The Green Revolution

by Ralph McInerny

  If Genoux was at the moment unoccupied, the inactivity was not restful, for it could be broken at any moment and he sent on some mindless task. When he had been asked to take this job, he had been elated. Literally. His chest seemed to balloon at the prospect. The preparatory year followed by the grand and gaudy installation had been a time of honeymoon when all the world seemed to smile benignly on the new administration, despite the faux pas of that trip to Utah. It sometimes seemed to Genoux that he had counseled against going, not flat out, you understand, but indicating by perhaps imperceptible foot-dragging that he … Oh, the hell with it. It had been an exciting trip, and the bad publicity died quickly. There seemed to be a lesson there. A lesson they had not learned.

  Genoux had taught English in a department that made chaos seem a formal garden, but he had taught against the grain. The nineteenth century was his. He wallowed in Dickens and Thackeray and Trollope, in James and Twain and Howells and a host of lesser figures who were as familiar to him as, well, family. He celebrated rather than debunked; he had had success in eliciting similar responses from his better students. In his present position, he looked back with longing on what seemed those halcyon days. It was like wanting to be living in an idealized nineteenth century. Alas, he had proved all too susceptible to the invitation to come up higher. Higher! He seemed caught in the inverted cone of the Inferno, involved in a long descent to the waiting ice. What a mistake it had been to waste their first year in office on prolonged discussions of the abominable Vagina Monologues. On other campuses, the problem had been dealt with summarily. The presidents of Portland and of Providence had reviewed the play and turned thumbs down. Other presidents had followed suit. A brief and outraged response followed, and then silence. By contrast, they had elevated the odious bit of pornography into the major issue of the year. There had been meetings with the faculty where the majority treated with contempt the notion that the play presented any problem whatsoever. This was a university where academic freedom was the watchword, was it not? The meetings with students had been no better. The notion that such careful consideration would endear the administration to the faculty and student body and the great world beyond seemed a bad joke in retrospect. They had actually attended a performance and been pelted with obscenties and condoms. And emerged to say that the matter was still under review!

  No wonder a group of alumni, alerted to such strange goings-on, had formed themselves into the Weeping Willow Society, their Web site helpfully citing Psalm 136. In Latin! Super flumina Babylonis, illic sedimus et flevimus cum recordaremur Sion. In salicibus in medio eius suspendimus cithara nostra. Genoux looked it up. “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and we wept, when we remembered Sion. On the willows of that land we hung up our harps.” Their theory was that, in the matter of that lesbian play, Notre Dame was under assault from nameless secular and neo-pagan forces. The members of the group began to acquaint themselves with other matters on campus, matters of a sort that they found incredible. The Gay and Lesbian Coalition, Gender Studies, other efforts to attack an imaginary homophobia. Papers were leaked to them and appeared on their Web site. Their calm and forceful letters had respectfully asked for an appointment with the president in which he could explain such matters to them, a request that had never been granted.

  Their next great concern, after sexual perversity, had been the issue of Catholics on the faculty. Over recent years, the percentage of Catholic professors had dropped precipitously. The Weeping Willow Society got hold of the white paper on the subject that had been prepared and pointed out that the proposed corrective, far from remedying the situation, ensured that the problem would increase. Of course there were members of the faculty who regarded this topic with loathing equal to their hesitation to permit the Monologues to be put on under university auspices. They professed to feel menaced. They saw this concern as retrogression, an attempt to reverse the great strides Notre Dame had made in recent years, the restoration of a Catholic ghetto, turned in on itself, hankering for the Inquisition. How often was poor Galileo invoked in such diatribes.

  It was the sense that he was failing in his job of special advisor to the president that had turned his thoughts to Father Carmody. What a mistake it had been, though, to seek to enlist the old priest’s help through Kevin Dockery. It had made him feel duplicitous when he telephoned Carmody, but the old priest had made no reference to the plea from a surrogate in the foundation. Barring an interruption, Genoux would head for Holy Cross House within the hour.

  His first thought when he pulled into the parking lot and saw a man seated just outside the entrance smoking a cigar was that here at least the ban against smoking inside could have been grandfathered.

  He approached the old man swiftly, hoping that his agility did not seem an insult.

  “Good afternoon,” he said brightly.

  “Hello, Father.”

  Genoux stopped. When you have done it unto the least of men, you have done it unto me.

  “That smells good.”

  “Would you like one?” Cigars emerged from the old man’s shirt pocket like a Latin American musical instrument.

  “No!” He actually stepped back. Imagine returning to the Main Building reeking of cigar smoke.

  “I’m Father Genoux.” He held out his hand. The old man seemed to be studying his life line before taking it.

  “I know.”

  Genoux looked at him more closely. How old was he? “Were you on the faculty, Father?”

  The old man sighed. “I’m used to defective memories, living here.”

  And slowly, out of the fallen flesh, cheeks stubbled with gray whiskers, the absence of teeth, and sunken still-merry eyes, Genoux composed a portrait of the man as he had been. And recognized him. It was like a moment in the Commedia when Dante came upon a fellow Florentine.

  “Father Witte?”

  “Affectionately known as Nit. I had you in class.”

  Genoux pulled up a chair and sat. “Of course. Epistemology.”

  “I met my class in Moreau.”

  How quickly it all came back. Witte seated at the desk talking to himself, occasionally scrawling illegibly on the blackboard—which was green; Witte had gotten a lot of mileage out of that—ignoring the men before him, winning argument after argument. Nowadays he would have been mistaken for someone using a cell phone.

  “Esse est percipi,” Genoux cried out in remembrance.

  “To think you would remember a fallacy like that. What do they have you doing now?”

  Genoux hesitated. “I’m in the English department.” This was technically true.

  “This place is going to hell in a handbasket. Do you know anyone in the administration?”

  Genoux’s heart sank. He stood. “I’ve come to see Father Carmody.”

  “I asked him to go straighten those birds out, but nothing’s happened yet. Of course, he’s not the power he once was.”

  The sliding door might have been a window. “Punch the numbers into that gizmo on the left.” Witte gave him the numbers, Genoux entered them, and the door slid open. “I’m never sure whether that’s meant to keep people out or to keep us in,” Witte said. It sounded like a problem in epistemology.

  “What a delight to see you, Father,” Genoux said as the doors slid open.

  “Say a prayer for me, Father.”

  Genoux raised his hand as if in blessing, and the guillotine of the doors closed behind him. How genuine and simple Witte’s request had seemed. Was he ill? The cigar might have been like the famous cigarette before the blindfold is put on the one condemned to die.

  * * *

  “Witte? Sound as a dollar,” Carmody said, when the nurse at the great arc of a reception desk had directed Genoux down the hall. Carmody’s room might have been anywhere, huge, lots of books, a desk that suggested an active life, overlooking the lake. There was the smell of tobacco in the air. Perhaps Carmody had given himself an exemption from the campuswide ban. “Once Witte went back to smoking, all
his ailments left him.”

  “Ho ho.”

  “Believe it or not.”

  “Tell it to the surgeon general.”

  “So what’s on your mind? Iggie Willis?”

  Genoux sat on a footstool, almost welcoming the symbolism. I will make thine enemy a footstool for thy feet. Then, too, he had come to sit at Carmody’s feet. “I would like to see if you couldn’t get him to stop stirring up the alumni.”

  “I thought you would welcome that as a diversion.”

  “Then you know of the Weeping Willows?”

  “Of course. They’ve consulted me.”

  “You’re advising them!” My God, with Carmody behind them they would soon know all the skeletons in the closet.

  “Hardly that, Father. Nor do they need my advice. Surely you realize they are among our most distinguished alumni.”

  This surprised Genoux. He did not know that. In the past few years his notion of distinguished alumni was members of the board, donors, a few politicians who, alas, were following the lead of other Catholic politicians. Carmody was rattling off names, followed by a brief description. Medal of Honor, Presidential Medal—“Like Ted’s”—chief justice of a state supreme court, two novelists, one of whom had won the Pulitzer—“When it meant something”—several auxiliary bishops, a recently named cardinal. Genoux knew of the latter. He had found himself too busy to come to campus to be honored by his alma mater. Genoux realized that he had lumped the founders of the Weeping Willow Society with Willis’s Web site.

  “I see what you mean.”

  “If I were still advising…”

  “Father, that is why I’m here.”

  “Answer their letters.”

  “I wish it were that simple.”

  “Don’t they listen to you over there?”

  Genoux tried to explain. Everything the Weeping Willows wished to discuss they already knew of with alarming accuracy.

  “Someone is leaking information.”

  Carmody shook his head even as he shook a cigarette from the package he had picked up from the table beside him.

  “Maybe the white paper. One of the silliest documents I ever read. Cardinal Newman responsible for the secularization of Catholic universities!”

  “How did you get hold of it?”

  “The Weeping Willow people brought it to me. They were certain it was a hoax.”

  “But where did they get hold of it?”

  “Do you really think that’s the problem?”

  Carmody lit his cigarette and dragged on it with relish, eyes closed. A moment later, great clouds of smoke issued from his mouth and nose. Genoux felt he was in a time warp, Witte with his cigar, Carmody with his cigarettes. Carmody noticed his reaction.

  “They can’t very well tell Ted not to smoke. He opened the way for the rest of us.”

  Any thought Genoux had had of snitching when he went back to the Main Building fled like Carmody’s exhaled smoke. He hadn’t come over here as fire inspector anyway. He began to explain the problem, from the viewpoint of the administration. In any conversation, all the documentation the group had gathered would have to be acknowledged as genuine.

  “They already know that. They want to know what you’re going to do about those things.”

  Do? It was all the undoing that would have to be done that was the problem, decades of trimming decisions, dancing away from the Catholic character of the place, Oh, not in statements, of course, but in the way things had been done. Carmody saw the problem.

  “You have to start unraveling it, Father.”

  “Can you imagine the publicity?”

  “Easily. You would be pilloried, on campus and off. People would begin to think we mean it when we say that Notre Dame is a Catholic university where things that go on elsewhere are simply out of place.”

  Genoux looked bleakly out the window, across the lake at the golden dome glittering in the sunlight, at the great statue of Mary atop it. What other advice had he imagined Carmody would give him? Hang tough, ignore the faculty and press, keep talking about the Catholic character of the university?

  “Father Witte says we’re going to hell in a handbasket.”

  “He’s thought that for years. He blames me, at least in part.”

  “That’s not fair.” Genoux might have been defending himself.

  “Accurate criticism always seems unfair.”

  On his way back to his special parking place in the shadow of the Main Building, Genoux found himself envying the men whose lives had brought them at last to the peaceful redoubt of Holy Cross House. He wished he were as old as he felt.

  5

  Professor Guido Senzamacula, despite his name, was professor of French, his speciality Paul Claudel and other figures of the French Catholic renaissance of the early twentieth century. He had been born in Sicily, on the southern coast, a few miles from the birthplace of Pirandello, whose writings he found at once fascinating and perverse. Anti-art, at least the plays. He loved the novelle since they evoked his native province and its dialect. His degree was from the Sorbonne, and he had begun his teaching career in Rome, where he had met Father Carmody, whose tales of Notre Dame had fascinated him. He’d had the priest repeat the salaries paid professors several times, incredulous. The first years on campus, when winter came, made Senzamacula think he had made a terrible mistake. He had taught Italian as well as French then, before the department became specialized. At that time, he had no courses in Italian literature; few students advanced far enough for that. He had long since been relieved of the drudgery of teaching grammar, that task given to a host of part-time people with odd titles—assistant academic specialist, and other strings of nouns that defied the tree of Porphyry—doing piecework that kept them off the princely payroll.

  Senzamacula was a respected if not beloved professor, jumpier as he got older, despite his idyllic schedule. He had married an American of Swedish extraction, captivated by her honey-blond hair and large blue eyes—and other parts of her, too, of course. Jessica. She had borne him two sons, and she herself now lay in Cedar Grove cemetery. She had died two decades ago, at the age of forty-nine, her once robust body reduced to skin and bones. Guido still dreamed of her, was sometimes wakened by the sound of her voice. Several times a week he stood weeping at her grave and almost longed to lie once more beside her, half in love with easeful death.

  There had been several bad spells after Jessica’s death, crying jags he could not stop and that had gone on for days. He felt guilty, he felt there was something he might have done, should have done, that he had not done and if he had Jessica would still be alive. “You’re Guido, not God,” Father Carmody said to him. “Stop this self-pity.” Stern words to a grieving man, but they hadn’t helped. When he did get back into his routine he felt like a fragile package. He noticed that others treated him with gingerly deference, as if he might break down at any minute.

  Olaf, their eldest, had been born retarded, a severe case of Down syndrome. He had died a few years after his mother, and now they lay together in Cedar Grove. That left Piero, whom he saw seldom, except in the fall when his son came with the network he worked for in order to televise Notre Dame football. This brought Piero to South Bend often enough during the season, for every home game, and of late he had sadly shaken his head and said he just couldn’t believe it.

  “With the Patriots he was a genius.”

  Guido waited. He had no idea what his son was talking about. It emerged that the Notre Dame football team was recording a historic series of losses. Piero predicted that the coach could not survive such a debacle. Of course, Piero was a graduate of Notre Dame and had always been passionately interested in football. Once long ago, Guido had attended a game. He would never forget the sight of huge heavily padded young men, lined up facing one another, and then suddenly crashing into the opposite line. While this was going on, someone ran with the ball, or it was thrown and sometimes caught. The point of the game seemed to be to maim the opponent, slamm
ing him to the ground, tackling with the intent to cripple. Guido had expected to see lightly clad men kicking a ball up and down the field. How could they call this football? The players actually handled the oddly shaped ball. All around him, spectators were delirious at what was going on on the field. At halftime, Guido had left the stadium and walked back to his house on Angela Boulevard. What game would not seem inane to one who did not understand it? Roger Knight had not been shocked by these heretical statements when Guido told him of his single visit to the stadium.

  “I remember the first time I watched a cricket match.” It was not a reference to entomology. Whatever Roger’s mystification on that first occasion, he had come to understand cricket thoroughly. “Not that I recommend it. Tell me, what do you know of Claudel’s illegitimate daughter?”

  “A fascinating story. You know Le partage du midi, of course. The play is based on his affair with a married woman in China, where he was French consul. She became pregnant, then met up with another lover and went off with him. Claudel himself married and had a family, but throughout the years he continued discreetly to care for the woman and her child.”

  “Then it’s true.”

  Roger had come upon a book by the natural daughter’s daughter—Claudel’s grandaughter, in effect. So much for Guido’s thought that he was telling his young friend things he did not already know. Until he mentioned his colleague Lipschutz and his notion that the series of losses by the football team was providential.