The Green Revolution

by Ralph McInerny

  He went on to read others who had been involved in the revival of the liberal arts in the thirties and forties—Mortimer Adler, Stringfellow Barr, Robert Hutchins—a bold band of brothers who were convinced that American higher education had become a wasteland, the elective system their particular bugbear. On what basis was a student to select courses from the smorgasbord presented to him? Was any and every combination of courses the point of education? If a college did not know what the student might become, and how, what right did it have to exist? Even decades later, these revolutionary ideas, largely ignored, could increase the beat of one’s pulse. The critique leveled seemed to fit Roger’s own experience, although, he told himself, he had managed to use well the nondirective character of higher education. Princeton, however full of certitudes and opinionated professors, left him pretty much to himself. This might have provided a counterexample to the description of the pleaders for a return to the liberal arts and a planned curriculum, but this was not a thought that bothered Roger.

  In his seminar, they were now reading Mortimer Adler’s onetime best seller How to Read a Book, and Otto Bird sat beside Roger, full of anecdotes of what it had been like to work with Adler.

  “Don’t the requirements for a major provide direction enough?” Bartholomew Hanlon asked.

  “What is your major?” Otto asked.

  “I have a double major in philosophy and theology.”

  “What is the aim of the philosophy requirements?”

  And so the discussion was under way. Otto had always taught using the tutorial method, and Roger let his senior colleague guide the discussion. What was demanded of a philosophy major? Bartholomew stressed the required courses in the history of philosophy.

  “Meant to acquaint you with the great names in your discipline.”

  “Yes.”

  “Descartes, Leibniz, Pascal.”

  “And many others.”

  “About whom you read secondhand accounts or listen to a professor tell you about their writings. How many of those books were you required to read?”

  “It was a survey course.”

  “Ah.”

  Otto made the point gently. Why not just read those great works of philosophy?

  “That would take a long time.”

  “Yes,” Otto said sweetly. “A lifetime.”

  Otto himself had spent his long lifetime doing what he indirectly recommended. Even if one concentrated on the great books, one scarcely began to plumb them during four years on campus. No matter. The process begun, it must continue.

  * * *

  Afterward, Otto invited Roger to lunch at the University Club, and they set off in Roger’s golf cart. Otto was greeted with delighted warmth by Debbie, who took his arm and led him to “his” table. “Bob Leader and I used to have lunch here once a week,” Otto explained.

  “The artist?”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  Debbie took their beverage order and then joined them, pulling her chair close to Otto’s and casting on him a bewitching smile. Clearly, he was one of her favorites. Otto insisted that she should know his guest.

  “I haven’t seen you here before.”

  “The door isn’t wide enough.”

  “You got in today.”

  “Otto held it open for me.”

  Debbie didn’t know what to make of Roger; of course, that was an old story. He didn’t know what to make of her either, but he liked the way she catered to Otto.

  Otto’s executive martini arrived—he had ordered “a bucket of booze”—and Roger lifted his coffee in response to Otto’s raised glass.

  “You never drink?”

  “Alcohol? No.”

  “Any reason?”

  “I just don’t like it.”

  Otto accepted that, but he told Roger of the late Canon Gabriel’s maxim. Never trust a man who doesn’t drink.

  “Well, you can trust him not to drink.”

  Otto acknowledged this with a smile. Their food came, and over it Otto discoursed on the book he was reading. “The oddest memoir by Saul Bellow’s longtime agent. No sense of language at all. I mean the agent.”

  “What prompted you to read it?”

  “I loved Herzog. And Mr. Sammler’s Planet.”

  “Which has lately brought a charge of racial prejudice.”

  “Ah, the ironies of liberalism.”

  Suddenly a compact man with a trimmed beard and a fierce look stood beside their table. “I must speak with you. Both of you. Lipschutz.” He thrust out his hand like a holdup man. “May I join you?”

  It seemed a rhetorical question, He took the chair on which Debbie had sat.

  “I want to enlist your support for a crusade,” Lipschutz announced. “This university has arrived at an historic moment. Our precedent will be the University of Chicago.”

  “I went to school there,” Otto said.

  “Did they still play football when you were there?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I mean the university. Did it still have a team?”

  “I wasn’t aware they ever had one.”

  “Exactly. They regained their soul, and doubtless you were one of the beneficiaries.”

  Lipschutz laid out the crusade he was embarked upon. The current collapse of Notre Dame football provided their golden opportunity. Like Augustine, Notre Dame had had to wallow in sin before redemption came. The time had come to follow Chicago’s lead and abandon football. Let the intrahall games go on, that was fine with Lipschutz, but all the blather about excellence demanded a consistent policy. What a statement Notre Dame could make if it abandoned varsity football because it intended to take its claim to academic excellence seriously.

  “Do you think that is realistic?”

  “I think it is idealistic! What do you think?”

  “It’s an interesting idea.”

  “Do I have your support?”

  Later, when his and Otto’s names appeared on the list appended to Lipschutz’s proposal, Roger was never sure that either he or Otto had actually signed on to the crusade.

  9

  Ever since his wife left him, Iggie Willis had been trying to reconcile two warring descriptions of himself. Life on the domestic front, and in the office, too, was undergoing a rocky period, no doubt of that, but nonetheless Ignatius Stephen Willis stood craggy and unbowed above the tumbling tide. Much as he liked that picture of himself, there was something to be said for Miriam’s portrait of him, a portrait to which she had given a final flourishing touch in the note he found when he had come home to an empty house three months before. “You are a selfish, thoughtless, pompous little man, and if you were tall enough to see into the mirror, you would know that. Good-bye!”

  A low blow, that, but who but a wife could know how touchy he was about his height? Let’s face it, he was just below five seven, and that was wearing shoes, slightly elevated shoes. Nonetheless, he had always been attracted to taller women. Miriam hadn’t been able to wear heels since they were engaged, at least not when they were together. Even then, she looked down at him and, over the years, looked down at him in several senses. What is more perilous than a credit card bill, especially when scrutinized by a wife with the instincts of a CPA?

  “There are some bad charges on this, Ig.”

  “Let me see.”

  She had checked the two motel charges and one from a florist she had never heard of. Iggie had shaken his head.

  “I’ll have Pearl take care of it.”

  “Pearl?”

  “It’s one of the things she’s very good at. Besides, all it takes is a phone call and off the charges come.”

  “Then why can’t you make the call?”

  “What am I paying Pearl for?”

  A wiser man would have known better than to send his wife flowers the day after that close call; only an idiot would have used the florist that had caught Miriam’s eye on the bill. No, that wasn’t fair. Pearl was no i
diot. He should have done more than just drop the credit card bill on her desk, point to the check marks and roll his eyes. It was an hour or so later that he’d had the big inspiration to send Miriam flowers.

  “Any message?” Pearl had asked, not meeting his eyes—but then she would have had to bend her head to do that.

  “‘Just because…’”

  Pearl wrote it on her little pad and went back to her office. Her legs were great with those high spiked heels. It occurred to him later that Pearl had used that florist with malice aforethought. Well, if she had, the effect had been delayed.

  “Who’s the tall girl you were having lunch with at Chesterfield’s?” Miriam asked some weeks later, not lowering the newspaper when she said it.

  “That was no girl, that was Pearl.” He hadn’t missed a beat. Sometimes he amazed even himself. Old quick-witted Iggie.

  “You’re being talked about.” The paper came down and her eyes drilled into him as if she were the dentist, not he.

  “So who told you I had lunch with my secretary?”

  “How is Prissy supposed to know this glamorous Amazon is your secretary?”

  “Maybe I’ll put her in uniform.”

  “How often does this happen?”

  He got up and crossed the room and sat beside her on the couch. “Oh, Miriam, not you. The green-eyed monster?”

  She might have been one of his patients, rigid in the chair, awaiting the bad news while he studied the X-rays. But he did manage to get his arm around her shoulders. Even so, it was five minutes before she scrunched down sufficiently for him to kiss her. Right then and there, Iggie resolved that it was all over with Pearl.

  Pearl proved surprisingly intractable.

  “Pearl, we were seen by a friend of my wife’s!”

  “Having lunch at Chesterfield’s. It could have been worse.”

  A woman is a ruthless thing when she’s got you in her clutches. Iggie had thought that Pearl could handle a little fling without making a federal case of it. The next thing he knew, she was crying. He quickly shut the door of his office. For a moment he wanted to strangle her. What had he ever seen in her? Of course she had a little history, a divorce threatened, but that had seemed a recommendation. She had been around the block a time or two. Just a guess, but he had gathered from what she had said that it was her husband who was talking divorce.

  “He’s even looked into annulments.”

  “Then you’d really be free.”

  Of course, she had misunderstood his meaning, but the result of the misunderstanding had been so torrid he hadn’t clarified his remark.

  After the two close calls, Iggie was the soul of discretion. They never went back to Chesterfield’s, and why rent a motel when Pearl had such a convenient apartment? Looking back on it, reading Miriam’s farewell address, he couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been. A man his age, off on a romp with his secretary. Madness. It was over, by God, and he meant over. Then he found the letter Pearl had written Miriam pinned to his pillow. It looked as if Miriam had taken several stabs at it before securing it.

  ‘I know that Ignatius has spoken to you of me. The last thing I want is to come between a man and his wife. I know how traumatic talk of divorce can be and have stopped Ignatius every time he has talked of leaving you …

  He had torn the thing into shreds and flushed it down the toilet. He had come home with a buzz on, but now he was clearheaded and sober. And frightened. He just wasn’t the kind of man whose wife walked out on him. He was a Notre Dame man! He had to get Miriam back—but how could he unload Pearl?

  It all became a great deal more complicated when a big guy in a towel confronted him in the club locker room after a phenomenally awful round.

  “I remember you,” the man said.

  Iggie found his glasses and put them on, adopting his professional smile.

  “From South Bend.”

  “A Domer!” Iggie stood, managing to catch his towel before he would look like Adam in Eden, before the fall. “What year?”

  “I lived in Alumni Hall.”

  “So did I!”

  “I know.”

  “So what’s your name?”

  “George Wintheiser.”

  Iggie nearly dropped his towel again. Pearl’s name was Wintheiser.

  “Weren’t you on the team?” he managed to say.

  Wintheiser bent and looked him in the steamy glasses. “Leave my wife alone.”

  He went off to his locker, and Iggie darted back into the shower. Could all great Neptune’s ocean wash this guilt from off his soul? He stood under water as cold as he could stand. He warmed it up a little and remained under the shower. He was still wearing his glasses. Oh, to hell with it. He wanted to make damned sure Wintheiser had dressed and left before he got out of the shower.

  “I met your husband,” he said to Pearl the next day.

  “I’m getting a divorce.”

  “Come on, you’re Catholic.”

  “You sound like George.”

  “What happened between you two, Pearl?” He tried for a concerned tone, the tone of a man anxious to help her in her troubles.

  “What did he say happened?”

  “No need to go into that.”

  It was an inspiration. He had transferred his panic to Pearl.

  “I think he wants to get back together with you.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “Pearl, he spoke in confidence. One Notre Dame man to another.”

  “To hell with Notre Dame.”

  “You can’t mean that.”

  This time her sobbing did not unnerve him. He patted her shoulder and managed to keep his hand from sliding down her back.

  “Give it another chance, Pearl.”

  It worked! Well, at least it cooled any ardor Pearl had felt for him. She apparently thought he knew all sorts of things he didn’t. Ignorance is power.

  With half his problem settled, he began telephoning Miriam regularly at her mother’s.

  “What did you tell her, sweetheart?”

  “Is that all that bothers you?”

  “Come home. Please.”

  He sent her flowers, using their regular florist. He asked her to come to the Boston College game with him.

  That was before the disastrous season began. Iggie would never have admitted it to himself, but he welcomed the vast distraction of the string of defeats with which the Notre Dame season began. He felt betrayed rather than a traitor. It was a good warm feeling. He got the fellow who had computerized his billing system to set up the Web site CheerCheerForOldNotreDame. The response was terrific. He flew back and forth to South Bend, a man with a mission. Charlie Weis had become his scapegoat.

  10

  Rimini was surprised and flattered that Wintheiser even knew that he had once been on the team, a member of the sacrificial squad that the varsity team played against in preparation for games. Nonetheless, aching, covered with mud and grass stains, the young Rimini had hobbled from the practice field on those long-ago afternoons, his helmet swinging from his hand, with the sense that he was an integral part of Notre Dame football. One step up from a tackling dummy, but what the hell, it had prepared him for life. He had never been able to duplicate that sense of exhausted achievement.

  “Where would we have been without you guys?” Wintheiser had said in response to Rimini’s self-deprecating remark. It was a sports banquet kind of remark, but Rimini appreciated it nonetheless. He had reached an age when he grasped at any laurel offered.

  Not that he and the enormous Wintheiser had been students at the same time. Wintheiser was fifteen, twenty years younger. Still, there seemed an easy camaraderie between them when Wintheiser came to Rimini’s office in Decio.

  “Not many former players on the faculty, are there?”

  Rimini might have said something unforgivable, his loyalties pulled between memories of those long-ago afternoons when he had been buffeted and knocked about by larger men and the ethereal ivory tower of a
cademe to which one was admitted on the basis of brain, not brawn.

  “Not many Renaissance men,” Rimini replied.

  Wintheiser was looking at Rimini’s framed degrees, prominently displayed on what little wall space the office had.

  “My degree is from the University of Chicago,” Wintheiser said.

  “Didn’t you graduate from here?”

  “I meant my doctorate.”

  Doctorate? Chicago? “What was your field?”

  “Ancient languages. Hittite, mainly.”

  “Hittite! What do you do with that?”

  “Not much. I helped my director put together his Hittite dictionary.”

  “And then?”

  “I’m a commentator on ESPN. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.”

  Rimini felt as if he had flunked a test. ESPN! It was a channel Rimini loathed, all those chattering panels, old jocks breaking one another up, pontificating about coming games, at last above the fray where no umpire would throw a flag if they made mistakes. “Of course,” he said weakly, and then wished he hadn’t.

  “My main income is from commercials.”

  “So you’re back for the game,” Rimini said, trying to regain his sense of ease with this giant of a man. Hittite, ESPN, commercials—what was the world coming to?