“What do you make of all the agitation about the team?” Wintheiser asked.
The team. Our team. Rimini had put his guest in his reading chair, legs crossed, huge shoes on display, and himself at his desk. The whistles of yesteryear, the crack and thump of padded body hitting padded body, seemed to echo in the office.
“Adversity is a tough school.”
Wintheiser liked that. “Absolutely. Those kids are playing their hearts out, and what thanks do they get? Self-appointed experts. Know-it-alls. It’s like ESPN. You ever watch Kornheiser?”
It was a rhetorical question.
“So what are we going to do about it?” This was not a rhetorical question.
“I suspect you have some ideas.”
Wintheiser had ideas. He knew about Lipschutz’s demand that football be dropped. He knew about Iggie Willis’s Web site.
“Don’t forget the Weeping Willows.”
“Who are they?”
“Concerned alumni.” Rimini said it with a sneer. “They’re shocked—shocked—at the new Notre Dame. First it was the Vagina Monologues.”
“What a bunch of garbage.”
Wintheiser seemed to mean the play. Rimini let it go. “Then it was the percentage of Catholics on the faculty.”
“Is that a problem?”
“They seem to think so.”
“I can’t believe what has happened to the Catholic Church,” Wintheiser said through clinched teeth. “Libertine priests, annulments…” He seemed to have run out of breath.
“Now they want to know how many Catholics are on the football team. And how many Irish.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish I were. How many Catholics were on the team when you played?”
“We always went to Mass together on Saturday mornings. In the chapel at Moreau Seminary.”
Rimini had forgotten that practice, which had apparently gone the way of many others that had once characterized football at Notre Dame.
“Lou came. The whole coaching staff.”
“I wonder if there are any Catholics on the team now?”
“There are no atheists in foxholes.”
They observed a moment of silence.
“So what exactly are your ideas, George?” Or should he have said Dr. Wintheiser?
“The best defense is a good offense.”
Rimini nodded. Even clichés have their role to play in polite conversation. He wondered if Wintheiser could translate his remark into Hittite.
What Wintheiser thought would be helpful was to make fun of the critics, lampoon them, hold them up to ridicule.
“You know any kids on these alternative campus papers?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
“Good. Let’s unleash them on these yo-yos. Cartoons, funny names, the whole thing. Picket their classes. Kids will know what to do.”
“I’ll get right on it.”
Wintheiser rose. Standing, he need only lift his arms and he could touch the ceiling.
“Here’s my cell phone number,” Wintheiser said, putting a card on the desk. “Keep me posted.”
Alone, without the thought that he and Wintheiser were acting as a team, he wondered how he could implement Wintheiser’s idea. Advocata Nostra was out, and the other conservative paper. The Observer? Forget it. Then he had it. Common Sense. They were furious with the efforts of Weeping Willow to turn back the clock as far as Catholicism went. Did they give a damn about football? Then he remembered the several cutting remarks about Roger Knight that had appeared in Common Sense … and Roger’s name had appeared on the list of professors supporting Lipschutz. How to approach them? Ah. Gordie Finlayson was the faculty advisor of Common Sense. His poems often appeared in its pages. Finlayson nursed a deep hatred for all chaired professors. Maybe that had been the reason for those slams at Knight.
He would talk to Finlayson. Let the campaign begin.
11
It should have been easier to track down football players to interview, but Bartholomew Hanlon found them an elusive bunch. Their size alone should have made them easy to spot, but then many of them allegedly went around campus in electric carts, so their height was hidden. Did they eat in dining halls with mere mortals?
“Why do you ask?” The young man’s shaved head gave him an infantile look, as if he were still awaiting his first growth.
“I’m a reporter.”
The bald one backed away. “We’re not supposed to talk with reporters.”
“You’re on the team?”
Bartholomew’s incredulous tone didn’t help. “I’m the kicker.”
“Of course. I didn’t recognize you out of uniform.”
Bartholomew had fallen into conversation with John Wesley just outside the South Dining Hall. Now he led him to a bench, where Wesley reluctantly sat down. Bartholomew got out a notebook.
“Nothing about football.”
“Absolutely not.”
Bartholomew realized that he was being less than truthful. In fact, he was lying. He had got hold of a team roster and then checked out the names in the campus phone book. Few players seemed to live on campus. Wesley, however accidentally encountered, was thus a real prize.
“How did you become a kicker?”
Wesley started to rise. “I mean it. Coach doesn’t want us giving interviews.”
“I don’t blame him.”
“What do you mean?” Wesley sat again and looked at him narrowly. “No games. We can’t talk about them.”
“No football, period. What hall do you live in?”
That got the ball rolling. Wesley was from Nebraska, someplace west of Omaha that Bartholomew had never heard of. “Why did you come to Notre Dame?”
“They came to me.” Wesley raised a hand as if to stop himself.
“What attracted you to a Catholic school?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, after all, this is the premier Catholic university.”
A look of pain spread over Wesley’s face. “You sound like my mother.”
“I have a cold.” Wesley’s eyes widened, and then he roared with laughter. Bartholomew had made a friend. “What about your mother?”
“She’s worried I’ll become a Catholic.”
“You’re not Catholic?”
“No! Methodist.”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Heard of it! It’s one of the largest denominations. We’re all over the country. Do you know who started the most universities in this country? The Methodists, that’s who.”
“I suppose your mother wanted you to go to one of those.”
“Oh, no. They’re not Methodist anymore.”
“How many Methodists on the team?”
“Only five.”
“So few among so many Catholics! No wonder your mother worries.”
“Ha.”
Bartholomew waited, but that seemed to be it. “They don’t pester you?”
“About religion? Football is our religion.”
“I’ll tell your mother.”
Wesley’s laughter was delayed but dependable.
“How many Catholics are on the team?”
“How should I know.”
“Someone told me the team goes to Mass together before games.”
“Come on.”
“It’s not true?”
“I never heard of it.”
“How about the coaches?” He put out a hand to stop Wesley from rising. “I mean religionwise.”
“Ask them.”
“Take a guess.”
Wesley’s roommate, John Foster Natashi, from darkest Africa, was also on the team. He was majoring in computer science. He seemed to think that Bartholomew was one of the tutors provided athletes and had come to help John with his homework. When Bartholomew identified himself, Natashi admitted he had never heard of Advocata Nostra.
“It’s one of those giveaways,” Wesley explained.
“Do you buy the Observer
?” Bartholomew had bristled at this description of his paper.
“I see your point.”
“Actually, you do. It comes out of your fees.”
Natashi had withdrawn to his side of the room and was now kneeling on a little rug. His head tipped over, touching the floor, and he remained motionless but not soundless for several minutes.
“It doesn’t take him long.”
“Not a Methodist, I gather?”
Natashi was indeed done with his prayers in a few minutes and rolled up the little rug. Bartholomew asked him where he had gone to high school.
“Prep school. Choate.”
“And you ended up at Notre Dame?”
“We have a devotion to Jesus’ mother.”
“At Choate?”
“I am a wide receiver.”
“He’ll be drafted before his senior year,” Wesley said proudly.
“Maybe the war will be over by then.”
“He’s kidding,” Wesley said.
“Many Muslims on the team?”
“Only one. So far.”
“Ah.”
“Islam is the religion of the future.”
“Tell it to the Methodists.”
Bartholomew left the roommates arguing amicably. Were two players a sufficient basis to write another article? They would have to do.
12
They met in Lipschutz’s hideaway office in Brownson. Wessel, Francoeur, and FitzJames, what Lipschutz thought of as his steering committee, were surprised and delighted to find that Lipschutz had secured the names of Otto Bird and Roger Knight for the petition that Notre Dame withdraw from college football, turn its back on the creeping professionalization of the game, and regain its soul. This was all bunk, of course. Lipschutz did hate football, but because he saw it as draining off huge sums of money that might have been more meaningfully spent elsewhere—for example, on the center he had proposed to the provost that, under the direction of Lipschutz, would put the university unquestionably among the leading research universities of the land. Ever since he had submitted the proposal the previous spring, complete with projected budgets for five years and suggestions as to where the building to house it could be erected, there had been foot-dragging from the main building.
There were those who might have thought that the campaign he was now leading against the Notre Dame football program would spell the ultimate quietus of his dreamed-of center. Lipschutz had thought through the matter carefully, listening to all his arguments and finding them good. What he would engineer was an inescapable either/or. Was the university serious about becoming a leading research university? If so, how did this comport with the madness of exploiting young men on the football field, young men who could scarcely be called students in any serious sense, and at who knew what cost of revenue?
“Horst,” FitzJames said. “Football brings in millions.”
“That is the story.”
“You don’t believe it?”
“A better question is, where does such money go? Into the professionalization of all the other sports in which the university engages.”
“That is their story,” Wessel agreed.
“So what is Notre Dame to be? A farm team of the professional football leagues or an honest-to-God university?”
The steering committee liked it. The next order of business concerned the means of publicizing their demand.
“The blimp that flies over the stadium during football games runs ads on its sides.”
“Hardly appropriate.”
“A vigil in front of the Main Building?”
“Or at the athletic department.”
“The decision will not be theirs,” Lipschutz decided. “Let us consider the Main Building.”
It was one of Lipschutz’s guilty secrets that he loved the movie Patton. He owned a copy, and he had watched it more times than he would want his friends, or enemies, to know. A scene from the movie sprang before his eyes. Patton in Palermo, in battle helmet and jodhpurs, silver pistols on his belt, boots gleaming, mounts a great stairway at the top of which the archbishop awaits him. A steely-eyed glance at the prelate and then, genuflecting, George Patton kisses the episcopal ring. The onlookers go wild with ecstacy. What a coup! Was it not possible that, analogously, after mustering at the foot of the stairway leading up to the entrance of the Main Building, the president and his minions, moved by the placards, would appear at the top of the stairs? Horst Lipschutz with a solemn expression mounts the stairs, gives the president a Patton look, and then presents him with the cogent and eloquent petition. No genuflecting or kissing of rings, of course. No need for that. What was the president if not primus inter pares—if indeed that?
Lipschutz liked it. It only remained to pick an appropriate day—and to go over and over the petition on which Lipschutz had been working since it first occurred to him that the present dismal football season represented a golden opportunity to strike while the administration, whose fingerprints were all over the appointment of this outrageously overpaid coach, was reeling and vulnerable.
13
After the Boston College game, Neil Genoux had accompanied the presidential party to the fourteenth floor of the library for what was to have been a celebration of a reversal of the abysmal fortunes of the football season. But Notre Dame had lost yet again. Ignominiously. Genoux’s reminder that Boston College had been beating Notre Dame regularly in recent years was not well received. Notre Dame had lost a game that, in the opinion of those gathered in the aerie on top of the library, with its magnificent views of less than magnificent things to view, Notre Dame should have won.
“He should have switched quarterbacks,” opined W. T. Gravitas, a member of the board.
The presidential response to this was a shy grin and a dipping of the head. Genoux wondered what the presidential response to Armageddon would be.
“Is Roger Knight here?” Genoux was asked by Mimi O’Toole. the wiry wife of an obese husband who was on the board for purely monetary reasons.
“Do you know him?”
“Know him! I wish I did. You should bring us into contact with distinguished members of the faculty.”
Genoux thought of the mopey poet and failed novelist who had been trundled out to the board as a fair sample of the faculty. Dear God!
“How long will you be here?”
“Francis is flying off at the crack of dawn.”
“And you?”
“Arrange a meeting with Roger Knight and I will stay forever.”
The woman began to dilate on Baron Corvo, a depraved and fascinating figure of whom she was dying to learn.
“Done,” said Neil Genoux. “You’re in the Morris Inn? I will notify you of arrangements.” Baron Corvo seemed an infinitely more attractive topic than whether or not another quarterback could have reversed the team’s dismal showing and filled the hearts of students, alumni, and some faculty with the sweet taste of victory. “Tell me about Corvo.”
“I know next to nothing about him. That’s why I want to meet Professor Knight.”
Genoux found the subject soporific but preferable to talking about who should be quarterback. He assured Mimi that he would arrange a meeting with Professor Roger Knight, and then, the moment seeming propitious, he escaped.
Descending in the elevator and emerging into the great out-of-doors, Genoux stopped and filled his lungs with the tonic air of autumn. The dim now-odious hulk of the stadium was visible to the south, but he ignored it. It had had its moment and failed. He went around the pond, where in spring ducklings floated, and found a bench, on which he collapsed. The great mural at the front of the library was illumined, Christ, the teacher. The suggestion seemed to be that Jesus was a professor manqué. Dear God.
Into each soul must creep temptations to think that everything that has guided one’s life hitherto, unquestioned certitudes, is a packet of lies. So it was that, to Neil Genoux, all the unexamined axioms that guided his days seemed suddenly in the dock. He did not kn
ow whether to weep or cry. What is he to Hecuba or Hecuba to him? A host of dubiously relevant quotes drifted across his mind.
And who in hell was Baron Corvo?
The bench on which he sat faced east. Somewhere in the gloaming was graduate student housing and the apartment where Roger Knight dwelt with his brother. Genoux knew these things as a bombardier knows the terrain of his target. He rose, steadied himself, and plunged eastward, Knightward, Rogerward. A discerning ear might have descried an off-key rendition of the fight song issuing from his smiling lips.
* * *
The gathering at the Knight apartment could not have been more happenstance, or, perhaps in a better interpretation, providential. Genoux’s knock had not been acknowledged, but as he stood waiting the door burst open and a figure reeled into the night, took up his stance on the lawn, and, addressing the night sky, bellowed, “Quousque tandem abutere, Catalina, patientia nostra?” After throwing up, he returned through the door from which he had exited. Genoux followed him in. Clearly this was not a time when the niceties of visitation were observed.
The scene he came upon might have been the incarnation of all his nightmares. Genoux was a willing agent of the administration. Whatever his wavering private views, he had endeavored to be a conscientious representative of those who had plucked him from the supposed obscurity of nineteenth-century literature and put him down at the alleged pinnacle of power. Like the good steward of the gospel, he had learned to lie and cheat for his masters. Now, here, in the Knight apartment, he found himself surrounded by the enemies of the administration. Never had anonymity felt so desirable, and indeed he seemed to have twisted the ring of Gyges on his finger and become invisible to the enemies of the administration for whom he toiled.
In one corner of the room, a man sipping a soft drink was listening to an enormous man who had to be Roger Knight. Genoux knew him by reputation; he had been pointed out to him from a third-floor window of the Main Building, guiding his golf cart among the students on the walk. Within a few years, the man had become a legend. He seemed to know more about the place to which he had come than those who had spent a lifetime there. How could such alleged genius be housed in that massive body? He had caught Roger’s eye and was beckoned forward.
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