Summer at the Lake

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “In fact, the car was driven that night by Phil Clare who had borrowed it without permission. He was probably on an illegal errand of his own for his father. The nature of that errand need not detain us.”

  “Probably” was not the right word. He certainly was on an illegal errand. Sheriff Miller had, as he had promised, confirmed my suspicions when I confronted him with an accurate scenario, when I had finally figured it out. It was a relatively simple scenario once I perceived that the money and the faulty brakes represented two separate plots.

  Thinking he was clever, Doctor Clare did not want his car to be seen in Warburg. Deceived as always about his son’s maturity and intelligence, he told Phil to borrow someone else’s car and pick up a package for him. He had tried to impress on Phil that it was an important task. He had literally sent a boy on a man’s job, a boy who brought along two friends to drink with him and risked a joyride down a steep hill in an old car. The Outfit people were dismayed that their potential partners in a shopping mall would be so careless. They demanded all the money back, less what it took to bribe the local cops. The cops accepted what they were given because they did not want to wake up some morning and find themselves dead. The Outfit charged the bribe money to Tino Nicola. When he refused to pay, they conspired to blow him up and killed his family by mistake.

  “We didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” Dickie groaned.

  “No one but me. Instead you killed two innocent kids and indirectly their parents. You wiped out the whole Murray family.”

  “Good God!” Madge Devlin screamed, “Can’t you see what you’re doing to us!”

  “I would submit, Ms. Devlin,” I continued calmly, “that rather a lot was done to the Murrays too.”

  “We have masses said for them every day of the year,” Dickie sobbed. “I pray for them every day too. I really do…”

  “Herbie drunk himself into an early grave.” Mickie wiped tears away from his eyes. “He saw ghosts. They drove him to drink.”

  “It could just as well have been my ghost.”

  “You wouldn’t have been driven that crazy.”

  “So you had to try again!”

  Jane was deathly pale. I was taking a big chance. Jerry Keenan had said that he hoped I knew the risk I was taking.

  I knew it all too well.

  “You can’t prove a thing,” Madge Devlin shouted. “It was all so long ago.”

  “I was knifed last week, Ms. Devlin.”

  “We didn’t mean that,” her husband was pleading with me now. “All we intended was a warning. You fought back and almost killed them. That’s why the guy pulled a knife on you.”

  Jane gasped. Lucianne started to weep.

  “Let that be a warning to any more thugs you plan to send against me…if I may continue. We also possess a statement from Martin Gorman, late Master Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps that his good friend, Herbert Patrick Devlin, whom he knew in the Bureau of Personnel during the Second World War, paid him ten thousand dollars to see that I was sent to Korea instead of to the Embassy in Paris. In current money that’s more like seventy thousand dollars. A lot of money.

  “They became friends because they both worked in personnel departments and they were both born to very recent immigrants from the same part of Ireland. Sergeant Gorman was very much afraid of losing his lucrative service pension if he did not tell the truth.”

  In my altered state of consciousness—or whatever it was—at the University Hospital I had remembered that Herbie had worked in the Navy Department during Second World War. The Navy and the Marines had started asking questions about me within the last week. It seemed likely that the mugging was the result. They must have hit paydirt without realizing it. I called my friend Tim to find out if Master Sergeant Gorman was the son of immigrants, perhaps from County Kerry. When he had phoned back and confirmed my hunch, not without some astonishment on his part, I told him to go after Gorman. Within twenty-four hours I had confirmation of my suspicions. All the rest was, as we used to say in the Marines, mopping up.

  I put Gorman’s statement aside. After that lucky guess or insight or whatever, all the rest were certainties.

  “She made us!” Dickie groaned.

  “Yeah, it was all her idea,” Mickie continued. “She hated you. She hated your mother. She wanted Jane to marry Phil. She had to get you out of the way.”

  I shivered. The evil of that hatred lingered long after the woman, twisted with sickness and anger, had died cursing her children to the end. Yet once she had been a pretty young woman with bright hopes for herself and her children in America.

  “You were adult men. You’re trying to tell me that your mother had that kind of power over you?”

  “She was the very devil! She wanted you out of the way.” Dickie held his head in his hands. “She knew Herbie had friends in the Pentagon. She made him keep up those contacts because, like she said, you’d never know when you’d need friends. She told Herbie to get you sent to the war, no how matter how much it cost. We didn’t know about it till after he’d done it.”

  “You would have stopped him if you did know?”

  “There was no stopping him when she gave the orders. He was the oldest. He’d do anything to please her. Anything. We all figured you’d come back anyway. Then you didn’t.”

  “Then I did. But too late it seems.”

  Were they telling the truth about Herbie’s responsibility and their own relative innocence? Probably. Not that it mattered either way. Their assault on me the other night was a hamhanded return to the goon tactics of the past, doubtless occasioned by a call from Marty Gorman. They shouldn’t have done it. That was the last bit of data I needed to put my puzzle together. They had foolishly overreached.

  Dullards, not arch villains but dullards.

  “I now have a statement that ties the two attempts on my life, the first two of them at any rate. It’s from Philip Clare.”

  Jane’s eyes opened in horror.

  My darling, I hate to do this, but it is necessary, absolutely necessary.

  Absolutely.

  “He told me that shortly before his wedding he encountered Herbert Devlin at a place of entertainment in Chicago. Herbert Devlin was intoxicated and feeling guilty over what he had done. Perhaps to expiate his guilt he confided to Philip Clare that he and his brother had made the marriage possible by getting rid of me. They’d tried once, he told Philip Clare, and failed but they were successful the second time. According to Mr. Clare, Herbert Devlin blamed it all on his mother.”

  I had played a hunch with Phil. I thought that if I confronted him up front that he had known about the plot against me before the wedding, he would want to know how I found out instead of denying the truth of what I said.

  My hunch had worked. He collapsed. How did I find out, he begged.

  “You talk too much, Phil. Especially when you’re drunk. Now you’re going to tell me exactly what was said and when and where and you’re going to sign an affidavit admitting what you knew. In turn I promise you that the federal prosecutors will not be given information that you were an accessory after the fact to murder.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone!”

  “After you heard Herbie’s confession or boast or whatever it was you knew about it, you didn’t report it to the police. That makes you an accessory.”

  “You won’t use it against me?’

  “No.”

  He had signed the statement. “If Jane sees this you’ll lose her again,” he looked up at me slyly.

  “I don’t intend ever to lose her again.”

  I might not have been as confident as I sounded.

  Nonetheless, before I let him off the hook I made him promise to cooperate in the annulment process. He promised he would. I had sufficiently frightened him that I didn’t doubt it.

  “Herbie was like that,” Dickie sighed. “He couldn’t fight Ma off, but he had terrible guilt feelings afterwards, especially when he was drunk. God knows how many peop
le he told.”

  Lucianne was now embracing her mother.

  “He had much to be guilty about.”

  “That’s why he died so young. He drank to forget it all.”

  “I daresay.” I placed the four documents on the table. “Read them at your leisure.”

  “Why did you take the money for the Chair?” Madge Devlin asked.

  “The University has taken money from far worse people, I fear. At the point in time the deed of gift was signed I was unaware of these matters. I would never have dreamed that such horror could actually happen in a family. But in any event I would not have turned down the gift. It’s not my right to make decisions on such matters.”

  “You’ll have a great scandal on your hands when the trial starts.”

  “Oh,” I stood up, “there will be no trial.”

  “No trial?” Dickie looked up astonished. “Why not?”

  “Why? Let the dead bury their dead. They’re all in the hands of God anyway. I will not attempt to arrogate a divine role for myself.”

  Damn professorial language. “Arrogate.”

  “But then why this,” Madge Devlin gestured at the pile of affidavits.

  “So that the truth be told, Madge. Once and for all. So that the past may be put to rest and life may go on. For everyone in this room. So that the evil and the hatred will be forever banished. Something like that anyway.”

  “Is that what we need?” Jane sounded tired and bitter. “More truth?”

  One last homily.

  “I accept the explanation that Ita Devlin forced you to do these things to me. I don’t blame you and now that she’s dead, I don’t blame her either. Who knows what terrible energies drove her, energies for which she was not responsible? I can only hope that she’s found the peace and joy for which we all seek. I hope that from this day on, the energies of hatred that have caused suffering to all of us will be permanently exorcised.”

  I felt I could not stand another minute of the terrible currents of tension that were bounding back and forth among the people in the room.

  All the demons were there. I glanced at Maggie; her eyes were closed in pain, as if she were absorbing all the hurt, all the sickness, all the misery, all the violence.

  The twisted soul of Ita Devlin was there among us and then gone. Left permanently to Heaven, which has promised mercy to all.

  I turned to leave the house. I did not care if everyone else remained. What I had done was done; now others might have to make of it what they would.

  I strode down the drive and out into the road. A hundred yards away at the foot of the hill was the oak tree where Jimmy and Eileen had died. I had done whatever I could to put their souls to rest.

  I knew Laura was behind me. I didn’t look to see if there was anyone else till I was on the road.

  They were all there, the Keenan family church, standing by one of their own.

  “That was very brave of you, Leo,” Mary Anne said.

  “I hope you knew what you were doing,” Tom added. “I suppose you do.”

  “He knew all right,” Jerry said. “Just what he was doing.”

  “Chosin all over again!” Packy exulted.

  “Brilliant, Lee, brilliant.” Maggie hugged me. “I couldn’t have done a better job myself.”

  Back at their compound we were herded into the elder Keenans’ coach house, where wet and noisy grandchildren would not interrupt us. Maggie produced champagne she had, without my knowledge, put in the fridge before we had made the trek down the road. She and Laura poured the bubbly for us.

  In the center of the spacious parlor, my adopted sister raised her glass, a slender statue of victory, an angel of light celebrating triumph.

  “Confusion to all our enemies,” she toasted me. “And God’s choicest blessings on all our friends.”

  Leo

  Packy went back for the Sunday Masses at his parish. Our crowd went to the early Mass in the church in the town.

  I encountered Jane in back of the church. Laura was behind me. Jane and Lucianne in tow. I dreaded what she might say. It was too early to talk about the scene.

  “Why did you do it, Leo? Why in the world did you do it?” She looked much older than her fifty years, the first time I had seen her in that condition.

  “The truth had to be told, Jane. It was there and it had to be told.”

  “What if their children were there?”

  “Then I would have put it off to another day.”

  “You ruined their marriages.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “It was hell on earth after you left last night.”

  She did not seem so much angry as too despairing to be angry.

  “It will get better.”

  “It will never get better. She was my mother after all.”

  “You knew what she was.”

  “I didn’t need to know all that she was.”

  “I think you did.”

  “You had no right to decide that.”

  “I think I did. The truth had to be told.”

  “What does that mean? What does it do to Lucianne to know what a heel their father was?”

  I saw that Lucianne was about to open her mouth and, teenlike, charge in with an argument. She caught my eye and thank God shut up.

  “All of us have been prisoners of hatred. We must at last shake ourselves free.”

  “Fine sounding words…but what about devastating their poor wives?”

  “They’re the kind that will snap out of it. Probably last night they were already recalling how cruel she was to them.”

  She swallowed uncertainly. I had hit home. Well, that was good.

  “You were very angry at me a couple of weeks ago because I had not freed you from your mother in 1948. In our second summer I had the chance to free you and I risked that chance.”

  “You risked a lot,” she said, her face stony.

  “I don’t judge her soul, Jane. I really don’t. I’m concerned only about the truth and the truth making us free.”

  “You and your goddamn Irish integrity,” she turned on her heel and weeping, stormed away. Not good. Now this conversation itself would become a new focus for her anger.

  Lucianne hesitated, as if she had to choose sides. I pointed towards her mother hurrying into the parking lot.

  Lucianne nodded and ran after her.

  “Nice going, Daddy,” Laura said. “You won that one.”

  “I wish I thought so.”

  Leo

  Late Sunday evening, Laura showed up on the porch where I was trying to read Graham Greene’s new novel The Human Factor. I had watched the new Pope—John Paul he had called himself—on television at noon. He seemed a wonderful man. The Church desperately needed someone like him. Alas, he would only live for another month.

  What had happened to the money? As best as Joe Miller and I could figure it out, the Mob/Nicola/Clare theory held. Tino had made Doctor Clare pick up the money. He in turn had sent Phil to pick it up. The Murrays went along for the ride. Probably Jim Murray knew nothing about the pick-up nor about the money, perhaps not ever. The Mob people wanted the money back, all of it. But the police had it. So they were paid off and Nicola was supposed to pick up the tab. That may have been why his car was blown up a couple of years later. The Devlin attempt on me had coincided accidentally with the money exchange. Two unrelated conspiracies had a single unintended consequence—two young lives snuffed out.

  I looked up from the unturned pages of my book to see my daughter in jeans and a maroon St. Ignatius sweatshirt.

  “Lucianne goes that her mother is like really totally angry at you, but she goes she’ll get over it because she loves you so much.”

  “That’s what Lucianne thinks, huh?”

  “Yes, Daddy, she goes Leo was simply wonderful yesterday. Aunt Madge and Aunt Helen think so too. Even Charley and Lin who weren’t there but read the papers you left behind. Nobody goes Jane don’t be a fool because she’s so mad. She’s ma
d at all the Keenans too, especially Aunt Maggie.”

  “She’ll calm down.”

  “Are you sure, Daddy?”

  “No, hon, I’m not sure. But it’s up to her.”

  “You could go over and talk to her, couldn’t you?”

  Aha, that was the latest Lucianne/Laura scheme.

  “I don’t think so. Not now.”

  “Not ever?”

  “Maybe, we’ll have to wait and see how Jane feels in a couple of days.”

  “Even Lucianne’s Aunt Madge and Aunt Helen go that you did the right thing. I think her uncles are so relieved that they are grateful to you. It’s only Jane…”

  “Mr. Clare was her husband for a long time, the father of all her kids.”

  “She knows what a creep he is.”

  “I suppose it’s her mother. You don’t like to have to face that fact that your mother was so filled with hatred.”

  “Why was she that way, Daddy?”

  “We may never know.”

  “Daddy, won’t you please go over and see Jane tonight?”

  I hesitated. What was the most pragmatic strategy?

  “Not tonight, hon, I won’t let her get away again. I promise that.”

  “How long?”

  “Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “When it’s time.”

  “You and your goddamn Shanty Irish integrity!”

  She laughed when she said it. Somehow I had responded properly. She and Lucianne would be reassured. Perhaps they thought I would give up on Jane.

  Not ever.

  “Jane didn’t say ‘Shanty.’ ”

  “I know. I just added it for emphasis.”

  She skipped out of the room, confident that it would be all right. I wished I felt the same.

  Yet I had done what had to be done.

  Or had I made another huge mistake?

  Patrick

  “You’re on his side, Packy,” Jane shook her head disconsolately. “You don’t want to see it from my viewpoint.”

  For almost four decades I had loved the woman. Never had I loved her more than at this moment. And never had I felt more powerless to help her. She was digging herself into a pit from which it would be difficult to emerge.