The Letter Killeth

by Ralph McInerny

  “That they’re works of genius,” Wack said, his damnable voice contralto.

  “Are you quoting?”

  Once he had the committee laughing, Izquierdo was home free, and he knew it. It would be too much to say that Wack had made an enemy by demanding that the matter be looked into; he and Izquierdo had entered the meeting as enemies. They left the room together, Izquierdo’s arm thrown over Wack’s shoulders in a bogus gesture of bonhomie. “Nice try,” he whispered. “I’ll get you for this.” The threat was made with a smile of Mexican silver.

  “Why don’t you take a few laps in the Rio Grande?”

  “My family were landed gentry in California when yours were still swinging from trees in the Black Forest.”

  Now had come that absurd letter threatening to firebomb Wack’s office. Its provenance seemed obvious. The disturbing visit of Philip Knight to the departmental office shook his certainty, but not for long. He bided his time, left the door of his office open, waited for the sound of Izquierdo skipping off to the men’s room. He looked out. Izquierdo had left his office door open as usual. In a trice, Wack was inside. He had to try several times to get the match to light, then he dropped it into the overflowing cornucopia of Izquierdo’s wastebasket. He fled the building, but as soon as he was outside his teeth began to chatter with the cold. How could he have forgotten that the temperature was only seven above? But this was no time to be fainthearted. He circled the building and entered by another door, went up to the third floor, and huddled out of sight. He could see smoke curling from Izquierdo’s office. And then came the awful realization. He had left his own door open!

  He pulled open the inner door and ran down the hallway toward his office. Before he got there, Izquierdo was coming toward him from the opposite direction. Who knows what might have happened if Lucy Goessen hadn’t emerged from her office and begun to scream. “Fire! Fire!”

  Izquierdo came to a stop at his office door and looked with horror within. Surprising himself with his presence of mind, Wack pushed past him into the office, maneuvered the flaming wastebasket into the hall with his right foot, and turned to Lucy. “Water, please. Lots of it.”

  All she had was a mug of coffee. Wack took it and dashed it at the flames. Meanwhile, others converged on the scene. Again Wack called for water, and this time water was brought. Soon the wastebasket was a soggy charred mess emitting an odious smell.

  “This is a smoke-free building,” Wack said to Izquierdo. Tentative laughter all around, and then the full-throated laughter of relief. He distinctly heard someone refer to him as a wit. He was elated. “Better dump that somewhere.”

  Izquierdo glared at him with pure hatred. “You did that!”

  “Put out the fire? Of course I did. Is that a sin?”

  He had the onlookers with him. He felt a surge of self-confidence, the kind he sometimes felt when rehearsing his lectures before a mirror and finding them marvelous.

  “No, my dear, only a mistake.”

  But no one heard Izquierdo. The offensive wastebasket was taken away; everyone retired to his or her respective office. Before disappearing into his, Izquierdo looked at Wack, who was seeking for some crushing final word.

  “Maybe I should report this to the provost.”

  The unnerving memory of Philip Knight came. “What do you mean?”

  “You can’t fight fire with fire.”

  And he was gone. Izquierdo had gotten the last word. But what in the world did he mean?

  9

  Fred Fenster had spent most of his adult life feeling like the rich young man who had asked Jesus what he must do to be saved. “Keep the commandments.” The young man already did, and so, too, did Fred. “If you would be perfect, sell all you have, give it to the poor, and come follow me.” Like the rich young man, Fred had always turned sadly away from that counsel. He excused himself in part by saying that the legal complications of divesting himself of the enormous wealth his father had left him made it all but impossible. Besides, what right did he have to deprive his son of that patrimony? Bill had an independent legacy, of course, but compared with what he might inherit it seemed, in a Fenster perspective, modest. So Fred had settled for imitation poverty. He lived as simply as anyone whose sole income was Social Security. But of course it was a pretense, and he knew it, and was ashamed.

  In his political phase, he had been a generous contributor to the causes he espoused, Gene McCarthy, Senator McGovern, Greenpeace; voices crying in the wilderness they had seemed, but what if they had been successful? The time came when Fred thought politics was simply a matter of misplaced emphasis. The only change that mattered was one the individual could effect in himself. He got religion, in the dismissive phrase of his sister, Vivian.

  Vivian had been born to wealth and found it the most natural and agreeable condition imaginable. Her concern was the predatory forces bent on wresting her wealth and privilege from her. Her politics were somewhat to the right of what their father’s had been. For her, the Republican Party had become a subservient wing of the Democrats. Her great heroine was Phyllis Schlafly, who had all but single-handedly stopped the Equal Rights Amendment. A pyrrhic victory. What the amendment sought had been gained by legislation. Pictures of women in combat gear could send Vivian into hysterics.

  “Think of Joan of Arc,” Fred suggested.

  “Joan of Arc had a divine mission to drive the English out of France. Is Iraq a divine mission?”

  He let it go. There was little to choose between winning or losing such arguments. All such things he had set aside as the things of a child. He visited Lourdes and LaSallette; he went several times to Fatima. He brooded over the messages of these apparitions, and they endorsed his conviction that personal holiness was the answer, not collective movements. He had been surprised when Quirk mentioned Garabandal.

  “Have you been there?”

  “Once. It’s a devilish place to find.”

  Fred Fenster knew. “What did you think?”

  Quirk studied him. They were in the bar of the Morris Inn, Quirk drinking Bushmills, Fred with a glass of mineral water. “That place scared the hell out of me.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Look, I made a study of several apparitions. Fatima particularly. You would think that the end of the world is at hand.”

  Fred said nothing, sipped his water, wondered what he was doing sitting in a bar like this. Memories of the Catholic Worker House he had visited assailed him.

  “I mean, what is She saying? The world is going to hell in a handbasket. War is a punishment, and if we don’t shape up, it will get worse. Well, are we shaping up?” Quirk finished his drink and waved for another.

  “Nothing’s stopping us.”

  Quirk’s third drink came, and he cupped it in both hands and leaned toward Fred.

  “What do you think of Our Lady’s university? I’m surprised you let your son go here.”

  “Really.”

  “Look, if you think this is the place we attended, forget it. Have you heard of this filthy play they’ve allowed to be put on here? What was the excuse? It wasn’t the administration that sponsored it but certain academic departments! What a crock.”

  “What got you interested in Marian apparitions?”

  “Remember Bastable?”

  Bastable! Of course. Their classmate who had become the scourge of the Notre Dame administration. Shrewd investments had earned him the leisure to spend much of his time castigating what he regarded as the slide of Notre Dame into the status of an ex-Catholic university. Bastable had moved to South Bend, the better to be near the object of his wrath, and lived in a town house overlooking the St. Joseph River, managing his investments and firing off e-mails to one administrator or another at Notre Dame. One of the great dangers of coming to South Bend was that he might run into Bastable. Running into Quirk was almost as bad.

  “Yes.”

  “We should get together with him.”

  “I can’t. Not this time.
”

  “When are you leaving?”

  Fred looked at his watch. “Right now, I’m going to bed.”

  “Have another.”

  “One’s my limit.”

  “Mineral water?”

  “Did you ever taste it?”

  Fred left the bar, crossed the lobby, and went up to his room, where he donned an overcoat and put on his beret. He took the elevator down, then went through the tunnel under Notre Dame Avenue and emerged in the McKenna Center. The outer doors were locked, of course, but only to prevent entry to the building. Fred let himself out and walked across the campus. The golden dome glowed in the lights trained on it; the clock in the tower of Sacred Heart looked moonlike in the darkness. He rounded the basilica and took the steps down to the Grotto, aflame with votive lights. It was a replica of the grotto at Lourdes, token of Father Sorin’s devotion to the Mother of God. Fred knelt and shivered through several prayers. He had intended to say a rosary, but it was simply too cold. His prayer became an apology for his weakness.

  Returning to the Morris Inn, ungloved hands thrust deep into the pockets of his overcoat, he felt himself to be a ridiculous figure. Fifty-eight years old and in many ways he still felt like an adolescent. His life seemed make-believe. Every day he read the Liturgia Horarum, he was a daily communicant, he longed to bring his life into line with the most austere ideal of the Christian life, but there remained the impediment of his vast inherited wealth.

  Bastable. Several times, Bastable had waylaid him when he came to visit Bill. The man was a crusader. Almost literally. He was amazed that Fred wasn’t a Knight of Malta.

  “I’ll put you up for it.”

  “I can’t afford it.”

  Bastable laughed. “It turned me around, Fred. We take sick people to Lourdes, you know. That’s when I first became aware of it, really.”

  Bastable had turned his interest in the shrine in a political direction. The messages of Mary at Fatima were a weapon he used against those who were betraying the Church. His public and private criticisms of Notre Dame were always put forward under the aegis of what the Blessed Virgin wanted. How could anyone resist such arguments?

  A year ago, Fred had accepted Bastable’s invitation to stop by his town house by the river. Mrs. Bastable was a comfortable overweight woman who seemed to spend the day reading jumbo paperback novels with glistening covers. But her passion was bridge. She played four days a week, leaving Bastable to grapple with the modern world. Fred wondered what he would be like now if Margie hadn’t died.

  “Don’t ask,” Bastable growled when Fred inquired about his children.

  There was a photograph of a beautiful little Chinese girl on his desk.

  “My grandchild. Adopted,” he added, and looked out at the river.

  Bastable’s reforming zeal was apparently directed only at others. He dismissed the suggestion that proximity to the campus must make daily Mass an easy matter.

  “At 11:30?” he said. “Come on.”

  Bastable reminded Fred of himself in his political phase. When Bastable wasn’t buying and selling, he was dreaming up campaigns to get the Notre Dame administration to admit their perfidy and shape up. He had known many defeats, not least with their classmates.

  “They think everything is hunky-dory. Look at all the new buildings, look at what they’ve done to the grounds, look at Warren Golf Course.”

  To keep up the level of his rage, Bastable pored over the Observer, the student newspaper, which he called the New York Times Lite. “The thing might just as well be coming out of Podunk Tech. Every stupid liberal cause is championed. And the faculty…”

  Not a happy get-together. The worst of it was that Fred came away feeling smug. There but for the grace of God go I. What was the point of all this rage at others if one made no demands upon oneself? Not so comforting a thought when he reflected that any demands he made on himself were voluntary and, however secret, theatrical. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas. He smiled, then frowned. Why hadn’t a verse from the psalms occurred to him?

  * * *

  Roger was made uneasy when Mary Alice Frangipani and Bill Fenster came to him and wanted to talk about the threatening letters that had recently come to various administrators. “And the football coach,” Mary Alice added.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Mr. Quirk suggested it would make a great story for Via Media.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t. It’s not just that the provost would like to avoid the publicity. My brother would be compromised. He has been asked to look into those threats.”

  “How can they be kept secret?”

  “Look, if you hear about them from some other source, one that doesn’t involve me or Phil, go ahead. Otherwise, I really hope you won’t write such a story.”

  They agreed—he had never doubted they would—but after they were gone, he wheeled up to his desk and made the comparison that had started dark thoughts. It seemed pretty clear that the letters pasted to the sheets of paper had been cut from an issue of Via Media. The font was the same, and each of the capital letters could be traced to a headline.

  Roger sat and mused. After all, television networks had staged battles in order to have a scoop when they covered them. There had been too many instances of events contrived with an eye to news coverage. Of course the Fourth Estate professed shock when these were revealed, but a lesson had been taught, and Roger wondered if these young campus journalists had learned it. How better to advance the influence of their paper than to print an article about those threatening messages?

  He looked again at the letters pasted to the sheet of paper. Of course anyone could have snipped those letters from the paper and concocted those messages. Those messages. It was silly to take a prank like that seriously, something he needn’t tell Phil.

  Phil had made the rounds of the recipients of the threatening letters.

  “Are they all from the same source?” Roger asked him.

  “See for yourself.”

  There was little doubt that the message on each sheet of paper had been formed from letters clipped from Via Media. The notion that the threats were an exercise in creative news would not go away.

  Phil’s account of his meeting with Oscar Wack seemed proof of the wild goose chase he was on.

  “Is he nuts or what?”

  “He teaches English.”

  “He seems to know you.”

  “I represent all that he dislikes. The amateur. I discuss books because they have given pleasure and the discussion promises greater pleasure in rereading.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Anybody can do it. Not equally well, of course, but there is no secret handshake or mystic doctrine separating the good from the best. My idea of a critic is Chesterton in his books on Dickens and Browning.”

  “What’s the other way like?”

  “You’ll have to ask Professor Wack.”

  “I don’t ever want to talk to him again.”

  “Don’t underestimate him, Phil. He’s famous in his own circles. His Foucault, Flatulence, and Fatuity won a prize.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “You don’t read a book like that. You decode it.”

  10

  Two days later the special edition of Via Media appeared, featuring a story on the conflagration in the faculty office building. The tone was arch, the story could have been a spoof, but there were pictures of the charred wastebasket, a long quotation from Lucille Goessen, and a suggestion from Izquierdo that students read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Oscar Wack preferred to make a written statement.

  The intellectual is ever under attack and nowhere more vigorously than in the university, the alleged redoubt for his ilk. A university is not a seminary or convent. Students may be unmarried but they are not celibates. The crushing suppressions of the past must be lifted. How can the mind be free when the body is not? All of us stand in solidarity with
our colleague Izquierdo. We will not be intimidated.

  Wack, O.

  That is not the way the professor had signed his statement, and he was furious when the issue came into his hand. He telephoned Bill Fenster.

  “Is this the office of the Via Media?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “You answer first.”

  “Yes.”

  “Professor Wack. Why are you mocking me? For whom are you working? Who pays for this miserable rag of a paper?” His voice mounted as he spoke, and the last question ended in registers audible only to dogs.

  “All that is made clear in the paper.”

  “That you are paid to harass the faculty?”

  “Professor, we didn’t light the fire in Professor Izquierdo’s wastebasket.”

  “Someone should light a fire to you!”

  He hung up.

  “Maybe he’ll send us a threatening message,” Bill said to Mary Alice.

  “It sounds as if he already has.”

  * * *

  It was becoming ever clearer to Bill Fenster that even a twelve- or sixteen-page paper that appears irregularly is a stern taskmaster, demanding much of one’s time. That would have been harder to take if Mary Alice weren’t every bit as conscientious as he was. The others, well, it was a volunteer job and people came and went, but there were always enough around at crucial times. Newcomers had to be warned that they weren’t interested in news.

  “I thought it was a newspaper.”

  “No, it’s a student publication. Let the others go scampering after news. We want to publish positive accounts of permanent aspects of the university. What do we know of the people who run the place, for instance?”

  He was echoing his father here, of course. He could remember when his dad told him how liberating it had been when he just stopped reading papers and magazines and watching television news. The constant reader or viewer had his curiosity or indignation or anyway much of his attention engaged by some event, for the moment the most important event in the world, only to find that item replaced by another, and that by another, on and on.