Which is better than ail of them being killed. And that’s what would have happened. Or so they said.”

  “Maybe.”

  My latest cinnamon roll lay untouched on the dish in front of me. I felt like I was in a time warp, standing outside of myself and watching my fife stumble on.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Oh, it’s true enough all right,” he said, casually sipping from a glass of ice water. “Someone wanted you dead. Fifth Marines in those days was a good place to get yourself dead.”

  “But they don’t seem to want me dead any more.”

  “Maybe not. But that’s why I told that kid priest of mine to warn you that you should be careful. Don’t stir up sleeping dogs.”

  “Phil isn’t capable of doing anything to me now.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t Phil.”

  “His father’s dead. Who else is there?”

  “Just don’t go jumping to conclusions.”

  “Two and a half years in a POW camp, two fingers lost, nightmares for the rest of my life, Jane…”

  “I know, son. I know. But getting even won’t change that.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “Take my word for it.”

  I shut my eyes to blot out the horror of what they—whoever they were—had done to me. I felt like I had been raped, exploited by the rich and powerful for reasons of their own. I wanted to get even with them.

  “I suppose you’re right, Tom. I don’t want to fight God. Maybe it will all work out. I’ve got to learn more about how it all happened.”

  “I can understand that, son. Only don’t dig any deeper than you have to. If I were in your position,” he sighed, “I’d concentrate on Jane. You’ll never regret that.”

  “I quite agree.”

  I thanked him for breakfast, asked him to remember me to Mary Anne, promised him that I’d see him at the Lake before the summer was over, and said good-bye. He took a cab back up East Lake Shore Drive and I walked towards the South Shore Station.