Summer at the Lake

by Andrew M. Greeley

  I was not all that clumsy, not towards the end of those early summers at the Lake. But she boycotted the golf course, though not the tennis courts or the swimming pool. Although she never quite said it, she would not play there even with the Keenans because the Club rejected her family’s membership application every summer (until after 1950 when, by common agreement of the “old-timers,” as Maggie Ward Keenan later told me, all standards were abandoned).

  She rarely mentioned her family and we almost never saw them. They were busy, as my own mother suggested, staying out of the war and making money.

  She also taught me how to kiss, an activity in which I was completely untrained. I became if not a proficient kisser at least a determined and not unsuccessful one. I set about those summers to conquer every reasonably attractive girl to whom I could find access. It must have been at least 1944 or maybe even 1945 because among my conquests were Angie Nicola and Eileen Murray, both younger than we were and I can’t imagine trying to kiss an eighth grade girl.

  I encountered little more than token resistance in these amorous adventures. Now looking back in embarrassment, I realized that among the young women at the Lake a kiss, especially a passionate one, from Leo Kelly had become a mark of social success.

  Jane must have known about these infidelities of mine, but she never complained, perhaps because she was proud of her pupil.

  I was careful not to engage in these escapades when Packy was around. I’m sure he knew about them—his sister Joan was one of my failures—but he never mentioned them. Many years later I asked him why he had not remonstrated with me.

  “None of my business,” he grinned wickedly. “Besides by contemporary standards, all you guys were capable of were pretty tepid explorations.”

  “Tepid?”

  “Yeah…did you confess them?”

  “Sometimes…couldn’t get a straight answer about whether they were sinful.”

  “You now think they were? God would reject you because of them?”

  “Course not…part of growing up.”

  “I wish that was all we had to worry about these days.”

  “You didn’t mind my trying to make out with Joan?”

  “I figured it might be good for her.”

  I never mentioned my erotic encounters to the spiritual director at the seminary. If I had, they might have asked me to leave long before I finally did.

  Yet it was not for women that I left when I finally did. And over the seminary authority’s protest, not with their sigh of relief.

  Jane, clad almost always in tennis whites when she wasn’t in a delectable (as it seemed then) two-piece swimsuit, was the unquestioned leader of our little band of “wild kids” as we came to be defined by the adults who heard our noisy laughter and found our beer bottles on their lawns in the morning.

  Only after my Pentecost conversation with Maggie did I realize that her leadership was in fact an assumption of personal responsibility for all of us—even to insisting that we all wear the Carmelite brown scapulars around our necks, so that we wouldn’t die without a priest.

  “Or,” she said in the interests of strict orthodoxy, “that you won’t need one. Either way God takes care of you.”

  She was younger than some of us and a girl, but by virtue of her energy and enthusiasm—combined, as these qualities were, with her startling beauty—she still was boss. When she said, “Lets…” we all fell into line without question.

  “Let’s swim in Birdbrain’s pool.”

  “Let’s sail in Amadon’s boat.”

  “Let’s give Lunkhead another tennis lesson.”

  “Let’s roast marshmallows on Goofy’s grill and sing songs from ‘Oklahoma’ all night long.”

  “Let’s take Angie down to the Rose Bowl and buy her a malt that is as big as she is. It’s her birthday.”

  “Let’s make Eileen sing for us, she’s better than all of us put together.”

  She blessed the males of the group with nicknames that questioned our intelligence, our good taste, and out ability to take care of ourselves. None of us minded.

  Packy—“Amadon”—was assigned the role of senior confidant, the one with whom she would have serious and private discussions. Already he had become her personal priest. Vociferous and comic at gatherings of seminarians, Pack was usually quiet and reflective with our summer crowd, as though he were an anthropologist from another world watching closely the strange culture of the local natives.

  Phil Clare—“Birdbrain”—was her “date,” for whatever fancy parties or dances might become available. Big, handsome, blond, and overweight even then, Phil was likable and harmless—and in truth not very bright. He was three years older than us, a Fenwick grad in 1943 bound for Notre Dame instead of the army because of weak eyes. I noted that his eyes were not so bad that he had to wear glasses on the golf course at the Club, where he spent all his time when he wasn’t with us.

  He was already a prodigious consumer of beer and even more of a loudmouth, albeit an innocent one, after his second bottle. He and Jim Murray introduced beer into our group. The rest of us, however, were afraid to drink any until Jane reached for her bottle.

  Eileen and Angie, a year younger than us and “too young” to drink, carefully imitated Jane’s drinking, which never exceeded one bottle, save on very hot nights. Packy limited himself to one bottle, regardless.

  As for me, Jane made my limit clear: “Lunkhead, no more than two bottles or you’ll be so high that you’ll fly back to Chicago.”

  It was solid advice. Son of two abstainers, I heard a buzz halfway through the second bottle. My capacity has since increased.

  In those days I consoled myself that the only reason she dated Phil was that she would not be welcome at the Club dances or in the homes of the rich unless she was in the company of Doctor Clare’s only child, spoiled only child I might have said to Packy.

  “Green eyes has green eyes,” Packy guffawed, permitting himself one of his occasional epigrams.

  I kept my jealousy in check by reminding myself of Phil’s remark after a dance at the Club.

  “Devlin doesn’t put out much, does she?”

  “Frigid,” I replied, calumniating my love.

  Jane and I were at best tolerated by the affluent people who lived in the “Old Houses,” I felt, with a fine sense of self-pity, she because she was so pretty and I because I was a friend of Tom Keenan’s son. In fact, my self-pity was wasted. Adults were immune to social class differences among our crowd. Even when they learned that “that gorgeous young woman” was a Devlin, they were not prepared to hold it against her.

  “She’s such a lively child and so sweet.”

  The silent implication was that she was so unlike her family.

  Whether Jane felt she was on the fringes I did not know. She never invited the rest of us to her house, however.

  It was to the pool next to Doctor Clare’s big Victorian house that we would flee on hot afternoons when the Lady Jane (as I called her) determined that the waves in the Lake were too high for our late afternoon frolic. The pool was shielded from the Lake by evergreen trees and built in a classical decor with nude statues and fountains and columns with doric capitals.

  “Looks like the decline of the Roman empire to me,” I whispered to Packy.

  “Decline and fall,” he replied. “With Mrs. Clare around, maybe after the fall.”

  We did not seem to disturb Phil’s svelte blonde mother who reclined on her chaise lounge in a white strapless suit, sipping on a martini, next to a fountain in which stood a mostly nude granite Greek maiden. (Well, she might not have been a maiden, as far as I knew.) She was always half-tuned but never more than half-tuned. Packy was the only one to whom Iris McDonnell Clare spoke, perhaps because he was the only one whose name she could remember.

  “It’s so nice, Patrick, to see you and Philip and your little friends having so much fun.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Pack would say with a perfectly straight face.

>   “Great ass on that woman, huh?” Jim Murray asked me.

  “Pretty good tits too,” I agreed.

  “What are you two whispering about?” Jane would demand furiously—she tolerated no secrets in our little gang.

  “Dirty boy talk, Milady,” I would reply.

  “Stop it!” She would splash us angrily; and as boys that age have done ever since the species discovered swimming, we would strive to dunk her. I doubt that there have been many young women in the history of the species who fought back with greater strength and determination.

  We would be distracted from these efforts only by Mrs. Clare’s departure from poolside, an exercise in bodily movements as she rose from her couch and donned her robe (left open) which would distract a male of any age.

  “Let’s go get a sundae,” Jane announced climbing out of the pool and grabbing a towel. “I’m hungry.”

  Did I really love Jane even then? Was there more than just exploration and experimentation in our kisses? Eventually there surely was, a lot more. But in the early forties while the War, hardly noticed, rolled on in such strange places as Guadalcanal and El Alamein and Stalingrad and Anzio and Normandy and Saipan did I love her even then?

  I don’t know. For all the rich details in my memory I can’t answer that question. I know that she had become a friend and I enjoyed being with her. Where else, I might well ask today, does love begin?

  So the memories flood back—sweat, sand, Coca Cola, and eventually beer; hot days and dark, humid nights, popcorn, a dangerously tilting dinghy, warm waves; the jukebox, war songs that we didn’t associate with fighting and dying like “Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me” and “There’ll be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover,” and “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” and “I Left my Heart at the Stage Door Canteen”; blistered feet, hot dogs covered with mustard, the pungent aroma of young bodies, the taste of dank air, soft and willing lips, firm young breasts.

  And Jane.

  My most powerful and poignant memory is of the dark. City boy that I was, I did not know night. At the Lake the immense oaks reduced starlight and even moonlight to a faint glow. The occasional patch of light in a window during the week and the dim, leaf-obscured streetlamps only added to the mysterious peace of the night. The summer smells, lake, beach, oak trees, garbage, were particularly intense in the dark and seemed to hang immobile on the curtains of humid air.

  And Jane and I would be together, hand in hand, walking down Lake Shore Drive in the village and turning into the unpaved road to the Old Houses, silent ourselves in the enveloping silence, straining to hear a freight train in the distance, utterly alone in a world that was ours and only ours. As the years slipped away, we were more content to hold hands in the silence and required fewer kisses and caresses. Or maybe the physical affection was less important.

  I cannot remember what we said, if we said much of anything at all. I remember only feelings of overwhelming tenderness, the like of which I would never experience again.

  I assume we said that we loved one another and meant it, though in the early forties we could have only the vaguest notion of what love was and were in fact enjoying an adolescent crush, transient, flimsy, ephemeral.

  Perhaps.

  Or perhaps even in the summer of 1943 the two of us were already caught up in the love of each of our lives, an ember that still smolders, an ember in the ashes waiting for someone to pour gasoline on it.

  I would learn what real darkness was like only in Korea. It was cold not warm, hell not an antechamber of heaven.

  I also recall vividly the lust of those times for Mrs. Keenan’s friends, the women who watched (with I thought notable lack of interest) from the pier the day of my first arrival. In those matrons, as I now realize, one might find the origins of the mystery that still haunts me.

  I don’t know when I first became conscious of the mystery, but it was before the accident in 1948. Very early, on the first day when I was able to take my eyes off of Packy’s mother to ogle the other three on the pier, I realized dimly that something was wrong.

  I still am not quite sure what it was.

  Leo

  “What’s wrong with them, Packy?”

  “Who?”

  “Whom.”

  He nudged me with a sharp elbow. “You’d make a great English teacher.”

  I think it was the June of 1944. The car radio was playing “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis,” Allied troops had landed in Normandy. It seemed that the War would go on for a long time. I was worrying about whether I ought to stay in the seminary. I was uncertain that I had a vocation to the priesthood and I didn’t want to use the seminary as a draft deferment. Packy and I were driving toward the Lake in the bulky, chunky LaSalle that seemed now to be his car.

  “Our crowd’s parents.”

  “Oh, them!” Packy shifted uneasily.

  “Yeah.”

  “Too much money and too little sex.”

  “Especially the women.”

  He didn’t take his eyes from the road.

  “Especially the women.”

  “You read too many novels,” Packy laughed. “What good does all that reading do you? How much money will it help you to make?”

  I felt my face grow warm. Packy was kidding me again about Jane.

  “If I leave the seminary, it won’t be because of her,” I replied uneasily.

  “You’re thinking of leaving?” His voice was casual, too casual.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Bing Crosby filled the silence with “Toora Loora Loora.”

  Although she and I lived in the same parish I had seen her only a couple of times and then from a distance during the school year. At the Lake we were constant companions in public and passionate lovers in secret—though only for a few weekends and maybe the week before Labor Day. At home we were strangers. At the Lake, away from my mother’s close supervision, I became another person. If Jane thought the transformation was odd, she did not say so. Perhaps she was as eager to hide our love from her family as I was to hide it from mine.

  I didn’t know whether she saw Phil Clare or not during the school year though I jealously assumed that she did. After all, I reasoned grimly, she went to Trinity and he had attended Fenwick before he went off to Notre Dame and his family moved from River Forest (which was on the West Side) to Lake Forest (which was on the North Side of the City and was the most exclusive of Chicago suburbs). Friendly enough with me at the Lake, indeed very friendly, Phil never did seem to realize that I lived in the same parish he did, even when he saw me coming out of church after Sunday Mass.

  Our conversation ended.

  I was uneasy at the thought that old people made love—and the Nicolas, Murrays, and Clares were by definition old. None of this was any of my business. Yet there was something strange about the three handsome couples, a tension I had sensed the first day at the Keenan house when Mrs. Keenan introduced me to her three friends who were lolling on the pier, women who were bored at best by their own children and couldn’t care less about one more noisy adolescent.

  I recall the day now, a vivid and erotic first impression of how the Catholic rich lived at the Lake on a summer day during the War. Giddy, slightly tipsy, high-pitched conversation that ended abruptly when Mary Anne Keenan brought us down to their freshly painted, brilliantly white pier next to their boathouse—also freshly painted. Half empty martini glasses, suntan lotion, white pier furniture, a big umbrella, a faint scent of alcohol, and lots of pampered womanly flesh: Iris Clare, sleek and trim in a strapless outfit; Elizabetta Nicola, a perfect little figurine in a daring (for then) black two-piece swimsuit; and Martha Murray, lush and earthy in a gray garment that was as much corset as it was swimsuit. Unlike Packy’s mother the others showed no sign of having been in the water. Their swimming garb was for display, not for use.

  Dazzled by the scene—which would have made an excellent if faintly satirical painting—and eager to escape from it l
est my hot face reveal my lustful thoughts, I still felt even then that there were strange emotions leaping back and forth among the three women.

  Sexual emotions at that; and of the sort that were beyond my youthful comprehension.

  In retrospect I realize that much of the tension might have been the result of the fact that three beautiful women at the height of their sexual powers were living most of the summer without men. Their husbands would join them at the summer house on Friday night or perhaps even late Saturday afternoon and return to Chicago on Sunday evening. Not much intimacy.

  Packy’s father usually drove up on Thursday evening and returned on Monday morning. Lawyer’s hours he would joke. Four nights provided a lot more opportunity for love I would later understand.

  However, most women in summer resorts lived without their husbands for five or six nights of the week and they did not seem to be driven by the demons I sensed in Mrs. Keenan’s three friends.

  All three families were rich beyond my imagination, second and third generation wealth that had been untouched by the Great Depression and that was growing rapidly because of the War. Their huge rambling “Old Houses,” Gothic, Victorian, Georgian, and Dutch Colonial, were on the top of hills with neatly tended lawns rolling down to the Lake shore and their piers—at each one of which bobbed an ancient and during the war rarely used powerboat. There were at least three servants at each house, all of them white, and at the Clares and the Nicolas a black chauffeur. Doctor Clare insisted on living in the old family home (built by his grandfather in the 1890s long before the bungalow belt invaded the area) in our neighborhood, before he moved to River Forest and then Lake Forest. The Nicolas and the Murrays were from Kenilworth, the most affluent of Chicago suburbs. Their daughters attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart and their sons Loyola Academy, which were the best in Catholic high schools. They drove Packards and Cadillacs, wore expensive clothes, traveled to Florida in the winter and crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary before the War.

  Doctor Clare, a surgeon with a national reputation, was chief of staff at Passavant Hospital, a third generation successful Irish Catholic doctor who had made it into the medical establishment. A short slender man with a pencil mustache, weak chin, and long brown hair, he was always pleasant, a well-groomed and impeccably dressed M.D. with a flawless bedside manner. He spoke to everyone, even his son’s friends, with the bland good humor that, I imagine, he would have used in the room of a terminal cancer patient.