The Letter Killeth

by Ralph McInerny

  “Where did you go to school?”

  “St. Joe High.”

  “I meant college.”

  “I was turned down.”

  “Where?”

  “Here.”

  “Geez.”

  On Henry’s second visit, Izquierdo developed the theory that Henry was better off as he was. “Your problem is you really want to use your mind. That disqualifies you. Students are engaged in job preparation. The degree is a ticket, that’s all. So-called higher education has become a fraud. Maybe it always was.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “To dig I am not able, to beg I am ashamed. Plus, the pay is great.”

  For all that, Izquierdo’s negative attitude toward Notre Dame rivaled Henry’s own.

  “I suppose you’re Catholic?” he asked Henry.

  “I was baptized.”

  “Who wasn’t? This is supposed to be the premier Catholic university in the land. Give me a break.”

  Izquierdo had put aside the faith of his fathers.

  “You’re an agnostic?”

  “Ha. No halfway measures for Raul. None of that can stand up to what we now know.”

  “What’s that?”

  Izquierdo looked sly. “You think I think that what I just said is true.”

  “Don’t you?”

  He shook his head. “The thing is, it isn’t false either. Look, there’s no there there. No objective world to underwrite our sentences and make them true or false. The world is part of what we fabricate, not independent of it. Are you following me?”

  * * *

  This was exciting stuff, until Henry thought of the sentence “I was turned down by Notre Dame.” But talking with Izquierdo fed his conviction that he was as smart as any student. Smarter. This wobbled a bit when he found out that Larry Douglas had a secret passion for poetry, but of the obvious sort.

  “Why didn’t you go to college, Larry?”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “All it is is job preparation. I’ve got a job.”

  Larry liked that. Why didn’t they double-date some weekend?

  “I broke up with my girl.” There had never been a girl. All that study in high school had given Henry the reputation of being a nerd.

  “My girl will fix you up.”

  Why not?

  Larry’s girl was named Kimberley, a real doll, but Henry got pudgy Laura, who worked in the office of campus security. She kept telling him she hadn’t wanted to come, she was only there to give Larry a bad time.

  “What for?”

  “Her. I was his girl for months, then she came along.”

  “Maybe we should trade.”

  Larry was driving, and he squirmed at the suggestion, but Kimberley turned and gave Henry a nice smile.

  “Larry says you’re quite a reader.”

  “Oh, a little poetry.”

  “Really?” Larry had given him the story about Kimberley’s susceptibilities.

  “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate,” he murmured.

  “What’s that?”

  “Dante. No translation really captures the poem.”

  Henry knew two or three other phrases from the Comedy, but the one did the trick. When they got to the sports bar, Kimberley was as much with Henry as was Laura, who snuggled up to Larry.

  “What other poets do you like?”

  “I was just going to ask you who your favorites were.”

  Larry was following this exchange with a desolate expression. Laura had him pretty well pinned in a corner of the booth, and if Kimberley was just across from him, she had turned to face Henry.

  “I suppose you think Emily Dickinson is too feminine.”

  “No woman can be too feminine for me.”

  “Hey,” Larry said, “how about that fire in the professor’s wastebasket?”

  “Let’s not talk business,” Henry said, but Laura was all for the suggested topic.

  “And he didn’t even get one of those threatening letters,” she said.

  “What threatening letters?” Henry wanted to know.

  “That’s confidential,” Larry said to Laura.

  “Oh pooh. It’s all they talk about in the office.”

  “Tell me,” Henry urged Laura, and Kimberley turned pouting away.

  So he got the official story. The provost, the dean of Arts and Letters, Professor Wack in English, and Charlie Weis, the football coach. Henry listened as if this were all news to him. He would have to tell Izquierdo of the reaction to those messages, if he didn’t already know. Izquierdo talked as if he wouldn’t mind firebombing Wack’s office himself.

  “Look,” Larry said, assuming a tone of authority. “They’re just a prank.”

  “So why the secrecy?”

  “It would still be bad publicity. Who wants such a story about Notre Dame to get around?”

  Who indeed? Henry pushed closer to Kimberley. “‘I’m nobody, who are you?’”

  “‘I’m nobody, too.’” And she squeezed his arm. “I love that poem.”

  14

  The story in Via Media about the fire in the wastebasket of Professor Izquierdo set the Old Bastards’ table aroar with excitement. Armitage Shanks felt vindicated. When he had passed on the rumor that threatening letters were circulating on the campus, he had been scorned.

  “I told you so,” he said with all the satisfaction the phrase conveyed.

  “He probably dropped a cigarette in the wastebasket.”

  “You can’t smoke in Decio.”

  “You mean you’re forbidden to,” Goucher corrected. “Prohibitions don’t confer incapacity.” Goucher had taught philosophy for forty-two years, without great success.

  “He blames a colleague. Some idiot named Wack.”

  A wide smile replaced the vague expression on Potts’s face. “Remember when we locked the dean in his private john?”

  The faculty had resented the fact that the dean had a private washroom, and locking him into it had seemed condign punishment. Chuckles went round the table. Debbie, the hostess, took an empty chair, singing softly, “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”

  “Is this a confession?”

  “Are you a priest?”

  “What do you hear about the conflagration in the wastebasket?”

  “Just what I read in the papers.”

  “Maybe that’s how they’ll get rid of this place, burn it down.”

  Debbie put her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  Armitage Shanks developed his theory that they had entered a period analogous to the phony war that had been prelude to World War II. War had been declared, but nothing much happened for months. He began to develop the parallel—the threat to the club, the countering protest, now long silence—but no one listened.

  “Who was dean at the time?”

  “At what time?”

  “When he got locked in the john.”

  “Sheedy?”

  “No, it was after him. Sheedy was all right. He was always hiding in the back room of the museum where he could read.”

  “He had one assistant dean.”

  “Devere Plunkett.”

  “Have you seen the present setup? I think the dean-to-student ratio is smaller than faculty-to-student. And they’re all living like Oriental satraps. I’m surprised no one has firebombed the place.”

  “He was one of those threatened.”

  “How do you know these things?”

  “I make them up.”

  “Guess who I ran into yesterday,” Plaisance said.

  “In your car?”

  “An old student. He recognized me, I didn’t recognize him. Quirk. He asked me why no one had told him about F. Marion Crawford while he was here.”

  There was a long silence. Finally Shanks said, “Crawford?”

  “A novelist,” Bingham said, emerging from wherever he went when he tuned out. “Late nineteenth century. I haven’t heard him mentioned for years.”
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  “You haven’t heard anything for years.”

  “What?”

  Plaisance reclaimed the chair. “He wanted to know what I thought of present-day Notre Dame.”

  “Who?”

  “Quirk.”

  “Is that a real name?” Armitage Shanks wanted to know.

  15

  Because of the weather, Greg Walsh, assistant archivist, offered to meet Roger halfway, so they were settled at a table in the pandemonium of the Huddle. A huge grainy television screen overlooked the dining area but was ignored; perhaps it was the watcher rather than the watched. Greg managed to say this, despite his impediment, but then Roger Knight was one of the few people with whom he could speak fluently.

  “Big Brother.” Roger laughed. “My brother Phil, that is. Can you keep a secret?”

  “Could I tell one, is the question.”

  Roger’s many references to his enormous size made it easy to refer to one’s own disability.

  “Several administrators, the football coach, and an English professor have received threatening notes.”

  Greg nodded. “I heard.”

  “You did?” Roger sat back. “Well, so much for its being a secret. Where did you hear?”

  “There is an alumnus named Quirk on campus who drops by the archives almost every day.”

  “Quirk. Of course.”

  “You know him.”

  “I’ve met him. He professes to have an interest in F. Marion Crawford, but all he talks about is his villa in Sorrento.”

  “He wanted to see any contemporary accounts of Crawford’s visit here. He seemed to think all our visitors were Catholics and that the idea was to promote loyalty to our side. Sort of like football, I guess.”

  “He must have been reading George Shuster’s little book.”

  “He didn’t know it.”

  “But you told him of it.”

  “I’m not so sure he reads a lot, Roger.”

  “Early retirement is a mixed blessing.”

  “I’d like to try it.”

  “No you wouldn’t.”

  Roger put a hand on his friend’s arm. Greg had come by a circuitous route to his position in the Notre Dame archives. He had a doctorate in English and a law degree, but his speech impediment had impeded either a teaching or a legal career, so he had turned to library science and ended as perhaps the most versatile and learned archivist in the land. For the most part this light was hidden under the bushel of his stammer, but with Roger he was able to release wit and wisdom that had long been inaudible. He knew the Notre Dame archives like, in the phrase, the back of his hand.

  “Did he ever explain why he is interested in F. Marion Crawford, Roger?”

  “Rather than any number of other writers? No. It seems to have been a random choice. One of the novels found in a secondhand bookstore, I guess. But I really didn’t press him on it. It is the villa that most excites him.”

  “What do the archives have on Crawford?”

  Greg put a printout on the table. “Not much really interesting. But after all, a single visit.”

  “Everything he published is in the library.”

  “Well, as you know, he was the most popular author of his day.”

  “And the first who became wealthy by writing.”

  Roger himself approached F. Marion Crawford as a publishing phenomenon, perhaps the first in the country’s history, although it was difficult to think of Crawford as an American novelist. He had spent very few years of his life in the United States, having been born in Rome and gone to India before he visited his uncle Sam Howe and his aunt Julia Ward Howe; two more quintessential Americans, or at least Yankees, it would be difficult to find. Most of Crawford’s novels had foreign settings, Italy as often as not, but Roger had found An American Politician interesting if only because it recalled the time when senators had been elected by state legislators. It did not bear comparison to Trollope’s The American Senator, but his history of Rome showed an easy erudition, as did his study of Pope Leo XIII. It was Roger’s suggestion that the more typical novels—the Saracinesca trilogy—be read as deliberate alternatives to the theories of fiction of Henry James and William Dean Howells. Crawford was a professed romantic, for whom fiction commented on the human situation, not by seeking the most realistic contemporary setting, but rather by employing the exotic. It wasn’t necessary to choose between the two schools, as if one were right and the other wrong. Best to take each novel by itself and analyze the enjoyment it gave. The fact that the two literary adversaries, and friends, James and Crawford had both lectured at Notre Dame fascinated, and it was disappointing that there were such scant records of the two occasions.

  As with a number of his other enthusiasms, Roger’s interest in Crawford had been triggered by coming upon shelves of his books in the Hesburgh Library. How wonderful to discover a hitherto unheard-of author with a shelf, sometimes several shelves, full of his books. And he could always count on Greg Walsh either to have anticipated the enthusiasm or to joyfully take it up at Roger’s behest.

  Roger indicated the things on the list Greg had brought that he would like to see.

  “I’m not as mobile as usual with all this snow.”

  “I’ll bring photocopies around to your place.”

  So they left the Huddle by the east door. Roger’s golf cart was parked just outside, and a uniformed young man, his bicycle propped on its stand, was looking it over. He turned when Roger and Greg came up.

  “Is this your vehicle?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “You can’t park here.”

  Roger hunted for and found his permit. “I don’t like to just leave it hanging on the cart.”

  The young man now studied the permit. The task might have been easier if he took off his dark glasses. Roger said, “I thought you were Larry Douglas.”

  He took off the dark glasses. “Henry Grabowski.” He handed Roger his permit. “This seems all right.”

  He wheeled away, and Roger and Greg sat in the cart, continuing their conversation. Ten minutes later, there was a tremendous booming sound, and Greg ran to the walk to look toward the sound.

  When they came around the library, it was to see an automobile burning brightly in a No Parking zone.

  PART TWO

  1

  “Was it insured?”

  Even before the odious Wack, feigning sympathy, had asked this question, Izquierdo had put two and two together. That his colleague was nuts was a given, but who would have thought he was a pyromaniac? First the stupid stunt with the wastebasket and now this. Izquierdo, his unbuttoned coat pulled tightly about him, stamping his unrubbered feet in the snow, stared at the flaming carcass of the car on which he still owed two more years of payments.

  “Against being set on fire?”

  “Maybe the wiring.” Wack’s glasses were steamed over, and he wore an idiotic smile. Maybe he was just freezing to death.

  The explosion had emptied Decio and Malloy, bringing professors through the snow to the blazing car. Izquierdo had known at once that it was his, the conviction encouraged by the way Wack loped along beside him. How do you set a car on fire? How would a zombie like Wack know?

  “It’s a car like yours, Raul,” said Lucy Goessen, joining them.

  “It is mine.”

  “Oh my God.” She moved closer. “I’ll take you home.”

  Her place? His place? He had to be careful with Lucy. She had struck up a big friendship with Pauline, Raul’s wife, and now Izquierdo got secondhand reports of what went on in Decio all day. He hadn’t told Pauline about the fire in his wastebasket, it made him look foolish, but she had got a dramatic account from Lucy.

  “You never tell me anything!”

  “It’s hard to get a word in.”

  Not wholly false. Pauline had a government job, downtown, dealing with drooling oldsters confused about Medicare and Medicaid. She filled his ear with pathetic tales over the dinner table, real appetizers, but as long a
s she was talking he didn’t have to listen. He could imagine life as a long trek toward the office where Pauline worked, signing up for Medicare, on the dole at last, just when your days were numbered. Lucy’s offer brought home to him what the immediate future would be like. They were down to one car, the Hummer Pauline had bought on eBay for a song.

  “Hum a few bars.”

  “Oh ha. You’re just jealous.”

  The reason Raul’s car made such a nice fire was that it was an old, very old Corvette, all plastic. The fireman poured some kind of foam on the fire; campus security urged the onlookers to back up. Lucy wanted to know if Raul was going to tell the firemen or the security men or someone that it was his car. He shook his head. A delayed reaction came over him, a wave of melancholy memories of what that car had meant to him, the playboy professor, devil-may-care corruptor of youth. But the fun of being the unintelligible representative of continental theories had diminished because of the rivalry of Wack. At least Izquierdo knew it was a game; Wack preached nonsense with the conviction of Cotton Mather.

  They began to walk back to Decio, Izquierdo bracketed by Lucy and Wack, his good and bad angels. Wack looked blue with cold and his teeth chattered. Weren’t pyromaniacs supposed to get some kind of perverse thrill from observing their handiwork? Oscar looked immersed, psychologically let us say, in the icy bottom of the Inferno. The burning of the car took on Dantesque overtones, fire and ice both. Lucy held the door for him and he went into the warmth of Decio. The gallant Wack insisted Lucy precede him. She shoved him inside and followed.

  “I have coffee made.”

  “Good,” Wack said. Lucy just looked at him.

  The coffee Lucy gave them in Styrofoam cups must have been made that morning, but it was too hot to taste anyway. She went on about her coffeemaker. It didn’t turn itself off automatically and sometimes she forgot to do it and in the morning, oh the smell, and the cakey gunk at the bottom of the pot.

  “I normally don’t drink coffee,” Wack told her.

  “Just abnormally?”

  Wack looked at him malevolently. “On special occasions.”

  “Whenever a colleague’s car is set on fire?”

  “Do you think someone did it?” Lucy was astounded.