He puts the ring on her right hand, another graceful touch.
She stares at it in wonderment.
And moves it to her left hand.
Leo
“You’re not wearing any clothes, woman.” I moved my hands from her shoulders to her thighs. “Only those two glowing stones.”
“You’ve noticed?”
“I have.”
I rose from bed, lifted her up and slung her over my shoulder. She was astonishingly light.
“What are you doing!” She screeched.
“Carrying you downstairs and outside.”
“Stop it!”
“Nope!”
“Why?”
“I want to make love to my woman under the old oak trees as the sun comes up by the side of the pool.”
“Oh.”
“Catholic summer idea.”
“The old Monsignor wouldn’t approve.”
“You seem to.” I ananged her on a chaise at poolside, sat next to her on the edge of the lounge, pressed her breasts against her ribs, and kissed her.
“Not much choice,” she said when I gave her a chance to speak.
The first rays of the sunlight turned her flesh rose and gold. I began my ministrations to her with all the tenderness and delicacy I could muster.
“I suppose you think you can do this to me whenever you want,” she sighed.
“Yep.”
The birds were singing around us. Jane murmured something I could not understand.
“Hmmn?” I raised my mouth from her belly.
“Chaucer,” she said as she moved my lips to her loins: “Well have they cause to be often glad, / Since each of them recovered hath his mate; / Full blissful may they sing when they wake.”
“The birds?” My tongue probed into forbidden country.
“Not just the birds.”
When we were finished with our sunrise ecstasy, covered with dew and sweat and the fluids of love, she pushed me off her.
“Did you ever swim in a pool with a naked woman after you made love at poolside?”
“Only in my fantasies.”
“Now’s the time, Lunkhead,” she propelled me toward the pool, “to do it for real.”
Without waiting for an answer she shoved me into the sparkling blue waters and dove in after me.
Later, our wet bodies glistening golden in the rays of the summer sun, we climbed out of the pool, giggling and holding hands like children.
Maggie would have compared us to the newly baptized on Easter morning.
Leo
I swung Maggie Ward Keenan into the air, just like her real brother (as opposed to her adopted brother) did. She blushed and giggled happily. Everyone else applauded.
“Thirty years and he’s finally done it,” Jerry grinned. “Better late than never.”
“She’s been wondering whether you’d ever try,” Packy laughed.
“Should I put her down now?”
“Yes, you may!” Maggie insisted but not too seriously.
“You see, dear,” Mary Anne Keenan explained, “she really enjoys the role of the poor little waif child that the Keenans took in, as untrue as it is.”
I finally put my captive back on the floor. She promptly served up a plate of bacon for me and kissed my forehead.
The five of them were sitting in the brunch room, discreetly reserved about where I had been before I walked into the room.
My exuberance with Maggie must have resolved any doubts—as well as my voracious appetite.
“The waif child isn’t all of me,” Maggie insisted, passing cinnamon rolls that must have come from the same bakery where Jane had purchased hers, “but it’s some of me. And the Keenan family is the Church that rallies around us waifs and protects us and gives us life—complete,” she jerked her finger at Packy, “with its own built-in cleric.”
The Keenans with their generosity and their strength and their love a metaphor for the Church? Not a bad image at all.
I realized that all my anger at Jane had been exorcised in our romps. It would never come back. How could you be angry at a woman who muttered a quote from Chaucer while she was in the advanced stages of arousal?
“Will someone preside over rearranging the cars?” I asked when I had demolished my second breakfast.
“You can use mine if you’ll be back by noon,” Packy said. “The key is in the car…I have to go in for the afternoon Mass at the parish, so I can come back for the birthday party tonight. Mustn’t miss that.”
“I think I’ll stay around for it,” I said, looking for smirks but not identifying any. “I’ll be back long before noon, Pack, I’m going over to Warburg to have a word or two with Lucianne Clare, notorious asshole. I’ll be back for your noon Mass here.”
“Be kind to the poor child,” Mary Anne pleaded.
“Give her hell,” Maggie insisted. “That’s what she needs.”
“I know that, dear,” Mary Anne replied, “but do you think Leo can do it right?”
“Now he can.”
I didn’t wait for further discussion.
Leo
“Lucianne,” I hugged briefly the small child with the huge black eyes and the bandage on her head, “you are an asshole.”
“Don’t bawl me out, please, Uncle Leo.”
It was a brand new, modern Warburg hospital, at least new in regard to me. Its sleek corridors and bright rooms and smiling staff were not at all like the place where I had come with burned hands.
“I agree with the received opinion that you might be suffering from a terminal case of assholeism.”
“I know I goofed up,” she said listlessly.
“On your mother’s birthday weekend. You wanted to ruin it for her.”
“I’m sure Aunt Maggie thinks that.”
“Aunt Maggie, I’m told, is always right.”
“I like Laura a lot,” she said squirming on the bed. “She’s really neat.”
“She has her problems too, Lucianne.”
“But you’re so good with her.”
“I try,” I said cautiously.
“I mean, Laura goes it’s a lot easier for someone to be a father and a mother to a daughter than it is to be a mother and father.”
So.
“You know what I mean?”
“Kind of.”
“I love my mother. I adore her. She’s one of the kids. I’d like to call her Jane, but I’m afraid.”
“Ask her if you can. She’ll be flattered.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Are you and she going to get back together again, Uncle Leo?”
“No comment.”
“I sure hope so.”
“If you love your mother, why do you do bad things to her?”
“Because I get so angry at her. She can be a real dork, you know that, Uncle Leo?”
“Sometimes we all are.”
“I don’t mean that, I mean about him, I mean about that man. He’s tried to ruin her life. He messed up Philip and Brigid. And the only reason he didn’t ruin me is that he wasn’t around often enough.”
“I thought you were against the divorce?”
“I go I don’t want to be fought over in court, you know? But then I call Aunt Norine, you know, down in Central America and she goes like it’s time your mother led her own life. And I go he’s trying to ruin me and Aunt Norine goes, he’s a sad man, dear, but he can’t ruin you unless you let him.”
“So you’re going to ruin yourself?”
“Pretty dumb, huh?”
“So because you are angry at your father, you take it out on your mother, that’s pretty dumb too, isn’t it?”
“Really dumb…he called her at the office yesterday morning and made her cry.”
“About what?”
“About how he would go to jail if she didn’t help him.”
“That’s not true!”
“She knows it’s not true, but he’s so good at messing her up.”
/>
“So you were angry at her because she will give him the money?”
“No, she won’t give him any money. I was angry because she let him make her cry.”
So. All very neat.
“Lucianne.”
“Yes, Uncle Leo?”
“Drop it. Your mother is ending a relationship that has been both intimate and long. She will finish it in due course and in her own time. Let her finish it her own way and support her instead of making her life more difficult.”
“Are you sure she’s ending it?”
“Bank on it. There’ll be some difficult times, but it’s all over.”
She sighed. “What should I do?”
Aha, I wasn’t doing too badly.
“Join her side, make up with her, hug her. Cry in her arms. Tell her how much you love her. Promise that you’ll be no worse than any other teenager. Tell her you want to be friends.”
“Can I ask her if I can call her Jane? Really?”
Another very important symbol.
“Absolutely.”
“If I try to make up with her, she’ll just lecture me. That’s all she ever does is lecture me.”
“Parents are for lecturing but if you try to become friends with her today, I promise: no lectures. I’ll forbid them.”
She seemed skeptical. “Really?”
“Like I say, bank on it.”
Lucianne smiled complacently to herself.
“Will you kiss me on the forehead, Uncle Leo, like you do with Laura?”
“Absolutely.
Everyone was making guesses.
Let them guess.
Later in the morning, Jane appeared at the Keenans’ dressed in blue slacks, a blue blouse, and a blue ribbon around her hair.
Blessed Mother blue, naturally.
She was wearing the ring, on which no one chose to comment, but which everyone saw.
What the hell, so they know.
“I’m off to the hospital to visit my youngest. Anyone need anything from Warburg?”
She was instructed to bring more ice.
“I’ll drive you.”
“I don’t want to trouble you, Lee,” she frowned.
“I said I’ll drive you.”
“OK,” she shrugged, “have it your way.”
I took the keys of her big, long, red Chevy convertible from her hand.
“Relax. It’s your birthday.”
“And a happy one.” She touched my arm.
I admit that I was a little distracted during the drive. My right hand had some strange ideas about what it wanted to explore again this morning. The woman who was riding shotgun did not seem to mind its presumptions.
“I don’t assume, Jane…” I said as we pulled into Warburg.
“Yes,” she laughed, “what don’t you assume?”
“I don’t assume that the renewal of our love gives me any right to tell you how to raise your daughter.”
“Nonetheless, you are about to give me strong advice on that subject.”
“Which you are free to ignore.”
“I won’t ignore it, Lee, believe me.”
“No lectures today.”
“I don’t lecture her.”
“All parents lecture.”
“All right, I guess I do lecture…I’m so worried that she doesn’t understand the kind of trouble she could get into.”
“Maybe and maybe not. My point is that telling her what you know about the world will not have any effect at all at this point in her life.”
“God knows,” she sighed, “I’ve made enough mess of my life.”
“I don’t think that is true either. In any event, dear God do I sound like a professor, Lucianne is ready for big reconciliation. Let her talk and love her. A lot.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I feel I have a lot more love to give today.”
“I should think so.”
We both laughed.
“You’ve set this up, haven’t you?”
“Certainly.”
“You do move in quickly, Leo.”
I pulled into the hospital parking lot.
“Are you coming up with me?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Do you mind if I take off the ring before I go in? I don’t want to have to explain everything at once.”
“Go right ahead. There’s more holding us together from now on than a ring.”
“So I noticed,” she chuckled and touched my arm. “Wish me luck.”
“Happy birthday.”
She grinned. “Thank you.”
Unquestionably, the ineffable Laura had already been on the phone about “Jane’s” new ring. Lucianne would phone as soon as she left and they would ponder in great detail why Jane had not worn the ring into the hospital room.
That was their problem.
I opened Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, not the most appropriate reading for my present exalted mood, but, as an academic, I had a certain obligation to read “intelligent” novels by other academics.
It wasn’t Professor Murdoch’s fault, but my spirits plummeted while I waited for Jane. Tristis post coitus. It was all too good to be true. The enemies were still out there. They would still try to take it all away from us, unless I found out who they were and, one way or another, disposed of them.
The worst enemy had been dead for twenty-five years. But she was still an enemy. This time I would beat her.
All I really wanted to do was to make love with Jane for the rest of time and most of eternity too.
What if I should lose her again in my battle to unmask those who had made us pawns for so many years?
I didn’t see how that could happen. Yet I had an uncanny feeling that the battle for the fair matron whom I had stormed in her phony Georgian castle the night before was not yet over.
When the fair matron joined me in the Chevy convertible an hour or so later, she was glowing.
“She wants to call me Jane! Can you imagine that? It’s a very big deal with her. Isn’t that astonishing!”
“Did she say why?”
“Because she wanted to be able to relate to me as one of the kids like everyone else does.”
“And you said?”
“Why, naturally I said yes. I told her I was flattered and I’d try to be one of the kids for her. And she asked me if we could still fight once in a while and I said I sure hoped so. Then she embraced me and cried like a baby and swore she loved me more than anyone else in the world and she would do her best never to act like an asshole ever again.”
“Really!”
“It was very moving. So I promised her I’d try not to lecture her any more and told her if I started, she should stop me and say I wasn’t being Jane. She howled at that.”
She pulled her new ring out of her purse and put it on again. “Last time it ever comes off. She probably knew about it anyway.”
“I’m sure she did…sounds like a good conversation to me.”
“It was glorious!” she exulted. “Simply glorious. I have my lovely little Lucy child back again. Oops, Lucianne child …she even told me where I could find the birthday present she hid for me.”
“What is it?”
“She wouldn’t say. I’m afraid,” she blushed, “it is some thoroughly improper article of lingerie. Those connivers will never give up.”
“I will wait eagerly to see it.”
“So you shall my dear, so you shall.”
“Will she be coming home for the party?”
“Not till tomorrow, which is the actual birthday anyway.” Her left hand began its own guileful explorations. “Now lets go back to the Lake. I’d like to play a set of tennis before Packy’s Mass.”
“Tennis?”
“I want to see whether a night long orgy improves my game or ruins my game.”
“It was only a demi-orgy.”
“Truly? I can hardly wait for the real thing!”
Her game was much b
etter. Her serve faster than it had ever been. She beat me 6-0 in two sets.
“Can you imagine how good my game would be after a total orgy!” She hugged me at the end of the second rout.
“The problem is the deterioration of my game.”
“So much the better.”
Patrick
“To say that Mary’s body is in heaven, my friends, is nothing more than to say that the human body is destined for glory. Our bodies with all their weaknesses and frailties, their propensity to weariness and sickness and eventual deterioration are nonetheless sacred. There is nothing in the human body that is not sacred, neither birth, nor growth, nor love, nor aging, nor death. In Jesus all creation is saved, in Mary that salvation is celebrated. Moreover she represents for us God’s life-giving, life-nourishing love, the blessings of the flock and the field, of the womb and the breast, the flourishing of life and love in all creation. Mary tells us about God: ‘whose glory bare would blind / or less would win man’s mind / through her see him / made sweeter, not made dim / and her hand leads his light / sifted to our sigh.’ ”
Leo
She was radiant at the birthday party that night in a blue summer dress, draped off one shoulder, which made her look like a Greek Goddess or a Roman Empress or a Fairy Princess.
Again.
Packy proposed a toast—to be drunk in the usual prohibitively expensive champagne—to his “first niece and his first girlfriend, long ago turned by the marvelous alchemy of our grinning little witch from Philadelphia to my adopted sister.”
Applause.
Maria yielded the response to Jane.
“To the Keenans,” she said, “all of them, in gratitude for not letting me ever get away.”
Much clinking and laughter.
And much truth.
Cake was cut, presents were opened, dancing commenced.
“Did Leo give you anything, Jane?” Packy, all phony innocence asked. “He gave Maria some very expensive perfume.”
“A little ring,” she held out her hand, champagne glass in the other. “Matches my pendant he gave me long ago. He’s such a romantic.”
“Takes one to know one,” Maggie sniffed.
More laughter.
“I’ll take you home,” I had said when the party broke up.
Summer at the Lake Page 36