Summer at the Lake

by Andrew M. Greeley

Jane was about to protest. Then from out of the crowd roared a screaming demon from hell—Jane’s mother, reeking of gin, in curlers, hairnet, and a white satin robe, a tiny wreck of what once had been a beautiful and vivacious woman.

  “Jane Marie Devlin, what are you doing out here with all this trash! Don’t you care what people will say about us! Go to your room this minute!”

  She slapped Jane hard across the face, three or four times. “You are a shameless, stupid girl. You’ll disgrace our family with this trash. Who do you think you are?”

  She hit her a couple more times.

  She and Jane were now the center of attention, the smoking wreck forgotten by the crowd in their astonishment at this exhibition of craziness.

  Jane disgrace the family? People will never forget this scene.

  “You stupid bitch,” Mrs. Devlin bellowed. “I’ll teach you to disobey me!”

  She hit her again, a vicious blow that brought blood from Jane’s lips.

  There was no fight left in me. It was all a bad dream anyway. It would soon end. As I watched, Jane, tears flowing down her cheeks, became irresolute, hesitated, looked at me regretfully, and then turned and followed as her mother dragged her away by the ear.

  I was astonished at how old Mrs. Devlin was. She could not be older than her late forties, yet she seemed twenty years older, tiny, sparrowlike, wizened—a minute, fearsome alcoholic bird of prey.

  So that’s what greed does to you. It wasn’t a nightmare, it was a movie, a bad movie and she was the wicked witch of the west. Pretty soon the good witch of the east would arrive and save me.

  No, she couldn’t do that. She just had a baby.

  Finally they took me to the hospital with the charred and foul-smelling bodies of my two friends. I had found my rosary and, barely able to hold it in my pain-shattered hands, said the prayers mechanically but still with as much feeling as I still possessed.

  The intern at the Warburg hospital who put sulfa on my hands and bandaged me up was like all the others. “You certainly were luckier than your two toasted friends in the other room.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You drive the car?”

  “I wasn’t in the car.”

  “How come you got burned then?”

  “I saw the crash and pulled one of them away from the car. I tried to get to the others. Too late.”

  “Yeah. Big hero, huh?”

  “Not with two of them dead.”

  He did a pretty good job of fixing me up, though my hands would hurt for weeks.

  Joe Miller, a cop from town, where the cops were all friendly and knew all the kids and young people by their first names, drove me back home. Joe was a short, stocky man, solid muscle, with thin blond hair, twinkling gray eyes and a friendly smile. He had a way with the kids, knew all our names and who was in love with whom at any given time. So he didn’t harass us and we didn’t harass him. Not much anyway.

  He could have been no more than thirty at the time.

  “It was the old Lasalle, huh? Leo?”

  “Yeah. He wasn’t supposed to take it, he wasn’t supposed to drive it that fast down the hill, he wasn’t supposed to be drunk.”

  “Young Phil drunk again?”

  “Out of his mind, the smell of booze on him was stronger than the smell of the fire.”

  “The brakes on the old jalopy OK?”

  “I had them fixed yesterday. Winslow. Picked it up this morning. Got a receipt somewhere. Here in my wallet.”

  “There’ll be a lot of covering up, you can count on that. There always is when the Old Houses are involved. The state and county cops think it was you in the car, no matter how often they’re told you weren’t in it. They will want to blame someone so they can withstand the pressure that’s going to build up for quick explanation. You’re not a member of one of the Old House Families—and they haven’t figured that Tom Keenan takes care of everyone in his house.”

  That idea kept me going until well into the next day. With Packy’s dad on my side, nothing could go wrong. Then I began to wonder if he was really on my side.

  “Why do they want to blame me?”

  Joe shook his head patiently. “You don’t get it, Leo. When something goes wrong in one of the Old Houses someone has to be blamed. It can’t be anyone who lives in the House and the county cops know that. Everyone knows that. So the cops find someone to blame or they’ll be blamed. It’s so much a habit with them that they do it automatically. You’re available so they’ll blame you, at least until they get more time to figure out another victim.”

  “They can’t get away with blaming me, can they?”

  “Nope, because I saw you and that little Devlin kid walking down the road a half hour before it happened. After a while, they’ll settle down and listen to me. But you know what the county cops think of us…that kid sure is cute.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tom Keenan around?”

  “He became a grandfather in Chicago yesterday.”

  “Think I’ll give him a call first thing in the morning. You don’t look in such good shape. Maybe ought to get some sleep.”

  “I’m all right. I have to pray for my friends.”

  “Maybe if you give me the receipt for the car repair I’ll take care of it.”

  “OK.”

  “Here,” he reached for a notebook as we pulled into the Keenan driveway, “I’ll give you a receipt for the receipt, all right?”

  “All right.”

  “You don’t mind if I phone Tom?”

  I couldn’t see why that would be necessary, but if he wanted to make the call that was all right with me.

  “Sure.”

  “Can I give him this receipt?” He waved the torn piece of notebook paper at me. “He can make better use of it than I can.”

  Fine.

  Looking back at those events over the years, I realized how much I owe Joe Miller. He knew exactly what was going to happen and how to put an end to it quickly.

  Not quickly enough, but that wasn’t his fault.

  “You take care now, you hear?” he said as he let me off at the Keenans’ gate. “Get some rest.”

  “Thank you, Officer Miller, I’ll try.”

  I didn’t try. Instead I poured myself a full glass of Tom Keenan’s Irish whiskey, sat on the front porch of the house, stared glumly at the Lake, and automatically repeated the prayers of the rosary.

  I also remembered Jane’s haggard, haunted face as she looked longingly over her shoulder at me while her mother dragged her away from the scene of the wreck, an expression that admitted guilt and begged for forgiveness. I would see that same face only once more in thirty years—at Packy’s Ordination on May 5, 1954. Her son Philip was a sulky two year old that day, her daughter Brigid a cute little infant in her arms with glowing brown eyes like her mother’s.

  Their mother wore the same mask of guilt and the same plea for forgiveness.

  I was still an emotional mess from my POW experience and was incapable of forgiveness.

  For which God forgive me now.

  I watched the sun go up, put aside the empty whiskey tumbler, and hiked over to the six-thirty Mass. It was after all Mary’s Day in Harvest Time and I had to pray for the repose of two souls. I couldn’t believe that I myself was in any jeopardy because I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  The priest rushed through the service in less than twenty minutes.

  My hands were now throbbing with pain and my head ached like I had been hit with a hammer. I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to make it back to the house.

  I stopped by the wreck and made the sign of the cross.

  That’s when I heard the State cops talk about the broken brakes and pry open the metal box with the counterfeit money. I guess they didn’t see me leaning against the tree.

  I stumbled against the gate at the Keenan house. A police car and two county cops were waiting for me.

  “Where you been, punk?” the big cop demanded.

 
“At church.”

  “What you doing at church on a weekday?”

  “It’s a holy day for Catholics. We’re supposed to go to Mass.”

  “Yeah? Well, it’s going to be one hell of a holy day for you. We’re taking you in for vehicular homicide. You’re going to spend a lot of holy days behind bars. Cuff him, Omer.”

  “You bet, sheriff!”

  The little cop brutally slammed handcuffs on my burned wrists. They both laughed at my screams of pain.

  1978

  Leo

  After she was safely out of sight I walked back to the oak tree into which the Keenans’ old Lasalle had crashed thirty years before. The Devlin Old House—the first as you drove in from Warburg, the last as you drove away from the village—was at the top of the hill, the tree at the bottom of the hill and the Keenan’s Old House—a delightful Gothic monstrosity was about a half mile beyond the tree. Time had long since covered the jagged gash with newer bark, but the outline was still indelibly imprinted on the tree, a fatal scar. I saw again the eruption of flame, a dirty orange burst of light, and heard the screams from those who were dying inside the car. I heard Jane’s screams next to me. I felt the heat of the blast as I pulled Phil away from the car. I remember my suspicion even then that he had escaped and the others had not—Jim and Eileen, as it would turn out. I recalled again the smell of burning human flesh, a smell that touched the terrifying memory of burning bodies in the Korean camp. I shivered as I did when I found out that Packy and his sister Joan were not the victims, a guilty joy that those closest to me had not been fried to a crisp.

  I saw again the State Police searching the rubble the next day. I heard them murmuring about faulty brakes. I saw them pry out the metal box from the trunk of the car and watched as the cover fell open and the hundred dollar bills streamed out, thousands of them.

  “Counterfeit,” one cop had told another.

  “Damn good fakes,” the other replied ruefully.

  “Just like they said.”

  “Who was it supposed to go to?”

  “That’s one of those questions we’re not supposed to ask. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  What the hell is going on? I had wondered.

  It was no clearer to me in 1978 than it had been in 1948 how the tangled passions in two generations of four families were intricately locked into that charred wreckage. There were mysteries within mysteries, puzzles within puzzles.

  I knew then I had to solve the mysteries if I was ever to have a happy life. Now thirty years later I still knew it.

  Perhaps I should say three families: the Keenans were only on the margins of the drama.

  Maggie Ward Keenan was there the last two summers; on the day of the tragedy she was in Oak Park Hospital admiring her newborn girl child—Maria Margarita. What did Maggie think? She was only a kid herself, no older than Jane or I, but with a tragic past of her own. Even then her keen, discerning gray eyes searched out the truth. I had never asked her what she thought had happened. Maybe she had made some of her usually shrewd guesses even then. I was not sure that I wanted to know about them.

  Jane and I were also on the margins. Or so I thought then. I was at the Lake as an outsider who was permitted to watch because I was a friend of Packy Keenan. Jane was also an outsider, a daughter of an unacceptable family, crude, uncultivated “Shanty” Irish. She was permitted to watch the drama because of her beauty and energy, which captivated the glittering and glamorous world, as it seemed to me, of the Old House families.

  Yet, somehow, in ways that I still could not comprehend, we were at the center of the drama and the tragedy.

  I shuddered and hurried away from the tree. I should never have come back here. Never.

  Jane

  Ought I to write about Leo in these fragments of my novel?

  Maggie says that writing fiction is a way to understand your life. That gave me an excuse to do it. I’ve always wanted to be a novelist. A very famous and successful one, naturally!

  I’ve made up my mind that I’m going to be one. But first of all I have to figure out how to do it. So I’ve decided that I’ll try to keep a journal first. A journal of the past, as best as I can remember it, and of the present when it happens. A journal and a memoir at the same time. Then when I figure out how it works I’ll use the journal and the memoir as a resource for the novel.

  Even the two greatest autobiographical novelists of the century lied a lot. I wonder if Lee would be impressed if he knew I had read Proust and Joyce. Well, first I’ll be good old Jane and then maybe after that I’ll become a womanly version of Marcel or Stephen.

  Poor dear men.

  It was just a coincidence that I started to write these fragments when I heard he was back in Chicago, right?

  Who do I think I’m kidding? “Whom” he’d make me say.

  Well, I can’t keep Leo T. Kelly out any longer. Not after tonight. He is still so cute with his red hair as bright as ever despite the snowflakes in it. Packy said he used to wear a beard. He’d be unbearably sexy in a beard.

  I love him so much.

  Yet I am thinking again about the sin against the Holy Ghost. Holy Spirit. Whatever. These pills I hold in my hand are that sin. Or so the nuns taught us. Is there sin? Is there a Holy Ghost? And if there is, does He care about me? No sign of that. I’ve turned Him off.

  Good old Jane, they all say. Isn’t it wonderful how she holds up? Takes good care of herself. Great figure. Wonderful boobs. Great game of tennis. Great wit. You’d never know what she’s been through. Always was a remarkable person. Radiant woman, full of life and laughter. Now that she’s gotten rid of Phil finally she should settle down with some nice widower and have a happy life. God knows she’s entitled to it.

  Bullshit. They don’t know what it costs to be good old Jane. I can cry my eyes out here but I don’t dare weep and rage in public. I don’t dare tell anyone, not even Maggie, that I feel like such a terrible failure because I could not keep my husband for myself. His fault maybe, but still I was inadequate.

  For him and for Leo and for my kids.

  Why don’t I swallow these little brown pills? Afraid of hell? Could it be any worse? Afraid that I’ll lose my nerve and that they’ll pump out my stomach and I’ll look like a fool. Poor Jane, she should talk to someone. Maggie Keenan maybe. Her family was always a little strange. Can you imagine her, with all she has going for her, trying to kill herself?

  I don’t care what they say about me after I’m dead. I just don’t want to have to hear it all while I’m still alive. Lucy won’t mind my dying, God knows. She’ll be glad to be rid of me. But if I bungle it she’ll tell me I have ruined her life by embarrassing her. Again. She was such a cute little tyke. It was so hard to bring her into the world. Where did I go wrong with her? Why does she hate me so much? Will I take the pills tonight? I tell myself at the beginning of the day that this will be my last day, that tomorrow morning I won’t have to wake up and face it all, I won’t have to play my good old Jane game. Then when the night comes and I take the pills out of the bottle and stare at them I lose my nerve.

  Leo Kelly. The bastard. He ran out on me when I needed help. Never once phoned me. Went off to Korea and got himself killed without ever once looking back. Damn fool! I’m going to have to tell him that before the summer is over. Whether I sleep with him or not.

  Dear God, why did he show up now? One more guilt to face. I should have married him. The chemistry was there tonight, like it has always been. A wrong word, a wrong touch and we’d be in bed together now. That’s all I need. A horny old woman in a final fling. It would not be as final as these pills. And it would definitely be more fun. My damn body was ready for the fun.

  I say that I don’t want to marry again and I mean it. But, since I began to think about an annulment, my sexual feelings are no longer dormant. I fantasize about seducing men, even poor Packy who adores me. Now I want to seduce Leo so badly I can taste his flesh. Horny old woman.

 
; Anyway, I’ll compromise. Only one pill tonight so I can sleep. And I’ll avoid Leo tomorrow.

  Are You satisfied with that compromise, damn You!

  Leo

  “I’m sure, Professor Kelly,” Maggie Ward Keenan looked up from her knitting, “excuse me, Provost Kelly, that you know that a Freudian like me does not believe in coincidences.”

  Maggie and her brother-in-law Monsignor Patrick James Keenan and I are the same age, a couple of years younger than her husband Judge Jeremias Keenan of the Seventh Circuit. A psychoanalytically oriented psychologist, she grew up in Philadelphia, the rest of us in Chicago. Packy and I were seminary classmates until I decided after the third year at Quigley, the high school seminary, that I lacked the personality necessary to be a priest. We were sitting on the deck of the Keenans’ lakeside house, sipping Jameson’s on the rocks (very slowly) and watching the lightning in the distance intermittently turn the Lake into an incandescent mirror. The Keenans’ kids and grandkids were all off somewhere celebrating the beginning of summer.

  When Tom and Mary Anne Keenan, Jerry and Packy’s parents, had wearied of presiding over the endless festivities at their Old House, they turned it over to Maggie and Jerry and moved into the clean and comfortable—and air conditioned—“coach house” fifty yards down the beach. The younger Keenans had done very little to change the old gothic lady, besides putting screens around the porch facing the Lake and creating a new porch, also with screens, on top of the boathouse, which was called a “deck” to distinguish it from the porch of the house. They had added an intricate and not always adequate air-conditioning system; but they had resisted the temptation to tear down walls and create a few large bedrooms out of the rabbit warren of tiny bedrooms on the third floor (including the former servant quarters at the back of the house facing the road). Nor had they replaced much of the old furniture that thirty years ago had been broken down and now perhaps approached antique status. The kitchen, the most important part of the house for planning parties, had been modernized, the “ballroom” floors resurfaced and the rest of the house had been left pretty much as it was—a home designed for informality and relaxation and not for propriety or even privacy when coming out of one of the showers, which at times worked better than at others times but never very well.