Last Things

by Ralph McInerny

  Foster laughed, then laughed some more. Father Dowling waited.

  “She must have lost it then?”

  “She?”

  “Lily St. Clair. She’s in English too. She was in here the other day and took the palm top.”

  “You saw her do it?”

  “It was there in that little stand when I turned to this bookshelf, and when I turned back it was gone.”

  “Why would she take it?”

  “You’ll have to ask her that.”

  “Didn’t you say anything?”

  “No. She could just have denied it. I couldn’t ask her to empty her pockets and purse. But I know she took it. Anyway, Andrew never used it much. The only time he mentioned it was to complain about it.”

  “Maybe I will ask her.”

  “I suppose you’ll have to bring me into it.”

  “Maybe not. We’ll see.”

  “She was kind of nuts about Cassirer, I think. You’d have to be nuts to like that guy.”

  Having found far more than he expected, Father Dowling was overwhelmed by a desire for fresh air. He thanked Foster for taking the time to talk with him.

  “No need to rush off, Father.”

  “Perhaps another time.”

  The corridor itself was a relief, but the outdoors, once he pushed through the entrance and stood on the front steps, was glorious. He stood and inhaled deeply, taking in a bit of secondhand smoke from the huddled smokers. Were they the same ones who had been there when he went in? Once restored, he went inside again and consulted the building directory. Dr. Lily St. Clair was in room 119.

  He tapped on the unillumined door of 119 and received no answer. A card pinned to a cork board beside the door gave him the office hours of Dr. St. Clair. According to it she should be in. He tapped again. Still no answer. He left the building again, went to his car, lit his pipe, and looked around at the campus. It had been here all along, and yet it was a strange place to him.

  As he sat there he turned on WBBM for the weather, to see if more snow was on the way. Commercials were interrupted by news items. Yet another faculty member at St. Edmund’s had been attacked. They went to their reporter on the spot.

  As he listened to the on-the-spot report of the attack on Professor Lily St. Clair, Father Dowling noted the antenna sprouting from a van not five spaces from his own. The television crew. He got out of the car and went over to it. The back doors were open, and a monitor carried the interview.

  Lily stood supported by a sheepish officer from campus security. She had called security on her cell phone and stayed right where it had happened until they came.

  “This is where it happened.” Her arm swept out. “Someone came up behind me and threw something over my head. My resistance surprised him.”

  “Attempted rape?”

  “A botched attempt!” Her chin lifted and her eyes shone.

  The attacker had fled, and she had not seen him. She had to struggle to get the blanket off her head.

  The real police arrived then, and Lily began her story again. Father Dowling went back to his car. When he arrived at the rectory, Marie had the television on in the kitchen.

  “Well, they can’t blame this on Andrew Bernardo,” she said with some satisfaction.

  Lily St. Clair had been taken to the student infirmary, where she was asked if her assailant had raped her. Her eyes rounded in disbelief.

  She explained. She had spent months in an evening class at the Y learning how to disable rampant males. Her knee, she learned, was her most powerful weapon. If there was any defect in the class it was its similarity to training soldiers with broomsticks. The instructor was a woman, so practicing counterattacks was largely theoretical. Sometimes as she jogged about the campus on her daily run, her tennis shoes not quite absorbing the impact of the sidewalk, Lily had an impulse to carom off her path and flatten a passing male with what she knew of his vulnerability. Her confidence grew to the point that she blamed the victims rather than the perpetrators of rape. Any woman could defend herself!

  “So how did it happen?”

  They ringed her bed like an attentive seminar, a male student from the campus paper, a toothy woman from the Trib, Detective Agnes Lamb, and assorted medical personnel.

  “A sneak attack. From behind. Just before he struck, I heard something, but it was too late to react.”

  The weapon had apparently been a baseball bat, an aluminum one. The bonging sound the blow made had been heard up and down the street, but no one had seen the assailant. The blanket thrown over her head had cushioned the blow. Agnes Lamb had been at the scene of the attack, had bagged up and sent downtown the aluminum bat. Of course the MO would be what everyone noticed. Maybe this would help Andrew.

  “How long will they keep you here?” the Trib reporter asked.

  “I feel ready to go now.”

  The infirmary was not a hospital. Lily had not been rolled into an emergency ward and examined; she had been driven to the infirmary by campus security, along with one of those who had heard the sound of the bat hitting her head and helped her inside, where she was put to bed. As a rape victim she might have commanded more attention. But then word spread, and the result was this rather pleasant interview. It was the student reporter who remarked on the similarity of the attack on Lily and on Horst Cassirer.

  “I’ve half-expected it,” she said.

  “You have?”

  “Horst and I were very close.” Such statements were now made while boldly looking the inquirer in the eye, to surprise there any moral judgment. The reporter understood.

  “Did you live together?”

  “Not at present.”

  “You broke up?”

  “No!”

  “I know you were his big defender on the committee that turned him down.”

  “And now I’ve paid the price.”

  47

  Walter called before she had done her writing stint for the day, but Jessica was glad for the interruption.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  He meant for Andrew. She wished there was something she herself could do. From the time Andrew had shown up in her apartment with his incredible story of having picked up the body of Horst Cassier and dumped it in the street a mile from his apartment, Jessica felt that she had stepped through the looking glass.

  “I wish there was.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Talking on the phone.”

  “Would you like to talk face to face?”

  She would. Walter’s calm solidity and unimaginative integrity were just what she needed now.

  “Could we go somewhere for a beer?”

  “Good idea.”

  He was there within twenty minutes, and they went out to his car through a gently falling snow.

  “Any ideas?”

  “Pat’s Pub?”

  He smiled. It was there that they had gone on their first date, if that is what it was. Pat’s was a sports bar, television sets everywhere, bringing in half a dozen different athletic events, the pictures captioned since the noise level prevented hearing the sound. It looked as if they would have to sit at the bar, but a booth was vacated and they claimed it. A waitress skated up to them.

  “Two lites.”

  “Sixteen or twenty-two.”

  She meant ounces. “Sixteen?”

  Jessica nodded. The twenty-two-ounce beer came in a mug ten inches high, frosted, hard to handle unless you stood up and used a straw.

  “What you’ve been through,” Walter said.

  “It’s not over.”

  They hunched over the table between them. How good looking he is, Jessica thought. Had she ever noticed? He had always been so deferential to her that she found it difficult to take him seriously. Now he seemed everything a girl—a thirty-one-year-old woman, that is—should want.

  “This can’t help work on your novel.”

  There had been a message from Thunder, but she had not called him back. His enthusi
asm was off-putting, and his emphasis was always on what this novel was going to do. He meant sell and make big money. Well, it had already done that, with the hefty advance he had gotten for it.

  “I didn’t write a word today,” she said to Walter.

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “That was Cassirer who stopped you in the parking lot last week, wasn’t it? Bearded, rode a bicycle.”

  “You noticed.”

  “I notice everything.” She could believe it. “I could see that he annoyed you.”

  “He was a very annoying man.”

  She babbled on about the situation at St. Edmund’s, the disagreement over tenure for Cassirer, his reaction by declaring war on Andrew. Anne Gogarty had called Jessica about it.

  “Why Andrew? I would be the most logical object of his wrath. But Horst just decided that Andrew was the key.”

  Anne Gogarty wondered again what she could do for Andrew. Why did all his allies seem so ineffectual? Well, how effectual was she? She was sure it had been right to arrange for the meeting between Andrew and Captain Keegan, sure at the time, more or less sure now. But it would have been infinitely worse had they found out before he told them. And the behavior of Gloria Monday made it clear she would have gone to the police if Andrew hadn’t. What a friend. But Andrew hadn’t been much of a friend to her, involving her in such an idiotic act. The finding of Andrew’s palm top at the spot where Cassirer was struck added an ominous note. For the first time Jessica believed that Andrew would be found guilty. But she could not bring herself to believe he was.

  “Why did Cassirer come to you?”

  “Oh, he talked to my brother Raymond and my aunt Eleanor too. He seemed to think we would pressure Andrew into voting for him to save the family from scandal.”

  “Living with that girl?”

  Jessica nodded.

  “If only Andrew had called the police when he found the body.”

  “If. Then his darned palm top wouldn’t look so bad, being found there.”

  Walter sipped his beer. Jessica realized that hers was half gone. Maybe she would take up drinking inadvertently.

  “I did know why he stopped you there in the parking lot. My sister is secretary of the English Department at the college.”

  “She is?”

  He nodded. “The stories she tells. She likes Andrew though. And the chair.”

  “Anne Gogarty.”

  “Yes. And everyone really hated Cassirer. Well, not everyone. But everyone Wilma likes.”

  “We’re practically related.” But she couldn’t laugh.

  “I wish we were.”

  She put her hand on his, thankful for the noise, the television sets, the atmosphere of frantic normalcy.

  48

  The turnout for Horst Cassirer’s memorial was disappointing, but Lily put on a brave face. Of course Zalinski came, and Anne Gogarty. How could she refuse to attend the memorial for Horst? And Wilma, the secretary, came, God knows why, but Lily was grateful. That seemed to be it, except for McDivitt, who hovered in the back of the room, in the little group but not of it. The urn with Horst’s ashes was bronze, a Grecian shape, an amphora, was it? Lily thought so. In the back of the room McDivitt cleared his throat as if to say no one else would be coming. Students? Not likely. But then the Gorman girl entered, sitting in back, shaking her head when McDivitt urged her forward. She took a seat in the back row of chairs, at the opposite end to Foster, who had entered just before her. Finally, dramatically, Gloria Monday arrived, fresh from the snowy world outside, beautiful. She came to Lily and took her in her arms in an expression of solidarity.

  “I am representing the faculty senate,” she whispered. “And of course myself.”

  Lily could have wept with gratitude. Gloria had at last seen the light of day as far as Andrew Bernardo was concerned. Even if he hadn’t been arrested she was sure Gloria would have ended their relationship and evicted him from the apartment. It seemed a small triumph but infinitely satisfying. Lily went to the podium.

  “We have gathered to say good-bye to a man all of us knew as a colleague, some as a friend, some as a dear friend.” She dropped her eyes. “It will be said that Horst was not a religious man. And that is true. Unless one wishes to call his unswerving devotion to the truth religious. If so, he would have to be accounted one of the saints.”

  Gloria Monday’s smile seemed to have been put on for the duration, wistful, pensive, unchanging. Zalinkski sought a more comfortable position in his chair. Anne Gogarty stared at her hands, which were folded on her lap.

  Lily read Catullus’s CI ode through in Latin, a short poem but lengthy enough to make her audience uneasy. It had come as a shock to her that Zalinski did not know Latin. After she was done, she put into English “the futility of words over your quiet ashes.” Then she stepped back and nodded to Zalinski.

  At the podium, Zalinski shuffled his feet and looked at the ceiling. Then, addressing his hands, which gripped the edges of the lectern, he spoke. He told them of Horst’s passion for baseball, his head full of statistics. A Mets fan.

  “Once I teased him about this, telling him Aristotle had made lists of Olympic winners. Horst glared at me, then said, ‘He should have stuck with that.’”

  No laughter but an altered key to the discomfort of those gathered there.

  Anne Gogarty read from “In Memoriam,” a few random quatrains, nothing daring.

  One writes that “other friends remain,”

  That “Loss is common to the race”—

  And common is the commonplace,

  And vacant chaff well meant for grain

  Gloria followed and spoke briefly but passionately of continuing the fight that Horst Cassirer had begun. The best tribute to his memory would be to bring St. Edmund’s College into the second millennium. She looked around. “And then we will push the college into the third.”

  Lily clapped, bringing her palms together half a dozen times, but her action was not contagious. The podium was now hers again.

  “If I have any regret it is that Horst and I allowed ourselves to be cowed by the medieval regulations of this university. Others defied those regulations.” She looked with fierce admiration at Gloria. She avoided Zalinski’s skeptical eyes. “Some of you know I wrote my dissertation on the poems of John Clare.” She unfolded a sheet and began to declaim.

  I hid my love in field and town

  Till e’en the breeze would knock me down;

  The bees seemed singing ballads o’er.

  The fly’s bass turned a lion’s roar

  And even silence found a tongue,

  To haunt me all the summer long:

  The riddle nature could not prove

  Was nothing but a secret love.

  She paused, then said softly, “Horst, we will never forget you. I will always love you.” She stepped back from the podium and let the tears come. Gloria comforted her. Through her tears, Lily cried, “Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.”

  Within minutes Lily found herself alone with McDivitt, who took the urn from its stand.

  “Come into my office,” he said.

  Lily followed him, head down, unsure whether the ceremony had been a success. When McDivitt stepped aside to allow her to enter first, Lily saw that a priest was seated there. He rose and put out his hand.

  “Father Dowling.”

  Lily could only take his hand.

  He said, “Would you leave us alone, Mr. McDivitt?”

  But the door was already closing.

  49

  “I visited Andrew Bernardo’s campus office and learned that you had taken away his palm top.”

  Lily St. Clair looked startled. “Who told you that?”

  “Why did you do it, to throw suspicion on him?”

  “Suspicion! He killed him.” McDivitt had given Lily the urn of Cassirer’s ashes, and she flourished it.

  “So you took his palm top and left it in the snow outside his apartment.”

&nb
sp; “I don’t have to answer such questions.”

  “Not when I put them to you, no. But you will surely be called to testify if there is a trial.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  “I was hoping you would do that. I suspect they may not make too big a thing of it.”

  “Foster,” she said vehemently. “That foul and smelly man.”

  Father Dowling smiled. “I followed the memorial ceremony from outside the room. That was a very decent thing for you to do. Obviously you and Cassirer were quite close.”

  Tears welled in her eyes. “It’s all so unjust.”

  “It’s far more unjust to make an innocent man look guilty.”

  “Innocent? Do you know what he did with Horst’s body.”

  “That was terrible, of course. But Horst was already dead.”

  “You believe his story that he just came across the body outside the building? Not even Gloria believes that. Andrew hated Horst.”

  “Wasn’t it the other way around?”

  “Have you any idea what a negative tenure decision can mean to a junior professor? He is branded for life. Andrew knew that. Andrew, who does not have the credentials of a real professor, was determined to block Horst’s advance. Yes, I do indeed think he’s guilty, and if they make me testify I will tell that to the jury.”

  So maybe it had not been a good idea to confront her with what he had learned from his visit to Andrew’s campus office. Watching the monitor in the television truck, seeing her interviewed on television when he returned to the rectory, had made him wonder if the attack on Lily had not been staged. And what if her love for Cassirer had been a one-way passion? A woman scorned is a lethal weapon. He had counted on a sense of guilt, at least from being found out, but she had lifted her chin and brazened her way through what should have been an uncomfortable confrontation. Tugging the urn to her bosom she opened the door and stalked out.

  After a moment, Father Dowling followed. McDivitt hurried along with him to open the door.

  “I hate these pagan rituals, Father.”