Summer at the Lake Read online

  My parents laughed somewhat uncertainly. They were never quite sure who or what I was at that age. Neither was I. I figured they’d all be a welcome addition to the summers at the Lake, particularly Jane. I’d heard that her brothers were jerks, but I wasn’t afraid of any male my age or a few years older. I was, I told myself proudly, a big tough kid myself with a powerful right punch. The punch was not bad, but I was never very tough.

  The brothers were rarely in evidence at the Lake, hidden perhaps as ugly family secrets.

  “He doesn’t seem like a thug,” my mother said as we walked home.

  “If he is, Mary Anne,” Dad replied, “—and all my information is that if he is—that little woman drives him to it.”

  “She is certainly lovely and very, well, vivacious.”

  “A charitable name for it…They’ll never fit in here,” my father said firmly. “Too bad. We could use a few honest crooks instead of those who pretend they’re not crooked. But she tries too hard. They just won’t make it.”

  “I suppose not,” my mother sighed. “If she talked less about how much things cost, she wouldn’t seem so vulgar, especially since everything is in such good taste—even if it is someone else’s taste.”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference. Some kinds of vulgarity are accepted up here and some are not. I’m not sure they’re any worse than Phil and Iris Clare, but they are vulgar in an acceptable way and the Devlins in an unacceptable way.”

  “What do you think of Jane, Patrick?” my mother turned to me.

  “Who?”

  “The daughter.”

  “I didn’t notice her.”

  They both laughed.

  Jane was certainly cute in those days. But there were a lot of pretty girls around and we were too young to distinguish between someone who was pretty and someone who was beautiful and likely to remain so. What fascinated me was her voice, rich like cello music and thick like dark chocolate, a voice that promised fun and affection and happiness. Kind of like Katherine Hepburn’s voice, but not so affected—and definitely a Chicago voice, which Hepburn’s was not.

  In a room full of young people you could distinguish her voice and the matching laugh. Whenever I hear it on the phone, my throat still tightens and my heart beats a little faster.

  We invited them back to our house. Jane didn’t come. I listened from the porch. I can’t remember exactly what was said but it was a very uncomfortable evening. Mrs. Devlin wanted us to sponsor them for the Club. Dad agreed; but they were voted down and then ignored us ever after.

  Except Jane who made terrible faces at me in Church on Sunday and grinned happily. Shyly at first, we became friends.

  The Devlins moved to our parish sometime after I went to Quigley Seminary in 1942. They had not been accepted in their old parish and they weren’t accepted in the stable, affluent River Forest suburb of that era either. I guess they weren’t accepted at any of the places they tried to get in. Or in the parish women’s society at which Mrs. Devlin worked so hard.

  “Poor thing,” my mother would sigh about her.

  Jane and I became tennis partners and good friends. She was the first girl I kissed and, she insisted vehemently, perhaps too vehemently, I was the first boy she kissed.

  I don’t know when Ita Devlin’s ambition for respectability turned to rage. I don’t know when she determined to win respectability by piling up more wealth and choosing indisputably respectable spouses for her children. I don’t know when her heavy drinking turned into alcoholism. I don’t know when Jane’s adoration for her mother turned to hatred—mixed with fear. But it all started I think that summer of 1941, a few months before the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.

  Thirty-seven years ago. If I’m to believe Maggie, Jane was virtually locked into tragedy even then.

  “It might have been different, Pack,” she says. “She could have escaped but she didn’t have much of a chance.”

  “Does she this time?” I ask her.

  “God knows,” she replies.

  Through the years my longings for Jane have been mostly romantic. Now they have become hard sexual hungers, mixtures of exquisite erotic fantasies and almost irresistible impulses to tenderness. I want to hold her in my arms and exorcise all the demons that make her such a contentious woman.

  I might make a fool out of myself. She might laugh at me. Or be terribly shocked by me. She likes me but I’ve always been a priest for her, even before I was a priest.

  Just the same, I love her and want her. Desperately. Yet I owe her and Leo their second chance.

  All my efforts to help would be chasing the wind. I guess I have to leave it in Your hands. Yours and Leo’s.

  If You don’t mind my saying so, he’s an unpredictable ally.

  So are You as far as that goes.

  So I’ll give You and Leo one more chance. If it doesn’t work out, it will be my turn. Just like it was in 1952.

  Leo

  The Korean came at me again with the club, a beatific smile on this round, bland face. You will sign now. You will admit war crimes. You will confess your guilt. Then we will take care of your wounds. I refuse. He hits me repeatedly. Then he throws me out in the snow. I grow numb from the cold. I am going to die. He comes back, his head cased in a giant parka and bent against the wind and the falling snow. You will sign now, he demands. I agree.

  Then I wake up, shivering from the cold. It is many minutes before I realize that I did not sign. I did not betray my country.

  For whatever that is worth today.

  Leo

  I came home from Korea in late August of 1953 with a stack of medals—including the Navy Cross for my bravery as a prisoner and the Medal of Honor for my rear guard action near the Chosin Reservoir and the X Corps retreat, the latter awarded posthumously because the Defense Department reported me killed in action in that last fire fight. For reasons I do not understand even today, I had ordered my men to fall back while I manned the last machine gun at the bridge as the Chinese swarmed down the road. My men survived. I killed a lot of Chinese. I still dream about them, though not very often any more. They always die silently, peacefully. It is the Koreans in my dreams who torment and try to kill me.

  I didn’t like the Marines and still don’t. I never bought their ideology even when I was a member. I resented the interruption in my carefully nurtured career plans the Korean war created. If you ask me about the Marines I’ll tell you how much I hated them. Yet I acted like a gung-ho Marine on that bitter cold December day in 1950. When President Eisenhower gave me the medals after I returned from Korea in 1953, an emaciated, quivering ex-POW, he said I was a real Marine in every respect.

  I replied, no sir I’m not. Ike thought it was humility and said, Yes you are, son, yes you are.

  Packy says the same character trait leads me to accept administrative and government service roles when all I want to do is my own research. Maybe he’s right. Well, there was more than a sense of duty that brought me back to the University last autumn.

  I was a time bomb of anger when I came home, angry at the Koreans for what they had done to me, angry at my family and Jane for believing me dead while I was alive and suffering. I knew even then that my rage was irrational. It was not their fault that the Defense Department had made a mistake about me. They had also written off General Hodge, the American commander in Korea, as dead and he was very much alive. I had no claim on Jane. She was within her rights to marry Phil Clare when she thought I was dead. Yet after years of therapy I still blamed her. Only after I married Emilie did I realize that my anger was less at Jane than at myself for losing her.

  I don’t talk about Korea much. I don’t think about it much either. I only dream about it. Maybe less now than I used to. I opposed Vietnam from the beginning, unable to believe that we’d make the same mistake twice in a generation. The dreams were especially bad during those years.

  In the first sweet and tender years of our marriage, Emilie tried to reason with me about my dreams, which
she could not understand. In later years she said she tired of being kept awake by my guilt over my “war crimes,” as she called them, against the people of Korea.

  Someone knocks at my door. Laura in her Notre Dame sleep T-shirt. Like me she is staying at the Keenan house for the Memorial Day/Pentecost weekend.

  “Are you all right, Daddy?”

  “Fine.”

  “I heard you scream. Korea dreams?”

  “I guess…when did you get in?”

  “An hour or so ago. Jamie Keenan picked me up at O’Hare. I phoned him from Geneva. See you in the morning.”

  I had persuaded Laura to try a year in Switzerland to get away from the fights between me and her mother. She liked it enough to stay for two years. I was now half hoping that she would want to come to Chicago and live with me. But I certainly did not want to interfere in her life.

  Sixteen years old, a high school junior and she flies in from Switzerland, summons a young man to pick her up, and directs him to drive her to the Lake from the airport. Maybe I’ve done something right in my life.

  Leo

  In the afternoon after lunch with Laura and the Keenan clan (Packy had returned to his parish for Sunday Mass or Sunday Eucharist as they now call it), dressed in sweatshirt and swim trunks, I abandoned the Indy 500 race on the radio and went walking on the beach in search of Jane. Or more precisely in search of Jane’s body, which I wanted to inspect more closely. Having admired her in tennis clothes I wanted now to see her in a swimsuit. I admitted to myself that I was engaging in the lustful activity of a sexually aroused male. I knew that my woman colleagues at the University would say that I was objectifying Jane. Just then, however, I did not much care what they would say.

  I was not, I told myself, your ordinary horny male predator. I had been faithful to my wife through our marriage and was still faithful to her, though we were now officially divorced in the eyes of the State and never married in the eyes of the Church, because I respected the marriage bond even when it was terminated—perhaps like Jane in this respect still in part of my soul an “old fashioned Catholic.” Moreover there was always available to me, should I choose, the slave market of graduate school women. Though I had never used them, I know all the magic words that make such seductions seem to both the victim and the exploiter not only politically acceptable, but indeed acts of high revolutionary virtue.

  However lustful I might be, it was not a new lover I was looking for, but an old one that I had lost.

  After Jane and I had beaten Jerry and Maggie that morning, Laura had appeared looking for a match. Jane, to whom I had introduced her had volunteered to be the victim. It was a match to remember—two tall, graceful, women with sizzling serves and wicked backhands competing for each point.

  “Poetry in motion,” Jerry had said.

  “Ballet,” I had added.

  “You understand the complicated psychological agenda in this match?” Maggie asked.

  “They’re negotiating about me.”

  Occasionally it is necessary to put Madame Shrink down.

  She sniffed in reply.

  Laura finally won 7–5. She and Jane walked off the court arm in arm.

  “She’s better than I was at her age,” Jane told me.

  “If Daddy hadn’t worn you out, you would have creamed me,” my daughter replied modestly.

  “So how did the negotiation end?” Maggie whispered in my ear.

  “I lost.”

  She sniffed again.

  When I began my stroll down the beach, a northeast wind had swept away the heat and the humidity of the previous night and the weather was now more appropriate for the Memorial Day weekend in middle western America, pleasantly warm but not hot, a promise of summer rather than its reality, a day for lolling on the narrow and artificial sand beach, which the village renewed every year between the Club and the Old Houses. But you did your lolling with a sweatshirt; or a jacket handy in case the wind picked up again. While only a few kids dared to dash into the chill waters of the Lake, now whipped into delicate white foam like lingerie lace by the wind, it seemed that everyone in the village, in varying degrees of undress, had crowded together on the beach, absorbing the sun’s assurance that summer was indeed at hand, if not quite present among us.

  My stroll was a pleasant, not to say triumphant, procession. People I had not seen for a quarter century and more shook my hand and welcomed me back. They congratulated me on my appointment, wondered if I were planning to buy a house in the village, some mentioned the National Academy, as if perhaps it were some kind of Masonic lodge. One or two even wondered what a provost actually does.

  “Keeps the natives on the reservation,” I would reply enigmatically if not inaccurately.

  A few asked if I had seen Jane yet, a presumptuous question given our past, but their memories of that evening thirty years ago were probably vague. I am, after all, a student of human behavior. I should understand that details of such events are promptly forgotten.

  I replied honestly enough to the question. She had beaten me at tennis that morning and therefore nothing had really changed. No one mentioned Phil. Ne nominetur inter nos.

  Only one man, an athletic fellow a few years older than I whose name I did not remember, dared to touch on the key question.

  “They never did figure out what happened the night the Murray kids died, did they Leo?”

  Probably a lawyer.

  “I never heard that they did,” I answered, “but I’ve been away a long time.”

  “Some folks said it might have been murder.”

  “I often wondered about that possibility myself. But it was a long time ago.”

  “No statute on murder.”

  “So my law faculty tells me.”

  He nodded sagely. “Well, anyway, good luck on the new job.”

  “Thanks. I’ll need it.”

  I did not interpret his remark to be an accusation against me. I was, after all, a war hero and a university vice president. We both knew, he had implied with the nod of his head, who might be to blame.

  I didn’t know. I didn’t have the slightest idea.

  In all fairness, however, if there had been a murder, I was as legitimate a suspect as anyone else. Indeed I had the receipt to prove that I had seen to fixing the brakes. But I could have loosened them again, could I not? It was my car, after all. Or rather the car I was driving that summer.

  The humans who had arrayed themselves on the beach or were strolling along it came in all the ages and sizes and shapes of humankind. I consoled myself for my own loneliness with the thought that one of the advantages of turning fifty was that you could enjoy a much greater variety of womanly attractiveness than when one was twenty, not that when I was twenty young women would have dared to wear the skimpy bikinis that seemed to be standard issue these days.

  Maggie, wearing a sweatsuit and massive sunglasses with white rims, glanced up at me from behind her copy of the New York Times Magazine. “Find her yet, Doctor Kelly?”

  “Played tennis with her this morning, Doctor Keenan.”

  “So I understand. You’ll find her under that large red beach umbrella maybe fifty yards in that direction.”

  “Where is your good husband?” I replied, ignoring her exercise in mind reading.

  She shrugged indifferently. “On the golf course with his good brother…I hear you’re not having supper with her at the Club tonight.”

  “In the middle ages they would have burned you as a witch.”

  “Arguably.”

  As predicted, Jane was sitting on a deck chair near the red beach umbrella, wearing a skin tight black swimsuit and reading one of the Barchester novels. She was, I decided, well worth objectifying.

  “How much money can you earn by reading Anthony Trollope?” I demanded.

  “Not much,” she closed the book and, finger in her place, rose languidly to her feet, “not unless you are a tenured professor in English literature and they don’t earn much do they, Mr.
Provost?”

  Maggie’s comments about Jane’s body were an understatement. I sunk deeper into objectification. Before the summer was over, my most exploitive persona whispered in the back of my head, you’re going to make love with that woman, you’re going to take off her clothes and play with her lovely breasts and arouse her hunger and then overwhelm her with your love.

  I replied with the silent question of what would happen after that, enough to shut the fantasy down temporarily. To Jane I said aloud, “A provost is committed ex officio to the doctrine that all academics earn too much money and meet too few students.”

  “A boss in other words…Provost Kelly, this is my son Charles and his wife Belinda and my daughter Lucy…the Provost, kids, used to hang around here when he was young. People remember him because they never forget redheads, even when they become provosts.”

  Maggie Keenan had described Charles and Belinda as Yuppie prigs. They were in fact very polite junior partners at an important loop law firm whose name they repeated several times in reverential tones in case I was not aware of its importance. They both wore white slacks, light blue shirts, and dark blue jackets in defiance of the more informal garb of the rest of us—and perhaps in judgment on Jane’s maillot. At least Chuck had not worn a tie. They treated me with enormous respect since they were both graduates of our law school and I was therefore a “very important” person in their world, though not as much as if I were the dean of the law school. Lucy, lying on her stomach in the sand, straps detached from her bikini ignored me completely.

  The Yuppies returned to the Sunday Times, he to the financial section, she to “The Week In Review.” Neither would, I was sure, waste their time on anything as frivolous as the Magazine. Lucy rose from the sand and, straps trailing behind her, flounced down the beach in disgust. At me I presumed. Her mother ignored this outburst.

  Lucy reminded me of her mother at the same age, though somehow she did not seem knitted together quite as well, more slack and less tautness in her fresh young body.