The Death of a Joyce Scholar

by Bartholomew Gill

  “And you suspect…?” McGarr looked off into the square, decided once again it was a park. From his vantage point he could see squadrons of fat bumble bees strafing a trellis of roses that was not visible from any other part of his property. Warped in the rising heat, the scene appeared as if through a film of tumbling water, and he blessed its tranquility and quiet.

  “Well, sumtin’ happened to him. Otherwise…”

  “Otherwise, what?”

  “Otherwise he’d be speakin’ to me,” she said impatiently. “Look—are you McGarr? I can’t see you standing there like that. The sun—”

  “You’ve been to the Castle?”

  She nodded.

  “And they sent you here?”

  “No—it’s not like they did or nuttin’.”

  “Of course you tried Missing Persons?” Three days was no time for a working-class Dublin man to be gone. He’d probably a drop taken or met up with a mot or both. Given the weather, he might as easily have awakened with some new friends in Wexford or Tralee. Working his way back, he was. On the tides that flow from a tap.

  But it also now intrigued McGarr why she should think her husband dead and the Murder Squad the appropriate agency to search for him. And now, in this heat in Belgrave Square.

  “I rang them up and they said I’d have to file a report.”

  “Which you did, I gather?”

  She shook her head.

  “Relatives. Friends. Any…” He looked off again at the roses. “…special interests?”

  Did she blush? McGarr thought she did.

  He waited and again catalogued the inspissated, matronly hands, water-worn and clutching the plastic purse that looked like it was melting in the heat. “It’s not like that.”

  She had something else to tell him, something that had not come out as yet, and she had come for that purpose. How many wives with a husband missing three days would look up the Chief Superintendent of the Murder Squad, bang off, no other calls?

  “And then”—she had so turned her head that she appeared to be speaking to the closed door—“I came to you because…” There was a pause. “…you’re one of…us.”

  Really, McGarr thought. In what sense? Obviously in the pancake accent of the great family of Ath Cliath, which he hoped he shared with the woman only on occasion, and then when he was forgetting the best part of himself.

  Still, it was an appeal that McGarr had not often heard, and he was enough a creature of his culture that he could not readily turn a stranger from his door. “Your name?”

  “Katie Coyle.”

  It was Dublin, all right, and nothing plainer. “Well, Katie Coyle—would you know how to get to the back garden of this house?” Taking the ring of keys from his pocket, he twisted one off and dropped it at her feet. With the same hand he gave the dog a command. McGarr had saved it from the vet’s final needle when, after an explosion in an Irish National Liberation safe house that was being searched, the Canine Corps decided to put the animal down. Its right front leg had been damaged severely, and the dog would only ever move with a limp. McGarr, however, found the nearly nine-stone “personal protection” dog a home with his elderly next-door neighbor, a spinster, and there the creature adopted a proprietorial demeanor that prompted a resident to dub it the “PM. of Belgrave Square.”

  The dog now hopped off the wall and on a hobbling gait was soon by Katie Coyle’s side. “You needn’t be afraid. He’ll see that you don’t get lost.”

  And that you get where you’re going, he thought, as he waited to hear the door close and the latch catch.

  He then scanned the quiet street, checking parked cars for passengers, the square for strollers or others sitting in the shade: anybody he could see in windows, doorways, stoops, side yards. But he saw no one. It was noon, and too hot to go out for those already not out.

  Or for work at what was work.

  In the back garden, under the deep shade of McGarr’s trellised grape vines, Katie Coyle told him that her husband’s name was Kevin and that they were from the Liberties, a profoundly working-class area of Dublin that occupied most of a hill between Christ Church Cathedral and the Guinness Brewery. They had nine children ranging from one year and three months to age eleven. They lived in a five-room flat, but were currently looking for something larger, but wasn’t everybody else.

  And what with Kevin’s salary, which wasn’t much, and the kids, and the housing grants having been cut off again by the government, there was only so much they could do, him (Kevin) insisting that they stay in the Liberties. “Where we were born and bred, the both of us, before it became the in thing to do for some.”

  McGarr’s eyes met hers for a moment before angling off again. As she was speaking, he had been telling himself how much he needed an iced pint of lager. There were several tall cans in the fridge, but McGarr had a proscription, which he seldom broke: he would not take a drink at home alone before four in the afternoon, except on a holiday. He had almost convinced himself that it was in fact a holiday and that the beer would help him cope with the woman before him, when he chanced to ask, “And what is it that your husband does?”

  “For a living? Or elsewise?”

  First things first. The elsewise—doubtless beer and football; or beer, football, and horses; or (probably better for her, given their numbers) beer, football, horses, and women—they’d get to later, if McGarr tolerated her that long.

  But when, with near embarrassment, she said, “Trinity College. He’s a professor there,” McGarr sat up on the bench they were sharing.

  “A what?”

  As though to say that she expected better of McGarr, she smiled wryly, and her large, dark eyes that were still a kind of perfection searched his face. “I know I’m not your typical Trinity professor’s wife. But nor is Kevin your typical Trinity professor.”

  McGarr couldn’t help but wonder if he had a disturbed woman on his hands. Reaching down to stroke the head of the dog who was lying by his side, he asked, “Of what?” For God’s sake, he nearly added. Psychology? Criminology? He nearly cracked a smile. He could almost taste that beer.

  “English literature, or like Kevin says, literature mostly in English.”

  “A professor?”

  She nodded, then looked toward the perfect rows of vegetables.

  “A full professor?” he insisted. She would destroy his afternoon only for good reason. But the possible murder of a Trinity College professor of English literature and father of nine, who also curiously hailed from the Liberties, would be in the eyes of the press, which influenced such things in the eyes of McGarr’s superiors, the very best of reasons. And only at his peril could McGarr ignore it.

  Then he could hardly disregard the fact that nearly nine out of ten homicides were committed by persons either related or known to the victim. And here was the man’s wife, who was by her own say-so “unlikely,” admitting that she believed her husband had been murdered. How had she put it? “…something happened to him. Otherwise…” Otherwise what?

  Excusing himself by saying “Let me get my notebook,” McGarr walked into the basement, where he removed his boots. At the fridge in the kitchen he popped the top of a can of beer and swallowed long until the cold lager bit the back of his throat and brought a kind of satisfying pain to his right eye. He then repaired to the library where, if memory served him rightly, he thought he recalled having seen a volume by one Kevin Coyle, M.A.

  And sure enough, there it was among his wife’s 90 percent of the library: Myth-Making: the Personal/Impersonal of an Author of Competence. A paperback, the volume had been reviewed in hardcover to what McGarr judged was critical acclaim. Said the Times, “Solid, insightful scholarship combined with trenchant wit and graceful prose…the book is a minor masterpiece of literary substance and style. As a primer on criticism, it will engage readers on every level.”

  Said the Guardian, “Coyle has observed Pound’s dictum to make it new. His Myth-Making is so artful an approach to a truly n
ew New Criticism that it often rivals the very works that it treats.”

  Said the Observer, “A brilliant debut. One can only look forward with anticipation to Mr. Coyle’s succeeding work, which promises to deal with the entire ‘modernist’ movement in Irish arts and letters and to be a major publishing event.”

  The reviews from America were similarly glowing; fanning the pages, McGarr noted that Noreen had actually read the book. It opened readily, and there was a distinct tea stain on page 285.

  At the fridge he reached for another pint can, and dialed his Castle office. Glancing out the Georgian window at the end of the kitchen, he noticed that Katie Coyle was now stroking the P.M.’s wide head. A jackdaw kited down into the herb garden but fluttered up again when the dog moved for it.

  “Bernie—tell me something. Was there a woman in there a while ago?”

  “Jesus, Chief—she didn’t. When she said she would, I told her don’t. He’ll eat you alive, shoes, handbag, and all. She had your address and everything.”

  “Kevin Coyle. From what she said, he’s a professor at Trinity College.”

  “Yah.” McKeon’s tone was unbelieving.

  “Lives in the Liberties.”

  “Yah.”

  “The wife seems to think—”

  “Ah, Chief. She went through the entire drill when she was here, and Rut’ie nearly threw her out the door. Bodily. Fella’s only been gone a couple of days, for chrissake, and from the look a her—”

  “Records,” McGarr cut in. “On both of them. I want a check on hospitals too. And the Liberties bit. Send Hughie out to interview neighbors.”

  “You must be joking. We don’t even know he’s missing, much less murdered, and in this weather, with what we already have on our plate, and you—”

  McGarr hung up blindly as he tilted the can back; he then dialed his wife’s shop in Dawson Street. The beer was now giving him a slight, agreeable buzz, and he imagined he must have been dehydrated. It was either that or he was going to hell altogether, which was a possibility now worth considering. He swirled his neck.

  The P.M. had returned to Mrs. Katie Coyle’s side. The bells of the cathedral on Lower Rathmines Road were ringing. McGarr checked the kitchen clock: three, which was close enough to four, seeing as how it was a holiday of sorts. He allowed himself another gulp.

  “Kevin Coyle—what can you tell me about him?”

  “What’s wrong with your voice?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with my voice.”

  “There is, sure.”

  “Like what?” He tugged again from the can.

  “Like high.”

  It was the proper word. The buzz had turned to a glow, and McGarr thought that after a bit more gardening, he might dust off his fishing rods and drive out to Howth for a little late-afternoon fishing. He had heard there were mackerel running off Puck’s Rocks.

  “What are you doing?” she went on.

  “Interviewing a complainant.”

  “At home?”

  “Why do you think I’m at home?”

  “Where else would you be drinking malt where it’s quiet? Early, I might add. Would that we all were civil servants.”

  “Senior civil servants.”

  “An adjective all too revealing.”

  Some twenty years separated them, and he wondered if Noreen was determined to keep him young through sarcasm.

  “Coyle. I understand he’s a professor at Trinity. You have one of his books.”

  “And he’s one of your complainants?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “You didn’t have to. I know the tone.”

  Like she knew what he was drinking, he thought. Malt, not beer. “Which tone is that?”

  “Coldly official. Your ‘state’ tone. The tone of the inquisitor.”

  “Coyle. Kevin Coyle, M.A.”

  “Sure, and much more. An utterly brilliant young chap. Professor, as you intimated. And early. It was either they promoted him or he was off. Don’t you remember me reading you the article in the Times, when the book came out?”

  As far as McGarr was concerned, his ears had been virginal to the name Kevin Coyle up until a dozen minutes past, but he conceded. “Vaguely.”

  “Ah, don’t cod me. Yah don’t. You never listen. I might as well be speaking to the bleedin’ wall.”

  “Kevin Coyle. The book,” he prompted.

  There was a pause in which, he imagined, she considered the fate of being married to an older man. Once, when she had complained of his not taking her seriously, she had accused him of thinking of her as “a tootsie, a bimbo, an…airhead.” McGarr had wondered where she picked up the phraseology, and when he had said, “I’ll take you anyway I can get you,” she had exploded, “See! That’s proof.”

  Finally, she said, “I don’t know why I put up with you, but the book, the first one, put Kevin in the spotlight. He had offers from everywhere, England, America. Who knows now when the other takes off.”

  “Now?”

  “What d’you do with yourself apart from brief stints at the Castle and early afternoon tippling?” It was another point of contention between them that McGarr’s life was too narrowly focused, when in fact trying to perfect him was perhaps Noreen’s most enjoyable pastime. “It’s been in all the papers for days now. He calls it Phon/Antiphon. It’s a critical reappraisal of modern Irish literature in English that focuses mainly on Joyce and Beckett. It’s out Monday next, I believe, and the publisher is launching it with a big bash at the Shelbourne.”

  Big bash, for sure, McGarr thought. It wouldn’t be much of a party without the main attraction. He wondered what Coyle looked like, what he was as a person, if he could mix with the crowd, introduce his wife around at the Shelbourne, which was Ireland’s most socially pretentious hotel. He looked out at Katie Coyle, who was now walking slowly along a path through a rose trellis in the back garden. Dowdy was too mild a term to describe her; she was matronly before her time. Too many children and—could it be?—cares to remember that her appearance might matter.

  “What’s he like?” Ireland was a small country, and its arts community was truly a little set, of which Noreen and her family, with their picture gallery, had long been a part. It had been there in the shop on Dawson Street that McGarr, while running down a lead in a murder investigation, had met his wife. She had been just twenty-one at the time, a research student at the Cortauld Institute in London. He had been so taken with her radiant red hair and her green eyes and her enthusiasm for her subject, and for life itself, it seemed, that in a vault at the back of the shop he impetuously tried to kiss her. And received a short, sharp slap for his “audacity. And think of it—you, a man old enough to be my father.” Only through dogged pursuit had he proved to her otherwise.

  “Coyle?” she now asked. “I’ve never met him, but you see him around now and again. Great walker, and they say he loves the city and knows it as well as Joyce knew it in his time. He even looks like Joyce. Tallish. Long, sloping nose a little flattened and off to one side. Wavy, reddish hair. Most of all, glasses.”

  “Made an impression, it seems.”

  “Who knows. He might be another, different, more modern Joyce, if you accept the premise that the novel has been both written and therefore exhausted by Joyce, and unwritten and therefore effectively eliminated as an art form by Beckett. What’s left then but criticism, which in the future—as begun by Coyle—might become the only genuinely artful possibility for the writer of serious fiction.”

  McGarr glanced down at the barrel of the cold can that was beading agreeably in the heat and humidity and wondered if he could fiddle with the date of his annual holiday, arranged for four weeks hence. “In other words, Coyle’s a man with literary…” He rejected the word pretensions, since teaching at Trinity satisfied at least that. “…aspirations.”

  “Aspirations?” Another redhead, Noreen’s moods could vacillate within mere minutes between elation and despair, and often bore little relation
to external stimuli. Six years of marriage told McGarr that at present she was moderating toward the former condition. By nightfall she would be ready for some sort of catharsis. “If the new book is accepted by critics at all like the first, the man’ll probably be canonized as our greatest living literary critic. He’ll be able to write his own ticket.”

  If he can write at all, McGarr thought. Katie Coyle stood before McGarr’s banks of multicolored lilacs; she was staring up at them as they nodded in the light breeze. Her hands were clasped behind her back, and in spite of the heat, she remained motionless as a statue in the full sun.

  “You still haven’t told me why you’re home.”

  “Won’t be for long.”

  “What about Kevin Coyle?”

  “His wife thinks he’s a missing person.”

  There was a pause. “And she came to you?”

  “She says she thinks I’m one of them.”

  “Them who?”

  McGarr thought of Noreen’s explanation of Coyle’s new book, which had meant nothing to him, and he said, “Them who aren’t the others, I suspect. See you.”

  “When? And what about Kevin Coyle? Why does she think he’s missing? Oh, Peter—”

  McGarr hung up. His wife was young, beautiful, sensitive, and intelligent, but she had a singular failing. Like most other Dubliners, she could not resist the most insignificant bit of gossip about anybody she even remotely knew, and nothing regaled her more than a certain sort of insider information. He imagined that anything about Kevin Coyle would have a currency among her art and literary friends that would command all ears. At social events those same acquaintances treated McGarr as though he’d just stepped out of the pages of a crime novel.

  After a quick shower and a change of clothes, McGarr found Katie Coyle seated at the kitchen table, his second can of beer before her. “Sorry—I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  Of course he didn’t; this was more us again. “I don’t, but you can tell me this.” He pulled a chair over and, turning it around, sat down facing her. “Why do you think your husband was murdered?”