Celt and Pepper

by Ralph McInerny

“Yes.”

  “Well, I remembered it. Forgetting might be harder. What does it mean?”

  Arne explained it to him. “Her name is Melissa. Bee. But mel is honey in Latin as well as Greek.”

  Kilmartin forgot about the arms of his chair. He looked long at Arne and began to nod. “But what’s the next line?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come now. It’s a real girl, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you are speaking to her.” He closed his eyes. “Your honeyed appellation is sweet upon my ear. Would that your ruby lips were nectar sweet on mine.” He opened his eyes. “Awful. But in keeping with yours. You should finish it. Good or bad, something begun should be finished. At least a quatrain.”

  “You know her.”

  “Who?”

  “Melissa.”

  “Melissa Shaw? Of course I know her.” Kilmartin sat up in his chair and his manner altered. “A lovely young woman.” He paused. “She’s a graduate student.”

  This was all wrong, Arne knew it, and could not now extricate himself from the ridiculous situation of discussing Melissa with this foppish poet. Kilmartin now knew his feelings for Melissa, but what were Kilmartin’s own? Maybe he was used to young women like Melissa doting on him.

  “Are you a graduate student?”

  Arne shook his head. “Preprofessional.”

  “Still an amateur?” His snaggled teeth appeared in a smile and then he began to cough. He sat still in the chair and tried to reduce the cough to a clearing of the throat. His eyes were wide as he stared at the dartboard. After a minute, it seemed over.

  “I’m as fragile as a goddamn doll. Do you know Dorothy Parker? ‘It’s not the cough that carries you off but the coffin they carry you off in?’ A cough could carry me off.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  A radiant smile. “They call it an enlarged heart. Isn’t that lovely? It would seem the promise of longevity rather than a mortal threat.”

  “Can anything be done?”

  “Yes. I can sit still, not catch cold, wear a mask like an asthmatic when pollen is in the air…”

  No wonder Melissa was smitten with the man. Despite himself, Arne felt a surge of sympathy for the delicate poet. How could you think of a man whose days were numbered as a rival? But he still seethed because of the fun Kilmartin had had with that stupid line.

  Like the course in writing poetry, Melissa represented a departure from the Arne Jensen he thought he was. A lower-middle-class family in Mound, Minnesota, his father on the county highway department, his mother a stolid woman who kept a spick-and-span house but who once had unaccountably gone off to Mankato for three days, just boarding the bus and leaving. A one-way ticket. But she came back, and that was the end of it. Had the wide world disappointed her? Her other children she understood, Arne was a puzzle. Teachers came and talked to his parents about his potential. His father considered learning an affectation, his mother sometimes seemed to think she had picked up the wrong baby at the hospital. He had his choice of colleges and chose Notre Dame, mildly shocking his Lutheran parents.

  “Be careful,” his father warned.

  His mother hugged him as if she did not expect to see him again. He drove himself to South Bend in the Jeep he had bought with summer earnings spraying wild marijuana plants for the county highway department. He harvested some too and cured the leaves and tried to smoke them. Nothing. His plan was to go through the medical school of the University of Minnesota and then get a residency at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. He had been reading medical books since high school. Sitting in Kilmartin’s office, studying the poet, making his diagnosis, he wondered why no one had ever suggested surgery.

  “So finish the poem,” Kilmartin said.

  “I will.” Arne rose. “This is all confidential, isn’t it?”

  “Confidential?”

  “About Melissa.”

  “Haven’t you told her?”

  Blushing was his cross. He avoided the poet’s eyes.

  “Not yet.”

  “Someone might get there before you.”

  A mean and merry little smile. Arne glared at him and then left, closing the door emphatically behind him.

  7

  From dozens of grills around the campus wisps of smoke and an alluring fragrance rose as hamburgers and hot dogs sizzled like burnt offerings to whatever angel decides the outcome of athletic contests. The closeness of Ann Arbor ensured that there would be Michigan fans in great numbers. It was an old and honorable rivalry and seasoned fans on both sides had known both heartbreak and triumph. Before the season began this game had been touted as the contest that would decide the national championship, but many things had gone wrong for both teams since then. It would be too much to say that the season of either team was ruined. Only high expectations could explain why identical 7–2 records were considered disastrous. Sportswriters wrote of the coming contest as if it were a consolation match, and there were fair-weather fans on either side who repeated such lugubrious comments. But the true blue—and the true blue and gold—fan knew otherwise. The outcome of the Notre Dame–Michigan game would decide which on this afternoon was the better team, if not the best in the nation.

  At the Morris Inn, in Sorin’s restaurant, James Elliot was at table with David Simmons, one of the platoon of university fund-raisers. The president had spent ten minutes with them and then gone on to stop at other tables where similar appeals were being made to the generosity of past and future benefactors of the university. Also at table was Padraig Maloney, the bearded acting director of Celtic Studies, a man to whom the president had had to be introduced and who scarcely looked up from his Eggs Benedict to acknowledge the presidential presence. Elliot’s eyes met David’s and there was the beginning of doubt in the benefactor’s eyes. Maloney had arrived at the Morris Inn in response to the invitation to the director of Celtic Studies.

  “She’s on leave.”

  “Leave!”

  “Dublin.” Maloney opened the menu and began to study it greedily.

  The purpose of the breakfast was to put before James Elliot a plan for a fitting tribute to the late and beloved Malachy O’Neill. A starker contrast between the formal, always well-groomed if never entirely sober professor of yore and the scruffy specimen across the table could not be imagined. David was beginning to wonder how he could indicate to Elliot that his proposal had nothing to do with this rough diamond. So why were they having breakfast with him?

  “Tell me about Celtic Studies,” Elliot said to Maloney.

  The account was fluent but unintelligible. Once Maloney began speaking there seemed no end to the words that poured from his whiskered lips, buttery words, words unreliable, words from which all sincerity had been drained to be replaced by a jovial condescension. Maloney might have been enlisting him in a pact to defraud the university and its students.

  “Such programs are all the rage, of course. Think of it as Black Studies for the third millennium. All we really do is cluster a few courses and professors and provide some semblance of a coherent effort. There is after all American Studies, a contribution of the Soviets, by the way.”

  “Here?”

  “It’s been here for years,” David said, not meeting Elliot’s eyes. “He means the Russians pioneered the notion of area studies.”

  Maloney rubbed the tip of his nose with the back of his hand and gave Elliot a devilish look. “There’s even talk of a program in Catholic Studies.”

  “Is that right?”

  “What a laugh. Catholic Studies at Notre Dame. Coals to Newcastle.”

  David pushed back more than slightly from the table, dissociating himself further from the chortling cynicism of Padraig Maloney, whose mellifluous voice turned the university’s effort to educate the young into a chaotic scramble to disguise the fact that it didn’t know what an education is. A fleeting allusion to James Joyce caused the flow to stop when Elliot asked Maloney for his view of Finnegan’s Wake.r />
  “It’s what you will, of course. Joyce himself didn’t know what he was writing half the time. How could he, the man was forever drunk. Still, one can have great fun with it.”

  “I was taught that it intimates Joyce’s doubts about leaving the church.”

  Maloney roared. Eventually under control, he leaned toward Elliot with tears of laughter still leaking from his eyes. “Someone was pulling your leg, lad.”

  There was twenty more minutes of the man but finally they were in the lobby where Maloney stuck to them like flypaper in a comic strip, his wet red eye following the traffic into the bar. Twice David had given the professor a valedictory handshake but still he stood planted before them.

  “The bar is open,” Maloney observed.

  “Go ahead,” David said. “We may join you.”

  When Maloney waded into the crowd, they fled for the stairs and went up to Elliot’s room, where David groaned aloud as he shut the door behind them.

  “James, I can’t tell you how sorry…”

  But Elliot was oddly calm. He had seen a parody of his remembered Notre Dame, one far worse than he could have imagined. All he need do is juxtapose the elegant Malachy O’Neill and the boor with whom he had just breakfasted.

  “That was a mistake.” David said this as if he had just come to an agreement with himself.

  “What was a mistake?”

  David looked at him abjectly. “I won’t even tell you what the point of asking that jackass to breakfast was.”

  “You thought I might want to support Celtic Studies.”

  “Maloney has no idea what we’re considering. Remember, he was only a substitute for the director.”

  “He is a professor, isn’t he?”

  David wished he could deny it.

  “And you thought I would be interested in supporting Celtic Studies?”

  “That’s out of the question.”

  “Is he really a charlatan?”

  “James, he’s a professor, yes. They all sound like that in the morning. It’s an act. They hate the students, the administration, and one another.” It was insane to tell him this.

  “And hate what they teach?”

  “Maloney isn’t typical.” Prolonging the postmortem would worsen the situation. David rose to go, shaking his head. “I feel as if I have already lost the game.”

  “Hey, we’re going to win.”

  “Sure you don’t want to sit in the presidential box?”

  Elliot shook his head. “I have guests.”

  * * *

  After the second quarter Michigan led 21–0 and gloom had settled over half the spectators despite the clear and sunny day. Overhead small aircraft moved slowly through the sky trailing advertising banners with messages about beer, food, someone’s birthday, a proposal of marriage. Philip Knight was explaining earnestly to James Elliot what the Irish were going to have to do if they were going to turn the game around in the second half. Sacking the quarterback was the key.

  And so it turned out to be. On Michigan’s first possession, a blitz caused the quarterback to cough up the ball. An Irish player picked it up and ran for the end zone but was brought down by a heroic tackle, causing another fumble. To the relief of the Irish fans, the ball bounced out of bounds before a Michigan player could fall on it. Notre Dame retained possession and two minutes later had put 7 points on the board. A surprise squiggle kick led to a scramble for the ball and when an Irish player emerged with it the stadium erupted. The result was a field goal. 21–10. Wary of the blitz, the Michigan quarterback got off his passes more quickly. Quicker than his receivers could get into position, as it happened. An Irish back snared a pass and had nothing but open field between them and the end zone sixty yards away. It became 21–17. That was the score with which the fourth quarter began. Fourteen clocked minutes later it seemed that it would be the final score of the game. Michigan had the ball at midfield and needed only to run out the clock. The Irish called a time-out and, when play resumed, called another time-out. They had one remaining. When the teams finally lined up, the Irish had bunched players at the center of the line. At the snap, the avalanche rolled and what should have been a routine taking of the snap and genuflection by the quarterback, stopping play, incredibly resulted in a fumble. It took minutes for the officials to unstack the pile of players that formed over the ball. A hush had fallen over the stadium. And then the signal was given. Notre Dame’s ball!

  The clock showed less than a minute. The ball was on the Michigan forty-seven-yard line. A quick pass to the sideline took the ball to the Michigan thirty with only seconds off the clock. The next play was apparently a duplicate of the preceding and Michigan’s defense converged on the wrong receiver. The ball went long and the Irish receiver, unable to advance beyond the ten, tried unsuccessfully to get out of bounds to stop the clock. Incredibly, the Irish did not call time-out. The clock ticked toward zero. Finally, the time-out was called but it was unclear whether the clock had run out before the request was made.

  Time on an athletic field is not solar time. The watches on the wrists of referees and game clocks record sporadic not continuous time. Two minutes playing time can take fifteen by the sun, seconds inflate to minutes. There were but two seconds on the clock when the Irish lined up for the crucial play. Once the ball had been snapped the game would last as long as the play, no matter the clock. The ball was snapped. The Notre Dame quarterback took the ball where he stood and immediately flipped it across the goal line to his tight end. But before the ball could reach the eager hands of the Notre Dame receiver, a Michigan player’s hand darted out and tipped the ball. It rose into the air, end over end, as players from both sides gathered under it. It dropped into a forest of clutching hands. Again a melee and pile-up that required minutes to unstack. An almost audible silence had fallen over the stadium. And then the call was made. A Notre Dame player had caught the deflected pass. The score was Notre Dame 23, Michigan 21. The extra point widened the margin to 3, but the game was over.

  There was no triumphal celebrating by Irish fans and Michigan fans were stunned into silence. Seldom had it been clearer that a contest turns on contingencies that no amount of preparation can ready a team for. There was a winner but not a victor, and the team that had scored fewer points had not been beaten.

  * * *

  When Philip Knight and James Elliot emerged from the stadium in a crowd of fans decompressing from the excitement of the game, they came to a stop and looked at the great mural on the Hesburgh Library.

  “Well,” Elliot said, and there was indecisiveness in his manner.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I suppose I’ll head back to the Morris Inn.”

  “Why don’t you come home with me. It’s only a short walk.”

  Elliot looked around, still indecisive. “I had half hoped to see my son Brian.”

  “You can call from our place.”

  Elliot agreed and they headed off in the direction of graduate student housing where the Knights had their apartment and where Roger and Greg Whelan seemed surprised to find that the game was over.

  “Did we win, Phil?”

  “Of course.”

  “Greg and I have been talking of William Butler Yeats’s visits to campus.”

  “Yeats.” Elliot said. “The Irish poet?”

  There followed a delightful discussion that Elliot could not help contrasting with the disastrous lunch he’d had with David Simmons and the ineffable Maloney. Roger Knight was more like what a professor ought to be. No Malachy O’Neill, perhaps, but no Padraig Maloney either.

  “I was introduced to Yeats by Malachy O’Neill. Not personally, of course, to his work.”

  “You studied with Malachy O’Neill?” Greg asked.

  “I took a course from him.”

  “Tell us about it.”

  Elliot did, warming to the task because Roger Knight and Greg Whelan were so obviously interested.

  8

  After lea
ving Elliot’s room, Simmons came down into the lobby of the Morris Inn. Too late he saw Padraig Maloney.

  “I’ve been waiting for you. Where’s Daddy Warbucks?”

  David allowed himself to be led into the bar. Strong drink might be the answer.

  “How long have you been in this country?”

  Maloney backed up to stare at him. “I’m a third-generation American.”

  So much for the hope of getting his green card revoked. “That’s quite a brogue.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Maloney said without any effort to look sincere.

  Simmons bought the professor a drink and then excused himself. He could not listen to Maloney without imagining shocked potential donors overhearing. What a disaster the breakfast had been! If he had been forewarned, he would have rejected such a substitute. Or was that only an ex post facto certainty? He wouldn’t be surprised if James Elliot never took another call from him.

  Ten minutes later, ensconced on a bench near the bookstore, Simmons lit what he hoped would be an anonymous cigarette and looked disinterestedly at the pedestrian traffic. Pre-game excitement was mounting but it left David Simmons untouched. Whenever he thought of the ineffable Padraig Maloney seated across the table from James Elliot, he felt like crying out in pain. Too late had come the realization that Maloney was the quintessence of everything Elliot loathed about the present-day faculty. It all went back to his romantic memories of Malachy O’Neill.

  Damn Malachy O’Neill! The mythical status he had posthumously acquired in the fevered memories of former students was difficult to reconcile with the facts Simmons had amassed on the man. Father Hesburgh had once confided to Simmons that he had never understood a thing O’Neill said.

  “His voice was soft. And he mumbled.”

  So much for the silver-tongued lecturer. That O’Neill had drunk deep and often was part of the legend, a plus rather than a minus. And he had been a chain smoker. He was the antithesis of today’s typical nonsmoking, jogging, malcontent faculty member. That of course was a good part of his appeal for former students like James Elliot. And equally of course they claimed he had opened to them the life of the mind.