Summer at the Lake

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Jane swept a towel around her shoulders and accompanied me a few steps down the beach. Her head was even with my shoulders, five feet nine inches, a tall and graceful woman with flecks of gray in her tight brown curls. And erect nipples pushing against the fabric of her swimsuit. The result of the wind, I assured myself.

  “I think I said last night that you are prettier now than when you were twenty.”

  “Some sort of Shanty Irish blarney like that.” She hunched her shoulders in her old mischief movement.

  I noticed that she was wearing a small Celtic cross around her neck, a successor to the brown cloth scapular of three decades ago. Did she know it was a symbol for sexual intercourse, I wondered. Now was not the time to ask.

  “Can I revise that comment?”

  She tilted her head up at me. “To improve on it?”

  “Well, I think so.”

  She giggled. “Same old imp.”

  I had never been an imp, had I?

  “I’d now rephrase it to read that you are more erotically attractive, far more so in point of fact, than you were thirty years ago.”

  “Gulp,” she laughed, a flush spread over her face and down her chest. “Is that an academic compliment, sort of thing you hear from a professor?”

  “Only from a provost…I fear my women colleagues would say I was objectifying you.”

  “You started doing that on the tennis court this morning, which is one of the reasons why it was so easy to beat you. But, like I always say, a little bit of objectification is all right,” she giggled again, “in the proper context.”

  “A beach on the Sunday before Memorial Day, I would argue, is the proper context.”

  “I agree,” she grinned up at me. “Though not the context for a detailed explanation of the content of that evaluation…anyway, thank you, I am flattered as my purple complexion shows…and isn’t it amazing how this man,” she gestured with the Trollope novel she was still carrying, “can fill a book with sexual tension without ever explicitly mentioning sex.”

  My love had matured into a clever and intelligent woman, far more skillful than I was or ever would be at navigating through a pleasant but potentially embarrassing conversation.

  “I’ve often wondered,” I joined her game, “whether the tension was as apparent to the readers in his time as it is in our time. Could they think about sex as explicitly as we do?”

  She waved the book at me in disbelief. “Now you are being a stuffy professor. Of course they knew. Maybe even enjoyed the tension more because they didn’t have Freud to explain it all away…anyway,” she turned back, “I’m sorry you can’t make supper tonight.”

  “Another weekend.”

  “If you’re invited.”

  We both laughed.

  She had beaten me in the exchange as she had long ago. I didn’t mind.

  You will definitely fuck her before the summer is over, my demon reappeared.

  Watch your language!

  Well, you will.

  Maybe.

  She was at least ten years older than the mysterious (or seemingly mysterious) women who were part of my real and fantasy life in the early forties at this same lake. Was she more erotically attractive now than they were then?

  Impossible question. They were not persons to me in those days, well not fully persons anyway. Bodies with stories attached, tragic stories perhaps. Mysterious stories certainly. Moreover they had not seemed vulnerable as Jane did now. As she always had even as a girl. Unbearably pretty and so fragile, for all her comedy and laughter, a Belleek figurine that you don’t want to drop.

  I was, nonetheless, very happy with myself when I returned to the Keenans’ for a shower and a preprandial drink. My better self, well, my professorial self anyway, told me that I was a male predator, horny from prolonged celibacy, on the prowl for a vulnerable woman. I was, the professor said, more interested in sexual intercourse (he never uses the word “fuck”) than trying to straighten out a relationship from the past.

  Even though I had in a momentary loss of nerve declined her supper invitation, I had, you see, already accepted the charge of my hosts, which I had denied vigorously less than twenty-four hours previously, that I had come to the Lake for Memorial Day to see if my love for Jane Devlin could somehow be revived.

  Revived, I said as I buttoned my shirt, it never died.

  Leo

  “That is you, isn’t it, Leo?” The cop got out of the sheriff’s red and white car and walked up to me—a short, stocky, bald man with a big grin.

  “Joe Miller!”

  We shook hands warmly.

  “You haven’t changed much, Leo.”

  “Neither have you, Joe. You’re sheriff now.”

  “Yep. Won it fair and square in a lot of elections. Might retire some day soon. So you’ve come back home, huh?”

  I had stopped at the drugstore in the village to buy sunglasses for the ride home. I never remember to bring sunglasses with me to the car.

  “Is this home?”

  “Only at home you wouldn’t get a ticket for parking illegally like you just did.”

  “Go on, Joe Miller doesn’t give tickets to strangers for that.”

  He threw back his head and laughed. “Well, don’t tell too many tourists that, huh?”

  “Anyway, this isn’t your jurisdiction.”

  We were walking toward my black Volvo, a provost’s kind of car.

  “It is now, we combined the village and country police twenty years ago.”

  “A little late for me.”

  “Still got that on your mind?” He hitched up his khaki pants. “It was a long time ago. You were the hero after they got things sorted out. You saved that worthless Clare kid’s life. You never did come back, not till now.”

  “Not till now.”

  “And you’re going to stay around?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, that’s better than a flat-out no.”

  “What happened back then, Joe?”

  “Leave it alone, Leo,” he shook his head in warning. “It’s over and done with and it was a long time ago.”

  “Two of my friends were killed.”

  “I know. But you won’t be able to bring them back to life. Or…”

  “Maybe I have to figure out what happened.”

  He shook his head again. “Dangerous, Leo. Very dangerous.”

  “There was a cover-up.”

  “Of course there was a cover-up. A solemn high coverup. But you can’t uncover it now.”

  “What was the cover-up about, Joe? Do you know?”

  He opened the door of my car, which I had not locked. “You’d be surprised how many cars get stolen in this village.”

  “You didn’t answer me, Joe.”

  “Same old Leo,” he grinned and shook hands with me. “Well, I will answer you. I’m not sure. I have my ideas but I’m not sure.”

  “Will you tell me about those ideas?”

  I got into the car and rolled down the window.

  “When I’m sure—if I ever am.”

  “If I find out, will you confirm it for me?”

  “Leo, it’s not worth it.”

  “Will you confirm it for me if I figure out whose money it was?”

  He watched me somberly.

  “Yeah, Leo. I will. I figure we owe you that.”

  St. John’s Night

  Four happy days bring in Another moon. But, O, methinks how slow The old moon wanes. She lingers my desires Like to step dame or a dowager Long withering out a young man’s revenue.

  —W. Shakespeare

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Leo

  “Do you know what night it is?” Maggie Ward Keenan relaxes on the bench at the side of the tennis courts and complacently slips her racket into its press.

  I have returned to the Lake in the third week of June, in great part because Jane had called me in my office at the University and renewed her invitation for a Sunday night supper.

/>   “Shortest night of the year. St. John’s night.”

  “Also Midsummer Night. ‘Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact.’ ”

  “Theseus is a fine one to talk,” I respond, showing off my recognition of the quote.

  “Precisely, he will that very night take his willing Hippolyta to bed. And arguably enjoy her more than his young friends will enjoy their brides.”

  I see what is coming.

  “Arguably.”

  “Do you know what St. John’s night was like in medieval Europe?”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  She sighs impatiently, as she must with recalcitrant clients on her couch.

  “Men and women went out into the woods for love—hence Shakespeare’s themes in the play. Children to dance and sing. Young people to flirt and court and maybe play with one another’s bodies. Serious lovers to experiment at love. Married men and women for the privacy that they did not have in their crowded little homes during the winter cold. The woods would be awash with love. Summer time was and still is, a time for love.”

  “Not very good Catholics,” I say, hoping to turn her away from her lecture to a theological discussion.

  “Were they not? Even Joan of Arc told her inquisitors without any sign of guilt or shame that she had sung and danced by the ponds. Old Celtic custom put to Christian use. Catholicism, despite our gloriously reigning Pope, believes in love and in the goodness of the human body.”

  “So it doesn’t mind people fooling around?”

  “It doesn’t mind human love, Leo, as you very well know. And if passion leads people too far, it was always understood down in the villages and the parishes that the passion itself is not wrong. Rather it hints at how God feels.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “You should have a Catholic summer, Lee,” she nods in agreement with her own dictum.

  That line stopped me. Yet I had come back to Chicago with something like tonight’s opportunity in mind, had I not?

  Not really.

  Yes, really.

  The University had made cautious inquiries about whether I would want to apply for the provost position. I was assured that of course there was a national search and there could be no guarantee that I would be the final choice. But…

  That “but” in our business is the all-important word. The tone with which it is said tells you everything. The “but” that I heard said, “if you want it, you can have it.”

  I asked for time to think it over. Why should I leave Harvard and my research for a thankless job in a city that had too many bad memories for me?

  The politician in me if not the political scientist thought the job might be fun, so long as I did not take it too seriously and become pompous. Well, more pompous than I already am.

  But I didn’t want to go back to Chicago.

  Then I met Chuck O’Malley at a meeting of the board of the National Endowment. Chuck was the other redhead in our class, a whimsical little guy who made teachers laugh in spite of themselves. He had always claimed, with his self-deprecating grin, that all he wanted to be was an accountant. Now he was one of the most famous photographers in the world.

  “How’s herself doing?” I asked him.

  He sighed. “More beautiful by the day. It is a terrible thing, Leo Thomas Kelly to be married to a beautiful woman.” He grinned. “Until you consider the alternatives.”

  “Give her my love.”

  “I will indeed. She has already sent hers and insists that you must come back to Chicago.”

  “Ah.”

  “Phil Clare has finally walked out on Jane.”

  “Indeed.”

  “His latest lover insists on marriage. Unlike many of the previous occupants of this role, this one has prevailed. The woman I sleep with says that this time Jane will not take him back. She’s applying for an annulment.”

  “So.”

  “My bed partner adds that it is high time.”

  “I should think so too.”

  I wondered why I had not heard from the Keenans about this development. Perhaps they were waiting for matters to become final.

  Well, it meant nothing to me. I was not going back to Chicago for Jane Devlin.

  No way.

  During the lunch break I called my contact at the University and told him that, while I hardly thought I was the man for the job, I would be willing to apply for it.

  Right.

  Patrick

  I decided against spending Sunday afternoon of the longest day of the year at the Lake. It was my turn to take calls at the rectory. While I could have persuaded one of the other priests to trade with me, I really didn’t want to have to observe the developing relationship between Leo and Jane.

  Someone said once that celibacy is hardest on Sunday afternoons in an empty rectory. Especially in late spring, I would add. Or early summer as it was becoming this weekend.

  I am by all accounts a happy and successful priest, pastor of one of the best parishes in the Archdiocese before my silver jubilee, loved by my people, admired by my fellow priests, with prospects of becoming a bishop once our crazy Cardinal dies or is removed.

  No one knows, not even Maggie who knows a lot, how tired I am and how I have come to hate my work and hate the assholes who are running the Church, especially the little old self-pitying Pope who messed up the impact of the Vatican Council with his damned birth control encyclical ten years ago and the paranoid sociopath who has pretty well destroyed the Archdiocese. How can you want to be part of an institution led by such pathetic human beings.

  They even make the twelve apostles look good.

  I’ll always be a Catholic, but I no longer think I’ll always be a priest. I swore ten years ago when everyone was quitting that I’d never leave the priesthood. Now I’m not so sure. Even if Leo does not marry Jane and even if Jane rejects me, I want out.

  Or do I?

  Maybe, like my young associate says, all I need is a vacation, a real vacation and not a day now and then at the Lake.

  The only hope I see for the Church is in the laypeople. But my own parishioners whom I love most of the time are now driving me up the wall. Some leave the priesthood because they want sex, some because they want companionship, some because they want children. When I leave, if I leave, I’ll depart because I want to be left alone.

  Leo

  “The old place change much, Leo?”

  I had arrived early for my dinner at the Clubhouse with Jane—the punctuality my mother had drummed into me sometimes survived the sloppy habits of the professorate—and was looking around in astonishment at a place I had once considered magic.

  The Clubhouse, built during the 1890s and remodeled every decade after that except during the Great Depression, was a mix of heavy oak, broad picture windows looking out on the Lake now purple in the late twilight of the shortest night of the year, thick maroon carpets, and sparkling white tablecloths with very old china and silver. As a kid I thought it might be the most glamorous place in the world. Now I realized that its hodgepodge tastelessness lent it a certain amount of quaint charm.

  Gone from the ceiling was the great revolving ball at least two feet in diameter made up of scores of mirror tiles that reflected the colored stage lights in the four corners of the room during the formal dances. It was like whirling stars. Probably they used strobe lights now.

  The formal dances at the Club were for me the most magical events at this magical place—stars shining above a jet black lake, a gentle breeze blowing in the open windows stirring ever so lightly the curtains and the women’s hair, handsome men in summer formals, beautiful women in dresses that revealed a lot of shoulder and breast, big band music, the murmur of soft, cultivated voices and occasional discreet laughter. Magic, pure magic. Or so it seemed to me then.

  And the most magical element was Jane, the most beautiful
of all the women, the one whom I knew eventually I would love and who would love me.

  “It seems to have changed a lot,” I said to the older man who was standing next to me, the same one who had spoken to me on the beach about the deaths of my friends. “Or have I romantic memories from my youth?”

  He chuckled, a big man, wearing white slacks, a navy blue blazer and a Notre Dame blue and gold tie—elaborate garb for a clubhouse from which all the old formality had been exorcised. His hair was white, his rugged face red, and his shrewd blue eyes missed nothing. I remembered his name, Steve Lanigan. “They mess with it every once in a while, but it’s pretty much the same place, a WASP dowager trying to live up to the ideals of elegance of the upper crust of the Irish middle class.”

  Not a magic fairy castle that it had once seemed.

  “I was interested, Steve, in what you said the other day about the accident. It was a long time ago, but…”

  “But you still want to know what happened to those poor kids. And you know and I know that it wasn’t an accident.”

  “Right.”

  “Having supper with Jane?”

  “Who else?”

  “A good idea. Poor woman deserves a real man for a change.” He nodded solemnly. “It might be dangerous to dig around too deeply. Not everyone who had reason to want that money is dead, know what I mean?”

  “Oh?”

  “Mind you,” he winked, “I’ll not mention any names…”

  The perennial style of the Irish politician who wants to give the illusion of telling you a secret when he’s really not revealing anything.

  “But,” he went on, “there were certain parties here that needed money a lot, a certain doctor maybe, to protect a certain investment that might have been made.”

  “And?”

  “And there were certain well-connected people who might have been able to put him in touch with those who had the money, know what I mean?”

  “Tino Nicola.”

  “I’ll name no names,” he winked again. “Everyone knows that the certain doctor was not much of a man and these other parties led him around by the nose, know what I mean?”