Celt and Pepper

by Ralph McInerny

  “What’s wrong?” Her tone had changed from the shamefaced one in which she had told him she had forgotten her key. Branigan had gone up on the elevator with her only to find that there was no master key on his ring. Melissa Shaw came along in a couple of minutes and she opened the door and Branigan got out of there. He spent an hour in the main building getting a replacement from campus security.

  “You lose the other one?”

  “It’s probably in a pocket I haven’t searched yet.”

  “Well, bring this back when you find your own.”

  It wasn’t until Martin Kilmartin’s death a couple days later turned up the fact that Deirdre Lacey was also missing and that the police were looking for her first husband, a bearded giant named Fritz Davis, that Branigan put two and two together. Fritz had had time to remove the master key from the ring while Millie was giggling over the pitcher of beer.

  He knew he should tell the police but he didn’t. He drove out to Fiametti’s on a weeknight and asked Millie if the bearded biker had been back but she couldn’t remember him.

  “He slapped your bottom.”

  “Big deal.”

  She made it sound as if giving her a pat was a bonus for ordering a pitcher.

  6

  Padraig Maloney cried helplessly when Stewart talked to him about Martin Kilmartin’s death.

  “I thought the man was in Ireland.”

  “So he must have had reservations. What airline?”

  Maloney tucked in his chin, his cheekbones wet with the tears that had continued down into his beard. “Aer Lingus, I’m sure.”

  But the airline had no reservation to Dublin for Martin Kilmartin and Deirdre Lacey, together or separately. Maloney sobbed again and Melissa wished he would take it easy. He looked guilty as sin.

  “It’s all my fault,” he said to Stewart.

  “How so?”

  “I’m the one who admitted that woman to special status so she could follow courses.”

  “What woman is that?”

  “The one he said he was going to marry. Deirdre Lacey. Oh, she had a transcript from Wisconsin and she wasn’t applying for student status, but what did we really know about her?”

  Melissa was shocked, not just because he was as much as accusing Deirdre of harming Martin but because he himself had been mooning over Deirdre for months, following the progress of Kilmartin’s conquest of her, muttering as he watched them slip into the poet’s car for a smoke. Reflections on the windshield made it impossible to know what they were up to, but the cigarette smoke coming from the cracked windows made that obvious. For him to point the finger at Deirdre now did more than make Melissa uneasy. She could not resist thinking that Maloney was making himself look responsible.

  “The door of his office was locked?” Lieutenant Stewart asked.

  “They lock when they’re shut.”

  “So how could anyone get inside?”

  “With a key?”

  “But who would have had a key?”

  “Who opened the door when you found the body, Melissa?”

  “Branigan.”

  The detective just listened, not reacting at all, one way or the other. Melissa waited for Professor Maloney to tell the detective that there were copies of all the keys of those in Celtic Studies right here in the office of the director. But he didn’t. Melissa left; she went down in the elevator and out into the chill December air. Then she sat on a bench and watched her breath escape like tobacco smoke from her lips when she breathed.

  * * *

  While they waited for the police to come, after she had fetched Branigan and he in turn had fetched Katie Schwenk, the campus cop had told Melissa of the smell of the telephone. Was that what Branigan had smelled when they first approached the door? With her first serious cold of the season, Melissa could not even smell the fumes from the ethanol plant anymore.

  “Did you know him?” Katie had whispered when they had gone down the hall, away from Branigan.

  “Yes.”

  “What a case of halitosis he had.”

  “I never noticed.”

  “His telephone reeked. Smelled like pepper.”

  “Pepper!”

  “I mean a bad smell.”

  “But like pepper?”

  “That was my impression. Did you smell anything funny?”

  For answer, Melissa sniffled. Katie handed her a tissue.

  Melissa had noticed Katie hanging up the phone before she closed Martin Kilmartin’s office door and said they would wait for the paramedics and the South Bend police to come.

  Melissa had slipped away to Celtic Studies, telling Katie where she would be. The door of the inner office was closed and a light on the phone suggested that Maloney was in there. Melissa sat at Mrs. Bumstead’s desk and tried not to think. But the mention of pepper recalled those occasions when Kilmartin and others had said that something as innocent as a sneeze could carry him off. Hadn’t Arne joked about turning in some poems over which he had sprinkled some pepper? But mainly it had been Martin himself who spoke of his fragile hold on life, his enlarged heart, the menace of the simplest things. How could this not endear him to her more, and, she supposed, to Deirdre as well. Deirdre had looked almost as surprised as anyone else when Martin announced that he intended to marry her. It was like becoming engaged to someone on their deathbed, and all the more romantic for that. Martin’s tenuous hold on life should have affected Padraig Maloney’s attitude toward their rivalry for Deirdre: he could lose in the short term and win in the long. And where was she herself in all this?

  Women students did not often admit it but there was always an element of flirtation involved when the professor was male. Sometimes on his side only and thus unwelcome, sometimes on hers and thus unserious but fun nonetheless. She was half in love with Roger Knight and Padraig Maloney as she had been with Martin Kilmartin. Why couldn’t she respond to the attentions of Arne Jensen or Brian Elliot?

  Arne had actually tried to write a poem for her whereas Brian had wanted to take her places, to dinner, to games, and finally to his parents home in Midlothian, Michigan, for Thanksgiving. Her parents in Delaware had been reconciled to her decision not to come home when she told them she had been invited to Midlothian.

  “Another student?”

  “Yes.”

  No need to say a male and an undergraduate at that. By all rights, Arne and Brian should regard her as half a faculty member herself, but she wasn’t a year older than either of them, enough to savor the pleasures of the big sister when she wasn’t leading them on. In Midlothian, she got along with everybody, but Brian’s father was particularly kind.

  “Brian tells me you steered him toward Roger Knight.”

  Had she? “He’s a wonderful professor.”

  “I know him a bit. I know his brother Phil better. I want Roger to be the director of a center I am being asked to finance at Notre Dame, in honor of Malachy O’Neill. Have you ever heard of him?”

  “From Roger Knight.”

  “O’Neill had the greatest impact on me of any prof at Notre Dame.”

  An almost identical statement was made by Donald Weber, a professor at the local college and a domer besides who was another Thanksgiving dinner guest. He and Elliot seemed to compete with one another to say the most outrageously favorable things about Malachy O’Neill.

  “I was in the classroom when he died,” Weber said, and it seemed a trump he had played before. Elliot fell silent and then left the room. For fifteen minutes she fended off Weber’s effort to get her to admit that Notre Dame was not a fraction of what it had once been.

  When she and Brian were getting ready to return to South Bend, James Elliot asked Melissa to put pressure on Roger Knight to accept the directorship of the Malachy O’Neill Center.

  “I doubt that he would make such a decision on the basis of anything I said.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short. We never know the influence we have with others.”

  When she brought
up the visit to Midlothian and out of a sense of duty turned the topic to Malachy O’Neill, Roger seized the opportunity to talk about the house in the Chicago suburb and the cache of papers.

  “If nothing else, they have great historical value. Greg Whelan, the archivist, is in seventh heaven.”

  “I suppose they’ll end up in the new center?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could insist on it.”

  The Ballad of Pearl Harbor had been making the rounds on the seventh floor of Flanner, recited derisively by those encouraged by Kilmartin’s alleged negative assessment of the poem. Melissa had read a stanza or two but it just wasn’t her sort of thing. She didn’t mean it was bad, or good, she just didn’t like ballads. Roger nodded as she told him this.

  “That is his longest poem, and probably one of the earliest. But he was a foe of free verse, there’s no doubt of that. He was attracted by the most demanding forms and with practice sometimes worked within the restraints to good effect. But I doubt that anyone would call him a major poet.”

  A minor poet? Roger took that to be a significant category. Minor poets were to be distinguished from the occasional writer of verse.

  “Of course almost all writers produce poetry. Is Cardinal Newman a poet? Is Melville or Updike? Failure to count as a major poet doesn’t make one a bad poet.”

  When asked to name other writers not known for their poetry who had nonetheless written it, Roger grinned. “Max Brand.”

  “The western writer?”

  “And the author of Dr. Kildare. Yes, he longed to be a poet and produced yards of quasi-classical poetry.”

  They were getting away from Malachy O’Neill. “Brian’s father asked me to pressure you to accept the directorship of the proposed O’Neill Center.”

  “He may be the only man alive who can imagine me in an administrative position.”

  “You could do it.”

  “Right now I am more concerned with what has happened to Deirdre Lacey.”

  Immediately Melissa felt terrible. Had it really sunk in that Deirdre was missing, perhaps worse …

  7

  The publication of several of Malachy O’Neill’s poems in The Observer called forth pages of harsh and hilarious comments. A contest was initiated inviting imitation O’Neill verse. Becky Fontana was sure that Sauer was behind it all, particularly when her colleague produced a tongue-in-cheek essay comparing the poetry of Malachy O’Neill with that “yardstick of campus poetry,” the verse of the Rev. Charles L. O’Donnell, C.S.C. He ended with the suggestion that readers who wished to rinse their aesthetic palate after tasting these two might turn with profit to the poetry of the late, lamented Martin Kilmartin.

  “Of course he despised Kilmartin when he was alive, advising students not to waste time on his courses. ‘Quite amateur,’ was his verdict. Now he has become his champion.”

  “Another dead white male?”

  But Becky would not rise to Roger’s gentle joshing. She was not a feminist, merely an extremely gifted young woman. Nor did she have any quarrel with the Western Canon, particularly when she saw the candidates to replace it.

  “That’s the danger, Roger. Look at this silly letter by Donald Weber, extolling O’Neill’s poetry to the skies.”

  “I hadn’t seen that.”

  “He compares it favorably with that of Kilmartin. Of course he is answering Sauer without mentioning him.”

  “Weber seems a bit of a chameleon. Wasn’t he here a few weeks ago feeding Sauer with negative anecdotes about Malachy O’Neill?”

  There was method in Weber’s madness, as became clear when David Simmons stopped by. The university fund-raiser was distraught because the death of Martin Kilmartin was no longer being treated as a natural one.

  “That’s all we need, a murder investigation on campus.” Doubtless Simmons was thinking of the effect of such an investigation on his efforts to attract donations to the university. “Mendax is raising hell with the police I can tell you.”

  Mendax was the university counsel, a lawyer who seemed to model herself on the more preposterous legal dramas on television. But she was a formidable foe nonetheless, as many had discovered to their sorrow. Whether her zeal would have been less were she representing those suing the university was an open question, but her zeal once purchased was certain.

  “Of course she is concentrating on the newspaper accounts.”

  “David, I myself think he was murdered.”

  “What!”

  “Someone had sprayed his telephone with pepper.”

  Incredulity assumed different forms on David’s face. “Pepper! This amounts to murder?”

  “In this case, deliberately done, knowing the condition of Kilmartin’s health, yes.”

  “Have you suggested this to anyone?”

  “David, it was generally known that it would have taken little more than a sneeze to bring on a fatal heart attack.”

  “But do the police know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh my God!”

  Simmons lived in the world of appearance, of what people think, of reputation, ranking, and public perception. How as a matter of fact Kilmartin had died signified less than what people thought had happened. The idea of a murder having been committed on the campus was inconceivable to one whose task it was to present the university in roseate unreal colors. Institutions themselves now occupied this wonderland where nothing is but what is thought. Esse non est percipi, Roger might have said to someone other than the flustered member of the Notre Dame Foundation.

  “Has James Elliot spoken to you about these matters?”

  “He has been more concerned about the attacks on Malachy O’Neill.”

  “Sauer! Is there nothing sacred for that man?”

  “William Butler Yeats, apparently.”

  Sauer, having savaged the favorite professor of many alumni, had disarmingly proposed that the university celebrate the anniversary of the appearance of Yeats on the Notre Dame campus. Sauer apparently knew nothing of the first visit and was thinking of that which took place under the presidency of Charles O’Donnell. Pending approval, Greg Whelan had begun to assemble materials from the archives for a display should the commemoration take place.

  “I thought I would include some verse by Yeats’s host.”

  “Father O’Donnell.”

  “Yes.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “I have also found a tribute to Yeats by Malachy O’Neill that would be appropriate.”

  Greg said these things, which surely would have sounded subversive to Professor Sauer, in his most matter-of-fact tone.

  “There’s one by Auden you might use as well.”

  Roger had come to the archives to see how the inventory of the O’Neill papers was going and Greg now turned to the work he had been doing on them.

  “He was a keeper. He must have kept every student paper turned in to him. His requirement was that the student prepare two copies, one for marking, the other for keeping. Sometimes O’Neill kept both copies. Take a look at this.”

  Greg had taken a sheaf of typewritten sheets from a large envelope and began to shuffle through them.

  “Are those student essays?”

  Greg nodded. And then he had found what he was looking for, an essay by James Elliot. He handed it to Roger. It was seven pages double-spaced, a study of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Windhover. The complete poem stood at the beginning of the essay and it was quoted copiously throughout. “The poem is the best comment on the poem,” Elliot wrote, putting the maxim in quotation marks.

  “One of O’Neill’s repeated bits of wisdom.”

  “There’s some truth in it.”

  “It made writing essays easier.”

  The copy Greg had handed him was unmarked so it was impossible to know what judgment Malachy O’Neill had made of it. There was no essay by Donald Weber in the same batch, which surprised Roger. They had been classmates and both had taken O’Neill’s class.
r />   “Are there papers for O’Neill’s last class?”

  Greg nodded and reached for another envelope. Roger easily found the proposal for an essay that Donald Weber, returned from the wars, now a graduate student, had submitted to O’Neill. It had been commented on with a red pencil. Weber had proposed to write on Pound. “Nonsense!!!” was printed in block letters across the front page. On the backs of the typewritten pages O’Neill had written a passionate plea against pedantry, telling Weber that he ran the risk of picking up the worst traits of the graduate student and academic critic, erecting a great screen of supposed erudition between the reader and the poem. He ended with the promise to give Weber an A if he would agree not to write the proposed essay. A complete putdown stated with unfeigned passion. Roger passed it to Greg.

  “Didn’t he say Malachy O’Neill was his favorite professor?”

  “Maybe he profited from this advice.”

  But the following day, Greg called to say he had an interesting addendum to what they had been speaking of.

  “I found a note from Weber to O’Neill.”

  “I’ll come over.”

  “Don’t be silly. I need some fresh air. I’ll make a photocopy and bring it to you.”

  And so Greg came to Roger’s office in the Earth Sciences building just behind Sacred Heart Church and the Main Building. He drove, pulling into a place just outside Roger’s window. Greg handed the photocopy to Roger and then prowled his bookshelves while he read it.

  Dear Professor O’Neill,

  I still cannot believe the unjust and arrogant comments you made on my proposed essay. Perhaps you were not quite yourself when you wrote them. Maybe you have forgotten writing them. I return them to you now so that you can get some idea what a devastating effect they had on someone who came to your class after some years away from Notre Dame carrying wonderful memories of your teaching when I was an undergraduate. In the meantime you have become remote and bitter. I understand now, as I could not before, the awful reputation you have acquired among your colleagues as well as among many, many students. Quite apart from the manner of your reaction, I think what you say in these comments is absurd. I cannot believe you wrote them. I appeal from O’Neill drunk to O’Neill sober. I will await your reply.