The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Also by Ralph McInerny
Copyright
For Kevin and Helen Cawley
Plots were seldom original: with fair frequency, there was the irrepressible, all-betraying sneeze in the dusty attic, or the pepper flung in the assailant’s eyes.
—Shirley Hazzard, GREENE ON CAPRI
PROLOGUE
Winter is the season when the University of Notre Dame, now in the third millennium, most resembles its nineteenth-century origins. It was a bleak winter day in 1842 when Father Sorin arrived at the site of the future university and then as now a frigid wind came from the northwest and shook the leafless trees. Great drifts of snow descended from the log chapel to the frozen lake. Only a visionary could have seen a university rising from that snow-covered ground.
There are countless more buildings now and for most of the year there is incessant activity on campus. While classes are in session ten thousand students reside in the dorms and other housing provided for them; they fill the dining halls and hurry from class to class along the campus walks. In May, after the graduation ceremonies are over, there is a slight lull, punctuated only by weddings in the campus church, but before the month is out a seemingly endless series of activities enlivens the campus. Flag-twirlers gather, crash courses in Catholicism are given, charismatic rallies are held, conferences convene, thousands of kids take part in sports programs, and wistful alumni wander about the campus, trying to get their bearings in the new Notre Dame. But winter is different.
The midyear break runs from the second week in December to the third week in January, and the exodus from campus is almost total. The Morris Inn closes, the University Club shuts its doors, campus eateries keep irregular hours; the foreign student who has remained on campus, too far from home to go there, finds food difficult to get. The classrooms in DeBartolo and elsewhere are abandoned. In Decio and Molloy, the odd professor can be found in his office, but he is unlikely to answer a knock on his door. The thirteen floors of the library are all but deserted.
North of the library, beyond the intervening quartet of residence halls, two towers rise, built originally to house students, but lately converted into offices. Grace accommodates the continuing metastasis of administrative activities, Flanner houses the University Press, a center or two, but largely faculty offices. Emeriti can be found there, moving arthritically about, but several floors are occupied by active faculty, by and large independent types who eschew Decio, attracted by this location, away from the center of things—eccentric, as one might say. A reclusive philosopher, experts in Dante, random members of Celtic Studies, are quartered there. It was in an office on the seventh floor of Flanner that the body of visiting professor Martin Kilmartin was discovered one January afternoon during the midsemester break.
* * *
“Don’t die between semesters,” Father Carmody advised Roger Knight. “Above all, don’t die in a campus office.”
Prompted by the discovery of Kilmartin’s corpse, the old priest had been recounting lugubrious stories of campus deaths of yore, especially when the deceased had not been discovered for some time. In one such tale, Father McAvoy, the archivist, had been found in his office in the library on a Monday, having died most likely on the previous day.
“That was quick,” Father Carmody added. “There have been some others…” He stopped when Roger lifted a hand. “Of course Joe Evans is a special case.”
“Joe Evans?”
“Director of the Jacques Maritain Center. A legendary bachelor don. But he lived off campus and was found dead in his apartment. In August. August is another bad month to die.”
“What month would you recommend, Father?”
“October,” Carmody said without hesitation. “Mid week in October. The funeral can be held on Saturday morning. A hundred thousand fans on campus!”
Father Carmody was of an age, eighty on his last birthday, and doubtless found thoughts of death congenial enough. Often in talking with the old priest, Roger had the sense that Carmody felt somewhat posthumous already. But events like the discovery of young Kilmartin’s body revived him.
“Did you know him, Roger?”
“I had hoped to know him better. We really talked only once.” Roger shook his head. “There seemed no need for haste. I love his poetry.”
“He was a poet?”
“An Irish poet.”
“Ah.”
* * *
It was a grim thought to anyone but Father Carmody that Kilmartin’s body might not have been discovered for weeks. As it was, the preliminary guess was that he had been dead for three days when a graduate student, in the building late, noticed the light under Kilmartin’s door. There was no response to her knock. When the light was still on the following day she told maintenance. Even in its current affluence the university would not wish to have lights burning continually in empty offices. But the office was not empty. Branigan, in whose charge the building was, stood before the locked door of Kilmartin’s office and glanced at the graduate student, an intense young woman named Melissa Shaw.
“What’s that smell?”
She had no idea. Branigan grew wary and decided to call campus security. Thus, when the door was opened three people discovered the body: the custodian, Melissa Shaw, and a pudgy uniformed woman who had come across campus by bicycle.
“It was like entering a mausoleum,” Branigan said later.
“Go on,” the reporter said.
“Like violating a grave. Know what I mean?”
If the reporter knew, her response was not recorded. “But you went in?”
This was a touchy point with Branigan. When he unlocked the door, Katie Schwenk, the campus cop, took one glance inside, put her right arm across her eyes, and barred the doorway with the other.
“Call the police,” she snapped at Branigan.
“I already did.”
She meant the real police. Campus security had limited jurisdiction and certainly was not equipped to handle dead bodies. While they waited, Katie hung up the phone that lay on the desk and then stood guard at the closed office door, Melissa was sick in the ladies room and Branigan went downstairs
to waylay the real police and exercise some authority.
It was Melissa who brought the dread news to Roger Knight. It would not be right to think, as Roger himself did, that given the all but deserted campus she had come to him because there was no one else she could tell. She had audited his course on the twelfth century in the just-ended fall semester, drawn by his promise to discuss Bernard of Clairvaux’s life of St. Malachy. It is widely thought that the saintly Cistercian was an early victim of Irish blarney, passing on to his reader the wild tales about Ireland Malachy had told him. Roger wasn’t so sure that the saint could have been so easily duped, even by another saint. A week had sufficed for the discussion but Melissa stayed on for the meetings Roger devoted to St. Anselm. It had been through Melissa that he had his first meeting with Martin Kilmartin.
“Are you reading that?” Melissa asked one day in his office, pointing to a book on Roger’s desk.
“Do you know it?”
“He’s visiting here, you know. Kilmartin. The author. I’m taking his class.”
“And what class is that?”
“Writing Poetry.” Melissa blushed. “I couldn’t write a Hallmark card, but I took the course anyway.”
Roger was surprised to hear that the poet was at Notre Dame. It was a sad thought, a poet like Kilmartin giving classes to students who couldn’t aspire even to writing greeting card verse. There was no indication on the book’s dust jacket that Kilmartin taught at Notre Dame, of course, and in any case Roger was reading his first volume, published five years before. It turned out that Kilmartin was newer to the campus than Roger himself, here on a visiting appointment.
“Why are the Irish such masters of English?” Roger asked Kilmartin when the introductions were over. They were seated on one of the benches that lined the campus walks, theirs in the shadow of Flanner. The bench easily accommodated the massive Roger Knight and the exiguous Kilmartin.
“The revenge of the conquered.” Kilmartin smiled as if he were trying to conceal his snaggled teeth. He had pale blue eyes and thin unruly hair and a complexion that might never have seen the sun. The smile was more engaging when he forgot about his teeth. They fitted the face. The face of a poet.
“Did you teach somewhere else before coming here?”
“Good God, no. I’m a poet not a professor.”
In Dublin he had done this and that, some reviewing, and he had won a prize that kept him for a time. When the director of Celtic Studies at Notre Dame, a Dublin native herself, offered Kilmartin a visiting professorship, he thought, why not?
“I’ve never had so much money in my life.”
“The laborer is worthy of his hire.”
“Laborer! I teach two days a week.”
He taught a course in Yeats as well as the class for aspiring poets. Kilmartin was not sure that he approved of what he had been hired to do. “Whoever heard of becoming a poet by taking lessons?”
“Poetae nascuntur?”
“What’s that mean?”
“Poets are born.”
“Latin?”
“Yes.”
“I gave a Latin title to one of my poems.”
“Dies Irae.”
“You know it?”
Roger threw back his head, consulted the clouds, and began.
Every day of his life came down to this,
his last, whose sun has set,
and quick time into the dark he steps to bliss
or doom. Each deed, each unpaid debt,
each meager merit too, now sums him up
for good and all. The last trump
blew everything else away except
the self he shaped. What’s done is kept …
Kilmartin interrupted. “Every time I see or hear a poem of mine I want to change it.”
“Don’t change Dies Irae.”
Well, he would never change it now.
PART ONE
1
The director of Celtic Studies was in Dublin on leave and during her absence Padraig Maloney was grudgingly sitting in for her. He called the director Pope Joan and compared himself to the cardinal that took charge while a consistory was held to elect a new pontiff. Melissa Shaw was Maloney’s student assistant as well as unofficial den mother of undergraduate students in the program. It was in this latter role that she had kidded Arne Jensen during registration the previous August.
“Your mother Irish?” she asked him.
“She was born in Copenhagen.”
“So how come Celtic Studies?
“Because I’m Danish.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Don’t you know that Dublin was founded by the Vikings?”
Melissa just stared at him. Later she learned that it wasn’t as wild a remark as it had sounded. Padraig Maloney, acting chair of the program, asked to see Jensen.
“You want to take my course in Irish Drama?”
“Is it closed?”
“No, no. Melissa told me what you said about Dublin.”
Arne was six feet tall with straight blond hair and unblinking blue eyes. He was listed as preprofessional, which suggested an overachiever. “It’s true, isn’t it, Professor? The Vikings founded Dublin.”
“Do you want it back?”
A slight delay, then two sparkling rows of teeth were put on display in a smile.
“When the Irish give back the English language.”
With sound views like those, how could Arne be refused admission to any course offered by Celtic Studies? Maloney almost wished he had refused, though, when the young Viking said he also wanted to take Martin Kilmartin’s poetry writing course, offered through Celtic Studies but cross-listed in English as well, an unfair advantage. Jensen would give Kilmartin’s a higher enrollment than Maloney’s course. There was a rivalry between them, declared and waged in the privacy of Maloney’s mind, although obvious to Melissa. She also knew that the real prize was Deirdre Lacey, not class enrollment.
Kilmartin had learned the hard way that smoking was not permitted in Flanner. Thanks to the trendsetters in the main building, the whole campus was smoke-free and this forced the well-behaved to step outside into the cold and freeze their lungs while giving them a new coat of nicotine. A savage practice. Half the occupants of the seventh floor of Flanner smoked so the hardship was widely felt.
“We should apply for an exemption.”
“Could smoking count as a species of handicap?”
“You’d need a letter from your doctor.”
“We ought to have a special parking space at least.”
“I’d almost settle for that,” Kilmartin said.
When he went out for a smoke he sat in his parked car, sheltered from the cold. It was thus that his advantage with Deirdre had increased, all the more impressive because she was the one person in the program who did not smoke. Still she went off with the poet to his car when he craved a cigarette. Padraig Maloney asked Melissa to find out if Deirdre understood the dangers of secondhand smoke.
It made Melissa feel older to watch the doomed campaign Padraig Maloney waged for Deirdre. Why was Maloney the only one who couldn’t see she was not for him? He was a bear of a man, tall and overweight, with a red and shapeless beard. He squinted at the world through the cloudy lenses of thick glasses. His voice was that of an angel, and when he taught he enacted all the parts of the play being read. A virtuoso performance. His brogue was more pronounced than anyone else’s in the program, but that was acting too. He had been born in Peoria and had not even seen Ireland until he was a graduate student. He very nearly never came back. Over the transatlantic telephone he put the question to his father, “Why in God’s name did you ever leave?”
Well, why did anyone ever leave Ireland except to keep body and soul together? A lack of potatoes or a lack of jobs came down to the same thing. Patrick Maloney had gone to the New World and prospered, raising five others beside Padraig. His brothers and sisters plugged their ears when Padraig talked of Ireland, but their father ha
d bought a small farm in County Clare to which he and their mother Kathleen could retire when the time came.
“Over my dead body,” Mrs. Maloney cried when he revealed the purchase to her. “I’ll not live in that cold rainy country again. Florida or Arizona, yes, but County Clare? You must be out of your mind.”
Kathleen was from Clare, the town of Ennis, and Patrick had thought the location of the farm would trump her sour memories of the old country. I’ll take you home again, Kathleen?
Padraig’s parents now wintered in Sarasota and the farm in Clare was rented out.
“Will you inherit the farm?” Melissa asked him.
“A sixth of it maybe.” His eyes drifted to the window and he sighed as if a vision of a little farm in Clare had formed upon the pane.
He was forty-five and unmarried, in the Irish way, but belatedly he had become susceptible to the charms of Deirdre Lacey, nearly twenty years his junior, who responded to him as she would to an older brother, or even an uncle. It did not seem to occur to her that his manner meant anything amorous. One day he took her hand and kissed it. He continued to hold it in both of his and looked pleadingly at her through his wild brows.
“What’s this?”
“Deirdre…” All fluency fled in these unprecedented circumstances. His head was chock-full of lines that could have been spoken, lines written by others and often delivered by Maloney to rooms full of rapt students, but this was not make-believe and he had no words of his own for the occasion. Deirdre tugged her hand free.
He blurted out, “‘Only God could love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair.’”
It was the best he could do. He had to say something. Deirdre’s hair was jet black, unlike Lady Anne Gregory’s, the target of Yeats’s poem. It had the effect of neutralizing the scene.
“I love that line,” Deirdre cried. She decided that Padraig had just been acting, that kissing her hand had been only a bit of stage business.
“You should dye your hair,” he said.
“Just for you.”
And that was it. Melissa, eavesdropping from the outer office, felt her heart break for poor Padraig. Later he looked out his office window and saw Kilmartin hand Deirdre into his parked car in the lot below. The car remained parked. Wisps of smoke emerged from the cracked window on the driver’s side.
Celt and Pepper Page 1
