Summer at the Lake

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  “We don’t need the car.”

  “Get in,” I shoved her rump.

  “Leo, what are you doing, this is not the way to my house.”

  “It is the way to Skinny-dip.”

  “You’re out of your mind!”

  “You promised!”

  “That was thirty-two years ago.”

  “A promise is a promise.”

  “You’ll ruin my dress.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  We turned off the road and down the path to the beach.

  “What if someone is there?”

  “We’ll leave.”

  “You may remember that I do have a pool at my house. We did use it this morning.”

  “Not the same thing.”

  “I suppose this is an important symbol,” she said with feigned reluctance. “You’re not about to try to make love to me here are you?”

  “No. I’ll arouse you and make you wait till I take you back to your house.”

  “All right,” she agreed, “sounds like fun.”

  Nonetheless, she shivered as I carefully undressed her next to the car and wrapped her in a huge towel I had packed in the car for just such a purpose.

  “You figured this all out.”

  “Sure. Just like you did a few years ago.”

  “I’m cold.”

  “Just nervous. The water’s warm.”

  “It had better be…hey, put me down.”

  “No way.”

  “Stop it, monster,” she pounded against my chest. “Brute, rapist, Viking berserker…”

  “Actually your first berserkers were Irish. Finn MacCool and that bunch.”

  “Add professor to the list of accusations.”

  “That’s a given.”

  “I suppose your Irish berserkers were high on breast fixations,” she sighed.

  “Totally obsessed.”

  I put her down on the pier, tossed off my own remaining clothes, unwrapped her, jumped into the water, and delicately guided her after me into the water.

  “Hey, it is warm! I can’t imagine a woman turning fifty is doing this.”

  “A woman whose ivory body glows in the moonlight with the glamour of the rising sun.”

  “How lovely.” She sunk all the way into the water and began to swim. “Naked in the water by both moon and sun. How delicious! Thank you so much, Leo my dearest, for being my Finn MacCool.”

  We swam and played and swam again. Then I bundled her up, took her to the car, and deposited her inside.

  “Don’t I get even to put my panty on?”

  “No.”

  “All right master.”

  Then we went to her house for our second night together.

  I worried that I could still lose her.

  Leo

  Back in her bedroom I thought I was about to lose her. I lovingly lowered her, still wrapped in a towel, on the bed, which had been carefully made up since our previous romp. I noticed a frown on her face, a warning of a thunderstorm. Before I could take cover, she bounded off the bed, pushed me away, swept a terry cloth robe around herself, and poked an angry finger at me.

  “Fucking bastard!” she screamed.

  “Me?”

  “You! Why did you run away on me?”

  “I know I should have called you, Jane, but things were busy at the University and I had to sort some things out in my own head.”

  “Dickhead!” she wailed. “I’m talking about 1948. You saw what a monster that woman was and you never came back to save me from her! Never! You went off to war and left me here!”

  My heart sank. I had never thought of it that way.

  “Jane, I’m…”

  “Don’t ‘Jane’ me, you worthless pile of shit. You were the big romantic. I was the fairy princess and you the brave knight. Well, you left me in this castle a prisoner of the witch and went away forever because your precious little lower middle class ego had been hurt by a bunch of dumb cops and a few sex-crazy idiots. You never called me, not once!”

  “I tried when…”

  “That doesn’t count!”

  I was sitting on the bed listening and she was striding around the room, white with fury. Her long, lovely legs mocked me as she swirled by me, her robe trailing behind.

  “You never called me either.”

  “You knew goddamn well that I couldn’t call you.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You suppose so? You goddamn well know so!”

  “I don’t know what to say.” I was hurt, confused, angry.

  “Are you going to walk out on me again?”

  “Of course not.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “I love you.”

  “You told me that shit thirty years ago. Why the hell did you leave me?”

  The enormity of her charge—and its fairness—hit me like a brick wall.

  “I…don’t know, Jane. I don’t know.”

  “YOU DON’T KNOW!”

  “I thought I’d have more time…I didn’t.”

  “What about my time? Two years of hell and then nothing but a memorial mass?”

  The wall collapsed on me, buried me, obliterated me. I was weeping, sobbing, overcome by pain and regret.

  Jane stopped shouting and leaned against the crimson walls, breathing heavily, her robe coming apart. She stared at me, her face a harsh mask.

  “I was afraid,” I choked on my own sobs.

  “Of what?” She sounded a bit more calm, the eye of the hurricane.

  “Of you, of me, of our families, of life, of my own terrible inadequacies as a man, of my failures, of my resentment, my hurt, my anger. I wanted time to get over my fears.”

  “And, like you said, we didn’t have any time?”

  “Not enough.”

  “Gosh, Lee,” she said softly. “Is that all? I was afraid that way too. Still am.”

  She knelt beside me on the bed and cuddled my head against her breasts. Then we both wept together.

  “It’s over, Lee,” she whispered finally.

  “Over. We are free from it all.”

  “Not completely,” she warned.

  “Enough to go on?”

  “More than enough. This time, buster, I won’t let you go away.”

  “Nor I you.”

  “Fair enough…by the way. I almost never use that kind of language.”

  “Be my guest.”

  There was no sex that night. We huddled in each other’s arms, like very old people or very young children. We were both confident that it was over.

  But it wasn’t.

  Labor Day

  Glory to thee, thou glorious sun,

  Glory to thee, thou sun

  Face of the God of life

  The Eye of the Great God,

  Pouring upon us

  At each time and season,

  Pouring upon gently

  And generously

  —Gaelic Hymn

  Leo

  “Judge Burke will see you now, Doctor Kelly.”

  “Thank you.”

  The bailiff, like an acolyte leading a priest to the altar in the old church, ushered me into the chambers of Judge Angela Nicola Burke of the Federal Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

  Shedding all judicial solemnity, despite her solemn robes, she flew across the room and hurled herself into my arms.

  “Lee! How splendid! Let me get a look at you! You haven’t changed a bit! As handsome as ever! Do you ever see Jane? I haven’t heard from her the last couple of months! I read that that idiot is divorcing her! What a laugh!”

  The years had been reasonably good to my ceramic doll. She had put on a few pounds, her hair was streaked with gray, and there were lines, more of suffering than of age on her face. But she still was a lovely little woman with an appealing body, a pleasure to come home to for the sports columnist who was her h
usband and who, according to legend, had not touched a drop of booze since the day of his first date with her.

  He is reputed to have said, “She’s worth more than all the Scotch in the world!”

  Fair comment.

  Hers had been a hard life—from wealth to poverty and then back if not to affluence at least to comfort.

  The summer after she had graduated from St. Mary’s, apparently over the trauma of Jimmy’s death, she, her sister and her mother were in the family Cadillac, preparing to drive from the Lake back to Chicago. Angie raced back into the house to get a book she’d forgotten. As she came out the door, her mother started the car and it blew up.

  Her father raced down the stairs at the sound of the explosion. His first words to her as he sobbed hysterically at the flaming rubble, were “Why didn’t you die with them?”

  It was a reaction, however spontaneous and unintended, from which neither of them ever recovered.

  The bombers were never found. The press reported, as Tom Keenan had told me many years later, that her father was moving in on a chain of restaurants that were Outfit fronts. The Boys warned him off and he laughed at them. So with the simple philosophy according to which those people worked, they decided to blow him up.

  There was perhaps some regret out on the West Side, that the Outfit, basically a male chauvinist organization that prides itself on its respect for women (except for the prostitutes they own), had killed a mother and a daughter instead of the father. But the outcome was the same. Tino abandoned his Chicago interests, sold all his companies, and retired to San Diego where, in some six months time, he married a woman only a year older than Angie.

  There were certain whispers that his wife had been the target all along and that he had put out a contract on her and both his daughters.

  “Did he?” I had asked Tom.

  “Personally I doubt it. His new wife, if one were to judge by the pictures, is a Sophia Loren type beauty. Tino would do a lot for a woman like that and she apparently said marriage or no dice. But kill your family? I think he had too much of an Italian regard for family to do that. Screw around, sure. Laugh at fidelity, sure. Push around your wife and daughters, yeah. Cheat every chance you get, you bet. But kill them? I don’t think so. Probably he meant nothing more than he couldn’t figure out how she escaped the blast and in a crowning bit of irrationality blamed the survivor.”

  “He was a strange man, Tom.”

  “Oh all of that. Every inch the courtier and the aristocrat. Rather like Cesare Borgia might have been, as you suggested a few summers ago. I liked him. Couldn’t escape his charm or his good taste in wine. But I never wanted to do business with him. He came to me a couple of times and invited me into what we’d call ventures now.” Tom had smiled. “Funny thing, I never quite had the capital available.”

  He had disowned Angie completely. “She’s got an education,” he had told his friends. “Let her take care of herself. I’m going to start a new family. Get me some sons.”

  His callousness shocked everyone that knew him. But the shock was not enough to move them to help Angie. “Her mother must have left her something,” they said. Or, “surely he’ll give her a little money.”

  Not one red cent from either source.

  Angie didn’t quit. She got a job running an elevator at Carson’s Department Store in the loop, moved into an apartment with some classmates who had graduated from St. Mary’s the same year, and enrolled in night class at Chicago Kent Law School.

  She led her class, although in the mid-fifties women were not all that welcome in the profession. She clerked for a federal judge and then went to work for the State’s Attorney. In those days women were sent to the Juvenile Courts, which was a hell hole then, though not as bad as it is now. She was as effective as anyone can be there and eventually, with some reservations, they transfened her to Criminal Court. She won a couple of spectacular cases. Dick Daley heard about her intelligence and ability and probably about her history and decided that she was one of the women he needed on the bench. So in 1964, in the landslide with which LBJ crushed the unfortunate Barry Goldwater, she was elected to the Cook County Courts and was sent back to Juvenile Court.

  For one week. Until Daley heard of it. Then she was put back in the Criminal Court where she stayed for four distinguished years until in his last batch of appointments in the terrible year of 1968, Lyndon Johnson appointed her to the Federal Bench. At the age of thirty-eight she had shown her father just what she was made of, not that it would have made any difference to him. In the feature articles that began to appear about her, she refused to discuss her father or the death of her sister and mother.

  She dated on and off but apparently was shy of marriage, not without some reason I thought as I read the clippings on her. Then, right after her appointment to the Northern District of Illinois, she married Joe Burke, a gifted but erratic sports writer, a perennial Irish bachelor her own age, and appeared at Cubs games with him. It was said he proposed to her on the first date and she promptly accepted him because he was such a gentle and loving person.

  No one else had thought so, but she must have been correct because, by all reports it was a marriage of mutual adoration, now shared by their son Joey who was born a year after the marriage.

  Burke’s writing, always clever, became brilliant. The judge, hitherto somber, was known to smile often, even to laugh.

  A tough magic woman, our Angie.

  It was now being said that she was in line for the next appointment to the Seventh Circuit.

  “First of all, Angie,” I began, as she poured me a cup of tea, “I should have called you long ago. I heard about what happened to your family when I came back from Korea, but I was too much of a mess to feel any compassion for anyone but myself.”

  She nodded, “I know the feeling, Lee. I didn’t get in touch with you either.”

  “Then I became involved with my career and my marriage and I drifted away from Chicago. I always wanted to write you or send a card at Christmas time. I found out about your marriage long after the fact and thought about writing you and never got around to it.”

  “All the things you hear about the courtship and marriage are true,” she smiled. “He did propose on the first date, he did swear a solemn oath that he would never drink again, I did accept him, we were married in three weeks, and I am very happy with him. I have had a little easier time keeping up with you. I run into Maggie often because Jerry is a colleague and she tells me about your life and career. Congratulations on your election to the National Academy. Not bad, not bad.”

  “Not as impressive as a judicial appointment.”

  “No invidious comparisons permitted or possible…now tell me about you and Jane.”

  “Well…?”

  “I mean do you see her ever?”

  “Just this weekend up at the Lake!”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Maybe, Angie.”

  “Definitely,” she smiled benignly. “I’ve never been back there since the deaths, but I’ve begun to think that’s silly. We had such good times. You know, I tell my husband that I fell in love with him because his eyes were so kind, like those of the only other boy I ever loved. As you imagine he wants to meet you. We must get together soon. With Jane.”

  “I’m flattered. I hope he is.”

  “Naturally. He’s so much like you.”

  She loved me? But what about poor Jimmy?

  Don’t ask.

  “You see Jane around town too?”

  “Sure, how can you miss her? She’s lovelier than ever, isn’t she?”

  “So I’ve noticed.”

  “What’s on your mind, Lee?” she asked sharply. “Something’s bothering you.”

  Bright lawyer.

  “Let me put three pieces of evidence before you, Judge.”

  She smiled her approval.

  “One: there was a half million dollars of money in that car Phil Clare drove into the tree. Real money, not counterfeit.
The police lied when they denied it.”

  Her jaw tightened. She nodded at me to continue.

  “Two: it seems very likely that I was the target of the weakened brakes. Under ordinary circumstances, I would be the only one driving the car. Packy had his Olds convertible by then.”

  She became grim. “Go on.”

  “Three: the Defense Department records show I was ordered to Paris, not the Fifth Marines. My orders were changed at the last minute by a forgery.”

  She leaned forward and blew air out of her lips, now very definitely a judge on the bench.

  “You’ve shared these data with Jerry Keenan and his father.”

  “Of course.”

  “There were a lot of strange things about that accident, Lee.” She closed her eyes thoughtfully. “Even then it screamed cover-up. There were so many odd accusations and suspicions. Some people swore for years that you were in the car when all the evidence was in the opposite direction. I heard the rumor about the money. I heard it denied. But there were no arrests, no charges, no suits. Nothing. After the two kids were buried, the case disappeared from the face of the earth. As the Murrays did a few years later…you’re sure of all your facts?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Still use that word, don’t you? I always liked it. Seems to fit you. Well, one thing is pretty clear, someone wanted you dead or maimed a whole lot in those days. Moreover it also seems reasonable that someone needed money pretty badly at the same time, badly enough to cover up a terrible tragedy. That Phil Clare went to collect the money kind of points the finger at people we both knew.”

  “I hope you don’t mind…”

  She waved aside my scruple. “Go right ahead.”

  “The best wisdom from the Lake, especially from Aunt Maggie as a new generation of urchins and young people call her, is that I should leave it all alone.”

  “Let the dead bury their dead…not bad advice, you know?”

  “So I understand. Your friend Jane agrees. Yes, I am in love with her all over again.”

  “I knew you were. I could tell by the expression on your face.”

  “I feel they may still be out there.”

  She did not ask whom I meant. Rather she nodded, “There are a lot of them out there, Lee; and they’re all dangerous. But they only kill when they have reasons. It’s hard for me to see what the reasons might be after all these years.”