“And then, of course, there is Maureen O’Kelly.”
“O’Kelly!”
Listening to Phil’s account of the lone female member of the class of 1977 who had shown up for the irregular reunion, Roger of course thought at once of Francie.
Professors with more experience than Roger’s are perhaps less surprised by a combination of striking beauty and exceptional mental gifts. An old bachelor like his brother, Roger nonetheless was capable of recognizing beauty when he saw it, and the first time Francie had come to ask permission to register for one of his courses he had realized that she was worthy of a Renaissance painter.
“Permission?”
“You must realize how difficult it is to enroll in one of your courses.”
“Nonsense.”
“There is an upper limit of fifteen and it has already been exceeded.”
“So we will exceed it by one more.”
“I will need a note from you.”
“You shall have one.”
It was not her beauty alone that won him; if he had been that susceptible he might no longer be a bachelor, despite his avoirdupois and eccentricity. And he had noticed that his clumsy obesity brought out a motherly impulse in coeds. But before offering to write the note he had asked Francie what her interest in Claudel was.
“Have you read him?” he asked.
“Only the Journals.”
“The Journals.” They were untranslated.
“I found a two-volume edition in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade and bought them on an impulse. I find them fascinating.”
“In what way?”
“All the biblical references.”
“You read Latin?” Claudel always cited the Bible in Latin.
“Well enough.”
So he told her that Claudel had a copy of the Vulgate Bible on his desk throughout his long diplomatic career and that, in retirement, he had devoted himself exclusively to writing commentaries on Scripture.
“He deplored modern biblical criticism and the foundation of the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem. His contention was that only a poet could understand the Old Testament.”
“Will you be talking of his biblical commentaries?”
“Of little else. Does that interest you?”
Her enthusiasm was clearly genuine. That was when he resolved to smooth her way into his class. It would have been a species of crime to keep her out of it; he saw that more and more as the semester proceeded. He put her onto Claudel Thomiste? And she wrote her term paper on it, an essay so far above the average that Roger could not help cultivating the girl. Like himself, she hardly fitted into what the university had become, a mindless recitation of technical knowledge or the mad attacks on the culture a university was supposed to transmit. Francie became one of the little group of coeds known somewhat derisively as the Ladies of Knight. Paul’s cousin Vivian was another.
With all this as prelude, Roger was not surprised when Francie called to say that she was on campus and could she come see him.
9
As an institution advances from humble beginnings to ever greater distinction and prestige, there are casualties of its progress. Teachers hired in a time of more modest expectations find themselves surrounded by younger and more ambitious colleagues, publications and involvement in professional societies become an expected thing, and many of the old guard, their habits formed in a different atmosphere, find it impossible to conform. So it is that the final decades of a professorial career can be accompanied by bitterness and resentment of the changes that have rendered one all but obsolete. A dinosaur in the modern world. At the university club a table was claimed by those who called themselves and were called by others, with somewhat different emphasis, the Old Bastards. Summer did not alter their habit of meeting at least twice a week for lunch and grousing about the decay and dissolution of the university. Vexation at the new had become a mark of virtue among them and it was mandatory to lament any change, particularly those heralded by the administration.
“A National Catholic Research University,” Bruno Basset said, emphasizing each word of the loathsome phrase now etched in signs at the various entrances to the campus.
“What is a national Catholic?” Potsdam asked. “It is contradictory. A universal specialist.”
Angoscia, who had lived out his active life as a member of what was called the General Program of Liberal Studies, bristled. “A generalist must be an individual.”
“‘I was that narrowest of specialists, the well-rounded man,’” Armitage Shanks murmured.
“Who said that?”
“Nick Carraway.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He is the narrator of The Great Gatsby.”
Debbie the hostess came by to refill coffee cups and was shamelessly flirted with by the impotent denizens of the Old Bastards table. She flounced away, not unflattered by their attention. It was said in whispers that she had suggested that the senior employees of the club call themselves the Old Bitches.
“Someone fell dead on the golf course this morning,” Basset said.
“Which golf course?”
Grumbling began. The exercise of eminent domain over the back nine of the Burke golf course was the sort of thing the Old Bastards could make a meal of. Only Shanks among them had ever golfed, but they were prepared to regard the confiscation of that land as a personal assault on them all.
“The spring before construction began,” Shanks said, beginning an oft-told tale, “during midyear break when all is deserted, even the Morris Inn, the campus a wasteland, I parked behind the inn, threw my clubs over the fence, clambered over after them, and played holes thirteen through eighteen three times. I pride myself on being the last one to play those holes.”
“They should put up a plaque,” Bruno muttered.
“You have to be a golfer to understand.”
“That explains it.”
“Who died on the golf course?”
“Mortimer Sadler.”
“Sadler?”
“That’s right. He gave the money for the new dorm named after him.”
The next ten minutes were devoted to lamentation on the constant campus construction, the inelegance of the architecture, the filling of every available space with some new monstrosity.
“The one genuine improvement is the benches.”
“The benches are a blessing.” Along every campus walk now, at intervals of perhaps twenty-five yards, there was a bench on which tired bones could be rested.
“Speaking of plaques…”
Groans. On each bench was a plaque commemorating the donor or the one whom the donor wished the bench to commemorate.
“Have you ever been to Paris?” Bruno asked.
The others stared at him in silence.
“Or Rome. Or Rapallo, for that matter. One will find in Rapallo plaques commemorating Ezra Pound’s long stay there, the fact that Nietzsche wrote part of Thus Spake Zarathustra there, and that it was also in that lovely town that Sibelius composed a movement of one of his symphonies.”
“Are they on benches?”
“On the walls of buildings.”
“Oh, well…”
“The principle is the same.”
But Bruno’s analogy was summarily rejected and he was ignored.
“I had a Sadler in class,” Bruno said. “But that was years ago.”
“He was in the class of 1977.”
“Perhaps he was the one. He died?”
“They found him on the sixth green, dead as a doornail.”
“What is the meaning of that phrase?”
Another diversion. Meanwhile, Bruno sat in awed wonder at the thought that a student of his had preceded him in death, in the obituary phrase. A small triumphant smile formed on his chapped lips that he found impossible to suppress.
10
Dennis Grantley walked slowly up the sloping path to the starter’s building on the first tee of the Burke golf course. The late after
noon sun shone at a painful slant, but it was not the sun that brought the squint to Max’s eyes; they squinted in all seasons and at all times of day.
“You heard about it?” Max asked.
“‘It’?” Grantley eased himself onto a bench and shielded his eyes from the setting sun.
“The big excitement here this morning.”
Grantley had heard little else all day—in the Huddle where he had his breakfast, in the Warren clubhouse where he had his lunch, and in the maintenance shed from which he had just come. There old Swannie had pointed out just where the golf cart used by Mortimer Sadler had been parked until it was taken away in a police truck.
“They put a big sign on the windshield. ‘Don’t touch.’ Who would want to touch the damned thing?”
The maintenance shed smelled of oil and grease and the sick, sweet smell of the grass that was wedged in the blades of the mowers and in the treads of their tires. Swannie had a little office in a corner, the door of which was always open lest he miss anything in the shed. Windows gave him a view of the Rockne across the road and the starter’s building to the right.
“Fingerprints,” Grantley suggested.
Swannie looked at his grease-stained hands. He still went out on a mower from time to time to keep his hand in, but by and large he let the boys hired for the summer keep the fairways and greens trim. But he himself personally made sure that all the course machinery was in order. He was presiding over the demise of Burke and had assumed an appropriately melancholy air. He had come to work here as a young man, in the glory days of the course. Who would have thought then that its days were numbered, that a time would come when the back nine would disappear and a row of pompous buildings stand where greens and traps and fairways once had been? It was the end of an era.
Of course Grantley had seen the cart and the sign coming from the Huddle, where he first heard of the death on the golf course. Shortly after he arrived, the police came to take the cart away and Grantley had wandered over to the Rockne, where he had a smoke seated at the one table left in the golf shop. Once groups of faculty and administrators had frequented the tables in the shop, whiling away the time before or after a round. Grantley had been an assistant golf coach and had spent much of the day in the shop year-round. When he first arrived on campus, there had been a physical education department and he had faculty status, but when the department was dissolved and he was retained as assistant golf coach his status had become equivocal. Freshmen still took a credit in physical education and golf lessons were one of the options, so Grantley had been kept occupied, but he was no longer on the staff that coached the golf team, which in recent years had dramatically grown in number. Thus he wandered ghostlike around the campus, haunting it with memories of other times.
As he had with Swannie, he let Max give him the news as if he had not heard it.
“A funny thing, Dennis. He was the Sadler that they named one of the halls over on twelve and thirteen after.”
“What’s funny about that?”
“He has a lot of guts playing on the course he helped ruin.”
Grantley said nothing. The complaints and grievances of others were as nothing to his own, but by and large he preferred to nurse his resentment in silence. His life had been a slow descent from his first position at Notre Dame, each change dropping him lower on the scale until he had achieved a kind of anonymity as he wandered about the campus. He could sit in the lunchroom at Warren without being recognized, as if he were a stranger. From time to time a middle-aged player, come in for a beer between nines, would glance at him quizzically, but he was seldom approached. He could count the times he had been asked, “Say, didn’t you give golf lessons once?” The last time he had told the questioner he was mistaken. What the hell good could such uncertain recognition do to offset the injustice that had been done him?
Yes, injustice. Sundays in Sacred Heart, at an early Mass—the earlier the better—he often heard sermons on peace and justice, but the priest never made an application of those lofty principles to the university’s own practices. The villains were always out there in the world, their misdeeds having to be undone or balanced by the efforts of those in the pews. Notre Dame was now the largest employer in town and people eagerly sought jobs on campus for less pay than they could get elsewhere, if there was an elsewhere available to them. If they were exploited it was willingly, and that, Grantley admitted, had been the case with himself. At first. He would have paid to be on the faculty at Notre Dame in those days. But the declining line of his local status had brought a resentment he hardly dared to formulate in his mind, let alone declare openly. The truth was, he was torn between an undiminished, almost holy love for the university and rage at its practices. His resolution of this dilemma was to blame the administration and exempt Notre Dame itself.
“He was just being generous,” he said to Max, exonerating Sadler in words. But of course his thoughts about the man made Max’s seem benevolent.
“They say he was poisoned.”
“Wasn’t he playing alone?”
“How the hell would I know? He took a cart and went out before I got here.”
When Swannie mentioned poison, Grantley had kidded him about the gunk he put on the greens and fairways. Before the sprinkling system had been put in, the fairways were hard to keep green. By August they had become khaki colored and slippery, so a duffer’s scudded ball could end up two hundred yards out on the fairway. Burke had been one of the first beneficiaries of the university’s affluence. A sprinkler system was installed, the ground crew increased in number, all kinds of chemical treatments applied to fairways and greens.
“He probably chewed on a blade of grass and keeled over.”
“You think I put poison on the greens?”
“Only the fairways.”
“Bah.”
Now Grantley sat on the bench, listening to Max grouse. Sometimes he thought there was a chorus of the disenchanted, oldsters whose time at Notre Dame had been a long decline. That was life, one might think, generation supplanted by generation, those about to go into the dark lamenting the lack of light, cursing the young who either ignored or disdained them. His own grievances were made sotto voce, spoken only to himself in the privacy of his room on the second floor of the Firehouse, a monkish cell in which he lived out the twilight of his life.
He had been in the bar of the Morris Inn when the irregulars of the class of 1977 arrived to register, alerted to their coming by Agnes, a waitress in the restaurant with designs on Grantley that he did not wholly discourage. The thought of marriage was as foreign to him as a vocation to the Carthusians, but it was pleasant to be the object of feminine attention. Agnes had been a divorcée, and was now a widow, a veteran of the dining room, carrying a few extra pounds that were pleasantly distributed. Her ample bosom was the promise of an almost maternal comforting, though Grantley had never availed himself of its promise. His conscience had been formed as a boy and sins of the flesh were the paradigm of wrongdoing, the subject of his first terrified adolescent whispering through the grille of the confessional. His relationship with Agnes was accordingly platonic but with the constant suggestion of a more that never got realized. He thought of her as his personal occasion of sin.
“Who’s registered?”
“Who? There must be fifty or more.”
“Can you get me the roster?”
She could and did, a computer printout of reservations. The name of Mortimer Sadler lifted from the page, the sum of all his discontents. In the bar, he had watched them enter in twos and threes and more, huddle at the bar, take tables. Sadler was the noisiest, of course, and Grantley, brooding over his drink in an ill-lit corner, watched the man with malevolent eyes. If there was a symbol of his decline in status on campus it was Mortimer Sadler, as if he singlehandedly was responsible for the desecration of Burke. The man’s voice was full of the pride of life, a voice without doubts, a menace. Grantley sat and thought confessable thoughts about the man.
Francie had been asked to the Knight apartment for dinner, meaning supper, with five-thirty given as the time of her arrival, and decided to ignore the vague plan to dine with her mother.
“That will give us a chance for some conversation before Phil gets here,” Roger had said.
Francie was thrilled by this sign of election. That she was able to take his class was in itself an enormous plus, but to be regarded as a favored student was bliss indeed. At five-thirty on the dot she rang the bell.
A minute passed before Roger Knight, his face aglow from his efforts in the kitchen, swathed in an enormous apron that reached from his chest to his ankles—enough material to make a tent, as he said—opened the door, greeted her, and bowed her into the room. Their greeting was a formal handshake. No hugging and backslapping from Roger Knight. But there was little doubt about the delight with which he greeted her.
“How is your summer going?”
Suddenly she felt ashamed of the indolence that had marked her time at home. Sleeping late, catching up with old friends, golfing. She had gone home with a list of the books she intended to read, but so far she had not even begun.
“Oh, fine. What have you been doing?”
And he was off and running, telling her what he was reading, the exchanges with his far-flung e-mail pals, comments on changes in the university, the latest squabbles at the highest levels, a veritable flow of interests—“trivia and quadrivia”—that made Francie’s life seem impossibly monochrome. But for the moment it was enough to bask in the participated glow of Roger Knight’s interests. Had she ever met anyone she would more like to be like than Roger Knight? Of course this seemed an odd ambition. She could not become a bachelor weighing nearly three hundred pounds who held an endowed chair at Notre Dame. But it was not the possibility of exact imitation that drew her to Roger Knight. He exuded the realization that there was a way to spend one’s life that was infinitely exciting and totally unlike the lives most people led, including, so far as she could see, most other members of the faculty. In vain had she tried to convey her enthusiasm for Roger Knight to Paul.
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