Probably marriages arranged by their shrewd and dominating mother who knew the way to respectability.
Nor would we say that the “distinguished military service” of the brothers during the war had been in desks in Washington, Seattle, and San Diego, for Herbie, Mickie, and Dickie respectively.
I corrected a couple of typos in the press release because, like I say, I’m mean and stubborn. Then I called Maggie again.
As the phone rang I noticed that the release did not mention Jane. Perhaps they didn’t want to taint their generosity with the scandals affecting her marriage.
Would she come to the signing of the deed? She wanted time and I was giving her time. If I wanted to see her before the middle of August at the Lake, I could always call her, could I not?
Somehow I was reluctant to pick up the phone. I wanted to see her face and measure her reactions when I spoke to her.
“You are continuing your exhumation of the past.”
“Digging around. Remember the night we saw Oliver Twist?”
“Indeed yes, it was just about then I think my first pregnancy began. As I recall you and Jane put on quite a show.”
“Yeah, I should have proposed to her that night.”
Pause.
“Possibly, possibly not. However, Lee, you may be able to reinterpret the past, you can’t change its facts. You did not propose to her then or, if my understanding is correct, ever, except in one very inconclusive effort. Unless you have done so in the past several weeks.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Yet.”
“That’s right, not yet.”
“If you are calling to ask me whether I think you should, you must remember that therapists do not give advice to either their clients or friends, but my answer is that you should do so without delay.”
“That’s pretty non-directive.”
“Like I always am…now what is it that you are afraid to ask me?”
“You never believed I was dead, isn’t that true?”
Another pause.
“Belief does not figure. I knew you were not dead. It is foolish to ask how I know what I know. I simply know. So I was the only one for whom your return in 1953 was simply a return and not a resurrection.”
“And you tried to tell Jane that?”
“Of course.”
“And she didn’t believe you?”
“She couldn’t believe me, Leo. She had this terrible compulsion to feel responsible for what had happened to you. Matriarchal guilt or something of the sort. Note that she feels responsible for the death of her son Phil, for the loss of her daughter Brigid, and for the apparent deterioration of her daughter Lucy.”
“Lucianne.”
“I stand corrected.”
“As to Brigid, I assure her that the child will return eventually, marry an Irish Catholic—arguably a commodity trader—and probably vote Republican before she’s thirty-five. But she cannot accept that promise of good news, because her compulsion to punish herself is so strong. So it was with your temporary disappearance.”
Two years of hell a temporary disappearance.
“She’s much too hard on herself.”
“She expects the worst to happen in her life because she believes she deserves the worst. Alas, the course of events tends to fulfill that prophecy.”
“Incurable?”
“Nothing some happiness and reassurance that she can be sexually satisfying to a man would not hold in abeyance. I want to emphasize again, Leo, that I am gravely concerned about her. The persona, however valid it may be in some important respects, is fraying at the edges. I assume that you thought she was extremely healthy at that rather romantic lunch the other day?”
“I don’t know that I’d call it romantic.”
Naturally, I did not question that she knew about it. Of course, Jane would tell Maggie all about it.
“A matter of terms perhaps. The question is about her health, mental and physical.”
“Candidly, she seemed fine, the vivacious smartass that she’s always been.”
“I never discuss, as you well know, the emotional condition of my clients or my confidants. So I will not say to you that she’s in very grave jeopardy. Nor will I add that it will not take much to push her off the deep end. One more blow.”
“If you say so.” I sounded dubious.
“The point is that I do not say so. Nonetheless at a more general level where I may speak with less need for artifice, you thought you had plenty of time that night in the Rose Bowl in 1947 when she made you that obscene hot fudge sundae. In fact, you did not. Is that not a correct statement?”
“It sure is.”
“Don’t commit the same error again.”
“Before her birthday, Maggie. Before her birthday.”
“A promise?” she said suspiciously.
“An intent.”
“Hardly the same thing.”
“One more question, Maggie.”
“The important one you save as everyone does till the end.”
“Who tried to kill me twice?”
Again I assumed she had been told of our reinterpretation of the events.
“I cannot say.”
“Cannot or will not?”
“I do not use whatever these creepy powers of mine are, Leo darling,” she was soft and sweet, Maggie the old friend instead of Doctor Keenan, “to solve mysteries. My convictions that you were not dead and that Brigid will surface were and are simple and elementary and beyond doubt. Any instincts I might have about the mystery are much more problematic.”
“Should I lay off that?”
“I don’t know, Lee, I don’t know. It may in some sense be necessary to resolve that once for all. I do know that Jane does not have much more time.”
“I hear what you’re saying.”
I really didn’t hear it. Not clearly enough. I couldn’t comprehend that Jane was as disturbed as Maggie seemed to think she was.
Professors, you see, think they know everything.
1977
Patrick
It was in December of the year before last that I finally realized how much in love with Jane I was. I knew that I’d always loved her. But when she took me to supper at Tuffano’s, a little Italian restaurant on Taylor Street, the week before Christmas and told me what was happening to her, my heart flooded with love and I knew that I wanted her as my companion for the rest of my life.
“I want one of those annulment things, Packy,” she began in her usual businesslike manner. “Can you swing it?”
“It shouldn’t be any problem. But why now?”
Her lips tightened. “My husband wants a divorce. His latest mistress wants to get married. To hear him tell it, I owe him a divorce so she can get on with her life and have the children she wants.”
“Wow!”
“So I said fine, so long as he provides evidence for an annulment. That would help wouldn’t it?”
“It would help but it’s not absolutely necessary.”
“At first he didn’t want to, but when I made it clear that it was a condition, he agreed. I want to be rid of him, Packy. Permanently rid of him, in the eyes of God and the eyes of the Church, and in the eyes of everyone.”
“High time,” I agreed.
I told myself that this would force me to make up my mind about staying in the priesthood. Saint Regina’s had been a wonderful experience. The old pastor was delighted to see me and the parishioners liked me at once, mostly because I was good to the old man. It was a busy, exciting, challenging, rewarding parish. I loved it and I loved them.
It was also exhausting, especially because I never seemed to find time for a vacation. I told myself that overnights at the Lake were enough. They were for a while. But then I found that I was becoming impatient and irritable.
“Boss, you need to get away from this factory,” my young associate told me when I had lost my temper with him.
“I’ll spend some time at the Lake this
summer,” I simmered down, knowing that my exploding at the kid was unjust. “Sorry I blew my top.”
“Be my guest,” he grinned. “But the Lake will do only if they cut down all the telephone lines.”
I don’t know when I began to think about leaving the priesthood. Maybe only a year or two ago. But the idea had become a full-blown possibility that night on Taylor Street. If I were to leave as a burned-out case, I should do it when I was young enough to enjoy the rest of life—and now a companion with whom to spend the rest of my life.
Jane had become dependent on me and I on her. When the news came of Philly’s death in Vietnam, she called me before she tried to find her husband. She leaned on me during the arrangements for the wake, and the funeral. Phil was useless, drunk both nights of the wake and absent at the funeral mass—though he did show up at the cemetery, still drunk.
“I told the stupid punk to keep his head down,” he said over and over. “But, no, he knew it all. He never would listen to me. God, what a disappointment he always was.”
I felt like slugging him. Jane ignored him, which was the better strategy.
When Brigie ran away from home to join a commune a couple of months after her brother’s death, Jane finally lost her cool and sobbed in my arms.
So why not spend the rest of my life with her? I had paid my dues and more than my dues to the priesthood. I’d wait till the annulment was granted and then talk to her about it.
I wondered anxiously what she would say. Might she turn me down? Would I never be anything more than a priest to her?
In the spring of 1977, while we were gathering materials to support her petition for a decree of nullity, my sister-in-law phoned me.
“Packy, you’d never guess who’s coming back to Chicago.”
I knew instantly and with a sinking heart and guilt for my regret.
“Tell me.”
“Leo T. Kelly. Professor Leo T. Kelly.”
“Who says?”
“Rosie O’Malley. Her husband, Charles E. O’Malley, reports that Leo will be the new provost at the University. And as Rosie said her Chucky Ducky is sometimes in error but never in doubt.”
“Interesting.”
“Isn’t it?”
The next day Leo himself called.
“I’ve done an interesting thing, Packy.” He sounded sheepish. “Maybe an impulsive thing.”
“Doesn’t sound like a cautious academic to me.”
“I’ve, uh, accepted an invitation to become provost at the University. Effective in September.”
“What university?” I said, tongue in cheek.
“You know what university. The University.”
“You’re coming home again?” I said very gently.
“It would seem so. I hope it’s not a mistake.”
“I’m happy for you, Leo. Very happy.”
And I was happy. To hell with ambivalence. My best friend was coming home.
1978
Leo
“Good morning, General,” I said to the man at the Pentagon who owed me a favor. “I need a favor.”
An Irish Catholic like me, he understood about favors. I had done a favor for him at Chuck O’Malley’s request. All in the family. Or at least all in the parish.
“Name it, Leo, and you’ve got it.”
“I’m interested in my records from the United States Marine Corps.”
I was calling him from my office in the University, oozing the kind of confidence I should have used to speak to Jane.
“That was thirty years ago, Leo.”
“Twenty-five when I was finally discharged.”
“That’s right.”
“Can you get them?”
“It might be a little difficult. We haven’t computerized that far back yet, though we’re doing a little bit each year. But that medal of yours makes you different. I think we have a special set of files for those who have won it. What are you interested in?”
“Someone who has reason to know tells me that my first orders were not to Korea but to either a carrier or an embassy and that they changed my orders at the last minute.”
“That would be unusual.”
“So I thought. Would an examination of the file reveal such a change? And the reason for it?”
“Hard to say. It might reveal the fact of such a change. Not likely the reason.”
“Good. Could you check it out for me?”
“It’ll take a few days, maybe even a week or two, but I’ll hunt it down. Why are you so interested?”
“My life would have been a little different if I had not been sent to Korea.”
“Yes…It’s been a very distinguished life, however, has it not?”
“If you say so, Tim. I want to know, nevertheless, if someone has been screwing around with it.”
“I guess I understand that. I doubt very much that anything of the sort happened. But, as a favor to you, I’ll look into it.”
“Great. I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you.”
He thought I was crazy. In his perspective Korean service, POW, the medal—all made my career distinguished. I should have been happy that someone might have changed my orders at the last minute.
I asked Mae to see if she could find Judge Angela Nicola Burke in her chambers at the Dirksen Federal Building.
Angela was one of the last of the survivors of those summers. Angela and her father. Perhaps she would remember something—if indeed she remembered someone she had not seen or heard from in thirty years.
“Judge Burke is on vacation, Mr. Kelly,” Mae informed me. “She’ll be back after the 15th of August.”
“We’ll call her then.”
August 15th. The Feast of the Assumption of Mary. Mary’s Day in Harvest Time. Jane’s birthday. And the day of the accident.
Just thirty years ago this summer.
Mary’s Day in Harvest Time
I adorn all the earth.
I am the breeze that nurtures all things green.
I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits.
I am led by the spirit to feed the purest streams.
I am the rain coming from the dew that causes the
grasses to laugh with the joy of life.
I call forth tears, the aroma of holy work
I am the yearning for good.
—Hildegard of Bingen
Now welcome, somer, with thy sunné softe,
That hast thes wintres wedres overshake
And driven away the longé nightés blake!
Saint Valentin, that art ful hy o-lofte,
Thus singen smalé fowlés for thy sake:
‘Now welcome, somer, with thy sunné softe,
That hast thes wintres wedres overshake!'
Wel han they cause for to gladden ofte,
Sith ech of hem recovered hath his make;
Ful blissful mo we they singé when they wake:
Now welcome, somer, with thy sunné softe,
That hast thes wintres wedres overshake
And driven away the longé nightés blake!
—Geoffrey Chaucer
1948
Leo
I see all the summers before 1948 through the prism of that summer, indeed I view all the events of my life, the joys and the tragedies and above all the mistakes through the lens of the sweetness and the sorrow of that eventful two months.
The United States military was in chaos. Congress had forced a merger of the War and Navy Departments into a single Department of Defense and established a United States Air Force, which was independent of both the Army and the Navy. The Navy had fought the merger with all its considerable bureaucratic skills and was still resisting with a fierce guerrilla war inside the new department. The Navy eventually won the battle and internal rivalries have plagued and on occasion paralyzed the Department ever since. The first phases of the battle provided me with a summer off between my junior and senior year, a summer I proposed to use in pursuit of my beloved Jane.
Maybe.
In its preoccupation with fighting the Air Force (which wanted to expropriate all of naval aviation) and the Army (which wanted to abolish the Marine Corps, a good work I must say in retrospect), the admirals had little time to worry about their sagging ROTC programs, which were prime victims of congressional appropriations cutting.
The Loyola program survived but just barely. There was only enough money for two weeks of summer service and that at Great Lakes, not at sea. However, since we were technically still members of the Navy we would receive full salaries but we were not to spend the money on tuition for summer school classes.
None of this made any sense. If we were to be paid, why not give us something to do? However, as the commanding officer of our program put it, “The Navy does things its way and that’s the right way.”
Yes sir.
So I was to have the summer off. With pay. I figured I would pile up a stack of books and devour them in my hot apartment in Rogers Park near Loyola—no air-conditioned apartments for students in those days. I was conscious for the first time of how much I had imposed on the hospitality of the Keenans in previous summers and I vowed I would not do it again.
But I was going to pursue Jane at the same time, wasn’t I?
In truth I changed my mind about that subject every day.
Packy, home from the Major Seminary at Mundelein and assigned again to an orphanage north west of Chicago (now in fact a residence for kids from broken families), called me on the phone.
“Summer off with pay, Lee? That’s a boondoggle if I ever heard of it. And on tax payers’ money.”
“I stand ready to protect our republic.”
“Yeah, well you can do it just as well up at the Lake. Get your lazy ass over to Northwestern Station and on up here. I’ll be around on weekends.”
Summer at the Lake Page 30
