Celt and Pepper

by Ralph McInerny

  “None. Look at Keats.”

  “But you don’t think he was a Keats?”

  “Oh no. Melissa, it is an interesting effort. To have written so much so tolerably well is beyond the powers of ninety-nine percent of us. But it was an effort. Listen:

  Once they were called the Sandwich Isles

  Boasting a king and queen

  Positioned precisely in between

  East and West by identical miles,

  They drew the world’s merchant marine.

  “I heard there was a plan to publish it.”

  “It deserves publication, I think. As the work of a legendary Notre Dame figure. Did you know that both Churchill and Eisenhower painted? Fairly well too, by all accounts. But if someone bought a painting by one of them, his motives would not be simply artistic, would they?”

  “It sounds like you’ve decided not to accept the directorship of the new center.”

  “Does it? That’s not true. I am still pondering it.”

  “I wish you’d take it.”

  “I wish I could find someone who wished I wouldn’t.”

  “Come on over to Celtic Studies.”

  “Oh?”

  “They have developed the myth that you jobbed them out of money meant for them.”

  “I have to disabuse them of such thoughts.”

  “Good luck.”

  16

  There was a delivery entrance on the west side of Flanner Hall and a parking area from which the snow had been cleared where Roger was able to park his golf cart out of the weather and close to the doorway. Several people huddled outside in the cold, smoking, their expressions those once seen on the denizens of Asian opium dens when a western camera pushed its prurient lens into iniquity. Chesterton had remarked that Americans had turned two of God’s blessings, alcohol and tobacco, into vices. If only we hadn’t turned vices into virtues at the same time.

  As Roger rose in the elevator, he was not thinking of what he would say to Padraig Maloney. His appointment with him was half an hour off. Meanwhile, he wanted to drop in on Martin Kilmartin. The poet had sounded surprised when Roger identified himself.

  Kilmartin said, “When we first met I had no idea who you were. I let you talk about my poetry when we could have discussed Baron Corvo! Melissa should have described you better.”

  “You know Corvo?”

  “Is the pope Polish? And I don’t mean Hadrian VII.”

  Roger fitted himself carefully into the chair Kilmartin offered. “My reputation is largely local. Like Malachy O’Neill’s.”

  “Ah yes. I have been reading about the great discovery.”

  “The ballad? I prefer the shorter things. He was trying too hard, I think, when he undertook the ballad.”

  “It’s the only thing of his I’ve heard of.”

  “Perhaps you would like copies of some other things.”

  Kilmartin watched as Roger placed on the desk a manila envelope he had taken from his shoulder bag. “Photocopies. You needn’t return them.”

  “I look forward to reading them,” Kilmartin said carefully. “I hope I like them better than the ballad.”

  “I am here on quite another matter and I would like your advice.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m told that Professor Maloney thinks that I was instrumental in diverting money away from Celtic Studies. From a benefactor named Elliot.”

  “Were you?”

  “No.”

  “So why would Maloney think so?”

  “I shall shortly ask him that. I have an appointment with him in a few minutes. Naturally I do not like to be thought capable of such tricks.”

  “Do you think Maloney ever had a chance of getting money from Elliot?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “My theory is that Maloney blew it. And he needs you to blame his failure on.”

  Kilmartin seemed more amused than miffed by the thought that the program in which he taught was not going to have largesse rained upon it. But then it was unclear that he saw his presence at Notre Dame as more than a brief sojourn. Long-term thoughts would thus be uninteresting to him.

  Padraig Maloney was anything but philosophical about the loss of the Elliot benefaction.

  “It was a done deal! I had breakfast with the man, the president came and gave his blessing. So what happened?”

  “What were you told happened?”

  “That he changed his mind.” Maloney sat forward and worked his beard. “Your brother attended the game with him and then he had supper at your place. After which he tells the foundation man it’s all off. He wants to give the money to you for a mausoleum for some long-ago faculty member.”

  “I haven’t accepted the offer to direct a center named after Malachy O’Neill.”

  “Holding out for an even better deal than they’ve offered?”

  Roger laughed. “I lack all these Machiavellian virtues, Maloney. I will say this. Rather than have it thought that I influenced Elliot to change his mind and take up the idea of a center, I would refuse to be its director.”

  “What do you want from me, absolution?”

  What had he expected? It is always difficult to see oneself as others do, and Roger was unable to see himself as one who would take advantage of his acquaintance with James Elliot to persuade him to give money where he neither wanted nor intended to give it. He found Padraig Maloney irksome, devoid of any collegial feeling. They spoke at cross-purposes for ten more minutes and then Roger was in the elevator, descending to his golf cart, anxious to get away. It had been a mistake to come.

  Outside, snow flurries had begun. He pulled his cap tightly over his head, raised the collar of his coat, and headed into whiteness. Had he promised not to accept the directorship of the proposed Center for Catholic Literature? He could not think so, given Maloney’s sarcastic reaction to his offer to do so. But he remained unsure whether he would accede to James Elliot’s wishes.

  17

  Before the advent of Kilmartin, Deirdre Lacey had been if not exactly Padraig Maloney’s girl, at least his constant and assumed companion. Their easy mutual jocularity might have been a warning that whatever seriousness was invested in the pact came entirely from his side. Why could he not make poetry out of the anguish he felt at losing her to Kilmartin? A possible line began and then unaccountably stopped. “Ah love, let us be false to one another…” Bah. Unrequited love was the traditional nurturing ground of verse, but his tears fell on barren ground. There was no gain from his loss. And now there was the devoted Melissa, too young by far, too uncritically adulatory, seemingly infatuated with him. He felt a duty to tell her that he was not worth her interest. At the most recent departmental party they had ended up side by side on a couch, he talking, she listening. He hated the sound of his own voice when he pontificated to her. But he felt avuncular, if not paternal. To lay a hand on her would have been too much like violating his own young sister.

  “Deirdre is so beautiful,” Melissa said. Did she realize her words were like a knife in his side?

  “Ah yes.”

  Great ropes of tawny hair lay plaited on Deirdre’s shoulders; she wore a black dress of ankle length and a necklace of green stones. Maloney could imagine saying a rosary on them, the sorrowful mysteries. But Deirdre doubtless saw herself as the Pietà, the dying or dead poet in her arms, herself the object of hyperdulia. The best analogy of her infatuation was the fatal attraction men condemned to death had for women. Female defense lawyers fell in love with the monsters they represented, sometimes married them. The moribund Kilmartin whose life might be sneezed away in a moment was irresistible to Deirdre. Was he the only one who saw her abject devotion, the glint of self-sacrifice in her eye? Martin’s frail body and translucent face lit up by the great green eyes that drank in the world and transmuted it into lyrical effusions was a powerful aphrodisiac. A recent sonnet could only have been written with Deirdre in mind, but like her the poet expressed his love obliquely. There was something fated in
their togetherness as if it had not been a matter of choice, but simply there to be recognized, and once recognized hidden by a mask of indifference.

  The moment toward which the evening led was Kilmartin reading. He read Yeats’s “The Choice” and then something of his own inspired by it.

  Raging in the dark is what we do in sunlit

  hours, no need to wait till we are late

  and wispy howls among the monuments;

  our heavenly mansion to all intents

  unchosen, we will our will to spite.

  “So gloomy,” Deirdre murmured.

  “Just Irish.”

  But she was right, the level of melancholy in his verse rose as happiness threatened in the form of Deirdre. He was a great Catholic, Kilmartin, as devout as a widow, slipping off to Mass at Sacred Heart on weekdays, 12:15 in the crypt, with Orestes Brownson under stone in the main aisle, secretaries and other lower orders from the Main Building scattered here and there in the pews. Maloney had looked in once or twice, spying, following Kilmartin when he left Flanner, fearing he had a rendezvous with Deirdre, but all it was was Mass.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Melissa asked.

  “Heart.”

  This puzzled her. Perhaps she thought he was speaking metaphorically. Maloney didn’t understand it himself medically, it was some malformation that was life threatening, so Martin would doubtless live to be a hundred.

  “Can’t they operate?”

  “Apparently not.”

  It was understood that he could go at any moment and sometimes Maloney prayed he would, making Deirdre a kind of widow and eligible again. He assumed Kilmartin would not marry, the demands of the nuptial couch a danger to his heart. How wrong he was. Last night at the party, Kilmartin coughed for attention and told the others their joyful news.

  “Deirdre has consented to become my wife,” he said, taking her hand, and drawing her to her feet beside him.

  “Martin!” she cried. “You said it would be a secret.”

  Her eyes had darted to Maloney who had once explained to her the impossibility of Kilmartin’s marrying, the information given at a time when she could not have imagined it to be self-serving. There had been no need to go on about it, Martin had such a valedictory air about him, the male counterpart of Camille on her couch, saying a long farewell to the world. Had Deirdre just noticed what she called gloominess in his poetry? Of course there were the light things. “Man is a National Animal.” “Witless in Ringsend.” Scarcely more than jingles. The serous ones dealt with the apparently inconsequential. “Old Shoes.” “Pocket Lint.” “Geography of My Window Shade.”

  Last night, with the hypocrisy of good manners, Maloney had jumped to his feet to congratulate the prospective bride and groom.

  “And when and where will the great day be?”

  “First Deirdre must visit Dublin. We will go when the semester ends.”

  18

  Deirdre Lacey’s condo in Shamrock Residences was rented in her own name and thus represented a new departure in her life, a first step toward the recovery of the freedom she had madly cast away out of infatuation for Fritz Davis, her husband of sorts, as she had belatedly explained to Martin Kilmartin after he had announced their engagement at the party.

  “You’re already married?”

  “It was only a civil marriage.”

  “Only? I should think a civil marriage is the best kind.” But he obviously could not joke it away.

  “We were married by a judge in the courthouse.”

  How could she conjure up for him the tawdry scene in the small Minnesota town, the courthouse rising like a fist from the khaki lawn, baking in the August sun? The clerk from whom they bought the marriage licence sniffled and sneezed as he served them, checking the form Fritz had filled out. Deirdre stood beside him at the counter, not as high as his muscular shoulders, leaning against him as if his presence could negate the circumstances. She was nineteen, Fritz was twenty-five, both were high on crack, a delight to which he had introduced her three days before when she met him on the midway of the country fair. With his ponytail and roguish bandana he had seemed to her all that the wider world contained of excitement and fun. She was seduced on the first night, something she inferred the following morning, having no unclouded memory of her own deflowering. The motel room in which they misbehaved until the fateful trip to the courthouse seemed impossibly luxurious to her. They had pizza sent in and drugs were supplemented with beer. They honeymooned in Baraboo, Wisconsin, driving there on his Harley Davidson, Deirdre clinging to his back in terror and excitement.

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m on disability.”

  He had been injured in the army in a manner that was judged service-related. His reward was a pittance, but it was for life, and he had organized his life around his income. Their footloose wandering continued for months, biking from town to town, getting zonked in one motel after another, growing bored with one another.

  “Why don’t we stay here? I’ll get a job.”

  “What for?”

  “For something to do.”

  “Don’t nag.”

  In moments of clarity she told herself she should take money from his wallet and board a bus for home. Instead she deserted him in Madison and took a job as a waitress near the university campus. Listening to the student chatter stirred memories of school and of how well she had done in her studies. Her high school sent a transcript of her grades without incident and she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, taking courses indiscriminately, an intellectual orgy to match the one she had shared with Fritz. Fritz. From time to time her heart ached with memories of their months together. But it was not until she had earned her degree and began following graduate courses that he reappeared.

  The sound of a motorcycle had always filled her with mixed emotions, fear that he would find her and beat her, a twisted hope that he would pull her up behind him and roar off with his captive. But five years passed and no motorcycle proved to be his. It was at the restaurant where she still waited tables that he found her.

  “Remember me?”

  “Fritz!”

  There was a girl with him, windblown, tan, vacant-eyed. Deirdre looked at what she herself might have become.

  “This is Molly.”

  “What can I bring you?”

  She wanted to get to the kitchen and escape out the back way. In the flesh, Fritz was menacing and his smile satanic. How had she ever allowed herself to run off with this animal? She took their order, walked right through the kitchen and outside. She would explain later.

  For days she kept to her room. To stay in Madison was to run the risk of his finding her. It never occurred to her that he would be as willing to forget her as she was to forget him.

  She made her way eventually to South Bend, where she waited on tables until she was successful getting a secretarial job at Notre Dame, her knack with computers being the Open Sesame. The interview with Padraig Maloney had gone very well. She came upon him baffled by the unwillingness of his computer to respond to his wishes. She solved the problem. She got the job. Eventually she was given status as a special student so she could audit courses.

  That had been two years ago, though it seemed mere months, but what a transforming time it had been. She was the person she claimed to be, fashioned for purposes of this new setting where at last she could truly flourish. She was in the academic world but not of it, privy to all the activities of a department yet independent of them. What she had never dreamt of was meeting someone like Martin Kilmartin.

  Fritz had been rough and crude; Martin was fragile and refined. Fritz was an animal; Martin was an angel—at least at first. She had marveled at his language and the fact that he refined some of it into poetry represented merely a difference of degree not kind. The literal world receded and, with Martin, Deirdre entered the world of imagination. He was prophet and seer, one through whom spoke powers beyond his own. When he first took her in his arms sh
e felt that she was being divinized by his touch.

  Of course he was a male, there was little doubt of that, and she would not have wanted it otherwise. The ephemeral can take one only so far. Perhaps she had led him on, wanting to discover if the verbal was an expression of flesh and blood desires or a substitute for them.

  “Shame on us,” he said the first time he had shared her bed.

  It was a moment for silence and a womanly smile.

  “Are you Catholic?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “It’s still a sin.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “With all my heart.”

  And he did. He was in an agony of remorse until he confessed to a priest that he had committed fornication. Deirdre was fascinated. He had cast her in multiple roles—his muse, his inspiration, now Jezebel. It was inevitable that they should soothe his conscience by talking of marriage. They became engaged and he made the announcement and only afterward did she tell him of Fritz.

  “I’ll get a divorce,” she assured him.

  “I don’t believe in divorce.”

  “I never thought you were such a gung ho Catholic.”

  He stared at her. She had offended him. Good grief.

  “Martin, I am kidding!”

  “Kidding?”

  “Of course, darling.” She flew into his arms, laughing. “You thought I was serious, didn’t you?”

  For a frightening half minute she was hugging him but he was not hugging her. Then his arms closed around her. Deirdre swore to herself that she would never tell the truth again.

  19

  “Melissa told me how to get here.” Kilmartin peeked around the door of Roger’s office then stepped in. He looked around. “She’s right. It has character.”

  “Meaning it’s a mess. Sit down, sit down.”

  “It’s hard to believe the stories she tells of you.”

  Roger was embarrassed. Martin Kilmartin was a poet whose work had earned him recognition on both sides of the Atlantic. That he should suggest that the distinction even of curiosity lay on Roger’s side was ludicrous.