Summer at the Lake

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “She’s had a hard life, Laura.”

  “Yeah, I know.” My daughter rose and drifted vaguely toward the door. “Almost as hard as yours.”

  I waited till I heard her opening the fridge in the kitchen and reached for the phone book. I punched in Jane’s number, but there was no answer. I tried to phone her intermittently the rest of the day until I finally gave up on the weather and on the phone and, bidding the Keenans goodbye, drove back to my apartment near the University. I took the route through Warburg, which would bring me by Jane’s house at the end of the hill. I even stopped and peered through the gate, hoping she might materialize. Neither she nor her car were in the driveway.

  I had missed an opportunity.

  An opportunity for what?

  Precise object discreetly unspecified.

  But the summer, our gratuitous second summer, our warm and sunny Catholic summer in which we were to become sacraments of God for each other, was young and there would be other opportunities, would there not?

  Jane

  Head still aches. Not as bad. Maybe I’ll sit in the whirlpool and imagine that he’s with me. Stop that! I didn’t see him while I was running. Met his daughter. Very friendly kid. She was with Lucy. They seem to get along. Strange combination. He hasn’t called. I won’t call him. Well, not today anyway. I suppose he will have to figure out what happened when poor Jim and Eileen died. Knowing him, he’ll want to put everything in order. I won’t let him get away this time like I did last time. Even if I have to be shameless. What did the people at the Club think of us last night? I bet the tongues were wagging! And the phones ringing this morning. A lot of them probably thought we looked cute and it was high time I had a little fun. My brothers will call me before the day is over. They’ll be real careful because they’ll remember how I blew up at them when they tried to talk me out of the divorce. But they will think it is scandalous for me to be dining and dancing with an old lover when my divorce isn’t final and I haven’t made much progress on the annulment process yet. I’ll hint that we did make love. That will drive them up the wall, them and their goody-two-shoes wives. They’re nice women all right and they cleaned up the family act, but so proper! I suppose I should pack the things I’ll be bringing home. Sleeping pills? Well, I might need one some night. Please don’t let my grace slip away again. Why shouldn’t I sit in the whirlpool and daydream after I’m finished packing?

  Leo

  “Maggie,” I knocked at the door of the attic room she used as her office when she was at the Lake, “can I interrupt with a serious question?”

  She looked up from her Radio Shack TRSDOS computer, a slight frown on her forehead. Then she smiled. “Sure, this article is dull. One of my rainy day articles.”

  She was wearing gray slacks and a matching sweater, a perfect fashion picture even in her rainy day work room. She waved me to a chair, almost as though I were a patient.

  “I never asked you this before: Who tampered with the brakes in the old Lasalle the day Maria was born? I had them fixed; someone else unfixed them.”

  She turned away and stared out the tiny window; rain was drumming against it. Nothing worse than intermittent driving rain on a summer Sunday.

  “I don’t know, Lee,” she shook her head disconsolately. “I knew something terrible happened up there before Mary Anne told me. I had a hard time with Maria—but she’s certainly worth it isn’t she—and I wasn’t feeling up to par.”

  Small woman that she was, Maggie had trouble with all her kids and they were all worth it, including the child she had lost to crib death when she was seventeen, before she met Jerry Keenan and came to Chicago.

  “It was all confusion in my head,” Maggie continued. “Has been ever since…. Do you really think you have to solve it before you win the fair matron?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I wish I could tell you that it’s not important any more.”

  “Packy says that.”

  She nodded solemnly.

  “I don’t even know where to start.”

  “And it could be dangerous not to simply let the dead bury their dead?”

  “You think it might be, Maggie?”

  “Yes,” she said simply. “Though I don’t know why. Maybe because everyone is so mysterious about it. But you might have to do it anyway. Like that poor Proust person, you may have to rewrite the past to make sense out of the present.

  “He didn’t think that’s what he was doing.”

  She shrugged her tiny shoulders. “But of course he was.”

  Call me Marcel.

  Patrick

  They both called me on the day after the weekend. The two of them kidded with me about “conflict of interest” but in such a tone of voice that I knew they didn’t want me out of the picture. Their accounts of the weekend were similar, herself’s far more sensitive and insightful than his, but that figures.

  If they only knew about my real conflict of interest…

  Jane trusts me more than she trusts him; she tells me things she’d never share with a husband; she even admits strong sexual desires for men since she dumped Phil.

  Does she desire me? She didn’t say she did, but wasn’t there a hint of that? Perhaps if I had raised the issue?

  I’m thinking like a fool!

  They’re still in love, an adolescent passion recurring in adult bodies, not that any of us ever banish adolescence for long. A new possibility offered them for this “second summer” as they both called it. How will they cope?

  What a strange mix of hero and wimp Leo is. Wait till he finds out that she is writing a novel or a memoir or a journal about growing up during the forties. About him, unless I miss my guess.

  “Yeah, Keenan here… Benedetto, comme sta? Yeah, I’m all right I guess. How’s the scheme coming to get rid of our nut case Cardinal? What’s the Roman gossip?”

  “The matter has already been settled discreetly the way such matters should be settled. Soon there will be an Apostolic Administrator. You can guess who it will be, I’m sure. The present man will lose all his powers. The Pope is sending Baggio to inform him. Baggio, as you know, chaired the commission that investigated him. The present man will resign for reasons of health.”

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  “Pardon me, Patricio?”

  “You’ll have to carry him out at gunpoint. I hope the man on the fifth floor is more ready for a fight than he usually is.”

  Silence.

  “Let us hope it does not come to that, my friend.”

  It will come to that.

  I’ve had a peculiar priesthood, one that many of my fellow priests envy. I worked for five years in a new suburban parish on the southwest side of the city and had the time of my life with the young families there. I was not particularly happy when the man that was then Cardinal, a tall, soft-spoken, extremely intelligent man, summoned me to his office.

  “Pat, the seminary authorities have described you as stubborn, contentious, and arrogant.”

  “They ought to know, Your Eminence.”

  He smiled ever so slightly. “They say you have a first-class mind but you are proud of your intellectual abilities, and prefer your own opinion to that of the Church.”

  “You could make a case for that interpretation.”

  “They say your problem is that your family is very rich and you’ve been spoiled.”

  “We’re professional class, Eminence, at the most. The Rector and the Prefect of Discipline don’t know from rich. They’re what we would call Shanty Irish.”

  “And you’re” he actually grinned, “uh, curtain?”

  “You mean Lace Curtain. No, we’re what they call Country Club Irish, out of one bog and into another.”

  We both laughed.

  “I need someone who can think for himself,” he sobered up instantly. “The Church is going to face some tough moral questions in the years to come, especially in the matter of sexuality. I want better advice on moral theology than I�
�m presently getting—a comment that I trust you will keep in confidence.”

  “Of course, Eminence.” I shifted uneasily in my chair, not sure what was coming but not liking it. “I’m not a radical. My problems in the seminary were about freedom not about theology. Yet I have to say candidly that five years in our parish have convinced me that we have to change our birth control teaching.”

  “Ah?”

  “We give our young laypeople three choices—impossibly large families, no sex, or no sacraments. It’s a cruel choice.”

  “You think so?” He rolled his pen carefully across his desk, watching its movements rather than my face.

  “If marriage is a sacrament, husbands and wives should make love often so as to reflect the constant passionate love of God for his people.”

  “The natural law?”

  “I don’t see—and neither do a lot of people in my parish—how it’s natural for husbands and wives to sleep in separate bedrooms.”

  “You convinced me, Pat, that you’re the man for the job. I’m asking you whether you will go to Rome to study moral theology for me. I will need your advice in years to come.”

  “But the Jesuits teach morality at the seminary.”

  “Not necessarily forever. It’s up to you, Pat. I won’t insist. I’m asking, not telling.”

  “I understand.”

  “Take a few days or even a few weeks to think about it.”

  “Not necessary, Eminence. Count me in.”

  Neither of us knew what “in” would mean. He would be dead in six years to be replaced by a fat, stupid monster. I would be caught up in the excitement of the Vatican Council and the tragedy of the birth control encyclical.

  The Thirties

  Jane

  The little girl and the little boy stood on the corner waiting for the Good Humor truck. I’m the little girl of course. They kept their distance from one another. The little boy, his red hair glowing brightly in the summer sun, pretended the little girl wasn’t there. She ought not be there because this wasn’t her corner. She had no business hanging around his corner. They were no more than eight so it must have been no later than 1936, perhaps even 1935. Milk trucks and garbage wagons were still horse-drawn. Only a few blocks from where they lived the streetlights were still gas lamps, lighted each evening by a lamplighter (though extinguished automatically the next morning). Peddlers still shouted “Rags-OLARN” in the alleys. On some hot summer nights the smell of the stockyards, many miles away, would drift in on the wind. “Three Little Pigs” was a favorite movie with all the kids and in the school yard they would shout, “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll BLOW your house down!” Grown-ups would hum, “The Music Goes Round and Round and Comes Out Here!” At the Lake they would show “Girl of the Limberlost” at the hall every summer. The kids knew some of the lines and facial expressions by heart. The pool at Charles Dickens Playground was where everyone went in the afternoons. Or so that time reappears in memory. Probably the sounds and the sights and the smells of different years bunch together as the little girl, now an “old woman” recalls that day when the Good Humor truck turned the corner at four-fifteen just as it had done every day in the summer since the beginning of time. Or so it seemed to her. To me. Whatever.

  The truck would arrive at her corner ten minutes later. But the cute little boy with red hair wouldn’t be waiting at her corner.

  Careful, cautious person that she was even then, she had scouted him out that summer and knew that he was usually the first one on the corner waiting for the truck. But only rarely did he buy an ice cream bar.

  That, she thought, was strange. Why wait for an ice cream man if you did not buy any ice cream?

  Sure enough, right on time, the white truck, bells ringing and music box playing, turned the corner and parked under a giant old oak tree. Kids swarmed out of the houses and crowded around the truck. The ice cream man, who seemed very old then, but was probably only in his early twenties, joked with the kids, calling them all by name.

  “Are you going to buy an ice cream bar?” she asked the little boy, even then not afraid to be bold.

  He shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged, as if he were not interested in ice cream.

  “Why wait for the truck if you don’t want ice cream?”

  He shrugged again.

  “I have two nickels.” She held out her hand. “I’ll buy two ice cream bars.”

  This was part of her carefully prepared strategy to trick the quiet little boy into a conversation. In fact she had four more nickels in the pocket of her skirt, but that was beside the point.

  “No,” he said flatly, his green eyes sparking fire.

  “I can do whatever I want to,” she announced, proud that she had coaxed a word out of him. Even if it were only one word and that one negative.

  You didn’t get much choice in ice cream bars in those days—vanilla with chocolate, chocolate with chocolate, and orange ice. A hedonist even then, she bought two chocolate with chocolate.

  “Two, Janey?” the Good Humor man laughed at her. “Really hungry today, huh?”

  “I like chocolate,” she replied, honestly enough.

  “Not even at your own corner?”

  She felt her face warm. She did not want him to know about her plot.

  “Couldn’t wait for the chocolate.”

  The little boy was sitting on the curb, watching the frenzy around the Good Humor truck. She sat next to him.

  “S’ter says it’s a sin to waste food.”

  He grunted.

  “I can’t eat two chocolate bars.”

  He grunted again.

  She held the bar out to him.

  He looked at it, looked at her, and then took the bar. His piquant, funny little face lighted up in a smile.

  “Thanks. I probably could eat two chocolate bars if I had to.”

  “Well, you only get one.”

  They both laughed and sat down to the serious task of demolishing their treats.

  The next day he was waiting for her.

  “I have two nickels today.” He held out a grubby little paw as proof. “My turn.”

  She had plenty of nickels but was smart enough not to argue.

  “That’s very nice.”

  He grinned impishly, a grin she would never forget.

  So he bought the bars. She thanked him politely.

  “You’re welcome, Jane.”

  “You know my name.”

  “Everyone knows your name.”

  Again, they sat next to each other on the curb, companionably this time, and polished off the ice cream.

  Did they talk to one another? They must have because they were both talkative kids. But her memory fails as she tries to recapture the conversation.

  The next day she was at the corner waiting for Leo and the Good Humor man. The Good Humor man came as he always did. But Leo was not there. He never returned to the corner all summer long.

  Later she would hear that his mother had told him not to play with her. She couldn’t believe that but when she saw him in the school yard in September, he would not talk to her.

  Leo

  The Devlins treated life like it was a barroom in which a brawl was about to erupt.

  The men in the family, father and three sons, were big and heavy with dark black hair, low foreheads, and frowning faces. Even in church on Sunday morning, they clenched their fists and glowered. Ita Devlin, the mother of the family, was a frail looking little woman, very pretty but with thin, tight lips that seemed always ready to erupt in a stinging and obscene denunciation of anyone who stood in the way of her family, especially when she had been drinking.

  “They’re thugs,” my father would say, “rural criminals from County Cork, a disgrace to Ireland, not much better than tinkers.”

  “The woman has the filthiest tongue I’ve ever heard,” my mother would agree. “Monsignor shouldn’t let her in the church on Sunday morning.”


  We were respectable, you see. My parents were not immigrants like Joe and Ita Devlin. They both had graduated from high school. They didn’t have much money during the Great Depression, but my father had a secure job as a clerk at the Pullman Company office building on Michigan Avenue and my mother was an officer in the parish Altar and Rosary Society. Neither of them drank or swore or engaged in barroom brawls. All of their (eventually five) children, of which I was the oldest, would go to college and professional school. I would be the priest in the family, the priest that every Irish and Irish American mother in those times wanted in her family. They did not exactly push me into the seminary. Rather they assumed I would go there, an assumption beyond question because beyond discussion.

  “When you’re a priest, Leo,” mother would say and then add an injunction like, “you certainly will not rush off the altar at the end of Mass like you were in a rush to get to the golf course.”

  I would remain silent in the face of such an injunction. Or perhaps say something like, “I don’t play golf.”

  To which Mom, always requiring the last word, would say, “Priests really shouldn’t play golf. They should do their work and say their prayers.”

  So I was not supposed to be interested in girls. Future priests could not act like other kids.

  Especially a girl whose parents were described to me (not without reason) as “heavy drinkers” and whose brothers were swilling down booze even when they were in eighth grade—a practice not unknown in those days or subsequent days, as much as the good people of the neighborhood would pretend to be shocked each spring when beer bottles appeared on the rectory lawn.

  My parents were handsome folk, he not as pompous as he often sounded and she cheerful and even funny when she was not worried about her kids—which was most of the time. In her wedding picture she is tall and striking and quite self-possessed. The last time I glanced at it I realized how much she looked like Jane—not in specific details but in general shape and posture. The realization frightened me.

  The Devlins were also rich and we were if not quite poor at least impoverished. The Devlins had migrated to America in 1921, one step ahead of gunmen, it was said, from both sides in the Irish Civil War of that time. Their three sons—Herbie, Mickie (for Michael Collins), and Dickie (for Richard Mulcahy, successor as commander of the National Army)—were born in short order after their arrival and then Jane in 1928, the same year as I was born. Even as boys they were frightening—big, mean, hard kids who delighted in beating up on younger and weaker victims—though they usually avoided their victims’ big brothers.