Summer at the Lake

by Andrew M. Greeley

  As I look back on our marriage I am aware that I repressed the signs and the symptoms of trouble as well as my rage. I did not know what to do about them and, dummy that I was, I didn’t understand that in her mind I had become the problem. As Packy would say later, “at her age in life, many bright and well-educated women begin to think they have wasted their talents. They look around for someone to blame and their husband is the first available target.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s not to blame.”

  “Nor does it prove that he is to blame.”

  It was after Brandeis had denied her promotion to full professor for the second time (and this time I heard early the rumors about her sleeping around but ignored them) that she told me in a furious rampage that she wanted to be her own person and that she was leaving me.

  Fool that I was, I was utterly astonished. I begged her to reconsider. She wailed that she was tired of everyone dismissing her as “Leo Kelly’s wife” and stormed out of our house, leaving Laura, who was then going on fourteen, to me.

  I begged her to come back, to try to save the marriage, to find a marriage counselor.

  Emilie was a very confused woman at the time. She did come back (and fought constantly with Laura) and we did go to a marriage counselor, one that Emilie had chosen. I later learned that the counselor was a radical feminist who specialized in attacking husbands. I put up with her because I thought there was still some chance of saving the marriage.

  As I recount this story—which I told as best I could to Jane—I realize that it probably sounds self-serving despite my efforts to describe our marriage objectively. Perhaps I did even turn Laura against her mother as both Emilie and the therapist claimed. I don’t know. I know that I tried desperately to save the marriage and that I searched my past as honestly as I could to see whether I had contributed to Emilie’s career failure.

  That exercise was counter-productive and quickly labeled as “self-serving.” I was not faulted for my lack of support for her, I was faulted for my own success. I didn’t know there was a race between Emilie and me and that I had exploited her to win it. I still don’t know that. I torment myself with efforts to understand what went wrong, where I failed, how I could have sustained her.

  “Forget it,” Packy told me on the phone. “You did your best according to your own lights. You can’t undo the past even if you made a lot of mistakes. Hasn’t she made it clear to you that she doesn’t want the mistakes undone? She does not want to be married to you any more, isn’t that clear?”

  “She may change her mind.”

  “Not likely. Hasn’t she moved in with a sociologist from Brandeis?”

  “A man who hasn’t published an article in ten years.”

  “You got it.”

  As I said before it was my election to the National Academy two years ago that led to final rupture of our marriage. I even offered to turn it down if she wouldn’t move out, an offer that both she and the therapist loudly scorned.

  One of the minor reasons for coming back to Chicago was that she became violently angry whenever we encountered one another at academic events in the Boston area.

  “Will you please stop following me around!” she would wail and burst into hysterical tears.

  Pack is right. The marriage is dead. I failed as a husband. I wish I could locate the precise time when it started to go wrong. I wonder now if the beginning of the end was that hot spring day in my office at Stanford when she took off her blouse. I guess I’ll never know for sure.

  Not in this life.

  “Verdict?” I asked Jane when I had finished my story, as sanitized as I could make it.

  “The poor woman,” she replied, tears in her warm brown eyes.

  “Oh?”

  “She’s a farmer’s kid whose parents probably couldn’t speak English. She discovers that she’s bright and slips into the academic world where she doesn’t really belong. She’s terrified of failure and marries a husband who will protect her from failure. He doesn’t, because finally he can’t; naturally she blames him for not being omnipotent like she thought he was.”

  “Maybe you should be the social scientist.”

  “Just common sense,” she dabbed at her eyes. “I feel so sorry for her even if she is a stupid little fool.”

  “And me?”

  “You?”

  “The verdict on me?”

  “Oh, not guilty on all counts,” she patted my hand. “What else? Now let’s order supper.”

  Leo

  “That isn’t big band music is it?” I asked my date.

  “Sure it is,” she grinned. “Glen Miller. ‘Moonlight Serenade.’ Romantic enough for you? Lots of old folks here at the Club on weekends. Want to dance?”

  “Wouldn’t it create great scandal?”

  “Probably.” She stood up and took my hand. “So what? Everyone knows that you academics don’t have any morals anyway…you’re as good a dancer as you ever were.” She buried her head against my shoulder.

  “I was never a good dancer, Jane.”

  She looked up in surprise. “Sure you were.”

  All right, you don’t argue.

  We danced through three numbers, close together like young lovers. Like the young lovers we had been the last time we had danced at the Club in 1948. Angie had been my date that night; Jane was Phil’s.

  She was still dazzling, lines on her face and neck notwithstanding. She smelled of spring, lilacs and orange blossoms.

  “Did I say erotically attractive?”

  “Um-hum.”

  “Can I add to that observation?”

  “Um-hum.”

  “I almost said ‘Intellectually interesting’…”

  “That would be nice.”

  “But that sounds too professorial.”

  “Um-hum.”

  “Though it’s certainly true…so I’ll say ‘an utterly fascinating woman.’ Is that acceptable?”

  That was, I suppose, seduction talk, though I meant it as absolute truth.

  “Um-HUM!” She drew me closer, her breasts firm against my chest and pressed her head more vigorously on my shoulder. “You’re as sweet as you ever were.”

  I did not dare contest her statement. But no one had ever thought me sweet in my youth. Shy, silent, morose perhaps, at least on occasion. Mean and stubborn surely. But hardly sweet.

  I plunged recklessly ahead with a professorial pontification. “A woman really doesn’t begin to be interesting till she’s forty. Not that it necessarily happens even then. I hasten to add that most men don’t become interesting either.”

  She withdrew her head from my shoulder and looked at me suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

  “By that time,” I raved on, “a woman is confident of her sexual appeal and skill, she’s had enough experience to understand what life is about and how really inferior in a charming sort of way men are. She knows how to manipulate a man so his only response to her is obedient adoration. She has faced a certain amount of tragedy and comprehends the dark dimensions of life. Source of life that she is, however, she knows that the power within her is stronger than death… oh, yes, she’s very interesting and will only become more so.”

  The band stopped playing. We stood on the floor hand in hand waiting for the next number.

  “I’m not sure,” she studied me intently, “whether that’s wisdom or bullshit.”

  “A bit of both. You see, however, how the conquest of a woman like that is one of the world’s greatest challenges.”

  The band began again and we returned to the dance.

  “ ‘Blue of the Evening,’ 1942,” she murmured. “You speak from experience about conquest of such a woman?”

  “Certainly not. Professors usually don’t.”

  “It’s an experience you’d like to have?”

  “In theory. In practice such an opportunity would scare the living daylights out of me.”

  “I doubt it,” she sniffed impatiently. “What about those beauti
ful women we knew around here when we were growing up. How many of them became interesting?”

  “Packy’s mom, for sure. Iris Clare. Elizabetta Nicola too, some of the time.”

  “Like Angie is now?”

  “So I’m told.”

  The memory of the four exquisite matrons of those days reduced us to silence—and perhaps some mourning—for the rest of our dance.

  Later, when we were about to leave the Club, she handed me the keys to her Mercedes. “You’d better drive.”

  I had walked over to the Club, expecting that she would drive me back to the Keenans’ after supper.

  “You seem perfectly sober to me.”

  “Two drinks before I came here, one at supper, half a bottle of wine. You drive.”

  I’d had needed only one drink to work up my nerve.

  “All right.”

  “I’m not a drunk, not like my parents or like my brothers used to be.”

  “I wouldn’t think that for a moment.”

  In the Mercedes she asked softly, “Do you still think Phil was responsible for the death of those poor kids?”

  There it was, the haunting question, the monumental barrier between us, much higher and thicker than my caution and her disillusion with marriage.

  Eileen and Jim Murray were “kids” now—what they had been when they died, part of another generation.

  “Not any more,” I said. “I agree with you. There is no harm in him. He just never grew up.”

  In saying that, I had come to believe it. Even the night before I would not have been so positive. Later that summer I would ask myself the question again.

  During our ride from the Club back to Lake Shore Drive I told her Maggie’s theory about St. John’s night, giving the latter a due reference as befits someone with academic ethics—and a prudent judgment that Jane might have heard the lecture already. I left out any hints that it ought to be Catholic summer for us.

  “I’ve heard that kind of stuff from her too,” she said. “But it’s true isn’t it? We kind of knew all along didn’t we that love was all right and our bodies were all right? I mean with all those ceremonies—First Communion and May Crowning and Midnight Mass and Ash Wednesday and Candlemas day, all those things—we had to believe that creation was good.”

  “Too bad they didn’t tell us.”

  She thought for a moment. “Maybe they were afraid we’d enjoy love too much.”

  “If man and woman are supposed to be God for one another, maybe we would have.”

  “It’s a shame all right, Lee. Our lives might have been different. I don’t mean yours and mine, I mean everyone’s.”

  “Yeah.”

  For the rest of the ride we were silent, each of us perhaps living with the memories of our failures—to one another and to those we had married. We were two lonely people, mournful about our mistakes, hungry for affection, mindful of the passion that had once existed between us, conscious of our mortality. Vulnerable, anxious, attracted, frightened. Moreover her inhibitions, if there were any, had been relaxed by the “drink taken” as the Irish would have said. The wind had died, the night air was soft and gentle. The smell of summer still filled the night—or was it only her perfume? Her children had all returned to the city because of the storm that was promised that evening.

  I could have her. Now. Tonight. After thirty years of waiting. What would be more natural than that we should fall into each other’s arms? Faint heart never won fair lady. I am congenitally fainthearted.

  “Are you sure you can walk down the road to the Keenans’?”

  We were standing, hesitant and awkward, both wondering what would come next, at the door to her house, the old “Devlin House,” the same granite “Old House” just beyond the edge of the village from whose yard I had been banned thirty years before. Now I had been permitted to drive through the open gate without comment. In the dim light of the lamp over her back door I noted banks of white peonies around the foundation of the house and a couple of blooming crab apple trees.

  “I need the exercise and it’s a lovely night.” I almost added that it was a night as soft as a lover’s touch. That would have done it for both of us.

  “It is that.” She hesitated, key to her house in hand. “Were you looking for me the night we met a couple of weeks ago?”

  “Of course…and you?”

  She laughed. “Naturally.”

  I put my hands on her shoulders, disturbing the symbolic scarf. “You and I will have many things we must discuss before this summer is over, Jane.”

  I rested my thumbs on the tops of her breasts.

  “I know that.” Her eyes filled with tears and she sagged under my hands. “I know that, Lee.”

  We kissed each other, at first affectionately, not passionately, and then our lips lingered together, as if savoring a familiar and intoxicating taste. She was crying and I was close to it.

  She broke away and slipped into the house, closing the door softly.

  If she had invited me into the house at that moment, I would have accepted the invitation.

  She did not, so I walked down the road to the Keenans’.

  As I say, congenitally fainthearted.

  Leo

  The next day I did what professors do best, I analyzed. A good analysis is usually at least as satisfying as action, sometimes more so.

  The storms that had threatened the night before had finally arrived and chased summer away. The sun ventured out of the clouds on occasion, looked at the gray, angry Lake, and darted away for its own protection. The longest day of the year dawned cold and gray. So much for Maggie Ward Keenan and her Catholic summer of warmth and love. I woke up with a mild buzz from the drink and I suppose from the woman. So I went down to the “ballroom” (under usual circumstances a comfortable parlor with TV, stereo, and a gorgeous view of the Lake), glanced at the surging gray waters, and opened the previous year’s minutes of faculty senate meetings—best cure for insomnia since sheep—and began to analyze, not the faculty senate, but what had happened in the previous twenty-four hours.

  I was the provost of a very great University. In many ways, as we would say, the best in the country, and I must therefore as a matter of strict obligation create around myself an atmosphere consonant with that role. She had not, as far as I knew, even graduated from college. She administered a travel agency of all things. I was sure it was a high quality travel agency, but still she would feel very ill at ease in the culture of the High Academy with its brilliant conversations and its profound and often allusive knowledge. Wouldn’t she?

  My daughter bounded into the parlor of the Keenan house where I was alone with faculty senate and my memories. She was dressed in yellow oilskins from head to toe.

  “Sensational day for sailing,” she pirouetted around the room. “Totally sensational.”

  “A little dangerous?”

  “Twelve knot winds? Don’t be silly, Daddy. It’s perfect.”

  “So long as you’re careful.”

  Pompous professor discharging parental responsibilities.

  “Did you have a nice time with that cute Mrs. Clare last night?”

  A question that pretended to be innocent when it was anything but innocent.

  “I wouldn’t call her cute.”

  “I would…well, how did it go?”

  “Not very far.”

  “Daddy!”

  “Actually, we had a very nice time.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing.”

  “I heard you danced with her.”

  “Your pompous old father dance with a beautiful woman? Slander! I bet they told you it was totally old music. Gruesome.”

  “Huh…” My child was not amused, definitely not. “I saw Mrs. Clare again today. She was out running. She’s really dazzling, Daddy. Sweet and gorgeous and like totally intelligent.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I mean really attractive.” She stopped and hovered over me, shedding her oilskins i
n the process.

  “Laura, you sound like you’re trying to make me a voyeur in the woman’s locker room at the Club.”

  She threw back her head and chortled gleefully. “Daddy! You are like totally funny!”

  “If there is one thing, my dear, that a provost of a great university cannot be, it is even partially funny.”

  She thought that was pretty funny too.

  “Well, she does have wonderful boobs!”

  “I need not enter in fantasy a woman’s shower room to make that determination.”

  More laughter, slightly ribald, from my sophisticated sixteen year old.

  Then she became serious. “I’ve met her daughter, you know, Lucianne.”

  “Yes.”

  “I kind of like her.”

  “I would have described her as a brat.”

  “All teenagers are brats, some of the time.”

  “D’accord as they say in the language of your school.”

  I would not divert her from her assessment of the Clare family by my feeble attempts at wit.

  “She’s had a hard time.”

  “So have lots of kids.”

  “We got along all right. She kind of likes me too.”

  I wondered where this line of chatter was going. It turned out that it wasn’t going anywhere. Whatever point she had intended to make, she had made.

  “Do you ever notice Mrs. Clare’s eyes, Daddy?” She sat down next to me, hands on her knees.

  “Brown in color, I believe.”

  “You know, she’s always so energetic and enthusiastic, like you know someone bubbling with joy?”

  “Always was that way, as best as I can recall.”

  “Until you look at her eyes. Daddy, they are so sad, the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen.”

  I thought my heart would break. Exit analyst, re-enter lover.