“Did you know that Lady Anne Gregory once visited Notre Dame?” she asked Padraig.
“No!”
“Professor Roger Knight told me.”
“I would need proof.”
“I’ll get it.”
Her heart warmed at the thought of Roger Knight. Was that her fate, to be the doting younger woman to helpless middle-aged men?
Martin sneezed and the room fell silent. Once a sneeze had nearly undone him, as if his soul could be expelled in a gusty breath. He was put in a chair, Deirdre hovered, the moment passed. Could death come so easily? Martin held a handkerchief to his face and looked around with widened eyes. He still held a lighted cigarette in the pale fingers of one hand. He took away the handkerchief and then, as if he were performing a trick, put the cigarette to his mouth. He might have been taking hemlock.
11
Thanksgiving came and the Knight brothers invited Father Carmody and Greg Whelan to share the massive turkey that Roger had prepared. It was served with all the traditional accompaniments—sweet potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pickles, olives and other assorted condiments, mashed potatoes and gravy from the bird—and everyone but Roger drinking deep of a Chilean red. Two kinds of pie, mince and pumpkin, were served with coffee afterward. It was a lovely day, bright and cold, yesterday’s snow still fresh and sparkling in the sun. Phil had another feast of holiday football. All Notre Dame home games had been played, there remained a fateful contest with Air Force, the outcome of which would settle the post-season play, if any, of the Fighting Irish. Father Carmody and Phil argued long and earnestly about the method used to select teams for the great bowl games that started the new calendar year.
Melissa had gone to Midlothian, Michigan, with Brian Elliot for the holiday. Thoughts of the Elliot family prompted Roger to talk with Greg Whelan about the proposal David Simmons had recently made about an Elliott donation.
* * *
Simmons had come to Roger during the week after the Michigan game, his eyes alight, a Greek bearing gifts. He began with a paean of praise for James Elliot and his loyalty and devotion to Notre Dame.
“I know his son Brian.”
“He mentioned that! That’s good. Let me just lay out what I have been thinking before you react, okay?”
The generosity of James Elliot had been seeking an appropriate major outlet at the university and Simmons had been trying to come up with something fitting. He had suggested various things, none with much enthusiasm, but then he had an epiphany.
“Malachy O’Neill! If there is anyone who is at the center of Elliot’s memories about Notre Dame it is O’Neill. Of course you will have heard of him. A problem with anyone whose influence has been exclusively in the classroom is that it is difficult to convey to someone who wasn’t there what he was like. Well and good. But if we think of O’Neill as a symbol as well as a historical personage, possibilities beyond a shrine to the man occur. What we are thinking of is a Malachy O’Neill Center of Catholic Literature.”
“You’ve already spoken with him about it?”
“Yes. And he is enthusiastic. Of course everything is still vague at this stage, but calling it a Center of Catholic Literature immediately brought you to mind. Because of your endowed chair? The center could simply be a setting for what you’re already doing.”
Simmons was thinking big. Not only would there be a separate building, it would have its own special library, and beside sponsoring conferences and inviting lecturers it would have resident fellows working on appropriate topics.
“What it would not be is another academic department. The obstacles to introducing a new instructional unit are formidable, there is a gamut of committees to be faced—the graduate council, the academic council, the provost’s advisory committee. It would be the fourth millennium before the thing got underway. But a center is another kettle of fish entirely.”
There were analogues of what Simmons was suggesting already in place on campus. It represented a new emphasis in academe, an effort to bring together different disciplines rather than to strengthen their differences.
Simmons spoke with the fervor of a man worried about being interrupted. He was very much in the grips of the idea and did not want Roger to react in any way at all right off.
“All I ask is that you think about it. That’s all James Elliot asks at this point. I said he was enthusiastic. He is. He is not an excitable man. But he is excited about having Roger Knight as the director of the new center.”
“I am acquainted with him, you know.”
“Why do you think he’s enthusiastic? Let me tell you a little story, strictly entre nous.”
Simmons then related the tale of the breakfast he had arranged for Elliot and Padraig Maloney. “I had the idea that Celtic Studies might provide the connection. Wrong. From the word go, I saw it was a big mistake.”
“Celtic Studies was expecting Elliot to…”
“No, no. Nothing was broached. The chemistry between Elliot and Maloney was so obviously wrong that all we did was eat breakfast. Nothing was proposed, nothing discussed. There would be no possible grounds for resentment.”
Roger agreed to think about it. He tried to express his doubts, but Simmons cut him off. “Think about it. Talk with a few people confidentially, if you want. Give it serious thought.”
At the door, he looked back at Roger.
“I cannot emphasize too much what this means to the university and to a valued alumnus.”
* * *
To discuss such a project, however confidential the conversation was supposed to be, would inevitably introduce it into the campus pipeline. There are no secrets in the academic community. Administrators confide in others, perhaps in the half-conscious expectation that a trial balloon will be released. Committees sworn to professional secrecy regularly find that their proceedings are known and discussed far and wide. But then Roger saw no need to discuss the idea.
Philip would be all for anything that consolidated their position at Notre Dame. For Roger to be not only an endowed professor but director of a center whose agenda he could set and implement would not seem to Phil an offer Roger could reasonably refuse. But on an impulse he trusted he mentioned it now to Greg Whelan.
“I can’t believe he’s serious, Greg.”
“Of course he’s serious.”
“The money was originally destined for Celtic Studies.” Melissa too had mentioned Maloney’s breakfast with the fat cat alumnus, and the expectations among those in Celtic Studies was that a huge financial boost was in the offing.
“The donor has to be the judge of that. There is a lot to be said for a Malachy O’Neill Center.”
“Tell me everything you know about Malachy O’Neill.”
“But you already know about him.”
Roger displayed a pudgy palm. “Pretend that I have never heard of him before. Start from the beginning.”
The assistant archivist was silent for a moment as he marshaled the formidable information he had amassed over the years as he pored over the holdings of the archives. And then he began.
It is the rare person who can speak impromptu with the orderliness and pith of Greg Whelan’s portrait of Malachy O’Neill. His performance was all the more remarkable because of his speech impediment, although this never bothered him when he talked with Roger. By and large, Greg’s interlocutors would imagine that his thought processes were as staccato as his speech. That this was far from being the case was once more clear.
Greg began by evoking the Notre Dame of several decades ago, inviting Roger to think away half the buildings on campus, remove women students from the picture, and imagine a community of some seven thousand male residents, few permitted to have automobiles, whose life was bounded by the campus, especially in the winter months. Computers did not exist although there was a computing center, harbinger of the future but not yet a household word: there were no computer clusters scattered across campus where students spent untold hours. Then, O’Shaughness
y Hall was the classroom building although there were also some rooms in the Main Building assigned to the Arts College. The bookstore was a place where textbooks for courses and little else could be purchased. On its erstwhile site now stood an equivocal building devoted to this and that.
This was a sketch of the Notre Dame in which O’Neill had flourished as a teacher. But what of the Notre Dame O’Neill had known as a student in the years just after World War II? An all-male school, of course, enrollment between four and five thousand. Proportionately fewer residence halls. Student automobiles not permitted and the young men even more campus bound, their lives defined by what they did as students. There was no competition from television, students were not permitted to have radios in their rooms; the lights were turned off in the halls at an early hour, the master switch thrown by the rector, almost invariably a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross.
And Greg suggested another way in which early stages of the school could be imaginatively reconstructed.
“Go to the community cemetery and see how many graves date from 1945. Most of them. It is in the few rows that precede them that you will find the priests who influenced Malachy O’Neill as a student.”
The note that Greg stressed as definitive of O’Neill’s outlook was the superiority of Catholic culture.
“He saw Notre Dame as in the mainstream, vitally connected with the great cultural events of western civilization. A liberal arts education aimed at introducing students to the great achievements of Christendom in philosophy, theology, art, architecture music, literature. These were not the achievement let alone the possession of WASPs, Roger. These were Catholic!”
The courses Malachy O’Neill had taken as a student and the courses he gave as a professor were not considered to be specialized courses, Catholic writers as opposed to others, a small and sectarian group out of the mainstream.
“O’Neill insisted that it was secular American higher education that was out of the mainstream. A kind of proof of this was the revival of liberal arts at Columbia, Chicago, and St. John’s, during the thirties.”
Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins looked to the Catholic colleges for the continuation of what they wanted to recover.
“Now it has to be recovered here,” Greg concluded. “I suppose that is the point of the proposed center.”
Roger Knight doubted that David Simmons or James Elliot would have been capable of stating the rationale for the center as ably as Greg Whelan had.
“How did we lose it? That is another and longer story.”
Greg supplied Roger with photocopies of Malachy O’Neill materials from the archives. It turned out that the man had written a few things after all. There was an essay or two in the literary magazine of which he had been faculty moderator. There were contributions to The Scholastic when he was a student. Over the next several weeks, Roger kept Simmons at bay while he tried to enter into the mind-set of Malachy O’Neill.
“I got a call from James Elliot,” Phil said in early December.
“How is he?”
“He wants to know when you’re going to decide.”
There was pressure from Simmons as well. Finally Roger set a deadline.
“Early January. I want to have the break between semesters to think about it.”
12
“A man named Weber was asking about you,” Greg Whelan said to Roger Knight.
“Weber.”
“Donald Weber.”
The friend—or was it enemy?—of James Elliot whose claim to have been in the classroom on the day that Malachy O’Neill fell to the floor dead had turned out to be true, much to Elliot’s chagrin. Roger remembered Weber’s somewhat hostile reaction to his own appointment as Huneker professor. And then Melissa came by to tell him that a Professor Weber from Midlothian had been talking with Padraig Maloney.
“Well, Midlothian is Celtic enough.”
“You know him?”
“Weber? Yes, we’ve met.”
“Well, you didn’t make another fan.”
“Another?”
Melissa actually blushed.
Roger was told by Becky Fontana in English that Weber had dropped in there in the role of successful alumnus of the program.
“I suppose he talked about Malachy O’Neill?”
“He had all kinds of anecdotes that some found funny.”
“You didn’t?”
Becky was in her mid-fifties and had huge, wide-spaced blue eyes that seemed never to blink. She wrote enigmatic short stories that had yet to find a publisher and had been writing a study of Carson McCullers for years. Her eyes grew if possible larger.
“Of course my colleagues regard anyone who taught here prior to their own arrival as by definition incompetent. The legend of Malachy O’Neill is an obligatory object of derision. Weber corroborated all their fondest prejudices.”
“That is odd. He once told me that O’Neill was the major formative influence in his life.”
“He talked about you too. Did you have lunch with him and the trash king of Michigan recently?”
“With my brother Phil.”
“Roger, you do realize that there are those who resent your position here, don’t you?”
“Seated?”
“Not that it matters, of course. Weber was assured what a joke your appointment is considered to be. A sort of quid pro quo for his stories about Malachy O’Neill.”
“Well, well.”
Phil ran into Weber in the bar of the Morris Inn, where the visiting professor had apparently been for some time before Phil’s arrival.
“And how’s your enormous brother?” Weber sputtered, looking about as if for an appreciative audience. But there was only a mustachioed man beside him at the bar, holding his drink with both hands.
Phil said that Roger was fine. “Flourishing.”
“Is that right? I’m glad to hear it.”
“I suppose you’ve visited Malachy O’Neill’s grave.”
“Ha!” And Weber’s eyes darted to the man beside him.
“Have you heard of Jim Elliot’s proposal for a Malachy O’Neill Center of Catholic Literature?”
The little man with Weber exploded, sputtering his drink in several directions, and launched a tirade against the influence of donors on the direction of the university.
“He’s even picked the director he wants!” the little man cried.
Weber stood back as his companion vented his wrath. He seemed to be a member of the faculty. His name was Sauer and he taught English. “I am, for my sins, the Malachy O’Neill professor of literature.” He went on from the proposed center to the travesty of Celtic Studies.
“A haven for bogus bards.”
Weber snickered.
“Do you know there is a course being offered on the Celtic Twilight by someone who has never written a word on the subject? We’re being taken over by amateurs.”
“Isn’t that your brother’s course?” Weber asked.
Sauer stared. “Is Roger Knight your brother?”
“He is.”
“Do you have a faculty appointment too?” Sauer smiled evilly.
“No, I’m gainfully employed.”
Phil left. He was still surprised by the pettiness some academics were capable of, but he did not trust himself to be patient with these two, particularly when it was an implicit attack on Roger.
“Sauer?” Roger said. “He’s the author of the hatchet job on Martin Kilmartin in The Scholastic. ‘Irish Bards and Scotch Consumers.’ His main complaint is that Kilmartin has learned nothing from Pound.”
The following day Weber tapped on the door of Roger’s office in Earth Sciences. Roger’s window overlooked the parking lot and, beyond, the grotto and lake.
“Busy?”
“Come in, come in. I heard you were on campus.”
“I ran into your brother. That’s why I’m here.”
Weber sat and looked around, doing a 180-degree turn. “Not very posh, is it?”
&n
bsp; “I like it. And it’s convenient. Getting in and out of. I leave my cart right outside.”
“Did your brother tell you of Sauer’s drunken remarks?”
“I gather he doesn’t share your admiration for Malachy O’Neill.”
“He never knew him! All these Johnny-come-latelys on the faculty can’t accept the fact that giants once walked this campus.”
“Your friend Elliot wants a center to be named after O’Neill.”
“A great idea! And Jim has the money to do it.”
Weber continued to take in Roger’s office.
“I can’t get over what a dump they’ve put you in. My office at Midlothian is sumptuous compared to this.”
“I would not want anything sumptuous.”
“You will have one, though, when you take over the center.”
Roger tried to laugh it off, but Weber was relentless.
“You’ve been offered it, haven’t you?”
“Can you see me as administrator?”
“How could you turn it down?”
“By thinking of more worthy nominees.”
“Who?”
“Martin Kilmartin.” Roger spoke the name as one drawn out of a hat, but once uttered it seemed right to him. He told Weber how accomplished a poet Kilmartin was.
Weber was staring at him. He found his voice.
“I understand he is consumptive.”
“He’s certainly not robust. I believe the problem is his heart. He is so fragile he could kill himself with a sneeze.”
“Literally?”
“I am quoting him.”
“What do you think of his poetry?”
“I was just going to put that question to you.”
Weber threw back his head and closed his eyes. “His is the purest lyric voice since Edna St. Vincent Millay.” His eyes opened. “She is my favorite American poet.”
“And you rank Kilmartin with her?”
Celt and Pepper Page 6
