Celt and Pepper

by Ralph McInerny

  “And Martin Kilmartin?”

  “Exactly! He could be the best poet Ireland ever produced and not be right for Notre Dame.”

  “Did you know Yeats visited Notre Dame twice?”

  For a moment, Weber was angered by what he took to be an irrelevancy, but then he smiled and nodded vigorously. “Exactly! I see what you mean. Nowadays they would try to hire him.”

  “Wouldn’t that have been a coup?”

  “No! Look what’s happened to football.”

  “Football?”

  Weber was patting his chest in an exploratory way and now brought out a crushed package of cigarettes. “Can I smoke in here?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “A smoke-free campus,” Weber muttered as he bent over the match he’d lit. “I’ll bet Father Sorin used snuff.”

  Smoke, inhaled deeply to sully his lungs, now poured from Weber’s mouth in accompaniment to a sigh. “God, that tastes good.” He examined his cigarette. “Unfiltered Camels. They’re harder to get than cocaine.”

  “You were going to say something about football.”

  “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? When did the team begin to sink in the national standings? When we began to recruit the same kids every other place was after. Generic excellence. How did Notre Dame recruit when it was great? The Catholic high schools of Chicago, the parishes of Pennsylvania. There was a whole network of volunteer scouts who alerted the coaches to a hot prospect, a Notre Dame prospect.”

  “Well, you have a unified theory, certainly.”

  “It’s a fact, not a theory, Roger. The theory has to do with why they act like this.”

  “Have you spoken of this with anyone here?”

  “What’s the use? Sauer thinks Malachy O’Neill is a joke. The institutional memory is disappearing. Look at you.”

  Roger laughed. “I try not to.”

  “I’m serious. You’re good. I believe that. You wrote an interesting monograph or … you know the guy.”

  “Baron Corvo.”

  “Right. So what does that have to do with Notre Dame?”

  “Malachy O’Neill was interested in Corvo, it turns out.”

  “Who says so?”

  “He began an essay on Corvo’s work.” Roger laughed. “He called it ‘Someone to Crow About.’”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Corvo means crow.”

  “I never heard O’Neill mention such a person.”

  “You might find the newly discovered O’Neill papers interesting.”

  Weber narrowed his eyes. “Will they go into the center Elliot wants to fund?”

  “Eventually, I’m sure they will.”

  “Have you accepted the offer?”

  “To be director? No.”

  “Are you being coy or are you serious?”

  “Obviously I couldn’t be anything but serious about such an offer.”

  “But you won’t accept it?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “Not deciding is a decision. You don’t want it. You have an instinctive sense of how wrong it would be.”

  “I may not be the man for the job, that’s true. But who is?”

  “I am!”

  Weber leapt to his feet as he said it. He repeated it. He leaned toward Roger as if willing him to agree. This, clearly, was the point of Weber’s visit.

  “Recommend me. Jim wouldn’t think of me if someone doesn’t suggest it to him. We’re too close. We’ve known one another too long. He is, to be frank, a bit jealous of me.”

  “Ah.”

  “Because I was there in the class when Malachy O’Neill departed this earth. Jim thinks that makes me one-up on him. But think of the symbolism. I am there, a graduate student, when Malachy breathes his last.”

  Weber saw it as an analogy with the upper room where tongues of fire had settled over the Apostles, filling them with courage and zeal.

  “It was a Pentecost,” Weber said in hushed tones. “A confirmation.”

  A moment of silence during which Weber lit another unfiltered Camel.

  “Will you tell Jim this is the thing to do?”

  “I will talk to him,” Roger said carefully.

  The words catapulted Weber to his feet and he leaned over the desk. Without that impediment between them he might have tried to kiss Roger. As it was, he grabbed his hand and began to slobber over it.

  “I’ll never forget it. Who else is there? Kilmartin is dead.”

  It seemed unwise to point out to Weber that he had not promised to recommend him. Weber had heard what he longed to hear. Roger was now his advocate.

  “He’ll do anything you say. He admires you. Really admires you. That’s why he made you the offer. His motives are right. All you have to do is direct them to another and more appropriate candidate.”

  Ten minutes later, Weber got up to go. He opened the door that led to the parking lot and stood looking out at the campus.

  “God, I love this place. I’d kill to get back here.”

  14

  Melissa was getting off the elevator when the gurney bearing Padraig Maloney was wheeled out of the west pod of the seventh floor of Flanner.

  “What’s happened!”

  Deirdre was in the little band accompanying the medics who had come for Maloney, but she turned and went back toward her office. Branigan got into the elevator with the medics and Melissa squeezed in next to him. Maloney was on his back and his beard had been cropped to reveal his throat. He groaned. An eye opened and he saw Melissa. His hand groped for hers.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Leave him alone,” a medic said. “He shouldn’t talk. His throat’s a mess.”

  Another groan. Melissa took Maloney’s hand in both of hers and began to rub it, as if restoring the will to live. Maloney looked up at her with infinitely sad eyes and tears began to well up in them. It was all Melissa could do not to take him in her arms and comfort him.

  In the lobby of Flanner, Maloney was wheeled out the back way, Branigan watched him safely aboard the 911 vehicle, then turned to Melissa. “Someone tried to strangle him.”

  “Dear God.”

  “Either that or he tried to commit suicide.”

  It said something about recent events and her reaction to them that Melissa found herself almost calmly weighing these alternatives. In favor of the second was that Maloney was his own worst enemy.

  “What hospital will they take him to?”

  “St. Joe’s.”

  In the manner of hospitals nowadays, what now called itself somewhat grandly the St. Joseph Medical Center had risen from the ashes of its previous selves so that only an archeologist could tell from its outside what was new and what was old. The receptionist in Emergency sat behind what looked like bulletproof glass and had to be addressed through a speaker. In a sitting room a dozen woebegone people who looked like Dante rejects stared despairingly at a television set where some mindless game was being played with shouts and screams and manic smiles. To the left of the reception desk, glass doors slid open for medical personnel then shut behind them, coming or going. Melissa sailed through after a pair of blue-clad nurses, her back tingling in expectation of being challenged. But no one said anything and she walked slowly down the corridor, looking into the examination cubicles where patients seemed to have been abandoned to their own devices. And then she saw what was left of Padraig’s beard and pushed through the half-drawn curtain. His eyes opened, then closed in shame.

  “Now tell me what happened,” she said.

  He groaned.

  “Who did this to you?”

  “Someone who wanted me dead.”

  The curtain was swept aside and a doctor and nurse entered. They ignored Melissa. The doctor stood next to Padraig, consulting a report the nurse had handed him. He lifted Padraig’s chin and looked at his throat. Before he touched the raw red line he donned rubber gloves, then his unreal fingers palpated the throat.

  “Can you talk?”
>
  “More or less.”

  He listened to Padraig’s chest, put a thermometer between his whiskered lips, looked at Melissa and said, “He’ll be all right.”

  Melissa realized she was holding Padraig’s hand. They assumed she was a relative, perhaps his wife.

  His examination done, the doctor lifted his face to the ceiling, expelled air, and said, “Release him.”

  Padraig seemed about to protest the return of freedom but the doctor swept from the room while the nurse opened a locker in the corner revealing Padraig’s clothes.

  “Will you help him dress?” the nurse asked.

  “Would you?”

  Surprised and then annoyed the nurse said, “Why don’t you wait outside?”

  It was important not to get too close to the glass doors because they slid open automatically at anyone’s approach. It was ten minutes before Padraig came slowly out of the cubicle, supported by the nurse. Miss Efficiency.

  “You check out here.”

  She steered Padraig to a table where a very fat woman sat. “Medicare?”

  “What?”

  “Are you insured.”

  “I teach at Notre Dame.”

  “Do you have your Cigna card?”

  He found it tucked away with a dozen cards in his wallet. The card activated the woman, who began plinking away at her computer keyboard, one eye on the insurance card. Forms were printed out, lines pointed to where Padraig must sign or initial. It was like renting a car. And then he was free to go.

  “They brought me here in an ambulance.”

  “I have my car,” Melissa said.

  “Deirdre is back.”

  “Oh good.”

  He looked at her abjectly. “I thought she was dead too.”

  15

  Roger told Greg Whelan about the surprising visit he’d had from Donald Weber because he couldn’t tell Phil without triggering a renewal of his brother’s campaign to make him accept the directorship of the proposed Malachy O’Neill Center. On reflection, Roger had found some justice in Weber’s excluding him from the authentic Notre Dame.

  “He seems to think Malachy O’Neill was a paragon of every intellectual virtue. Of course, he hasn’t seen the papers.”

  “Or the ballad.”

  “Ah, the ballad.”

  Martin Kilmartin had sinned on the side of kindness in likening The Ballad of Pearl Harbor to Chesterton.

  “Closer to Father O’Donnell?” Greg asked.

  “Very much closer, if so good.”

  Charles O’Donnell, C.S.C., had been a dear man, a good priest, an effective president of the university, and a poet. But what kind of a poet? How many kinds of poet are there? Roger remembered Willa Cather’s essay on Sarah Orne Jewett, someone the novelist had known and admired and whose writing she praised. But she did not overpraise it. She had found a place for it in the commodious mansion of literature, a modest place, but a secure foothold nonetheless. Could something like that be said of Charles O’Donnell? There was a handful of poems that were genuine, good of their kind, indeed excellent within their limitations. Had O’Donnell shown Yeats any of his poems when he acted as the visiting Irishman’s host? The diffident smile on O’Donnell’s face when he was photographed with the formally dressed poet about to speak to the students of the university did not suggest that he imagined himself to be a peer of Yeats. Yet some few of his poems were as good as some of Yeats, though none approached the Irishman’s greatest poems. Willa Cather had managed to praise her friend both honestly and sincerely. The same could be done with Father O’Donnell and Malachy O’Neill.

  “Roger, when do you speak with James Elliot?”

  “In a few days.”

  Greg said nothing, but the silence was a question.

  “I don’t know, Greg. I don’t. But my inclination is to say no.”

  “It is a great opportunity. An unprecedented one.”

  Such ideas shimmer and glitter most as ideas, as possibilities, but what would such a center look like in reality? It might seem a monument to nostalgia and mediocrity. A director would have to defend the assumptions of founding a center in honor of Malachy O’Neill. Donald Weber could do that, Roger had no doubt. But then Donald Weber could adopt the opposite view just as easily, and doubtless would when he was disappointed in his ambition to be director. What Roger knew of James Elliot’s view of his old classmate made it seem impossible that Weber should be rescued from the obscurity of Midlothian College and given the plum of the new center.

  “Will you mention Weber?”

  “I said I would tell Elliot of his visit.”

  Greg looked alarmed. “Is there any chance that Elliot would…”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. In fact, I am sure he would not.”

  “I would rather that there were no center at all.”

  * * *

  David Simmons took Roger to lunch at a Chinese restaurant and came none too subtly around to the proposed center.

  “You have to take it.”

  The necessity applied to Simmons and the Notre Dame Foundation: from their perspective such an offer must be accepted, it was too much money to refuse, and the prospect of putting up another building on the already crowded campus was irresistible to the administration.

  “There are many who would want such a job.”

  “Weber’s been to see you, hasn’t he?”

  “He dropped by, yes.”

  “He is lobbying for the position. The one person he can’t ask is Jim Elliot. Roger, if you don’t take the job, I am afraid Jim will back away. We let him define his offer in terms of you being director, whether or not that was wise, and he could walk away with no questions asked if you turn him down.”

  “Who has Weber been lobbying?”

  “Me for one, as if I could swing it to him. And the provost. Well, an associate provost. Do you know Weber has a niece in the registrar’s office?”

  “I think I did know that.”

  “She goes around after him, urging that he shouldn’t be hired.”

  “He has a lot to commend him.”

  “Not when he’s the one stating it.”

  * * *

  Phil and Jimmie Stewart were discussing the strange case of Padraig Maloney, who had been found in Dierdre’s office with a telephone cord twisted around his neck.

  “Have you ever wondered if it could have been self-inflicted?” Stewart said, speaking as he always did for the record.

  “Are you serious?”

  “The examination in Emergency was ambiguous in its result. That he was very nearly strangled seems true. The medical report alone wouldn’t raise any questions. It’s Maloney’s explanation of what happened that raises questions.”

  Why was he in Deirdre’s office?

  “Let’s ask him.”

  * * *

  “I just wanted to be there. To feel her presence.” There was defiance in his tone, although he looked sheepish when he said it. “I am a very sentimental man.”

  “You were attracted to her?”

  Maloney rubbed his chin as if urging his whiskers to grow in more quickly. “Of course.”

  “And she was going to marry Kilmartin?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he was dead. Now she was free.”

  “What a terrible thing to say. I thought she was dead too.”

  “So you went into her office to commune with her spirit.”

  “Mock me if you wish.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “There are keys to all the offices in the director’s desk.”

  “So you let yourself in?”

  “I did.”

  “And were attacked.”

  “I must have left the door open.”

  “And you must have seen who did it.”

  “Hardly more than a glance before I blacked out.”

  “Someone came in, picked up the phone, wrapped the cord around your neck and began to choke you and you saw nothing.”

 
“I hadn’t turned on the light.”

  “But this was daytime.”

  “Winter daytime. A dull gloomy day. He had a beard.”

  “You remember that.”

  Maloney bristled. “That is enough. I will answer no more questions. You have no right or reason to quiz me like this.”

  “I don’t know. It’s against the law to commit suicide.”

  * * *

  It was becoming the received view that Maloney had staged an attack on himself, causing himself some harm, no doubt of that, but with no intention of killing himself. He wanted to create the impression that he had been attacked. Melissa tried without much success to cast cold water on that.

  “He knows the police don’t believe him. Martin was dead, Deirdre was missing, who had more reason to resent their marriage? Of course you must suspect him. He half-suspected himself. But if he were a victim too, attention would be turned elsewhere. Is that the idea?”

  “If that is the effect he wanted, he certainly failed.”

  “That’s why I believe him. If he tried to fake something like that, he would bungle it. You should be looking for his assailant.”

  “He mentioned a bearded man.”

  “I know, I know. He spoke of a case in Cleveland, Dr. Shepherd, a bushy-haired stranger. Nobody believed him either.”

  Jimmie Stewart and Phil, in chorus, ticked off the reasons to suspect Maloney of killing Martin Kilmartin, starting with the staged attack on himself. Obviously Maloney thought himself to be a logical suspect.

  “But it makes no sense,” Roger said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because of Deirdre. If he thought she was dead, it would be like throwing himself on the funeral pyre. If he thought she was alive, then he has no motive. If he was acting, the only audience he would be playing to was Deirdre. And he thought she was dead.”

  16

  Branigan spent an hour at Fiametti’s after work, still thinking he might run into the bearded biker again. Or at least see him. Sometimes he wondered if the guy really existed. But then he spotted the skinny girl with the hair hanging to her bottom and waited for Fritz to show. Instead the girl left. There was the sound of a motorcycle kicking in and then she sailed through the lot toward the highway. Branigan felt more relief than disappointment.