The Letter Killeth

by Ralph McInerny

  “We’re going, we’re going.”

  “Watch your language.”

  3

  Bill Fenster’s grandfather had made a fortune during World War II as a defense contractor, although to his dying day he described the conflict as Mr. Roosevelt’s war. With the coming of peace, he had sold off everything and invested so wisely and widely that he had provided for his progeny into the second and third generation, and doubtless far beyond. In the postwar period, Grandpa Fenster had lent his support to the John Birch Society and to the campaign to get the United States out of the UN and the UN out of the United States. Bill’s father, perhaps in reaction, had drifted leftward and worked for the doomed Gene McCarthy campaign. McCarthy’s defeat and the later debacle of George McGovern had cured Bill’s father of politics and provided his grandfather with satisfaction at this proof of his son’s naïveté. The son, Manfred, called Fred, had then turned to religion and spent much of the year traveling to reported new apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. When Bill was accepted at Notre Dame, his father had attributed this to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, whereas his grandfather was certain that in his generosity to the university lay the explanation. Thank God he hadn’t put the family name on any buildings.

  “Don’t make my mistake,” his father advised Bill.

  “How so?”

  “I never had to earn my living. Neither will you. I have come to think that money is a curse.”

  “You could disinherit me.”

  “Not even your grandfather could have done that. I’m afraid you’re doomed to affluence. I have found that the best way is to live as if one were poor.”

  Bill’s mother had died when he was four, worn out after a series of miscarriages when she was trying desperately to provide a brother or sister for him.

  “Actually, she had dreamed of a huge family. Eight, nine, even more.”

  His father had never remarried. It was surprising he hadn’t entered a monastery. He spent a week every year with the Trappists in Gethsemani, Kentucky. Bill had joined him there for a few days, once.

  “It’s not what it was,” his father said afterward.

  Bill said nothing. He had found it unnerving to be off in the woods like that, life on the farm, sort of, except for the services in church when the high-pitched keening voices rose to where he and his father knelt in the visitors’ loft in the middle of the night. They could have used a second bass or two. It turned out that his father thought the life was not austere enough.

  “It was like marine boot camp when I first went there. Their heads were shaved, total silence, no Muzak in the guests’ refectory.”

  His father mimicked the life of a poor man and was half a priest himself, saying the office in Latin every day. It was from one of the readings in Advent that his father had typed out a text from Isaiah for Bill to translate when he had been in prep school: “Et aures tuae audient verbum post tergum monentis: ‘Haec est via, ambulate in ea, et non declinetis neque ad dexteram neque ad sinistram.’” It had become Bill’s motto and hung framed over his desk at Notre Dame.

  “What’s it mean?” Hogan, his roommate, asked.

  “I thought you took Latin.”

  “In high school.”

  “It says, ‘Your ears will hear a voice behind you warning: This is the way, walk in it, and do not turn either to right or left.”

  It wasn’t political advice, of course, but Bill took it that way, too, determined to avoid the opposite extremes his grandfather and father had embraced. But he had accepted his father’s advice about keeping secret that he already had the wealth most of his classmates dreamed of acquiring. He himself had financed the alternative campus paper he and Mary Alice and Hogan and some others had started. The Via Media.

  “The donor prefers to remain anonymous,” he said, which was true enough.

  They put the quote from Isaiah on the masthead, in Latin. Recent issues had been concerned with the fate of the University Club, suggesting that the decision to tear it down and replace it was not only autocratic but indicative of a worrisome trend toward running Notre Dame as if it were a business. “The Bottom Line” was a regular feature in the irregularly appearing newspaper, chronicling the salaries of administrators and coaches, the swollen endowment that was never used to bring down the cost of a Notre Dame education to students. Nothing strident, just the chiding voice of reason. Bill had become a bit of an amateur in the history of the university. Sometimes he reminded himself of his father lamenting what had happened to the Trappists.

  * * *

  His father’s visits to the campus were always unannounced. He would call from the Morris Inn and ask Bill to have lunch with him there. Today Bill found his father seated in the lobby. He rose and shuffled toward his son. Worn corduroy pants, baggy cable-knit sweater, tousled hair almost all gray now, he really looked like the poor man that he had wanted to let out of the very rich man he was.

  “It was spur of the moment,” he said unnecessarily, when they had been shown to their table near a window that looked out on the snowy world. “I forgot how cold it is here in February.”

  “There’s not much going on.”

  “I want to look into the Catholic Worker House in town. Have you ever been there?”

  “What is it?”

  “Dorothy Day. Surely you’ve heard of her.”

  “Notre Dame gave her the Laetare Medal.”

  “That’s hardly her claim to fame. Not that fame is what she wanted.”

  So Bill got an account of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and the Catholic Worker movement that still went on years after the deaths of its saintly founders.

  “I ran into a classmate of mine,” his father said, changing the subject. “It’s the risk you run.”

  His father never returned for alumni reunions; he never came for football games. Yet he was a proud if critical alumnus. Bill had not told his father of founding Via Media. He hadn’t told him of Mary Alice either.

  “A fellow named Quirk. Why he remembered me, I don’t know. It’s even more surprising that I remembered him.”

  4

  Mary Alice Frangipani was the eldest of six Frangipanis, a native of Morristown, New Jersey, where her father was senior partner in the law firm that bore his name. He had graduated from Seton Hall, but his unfulfilled dream had been to go to Notre Dame, and sometimes Mary Alice felt she was living out his dream. He called every other day, avid for a blow-by-blow account of her life on the campus that was for him the earthly paradise. He attended every Notre Dame football game, at home and away, but Mary Alice did not find his passion for athletics contagious. Her father was wild about Charlie Weis.

  “Do you know what they’re paying him?”

  “He’s worth every nickel of it whatever it is.”

  “It started at two million dollars. Who knows what it is now?”

  The whole family had attended the Fiesta Bowl on January 2, flying out in her father’s Learjet. Her father had been in ecstasy. He attributed the outcome to bigoted officials. You would have thought they were all obtaining a plenary indulgence for cheering on the Fighting Irish.

  Her major had been English until, in disgust, she had switched to the Program of Liberal Studies. Her father had thought English was a quixotic major, but the switch baffled him even more.

  “What can you do with it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You better marry a rich man.”

  She thought vaguely of graduate school, maybe philosophy. If that thought was vague, anything beyond was vaguer still. Did she want to be a professor? The one professor she unequivocally admired was Roger Knight, and he was anything but typical. It was in one of Knight’s classes that she had met Bill Fenster. They were taking another this semester, devoted to F. Marion Crawford. Neither of them had admitted that they didn’t have the faintest idea who F. Marion Crawford was. Roger Knight could make a class on Edgar Rice Burroughs exciting. She had told him as much.

  “Of course you cou
ldn’t connect him to Notre Dame.”

  “You’re wrong, you know. When he was a student at what was called Michigan College he managed to schedule a game with Notre Dame.”

  “How do you know these things?”

  “Constant attention to trivia. You know the name for the first three of the seven liberal arts?”

  Why did such tangential things seem the very reason one wanted a higher education? When he first heard Bill’s name, he had said, “Ah, window.”

  “Just don’t defenestrate me.”

  “I’ll spare you the pane.”

  Mary Alice hadn’t followed that, but Bill explained it to her later. “I’m surprised he didn’t comment on your name.”

  They both loved Roger Knight and seemed to be his favorites. After the first class of his they had attended, they came outside with him to his golf cart to find that the battery was dead. Bill plugged it in, and while it recharged he amused them by asking why the Battery in New York was called that. And why are the pitcher and catcher called a battery? How quickly the battery recharged, but they walked beside him as he drove to the apartment he shared with his brother, Philip.

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a private detective.”

  “Come on.”

  “It’s true. And so am I. Or was. My being offered a chair here changed our lives.”

  He asked them in, but they were shy, thinking he was just being polite. Eventually, though, they did come to know him in his now native habitat. The whole apartment seemed a study, books everywhere, but also a giant television before which Phil was often sprawled in a beanbag chair watching some game or another. Mary Alice’s father would have liked Phil. She didn’t want to think what he would make of Roger Knight.

  * * *

  “Crawford was born in Rome, son of the sculptor who made the figure of Liberty atop the Capitol in Washington. His aunt was Julia Ward Howe. Although he was raised in Rome, he didn’t become a Catholic until he went to India as a journalist. His first novel was based on his experience there. He lectured at Notre Dame in 1897.”

  That is how the class on F. Marion Crawford began. Roger Knight’s courses always related, one way or another, to the past of Notre Dame, and this was no exception, although there had only been that one visit to the campus by the author who in his day had known a popularity that was the envy of Henry James. Roger began with a discussion of With the Immortals.

  “An unusual novel, not really a novel at all, but a sort of philosophical dialogue. I have always thought that the figure of Samuel Johnson is the most successful. We will be considering Crawford’s theory of fiction later.”

  Mary Alice had written a profile of Roger Knight for Via Media. It gave her a chance to quiz him about his past. It turned out to be even more exotic than she had imagined. He and his older brother had been orphaned, but Phil had been old enough to keep them together and raise Roger. Had Roger always been so fat?

  “I was briefly thin in the navy.”

  “The navy!”

  “I enlisted after I got my doctorate at Princeton.”

  “In what?”

  “They called it philosophy.”

  He had still been a teenager when he got his Ph.D. His age and his avoirdupois had made getting a teaching position difficult, and rather than subsist on postdoctoral fellowships, he had slimmed down enough to join the navy. Meanwhile, Phil had become a very successful private investigator. After Roger’s discharge from the navy they settled in Rye, New York. Roger, too, got a private investigator’s license, and they had accepted only cases of unusual interest. Their undemanding life had enabled Roger to pursue the life of the mind, and via the Internet he was in contact with kindred spirits around the globe. It was his monograph on Baron Corvo and its surprising popularity that had brought him to the attention of Father Carmody, who nominated Roger for the Huneker Chair in Catholic Studies, the funding for which Carmody had secured from a Philadelphia alumnus.

  “Who is Baron Corvo?” Mary Alice asked.

  “Was. His real name was Frederick Rolfe.” And he told her a thing or two about the disenchanted convert to Catholicism.

  “You should give a course on him.”

  “I have.”

  “I suppose you’ve given one on Huneker, too.”

  “Not yet.”

  Several agnostic courses in graduate school had been the prelude to Roger’s own conversion to Catholicism. “Philosophy has been called the formulation of bad arguments for what you already believe. That is certainly true of disbelief.”

  * * *

  “My father is here,” Bill told Mary Alice after Roger’s class today.

  “In this weather? What’s going on?”

  “He came on impulse. He usually does.”

  She waited. Would he want her to meet his father? He seemed to be asking himself the same question.

  “You could have dinner with us tonight. At the Morris Inn.”

  “Should I dress up?”

  He laughed. “Wait until you meet my father.”

  5

  When Father Carmody arrived with Quirk in tow, he displayed the letter the provost had received. Phil levered himself out of his beanbag chair and took the letter from Roger.

  “A joke?”

  “Who knows? Several other administrators and one faculty member received similar notes, apparently. I haven’t seen them. Another went to Charlie Weis.”

  “Weis!”

  Quirk seemed indifferent to Father Carmody’s mission. He stood, smiling at Roger and shaking his head.

  “Is it true?”

  “That depends on what you mean by ‘it.’”

  “You’re interested in F. Marion Crawford?”

  “I am giving a course on him this semester.”

  “You are! That’s wonderful. I never even heard his name when I was a student here.”

  Father Carmody rolled his eyes and took Phil into the study.

  “Have you ever been to the Villa Crawford in Sorrento?” Quirk asked Roger.

  “You have.”

  “Several times. I have a great idea. Father Carmody tells me you are just the one to propose it to the administration.”

  “I think he’s pulling your leg.”

  Quirk ignored this. When he had entered, he had thrown back the hood of his parka, a commodious jacket with NOTRE DAME SWIMMING emblazoned on it. Roger commented on this.

  “I was on the swimming team. Of course, there was only the pool in Rockne then.”

  “What is your great idea?”

  Quirk rubbed his head as if to verify that it was hairless. He had not stopped smiling since he came in. Now he grew serious. Roger was aware of the many countries in which Notre Dame students could spend a year abroad. St. Mary’s has a Rome program, and so does Architecture. What was needed was a place with associations with Notre Dame.

  “Notre Dame as it was. Notre Dame as it should be.”

  “Is the villa for sale?”

  “Everything is for sale.”

  “Isn’t it a convent?”

  Quirk tapped the tip of his nose. “I have reason to think that Notre Dame could buy the place.”

  “Villa Quirk?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Most donors like their name given to the buildings they provide the university.”

  “Oh no no no. Good Lord, I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “What kind of money would be involved?”

  “Euros.” His eyes widened and he laughed. “You mean, how much? Like everything, that is negotiable.”

  Roger was beginning to realize that Father Carmody had palmed this enthusiast off on him. Despite Quirk’s easy confidence that the villa Crawford had built in Sorrento on the princely proceeds of his fiction could be bought, Roger did not get the impression that Quirk was a practical man. The way he spoke of the purchasability of whatever one might covet and his vagueness as to what sum would be needed if his improbable scheme were adopted did not
suggest a man at home in the rough-and-tumble world of buying and selling.

  By this time, he had got Quirk into a chair and was trying not to glance enviously to where Phil and Father Carmody were huddled in conversation. Roger’s curiosity had been aroused by the letter the old priest had brought, and he was almost as struck as Phil had been to hear that such a threat had been made to the football coach as well. Charlie Weis had taken Notre Dame football from the nadir to the peaks in a single year. Already, he was spoken of in the same breath as Knute Rockne, a comparison he of course dismissed. But he was indisputably a national figure, and the news that threats had been made on him, particularly after the Fiesta Bowl debacle, would be broadcast from coast to coast. Quirk, on the other hand, was completely absorbed in his quixotic project. Had he even understood the import of these threatening letters? Given the potential for bad publicity for the university, it was probably just as well Quirk seemed unaware of this.

  “So you’re an alumnus.”

  “Do you know that Father Carmody actually remembered me? Incredible. I was not, I can tell you, a campus luminary during my time here.”

  “And what have you done since graduating?”

  “Wondering how I could have been so little interested in Notre Dame during the years I was here. A student’s four years on campus are over almost as soon as they begin. You would be surprised how small a part of a student’s interest is engaged in the classes he takes, in learning. Before you know it, you graduate and get swept up in life. Gradually it dawns on you that you all but wasted the opportunity of a lifetime. I have resolved to make up for that.”

  “Hence your interest in F. Marion Crawford?”

  “Yes.” He paused. “I collect Notre Dame memorabilia. Books about the place. I have someone who keeps on the lookout for me. She came upon a mention of Notre Dame in a biography of Crawford. You know he lectured here?”

  “So did Henry James and William Butler Yeats.”

  “But they weren’t Catholics! Have you read the chapter on Crawford in Louis Auchincloss’s The Man Behind the Book? I wonder how much of Crawford he actually read. And he doesn’t even mention his conversion to Catholicism.” Quirk might have pronounced that scandalous sentence in italics.