Celt and Pepper

by Ralph McInerny

  From somewhere through the trees came the oompa oompa of the band as it paraded to the stadium; the chatter of passersby, shouts, festive noises, drove the sense of defeat from David Simmons’ soul. It was in times of adversity that one’s true mettle was shown. He would snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. He would step over the fallen body of Padraig Maloney and resume his place at James Elliot’s side. Somehow he would come up with an idea that brought together the man’s profound love for Notre Dame and the limitless amounts of money he had with which to express that love.

  With cigar smoke in his eyes and slurred shouting in his ears, Simmons watched the game in the back bar of the University Club, and its outcome seemed a clear moral lesson for him. A team that had been crushed in the first half managed to come back and, in the last moment, win. It was the Notre Dame way. It would be his way with James Elliot. But how?

  Inspiration struck him along with the bracing fresh air when he left the University Club at six o’clock. Earlier there had been disappointment verging on despair. Then had come the O. Henry twist of the win over Michigan. Now came illumination and with it a pious awe. If he were sober, he would have gone off to one of the postgame Masses, to fulfill his obligation for the morrow. His seeming clarity of mind squeezed an impromptu prayer of thanksgiving from his pusillanimous heart. He resolved to visit the Grotto during the week and breathe an Ave there in thanksgiving.

  Roger Knight! The name might have been written in smoke in the azure sky. It might have been emblazoned on a banner pulled through the heavens by a small but powerful plane. Roger Knight. Of course. The thought was so right he could not believe it had not occurred to him before. Anyone who cherished memories of the supposed polymath Malachy O’Neill would find in Roger Knight an acceptable reincarnation of the departed hero. The occupant of the Huneker Chair of Catholic Studies had not come within the range of David Simmons’ official functions. The money for the endowed chair Roger Knight held had been given without any mediation by the Notre Dame Foundation, given to old Father Carmody almost as a personal favor. A condition had been that Carmody oversee the search for the Huneker professor. There had been muffled laughter and an unearned sense of vindication when the credentials of Roger Knight were made known. A Princeton doctorate, no doubt, but the man had been employed as a private investigator for nearly a decade, his brother’s partner. It was more difficult to dismiss the monograph on Baron Corvo, given the reception it had enjoyed. Of course the faculty was furious, but the faculty is always furious.

  It was impossible not to hear of the profound if undramatic impact Roger Knight had made during his few years on campus. A legend was aborning, no doubt of it. Mike Garvey had offered to enter Knight into the canon of Notre Dame saints with a puff piece but he was gently rebuked by the proposed honoree. The bitterest realization of all, now that inspiration had come, was that James Elliot himself had mentioned Knight and that his son Brian was enrolled in his class. But that was a plus not a minus!

  As these thoughts churned in his head, Simmons was drifting north northeast from the club, in the direction of graduate student housing where the Knights were ensconced. The mad hope leapt in him that he could recoup his losses this very weekend, substitute Knight for the ineffable Maloney and let nature take her course. His head was not as clear as he supposed, needless to say, and opportunity might have insured a second defeat more crushing than the first. In any case, professional caution reasserted itself and while he continued on his way, it was no longer with any idea that he would approach Roger Knight immediately and discuss possibilities of the Huneker professor becoming the beneficiary of James Elliot’s generosity.

  Benches were everywhere on campus now, and the little village of graduate student housing, row after row of identical structures, was not bereft of them. David Simmons sat on a bench that gave him a clear if oblique look at the door of the Knight apartment. He smoked meditatively. No specific plan formed in his mind, but it did not matter. That would come. And it would be well to let some time pass so that Elliot could rinse his mental palate of the taste of Padraig Malony. In the fullness of time, Simmons would bring donor and recipient together.

  Twilight came on. He nodded off. When he came awake again it was dark. His bench was illumined by a lamp and a couple frowned at him as they went by, a young woman quickened her pace and averted her eyes as she hurried past him. But on a game weekend it was difficult for any oddity to alarm. Beyond, a door opened and light spilled outward from it. It was the Knights’ entryway. And then stepping into that light, unmistakable even at a distance, was James Elliot! Next, a tall figure was momentarily visible but then the doorway was filled with the enormous presence of Roger Knight. The voices that came to Simmons were indistinct, but the tones were the tones of friendship and camaraderie. The farewells were finished. Elliot was driven away. The door closed and unrelieved darkness returned. When David Simmons rose from his bench he felt that some unguent had been traced upon his forehead, that a flat blade had rested for a moment on his shoulder.

  He could perhaps be forgiven for imagining that he had somehow brought Roger Knight and James Elliot together in stage one of his successful effort to extract more millions for Notre Dame from the waste king of central Michigan.

  9

  Whatever the point had been of the breakfast in the Morris Inn it left no lasting impression on Padraig Maloney. What lingered was Simmons’ question about how long he had been in the country. Did the man think he was a visitor like Martin Kilmartin? Maloney doubted that Simmons even knew who Kilmartin was. It had been a matter of surprise that the reputed whiz kid of the Notre Dame Foundation had even heard of Celtic Studies.

  The program was amply endowed, thanks to the atavistic longings of Irish-Americans who, like American Jews with respect to Israel, loved their country of remote origin in inverse ratio to their desire to live there. He suspected that the generous donors who had made Celtic Studies viable would also be susceptible to appeals from the IRA. Nice acronym that, for one who knew Latin. The lovely Deirdre too had acquired along with her DNA a visceral love of the Old Sod, an affection that had all too easily transferred to the fragile and lyrical Martin Kilmartin. In matters of the heart, poetry was a weapon without equal. But Maloney had been left unarmed by God. He had drawers full of lousy verse of his own, testimony to his doomed effort to prove that anyone with Irish blood had the ear of the Muses. He could not bring it off. His lines seemed arbitrary in length, his rhymes contrived, the underlying ideas banal. He had to settle for criticism, lofty animadversions on the creative work of others, with especial reference to James Joyce. In a crowded field, he had secured a minor niche for himself by writing on Joyce’s poetry. The great writer’s two collections of verse betrayed no marks of Modernism. Chamber Music was traditional in both prosody and outlook. Pomes Pennyeach was simple and disciplined, frothy but memorable. Even the title was self-deprecating, as if to signal that this was Joyce in a minor key, running on half a cylinder at most. Kilmartin, the arrogant bastard, condescended even to Joyce. As for Cavanaugh and Heaney …

  “The key to becoming an Irish poet is to forget you’re Irish.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “You sound like Deirdre.” Kilmartin looked slyly at him.

  “I’ve got a cold.”

  The essence of humor is surprise, but it was Kilmartin’s response to his joke that surprised Maloney. The poet just stared and then his mouth opened slowly and the laughter began, an odd barking laughter. Kilmartin seemed to find his own laughter contagious and it fed on itself. He hugged himself, making a seatbelt out of his arms, squeezing his eyes shut so that tears ran down his pallid face.

  Just as suddenly, the poet’s laughter changed. He began to gasp, his eyes looked wildly at Maloney, and he pointed at his chest. Then he bent forward. Padraig sprang beside Kilmartin’s chair and thumped him on the back, hard. The poet gasped. Maloney thumped him again. Kilmartin dipped forward until his forehead rested on his desk.
Silence. And then a raspy breath, and another. Slowly Kilmartin sat up.

  “Dear Jesus, you might have killed me, but it seems to have had the opposite effect.”

  “You want me to get someone? A doctor?”

  Kilmartin waved away the suggestion. “Paddy, I know what they would tell me before they opened their mouths. They would tell me to quit smoking and drinking and everything else that makes life worthwhile. Isn’t it a fix to be in though, a laugh or a sneeze a mortal danger?”

  “Do you take any medicine?”

  “I do, I do.” He slid open a drawer and brought out a bottle of Jameson’s. “You’ll join me?”

  It was like joining the condemned in a final cigarette. Maloney did that too, lighting up despite the fact that he did not smoke. Keeping Kilmartin company, that was the idea. How could he be jealous of someone as fragile as Martin Kilmartin, whose life could be snuffed out by a joke?

  10

  “I thought you weren’t interested in football,” Arne said accusingly.

  He had heard she had gone to the game with Brian, perhaps from Brian. There was a fleeting pleasure in the thought of two young men vying for her favors, but Melissa’s sights were set higher. For reasons that might baffle a psychiatrist but which any grandmother would have guessed, she began to speak of Padraig Maloney’s crush on Deirdre, but her manner warned him not to laugh.

  “She seems more interested in Kilmartin.”

  “I know.”

  “The poor man.”

  “Kilmartin?”

  “Maloney.”

  “Because he can’t interest a woman that much younger than he is?”

  “She’s not all that younger.”

  “Well, just how old would you say she is?” she demanded.

  “She’s not much older than you are.”

  Melissa turned away in anger. She would have liked to beat her fists on Arne’s broad chest. He was only saying these things to hurt her, to punish her for the imagined slight of going to the game with Brian, but why should his remarks sting her as they did? She did not have a crush on Martin Kilmartin. A proof of this was the fact that she had felt no sense of loss when she saw Martin succumbing to the flagrant flirtation of Deirdre Lacey. Her thoughts had gone immediately to Padraig Maloney. And without doubt she noticed his reaction whenever he saw the two together.

  A beard is a mask, of course, and she had never seen his face unbearded. It was as if he had a single expression, no matter what. The eyes might give him away but they in turn were masked by the cloudy lenses of his glasses. But she knew how he felt and Melissa’s heart went out to him. A man should not have to suffer so for someone like Deirdre.

  Was it catty to say that there was nothing to Deirdre, no mind or soul, her undeniable beauty aside?

  “She writes well,” Maloney replied when she had obliquely suggested this to him.

  “About other people’s writing.”

  “So?”

  “I mean she’s not creative.”

  He lost interest in contradicting her. Did he think she was alluding to his own inability to write a poem? How different he was from Brian Elliot.

  * * *

  Going to the game with Brian had been a more exciting experience than Melissa would have believed. She hadn’t the faintest idea what was going on out on the field but few of those in the student section seemed to pay close attention to the contest. Everyone stood throughout the game, sitting down was infra dig. A girl was handed up and down the rows, held high above the heads of those who passed her on. She squealed and writhed but made it safely to the top to earn a cheer. Some minutes later, Melissa noticed her walking down the steps. People acted drunk but there was no sign of drinking. The first time Brian offered his massive plastic drink holder, she shook her head. When later she did accept she almost choked.

  “What is it?”

  “Whiskey sours.”

  “You might have warned me.”

  Several times he fought his way down to where food was available and brought it back to her. He shook away her offer to come along. Gallantry, it seemed. It was odd how she felt perfectly at ease among the heedless undergraduates.

  Notre Dame won the game and the students went mad. The whole student section remained through all the postgame festivities, band saluting band, and then she and Brian were carried along in the mass movement as they descended. They were approaching an exit, when Brian took her arm and pulled her back.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He turned toward her, eyes closed but smiling. When he opened them, he turned around.

  “The coast is clear.”

  “Who was it?”

  “My father. He would have insisted we go with him.”

  Melissa knew that Padraig Maloney had been asked to breakfast to meet Elliot senior, but doubted that he connected Brian with the rich alumnus. Was Brian rich? She supposed he was, or would be. The breakfast had something to do with a possible benefaction, but Maloney was vaguely indifferent to what it might be.

  “I wish they’d leave us alone,” he’d say.

  “They” stood for administrators, deans and their assistants, provosts, vice-presidents, the hostile army employed to disturb the even tenor of the academic life. Padraig’s complaints about the paperwork always led to a citation from Auden, the clerk who writes, “on a pink official form ‘I do not like my work.’” Melissa usually did such work for him. He had a secretary of sorts, Mrs. Bumstead, chosen apparently for her name and not her skills, who whiled away her day surreptitiously reading romance novels, a headset clamped to her thinning hair, Muzak to accompany the torrid plots. Padraig always addressed her formally as Mrs. Bumstead, giving it an emphatically trochaic pronunciation, although her baptismal name Prudence was also tempting. Mrs. Bumstead confided to Melissa that the only reason she worked was to secure an eventual tuition reduction for her son. The son, Eric, wore massive tennis shoes and oversize trousers. His hair was artfully dyed a number of colors—yellow, blue, a dash of red—his expression mindless. Melissa doubted that Mrs. Bumstead would ever benefit from that tuition reduction. Maloney regarded Eric with bemusement.

  “I think of Augustine, in North Africa, hearing of the hordes of barbarians descending from the north, occupying the empire, putting out the lights. Eric the red—and yellow and blue.”

  “Looks are deceiving,” Melissa said.

  “You really ought to write down such thoughts.”

  “Oh ha.”

  He put his big arm around her and tugged her against him. Melissa felt dizzy, his beard brushed her cheek before he let her go.

  “I’m going to the game,” she said.

  “So am I.”

  “You are!”

  “David Simmons sent me some tickets.”

  “Plural?”

  “Two.”

  “Who will you take?” If he asked her to go with him she would desert Brian Elliot in a shot.

  “I may change my mind and not go.”

  “You could make a fortune selling them.”

  “You too? Money, money, money.”

  * * *

  After the game, Celtic Studies threw a party, a tradition on home game Saturdays.

  When she asked Maloney if he had seen the game, he nodded. “It was on television. But I missed the end of it.”

  “You didn’t go?”

  “I never go.”

  “We won.”

  “We?”

  “Notre Dame.”

  Maloney’s snobbery about athletics and money was comic. Few faculty members admitted to being fans of the university’s teams, although many were, perhaps a majority. But those professing disdain for the conjunction of sports and learning were more apt to be heard. With Padraig Maloney it seemed an acquired complaint, a language he had learned, not his native tongue. So why did he do it? You might just as well wonder why the only political viewpoint you heard expressed on campus was to the left of Lenin, the excessively well-paid faculty enjoying the radical chic o
f imagined solidarity with the oppressed. Jeans, open shirts, gray tweed sport jackets, and sneakers had become a uniform.

  “Is your father a Republican?” she asked Brian.

  “Of course.”

  “Of course!”

  “He’s very pro-life.” He looked at her. “So am I.”

  “Good.” She gripped his arm. She was pro-life too, wasn’t she?

  Sometimes Melissa felt like a lump of play dough that could be shaped by any dominant person. She would echo Padraig or Kilmartin and probably Brian too. But not Arne. He came and stood resentfully before her, a large plastic cup of beer in his hand.

  “I thought you weren’t interested in football,” he said accusingly.

  “It was the first game I’ve seen since I came here.”

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  “Weren’t you there?”

  “I meant, how did you like it?”

  She felt a perverse desire to say it had been awful, if only to baffle Arne. Your honeyed appellation is sweet upon my ear. Remembering the line made her feel sorry for him.

  “It was fun.”

  “I was there too.”

  “In the student section?”

  “Where else?”

  Odd to think that he had been there in that anonymous mass of fans. Had his been one of the pair of hands that handed that girl upward?

  * * *

  When she got away to Padraig’s side, she said, “How was breakfast with the president?”

  He shrugged. “I think I was a disappointment.”

  “What is Mr. Elliot like?”

  “From central casting.”

  It was de rigueur to be disdainful of potential benefactors. Once poets and scholars had patrons to whom they wrote fawning dedications. Now they kowtowed to impersonal foundations and the NEA without any sense that this was demeaning. Why should one strain at benefactors if he were willing to swallow obsequious grant proposals? Melissa had helped him fill out the forms. More paper.

  At the party, Deirdre and Martin Kilmartin were the cynosure of every eye, a hymeneal couple wreathed in bashful smiles. Melissa tried to imagine the two in one another’s arms and could not. It would have been pleasant to imagine Deirdre the dominating wife and Martin the doomed Robert Louis Stevenson, heading for an early death. But moribundity was part of Martin’s charm.