Summer at the Lake

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Don’t we all.”

  “I guess so.”

  Then we were in town and in front of the old Bijou and an odd thing happened. For a couple of minutes I was back in Korea.

  We joined the ticket line behind a bunch of chattering teenagers. Off to one side, a couple seemed to be arguing, two of your classic hippie types (or they could have been graduate students or even junior faculty at the University). The woman was wearing a long and dirty dress with a floral pattern, a kind of early twentieth-century rural gown. The man, a smelly guy with a long pony tail and a goatee, was clad in a skin-tight T-shirt and jeans. They were superannuated kids, probably dropouts, from the upper middle class mainstream in their late twenties, if they weren’t junior faculty. Even from our distance you could smell their unwashed bodies and the pot they had been smoking. Most likely two gypsies on the drug circuit, perpetually stoned, perpetually paranoid. Casualties of the protest movements of ten years ago for whom the drug culture had become the last redoubt of symbolic radicalism. Just like Brigie Devlin who not so long ago, it seemed to me, was a babe in her mother’s arms.

  The guy pushed us aside. “You took our place in line,” he said.

  A sudden rage exploded within me. The little punk had become one of my Korean tormentors. I clenched my fist.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize you were in line.”

  Jane and I stepped back to let him and the young woman ahead of us.

  He turned on me, his small eyes blazing hatred. “You’re not sorry, old man. You’re a shit faced mother fucker.”

  “Have it your way,” I said icily.

  “Lee,” Jane whispered, “don’t get in a fight with the poor kid.”

  “Shut up, you fucking old crone.” The kid glared at her.

  “I think you’re the one who had better be quiet,” I said calmly.

  I was back in the prison camp, shivering with the cold, waiting for the guard to hit me in the gut again.

  He buried his elbow in my stomach. “Fuck you, old man.”

  The crowd of teens were now staring at us, forming a semicircle to watch a fight that might just happen.

  Other Marines and guards.

  I picked the kid up by the shoulders and threw him across the front of the Bijou against one of glass showcases that announced coming attractions. His head smashed the glass. For a moment he lay on the ground, his head and shoulders propped up against the wall.

  I was at the peak of my Marine intensity, ready for more hand-to-hand combat. The basic training of the late forties reeled through my head like an old film.

  The kid shook his head, and produced a switchblade from his pocket and flicked it open.

  “I’m going to kill you, mother fucker.”

  “Lee, look out,” Jane screamed.

  As he charged me I kicked him in the groin. He fell back screaming, both hands clutched to his injured vitals. I grabbed his right arm and tossed him to the ground. Then I stomped on his right hand. The sound of his fingers cracking was like more exploding firecrackers.

  Everyone was screaming. I heard a police siren coming down the street.

  Screeching agony, the kid groped for his knife.

  I kicked it away, pulled him to his feet, twisted his arm behind his back, and ordered through clenched teeth, “Someone call the cops.”

  “We’re here already, sir,” a voice said. “You’re lucky he didn’t cut you with that thing.”

  “Wrong, officer. He’s lucky I didn’t kill him.”

  “Marine, by the looks of you?”

  “A while ago.”

  “Nam?”

  “Korea.”

  Weapons were still firing all around us. Reinforcements from the Corps. No, only Fourth of July firecrackers. I struggled to choose one world or the other.

  “What outfit?”

  “Second Battalion, Fifth Marines.”

  “Jeez. The Reservoir?”

  “Yeah.”

  I was shivering now, cold roaring down out of the mountains into the prison camp.

  “Medal of Honor, Officer Kane,” Jane said proudly. “This is Doctor Leo Kelly.” Her voice choked, “A professor doctor, not a real doctor.”

  “Glad to meet you, sir.”

  The cop, a kid about the same age as the screaming hippie, now handcuffed and held by two other cops, actually saluted.

  Thank God, I told myself, that my old friend Joe Miller had not seen me make such a fool of myself.

  “A pleasure to meet you, sir.”

  “He pulled a knife, Officer.”

  “We saw it, Mrs. Clare. We came as quickly as we could but we would have been too late if it hadn’t been for the Colonel here.”

  Korea faded and I was back in America in the era of Jimmy Carter. I looked around the crowd. The hippie girl was clinging to her man, sobbing with him. The teenagers were watching us with wide eyes. Laura and Lucy would have the whole story, substantially enhanced, before the night was over.

  On the outside I was the charming provost again. Inside fury was still raging—and with it terror. “Never more than Captain, Officer, and then only before they threw me out. Thank you for coming up with the reserves.”

  “I’m terribly sorry that this happened to you here. We’ve been watching these two since they showed up this morning, just waiting for something to happen. We’ll take care of them.”

  “Better get him to a doctor first,” I said. “And call their families if you can find out where they live. There may be parents somewhere who care about them. Tell Sheriff Miller I suggested that.”

  I was coming down off my high, shivering as I always did after combat, the few times I had been in actual combat. My shivering was internal. Outside I was the calm, self-possessed academic.

  “You don’t want to press charges?”

  “Not if they will go into rehabilitation.” Jane spoke for me.

  “Now,” I turned to the ticket seller, “do you think we can have two. Adults, more or less.”

  “No sir,” said the young woman. “It’s on the house…Hi, Mrs. Clare.”

  “Hi, Melanie. You should have seen him beat up kids here back in the forties. Lethal Leo, we called him.”

  “Korea?” She took my arm and lead me inside.

  “Yeah. The kid reminded me of a Chinese guard.”

  “I’ll buy the popcorn—and the ice cream after. I have clout at the Rose Bowl…do things like that happen often?”

  “The anger surfaces every once in a while. I never hit anyone before.”

  She nodded. “Two very large popcorns, Jennifer, drenched in butter, two extremely large diet cokes, two packages of M and M’s and two packages of Raisinets.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Clare.” The gum-chewing kid nodded her head and looked at me appreciatively. “Gosh, that was scary out there.”

  “Nothing to worry about, honey, not with legendary Leo on the job.”

  To me she whispered, “Would you have killed him?”

  “Only if necessary.”

  “Did you kill anyone in the war?”

  “That’s what war is about, Jane, killing people.”

  “Brr…How many?”

  “Hundreds I suppose, that day I lost my mind and played at being a hero. Chinese. They die very quietly, although they charge at you blowing bugles and screaming. I suppose they know they’re going to die. Only one out of three even had guns. Chinese leaders have never cared much about the lives of their people.”

  “There’s so many of them.”

  “Even when there wasn’t.”

  We walked into the theater, half-filled with young people and families and found a quiet corner.

  “You all right now, Lee?” she asked anxiously.

  “More or less. I acted like a prize asshole.”

  “He would have killed you.”

  “I started the fight.”

  “No you didn’t, he elbowed you.”

  “I overceacted. Firecrackers bring back all the memories.�
��

  She patted my arm. “He was stoned out of his mind and just looking for a fight. Lucky it was you instead of someone who wouldn’t have been able to fight back.”

  “I suppose so.”

  The lights went down and Star Wars began. Third time for both of us. Great flick.

  “Leo, you’re shaking like a leaf.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes, you are. How terrible!”

  “I’ll be all right.” I put my arm around her shoulders. “Do you mind?”

  “Of course not.”

  At that moment I would have had as much sexual feeling if I had embraced a tree trunk.

  It was however a warm and pliant tree trunk; and as Luke and Han and the Princess and the two androids cavorted around the screen, the tree trunk became a woman with warm breasts even more endearing than they had been thirty years before.

  Leo

  “Where’s Lucy going to school next year?” I asked when we had seated ourselves in a corner of the Rose Bowl.

  Jane had ordered “two of the largest chocolate malts in all the world, heavy on the malt.”

  The young man in the pink uniform shirt behind the old-fashioned soda fountain corner had asked, “Vanilla or chocolate ice cream, Mrs. Clare?”

  “Tony, do you gotta ask? I’m an old-fashioned conservative! Vanilla, naturally!”

  “I meant,” the kid had nodded at me, “uh, your guest.”

  “He’s an old-fashioned conservative too.”

  After we had collected our treats, Jane led me to an alcove in which we were protected from the glare of the fluorescent lights and the babble of teenage voices.

  “I think we’re the only adults here,” I had said.

  “You mean we’re not teenagers? I thought we were.”

  “I even had a teenage fight.”

  “No, you didn’t,” she had patted my arm as we sat at the table. “Are you all right now?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you ever get that mad at Emilie?”

  “No. I haven’t been that way for a long time.”

  “But it’s all inside you.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Did you ever get mad at her about anything?”

  “No, I was afraid the deep anger would explode and I would hurt her.”

  She pondered that. “That wasn’t good for the marriage, was it?”

  “No.”

  “You’re angry at the Koreans and at all of us for thinking you were dead. And especially at me.”

  “I have no reason to be angry at you, Jane.”

  “Sure you do. I thought you were dead. And I was angry at you for dying and then for coming back from the dead when it was too late.”

  “It was all over long ago, Jane,” I said, not really believing it.

  “Is it?” She tilted her chin at me.

  “Your fingers are safe.”

  We both laughed, turning away from dangerous subjects.

  But I was not angry at her, not at all.

  “You didn’t go to church for a long time, did you?”

  “Angry at God, too. Childish. Then about ten years ago I started to take Laura to Mass because I figured she ought to have some kind of religion and Catholicism for all its faults was the best available. I realized that you can’t leave. It’s in your blood. I had missed it all, the art and the music and the ceremony and parish life and the passing of the seasons and the candles and the changing colors of the vestments and talking to the priest after Mass and people swarming around when you need help. So, hell, I was still mad at God but why take it out on the Church! Now sometimes I’m mad at the Church, but no longer at God.”

  “Once a Catholic always a Catholic.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And warm summers for love like Aunt Maggie says?” Her eyes glittered impishly.

  “Outdoors and by the ponds.”

  “No way.”

  “We’ll see.”

  She changed the subject. “They don’t give cookies any more like they used to when I was working here. Nothing is the way it used to be. But then you wrote the book on that, didn’t you?” She had reached in the large purse she had carried over her shoulder, “So I bring my own cookies. Not homemade, but short breads anyway. Two for you and two for me. Don’t dare try to eat mine.”

  “I can’t remember you working here.”

  “You can’t? Two summers. Between sophomore and junior years and then between junior and senior years. You used to come in to keep me company.”

  “I guess my memory of those times is selective.”

  “Maybe with good reason,” she said with an edge of sadness in her voice.

  “Do me a favor, Milady?”

  “Sure, Lunkhead.”

  “I’m not proud that I was a Marine.”

  “I didn’t mention it.”

  “I know. I’m talking about the future, not tonight. Also I’m not proud of the Medal of Honor. It means only that I killed a lot of Chinese kids and maybe broke the hearts of their mothers and their sweethearts.”

  “And saved the lives of lots of American kids, according to the citations.”

  “Somehow that kind of calculus doesn’t work for me any more.”

  She considered me with eyes so soft and sympathetic as to break my heart.

  “I think I understand, Lee. I won’t mention it.”

  “I’m not a hero. Only a survivor.”

  “I won’t buy that.”

  We sipped our malts for a few moments in silence. On the jukebox, which was as asthmatic as it had been thirty years ago, the Bee Gees were telling us, “How Deep is Your Love.”

  Then I had asked about Lucy and school.

  “She wasn’t doing well at Hardy Prep—that’s the Convent of the Sacred Heart now that it’s gone coed. They didn’t ask her to leave, but I think it was close. I thought we’d try Frances Parker, that’s a private school for rich liberals but they take Irish Catholics.”

  “But actually she’s going to St. Ignatius College Prep, as it must be called in these days.”

  “How did you know that?” Her eyes widened.

  “I had a serious chat with my Laura this afternoon. Or rather she had a serious chat with me. Then just before I left to walk over to your house, she stopped me, keys to my car in her hand, and says, ‘Oh, Daddy, I forgot this afternoon. I’m probably not going back to Lucerne, if you don’t mind that is.’ And I ask where she is going if I don’t mind. And she says, ‘To St. Ignatius if you don’t mind. I figure it’s time I learn how to be an American teenager. And besides that way I can take care of you.’ ”

  “And you said?”

  “I said I don’t mind. What else could I have said…do you smell a conspiracy?”

  “Sure I smell a conspiracy. Do you think it is about us?”

  “What else?” I asked.

  “They seem to be thick as thieves. Lucy really admires Laura. I can’t imagine her being anything but a good influence on my daughter.”

  “You can guess about what they’re conspiring, Jane?”

  “Yes.”

  “Should we try to nip this conspiracy in the bud?”

  “How?”

  “I could send Laura back to Lucerne.”

  “Don’t do that!” She grabbed my hand.

  “Why not?”

  I knew full well that I could fly to the moon more easily than I could keep Laura away from St. Ignatius if she really wanted to go there.

  “Friendships in these years are so important to people. Like Eileen and Angie and me. If our daughters want to be friends, let them be friends, before it’s too late.”

  “Their conspiracy?”

  “What harm can they do?”

  We left it at that. I found her smooth, solid thigh and moved my hand up and down.

  “Like I said,” she continued to sip her malt, “we’re acting like teenagers…I had to resist a lot of passes when I was working here.”

  “Not from me?”

&nbs
p; “You made your passes elsewhere. I can’t remember resisting them. That was because you knew when to stop without being told, which I hope you still do.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” I said, squeezing her thigh.

  “Lee, please!”

  But she didn’t push my hand away.

  Outside as we walked out of the dark streets of the town and down the darker road, I put my arm around her shoulders again. She snuggled close to me.

  Firecrackers were exploding all around us. I was able for the most part to ignore them. Except for the big ones. Jane did not notice my reactions because I had long ago learned how to hide my leftover Korean fears. Most of the time.

  “We should talk seriously now, Jane.”

  “I know. I don’t want to because I’m so confused.”

  “I am too.”

  “Something terrible happened to me,” she blurted, “when you died.”

  “I didn’t die, Jane. I was still alive.”

  “Not for me. When you died the last hope went out of my life. It’s never come back.”

  “Last hope?”

  “I lost most of it when Jimmy and Eileen were killed. Then your sister Meg came over to our house just before Christmas two years later, tears streaming down her cheeks, and told me that the Defense Department said you’d been killed in action and that you had been recommended for the Medal of Honor.” Her shoulders were quivering at the memory. “I’ve never had any hope since then.”

  This was a strange, enormous statement. The woman had married, raised children, become successful in business, maintained a persona of bravery and good cheer to the world. Was she confessing despair?

  “What do you mean, Jane?”

  “When kids are growing up, girl kids especially, they have such bright hopes for all the good things that are going to happen in their lives. Most of us lose those hopes as life goes on, some people manage to cling to them. I lost mine early. Since then I’ve just hung on.”

  “Hung on bravely, it seems to me.”

  I felt her shrug her shoulder. “Fuck bravery…look out for the car.”

  We dodged away from the oncoming headlights.

  “I would have waited for you forever, Lee, I really would have, if only they said you were missing. But they said you were dead. So I gave up. Phil wanted to marry me. My folks were pushing me. Iris liked me. Doctor Clare thought I’d settle Phil down. I said what the hell. It might as well be him as anyone else. You were dead.”