“Let me digest this, Jane, and we’ll talk about it again.”
“If you want to,” she said wearily. “Please think about it sensibly first, because we will have a war in heaven on our hands if we try to marry one another.”
I walked her home and kissed her gently. “We will talk again.”
We didn’t have a chance to talk again.
What if I had demanded that night that she agree to marry me, regardless of our mothers?
I didn’t and in another week, on her twentieth birthday, I lost my chance.
Leo
We never renewed that conversation on the pier. I thought there was plenty of time. In fact, there was almost none.
I can’t remember in any specific detail the combat in Korea. The most I have are vague, disconnected, and terrifying memories of the landings at Inchon and Wonsan, the horrible motion sickness, fear, the sound of rifle and automatic weapon fire, the booming of artillery, the screaming of our jets as they came in to cover us, even the feel of the cold, up at Chosin. All of these come back to me in a montage, a kaleidoscope in my dreams. But no details.
However, the two days in mid-August are branded into my memory in rich and precise detail. Even now as I try to sort through those detailed images and put some order into them I cannot make sense out of any of it. It was like forty-eight hours in an evil Wonderland in which the Mad Hatter and the March Hare both turned diabolic.
“No wonder you ran away,” a psychiatrist would say to me after I returned from Korea. “Even allowing for exaggeration on your part, it sounds like an interlude in Franz Kafka.”
Maggie Keenan, many years after that, said sadly, “I was busy having a baby in Chicago. When they told me what had happened it made no sense at all. It still doesn’t.”
And Tom Keenan who was listening solemnly to our conversation added, “There was a cover-up going, Leo, from day one. Crooked state and county police. You didn’t have to leave, however.”
“I know that now.”
“Yes, you did have to leave,” Maggie insisted. “To save your sanity, you had to leave. You may or may not have been right about what happened—I suspend judgment on that—but as I told them when they finally gave me the details, you should have run.”
“I lost a lot.”
“I quite agree but you didn’t lose it then. You lost it when you didn’t come back. Why didn’t you come back? Why didn’t you call Jane?”
“I tried to call her before we shipped out.”
“Two years later. What happened to those two years?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I simply thought it was all over.”
That was a lame answer. But it’s the best I could give then. Or now. I just assumed that what I thought was my disgraceful performance at the police station, my wild accusations, my deliberate insults would have made me a permanent persona non grata. I know now that it was an absurd reaction. But it was the way I felt, so powerfully that there seemed to be no reason to question it. Yet the horror of those days affected everything I did until I received orders assigning me to the Fifth Marines.
It all started with Packy’s old Lasalle, which was my car for the summer—Packy somehow having come into possession of a new Olds convertible with hydromatic drive as they called it in those days, like his mother’s, except a discreet clerical black instead of bright yellow.
The day after Jane and I were “sensible,” I noticed that the brakes were loose and didn’t grip as they should when I came down the high hill on the gravel road from Warburg that runs from the end of the Lake at the far opposite of the town, through the newer subdivisions and opens up to the road to town where the recent and indifferent asphalt paving, soft and gooey on a hot summer day, begins.
The Old Houses where the very wealthy lived were on small hills of their own, except for the Devlins’. Theirs was at the very top of the large hill, which a glacier had gouged out of the ground ten thousand years ago. The rest of them stretched out for a mile and a half on the north side of the Lake. Each of the homes was approached by an upward grade because the road that ran behind the homes was flat. The “big hill,” as we sometimes called it, was high enough and the road flat enough that crude skiing was possible in the wintertime before the county got around to plowing it. It was also, I imagine, great fun for kids on sleds.
In the summertime, when we would venture over to Warburg, ten miles west of the Lake, we used to coast down the hill and see how far we could glide along the flat before having to use the accelerator.
It was a harmless enough game because even if a car was coming from the opposite direction you could see it from a distance and there was room to pass.
Neither Jane nor Packy would accept the crazy suggestion that we race down the hill at full speed to discover whether we might be able to coast all the way to the outskirts of the town. It was, as Jane insisted, just plain silly.
Since we didn’t go to Warburg often because, as we said, it was Hicksburg, U.S.A., we didn’t use the hill all that much.
Mrs. Keenan, all aflutter about the imminent arrival of her first grandchild, asked me to deliver a package over to the post office at Warburg. It was coming back that I noticed the brakes seemed to be looser than usual. So I drove right into the tiny auto repair station in town.
The mechanic, a slow-talking rural type named Al Winslow with little love for people in the Old Houses, looked at the car dubiously.
“You should be able to afford better than that, kid.”
“Family heirloom.”
“Well, let’s see about those brakes that are worrying you so much.”
He pumped them up and down, climbed under the car, muttered a few obscenities, and crawled out again.
“Well, they could stand a little tightening all right, nothing serious, but you probably have to get it done unless you’re gonna throw this one away and get a new one.”
“How much?”
“Twenty dollars.”
“Come on.”
“All right fifteen.”
I suppose I could have got him down to ten.
“When will it be done?”
“Can’t get to it till late today.”
As far as I could see there was no car on which he was working.
“What if I come back about this time tomorrow?”
“Yeah, might have it ready then.”
So I turned the car over to him and walked back to the Keenan house.
If I missed an appointment with Jane, I could not call to explain it to her because I was strictly forbidden ever to call her home. We understood that she would not hold it against me if I failed to show up. I didn’t catch up with her that day, until I found her at the Rose Bowl.
“Sorry, Jane…yeah I’ll have a massive malt, why not?…I had to run an errand for Mrs. Keenan and then the brakes were sorta loose so I brought them in for repair.”
“I’ll forgive you in a thousand years. I had to play singles with Jimmy and Eileen.”
“Are they up here to stay?”
“Two week vacation.”
“How are they?”
“Same as ever. He’s a drip, she’s a dope.”
“Jane!”
“I’m a little tired of our friends. Then stupid Phil showed up and wanted to play doubles, me and him against them. I said I had to work. I’m also fed up with stupid Phil.”
“He on vacation too?”
“Traders don’t get vacations. They take their own time off. He said something about restructuring his capital. He made it sound like a big deal, like he had made some kind of huge killing, but I think he went broke and has to borrow more money from his dad.”
“You are not in such a good mood today, kid.”
“I was till I met them. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell them that you and I were going to the Bijou tonight, so we won’t have to put up with them.”
“I didn’t know we were going to the Bijou.”
“I didn’t tell you either,” she g
rinned, “but I am now. OK?”
“Wonderful.”
The Tarzan film that night was something less than wonderful and Jane, my Jane, not the one in the film, was still listless. We walked home quietly and I kissed her good night gently. Tonight was not the night to talk of love.
She told me she had promised that we would meet the Murrays at the tennis courts the next morning at ten for mixed doubles.
“I hope you don’t mind, Lee?”
“Not at all. They’re our friends and it will be good to see them again.”
The next day I picked up the car, paid Al Winslow his fifteen dollars and accepted his receipt, laboriously scrawled out on a half sheet of loose-leaf note paper with his signature at the bottom. I knew Packy would insist on picking up the tab, so I wanted to have documentation.
It might have been a lifesaver for me the next day because it was my way of proving that I had taken care of the brakes. Yet I don’t think that mattered. Even without the receipt a decision was made that I didn’t matter one way or another.
I drove back to the Keenans’ to grab my tennis racket. The Polish woman who was in charge of the place—and found all of us vastly amusing—told me excitedly that Missus go to town for baby.
I responded with the few “happy words” she had taught me in Polish.
I was excited too. If Maggie was my adopted sister that meant I was an adopted uncle.
We played only one set of tennis because the Murrays were planning a trip of some sort with Phil in the afternoon.
“Want to come?” Eileen said. “We’ll have a great time. Maybe drink some suds on the way back. Whataya say?”
I’m afraid that the poor kid’s notion of a great time in those days was nothing more than drinking some suds.
“I’m working,” Jane said, clearly relieved that she could decline.
“I’ll stay here to keep Jane company.”
“You don’t have to,” she said glumly.
“I want to.”
Eileen giggled at our romance. Jim said nothing at all. During that idyllic summer he hardly opened his mouth.
Thank God, I had an excuse.
“Swim before or after work?”
“After. I’m off at five. At the Keenans’. We can water-ski. You’re bound to get the hang of it eventually. Call me at the Rose if you hear anything about Maggie.”
The thought of Maggie’s baby brought a little more life into her disposition. She still hadn’t recovered, I told myself, from her explosion on the pier. I’d wait till she calmed down.
I walked back to the house. My Polish friend greeted me with a vast smile. “Missus call. Young Missus have fine girl child. Both fine. Baby named Maria Margarita.”
We hugged each other and sang a Polish song, I phoned the house in River Forest. Packy answered the phone, deliriously merry. “I’m an uncle!”
“And I’m an adopted uncle!”
We chattered happily. Then I told him about the Lasalle.
“Good thing you fixed it. I wouldn’t want you and herself banging into a tree. How goes it with her by the way?”
“A difficult period, Pack.”
“Oh?”
“We’re trying to talk seriously and we encounter the enormous problem of what we do about both our families.”
“Ignore them.”
“That may well be what we’ll have to do eventually, but they won’t ignore us.”
“You’ll beat ’em.”
As it turned out we never got the chance.
After I hung up I thought about the Lasalle. Did I see it in the driveway when I came in?
I went to the back door. Sure enough, the car was gone.
“Missus,” I asked her, “where car?”
“Young doctor come, borrow car, say he need car, his not work, he bring back, hokay?”
“Hokay Dokay Pannia!”
“Pannia” being Polish for “Mrs.”
But it wasn’t. We left the keys to the old tub on the front seat because no one would want to steal it. But it was there only for the Keenans and their guests. No one else was supposed to borrow it. What was Phil’s rush? He could have waited to ask me. Or even driven by the tennis court.
I would have warned him to test the brakes on the hill as I would have.
Maybe he knew I would say that I couldn’t give him permission and I didn’t think he should take it on his own authority.
I called the Rose Bowl.
“Rose Bowl Soda Fountain, the best ice cream in the world, Jane Devlin speaking.”
“I bring good news, one Maria Margarita Keenan. Mother and daughter doing well.”
“Maggie knew it would be a girl! How wonderful! How much did she weigh?”
“Maggie?”
“No, Lunkhead, little Maria!”
“I didn’t ask, Milady.”
“Typical man. Pick me up at five o’clock?”
“Can’t. Phil borrowed the Lasalle.”
“With your permission?”
“He didn’t ask.”
“Typical. All right, I’ll be there about five fifteen and today you’re going to master the water-ski thing, right?”
“Right!”
And I did.
We had a glorious time on the Lake—it was long before there was a rule about a third skier in the boat, then went back to the house, ate a couple of Missus’ “good Polish sandwiches, ain’t it?” and went back for more swimming as the sun set and the harvest moon rose in the east.
“You know what day tomorrow is?”
“Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, Mary’s day in Harvest Time, August 15, a Holy Day of Obligation.”
“And?”
“A day on which all Catholics must attend Mass under pain of mortal sin.”
“And?”
“A certain young woman’s birthday.”
I reached in the pocket of my beach robe and produced a box.
“OOOOH!” She ripped it open. “A peridot pendant, my very own birthstone.”
Tears poured down her cheeks and she hugged me fiercely. “Thank you so much!”
“It’s not very big.”
And I could barely afford it but after sponging off the Keenans all summer I had a little extra money.
“You’re so thoughtful, Lee, so thoughtful. No one ever gave me a birthstone before.”
As I write these words, I am furious at myself that it was not a ring. It would not have had to have been an engagement ring. Just a small peridot. A promise for the future.
So many regrets, so very many regrets.
We went back into the house, changed to dry clothes, made more congratulatory calls to Chicago, and listened again to the “Kiss Me Kate” album. Jane insisted that we sing along—a hard task for me distracted as I always was by her off-key voice.
It didn’t bother her. Never did.
Then she said, “Walk me home, Lee, I want a good night’s sleep before my nineteenth birthday.”
“Big party tomorrow?”
“Not with the family. My mother probably won’t remember it’s my birthday. We don’t have time for celebrations. Besides they cost us too much.”
So I walked her home, wished her a happy birthday, and kissed her good night, the last kiss until Memorial Day of 1978.
Jane
Mary, my mother, my real mother in heaven, I failed him. I let her drag me away from him when he needed my help. He’s too hurt and too shocked to realize what they’re trying to do to him. Mr. Keenan won’t let them. But he’s not here. I’ll call their house in River Forest in another hour or so and beg him to come right up.
That doesn’t change it, my heavenly queen, I failed him. I know that I’ll never see him again. I lost him tonight.
No, that’s not true. He’ll forgive me because he is so good.
I didn’t know that Mom was on to us and watching us all summer. When she heard me rush out of the house and looked out the window and saw I was in my pajamas, she thought I was rushing o
ut to make love to him.
She knew I had been seeing him. She hit me and shouted, “What are you doing, young woman, in public in your pajamas with that trash? You have disgraced our family and all I’ve worked my fingers to the bone for.”
I tried to explain that Phil was in the car and he had saved Phil’s life.
She slapped me again. “You’re a goddamn liar. I know what you’ve been up to,” she said. “I’ve known it for a long time. You went out to make love with him.”
“I came back to call the police about the wreck and put on my clothes.”
“After you laid him!” She hit me with a broom handle. “Trash!”
I wish that was the reason I went out and not the death of my two friends. Mom seemed utterly unaware of the wreck. She had seen only me and Leo.
As I lay on the floor trying to protect myself from her blows, she hit me again and again with the broom. There was no point in fighting back. There never was.
Finally she stopped. “There, that should teach you. Never speak to that trash again.”
She poured herself a glass of gin and drained it in a single gulp.
I dragged myself here to my room to pray for Eileen and Jim. Dear God, I can’t believe it. They’re not dead. They can’t be.
I didn’t deserve Leo. I never deserved, him. I am not good enough for him. But I do love him. Since I can’t take care of him, please, you take care of him. On this my birthday and your feast day and the most unhappy day of my life I offer all my sufferings for the rest of my life to you so that you will take care of him.
I also want to pray for poor Jim and Eileen. I can’t believe they’re dead. Grant them peace and happiness. And even poor dumb Phil who killed them.
By rights, I should be dead.
Ask your son to forgive all my sins.
Amen.
Leo
“You were drunk and you were driving the car,” Sheriff Black insisted, “admit it and we’ll stop hitting you.”
“I wasn’t in the car,” I muttered through swollen lips. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
Summer at the Lake Page 32
