No one in the administration would take his calls any longer. His letters to the Observer were countered by half a dozen disdainful and mocking replies, most from the faculty. One insolent young woman had suggested that Hugh Bastable was an all too fair example of the alumni the university had once turned out.
To his surprise, Fred Fenster called in person. He came in out of the cold wearing a bum’s overcoat and a shapeless beret. When Florence took his wraps, there he was in a flannel shirt, a baggy sweater, and old corduroys. The man could buy and sell half his classmates, singly or collectively, and he looked as if he needed a handout.
“You got my message?”
“My, it is cold out there.”
Florence offered hot chocolate, and Fred lit up like a kid. Hugh took him off to his study, what he liked to think of as his command center. On the radio a taped Rush raved on.
“Who’s that?”
“You’re kidding.” Hugh turned it off. “Well, what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know about you, but I’m going to Florida.”
“We sold our place.”
“Oh, I rent.”
“Where?”
“Siesta Key.”
“What do you do, just sit in the sun while Rome burns?”
“I walk a lot. And read.”
Bastable shook his head. “Well, I can’t blame you for wanting to get away from here.”
“I had a nice visit, actually. I had lunch today with Roger Knight.”
“I should look him up. What’s he like?”
“My son is taking another class from him. I can see why.”
“He’s not an atheist?”
Florence came in with a cup of hot chocolate for Fred. She put Hugh’s Bloody Mary on the desk.
“I also went down to the Catholic Worker House.”
“Is that still going on?”
“Oh yes.”
“Bunch of Commies.”
Fred laughed. “What will you say if Dorothy Day is canonized?”
Hugh sought consolation in his drink. St. Dorothy Day? But he could believe it. He could believe anything now.
“Sometimes I think I’ve lived too long already.”
“You’re that ready to go?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m going to stop at Gethsemani on my way south.”
The river was all but frozen over now, and swirls of snow were blowing across the surface. The trees outside the window seemed black hands groping in the wind. It took an act of faith to think they would ever leaf again.
“You ought to join. You live like a monk.”
“You could come along.”
“Ha!”
“What do you know about Holy Cross Village?”
This was a retirement community run by the Brothers of Holy Cross, houses, apartments, terminal medical care.
“It’s right up there on top of the cliff.” Bastable pointed.
“I checked it out. Maybe that will be my monastery.”
Bastable was excited. “You mean settle here permanently? Great. Why, together we could—”
Fred took one hand away from his mug and held it up, shaking his head. “You know the most effective thing you could do?”
“What?”
“Say a novena.”
Bastable just stared at his classmate, but for all he could tell Fred was serious. Say a novena? Did he really think …
Bastable stopped the thought. Of course he believed in the efficacy of prayer. The trouble was you couldn’t count on it. You had to do things. But suddenly he felt helpless. Do what? Get into a rage daily and harangue Florence about what was wrong with the world? He had a fleeting image of what he had become, but he dismissed it.
“Okay. I’ll say a novena. What will you do?”
“I told you. I’m going to make a retreat with the Trappists.”
Bastable gave up. “You can say a few prayers to Dorothy Day.”
“Good idea.”
8
“What are you talking about?” Crenshaw demanded, when Jimmy Stewart asked if campus security had found anything interesting when they checked out Izquierdo’s office.
“The inspection of the car turned up nothing. The professor himself was of no help. But you found nothing?”
“That is all in Phil Knight’s hands.”
Jimmy thought about it, then let it go. If Crenshaw wasn’t interested, then he and Phil could find out who Oscar Wack had found examining Izquierdo’s office. That it wasn’t imaginary seemed proved by the presence of the pogo stick in the wrong office. Why had he thought of that young guy in the space-cadet helmet when Wack had described the supposed investigation going on in Izquierdo’s office?
More snow was falling. What a winter this was. Phil had asked him out to watch a game, but the weather made that less attractive. Of course he would go. The thought of watching the game alone suddenly brought home to him what a lonely life he led. Not that he was given to self-pity. It hadn’t been a shot in the arm to his self-esteem when Hazel told him she was going. He found himself unable to think of any good reason for her to stay. Her complaint was that he was too wrapped up in his work, but of course it was because they had no kids that her life was boring. He had suggested adoption, but she just made a face and wouldn’t talk about it.
When he put down the phone after talking to Crenshaw, he wondered if that was his destiny. Get his pension and then apply for a job at Notre Dame security. Any real problems were foisted off on South Bend anyway, or lately on Phil Knight. He looked around his office and thought of Oscar Wack. Is that the way he looked to other people, a quirky bachelor? Geez. He got up, put on a storm coat, and headed for the elevator. He would waste the time before going to Phil’s in a bar on Grape Road.
Downstairs he ran into Piazza, stamping snow from his shoes and looking around as if trying to keep time to the Muzak. He was in uniform; he preferred being in uniform, saying it saved on clothes. Piazza was always being kidded about using the prowler he took home as the family car. But he couldn’t have got half his family in the thing, there being seven little Piazzas. They kept him on patrol duty because it was safer and because that was what his wife wanted. Sitting at a desk would have kept him out of harm’s way, but Piazza would have none of it.
“Look, I was a clerk in the army. I had my fill of that.”
He looked as if he had had his fill of lots of things, a real roly-poly. But then his wife was a terrific cook.
“Come watch the game tonight, Phil.”
“I wish I could, Lou.” And he did. It was hectic at the Piazzas’, with all those kids, but the place was what a home should be.
“Big date?”
“I’ll never tell.”
“Ho ho.”
Outside and through the snow to his car. Had Lou been kidding? Did others think he led an interesting life, now that Hazel had gone to California? There were times when he really missed her, even the nagging. He should give her a call. Of course she was still single. They had been married at St. Hedwig’s, a big Polish wedding with a huge supper and dancing until all hours. How could you ever feel unmarried after a shindig like that? And of course they were Catholics. At first he had thought that Hazel would miss him the way he missed her and they would get together again. That was still possible, but the more years you added to a separation the more likely it was it would go on. Separation. That was all her pastor, old Senski, would permit her, and he had been against that. It had been something to watch the expression on the priest’s face while Hazel tried to explain how awful her life was.
“You think I never get bored? What if I decided to just toss in my cards and go?”
“Well, at least you get to Florida in the winter.”
“Take her to Florida,” Senski had advised Jimmy.
“I don’t want to go to Florida. I want a life of my own.”
“Why no kids?”
“It’s not my fault.” She broke down then, crying like
a kid. It broke Jimmy’s heart to see a grown woman do that. From that point on, Senski’s sympathy was with Jimmy, but that meant he was going to let Hazel call it a separation and head for her sister’s in Santa Monica.
It took him fifteen minutes to scrape the ice off the windows. That was probably the most exercise he’d had all week. Maybe he would get a pogo stick and bounce around the house.
He had a couple of lonely beers before heading for the Knights’, where Roger had made enough goulash for John Madden. Phil had laid in a supply of Guinness for the game, and during the hyped-up intro, with the set muted, Jimmy asked Phil if he remembered that kid on campus security that had been a help when they were on the Kittock murder. But it was Roger who remembered.
“Larry. Larry Douglas.”
9
Quirk had asked to audit Roger’s class on F. Marion Crawford, and Roger had countered with the suggestion that Quirk give a guest lecture.
“I never taught a day in my life.”
“It’s just a matter of discussing with other people some topic you know better than they do.”
“I’m not making any headway with the provost.”
Father Carmody felt that he was getting a secondhand run-around himself insofar as Quirk had been turned over to him. Now, as a result of the dilly-dallying, they had lost the chance to put the proposal to Fred Fenster. Of course Mendax in development had checked out Fenster and came back whistling and rolling his eyes. Neither Quirk nor Father Carmody had needed such confirmation. Father Carmody had of course remembered Fenster. He had been very active in campus politics on the liberal side and kept it up after graduation. He could afford it. Carmody knew Manfred’s father, a gentleman of the old school, as only his friends would have put it. All the confidence of the self-made man. But he had been generous to Notre Dame so long as you listened first to his extended exposition of what was wrong with civilization. Unlike others, he had never included Notre Dame in his negative estimate of the modern world. Father Carmody could still remember old Fenster’s eye damp with sentiment when he returned for home football games and was included in the select group entertained in the presidential aerie on the fourteenth floor of the library.
“Roger,” Father Carmody said, bringing the Knights up to speed, “the problem is that Quirk wants to be generous with someone else’s money. I suggested that he pledge something himself, to get the ball rolling. He thinks he’s being stalled.”
“Maybe he can’t afford it.”
“Ha. He’s no Fenster, but he’s got plenty.”
“I’m surprised he hasn’t just gone ahead and bought the villa in Sorrento.”
“He tried to.”
“He did?”
Carmody nodded. “Given the use to which it had been put in recent years, they want to turn it over to a religious order. So he asked, how about the greatest Catholic university in the world? They liked that.”
“But he could have bought it himself?”
“I know what you’re thinking, Roger. Why not just fork over the purchase money to Notre Dame and leave Fenster out of it? Sometimes I thinks he wants the project to fail.”
“Has he been generous to the university?”
“Not lately.”
Notre Dame alumni all looked alike at first, and then they fell into types and subspecies and ultimately into fierce singularity, no two really alike. Roger had classified Quirk among the nostalgics, and there was something to be said for that. His voice could get husky when he spoke of his time on campus. But he had a lot in common with what Roger thought of as alumni-penitents, men and women who bewailed the fact that they had wasted their undergraduate years. Some of these, like Quirk apparently, resolved to do belatedly what they had not done in their youth. But F. Marion Crawford, fascinating as Roger himself found the author, was an odd handle to take hold of initially. Then Roger began to suspect that Quirk’s knowledge of the author was fairly superficial. He hadn’t actually read much by Crawford. He had found Ave Roma Immortalis tough going, and of the novels he had read he preferred The Ralstons!
“Fred only reads saints and mystics,” Quirk had answered when Roger asked him what headway he was making with Fenster. That had made Roger curious and he had gladly accepted Fred Fenster’s invitation to lunch. And now the mysterious alumnus was gone.
“That’s the way it always is,” Bill said. “He shows up without warning, and then one day he calls to say so long.”
“How often does he come?”
“A couple of times a year. His life is pretty much his own, you know.”
Mary Alice said, “I think he really liked Via Media. Except for the symposium on abortuaries.”
The question was, can force be used to protect innocent life, and one or two participants had been all for marching on the clinics and forcibly shutting them down. Even burning them down. The consensus had been against that, thank God. But to the zealous young it seemed a counsel of accommodation to recommend the slow path of legislative reform. The trouble was that the flood of abortions had not been begun by the passage of any law. Roger could share the anguish, who could not?
“What did your father say?”
“He said that in his experience any attempt to change others usually led to something worse.”
“He suggested prayer and penance,” Mary Alice said. “No one could stop us from doing that.”
Quirk, on the other hand, applauded the more fiery contributions to the symposium. Not that he wanted to defend the position.
“It’s just a gut feeling,” he told Roger.
“Civil disobedience. Like Dorothy Day?”
That was sly, of course. Roger had gotten some sense of where Quirk stood on the Catholic Worker movement when Quirk mentioned that Fred Fenster had paid the local group a visit.
When eventually Quirk did show up for Roger’s class on Crawford, he sat in a corner and said nothing, following the discussion but not taking part. He stayed around afterward, and it seemed that he had come to the class largely to talk with Roger.
“Did you know there’s an atheist on the faculty?”
“You’ve been reading the paper.”
“I can’t believe it. It’s not just what he might or might not believe himself. He preaches it in class.”
Roger disliked feeling this kind of indignation. Quirk was puffed up with rectitude, a defender of the faith. Well, no need to doubt his sincerity. But Roger could understand why Fred Fenster had withdrawn into quietism.
10
Oscar Wack gnashed his teeth in indignation. The story in the campus paper featuring Izquierdo should have been the kiss of death. Instead he was being hailed as a hero of academic freedom. The intrepid atheist. And he had stolen Wack’s thunder! That hurt. That and the realization that he himself would not have had the guts to bare his soul to a student reporter. Now, of course, the burning of Izquierdo’s car was seen as an attack on a man who had the courage of his convictions.
How accommodating could the university be? Did they imagine that a Holocaust denier would be feted at Brandeis? You could understand all the waffling about The Vagina Monologues and other activities of campus gay groups. To oppose those would invite being pilloried by the national media. That would have been a real clash of creeds. And Notre Dame blinked. But for God’s sake, how could you sit still for a professor who used his classroom to argue atheism and mock Catholicism? If that wasn’t rock bottom, Wack didn’t understand the faith of his fathers. Yet Izquierdo was a hero.
Huddled at the desk in his office, muttering to himself, Wack asked half aloud when that blimp of a Roger Knight and his obsequious minions would take on Izquierdo. After Izquierdo, Roger Knight was Wack’s greatest complaint. So he had earned a Princeton doctorate when he was still using a teething ring; he had never held a teaching position, and his reputation reposed on a single monograph, the incredibly successful little book on Baron Corvo. That was the unkindest cut of all. Wack had long nursed a secret passion for the writings of Corvo.
Not the sort of thing you could admit in the department, of course. Wack had every biography ever written on the tragic author, beginning with Symonds’s Quest for Corvo. The man had fascinated many, but they were all outside the walls of academe. No matter. When his disbelief wobbled, Wack could curl up with Hadrian VII and feed his disdain for the church that regarded what was delicately called his sexual orientation as sinful. It had been the thought of subjecting himself to the humiliation of the confessional that had opened Wack’s mind to the flaws in any proof for the existence of God and liberated him from the faith.
Of course his personal life was concealed behind the armor of indirection. Never anything overt! Stolen holidays, trying to live out his convictions in the Caribbean sunlight but always hampered by the repressive beliefs of his youth, that was as much as he dared. On campus Wack was as chaste as a Trappist and kept all crusaders at arm’s length. Izquierdo, of course, was flamboyantly heterosexual, and Wack was not misled by the man’s lip service to sexual liberation in the fullest sense. Izquierdo had guessed his secret, he was sure of it, though the taunting was always ambiguous enough. Item, his teasing of Wack about Lucy Goessen.
“Of course I know the impediment,” Izquierdo had said, his eyebrows dancing. Wack was furious. Was this a reference to his lisp?
“She’s married.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Isn’t that what holds you back?”
Oh, the homophobic beast. But it had drawn him closer to Lucy. How buoyant she had been when she displayed her agility on the pogo stick that had somehow ended up in Wack’s office. That memory led on to the memory of that late-night investigation of Izquierdo’s office. He sat back, and some of his anguish left him.
The Letter Killeth Page 9
