“Some professors might have encouraged her to quit.”
“Oh, I doubt that.”
“It is a demanding schedule, but Griselda handles basketball and her classes better than anyone I’ve known. She doesn’t even have a tutor.”
Fred just shook his hand wordlessly, his expression telling the gratitude he felt. Roger did not mention that his floating the length of the pool was his greatest achievement as a naval swimmer. Griselda had made more of that feat than it deserved but it seemed an innocent deception.
“That kid will be a pro,” Phil said, watching Griselda lead the Lady Irish to victory over the fabled University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball team. They were called UConn, which suggested Alaska, but Griselda put the freeze on them.
“We’ll see.”
And then tragedy struck.
In the second week of November, Fred did not appear at his desk in the Joyce Center. On the second day, when there was no response to messages left on his telephone, Roger went to check. He persuaded the caretaker of the building to let him into the apartment, a flashing display of his private detective’s license the open sesame. Fred Neville lay dead in his bed.
6
THE WAKE FOR FRED NEVILLE was held in Hickey’s Funeral Home on Cleveland Road and all Notre Dame teams were heavily represented by coaches and players, something Phil took great pride in.
“What a turnout, Roger.”
Fred’s parents were equally impressed. Mr. and Mrs. Neville had flown in from their retirement home in Phoenix, stunned by the news. At their age, it was their own death that had seemed proximate, and now their only son was dead at the height of his powers.
“He e-mailed us everything he wrote,” Mr. Neville said. Mrs. Neville, a little woman with large almond eyes, nodded.
“Everything.”
“He will be sorely missed,” Roger assured them. It was a phrase the Nevilles would hear again and again during the taxing hours of the wake. Father Molloy came to lead the rosary, one of several dozen members of the Holy Cross community who came to pay their respects. Monk Molloy had been a basketball player in his day and not even the presidency of Notre Dame could compete with that fact in his personal estimation. He was still a familiar figure on the outdoor courts for pickup games and never missed a home game when he was in town, sitting in taciturn appraisal as priests around him leapt up and cheered at any provocation. But Monk sat with folded arms in more contemplative appreciation of the feats of the team.
Roger had seen Marjorie Shuster enter the viewing room and sign the book and he crossed the room to join her. She turned her large sad eyes on him.
“Have you seen Mary?”
“Isn’t she with you?”
“She came early. She said she wanted to be here for the whole four hours.” There was that in Marjorie’s tone that filled Roger with apprehension. “Look, she’s on the prie-dieu.”
And there indeed she was, clad all in black with a black mantilla on her head as she stared in desolation at the body of Fred Neville. She might have been a widow.
That, as it turned out, was the explanation of Marjorie’s tone. She leaned toward Roger and whispered, “She says they were engaged.”
“Engaged.”
“Can you believe it?”
The thought disturbed Roger’s prayers when he himself lowered his enormous body onto the prie-dieu before the open casket and stared at the body of his friend. Mary was now seated prominently in the second seat in the front row and when Father Molloy sat beside her before beginning the rosary she wept silently. The puzzled Nevilles sat in the same row. Mary embraced Mrs. Neville and lifted her face for Mr. Neville’s kiss. His dry lips pressed against her mantilla. They were clearly as surprised as Marjorie. Few in the room failed to notice Mary’s mourning apparel and her look of unutterable grief. Roger and Phil took Marjorie home for a fortifying drink.
“Just a little Jameson’s,” she said. “No, make it a lot.”
“Ice?”
“Water. Just a little.”
And then she told her story. Mary had been hysterical when she heard the news, already something of a surprise, and then she had told her mother she was engaged to marry Fred.
“She claims they had been engaged for months.”
“Claims?”
“I know nothing about it.”
“Do daughters always tell such secrets to their mothers?”
“They do when they live as close as we do. We have no secrets.”
“The night she was here and Fred came in she acted as if she didn’t know him.”
“I said the same thing. Apparently, she was peeved because he came in with Griselda Novak!”
The ways of women were a mystery to the Knight brothers. “I wonder if Fred knew.”
But Roger remembered Griselda’s remark about Fred being in love. Had she meant Mary Shuster? He went into his study and made a call.
“Isn’t it awful?” Griselda said. “I saw you at the wake but didn’t get a chance to talk to you.”
“You remember Mary Shuster, the woman who was here the night…”
“She’s his girl. Or she was. I often caught them smooching in his office. She visited him there a lot.”
This would be confirmed by others in the Joyce Center. Marjorie and the Knights seemed the only ones who hadn’t known of Fred and Mary. When his desk was opened some days later, her photograph was found.
Marjorie said, “Why would she keep it a secret? The reason she gave made no sense.”
“What was that?”
Marjorie hesitated. “She said I nagged her so much about being single she didn’t want me whooping it up if she told me.”
“Of course she would have told you eventually.”
“Look at what eventually turned out to mean. The girl is making a spectacle of herself.”
“You can’t blame her for mourning Fred.”
“All in black? She never brought him home, not once, to introduce him to her mother. If I knew nothing about it, who did? And there she was, acting like a widow. How can you be a widow if you never married?”
“Our Mutual Friend,” Roger murmured.
The reference sailed past Marjorie. “Oh, I know, I know. It isn’t that I didn’t like the man, what I knew of him, God rest his soul. She did this out of spite.”
“Now, Marjorie.”
“Well, what am I to think? Keeping something like this from her own mother. If it’s even true. Do you have any more of this, Phil?”
“A little.”
“That’s all I want.”
Marjorie seemed intent on having an Irish wake for Fred Neville, the son-in-law that might have been.
“I suppose it’s a blessing, God forgive me. What did he die of?”
Phil said, “He died in his sleep.”
Phil drove Marjorie home and Roger asked to be taken along. “Drop me at Hickey’s, Phil.”
“You’re going back there? Talk to Mary, please.”
Thus it was that Roger was at the funeral home when Naomi McTear appeared.
She was a slender girl with thick red hair worn to her shoulders, familiar as the breathless reporter from the sidelines at televised football games, the one that buttonholed a coach as he was heading for the locker room at halftime. Her dress was modish, festive rather than mourning. She stood in the open door of the viewing room and looked around at the depleted group. Then she saw the Nevilles and walked rapidly to them as if she were going to conduct an interview. She gathered Mrs. Neville into her arms, her left hand splayed on the back of the smaller woman. She was wearing the biggest diamond Roger had ever seen.
“Phyllis,” she sobbed.
“Naomi.”
Then she turned to Mr. Neville. “Oh, Arthur, Arthur.” It was he who embraced her and she looked up at him, all tears. Then she glanced at the casket and shuddered. She broke free and went to the casket where she stood, hands at her hips, staring at the body. Not ten feet away, Mary Shuster
studied the new arrival. She had seen the greeting she received from the Nevilles—who hadn’t? Someone approached the Nevilles and then the word went around.
“She’s Fred’s fiancée. Naomi McTear.”
Part Two
Portrait of a Lady
1
THE BELLS OF SACRED HEART basilica tolled mournfully on the Friday, prelude to the funeral Mass for Fred Neville. Snow had begun to fall during the night, falling on the living and the dead, and students tramping through it to dining hall or early class heard without hearing the tolling bells. Few of them would have heard of Fred Neville, let alone his death. A decade ago he had been one of them, indifferent to the liturgies that went on in the campus church, weddings, funerals, baptisms. The hall chapels were the site of such devotions as students engage in. Sacred Heart was for special occasions. Students could be pardoned if they did not regard Fred Neville’s funeral as a special occasion.
There are four seasons at Notre Dame, of course, but students know only three of them and fall and winter are the only ones whose beginning and end they observe on campus. Despite the excitement of football in the fall, winter is the season most will remember in future years, the campus walks winding between piles of shoveled snow, the leafless trees exposed in their spectral beauty, mere sketches of what they have been and will be again. In winter the world awaits its resurrection, spring is the Easter season when ducks and geese and swans move about on the melted lakes, and for seniors commencement looms. It is an academic conceit that the end of their time at Notre Dame should be called a beginning, but so in a way it is, for then they will join the great silent majority, the quick and the dead, that have walked this campus and, however little remembered, take indelible memories of it with them when they go. So it had been with Fred Neville with the difference that he had returned to find himself an almost-stranger in a place that had marked him for life. And now he was definitively gone.
Last night, when he had returned to the funeral home a second time and witnessed the arrival of Naomi McTear, Roger had received disturbing news. A hand was laid on his arm and he turned to face Lieut. Jimmy Stewart of the South Bend police.
“Is your brother with you?”
“He will be picking me up.”
“Good. Let’s go in here.”
Jimmy Stewart led Roger down the hall to an empty room much like the one in which the body of Fred Neville lay.
“We may have a problem, Roger.”
“Hence your presence?”
He nodded. “Apparently it wasn’t an accidental death.”
There had been an autopsy, just routine because Fred had been dead some days before his body was discovered and, while the usual tests were being run, the body had been turned over to the undertaker.
“No problem there, though we may postpone burial.”
“You don’t mean the funeral won’t take place.”
“That can go on. Why not? But the body will be brought downtown to the morgue.”
“Good Lord. His parents have come, all kinds of people will expect to accompany the body to Cedar Grove Cemetery.”
This cemetery was on campus, on Notre Dame Avenue just south of the bookstore, not to be confused with the community cemetery where members of the Congregation of Holy Cross were laid to rest in their own private Arlington under identical crosses, row on row. That was located off the road that led from the Grotto to St. Mary’s College across the highway.
Phil came half an hour later, having got Marjorie safely to her door and through it.
“She chattered all the way home,” Phil said. And then he noticed Jimmy Stewart. “What’s up?”
Jimmy Stewart took Phil away and put him in the picture. Roger returned to the viewing room and walked slowly up to the casket and stared at Fred with far different emotions than he had prayed for him earlier. He had been poisoned. When the report was given to him, Jimmy Stewart had gone to Fred’s apartment, which was untouched although of course it had not yet been declared a crime scene. The Nevilles had postponed visiting their son’s apartment until after the funeral, before they planned to return to Phoenix. There was no one else to clean up the place. Jimmy Stewart had taken the coffee mug from the table beside the bed downtown to the lab. In it were traces of the poison that had sent Fred into the next world. A dreadful thought had occurred to Roger. Had Fred administered the poison to himself?
“There wasn’t a note?” Roger asked.
“I didn’t really look. The apartment is sealed now of course and we will be going over it thoroughly.”
Nothing Roger knew of Fred suggested that he would kill himself but the events of the evening had made Roger wonder how well he knew his friend. He had been revealed to have a fiancée, whom he had never mentioned, Mary Shuster had appointed herself principal mourner, and there were indications that there had indeed been something between her and Fred. How little we know others, even those to whom we are close. He and Fred had spent so many happy hours talking, and he had sensed that Fred could be open with him about his non-athletic interests; there was an implicit confidentiality clause in all their conversations. It seemed impossible that Fred would not at least have hinted at his feelings, whatever they had been, for Mary. Griselda had certainly no doubt what they were; she was sure Fred and Mary had been in love.
But Roger thought of the evening when Fred had come to the apartment after dining with Griselda, to enlist Roger in the campaign to prevent her from leaving the basketball team, and Mary and her mother were there. There was little indication the two had even known one another. Indeed, Mary had all but snubbed Fred. Jealousy? The vast mystery of every human person struck Roger forcibly, as it often had before. What we say and do reveals who we are, up to a point, but one is a mystery to himself so how can we expect to penetrate the soul of another? The investigation that was about to begin would uncover many facts hitherto unknown—investigations always did—but they would only deepen the mystery, not dissolve it.
When he and Phil returned to their apartment, they sat up late discussing this surprising turn of events.
“He give you any clue he might do this, Roger?”
“Does Jimmy Stewart think it was suicide?”
“Why would anyone else kill him?”
“Why would he kill himself, Phil?”
Phil assumed his professional persona. “Whether or not he did has to be established before we ask why.”
It was nearly eleven when Father Carmody showed up unannounced. They had acknowledged one another at the funeral home but that was all. Now it was clear that Father Carmody had learned how Fred had died.
“You have to be our liaison with the police, Phil. We can’t have a scandal.”
“Jimmy Stewart is the investigating officer.”
“Is that good?”
“Very good.”
Father Carmody looked relieved. The old priest was the unofficial custodian of the university’s reputation, a man whose whole life had been lived here. He had come to Notre Dame as a teenager, when there was a preparatory seminary on campus, and lived his whole life at the university. So many things that had been personal experiences of Father Carmody were matters of history to others. He had been instrumental in Roger’s being appointed the Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies, making him a free variable on campus, able to cross-list the courses he chose to give in several departments.
“You two knew him, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“His poor parents,” the priest said. “I had just a few words with them. Wonderful people. They were bearing up well under the blow of his death, but what will their reaction to this news be?”
Fred’s death had been blow enough, but now the manner of his going would provide a testing time for his parents and doubtless for the two women he seemed to be connected with. And of course for his friends. Roger was glad that Phil would have a quasi-official role in the investigation.
So it was with mixed emotions indeed that Roger and Phil
had gotten out of their car and walked slowly to the basilica with the bells tolling overhead.
2
A FUNERAL MASS IS NOT WHAT it was. Not so long ago, the priest was vested in black, yellow rather than white candles stood on the altar, the sermon was devoted to generic remarks about the fragility of life and the certainty of mortality. And the lugubrious Dies Irae was sung. The liturgy was solemn and somber, all in Latin and conducted in the guarded hope that the deceased had made it into purgatory at best where the sins of a lifetime must be washed away. The chaste tones of Gregorian chant rode their measured scale. Dante’s great poem depicted this halfway house to heaven as a seven-story mountain, up which the soul must painfully climb as it was purged of the effects of the capital sins. The stakes of life were put earnestly before those still living, and for the departed was implored an eventual entrance into paradise.
It is thus no longer. The tendency is to speak of the deceased as even now enjoying the beatific vision, swept up from a sinful life immediately into the presence of God. The homily is often an untroubled celebration of the life that has ended, given in the sunny conviction that the congregation was marking the passing of a saint. There is little somber about it, however grief-stricken the family might be. But grief is masked with smiles. A kind of jolly universalism is in the air, as if everyone must be destined for eternal bliss, with no suggestion that there could be any delay in entering into it. Seldom are lessons drawn for those who fill the pews.
Fred Neville’s funeral struck a middle note between these two extremes. There was no eulogy of the deceased during the liturgy. Naomi McTear was prominent in the first pew beside the Nevilles, her claim upon the departed thus dramatically endorsed. But the first reading called this into question. Mary Shuster, clad all in black, her mantilla shading her eyes, appeared in the pulpit and read in clear and tragic tones the words of the epistle. Her tone, her manner, her dress, proclaimed her to be chief among the mourners. The church was hushed when she first appeared, the silence deepened as she read and when she concluded with “The Word of the Lord,” she might have been enlisting the almighty in her claim to be the bereft beloved of Fred Neville. She slowly lifted her bowed head and for half a minute stared out at the congregation in silence. Then she turned to descend and was lost from view. As if in relief, there was stirring in the pews and throats were cleared.
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