Summer at the Lake Page 7

  “I think so.”

  “Something went wrong. A lot of money changed hands. Then everyone shut up.”

  “They did indeed.”

  “You know what happened to a certain party’s family? They went up in smoke.”

  He meant the Nicolas, Angie’s family.

  “So I heard.”

  “And the party is still alive and as dangerous as ever.”

  “And still connected?”

  He nodded. “Still connected. And still crazy and still dangerous. Know what I mean?”

  He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know, but he made it sound ominous.

  “Sometimes you have to know the truth,” I said. “No matter how dangerous it is to find out.”

  “True enough…here comes Janey. Still a lovely woman isn’t she? Be careful, Leo.”

  “I will,” I said. “Or at least I’ll try to be careful.”

  Coming across the lobby, Jane was so beautiful that she could drive a man to almost any risk. The magic castle was gone but the fairy princess remained.

  Leo

  “So what did you mean erotically attractive?” she demanded with a crinkly smile after we had ordered our drinks (two Jameson’s, straight up—the way it ought to be consumed, despite the Keenans). “I want further details.”

  She had swept into the dining room of the Club like an empress on a royal visitation. “Non-smoking as always, Charles. Professor Kelly does not approve of women smoking.”

  “Men either.”

  “You have grown more tolerant,” she had hunched her shoulders in the familiar expression that accompanied a giggle. “I quit when I was carrying my first baby.”

  “I promised never to smoke again if I came home alive from Korea.”

  For a moment we were both silent, realizing that we had stumbled on dangerous rocks.

  “Didn’t give up the creature?” she asked lightly.

  “No way.”

  She was wearing a white dress, brief at both top and bottom, with a gauze-like pale blue scarf around her shoulders, a cover that merely enhanced the picture.

  “A little too cool for this,” she had waved her hand dismissively as she pecked me on the cheek, “but I figured it might be the only dinner date I’d have all summer.”

  “I doubt that,” I had said.

  “You still don’t play golf?” She had waved at the eighteenth green outside the picture windows of the lobby of the Club, a mixture of Decadent Georgian and Scandinavian Pseudo-Modern.

  “Only tennis and squash, the latter a professorial sport. I guess I could play golf with this hand,” I had lifted my left hand, the last two fingers of which had been left in Korea. “But it didn’t seem worth the effort.”

  “I’m sorry, Lee,” she had been terribly flustered. “I guess I forgot.”

  “No problem, Jane. Most people don’t notice. I guess I cover up pretty well. I figure that it’s a nice reminder for me of how lucky I was.”

  “Lucky?”

  “I didn’t leave any more of me in Korea.”

  She had been silent while I had ordered our drinks and then, confidence restored, she demanded an explanation for my ill-advised comment on the beach a couple of weeks ago.

  “I’m sorry for that comment,” I said, truly regretting it at that moment. “It sort of slipped out.”

  “Nothing has ever just sort of slipped out of your mouth, Leo Thomas Kelly. We both know that…did you mean that I looked like I’d be a good fuck?”

  I winced as I always did at such candid obscenity. “I don’t doubt that for a moment, Jane. But…”

  “But professors don’t put things quite that way…oh, thank you very much, Joseph. That’s right. No ice. Professors don’t drink ice in their Irish whiskey.”

  “What I meant,” I fell back on language, the last refuge of the scoundrel if he happens to be a professor, “was that you are pure delight to the aging male eye because you suggest that pleasure and joy of every sort need never end.”

  “That sounds almost religious,” she peered at me suspiciously, “like I’m grace or something.”

  “Surely that,” I toasted her. “Surely that. Besides you have wonderful breasts.”

  “Genetic luck,” she held her tumbler cautiously, not ready to return the toast but pleasantly flushed just the same.

  “The total person is not luck.”

  “OK,” she laughed and raised her glass, “to grace.”

  “Capital G or small g?”

  “Both.” She swallowed a large draft of Jameson’s and choked on it. “See what you do to me with your terrible dirty talk!”

  “I’m afraid that I’ve never been very good at saying the right things.”

  “Huh?” She put down her tumbler. “You gotta be kidding. You were always clever with words, an accomplished flatterer even in fifth grade.”

  “I was a shy quiet boy whom no one ever noticed.”

  “You really believe that, don’t you?” She was examining my face carefully.

  “I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.”

  “I won’t argue,” she waved away my self-image as patent foolishness, “except to say that you are wrong. Everyone thought you’d be a good priest because you were such a good talker. And how could we not notice all that red hair. I’d say that you had a terminal case of Blarney then and now. Erotically appealing, indeed!”

  I felt my face grow warm. She had selectively misperceived the past. I had become articulate only in the classroom and only after my marriage to Emilie. Yet her admiration for me was both pleasing and acutely embarrassing.

  I was in the swamp in which I often find myself with women, both attracted by the mysterious cave they offer (metaphorically as well as literally) and also frightened of it. I talk a good line but they scare the hell out of me.

  It does not follow that I am inadequate at lovemaking. Whatever went wrong in our marriage was not in that area, not at first. Rather the problem is that I don’t know how to combine firmness and tenderness in the appropriate amounts, a rare art at which, in my observation, most men are not very good and in the exercise of which most women are very demanding.

  So, naturally enough, I suppose, Jane and I talked not of love nor of sex but of our marriages. While I was legally divorced and she was not, not yet at any rate, she was more definite that her marriage was finished.

  “Phil’s not a bad man,” she said, with a shake of her brown curly hair, “but he’s an incurable chaser. He simply can’t stop it even when he tries. If I know Phil, he’s cheating on her already. The next step is to want to come back to me. But it’s too late for that.”

  Jane’s tone, as she recounted the story of a quarter century and more of marriage to Phil Clare, was composed, matter-of-fact, as if she were narrating someone else’s problem. She displayed no anger, only a mild impatience with her husband’s infidelities. I began to suspect that Maggie Keenan’s diagnosis of the high costs of Jane’s living up to her own image might be valid. I could not, however, picture this tall, graceful, self-possessed woman ending her own life. Quite the contrary, her good humor now seemed to be alloyed by tragedy transcended. She was not only an attractive woman, I decided, but an interesting one.

  However, her glow faded a little as she talked about her two lost children. She was no longer the vivacious woman who had so charmed my daughter. Even the most radiant, as I had preached at Laura, suffer tragedy.

  (Laura: “You should have seen her in the shower. She’s simply gorgeous, Daddy. And sweet too. You shouldn’t let her get away.”

  Me: “It sounds like you’re objectifying her.”

  Laura: “No way! And you know what I mean!”)

  Young Phil had been killed by a Vietcong mine the second day he was in Vietnam. Brigid had been in and out of communes and drug treatment centers. Jane had not heard from her for two years and was not even sure that she was still alive.

  “Charley and Lin are dull Yuppies, I know,” she smiled af
fectionately about them, “and I suppose they’ll eventually get around to providing me with a grandchild or two. And Lucy is a moody teen. But, dear God, Leo, they’re relatively normal. Phil wanted to be a hero like he thought his father was in the Big War and Bridge wanted to save humanity.”

  “And neither succeeded?”

  For a moment a far-away look—pain, grief, unfinished mourning—lingered in her deep brown eyes.

  “I still love them both. I’ll always miss them.” The sadness vanished from her eyes. “But life goes on and I treasure my normal children.”

  Maggie, I told myself, is wrong. This lovely woman has managed to put it all together—a neat balance of vitality and a sense of the tragic.

  We returned to the subject of our marriages.

  She was, Jane insisted, a traditional Catholic on the subject of marriage. If you had made a mistake, you learn to live with it, make the best of it, stay together for the sake of your kids and your immortal soul, hope that your spouse will finally grow up. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe if she had threatened to walk out on Phil after the first time he would have shaped up. Maybe she had not been altogether fair to him.

  He was, she repeated, not a bad man. He had just never grown up. She had to deal with all the tragedies, Philip’s death in Vietnam, Brigid’s rebellion and disappearance into a commune, the death of his parents, and the joys too, like Sister Norine’s wonderful work in Belize. She had to go to the wakes and funerals because he was afraid of breaking down at them or so he said. He was afraid of aging. He wanted to be perpetually young; he dyed his hair, wore cosmetics, went on radical diets and then put the weight back on again. He did not work. He never really had worked, probably didn’t know how. Even when he had his own firm, he rarely did anything, but left the work to his partners who probably robbed him blind. Her brothers Mickie and Dickie paid him a handsome salary from the Devlin firm after his own business had gone under and would do so forever. A sad and unhappy man, but not a bad man, not deliberately bad. Just a hurt little boy.

  “Peter Pan syndrome,” I murmured.

  “And I was his always patient and sympathetic Wendy…I don’t think I was all that bad in bed…whenever he slept with me, which wasn’t often. I think he was probably more interested in conquests than sex as such.”

  This time he had gone one step too far. He had actually filed for divorce. All right, she had said, if he wanted to be free of her because his “Sheri” wanted to be wife as well as mistress, fine, she would accept her own freedom. Now as the divorce was almost final, his lawyers were hinting at reconciliation. He and Sheri had probably discovered that he did not have all that much money. He had run through his vast inheritance. He couldn’t touch her own investments as well as her very prosperous travel agency, not even the house in Lake Forest or the one here at the Lake. There were rumors of a government investigation of his involvement in some kind of inside information scandal in his defunct brokerage firm. If there were anything like that, he certainly hadn’t made any money from it. His salary from her brothers was not nearly enough to sustain his life-style. So he wanted her to support him—and probably Sheri too. No way.

  Sure?

  She hesitated. Not absolutely. Lucy was on her father’s side for a while. Jane was not sure where she is now. Mickie and Dickie wanted a reconciliation for the good of the family, by which they meant the family firm. Monsignor O’Malley, the pastor emeritus of their parish, the priest who had officiated at their wedding, had pleaded with tears in his eyes for “Christ-like” forgiveness. But she had enjoyed a few months of emotional freedom after twenty-seven years; she did not want to return to the old burdens.

  “Judgment, please?” She smiled appealingly at me, vulnerable to my response.

  “Huh?”

  “What do you think of my story?”

  “Why should it matter what I think?”

  “It does. Please.”

  “I don’t think it was ever a real marriage. You were married. He wasn’t.”

  “That’s what my priest says. He says I have a perfect case for an annulment. I don’t know that I should bother. I won’t marry again. I’ve tried it once and that’s enough.”

  “You will be pursued avidly.”

  “That won’t be new,” she lifted a bare shoulder from which the blue gauze had slipped. “I’m pretty good at saying no.”

  “Who’s your priest?”

  Laughter and the old smile bounced back. “You shouldn’t have to ask.”

  “Pack?”

  “Who else?” She blushed.

  “He agrees that you won’t marry again?”

  “I told you I was an old-fashioned Catholic…now am I going to hear your story?”

  I could hardly wait to tell her. Yet I was frightened at the prospect of revealing my failures. She had persevered with a spoiled little boy. I had lost a brilliant and gorgeous adult woman and I still wasn’t sure how.

  I did not begin with our first romp in my office. I was contemptuous of my colleagues who seduced attractive graduate students and I did not want to seem to be guilty of the same offense myself. In retrospect maybe I was not the seducer. She did take off her own blouse after all.

  On the other hand I had felt proud, immensely proud of my conquest. Emilie was the most beautiful graduate student any of us at Stanford had ever seen. I’m sure others had tried before me to capture her in the slave market that graduate schools have become. I won the prize, beautiful and brilliant, the brightest and most promising in her cohort—even if she was having trouble finishing her dissertation, a long, complicated theoretical comparison of Pareto and Gamasci.

  Good Catholic that I was, I had made up my mind from the beginning that I would marry her. Emilie LeBeau was the descendent of French Canadian dirt farmers who had migrated to New England to work in the mills. Less devout than they or maybe not so scrupulous, she had no objection to marriage though she seemed less compulsive about it than I was—though she adamantly refused a Church marriage. “I’m finished with all that religion shit.”

  Marriage did not help her to make progress on her dissertation. Since I was an empiricist busy developing the mathematical model for explaining election results (what else would you expect from an Irish Catholic with Chicago roots?), I was not much help to her. Indeed like most theorists she had little respect for my nose-counting, number-crunching work.

  After I had put myself back together again in the middle fifties, my academic career was rapid, if not quite brilliant. I did my doctorate at the University, moved on to Stanford, and obtained tenure at the end of my first three-year term. The profession marked me for great things. It never occurred to me that my wife, with more native intelligence than I possessed, would consider me a competitor or envy my success.

  I know better now, but the competitive spouse was a rarity in the early sixties. Even if I had understood the problem I don’t know what I could have done, but I have the uncomfortable guilt that there must have been something I should have done, long before it was too late.

  My surges of anger continued through those years, but I kept them between myself and whoever my therapist was at the time. I never turned it on Emilie. Maybe I failed her because I spent so much emotional energy containing my anger.

  I did not tell Jane about my anger.

  She finally ended, not finished, the dissertation, and gave it to me, triumphant in what she thought was a brilliant Marxist analysis (Marxism was just becoming popular again, especially in the Bay Area) and impatient with my less than enthusiastic response. It was, though I did not tell her, so much garbage. But we managed to move it through the department. I took an appointment at Santa Barbara, full professor for which I would have had to wait a couple of more years at Stanford, because they were willing to hire her as an assistant professor.

  She had six years to produce a book and a couple of articles, a relatively easy task it had seemed to me. Instead she produced Laura in 1962, as adorable a little girl child as one could
have imagined.

  Laura, however, became the scapegoat for her mother’s academic failures. Because of Laura Santa Barbara gave her another year to publish something, but her seven years ran out. At the end of the sixties she had published one article in an unimportant European journal, submitted several more to other journals (none really prominent), and written most of a book that had yet to find an academic press that was interested in seeing the rest of it.

  In the meantime I was flying back and forth to Washington to consult with the Hubert Humphrey campaign. (He did not follow my advice, backed up by data, to disown the war. If he had, Richard Nixon would never have been president and we would have a much different country than we do today.) I was aware of her resentment but didn’t take it seriously. I also realized that I was playing the role of mother as well as father to Laura but didn’t know how to respond to that problem either.

  I learned later of the rumors that she was having affairs with my faculty colleagues. To this day I don’t know whether the rumors were true. They probably were.

  Santa Barbara couldn’t possibly give her tenure under the circumstances, whatever promises her lovers, should there have been such, might have made. They offered her a five year appointment as a lecturer, which she turned down with hysterical tears.

  So we went to Brandeis where she did get tenure as part of the package deal for me. I accepted the job only for her sake, but she didn’t seem grateful. Looking back on it, I should not have expected gratitude. I should have been sensitive to the problem of a woman who knows her university wants her only as a means to win her husband. I don’t know that I should have also been aware that my success made me (and Laura) the problem. Emilie had begun to feel that her only identity was as Leo Kelly’s wife. My move to Harvard four years ago didn’t help, although our home in Chestnut Hill was closer to Waltham than to Cambridge. Fool that I was, I thought it might be better if we were at different schools.

  I wrote position papers for the Carter campaign and tried to persuade the rednecks around him to reach out to the Catholic “ethnics.” My only success was in a spate of late campaign ads in which Catholic Poles endorsed him. No wonder they defeated the man who had pardoned Richard Nixon by a little more than two percentage points. I was offered a State Department post but turned it down because I felt I had to stay with Emilie and Laura. I did make a couple of trips for the Carter crowd to international monetary conferences (a sideline I had picked up) but accomplished nothing.