“Ms. Devlin to see you, Mr. Kelly.”
Mae beamed her approval.
“I thought I heard distracting conversation.”
“Hi, Mr. Kelly,” Jane took in my office at a glance, “not a bad place for a provost. You can look out the window and watch all the kids.”
“We don’t have any kids at the University, Ms. Devlin.”
“I can think of two.”
I had prepared myself for her to be devastating but I had underestimated her capacity for anticipating a situation and making the most of it.
The Jane of that morning would be a sight rarely seen at the Faculty Club but not out of place. She wasn’t quite part of our world, they would think, but what good taste. Clearly a woman of importance and class, perhaps a major benefactor. Or an opera singer.
She wore a white sleeveless dress, which managed to hang so it touched just the right parts of her generous anatomy, a matching white hat whose blue ribbon matched the scarf at her neck, white shoes and a large white shoulder purse, whose trim somehow keyed the scarf and the ribbon.
“I hope I haven’t overdone it,” she said anxiously as we walked over to the Club.
“Perfect.”
“I thought I might be.”
She was wearing both the peridot ring and pendant. Perhaps she never took them off. I would have to buy her matching earrings.
Every head in the dining room of the Faculty Club turned when I walked in with her, even the heads of the Nobel Prize winners at the round tables. The dining room, on the second floor of the Club, high ceiling, gothic windows, red leather chairs, is the most elegant in the country. Harvard isn’t in the same league with us. It is a very serious place; you don’t hear much loud talk and very little laughter. And rarely does someone like Jane stride in.
I could imagine the whispers.
Is she the Provost’s wife?
He’s not married. His wife divorced him.
Is that her?
I’m sure not.
His significant other?
She doesn’t look the type.
A fiancée?
Maybe.
His new woman?
The way he looks at her, how could she not be?
She’ll certainly liven up the campus.
Make him smile more. He’s really a mean and stubborn bastard.
I wonder what she’s like in bed.
The Joyce man was, needless to say, overwhelmed. We Irish are genetically programmed to cave in to beautiful and intelligent women, especially when they are familiar with our field and have read our work.
I let them talk. Let everyone see this new woman of mine, who is really my timeless woman, talk with a Joyce scholar like she’s an expert too.
“Nora is all of the women, isn’t she? Gerda, Gertie, the girl on the beach, Molly Bloom, Anna Livia Plurabelle?” she asked.
“Nora was his life. She kept him together. He didn’t live very long, but he would have died years before if it wasn’t for her.”
“It’s a responsibility that all we Irish women must bear,” she said with an elaborate sigh. “We have so little to work with, you know.”
He chuckled. “That’s what Nora thought too.”
On the way down the steps after lunch, the dean of the Social Sciences, an Irish Catholic like me, whispered in my ear as Jane continued to enchant the Joyce scholar, “Don’t let that one get away, Leo.”
“I don’t plan to.”
We strolled out of the Faculty Club and by the tennis courts.
“Nice tennis courts. You play here?”
“Certainly.”
“Maybe I should have brought tennis clothes?” she asked cautiously.
“That would create a sensation.”
“I shouldn’t?”
“Oh yes, you should. Next time.”
“I’m going to be permitted to come back again?” She wasn’t quite sure of her success. No, that wasn’t quite true. She knew she had been impressive, she merely wanted to be reassured.
“I think so.”
She beamed. “Great…are you going to show me your apartment?”
“Was that to be part of the program?”
“I assumed that it would be…hot summer afternoon, quiet day at the University, laughter in the park…”
“I’m convinced.”
She prowled around my apartment like an Irish “woman of property” who might be thinking of buying it. Or selling it.
“What a strange, charming sort of place—very expensive art deco, deliberately tasteless, but lots of room. Someone could do a lot with it.”
“Could they?”
“Beautiful view of the park and the Lake and the museum.”
She stood at the window and casually lowered the zipper on the back of her dress. “Hang this up, will you please.”
“Are we going to make love?” I asked with pretended innocence.
“I don’t know about you, but I a m…now hang it up carefully and come back and I’ll take off your clothes.”
“Will you?”
“Yes, I will!” She turned to look out on the Lake again. “No voyeurs out there in cruisers that I can see.”
I hung up her dress, very carefully indeed, in my bedroom. My heart was pounding in turbulent anticipation. She was learning very quickly the game of love—how to drive me out of my mind at her whim.
When I returned to the parlor, she tossed her lacy, front-hook bra at me. “Now let’s get down to business.”
“I’m scared,” I said honestly enough as she removed my tie.
“My darling, on this nice summer afternoon here at your University, you have reason to be scared. I’ve been reading a few books about men and what scares them.”
It was an exquisite pas de deux she made me dance with her.
At the end of our dance I feared more than ever that I might lose her, not to a death that might lurk ten or fifteen or twenty or perhaps even thirty years in the distance, but to a doom that lurked outside the window of my apartment and might invade at any time to take her away from me.
“Foolishness,” I told myself as she slept in my arms, enormously proud of our dance. “No one can take her away from me. Not this time.”
Yet my dread, dark, brooding, dismal, did not abate.
Which would be worse, I wondered, to let the sleeping dogs lie and to worry about them or stir them up so we can chase them away forever?
Which strategy runs the greater risk of losing her?
None of my computer models could answer that question.
Leo
“Isn’t it strange,” my love said to me as I lathered her body with thick suds, “that God chose to compare himself with love?”
We were in the vast shower of her co-op in East Lake Shore Drive—black marble walls and gold faucets.
“How so?” I piled the lather on thick in some strategically important places.
“It’s so violent and messy and demanding and unpredictable,” she sighed as my hands and the soap did their assigned work of stirring her up again.
“Raw impulse toward unity.”
She nodded. “Leo, it would never have worked between us thirty years ago. We were too young, too confused, filled with too much passion and too many furies.”
I paused in my progression. Jane’s insights during foreplay or after-play or whatever it was to be called were almost always distracting and usually important.
“Too tied up with our families’ needs and demands?”
“It took us a couple of decades to be old enough to be able to love one another.”
“Not second chance, but first real chance?”
“Uh-huh…don’t stop what you were doing!”
Leo
“I’m offended, Mr. Kelly,” the Marine with the three stars on his shoulder frowned, “that you should wait till now to surface this ancient history. Your charges are a grave threat to my record of thirty-four years of service.”
We were in the office
of an assistant secretary of something or the other, looking out on the inner court of the Pentagon. The general, a hard-charging Marine of the type I had always hated, strode into the office spitting fire. I was his target.
My friend Tim, who had only two stars, and the youngish assistant secretary watched our confrontation with silent interest.
“No charges, Max, just curiosity.”
He was a man of medium height at best who strove to look taller by holding himself stiffly erect. His hairline had receded substantially, so his head was shaven. He seemed fit enough, though I thought he had to work at keeping his stomach in place. His chest was covered with ribbons, though he lacked the single ribbon I had remembered to wear, which was worth more than all his put together.
He gave the impression of being your ideal, hell-for-leather Marine who had just charged up a hill on Iwo Jima. In fact, as I had learned from Tim, his Vietnam tours were mostly in intelligence work in Saigon and DaNang, and he had not seen much combat. The kind of intelligence work, I reflected, that had won that war for us.
“Why now!”
“Because I only found out about it now.”
“How did you find out?” he demanded.
“I’m afraid, Max, that question is beside the point. What I was told turns out to be true. I want to find out why it happened, if that be possible.”
“I hope you aren’t suggesting I forged those orders.”
“I can’t imagine that you did, Max.”
“As a matter of fact, I wanted to go to Korea, I would have been much happier there.”
Bluster.
“Maybe, Max, but I doubt it. No one was happy there.”
“I don’t intend to minimize what you did,” he mumbled, with a faint hint of apology in his voice. “It was a remarkably brave action in the circumstances.”
“Maybe.”
“I should have thought that it would have been possible to evaluate the situation in such a way that the withdrawal might have been more orderly.”
An armchair general. Would they make this asshole Commandant and put him on the Joint Chiefs? They just might. They’d done dumber things.
“Maybe. I was concerned only about getting my men out of there and back down to Wonsan. It was a long way.”
“I’ve studied that redeployment at some length. Naturally. It was a remarkable feat. Brilliant improvisation by junior officers like you.”
“It was a retreat, sir. Very nearly a rout. We pulled it off because we could run faster than they could and had air cover and naval artillery. Not as bad as Dunkirk maybe, but still not a victory.”
“I suppose so.”
“I was there.”
“Yes, you were. And I was in Paris and we both wonder why.”
So he had settled down.
Not a bad asshole, maybe; but he would have run that bitter cold day, surely he would have run. He would not have lost his fingers in a POW camp. If they had captured him he would have died. Not stubborn and mean enough to survive.
You don’t need to be that kind of person as Commandant. Maybe you need the stubborn, mean kind only as platoon leaders when the world is collapsing all around you.
Well, God had a good reason for putting me there. I wanted no revenge, but I did want to know who they were.
“If you had gone to Paris,” he continued, “you’d probably still be a Marine officer, a colleague here.”
“I wasn’t the type, Max. Much more likely I would have married a French girl of dubious morals but great piety and would be loafing in a bar on the Left Bank.”
That wasn’t very likely either, but it got a laugh and eased the tension.
“We can reconstruct the matter somewhat like this,” the Assistant Secretary continued. “The Department has issued orders in many different ways through the years. In those days they were actually cut. It was easier to type mimeograph stencils than to make photocopies, a much slower process then than it is now. Your orders were cut by a clerk typist who distributed them to the appropriate offices and files. Only two copies left this building, one to each of you and one to the commanding officer to whom you were assigned. Subsequent orders in your careers, many for you, General, only one or two for you, Doctor Kelly, were added to your jackets. There was never any reason for anyone to look at your first set of orders.”
“I see.”
“Presumably the Commanding Officer of the Fifth Marine Regiment received his copy as did the Attaché in Paris. It would be hard to find those at the present time. One must presume that they received the same version as you did, though in those days the Fifth Marines were not looking at documents all that carefully because they were otherwise occupied.”
The Assistant Secretary was too young to remember those days.
“Between the time of the duplication of these orders and their actual transmission, almost anyone with access to the Bureau of Personnel could have accomplished a quick and crude forgery. There are four men who might have had especially easy access to them—Lance Corporal Farmer who was the typist, Sergeant McIntosh who supervised the files, Gunnery Sergeant Gorman who was the mail clerk, and Private Crick who was the mail messenger.”
“I understand.”
“We have investigated the records of all these men. Private Crick subsequently died in Korea. Farmer returned to civilian life after the war and lives in Seattle. McIntosh and Gorman became career Marines and retired after twenty years of service, the former lives in Minneapolis, the latter in Boston. We have interviewed the three survivors and they deny all knowledge of a forgery and indeed all memory of your names.”
He paused and looked up at me. “I believe you can understand that hundreds of thousands of names must have flowed through that office in those times.”
“Yes.”
“Would you mind glancing through these files, both of you, and see if you recognize anything about them or their history in the Corps.”
Nothing. Crick was an innocent looking kid. Gorman was your classic Boston Mick, the look of a Kerryman about him. McIntosh seemed more Swede than Scot. Farmer looked like the kind of guy who sells used cars.
“Not a hint of anything,” I said.
“Nor I,” the general agreed. “I had never been inside the building at that time. I don’t imagine you ever had either, Leo.”
“Today’s the first time.”
“It looks like a pretty cold trail to me,” Tim suggested.
“Stone cold.”
“The statute of limitations has long ago expired,” the Assistant Secretary continued his bureaucratic recitation, “we would have a hard time with Farmer. Maybe go after his veteran’s benefits, Hospital and such like. McIntosh and Gorman could be in more trouble. We might be able to revoke their pensions if we found evidence of wrongdoing. But we don’t have a shred of evidence.”
“Tim said someone tried to kill you in Chicago a couple of years before?” the General frowned. “You were only a kid then. Hell, so was I! Who would want to kill a kid?”
“Someone who hated him pretty bad…”
“You think they’ll try again after all these years?”
“Maybe, you can understand my curiosity, Max.”
“I sure can, Leo. Lot of crazy people out there.”
Time to end it.
“Gentlemen, I appreciate your time and energy to satisfy my foolish curiosity. I’m sorry to have troubled you. As far as I am concerned the matter is closed.”
“No records of this inquiry?” The Assistant Secretary raised his eyebrow.
“None at all.”
“Leave your jacket as is?”
“Absolutely.”
“Yours, General?”
“No reason to change it now…I appreciate your sensitivity, Leo.”
“And your understanding, Max.”
We all shook hands cordially. I had taken them off the hook.
“I still think you would have made a hell of a Marine officer, Leo.”
“Too stubborn
, Max. Too stubborn.”
He laughed but he didn’t deny it.
My visits to the National Academy and the National Science Foundation were no more successful. They weren’t supposed to accomplish anything, however. They were merely routine court visits to the modern Medicis.
There was bad weather from the Rockies to the Great Lakes and my 727 was late getting out of National Airport, a nighttime adventure reminiscent of the rides at Riverview in the old days.
I had remembered to phone Jane before I boarded the plane at National. One of the responsibilities of acquiring a person who will worry about you is to let them know what phase of the worry situation they should take into account.
“Good trip?” she asked brightly.
“There are no good trips to this city, some are just worse than others. This one wasn’t too bad.”
I hadn’t told her about the visit to the Pentagon.
“Check in when you’re home?”
“It’ll be late.”
“I don’t care.”
“Sure.”
That comes with being loved.
We landed in rain and low clouds at O’Hare, the kind of weather that makes you wonder whether the airport is really there until you see the white lines of the runway at the very last minute at which time God gets a lot of attention.
It was ten-thirty Chicago time when I found an empty phone.
“Another successful experiment in aeronautics,” I said when she answered the phone.
“Always the Professor!” she giggled. “Get a good night’s sleep.”
“It would be easier if my bed wasn’t empty.”
“That problem can be resolved easily enough in the near future.”
“The sooner the better.”
I waited in a long line for a cab. There’s always plenty of them at O’Hare until you want one.
On the tedious ride back to the University, through fog and rain, I abandoned any hope of cracking the mysteries of the past. Let the dead bury their dead.
As to the puzzles of the present, they were pure pleasure.
Where would we live? Her apartment presumably. She owned it and the University only lent me mine with the job. We’d keep mine for University events over which a provost ought to preside and for assignations free from snoopy teens.
Summer at the Lake Page 39