Summer at the Lake

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Then I turned out not to be dead.”

  “It was too late. So you were dead for me. When I saw you at Packy’s Ordination I already had two kids and was expecting a third. We were both other people. You had the same kind eyes. But you were so different. Not that I had any choice by then. And that’s the only time I’ve seen you, not counting TV, until Memorial Day.”

  “Am I still different?”

  “Not really,” she sighed. “Not at all.”

  I did not know what to make of this odd self-revelation. But it made me love her even more. And want her more passionately.

  “If I had been a little more explicit in how I felt about you, it wouldn’t have ended that way.”

  “Even if we were engaged, I would have lost hope and married Phil when they said you were dead.”

  “I tried to call you before we left for Japan. No one was home at either house.”

  “It would have been a wonderful memory, but I would have married Phil just the same.”

  I was not so sure of that. But there was no reason to argue.

  “But it’s all over now, Jane. We have another summer and another chance. We can change the past by giving it a different meaning.”

  “You keep saying that, but I don’t know that I believe it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I killed Jim and Eileen.”

  “What!”

  “I had a big fight with Phil the night before. He…well, he wanted to make love and I turned him down cold. He called me a prick teaser and I hit him. He went off crying. He was so angry at me the next day that he drove the car down the hill at sixty just to show me how angry he was. I knew it as soon as I heard the explosion from the accident and ran over to find you watching the fire and weeping. It was all my fault!”

  Now she was sobbing in my arms.

  What do you say to a normal, intelligent woman when she has spoken utter nonsense?

  If you’re a professor turned academic administrator, you try to reason with her. You don’t try to understand the deep feelings of guilt and responsibility that underlie her seeming irrationality.

  “You didn’t tamper with the brakes, Jane. You didn’t get drunk over in Walburg before you drove back. You didn’t drive down the hill at seventy miles an hour. You didn’t act childishly merely because a woman turned you down. It was Phil’s fault not yours.”

  “I didn’t have to slap his face,” she sobbed, “and tell him he was a stupid pig…they were my friends, I was responsible for them. I failed them just like I failed little Phil and Brigie. And probably Lucy too before I’m finished with her.”

  Such reasoning makes sense only if you view yourself as a matriarch responsible for the lives and loves of all around you. Thank God I didn’t say that. What I did say, however, was not much better.

  “Did Phil tell you he drove the car recklessly because he was angry at you?”

  We had, in unspoken agreement, turned off the road into the small stand of trees, amazingly not yet cleared for construction, which had been our trysting place when we were young. The automatic weapons sound of firecrackers continued but now at a great distance.

  “Yes,” she said, dabbing at her tears with a tissue.

  “Even then, Jane, your husband was remarkably skillful at imposing the blame for his actions on others. Surely you remember that. Surely he did it through the years of your marriage.”

  “Ex-husband,” she sniffed.

  “Didn’t he?”

  “He still does. The other day he came into my office to try to persuade me to postpone the divorce until after the Feds are finished with him, although the divorce is final now. He managed to make me feel responsible for the insider mess in which he has trapped himself.”

  “You didn’t agree.”

  “Certainly not. He guilts me as cleverly as he always did. But I don’t care about guilt any more. I just want to be rid of him.”

  She became stiff in my arms, furious at her husband. That, I thought, was good.

  “So he was doing the same thing after the crash.”

  “I know that, damn it.” She pounded my chest. “But I still feel guilty. I felt guilty even before he tried to blame me. They were my friends and they’re dead and I’m alive and it just isn’t right.”

  “I know what you mean. I feel exactly the same way.”

  She sighed, her emotions spent, and leaned against me. “And Packy says you feel guilty because you didn’t solve the crime, if there was one.”

  “There was one,” I said firmly.

  We clung to each other, a man and a woman well beyond the middle years of life (as life expectancy charts would indicate), still haunted by deaths that had happened thirty years before. Our guilt was irrational maybe, but it still was a Great Wall in our lives beyond which we could not venture to find peace, and possibly each other.

  Then Jane pulled away from me.

  I made up my mind. I would have to solve the mystery. There could be no future for Jane and me unless I tore down that Wall and reinterpreted the past to make it different from what it seemed to be. I had no choice.

  “Why? Why would anyone want to loosen the brakes in Packy’s old car?”

  “I don’t know, but they did. Al Winslow the auto repair man in town swore that he had fixed them the day before.”

  “It was odd, wasn’t it,” she continued, “how everything just faded away. No arrests, no suits, the insurance company settled and that was that.”

  “After I made a fool out of myself.”

  “You tried to find the truth.”

  “Unsuccessfully, I guess…but you’re right. It just faded away.”

  “Isn’t it strange how everyone is dead. Except us. Only the Keenans—and they don’t really count—and poor Angie and her father. Everyone else, parent and child, is gone.”

  “Phil.”

  “All right, I forgot him. But he’s dead from the neck up.”

  “People die, Jane. It’s part of life.”

  “So many and so young?”

  “It’s a bit unusual, but one accident, if it was an accident, accounts for most of it. Maybe all of it. We’re not really that unusual.”

  “It spooks me.”

  “Me too.”

  With a foot of space between us, we walked in silence back to the highway and the star-drenched sky.

  “I don’t want to be involved with a man ever again, for the rest of my life.”

  “You’re too young and too attractive to say that.”

  “I don’t care,” she replied stubbornly. “I don’t intend to fall in love ever again. I’ve done it only once and I thought I did it with Phil, but I was kidding myself.”

  “I was the only one?” We were entering the area of the Old Houses where our crowd had lived so long ago.

  “Who else?” she said bitterly.

  “But, Jane, we’re both still alive and free again or almost free, why couldn’t we avoid the mistakes we made the first time around?”

  A reasonable and persuasive professorial argument, addressing none of the fears and guilts and perplexities that spooked both of us.

  “I don’t believe in second chances,” she insisted stubbornly. “You make your mistakes and you live with them.”

  “All right, maybe it’s a first chance. Maybe we never had a chance thirty years ago.”

  That stopped her for a moment.

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe the same thing would have happened if I hadn’t been reported killed in 1950.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’re afraid to try?”

  Mistake!

  “I don’t want to try.”

  What do I say now?

  We passed a secluded section of beach, ringed by trees and a little marsh. It was the accepted place for skinny-dipping. In an implicit agreement between the police and young people, the former did not patrol it on summer nights and the latter did not make enough noise to disturb the neighbors.

  “Remem
ber this place?” she asked, changing the subject.

  Our crowd talked nervously about “Skinny-dip Beach” but we never went there as a group. Some of us may have worked up enough nerve to go to the beach very late at night as a couple, but we did not discuss such adventures with our friends.

  Jane and I had spent a delirious hour there one humid August night, a starlight night instead of a full moonlight night, worse luck for me. However I did remember it when I read John Updike’s word that the naked body of a woman is the most beautiful thing a man will see in the course of his life.

  “I think so,” I replied.

  “Don’t give me that, Lunkhead. You remember.”

  “I remember there was not enough light. Tonight with the quarter moon rising there should be enough.”

  “There will be none of that,” she said firmly.

  “A man is entitled to his fantasies.”

  Was the fantasy of your naked woman with you on the side of a lake on a warm summer night part of the tradition of the Catholic summer about which Maggie had preached, apparently to both of us?

  Well if Catholic meant that creation is good and the body was good why not?

  This summer?

  If not this summer, when?

  Tonight?

  I thought about it.

  No, I must not push too hard too soon.

  The Lake rippled in the moonlight, little chains of gold trying to stretch from shore to shore. I remembered the moon creating similar ripples on Jane’s young body as it peeked in and out of the clouds on that enchanted night so long ago.

  “So long as they’re fantasies,” she insisted primly.

  I put my hands firmly on her shoulders. “Fantasies tonight, but before the end of the summer, woman, they’ll be more than fantasies, that I promise.”

  She didn’t try to squirm out of my grip. “We’re not teenagers any more, Lee.”

  She was embarrassed and confused, but not angry.

  “I don’t know about that. I hear they call you ‘Jane’ instead of Mrs. Clare, because you’re, like, just one of the kids.”

  “That’s different.” She slipped away from me. “I’m really just a modest Catholic matron.”

  “Best kind.”

  “Of what?”

  “Wanton, when you finally get them stirred up.”

  “Silly,” she pushed me and we continued our stroll in the darkness. An occasional skyrocket from the direction of the town was exploding over the Lake and spewing its firefly specks of light into the sky.

  “What are you humming?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I always hum. Do you want me to sing to you?”

  I had sung to her that night we had swum at “Skinny-dip Beach.”

  “Certainly not…it’s the Bee Gees.”

  “Better than Fleetwood Mac.”

  “You couldn’t do Fleetwood Mac.”

  “You’re probably right. It’s the song they were singing at the Rose Bowl.”

  “ ‘How Deep is Your Love?’ ”

  “Appropriate, isn’t it, Jane?”

  “No.” She was not amused.

  Then her wit returned. “I’m surprised the Provost knows about the Bee Gees and Fleetwood Mac.”

  “The Provost has a teenage daughter.”

  We strolled up the walk from the road to the door of the old Devlin house. Were there haunts there, I wondered. I’d have to ask Maggie whether the vibrations she experienced inside were any more disturbing than plain old normal psychic vibrations.

  She brushed her lips against mine. “Thank you for an interesting and exciting evening, Lee.” She was her old laughing self.

  “And thank you for making it both interesting and exciting.” I kissed her, somewhat more firmly.

  “My decision on the future is final,” she said, putting her key in the door.

  “I respect that.”

  “Good.” She opened the door.

  Had she not remarked that Lucy was sleeping over someplace? We would have the house all to ourselves.

  “But I don’t accept it.”

  She whirled on me. “I said my decision is final.”

  “The rules don’t say that I have to give up.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you again.”

  Was that perhaps the real reason?

  “I’m entitled to my own risks. I repeat: your final decision is not my final decision.”

  She considered that policy statement carefully.

  “That’s your right, Lee.”

  She closed the door, the physical door to her house. But she had left another door ajar.

  I didn’t feel that I had made a complete mess out of the night.

  Jane

  I slumped against the door, limp, exhausted, and still sexually aroused. Why did I do that? Did I turn down grace again? I’ve been praying for help, for a sign. There was plenty of help and a bright, bright sign—much brighter than the quarter moon.

  I was furious at him, that’s why. The bastard has no sense that he deserted me. He still thinks I deserted him and forgives me for it, the self-righteous prick!

  All right, why didn’t I blow up and get it over with? Why didn’t I shout and rant and rave and get it out of my system? I’ll have to do it sometime won’t I?

  I didn’t shout because my anger gave me an excuse for pushing him away. I want him and I’m afraid of what will happen if I have him and he has me. So I use my rage as an excuse. If I blow up at him and get it over with, I’ll have lost my last excuse. My last protection against love, my last shield against being hurt again.

  He’s got his own excuses too, but just now I don’t give a fuck about them.

  Terrible language. I should be ashamed of myself.

  But I’m not. He ran out on me and he might run out again.

  Leo

  Packy was sitting on the front porch of the Keenan house, a pile of magazines on the floor on either side of the old wicker chair. A bottle of beer in his hand, the good monsignor was catching up on back issues of America and The Commonweal.

  “Good date?” he said without looking up.

  I popped open my can of beer and sat in the chair next to him, our favorite conversation place in years gone by.

  “Does everyone in the village know?”

  “I suspect so. They will in the morning after your stunt with the junkie.”

  “No privacy in this place at all.”

  “You should know that by now.” He tossed aside a copy of The Commonweal, contemptuously I thought. “So?”

  “So she says she does not want to marry again.”

  “That’s not an unexpected reaction given all the recent events. And you said?”

  “I said I accepted that as her final decision—she said it was final—but it did not represent my final decision.”

  He ruffled his silver hair, “Sounds very professional.”

  “I suppose so…the whole date was not completely professional.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “Packy, I played sensitive and respectful gentleman. I’m not sure that was the best way to go…yes, I am. That was what I should have been tonight. No guarantee that I’ll be that way the next time.”

  “There’ll be a next time? I thought she said her decision was final?”

  “It’s not final final, Pack. Not yet. I’ll have a couple of more shots. It ain’t over till it’s over.”

  “Uh-huh. Then if you’ll lose, you’ll give up?”

  “I won’t lose,” I said, astonished at my own confidence.

  He considered me for a minute. “I hope not.”

  “Why did that accident happen, Packy?”

  “Ask God,” he said crisply. “I’m only a monsignor.”

  “I don’t mean the theology of it. I mean who loosened the brakes in the old car?”

  “What does that have to do with you and Jane?”

  “Guilt, Packy, guilt. We both are irrationally but profoundly guilty that our friends a
re dead and we are still alive. If we can solve the mystery, perhaps we can discharge our obligations to their memories.”

  “Or to your own neuroses?”

  “Maybe. I have a hunch it’s a precondition for a renewed love affair between Jane and myself.”

  He pondered, then nodded. “I understand, Lee, I understand perfectly. Maybe I even agree with you up to a point. But it’s been so long ago and almost everyone is dead.”

  “I know that…is there any information about it that I don’t know?”

  Slowly he uncurled his long frame from the rocker and rose to his feet. He turned and stared at the reflection of the quarter moon on the Lake. There were no more skyrockets, but the firecrackers were still popping away.

  “Yeah.”

  “There is?”

  “I don’t know what it means, if it means anything at all.”

  “What is it?”

  “The money wasn’t counterfeit.”

  “What?”

  “You quoted the cops that found the money in the metal box that the bills were very clever fakes. But they weren’t fakes, it turns out. They were the real thing. My dad heard that years later. I don’t know where, but he was confident about it.”

  “What happened to it—there must have been thousands of hundred dollar bills?”

  “Fifty packs of one hundred.”

  “A half million dollars!”

  “You social scientists are good at arithmetic.”

  “Where did it go? Cover-up?”

  “Where else? But Dad didn’t know to whom. He was as baffled as I am. He also thought it best that we let the dead bury their dead.”

  “Why do you think he told you?”

  Packy turned back from the Lake. “I can ask him. It doesn’t follow that he’ll give me a straight answer. Irish political lawyers rarely do, you know. It’s kind of a genetic imperative. My guess is that he wanted the fact sort of around for a while in case someone needed it.”

  “Sounds like him.”

  “He probably doesn’t know as much as he’d like to have us think he knows. That goes with the genes too. He might give you something to go on, however.”

  “You sound like you think the Provost is going to turn detective.”

  “They do in the English mystery stories, don’t they? And for a prize worth less than Jane.”