Celt and Pepper

by Ralph McInerny

  Our lives turn on contingencies. At no other time would Philip Knight have come so far without knowing what the request of a potential client was. At no other time would he have agreed to take on such an absurdly simple task. But now he was influenced by the connection with Notre Dame. Roger was now comfortably installed in the Hunneker Chair of Catholic Studies and it seemed a case of noblesse oblige. The information Elliot wanted, Philip guessed, could be obtained with a minimum of effort.

  “I’ll look into it as soon as we return to Notre Dame.”

  If James Elliot had doubted his request would be accepted he gave no sign of it.

  “Tell us about Donald Weber,” Roger suggested.

  “You’ll meet him at lunch.”

  * * *

  Weber and Elliot had been boys together in Midlothian, they had been rivals from childhood, and they had carried their rivalry with them to South Bend. After graduation, Weber spent ten years in the Navy and when discharged he had entered graduate school on the west coast. But eventually he returned to South Bend, and in his early forties, earned a doctorate in English from Notre Dame, an achievement that earned him the prospect of professional unemployment. Ph.D.’s in English were a glut on the national market and jobs were at a premium. It had been Weber’s dream to join the faculty at Notre Dame. In the event, he was fortunate to find a position in his hometown at Midlothian College.

  “The lowest level of the academic inferno,” he explained to Roger when it came up at table in the Midlothian Athletic Club.

  “The circle of ice?”

  “You have to be here in the winter.”

  James Elliot had the look of a professor, whereas Weber could have been the emperor of trash. The conversation was all about Notre Dame and soon turned on Weber’s ill-concealed astonishment that Roger had been given an endowed chair. He quizzed Roger about his academic background, he wondered what he had been doing during these non-teaching years. To say that he was shocked by what he learned would be an understatement. His envy was palpable.

  “I just don’t understand,” he confessed.

  “You can imagine my own surprise. My little book on Baron Corvo seems to have opened the door for me.”

  Weber did not know who Corvo was nor did he seem anxious to learn. Roger had the distinct impression that Elliot had arranged this luncheon in order that Weber might be annoyed. Finally, the disgruntled Midlothian professor let it go. “They never hire alumni, you know.”

  With that as solace, he was open to Elliot’s introduction of Malachy O’Neill as topic.

  “I have modeled my life on his,” Weber said fervently. James Elliot brought his napkin to his mouth as if to gag.

  “He must have been a great teacher,” Roger said.

  “Incomparable. I am one of the few alumni who can boast having taken two of his courses, once as an undergraduate, again as a graduate student. I was in the classroom when he collapsed and died.” He lowered his head. Across the table, James Elliot’s eyes sparked with angry triumph. The Knight brothers had now heard the claim from Weber’s own lips.

  “The guy does seem like a phony,” Phil said when they drove out of town later than day.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Roger said. “An enthusiast certainly.”

  When they returned to Notre Dame, they learned, with the discreet help of their friend Father Carmody, that Donald Weber had indeed been enrolled as an auditor in the last class taught by Malachy O’Neill.

  “What’s so hush hush?” the priest asked.

  “It’s confidential, Father. A client.…”

  “All this fuss over poor O’Neill. What he might have been if he had only controlled his drinking we will never know.”

  James Elliot’s reaction to the finding was one of jealous disbelief. “His niece must have altered the records. Can you find that out?”

  It fell to Roger to convince James Elliot that his campaign to discredit Donald Weber was unworthy of him. And of the memory of a beloved professor.

  “Weber did lie about one thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He said he had taken two courses from O’Neill. Actually, he only took the one.”

  “The last one?” There was anguish in Elliot’s voice.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  * * *

  That disappointing discovery formed a bond between James Elliot and the Knights. The alumnus kept in touch. It was the rare campus visit that he did not look them up, and to Phil’s delight he was often Elliot’s guest in his choice seats on the fifty-yard line at football games. As the date of the football game with Michigan approached and Elliot had not been heard from, Philip was resigned to watching the game from his usual seat in the south end zone. But on Thursday the call came.

  “Can you join me, Phil?” Elliot asked.

  “Of course.”

  “And your brother?”

  “It’s really too much trouble for him to get in and out of the stadium.”

  Elliot sighed. “Too bad. Maybe my son Brian will join us. I have a breakfast meeting, so why don’t we just meet at the stadium?”

  And so it was arranged.

  4

  But Brian would attend the game with Melissa Shaw.

  Weeks ago, Arne Jensen had told Brian about Melissa and had pointed her out on campus before introducing Brian to her in Reckers. That had been a fateful mistake on Arne’s part. Not only did Brian understand Arne’s fascination with Melissa; almost immediately he shared it. He secretly signed up for a course on the Celtic Twilight when he learned Melissa would be sitting in. Infatuation had been fed by proximity. Could this be love?

  Brian sought lofty parallels to his plight. Dante had been led out of confusion by the influence of Beatrice, Petrarch was inspired by Laura, and Scott Fitzgerald had Zelda. History is replete with stories of women who inspired unworthy males, and such precedents occurred to Brian Elliot when he followed Melissa Shaw’s lead and signed up for Roger Knight’s class.

  His major was preprofessional, his goal was medical school, and he had no idea what a Celtic twilight might be. One glimpse of Melissa would have sufficed to justify this waste of three credits. Here was a woman worthy of sonnets. No need to warn Arne of his interest in Melissa, of course. His excuse to his friend was boredom with the exact sciences. And the fact that his father had urged him to take a class from Roger Knight. Thus Brian had assured himself of a semester’s proximity to the lovely Melissa. It would have been ideal if it had not been for the imposing Nordic presence of Arne Jensen, who was also taking the class and was helpless to conceal the fact that he found Melissa at least as powerful an attraction as the massive Roger Knight.

  “Sometimes I think I have a vocation,” Brian said to Melissa in early September. He had long ago outgrown his boyish dream of becoming a priest but had discovered that a feigned attraction to celibacy was a powerful aphrodisiac with young women.

  “Vocation to what?”

  “Maybe the monastery.”

  “What do you think of Joyce?” Melissa asked Brian.

  “I don’t know her.”

  Had female laughter ever seemed as golden as hers? She took his remark for a witticism and he did not correct her. It was intimidating to learn that she was a graduate student.

  “I’m young for my age,” she said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  He led her away to the restaurant in Grace Hall, where she wouldn’t let him pay for her food.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said.

  But she told him about graduate studies and what she hoped to do with her life. He was acquainted with women aiming at a career, the business school was full of them, but her ambitions were different. Her dream was to live and die on such a campus as this. All Brian could think was what a waste it would be if her dream was realized.

  “You were kidding about James Joyce, weren’t you?”

  “Up to a point.”

  “Tell me about yourself.”

  Had an
y biographical sketch ever seemed so dull? He skidded over the fact that he was from Midlothian, Michigan; of course he did not mention that his family was affluent or how they had gotten that way. But she seemed impressed when he mentioned medical school as she had not been when he tried the priestly vocation line on her.

  “How did you wind up in Celtic Twilight?”

  He wasn’t about to tell the whole truth. “Someone recommended Professor Knight.”

  His father, whose romantic memories of his time at Notre Dame seemed to evoke a past that no longer existed. Thank God his father had not attached the family name to any of his benefactions to the university.

  “Are you related to James Elliot?” Roger Knight asked him after the first meeting of the class.

  “He’s my father.”

  “I’ve met him.”

  “He told me.”

  “He and my brother have become good friends.”

  He would have been made uneasy by the overweight professor’s remarks if Melissa had not shown interest in this surprising connection. His father was delighted when he told him he was taking a class from Roger Knight.

  “Good. Good. Now that’s my idea of a professor.”

  “He says you know his brother.”

  “He told you that?” His father seemed wary.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I know them both.”

  It was a further bonus of Roger Knight’s remark that it seemed to give him an advantage over Arne Jensen. Melissa was glad to grant his request that she help him with the course.

  “I have trouble understanding poetry.”

  She smiled indulgently. “Yeats isn’t difficult.”

  “Maybe not for you.”

  The smile grew warmer. “You remind me of my brother.”

  That was bad but what could he say? “I thought Arne was your brother.”

  “He wants to be a poet.”

  “Come on.”

  “So do I.”

  “You write poetry?”

  “I try. The two of us are in another class together.”

  This called for a quick switch of topic. “Are you going to the game Saturday?”

  “The game?”

  “Michigan–Notre Dame.”

  “I’ve never been inside the stadium.”

  He allowed for a moment of silence but she hadn’t meant to be sacrilegious. “Would you like to go?”

  He might have suggested that she make a journey to the North Pole. But, unfamiliar as she apparently found it, she began to show interest. “But I don’t have a ticket.”

  “I’ll get you one. We can sit in the student section.”

  She agreed. He arranged to pick her up for the pep rally Friday night as well, and that gained him knowledge of where she lived, in graduate student housing east of Hesburgh Library.

  “You must be able to hear the roar from the stadium during home games.”

  “It’s not so bad. With all the people around, I usually just stay in.”

  5

  Roger Knight particularly valued his friendship with Greg Whelan, assistant university archivist. For one thing he was good company while Phil was off watching one athletic contest or another on campus, but that was simply an extra bonus of having such a knowledgeable friend. Whelan’s stammer was a handicap that had blighted both his university and legal careers, but he had finally found his niche as a librarian and spent his days surrounded by precious archival material.

  “Yeats visited the campus, you know,” he had said to Roger.

  “No, I didn’t. Tell me about it.”

  “I’ll dig out what we have.”

  And so it was that Roger became acquainted with the visit that William Butler Yeats had paid to Notre Dame. There was a photograph of the poet with the then president of Notre Dame, Father Charles O’Donnell, a bit of a poet in his own right. Yeats wore formal attire in which apparently he had lectured in Washington Hall. It never ceased to amaze Roger how many luminaries had found their way to the then obscure South Bend campus. That F. Marion Crawford and Henry James had lectured at Notre Dame had come as a pleasant surprise, and of course Chesterton had actually taught courses at Notre Dame. But that Yeats, an Anglo-Irishman with odd spiritualistic views, should have been feted on campus was even more surprising.

  But what Greg dug out proved even more astonishing: Yeats had actually visited the campus on two occasions, once in 1903 and again thirty years later, after he had received the Nobel Prize. Greg found in The Scholastic an account of the three lectures given on the first occasion that was both evocative of the speaker and of the listeners, if the student journalist were any indication. Roger found himself growing more curious about Father Charles O’Donnell, who was described as president both of Notre Dame and of the Catholic Poets of America. His collected—and neglected—poems were in the Hesburgh Library.

  The volume had been published by the university press in 1942, on the occasion of the centennial celebration of Notre Dame. Literary accomplishments had long since fallen out of the job description of university presidents, of course. Not that Roger could bring himself to think of O’Donnell as much of a poet, but he had his moments. His basic themes were his own priesthood and his Irish roots.

  The hills of Donegal are green,

  And blue the bending sky,—

  For sky and hills I have not seen

  The holiest love have I.

  O’Donnell died in 1934, aged forty-nine. The book and the poems it contained evoked a Notre Dame that in one sense was no more but in another was ever present. With Greg Whelan beside him, Roger drove his golf cart up the road from the Grotto to the community cemetery and found the grave of Charles O’Donnell, C.S.C. From the campus came the sounds of the marching band getting ready for the big game the following day with Michigan. The Fighting Irish that had engaged the heart of O’Donnell and others on this campus long ago were not athletes but patriots struggling against the English oppressor. On his first visit to campus Yeats had spoken as much as a representative of Irish independence as a poet.

  Overhead, private jets descended at regular intervals toward the airport, which bore the hybrid neologism of Michigan, affluent fans arriving for the big game. When he and Greg returned from the community cemetery, Roger took the road that led behind the Main Building, a mistake. The walks were crowded with early visitors who were in no hurry.

  “Come over tomorrow afternoon,” Roger said.

  “Will you have the game on?”

  “Of course!”

  Greg was a fervent fan although he seldom attended games, preferring them televised. “I find it easier to follow then.”

  The game itself was not the sole reason for being in the stadium and thousands of distractions drew the less than dedicated eye from the play on the field. For Roger, the stadium represented too many challenges to his mobility. To say nothing of the fact that the amount of seat allotted each fan was woefully inadequate to his derrière. Better to make a huge batch of popcorn and watch at leisure in the apartment. The roar audible from the stadium added authenticity to the experience. The road along which they came was flanked by the trees that might have inspired the priest-poet-president in the lines called simply “To Notre Dame.”

  So well I love these woods I half believe

  There is an intimate fellowship we share;

  So many years we breathed the same brave air,

  Kept spring in common, and were one to grieve

  Summer’s undoing, saw the fall bereave

  Us both of beauty, together learned to bear

  The weight of winter:—when I go otherwhere—

  An unreturning journey—I would leave

  Some whisper of a song in these old oaks,

  A footfall lingering till some distant summer

  Another singer down these paths may stray—

  The destined one a golden future cloaks—

  And he may love them, too, this graced newcomer,

  And may rememb
er that I passed his way.

  Father O’Donnell had been granted his wish that day when Roger and Greg recalled his passage—if either could be called a “graced newcomer.”

  “Phil is going to the game?”

  “Need you ask?”

  Doubtless Phil would bring Father Carmody back with him afterward. Roger planned to make spaghetti and a gargantuan salad. Although Phil would be sitting with James Elliot, they would be parting after the game. Elliot always had multiple fish to fry when he was on campus.

  “He still thinks Weber’s niece altered the records, putting his old nemesis into O’Neill’s final course.”

  “What would count as disproof?”

  Phil laughed. “You may be right.”

  6

  Arne Jensen confronted his tormentor in his Flanner office. The cork board on the wall of Martin Kilmartin’s office held three darts. A fourth had lost its grip and fallen to the floor. Their target seemed to be a photograph affixed to the board.

  “That’s Ennis, whence I come,” Kilmartin said, his tone elegiac. He looked up at Arne Jensen through a tangle of brows. “Take a pew.”

  The frail poet sat at a large U-shaped metal desk that matched the file cabinets against the wall. His chair had arms that swung out and raised and lowered. Kilmartin continued to fuss with them.

  “Don’t ask me how they work. It’s a damned uncomfortable chair.”

  Arne sat. Melissa’s account of the poet’s Flanner office had not prepared him for this. Whatever image he had formed of it was miles distant from this almost empty room with its metal furniture and improvised dart board. The absence of a computer was noticeable.

  “I’m in your poetry course.”

  “I remember the face.”

  Not a very flattering beginning, given the small size of the course. “I turned in a single line that you were pretty rough on.”

  Kilmartin looked at him with a bemused smile. “‘Your honeyed appellation is sweet upon my ear?’”