Summer at the Lake

by Andrew M. Greeley

  We had met in the lilac-scented dark, by accident we would have said, at a place of love and death and the death of love. Perhaps of murder and the murder of love. But lilacs, I had always thought, were flowers of hope and promise.

  “It seems so long ago,” her sigh hung like a wisp of fog on the humid night air. “Thirty years.”

  Thirty years ago sighing was not part of her character.

  “Or only yesterday,” I replied.

  Then, stuffy professor that I was, I added ponderously, “The past is always incarnated in the present.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “I used to like it, Jane, when you said I was talking intellectual nonsense.”

  She sighed again, a hint of weary wisdom, “I’ve changed my mind about intellectuals, Leo. Sometimes,” and her magic laughter returned, “only sometimes, mind you, they know what they’re talking about.”

  I felt the first stirrings of rage in my gut. I fought to keep it down.

  My friends had told me that she was the “same old Jane,” yet I was not ready for her to enchant me just as she had when I was twenty.

  “How much more money do you make now because you are a member of the National Academy of Sciences?” she had touched me lightly on the arm. “What’s it worth in hard cash?”

  She was grinning wickedly, mocking me, mocking herself, mocking the values of her family, and at the same time congratulating me.

  It was election to the Academy that had ended my marriage. My wife and our therapist had bitterly attacked me for not rejecting the honor because of what it did to Emilie. I knew then that no matter how much I wanted to save the marriage it was finished. So too were the therapy sessions. I had called my friend Packy, as I always did when I was in trouble.

  “They’re the crazy ones, Leo,” he had told me. “Get out while you can.”

  In fact Emilie had moved out when I refused to attend the therapy sessions any longer. “Your precious National Academy of Sciences,” she had snarled, “is more important than the wife you’ve exploited all through your marriage.”

  That was that.

  “Maybe you could get a ride on the Chicago subway with it, so long as you had the money for the exact fare,” I replied to Jane, trying to organize my response to the surprise of meeting her again at just this place and control the frenzy that suddenly had begun to flame within me.

  There was no reason for me to be angry at her, I told myself. Yet anger was surging up from my gut and threatening to pour out of my mouth.

  Had she been waiting for me?

  No, that was impossible. She had caught up with me. Besides, she had no way of knowing that I was at the Lake this weekend.

  She had hunched her shoulders and giggled as she always had, “I’m sure there’s big money in being a university vice president.”

  “Provost.”

  “Whatever!” she cackled with glee. “Really big money!”

  “Junior partner in a law firm makes more.”

  She clapped her hands, “Same old Lee. Nothing has changed. Déjà vu all over again.”

  “I’m staying with Jerry and Maggie Keenan for the Memorial Day weekend,” I stammered.

  I had learned how to control my explosions of rage, to wall them up inside myself, to give no hint of them though they seemed to tear at me and twist me apart.

  “You have grown up OK, Lee,” she rested her chin in her hand as if considering me. “Not bad for a fusty old political scientist.”

  It was a humid, windless night for so early in the season. The Lake was listlessly tapping the shore and the smell of flowering trees permeated the air. My anger ebbed, leaving me emotionally exhausted. I had also learned to hide the letdown after my rage.

  “And you’re prettier than you were when you were twenty, Jane.”

  It was a typically creative compliment from me, a cliché that I had regretted as soon as I had spoken it.

  She slapped my arm lightly. “None of your blarney, Professor Kelly…it’s the dim light that deceives you.”

  “It’s not that dim and I don’t think so.”

  Then we both became silent, the memories of the dead past throbbing around us.

  I almost reached out for her breast just as I had done in 1948. We were both of us flirting with adultery. More or less.

  “The same spot,” I murmured.

  Then she sighed, and somehow in her seriousness both my anger and the possibility of passion renewed evaporated; all that remained was the scent of lilacs and the jasmine and the crab apple trees.

  1948

  Leo

  The nightmare started after I had turned around at the wrought-iron gate of the Devlin house and started to walk back down the road. I had leaned against the gate for some time, trying to figure out why Jane had been so hostile to my suggestion that we should marry.

  I gave up the puzzle and started to plod down the road to the Keenans’ house. Jane and I could talk it out on the morrow. Then I heard a fearsome roar behind me; a car was careening at full tilt down the road, seventy miles an hour at least. I dove into the ditch and escaped it by a second or two. As it thundered by I realized that it was the Lasalle.

  Damn Phil, I thought, why did he and Jim and Eileen borrow the car without asking me. Thank God I had the brakes fixed.

  A half block down the road the car spun off to one side into the ditch and then lurched back onto the road, spewing out a stream of gravel in its wake.

  The brakes are gone!

  I had checked them, had I not?

  Yes, but not on the hill!

  The car plunged ahead, twisting and skidding like a tornado racing across a prairie. Then it swerved into the opposite ditch, flew into the air in an almost lazy slow-motion gyration and turned over on its back.

  Astonishingly it turned upright again, lunged forward, and crashed with a boom into a huge oak tree. The front door on the driver’s side swun open and someone hurled out. I was running down the road as fast as my feet would move; but I seemed to be caught in a swamp of molasses.

  For a moment there was no sound, only a total and hollow silence. Then with a dull blast, the car blew up and a dirty orange and black flame consumed it.

  I kept on running. Phil was stretched out on the highway unconscious only a few feet from the fire. I grabbed his shoulders and pulled him across the highway.

  Then I was aware of the terrible screams in the car—Jim and Eileen. I rushed into the smoke, grabbed the rear handle of the car door with both hands and pulled it open. My hands were pierced with pain and I jumped back.

  A second explosion tossed me across the road. The screaming in the car stopped. I was alone with Phil’s motionless body, watching the fire and listening to the leaves of the oak tree crackle as the fire consumed them and smelling gasoline and a terrible sweet odor that was probably burning human flesh.

  Almost certainly Jim and Eileen. The maid had said they came with Phil to take the car.

  Someone else was running down the road, Jane in her pajamas. Pink silk pajamas.

  “Leo!”

  “I’m here, Jane, in the ditch. Stay away from it!”

  She jumped into the ditch next to me. “Are you all right?”

  “A few burns. I tried to get the others out.”

  She stared at the dark, ugly fire.

  “Leo,” she grabbed me, “is it the Lasalle?”

  “Yeah!” I found that I was choking for breath and that my eyes were stinging from the smoke. I hurt from head to foot.

  “Who’s that!”

  “Phil. I pulled him away from the flames.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “He’s still breathing, drunk I think.”

  “You saved his life!”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Who was screaming?” She clutched my arm.

  “I think it was Jim and Eileen.”

  “No!”

  “I’m afraid they’re dead, Jane,” I said dully, “burned alive. I tried t
o get them out, but I couldn’t get there in time.”

  “How horrible,” she clung to me and sobbed. “It can’t be happening.”

  “Go back to your house and call the fire department and the police and the ambulance. Right away.”

  “Yes.”

  And, brave woman that she was, she rushed back to her house.

  Phil was breathing all right, indeed he was struggling back into consciousness, more drunk than hurt.

  “Take it easy, Phil,” I said. “You’re all right.”

  “Am I going to die?”

  “No, you’re not going to die.”

  “Who was in the car with you?”

  “In the car…? Uh, Jane and…”

  “No, Jane was not in the car.”

  He frowned. “You’re right,” he mumbled.

  “Were Jim and Eileen Murray with you?”

  He shook his head, unable to concentrate. “Yeah, I guess they were. We were coming back from Warburg, we had some wonderful suds. Really great Wisconsin beer…”

  Then he passed out again.

  Drunk again. And he didn’t even ask whether the Murrays were still alive.

  Time seemed to stop completely. It might have been minutes or maybe a quarter hour or maybe eternity before the first police car, lights spinning madly rushed down the road. Then, perhaps quickly, perhaps not, a fire truck and an ambulance appeared, then another police car.

  The cops and fireman shouted confused orders at one another. There was no fire main this far out from town. But someone had the sense to turn on the hose in the fire truck and pour the water from its auxiliary tank on the blaze. It died quickly.

  “Pardon me, sir,” I said respectfully to the two men from the ambulance; “there’s an injured man over by the ditch.”

  “How did he get there?” the man yelled at me. “Don’t you know that you shouldn’t move an injured man, you damn fool!”

  “Not even away from a fire?”

  “You the driver of this car, kid?” a cop grabbed me. “You know what you’ve done?”

  “No, sir,” I said wearily, “I’m not the driver. I saw the car go off the road and rushed up to help. Phil was on the road and I pulled him out of the way.”

  “If you weren’t in the car,” he snarled, “how come you’re burned?”

  “Am I burned?”

  “You sure are.”

  “I tried to get the others out.”

  “Others? There were others in there? How do you know?”

  “I heard them screaming. I pried open the back door,” I held up my hands, “but I guess it was too late?”

  “Why the back door?”

  I knew that the cops were under pressure, but I couldn’t figure out why I was being talked to like a criminal. I had probably saved a life.

  “It’s where I was in the smoke. One of them should have been in the back.”

  “You saw them?”

  “No, sir. There was too much fire to see anything.”

  “How did you know there was someone in the back seat?”

  “I think they were two friends of mine, Jim and Eileen Murray.”

  “The Murray kids! From the Old Houses! Wow!”

  These were county cops, not town cops. They hated all the people in the Old Houses. Hated them and feared them, rural poor hating and fearing urban rich. The kids from the Old Houses were spoiled rich kids and Irish too. They thought they could do whatever they wanted and their parents would bail them out of trouble. Nor was this accusation altogether false. Our crowd was often in trouble with them for drinking and making noise in their jurisdiction outside the village limits. Jane and Packy and I were never caught, but Jim Murray and Phil Clare were not so elusive. Their fathers routinely put in the fix.

  “Someday,” a county cop called Omer whom we had tormented for years had warned us, “we’re going to get one of you rich brats and we’re going to get you real good.”

  When I tried to figure out much later why they abused me the next couple of days, I concluded that I was the perfect target—a kid from the Old Houses but a hanger-on, an outsider without clout. They thought they could vent their rage on me with impunity. Not once did they bother to pause to consider that they had misunderstood what had happened.

  In retrospect perhaps I can’t blame them.

  And there was always the possibility that the fix was in. Not to blame me for the accident. But to give the fixers time for a cover-up.

  I hated them and I hated the people in the Old Houses for believing them at first. I hated myself for losing my temper and playing the fool.

  “Who’s the guy they’re putting in the ambulance?”

  I noticed for the first time that the cop was Omer.

  “Phil Clare.”

  Would the dumb questions never stop!

  “Doctor Clare’s son! Holy shit!…Well I knew something terrible would happen to those spoiled rich brats.”

  I was too tired and too sick to poke him in the mouth like I wanted to.

  “What’s your name kid?”

  “Leo Kelly.”

  “You a renter or something?”

  “A visitor at the Keenans’ house.”

  “A hanger-on,” he sneered.

  “What’s your occupation?”

  “None…no, officer, I’m sorry. I’m a little confused. I am an officer candidate in the United States Marine Corps.”

  “No shit!”

  “No shit.”

  “You sure you’re not the driver?”

  “How could I be the driver?”

  “You got burns. He doesn’t.” He glanced over at Phil who was babbling in the ambulance.

  “He was thrown clear. I tried to save the others after pulling him away from the fire.”

  “I think you’re the driver and you’re lying to protect your ass. I don’t believe a young punk like you could be a Marine, not a kid who sucks ass around Tom Keenan’s.”

  Tom Keenan, Packy’s father, was not the richest man in the Old Houses, but he was the most powerful—and the most dangerous to the county cops and hence the one they feared and hated the most.

  “He couldn’t have been the driver, officer;” Jane, dressed now in white slacks and a navy blue sweater, spoke coolly, “he’s been with me all afternoon and evening.”

  “Who are you?” he asked with a leer, hinting at what we might have been doing.

  “I’m Jane Marie Devlin. That house at the foot of the hill belongs to my family. I heard the crash and the explosion and came rushing out. Lee sent me back to call you and the fire department.”

  “Yeah? Well, we’ll talk to you later.”

  “You’d think we’d done something wrong,” I said to her.

  “They’re as confused as we are, poor men.”

  The surrealistic nightmare continued, as clear in my mind as I write these words as it was at the time. It took me a couple of years to sort out what happened. Then I began to suspect that by the next morning the fix was in and the cover-up was proceeding. I was a pawn not so much to their hatred as to their need to stall for a day to get the cover-up in place. Now I am convinced that was what was happening. But what was being covered up?

  More police cars and fire trucks appeared and a crowd gathered. The local priest bustled up. “I’ve warned you kids about the way you drive,” he said to me.

  “I wasn’t driving the car. I wasn’t in the car. There’s two dead kids over there, you pious faker, go give them the last rites.”

  “Leo!” Jane protested.

  He fussed and bothered, and hand on his nostrils, pushed into the smoldering rubble and began to rush through the Latin prayers. Jane and I followed him and answered the “Kyrie” and “Amen” at the proper place. He glanced back at us, annoyed to find cooperators. We even said the “Pater Noster” in Latin with him, slowing him down I fear.

  “Where are they?” he demanded. “I don’t see any bodies.”

  A fireman gestured at two lifeless heaps, one in the
front seat, one in the back seat, incinerated corpses which had once been my two friends.

  “Dear God, they smell,” said the priest.

  I grabbed Jane lest she hit the man.

  “Anoint them,” she ordered.

  He quickly made signs of the cross in oil on the pathetic remnants of two skulls and scurried to his feet, eager to find a place where he could barf with dignity.

  “The papal blessing,” Jane ordered him.

  “What!”

  “I said give them the papal blessing with the plenary indulgence that remits all the temporal punishment due to sin.”

  He mumbled the words and staggered away from the wreck. He vomited across the road.

  At least a half dozen people came up to me and bawled me out for my reckless driving.

  I had had it with being blamed. I merely turned my back on them.

  Every time Jane put the record straight. “He was not the driver. He wasn’t even in the car. He pulled the driver out and saved his life.”

  No one seemed persuaded.

  Looking back at it as an adult trained in the study of human nature I can see there were two ordinary human prejudices at work that night—the older against the very young and the less affluent against the rich. Envy, resentment, call it what you will. It was the first time I ever encountered such generalized hatred. It shocked me into a silence that would last till the next day when I would explode against it.

  “You should see a doctor about those hands,” Jane insisted and dragged me over to an ambulance.

  I followed numbly, too battered and too overwhelmed by death and hatred to think.

  “This man was hurt trying to save those in the car,” she told the medic who was in charge. “He should see a doctor.”

  “You the driver of the car?” he asked contemptuously.

  I was about to hit the guy.

  “Look, asshole, he’s the hero who came down the road after the accident, saved one person’s life, and tried to save the other two. Now get him to a doctor.”

  “Yeah?” the attendant looked at her skeptically and then decided that he didn’t want to combat the fire in her eyes. “OK, we’ll take him in with the bodies.”