“I feel like a pawn that has been moved for all its existence around a chess board by unseen and dangerous powers. I want to be free of them.”
“I understand.” She nodded slowly. “I understand. Yet you have Jane now or, to be discreet, you will surely have her soon. What else do you need?”
“I have her now Angie,” I said bluntly.
“I know,” she laughed, “I could tell. Give her all my love and my very best wishes.”
“I will.”
“Then what is the problem?”
“I lost her once and I don’t want to lose her again.”
She pursed her lips. “I can understand that fear.”
“I don’t want to punish anyone, Angie. I merely want to know what happened and to make sure it never happens again.”
“Some garbage dumps are better left untroubled.”
“What can I tell you?”
“Well,” she became very businesslike, “if you tell me that money of that size was floating around at the Lake in 1948, I would say it was almost certainly from Organized Crime. And I would add that my father was probably involved in some way. He was never quite part of Organized Crime. But he had certain liaisons with them. He thought he could be both outside and inside at the same time. He learned,” she grimaced, “that it was not possible.”
“Phil was bringing Mob money to his father for some project that your father and his had in common. Phil or Jim. Or maybe both.”
“It would be the kind of angle my father would work…he was such a strange combination of affection and terror. But let that go…When the Mob found out what had happened, very likely they demanded a cover-up, which the local police handled clumsily and then effectively.”
“Murray went along?”
“He assumed that there was an accident. As perhaps did my dad and Phil’s father. Perhaps that was all there was.”
“Except my orders.”
“Except your orders,” she sighed. “The two phenomena might be totally unrelated, you know.”
“I’ve considered that.”
“My father and Doctor Clare and Mr. Murray put a lot of money into a shopping mall as we call them now in the northern suburbs. It was not a bad idea, just a little too early. They lost everything they put into it eventually, though neither of them were anywhere near bankruptcy. Subsequently the Old Orchard center replaced their plan and, as I’m sure you know, has been a huge success. In 1948 their idea still seemed viable. I would imagine that Daddy might well have invited his friends who had friends into the action. Perhaps on an urgent basis. After the accident, they might have pulled out or might have taken over completely. They would be capable under the circumstances of doing either. The mess itself would have given them one more reason to think that my father was too clever for half.”
She recited these facts quietly and dispassionately, as though there was not terrible heartache beneath them.
“Pieces fit together.”
“Some pieces, Lee, and they fit together hypothetically. Personally I would worry very much about your own safety if you become involved in further exploration.”
“Some of the Boys might still be alive.”
“Or their heirs. They don’t like anyone digging.”
“So I’m told.”
For the first time in my poking around, I now felt fear, a cold terror such as I experienced in the LSV as we rode in on the huge tide at Inchon.
“As should be obvious, Lee…” she stood up, “I have a court call in a few minutes…as should be obvious, I do not like my father. I invited him to our wedding with a personal letter. He ignored it. You may wish to discount what I say for that reason. I urge you not to do so. If anyone is capable of orchestrating this sort of treachery, he would be that person. It would delight the dark side of his character. I know very little of his circumstances now. He lives luxuriously off his so-called investments. He’s in reasonably good health for a man approaching eighty, very proud of his wife and family. Even now, he would be dangerous if he felt threatened. Very dangerous. Do not go up against him unless you are armed to the teeth with evidence, clout, and automatic weapons. About the latter I do not joke.”
“Thank you for your candor, Angie, and for your willingness to renew an old friendship.”
“I’m delighted to do so,” she said rather formally and then kissed me. “May I call your office at the University and propose a date for dinner—we live in Lincoln Park, near Wrigley field, naturally—after Labor Day?”
“I would love it. It might take a few days to clear it with Ms. Devlin, as I think she calls herself again. I don’t quite have access to her calendar yet.”
“It looks like you have access to what matters.”
I did yesterday, but that was yesterday. It was pretty special too.
As I was walking down the corridor after leaving her chambers, she appeared in the doorway, her face ashen.
“Lee, please come back.”
“Something wrong, Angie?”
She waved me into a chair and slumped on a couch across the coffee table from me.
“I just remembered something. It didn’t matter until you told me about your orders. Then it fit into place.”
“Oh.”
“I bumped into Brigie, Jane’s daughter a few months ago.”
“In Chicago?”
She nodded vigorously.
“At Tuffano’s out on the West Side. She was with a nice young Irish Catholic commodities trader.”
Arguably the best Italian restaurant in America.
“Really?”
“She’s been clean for over a year and a half and can hardly wait to see her family again. She looks wonderful, like a cute little kid again. But she won’t go home till she’s been clean for two years.”
“How wonderful!”
“In the women’s room she told me a strange story. One night, when she was living in San Francisco three or four years ago, her father visited her. She said he was drunk, really awful. More awful than usual, which was pretty awful. He bragged about how they got rid of you. Failed once and then succeeded. She didn’t know what he meant, but he seemed to think it was pretty funny. She said it had bothered her for a while and she forgot it but then seeing me and knowing you were back in town she remembered and wondered what he meant. Naturally she swore me to secrecy about being in Chicago.”
“Did he give her any hint about who ‘they’ were? Was it first personal?”
“I asked of course. Not for nothing am I a lawyer. She said he was too drunk to be sure. I confess I discounted it. In his cups Phil could say almost any stupid thing. What had anyone done to get rid of you? Now I know. Not once, but twice.”
“Not once but twice.”
Outside under the Calder mobile in the Federal Plaza I looked up at the ice cream clouds that were drifting towards Lake Michigan.
I had rediscovered an old friend, however belatedly. Old sweetheart, really.
I had realized that I was not the only one who could rise from the dead. Angie too. As far as that went Jane was a resurrection person too. Maybe the bravest of them all. How vile had been my years of self-pity.
I had, finally, found confirmation, however tentative, of what I feared might be true. I should forget about the past and enjoy my new life. With Jane.
If only I could forget.
Jane
At six she prepares to close her shop. As she is about to lock the door, he appears. What do you want she demands. To come in, what else, he grins triumphantly at her.
I think you want more.
She really has no time for him this evening. She must finish some work before her eight o’clock supper with the visiting people from the Irish National Tourist Board. Nonetheless she finds herself opening the top button of her blouse.
He really can’t be serious. Not here. Not at this hour of the day.
He does seem to be serious. He grabs her hand and drags her into her office. She should protest, but the wor
ds won’t come. She also is a little frightened of him. Not terribly frightened, but still uneasy.
He does not close the door of her office. He does not give her a chance to talk. He is all over her. In a few seconds he has disposed of her clothes and her sexy new lingerie. He throws her on the narrow couch and forces her to race with him down the path of love, breathless, surprised, possessed.
Not sweet or tender love. Wild, demented passion. Two wrestling, panting, shouting, clawing creatures tearing at one another in an outburst of hunger and need. He leads the way in their furious ride but she follows willingly.
I cannot possibly be doing this.
You wanted an active sex life, didn’t you?
Please! Please! Please! Stop! I can’t keep up! It’s too much! Too much! You’re cleaving me apart! I cannot stand the pleasure! It is killing me! No!
Oh!
Yes, yes, now, yes, yes. Oh!
Oh.
Leo
“There’s a lot of violence in you, my darling,” she stroked my chest.
“I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
She smiled and patted my chest. “You’ll never hurt me. It’s a little scary when you want me that way, but I like it. Obviously.”
We were huddled on the couch in her office, she resting in my arms, both of us naked and content, oblivious of Oak Street and the world beyond.
“You must tell me if I ever…”
“Don’t worry about it,” she kissed me. “Your violence speaks to violence in me that I didn’t know was there. We’re well-matched lovers it seems.”
“We’re fortunate that we can express our angers in love instead of hatred.”
“That’s my dear professor speaking philosophy.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever have enough of you.”
“I hope not my darling.”
“I saw Angie today.”
“How wonderful!”
“She says she was in love with me back then.”
“Certainly she was in love with you. Didn’t you know that?”
“I guess not.”
“They all loved you, my darling…she finally married someone just like you. Not,” she looked up at my face, “quite as cute as you, but maybe a little bit nicer. I bet he never charges into her chambers and practically assaults her.”
“I bet he thinks about it.”
“I hope he does.”
We fell back into sleepy and satisfied silence. It didn’t seem necessary to tell her about Phil’s conversation with Brigie years before, especially as I felt honor bound to protect the young woman’s confidentiality.
“You know what I want?”
“What?”
“I want to go to films and concerts with you, I want to talk about books with you, I want to meet your friends at the University and charm them even if I’m not a professor, I want to talk about politics with you, I want to watch you with people, charming them as you do so well, I want to watch you charming me despite me, I want to see you pulling the wool over the eyes of those poor teenagers who worship you, I want to know your ideas about everything, I want to eat breakfast with you, I want to seduce you when you’re working at your computer, I want to fight with you sometimes just for the pure hell of it, I want to beat you at tennis, I want all of you, do you hear me,” she pounded my chest, “all of you.”
“Do you?”
“Yes…is that all right, my darling?”
“To want all of those things?”
“To insist on them, to demand them, to settle for nothing else?”
“You propose to push your way into my life and take it over, is that it?”
“Yes, damn it,” she twists around so she can pound my chest with both her fists.
“Sounds like an offer no man in his right mind could possibly refuse.”
We laughed together.
A demanding lover, my mistress, my wife.
Dear God, don’t let me lose her this time.
“I have to leave, I really do.” She struggled up. “I’ve got to get dressed and go off to supper with these damn flannel mouth micks.”
“Let me help you dress.”
“All right, that will be fun.”
I did, and it was.
After I had helped her into a cab and she had blessed me with a wicked grin, I walked down Michigan Avenue in the fading August light.
I had the whole resurrection paradigm wrong. Korea wasn’t death. It didn’t figure in the equation. Death came long before in our families. Angie had risen from the dead. Poor Jimmy and Eileen never had much of a chance. Phil had a chance but a slim one and had not been able to break away from the forces that were killing him. Jane and I hung in the balance. The verdict for us was maybe.
Why does family life become so twisted? Five families, six kids about the same age, one authentic survival and that at terrible cost.
On the other hand the Keenans, Maggie Ward’s metaphor for Church. Not a perfect couple. Mary Anne was not a woman with great depth; Tom was often so tangled in his Irish political obscurities that he didn’t know himself whether he was coming or going. Yet their three children were all fully alive from the beginning, even Joan who at one time seemed so different from her two brothers.
Why are some families life-bestowing and others death-dealing?
Why can’t we leave our children alone so that they can be themselves?
Dear God, help me not to blow it with Laura.
Or now, I guess, with Lucianne.
Leo
“Mae, will you make a reservation for me at the faculty club for lunch? For two.”
“Should I call someone and confirm the time?”
Mae knew about absentminded professors.
“I don’t think that will be necessary, Mae. Ms. Devlin is not a professor and hence is not likely to forget.”
“Ms. Devlin!” she exclaimed. “Do I get to meet her?”
“How could I prevent that?”
Jane, I knew without being told, was determined to capture the University in one brilliant attack. Her excuse was that she wanted to meet one of our Joyce scholars about her Bloomsday tour. But she really wanted to see me in action and stake out her claim to the University.
I smiled to myself. It would be a show and a half.
“The general is on the phone.”
“Hi, Tim.”
“Leo, you’ve stirred up a lot of trouble down here.”
“Have I?”
“The general whose orders were apparently changed with yours is furious. He’s had a distinguished career and he sees this charge as a blight on it.”
“I didn’t make any charges.”
“I understand that…we have an assistant secretary monitoring our investigation now.”
“Should I be impressed?”
“We rarely are this serious about something that happened twenty-five years ago.”
“Twenty-eight.”
“It would be hard to bring formal charges against anyone, especially if the suspect were no longer in the service. If there is a pension that might give us some leverage.”
“I don’t want formal charges. I want only to know what happened.”
“Well there’s no doubt that your orders were forged, sometime after they were cut and before they were sent to you, the names were switched. In fact, the forgeries were crude, but a young officer right out of Annapolis and out of…”
“Loyola of Chicago.”
As George Orwell had said in his Animal Farm, all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
“…would hardly notice the crudity. These were your first orders and you didn’t question them.”
“No.”
“Could you come down here for a day next week while we try to figure out what we should do? We’re trying to put together a list of those who might have been in a position to accomplish this forgery. The criminal may be dead or long since out of the Marines. It’s not the sort of risk a career Marine would normally ta
ke.”
“Not unless there was a lot of money involved.”
“Well, yes.”
“What can I do?”
“We’d want you to look over our list of suspects and see if you recognize any of them.”
“All right. I have to make some other Washington stops anyway.”
What exactly did I want to know? Did I really think they could tell me who switched my orders in 1950? If it wasn’t for an irate senior officer who thought his life had been messed up too, they would probably have told me they couldn’t find a thing.
Maybe it was all coincidence.
I had tentatively decided not to pursue the Nicola lead. He was dangerous enough, a narcissist with sociopathic tendencies. However, those who might be lurking behind him were more deadly. They’d simply keep coming at you. Maybe you’d win a few rounds against them, but they’d do you in eventually. It wasn’t worth it.
Jane, my exuberant, challenging, delightful love, was a distraction from all possible serious worries. Our teenagers were off at a basketball camp and we had one another to ourselves. We had not spoken yet of the next phase of our relationship. Yet we took it for granted that our commitment was permanent. What else would it be?
After Labor Day we would become serious and figure out the logistics and mechanics of our merger. Now, in the waning days of summer, we wanted merely to play.
“Are you Ms. Clare or Ms. Devlin when I introduce you at the University?”
“Either. Both.” She punched my stomach. Very gently. “For the moment.”
“For the moment indeed,” I moved my hand across her breasts, pushing them firmly against her ribs and holding them there.
“Hey, that doesn’t mean you can do anything you want to me.”
“Within reason…I think you gave me that right long ago.”
She sighed happily and drew me close. “I sure did. Don’t stop. Please.”
I heard her chattering in my office with Mae. That nice Ms. Devlin. Co-opting my staff. Gradually taking over my office and then the whole University.
I let them talk. Better that they be on her side.
Summer at the Lake Page 38
