Summer at the Lake

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “She didn’t know I was up here for the weekend.”

  Maggie, a small pretty woman, with vast eyes, a quick tongue, and uncanny instincts, sniffed derisively. “No, and it would never occur to her that the good Monsignor here would invite his once-again bachelor friend to the Lake for the Memorial Day weekend. Nor that the aforementioned friend would wander down the same dimly lit street in which the two of you had nuzzled each other in the days of more demanding hormones.”

  She was wearing a light summer dress, gray as usual, her husband and her brother-in-law were in chinos and knit sport shirts—presumably returned earlier in the evening from golf at the Club. The air was still and now a bit ominous. Clouds had covered the stars. The Lake was tapping light against the foundation of the boathouse as it often did when a storm was in the air. The heavy smell of late spring still hung all around us.

  “I haven’t noticed hormones diminishing,” the Judge, a big handsome man, silver-haired like his brother the Monsignor, with gentle eyes and a slow smile like his wife, observed. He was much like his father, Tom Keenan who with his wife Mary Anne, the adopted parents of my youth, were in Taos with their daughter and her children. Jerry was a little less obscure than his father in the style of communication favored by old time Irish political lawyers. But not much less obscure.

  “We’re both married,” I protested, not too vigorously.

  I was well aware—too well because the situation had been explained to me at least three times by Packy—that I had never been able to persuade Emilie to have our marriage validated in church and we were legally divorced. Jane’s civil divorce would be final by the middle of the summer and her canonical annulment would probably come through in early autumn. There was not much in the way of civil or canonical obstacle to a little summer romance. But it was useful to pretend that I saw such problems, if only to restrain somewhat the enthusiasm of my friends for getting Jane and Leo together again.

  “Your wife has divorced you.” Packy, a six-foot-five, silver-haired ex-basketball player and “new-style Monsignor” (if the term isn’t an oxymoron) jabbed a finger at me, being careful not to spill any of his precious Jameson’s. “And you were not married in the Church and she’s getting an annulment, not that I believe much in those things.”

  “She doesn’t have either a divorce or an annulment yet.”

  Packy shrugged. “Everyone gets them these days.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Yes, it does. We now understand that for a marriage to be a sacramental union—one that reflects the union between Jesus and his Church—a certain amount of maturity is required. Marriages that break up generally do so because of immaturity one side or the other…”

  “Usually both,” his sister-in-law interjected.

  I didn’t bother to argue, as I usually did when priests tried to explain this to me, that the Church had done a bad job explaining its new approach to divorce to the laity.

  “And there’s no question,” Packy continued, “that Phil Clare is about as immature as anyone can be. He’s been unfaithful since the beginning…”

  “From the very beginning,” Maggie added.

  “He walked out on her,” Jerry Keenan summed up the argument, “to shack up with some bimbo in Florida. Again. The divorce is final next month.”

  “She’s taken him back before. I don’t want to break up a family.”

  “Why did you come up this weekend if not to explore that possibility of a second summer?”

  “I’m not your patient, Margaret Mary Ward Keenan!”

  She chuckled. The others roared.

  “It’s the feast of Pentecost,” she argued. “You shouldn’t fight the Holy Spirit. She doesn’t like it.”

  “Fove quod est frigidum,” Packy said piously.

  Warm up what is cold, huh?

  “I’m being blamed for not committing adultery with a woman I have not seen for thirty years.”

  “Minimally for not beginning the process of seduction,” Maggie nodded. “Not that the poor woman is likely to resist.”

  “Poor woman,” I exploded. “Jane seems fine to me.”

  “Good old Jane,” Maggie sneered. “Isn’t it wonderful how she holds up? Takes such good care of herself. Great figure. Great game of tennis. Always good for laughs. A philandering husband who has destroyed her sense of sexual worth, brutish brothers, a son killed in Korea, a daughter vanished into a commune, a second son who is a Yuppie prig, and a daughter who hates you—and none of it bothers good old Jane.”

  “It doesn’t seem to.”

  “Some day we will wake up to find that she’s ended permanently the burden of being good old Jane.”

  “Kill herself? Jane’s not the kind.”

  “Don’t bet on it! She’s had to pretend all her life. Adult children of alcoholics grow weary of pretending. And her alcoholic and avaricious and twisted mother was much worse than her father. She ruled the roost with fear and no one in the family dared to resist her drunken tantrums.

  “Good old Jane has assumed responsibility for everyone else since she was a child—including you and the rest of that crowd back in the forties. It was too much even then.”

  I didn’t argue. I had always thought myself that in part Jane’s radiance was a cover-up. But she certainly wasn’t the kind who might kill herself. Moreover I had already contended with one troubled woman whom I had desperately tried to save. I didn’t need another.

  “And there’s everything that happened back in the forties,” I said.

  “Ah yes,” Maggie Ward nodded solemnly. “That’s the problem isn’t it?”

  “It’s not written in the stars,” Packy said softly, “that you have to make the same mistakes again.”

  “I didn’t make the mistakes.”

  “The hell you didn’t.”

  “And I’m not afraid of making them again.”

  “The hell you’re not.”

  “If you weren’t,” Maggie intoned the words of solemn judgment, “you would be with her now and not with us.”

  At the moment it seemed like a pretty good idea.

  “There was killing in the summer of 1948,” I murmured. “I don’t want there to be any killing this summer.”

  “Do you honestly think you could have stopped it?” Maggie asked.

  “Besides, you’re not going to be called off to Korea this time,” Jerry Keenan added.

  “No way out,” Packy concluded, sealing my fate. “No way out.”

  I refilled the drink Jerry had put in my hands when I joined them on the deck and tried to change the subject. “I suppose everyone fantasizes that their youth was a time of shimmering lights and glorious wonders, a special time and a special place and special people. I suppose our crowd wasn’t all that much different from any other group of kids growing up in the forties.”

  “Wrong,” said Maggie Ward Keenan, her knitting needles clicking furiously. “Totally wrong. I came as an outsider, as you may remember, and I was immediately impressed with the fact that it was a special place and a special time and special people. Magic. Pure magic.”

  “What made it magic?” I demanded.

  “You and Jane,” she responded crisply, “and the luminosity that glowed in everything you touched. You were magic people.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “So does she, but you’re both wrong. And, Leo Thomas Kelly,” Maggie added, “don’t you dare deny that you went out looking for her tonight.”

  “I did not.”

  “Then why did you go to the one place where you were certain to find her if she were looking for you?”

  Patrick

  Besides my family, they are the two most important people in my life—a woman I have loved since 1941 when she and I were both thirteen and would have hoped to marry if I had not become a priest, and the other a man with whom I shared the anxieties and the playfulness of middle adolescence. Two marvelous human beings, admirable in every way, doomed from
the beginning by forces outside of themselves they could not control. I was at the seminary in December of 1950 when the news came of Leo’s death. My dad called them and asked them to tell me. The Rector refused. “A lot of young men are dying,” was his reply. “We don’t do any favors for young men merely because their family has money.”

  I received the letter from Mom two days later, the day before the Memorial Mass. I begged the Prefect of Discipline to let me attend the Mass. He refused flatly. “We don’t even permit anyone to leave the seminary for the funeral of a grandparent or an aunt or uncle. We cannot do it for a mere friend.”

  “He’s not a mere friend,” I snapped. “He’s the closest friend I ever had.”

  “You will not bring him back to life by leaving the seminary.”

  “Why do you have this rule?”

  “Cardinal Mundelein wanted it this way. He did not want seminarians riding back and forth to Chicago.”

  “Cardinal Mundelein has been dead for fifteen years!”

  “Thirteen,” he corrected me.

  My father who had, and has, enormous clout in Church and State did his best, even talking to the Cardinal’s secretary on the phone. (The Cardinal, he told me, was probably taking a nap, his favorite pastime.) “If we do it for one,” the Monsignor apologized, “we’d have to do it for everyone.”

  “Then why not do it for everyone?”

  “Cardinal Mundelein wanted it this way.”

  “He’s been dead for thirteen years!” Dad had a better sense of time than I did.

  “I know,” said the young Monsignor sadly.

  So I did not see Jane till our two week vacation at the end of January—Cardinal Mundelein did not want seminarians going home at Christmas time. Didn’t we have everything we could possibly want at the seminary?

  She was incoherent the one time we talked, grief and guilt stricken. And unbearably beautiful.

  “I killed him, Packy, I killed him. If I had married him when he wanted to marry me, he’d still be alive.”

  “Jane, that’s not true,” I held her in my arms while she sobbed.

  “Yes, it is. I betrayed him.”

  “She’s a sponge looking for guilt to absorb,” Maggie told me later. “It’s the down side of being an Irish matriarch.”

  Maggie kept me informed by mail of Jane’s deterioration until I was summoned to the Rector’s office.

  “Who is this Maggie person who is writing to you?” he demanded.

  “My brother’s wife,” I replied. I did not volunteer any of the details of our search for Maggie Ward because I knew the Rector would not appreciate the story.1

  “She has strange ideas about psychology.”

  “She’s a psychologist. Just earned her Ph.D. and is finishing up her internship.”

  “Doesn’t she have any children?” His feigned surprise hinted that perhaps my brother and his wife were practicing birth control.

  “Three.”

  “She belongs at home with her children.”

  “I’ll tell her that you said so.”

  “You will also dismiss her from your correspondents. We forbid you to receive any further mail from her.”

  The rector loved the word “dismiss”; he savored it as if it were orgasmic.

  “Yes, Monsignor.”

  I hated the seminary and the fools who ran it. But I wanted to be a priest. Putting up with them for seven years was part of the price you paid.

  So it was Mom who wrote that Jane was engaged to Phil Clare and would marry him in early June. They wanted me to be an acolyte at the nuptial mass.

  They let us out of the seminary just a week before the wedding.

  “Jane,” I begged her, “it’s too soon. You can’t make a decision this important while you’re still grieving.”

  “I’ll always grieve.” Her face was hard, her voice cold.

  “So will we all, but give yourself some time.”

  I had rehearsed my lines carefully. I would tell her that I loved her and wanted to marry her. Forget Phil Clare who was a shallow creep.

  Before I could act out my little drama, she said, “I’m pregnant, Packy. I don’t care about anything any more. I wish I were dead. But since I’m not dead, I might as well marry Phil.”

  I criticize Leo for being indecisive, but I was just as indecisive as he was.

  “That she’s pregnant doesn’t change anything for you, does it?” Maggie asked me later that day—the only time in all the years we’ve known each other that she hinted she knew about my love for Jane.

  “Not really,” I replied.

  I don’t know whether it did or not. Maybe I would not have declared my love even if she had not told me she was pregnant. Or maybe she would have turned me down.

  So, as much as I loved her, I decided to hang on at Mundelein.

  I knew then that it was the right decision and I still do some of the time. But I feel guilty about Jane. Was there another way I might have saved her?

  How does Qoheleth put it, “My mind has carefully observed wisdom and knowledge. So I applied my mind to know wisdom and knowledge and folly. I realized that was a chase after the wind.”

  So do I chase after the wind when I try to figure out their story. Now for some reason that You alone know, You have decided to give them a second chance. How clever of You. Will it work this time?

  I don’t buy the idea that it was Leo’s “death” in Korea that doomed their love the first time. Nor the auto accident thirty years ago. My charming sister-in-law doesn’t buy it either. “Over-identification with the internalized mother,” she says. “They’ll have to resolve that first, Jane more than Leo.” Her mother was a real prize. Given a choice between a sneaky, conniving, dishonest way of attaining her goals and a straightforward and direct way, she would invariably choose the former because she enjoyed being sneaky, conniving and dishonest, especially when she was drunk, which was most of the time during the last years of her life.

  The mothers were real prizes all right. Both wanted respectability for their family, the battle cry of Irish women for hundreds of years I suppose. Ita Devlin thought she could win it by wealth and power and the right marriages. Delia Kelly thought her kids could earn it by hard work, educational success, professional careers. So she pushed her kids unremittingly when she didn’t have to and never quite had time to love them, especially since she feared that, if you spoiled kids with too much love, they wouldn’t work hard enough to be successful. Funny thing, they both achieved their goals, only they didn’t realize it. And they both died sour and bitter women. Delia’s kids are all successful professionals and she died with every one of them hundreds of miles away, having fled her constant harassment. It’s kids are all respected, affluent even, in their own worlds, respected—which the boys were not thirty years ago. And she died cursing them for their failures.

  Dear God, how do You tolerate such tragedy, how do You endure it, why do You permit it?

  Delia loved her kids enough so that, despite her constant pushing, they could become mature adults, even Pete whose smartest move was to leave the priesthood where he never belonged in the first place. She didn’t love them enough to leave them alone, poor woman.

  Ita?

  Ah, there’s the tragedy. She was a lively and appealing woman, gorgeous in fact, who turned bitter through the years—bitter and alcoholic and maybe evil.

  She was always tricky. Dad told me that she was the kind that would stop payment on a forty dollar check for, let us say, a carpenter because it would cost five dollars for the stop-payment and she’d save thirty five dollars because the carpenter wouldn’t bother to try to collect from her. It was a cheap petty trick but she got away with it for years before tradesmen would demand payment in full before beginning work for her.

  I remember when they bought the house up here in 1940 and invited us over for dinner. Mom and Dad had been told that they were vulgar and corrupt, but were too polite to turn down the invitation. I managed to tag along becaus
e I had seen Jane from a distance and wanted to see her up close. Her parents seemed all right to me. He was a big, black-haired Irishman with a genial smile and a warm handshake. He didn’t say much because his wife talked all the time, mostly about how much all the finery in the house cost. But he had a warm laugh that made you want to laugh with him.

  His wife was very pretty, sexy even, in an intense and diminutive way. She was, it seemed to me, awfully young to have three sons older than I was. She looked like she might be Jane’s older sister, and not much older because Jane was already as tall as her mother. She was, as far as I could tell, a lot of fun—energetic, witty, charming. I thought she was tiny in comparison to my tall parents but she filled the house with her laughter and vitality. And what I now realize was, perhaps, unconscious sexual invitation.

  Jane paid no attention to me but watched her mother perform with mute adoration. I was permitted to sit at the dinner table, but Jane was banished to the kitchen to eat with the servants. I didn’t think that was fair, but I kept my mouth shut and kept my eye on the kitchen door just in case I might get another look at my new love’s gorgeous face.

  The house was at the top of the hill, the last of the Old Houses. Indeed according to some it was not truly an Old House because the village line ended just beyond our place. It was newer than the others, a sprawling imitation of a nineteenth century Irish or English country house. Looking back, I suppose it suited Ita as a replica of the “Big House” near which she had grown up. Moreover it was decorated and furnished in every detail as a late Georgian country house ought to be furnished. As Dad later said, “Lord Mayo himself would not have lived in any place more Georgian than that.”

  “Except for that ugly statue of Our Lady of Knock in the master bedroom,” I piped up.

  “How do you know it’s Our Lady of Knock, dear?” my mother asked.

  “When no one was looking I checked the inscription on it. Ugly.”