The 1940s
Leo
“Patrick James Keenan,” the big kid said, “usually known as Packy. What’s your name, Red?”
“Leo Thomas Kelly,” I replied. “I’m glad you’re name isn’t Kennan.”
“How come?”
“Because then I’d be sitting in front of you.”
“Why would that be bad?” he grinned, suspecting what I was about to say.
“Then I’d have no place to hide.”
He chortled gleefully.
In that instant Packy Keenan and I became life-long friends. He was and is, without any doubt the most important male friend in my life. With the exception of Jane and Laura and maybe Emilie, he was and is the most important person in my life.
“Where you from?” I asked.
“St. Mark’s,” he shrugged as though a River Forest origin was not important.
My mother would approve. I was choosing my seminary friends from boys “with a nice family background.”
“You?” he continued.
“St. Ursula.”
That name ought to have meant a lower middle class parish, not worth comparing to the affluent St. Mark’s. Instead his eyes widened.
“So you’d know Janie, huh?”
“Who doesn’t know Janie?”
“A real hot number,” he shook his head. “Enough to make a guy think twice about celibacy.”
“We shouldn’t let girls disturb us.”
“Ha!” he exploded. “If someone like Janie doesn’t disturb you, you’re not a human male…hell, Leo, we don’t give up marriage because we don’t like women. No dedication if that were true.”
Thus did he absolve me from my mother’s constant injunction to avoid liking girls.
“Naturally,” I said glibly. “How could anyone not like Janie.”
“Especially in a swimsuit,” he nodded appreciatively. “Especially one of those two-piece things.”
“Where did you see her in a two-piece swimsuit?” I demanded, astonished at my own emotions of jealousy.
Janie was mine, I didn’t want this big, handsome, black Irish kid from River Forest ogling my Janie.
“At the Lake. Her brothers are jerks, but she’s wonderful. Spectacular tits, huh?”
“I didn’t notice.”
He clapped me on the back, “The hell you didn’t.”
“You have a house at the Lake too?”
“Right down the street from them. They’re terrible people, but she’s an angel,” he sighed, “a glorious angel. And a great kid besides.”
“Absolutely. Maybe we can found a Jane Devlin admiration society here at Quigley.”
He glanced around the classroom, always half dark because of dim lights and narrow gothic windows, with fake nervousness. “We wouldn’t want any of the faculty to find out about her, would we now?”
“Absolutely not…you know Philly Clare too.”
“I’m not bragging about that,” he said. “That drip thinks he has a monopoly on Janie. And no one has that.”
“The Clares are important people in St. Ursula.”
“They think they’re important everywhere…hey, maybe you can come up a couple of weekends next summer and we can organize that Janie fan club. Memberships strictly limited to the two of us, right?”
“Right!”
Before we could continue our conversation, the Latin professor came in, smelling of after-shave and whiskey and I was left to fantasize about Jane in a two-piece swimsuit at the Lake, as pleasant a fantasy as was possible inside the gray preparatory seminary.
Packy and I were close friends from that day forward. We discovered that we had a lot in common besides Jane, including a love of off-beat whimsy, like the Janie Devlin fan club. We studied together, played basketball together—especially after I grew a foot or so and was able to catch Packy’s quick passes and lay them into the basket.
We traveled to Quigley together each morning and home each evening, laughing most of the way at our teachers. Most Quigley students from River Forest took the Lake Street L downtown and the subway up to Chicago Avenue and the Q. However, Packy’s mother, one of the most elegant women I had yet seen, used to drive him over to Division and Austin where Packy would meet me. We would ride to Central, take the Central Bus to Chicago Avenue and hang on for dear life as the “red rocket” bumped down to Quigley, which was on the then dull and seemly Rush Street.
I learned that Packy had a sister named Joan whom he didn’t like and an older brother Jerry whom he adored—and about whom he worried because he was in Navy preflight as part of the V-5 program at Iowa. Each day when we walked down Rush Street from Chicago Avenue and saw the V-12 “ninety day wonders” double timing from their residence in Luis Towers (now Loyola University Downtown) over to Northwestern’s Abbot Hall on the lakefront, Packy would frown. Casualties among aircrews he told me were sometimes a hundred percent. Only one man had survived Torpedo Squadron 8’s disastrous failure at Midway.
Packy’s father was a lawyer with political connections—Democratic, which was unusual for River Forest in that era. His mother was active in a lot of “Red Cross things.”
“She’s a very pretty lady,” I said cautiously, feeling that such an observation was not only appropriate but necessary. “Indeed if the word doesn’t offend you, she’s a knockout.”
Packy laughed at that but seemed pleased with my praise of his mother—as well he might be. “You notice good-looking women at every age, don’t you, Leo?”
“Don’t you?”
“Yeah, but a lot of guys don’t.”
“Worse luck for them.”
We both laughed at that.
I wondered if his mother wore a swimsuit at the Lake but dismissed that as an inappropriate if not irrelevant question.
If he meant his invitation to the Lake on a couple of summer weekends I had a lot to anticipate.
Jane
She pretended to be surprised and a little disgusted when she met them on the village dock, a multistory boat pier and amusement hall with pinball machines, soda fountains, and juke boxes—one of them at that moment blaring “Moonlight Becomes You.” Two seminarians, she protested; that’s all that a dull summer needs. But she hugged and kissed them both, as though that were typical behavior among fifteen-year-old friends in 1943, which it certainly wasn’t. The boy with the black hair laughed appreciatively. Her old friend with the red hair, now so tall and strong that she hardly recognized him, absorbed her body and soul with his response to her kiss. No one had ever kissed her that way before, not even in the dark at the Rockne movie theater. Now he was doing it in public with everyone watching. She didn’t care.
“We should have invited you to the kissing game parties,” she said breathlessly. “Or do you only kiss like that in daylight?”
“Depends on the girl,” he had laughed.
“Only the easy makes?”
“Only those I want to kiss.”
Ohmy!
“What the girl wants doesn’t matter?”
“Sure it does,” he brushed his clenched fist lightly against her jaw. “I read the invitation in her eyes.”
Ohmy, ohmy!
“Listen to him!” Patrick had hooted derisively.
“Maybe you should take him back to Chicago!” she sniffed, knowing that it was the last thing she wanted.
She had been waiting to see them together all summer long. Her two favorite boys in all the world. Both destined for the priesthood. All right if God wanted them, that was His right. She didn’t doubt about the boy with the black hair and the easy laugh. He had priest written all over him. About the other boy with his smoldering green eyes and his quick tongue and his intense gentleness she was not so sure. Even less after he had kissed her. You could, she supposed, like to kiss girls and still be a priest. But that much?
What would she do if he tried to kiss her again while he was at the Lake?
She would not permit it.
Don’t be silly. Of co
urse she would permit it.
Up to a point.
So she would trust that God knew what He was doing but still look out for her own interests.
As her father had taught her. “Trust everyone, Janie girl, but cut the cards just the same.”
“You’d better believe that,” her mother had agreed with the mean laugh that was becoming more frequent in their house.
Aloud she said, “Patrick, do you think we could teach this big goof how to play a decent game of tennis? Then we could play mixed doubles with Eileen Murray.”
“Difficult but not impossible task.”
Mixed doubles were reasonably safe. Not that she trusted Eileen all that much. She was really boy-crazy.
Almost as bad as I am.
Patrick
I knew in less than five minutes that I was no longer Jane Devlin’s best summer beau. She smiled at Leo and he melted like butter soaked in maple syrup. He admitted on the ride up to the Lake that he’d actually spoken to her only a couple of times and insisted that if it were not for his red hair she wouldn’t even recognize him.
Leo smiled back, a big, amiable grin that suggested not the slightest hint of shyness. She pecked at his lips, a daring move in public in those days and he devoured her with a kiss that took her breath away.
Now we’d say there was instant chemistry between them.
I was so fond of Leo that I really didn’t mind him taking Jane away from me in that moment. Since I was going to be a priest, he was welcome to her.
I stuck to that opinion for the next half dozen years, though I admit that there were occasions when I wavered—especially when Leo seemed to hesitate in his affection for her, not trusting his emotions.
In recent years he often claims that he analyzes life to death because he is a professor. The truth is the other way around. He became a professor because analysis is his favorite way of escaping decisions.
I’m a fine one to talk.
Leo
“We’re delighted to have you as a guest.” Packy’s mother kissed me on the forehead. “Packy is so fond of you. It’s nice we’ll have two seminarians here for a week or two.”
“I’ll try to keep him out of trouble,” I said, feeling my face flame. “But it won’t be easy.”
“Trouble is his middle name, Mom!” Packy chortled.
We were under a warm sun on the lawn in front of their house, surely the biggest home I had ever seen in my life, and, as I remember it, the Lake was calm. I had fantasized since Packy’s first casual invitation about what his mother would look like in a swimsuit. The reality was much more appealing than my fantasy. I was acutely embarrassed by what I was sure were my exploding eyeballs. Mary Anne Keenan noticed my admiration—what woman wouldn’t—and was amused and pleased by it. Graceful in all things, she accepted my reaction and immunized me from embarrassment.
Did she know how clinical are the hungers of a boy in his early teens, how objectifying they are, to use the fashionable term of the ideology of the present? Did she know that images of her totally naked would haunt him for the rest of the summer?
Then I took consolation in the thought that she didn’t know what was going on in my dirty imagination. Now I realize that of course she did and was not in the least troubled by my lustful fantasies, as other women would be or pretend to be.
Do I read my subsequent reactions to trim and full bodied women in tight blue strapless swimsuits who are turning forty into that horny fifteen-year-old’s filth-crazed brain? At that age in life are not the males of the species interested only in the kind of womanly allure that would later grace the centerfolds of Playboy?
Maybe.
Yet I clearly remember being overwhelmed by Mary Anne McCarthy Keenan, her shoulders and legs still wet from the waters of the Lake, kissing my forehead and, in the process, as she stood on her tiptoes, granting me a generous view of her superb breasts.
Even now I hope I didn’t gulp too loudly.
Those three summers from 1943 to 1945 blur in my memory. I spent most of the first two pushing a lawn mower for the Chicago Park District. In 1945 we had to attend summer school because of a crazy decision of the faculty, worried about a hostile reaction to draft-free seminarians from the laity whose sons were dying on Iwo and Okinawa. But there are few memories of either the lawn mower or the classroom from that era. All I can recall are images of the Lake, images perhaps shaped by nostalgia for the summer of 1948 when Jane and I loved and lost one another.
Our side of the Lake, as I came to call it, though nothing in it was mine except my friends, had been settled first, at our end before the turn of the century. Indeed some of the sprawling Victorian homes with their gables and turrets and porches and balconies dated to the first summer settlements of the late 1880s and early 1890s before the Columbian exposition in 1893. Each of the Old Houses, as they were called by everyone, boasted a neatly manicured lawn rolling down the hill to the Lake and a freshly painted gazebo and pier—usually with a motor launch of some sort, steam first, then internal combustion (idle during years of the War). On the road side of the house there would usually be a park of trees, all carefully maintained and landscaped and protected by a wrought-iron fence and gate with the family name scrolled always on the gate and sometimes on the fence too. Art deco swimming pools, with pillars and porches and fountains and classic statues graced some of the homes—though not the Keenans’. (Tom Keenan: Who needs a pool when you have a lake that’s warm for three months?)
Servants, more often white than black, cut the lawns, raked the sand driveways, cleaned the cars, painted the fence and the pier and the gazebos and seemed ready, usually with what seemed like cheerful grace. This was, I thought, the world of the really rich, a fairy land for a kid who had lived in a two-flat until 1939 and then a bungalow, which was too small for five kids.
Then I thought the homes were the most elegant houses in the world, the kind of places I read about in English mysteries or ghost stories. Later I would realize that they were in horrendous bad taste (and the people who lived in them for the most part new rich). Still later I would agree that they are interesting museum pieces from the Gilded Age and the Mauve Decade.
The Keenan house, as elaborate as any and more grotesque than most, was part home and part parish rectory for me. As Maggie would say later, the Keenans were in fact a kind of neighborhood, a kind of parish, a kind of church.
The Keenan house was arranged for comfort, not for show, and its many small rooms set up for guests, the rooms painted in different colors (mine was robin’s egg blue!) with a tastefully matched and framed print on the wall to create a touch of elegance. Somehow there was always an extra room for a guest, usually with an extra bath.
“Save the expensive furniture,” Tom Keenan would proclaim, “for River Forest and put the plumbing in here.”
It seems in retrospect that I spent most of those very hot and humid summers (as I recall them) at the Lake. With Packy and Jane and their friends I walked the streets, darkened even at midday by giant oak trees and illumined at night by faint streetlights that only enhanced the inviting secrecy of the gloom. In fact, I suppose that in my middle teens I was not at the Lake any more than ten or fifteen days at the most—a couple of weekends and a week at the close of summer.
I drank Coke and smoked cigarettes (a habit abandoned when I was in Korea) and listened to the juke box in the amusement center at the municipal pier while I argued and bantered with and worshipped Jane. She taught me how to dance and danced contentedly with me and Packy until the older boys like Phil Clare and the G.I.s home on leave discovered her. Even when they did, she still danced with us some of the time.
“Should seminarians dance with girls?” I asked Packy one morning as we hiked home from church.
We honored as best we could our obligation to daily Mass.
“Depends on the seminarian and on the girl.”
“Huh?”
“It’s all right if I dance with Devlin, but not all right if yo
u dance with her.”
“How come?”
“She’s only a good friend to me. You’re gaga over her.”
“Bullshit.”
“You should see the look in your eyes when she’s around.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I enjoy looking at every pretty girl.”
“Or woman.”
“Or woman,” I amended myself—for Packy had also noted my interest in his mother’s luscious friends.
“But it’s different the way you look at Jane.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t think so.”
“Hell she doesn’t.”
“So I shouldn’t dance with her?”
He shrugged. “How do I know!”
“You said it wasn’t all right.”
“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. Besides,” he grinned broadly, “she’s gaga over you.”
“Impossible!”
I let it go at that. Anyway there wasn’t much chance that I’d turn her down when she would grab my hand and announce, “OK, Lunkhead. It’s your turn for another lesson. Eventually, we’ll make a good dancer out of you.”
“Fat chance,” Packy would chuckle.
I would play tennis with her and Packy and either Packy’s sister Joan or Eileen Murray, both of whom I thought were pretty and giggling blondes, but excellent tennis partners and agreeable kissing partners. (Not as good as Jane, obviously.) I turned into a pretty good tennis player, which I still am, capable of beating most faculty colleagues of my own generation, but I was never good enough consistently to beat my teacher.
“Better stick to basketball, Lunkhead,” Janie would inform me as she wiped the sweat off her face. “You’ll never be as good at this as I am.”
She also taught me to swim and to sail in the Keenans’ old dinghy and to paddle a canoe—water skiing had yet to come to the Lake and there was no gasoline till 1945 for powerboats. She absolutely refused to attempt to teach me how to play golf.
“You are too clumsy for them to permit you even on the first tee at the Club.”
Summer at the Lake Page 11