Summer at the Lake

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Phil Clare,” Tom Keenan observed, “is not your ordinary surgeon. He doesn’t think he is God and he doesn’t demand that his family worship him.”

  “He even manages to find time to visit them occasionally,” Mary Anne Keenan observed in a rare burst of sarcasm.

  Astonishingly, Doctor Clare knew who I was. The red hair I suppose.

  “I’m told your father plans to go into real estate after the War, Leo,” he said to me one day while I was waiting outside their grotesque red brick Victorian house to pick up Phil for a tennis game.

  I had heard vague hints of it around the house. My mother was adamantly opposed, afraid that our limited resources would be swallowed up when the Depression returned.

  “If the Depression doesn’t come back.”

  “Oh it won’t come back. There’s a lot of pent-up demand and the money to back it up. Those who are ready for the expansion after the war will make a lot of money.”

  I noticed for the first time that his small blue eyes, shrewd and hard, belied his reassuring bedside manner. Pirate’s eyes.

  “It wasn’t that way in 1920,” I said, continuing my mother’s approved wisdom.

  He laughed and patted my head, “The late forties won’t be the early twenties, count on that.”

  My father did risk that the late forties would be different and changed our family fortunes, though we never did buy a house at the Lake.

  I also noticed that night that Iris’s eyes were as vague as her husband’s were focused. I might have wondered if, despite her slim and appealing loveliness, she was much of a challenge to him.

  Martin Nicola (“Tino” to his wife) seemed to me to be the kind of man who appeared in a Tuscan painting, about which I was learning in my quick visits to the Art Institute—a tall, elegant aristocrat with flashing black eyes who might have been a friend of Lorenzo de’ Medici or Cesare Borgia. His parents were from Lucca in Northern Italy and had settled in Highwood north of Chicago, an enclave of immigrants from Parma and Lucca. They had been almost instantly successful in a restaurant and food supply business that he had inherited and built into a powerful food distribution network.

  “Martin,” Tom Keenan remarked expansively one night after supper, “is not exactly your local fruit peddler. He’s on the board of the Chicago Opera and the Art Institute. And he’s not connected at all to the Outfit—though of course he knows them.”

  “The Outfit,” Packy swallowed half a steak in a single hungry bite, “doesn’t mess with the Lucese. They’re afraid of them.”

  “They sure are. Some sort of racial memory.”

  “Mr. Nicola reminds them of Cesare Borgia,” I said, not looking up from my scoop of mashed potatoes.

  General laughter at the resident comic.

  “Or Niccolo Machiavelli?” Mr. Keenan asked

  “Or Savonarola.”

  “I don’t think, Lee, he’d burn anyone at the stake, but I take your point.”

  “I hope you’re not comparing Mrs. Nicola to Lucrezia Borgia, Leo?” Mrs. Keenan smiled benignly at me.

  “No ma’am. More like Maria D’Este.”

  “I don’t think, my dear,” Tom Keenan barely controlled his laughter, “we want to know who she was. Better that we leave Leo’s fantasy life alone.”

  “For sure,” Jane, who often ate with us, chipped in.

  More general laughter.

  For all of that I would not have wanted “Tino” Nicola as an enemy.

  He had access to a seemingly limitless supply of elegant liquor. “So you like the Barolo wine, Irish?” he would ask me. “Pour him some more, Elizabetta. Perhaps we civilize him, no?”

  We were sitting in the gleaming “sunroom” of their palatial Queen Anne. Old House, surrounded by flowering plants, white wicker chairs and couches, and chattering parrots.

  “Would your parents mind, Leo?” Mrs. Nicola paused over my goblet. “I would not want to offend them.”

  “No ma’am. They taught me never to refuse free booze.”

  Jane guffawed and pushed her goblet in the direction of Mrs. Nicola and the bottle. “Barolo, Leo,” she said primly, “is not booze. Please don’t embarrass us.”

  It seemed a happy house; Angie and her little sister were happy kids who appeared to be immune from parental wrath.

  One hot evening she “borrowed” a bottle of Cord apricot liquor from her father’s cabinet and brought it to a marshmallow roast.

  “My papa says this is wonderful.”

  “Angie!” Packy exploded, “you’ll get in terrible trouble when he finds out.”

  “No, I won’t, Patrick,” she insisted. “I’ll tell him tomorrow and he’ll say at least I have good, if expensive taste.”

  I took the first sip from a paper cup in which it was perhaps a grave sin to put such sublime booze.

  We finished the bottle, with half the credit for this accomplishment belonging to me.

  “Take my hand, Lunkhead,” Jane instructed me later in the evening.

  “Yes, Milady…why?”

  “Because otherwise you won’t find your way back to the Keenans’, maybe not ever.”

  “I’m fine. The only trouble is this squadron of P-47s that is buzzing around in my head.”

  “Look out for that rock!”

  The next day at the tennis court Angie smiled smugly. “I told papa and he said just what I knew he’d say. He asked me if you liked it.”

  “Did Irish like it?” I echoed what I knew her old man had said. “What did you tell him?”

  “I said that Irish was acquiring a little civilization but still had a long way to go.”

  Jane whooped enthusiastically at my humiliation.

  It is still possible, if you have sufficient clout with a liquor dealer, to find an occasional bottle of Cord. I keep one in my office at the University—rather against the rules to tell the truth, and offer a small sip of it, with a conspiratorial wink, to everyone whom we appoint a distinguished professor. If they have the taste to sigh blissfully, I know that besides a scholar we have found ourselves a true humanist.

  James Murray Sr. (father of Jim and Eileen) was perhaps the richest of all. He presided over a brokerage firm in the loop and owned a chemical company that worked three shifts providing unspecified materials to the war effort.

  “Profiteer, James,” Tom Keenan had laughed at him, half-fun, and full earnest, as my mother would have said.

  “Lawyers are doing all right too, Thomas.” Mr. Murray would raise his glass of gin (no martini for him) in salute. “May we all prosper and live long enough to enjoy it.”

  The older Jim Murray, whose grandfather had sold arms to the Union Army during the Civil War was a genial Mick with silver hair and a red face, a handsome if somewhat dissolute-looking man with a loud tenor voice, quick wit and all the charm of a precinct captain who might also be the local undertaker. Oddly enough and despite three generations of wealth, he would have been a fine match for Jane’s father, a touch of the gombeen man in both of them.

  “Cut the cards with him,” I whispered to Jane.

  She giggled. “You bet.”

  He drank too much as did Jim and Eileen’s mother Martha, too much even by the relaxed standards of the wealthy Irish Catholics at the Lake in those days. Jim and Eileen seemed to be following in their parents’ path. The parents, unlike Jim who became even more melancholy after his second beer, were happy drunks. Their laughter and song merely became louder as they progressed along the road to incoherence.

  “How does he ever manage to be so successful on the stock market,” Mrs. Keenan would demand, “when he must have a hangover every morning?”

  “Darned if I know,” her husband shook his head in mystification. “There are not many firms that survived the Crash as well as his did.”

  “Flair, instinct, genetics,” I offered.

  Everyone at the Keenans’ dark oak dinner table looked at me as though I had two heads—though by then they were used to my nutty comments.

&nbs
p; “A thousand years of survival in British misrule,” I continued, slopping up the remnants of my vegetable soup.

  “And when the flair runs dry?” Tom Keenan was watching me intently.

  “Boom,” I imitated with my hand a plane crashing on the table.

  “You could become very dangerous as the years go on, young man.”

  “You’re telling us,” Jane agreed. “Lunkhead sees too much.”

  “He’s harmless,” Packy said in weak defense of me.

  Even the servant hovering behind us (the husband of a married pair who “took care” of the Keenans not only during the summer but all year round) laughed at me.

  “He certainly thinks he’s a ladies’ man,” I was pushing my luck, but what the hell. “Those expensive tailored suits and that cologne, which must cost a hundred dollars a bottle…and he’s always flirting with women, even with children like Milady here.”

  “LUNKHEAD!” that worthy screamed at me.

  “It’s just part of his silly little game, dear,” Mary Anne Keenan reassured me. “He’s harmless.”

  “Don’t bet on it.” Her husband was frowning thoughtfully. “Don’t bet on it…and I wonder, Master Kelly, what you say about us behind our back.”

  “That you have to be the kindest and most generous people in the world to feed hungry urchins like me and this woebegone Devlin child every night.”

  They all laughed, even said urchin whose eyes were already demolishing the cherry pie that was awaiting us for dessert.

  The Keenan house was my parish, you see. In it I could be myself the way I could never be at home.

  Those three families, (four counting the Keenans, which sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t) were the beautiful people of my youth, talented, wealthy, handsome, powerful. They dazzled, fascinated, obsessed me. I knew that I would never be like them, never own a house at the Lake, never live the way they lived. And, I would often add in my thoughts, never be unhappy like some of them seemed to be.

  I remember in particular one formal dance at the Club. It must have been in 1945 because Phil Clare was there in his officer’s uniform—his father having obtained for him some sort of supply officer’s appointment in the medical corps. Phil came no closer to gunfire than Sheboygan Wisconsin—a couple of hours’ drive from the Lake—and hence was available for golf with his father almost every weekend—and for dances at the Club with Jane.

  The War in Europe was over and there was a pause before the invasion of Japan, an attack that it was said would cause at least a million American casualties.

  The war did not seem to be on anyone’s mind, however, that sparkling evening at the Keenans’ cocktail party before the dance. The glasses clinked on the porch illumined for the evening by oil lanterns. The women, their light summer gowns rustling as they moved, giggled softly. The men, in white jackets and red cummerbunds, chatted about the coming “postwar” world. Quiet and unobtrusive dark-skinned servants offered hors d’oeuvres, and a pianist played Mozart and Strauss inside in the parlor.

  I was there, in my own rented summer formal, because Angie Nicola, a gorgeous sixteen year old and hence eligible for the dance, had invited me as her date. Presumably Jane had set that up. Jane was with Phil, naturally, and Jim Murray with a Protestant whose name I don’t remember.

  Packy adhered to the seminary rules and stayed away from the dance and the party before the dance. He did not object, however, to my participation.

  “Do you feel out of place here?” I asked Jane as I offered her two of the four goodies I had speared from a passing silver tray.

  “What are you talking about, Lunkhead?”

  She was the only woman at the party whose shoulders were marred by straps, albeit thin ones. She was also and easily the most beautiful woman in the room, looking older than her seventeen years in a pale white loosely hanging gown belted with a narrow strap, which suggested not so much Rome as Athens. Athena rather than Venus. I wanted desperately to kiss her and knew that I was not likely to get a chance.

  “These people are rich and we’re not.”

  “Not yet,” she lifted her lovely shoulders indifferently. “Besides I think we are.”

  “It’s not our world.”

  “They’re not one bit different from us. Stare at all the boobs in the room if you want, but don’t you dare ruin Angie’s night by sulking.”

  “I won’t.”

  I didn’t.

  “Isn’t she beautiful, Leo?” Angie whispered. “Aren’t they a lovely couple?”

  “Who?”

  “Jane of course, who else? Isn’t she the most beautiful woman in the room?”

  “Adolescent girl child in a high school prom dress that embarrasses her.”

  “Leo,” she slapped my arm lightly in protest against this blasphemy.

  I was watching Doctor Clare and his wife chat with Phil and Jane at the other side of the dance floor. Iris’s dress was the most suggestive at the dance, flaming red and cut almost as low in front as in the back. The doctor doted on his son but I was not sure that he approved of Jane. His keen little eyes saw a coal man’s daughter, a beautiful child perhaps, but not quite what he thought his son deserved as a wife. Iris Clare did not seem to mind, but she didn’t count.

  Or that was what I thought I saw. Or maybe what I read into the scene today with my memories of what I would learn later after I came home from Korea.

  “It is not right,” I drew my lovely little date closer, “to make comparisons among so many lovely women. Devlin’s all right, but you’re not bad yourself.”

  “Thank you, Leo,” she murmured complacently. “I’m glad you like me.”

  In those days I liked them all. But in truth Angie was special.

  Doctor Clare and his wife had a spat later that night, perhaps because she danced with many other men, and as the evening wore on her dancing was abandoned. After a quick and sharp exchange of words between her and the Doctor she stormed out of the Club, Phil in tow.

  He returned a few minutes later, his broad, solid face furrowed in a baffled frown.

  Guided her to the chauffeur, I thought.

  I finally danced with Jane.

  “I’ll take Lunkhead off your hands for this dance,” she said to Angie.

  “Do I have to?” I protested.

  “I want to see whether your dancing has improved.”

  I must have thought I had died and gone to heaven.

  “Yeah,” she said, “you are a little less clumsy than you used to be.”

  “You look very lovely tonight, Jane.”

  “A compliment?” She looked at me suspiciously.

  “An observation.”

  “I bet.”

  “A little family fight?”

  “You mean Doctor and Mrs. Clare?”

  “Whom else?”

  “She’s such a nice woman except when she’s drunk.”

  “And she’s drunk every day by supper time.”

  “Tipsy, not drunk.”

  I took Angie home after the dance—in the Keenan Lasalle, which had by now become the group car—kissed her good night and drove back to our house. The Keenan family seemed to be asleep but I was too tense even to think about sneaking into my guest room (of which there were a half dozen). I strolled down to the pier and stared glumly at the Lake, seeing in its dark waters Jane in her long, gauzelike white gown in which she looked like a Greek goddess, a fairy tale princess, a Roman empress. Even if I left the seminary I would never have a shot at her. Her family, I felt sure, was delighted with Phil Clare’s attentions. He was hopelessly enchanted by her. If he wanted her badly enough, Doctor Clare would not stand in the way of the match.

  They might be married up here instead of back in the parish. They’d have their wedding reception at the Club and I wouldn’t be invited. In four or five more years she would be Mrs. Phil Clare.

  I kicked a stone and walked back to the house.

  It was an accurate enough prediction, although their marriage was
in 1951 instead of 1950. I was not invited because I was dead, Jane had wept at my funeral mass.

  But I wasn’t dead. I was shivering with fever while Phil and Jane were coupling with each other on their marriage bed.

  Nonetheless, for all my self-pity on the pier that night, I still felt that I had been at a scene from a romantic novel—handsome men and beautiful women dancing under the stars while a band played idyllic music and multicolored lights glittered on the waters of the Lake. Maybe a scene from the Great Gatsby? Perhaps, though I don’t think I’d read that yet. More likely a picture from a Kipling story about the summer season at Simla—if that was the place where the Brits in India went for the summer. The men may not have looked like British officers, but the women all seemed mysterious and wonderful, especially the two princesses who were assigned to my care, one of them with skin sufficiently dark that she might be the daughter of a maharajah and the other perhaps the wife or the daughter of an Irish republican secret agent who had infiltrated into the British Army—for what purpose I was not altogether clear.

  Magic, pure magic. Or so it seemed that night.

  The feeling of magic faded away, but the memory of its images remained.

  Remains.

  Our lives have worked out just the way I had thought they would that night. But it didn’t have to be that way. Even less did it have to be that way a second time.

  Jane

  I’ll have the largest double chocolate malt in the world, the customer insisted, and heavy on the malt!

  Mom had demanded that I get a job during the summer because I needed to learn the value of money. I was sixteen, she said, and old enough to learn what money means. The world is a harsh place and you have to work for every penny you squeeze out of it. You’ve had enough opportunity to run around like a spoiled rich brat, now you have to settle down and find out what life is really like.