Sham Rock

by Ralph McInerny

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “Isn’t she?”

  Chadwick dismissed Sarah’s continuing anxiety about the note that had been slipped under their doors. Your days are numbered. “A prank, my dear. And a not very imaginative one.”

  Nor did Roger Knight encourage her concern. “A reminder that one’s days are numbered is scarcely a threat.”

  “It is when you print it out and slip it under people’s doors.”

  “Sarah, you have to understand the student mind.”

  “Do you?”

  “What there is of it.”

  “You don’t know it was a student.”

  He thought about it. “That’s true. Any word on the articles you sent out?”

  She shook her head. “Referees take forever, and even if they’re accepted it will be a year and more before they appear. But just an acceptance would add to my résumé.”

  Publish or perish. Publish and perish in many cases. All the standards were subject to the interpretation of members of the appointments and tenure committee. They could arbitrarily decide that certain journals were not really journals. They were like an election board after a close contest.

  Her husband, Charlie, wasn’t much help. “You can be part-time at St. Mary’s. Or Holy Cross College.”

  “Oh, Charlie.”

  He felt bad enough about having a tenured position while Sarah did piecework. From the time they had met, he had treated her as the smarter of the two. “I’m a technician, Sarah. You use your mind.”

  The letter from Speculum arrived at home. Sarah did not open it until Charlie returned, then asked him to. He blithely opened the letter, glanced at it, smiled. “Congratulations.”

  “Really?” She had already snatched the letter from him. An acceptance, and from Speculum!

  She could hardly wait to let the department chair know; the following morning she was in the departmental office before he was, half an hour before, trying to control her eagerness, trying to act blasé.

  “Very nice, very nice,” Tuttle said, reading the photocopy of the letter she had made for him. “I’ll see that the committee gets this.”

  When she left the office, there was the inevitable reaction and her spirits dropped. Tuttle hadn’t exactly jumped into the air and clicked his heels. Of course, she had no idea where he stood on her case, but he was allegedly under the influence of Braxton. Not even Braxton could deny that Speculum was as good as it gets in medieval studies.

  Chadwick’s reaction was more satisfactory. As a Thomist, he had subscribed to Speculum, and there was a shelf of ancient copies in his office. “You must give me an offprint when it appears.”

  Would he still be alive? Shame on her. Your days are numbered.

  She waited until Roger Knight came back from his afternoon class. When told her news, he looked as if he were about to embrace her, then looked sheepish. So she gave him a hug, or as much of one as she could. He made the coffee then and asked for a summary of her article.

  “I’ll print you out a copy.”

  “Good. Good.”

  Roger Knight’s one publication was his monograph on Baron Corvo, which had been the excuse for offering him the Huneker Professorship of Catholic Studies. Sarah had read it; it was a delight, but Roger was not a publishing scholar. Yet he seemed to know everything. Who had said that the academic life was now geared to mediocrity? Most scholars knew more and more about less and less. Next to Roger Knight they seemed narrow. Of course, anyone would look narrow next to Roger.

  The acceptance from Speculum drove away all her silly anxieties about the note under the door. She and Roger left together, going out to the parking lot beside Brownson. She went with him to his golf cart, where they went on talking until Roger noticed how low his vehicle seemed to be. No wonder. Someone had let the air out of all its tires.

  Sarah just looked at him. “Come, I’ll drive you home.”

  When they got to her car, they discovered that all the tires were flat.

  “What about Chadwick?” Sarah asked, all her panic returning.

  “Sarah, he cycles here from Holy Cross Village.” Chadwick’s three-wheeled cycle gave him a magic mobility that more than compensated for the hoots and stares his passage elicited.

  “Roger, it couldn’t possibly be …”

  “Coincidences do not require causes, Sarah.”

  But she could see he didn’t believe that this was a coincidence.

  The next day they learned that a tire pump had been propped against Chadwick’s door.

  9

  ALONG WITH ALL THE OTHER MEMBERS, both town and gown, the onetime self-described Old Bastards table had been cast into outer darkness by the administrative ukase that had declared the University Club expendable. The announcement had met with indignant protests. A committee had been formed to compile a report that would tell the administration what the club meant to the faculty and staff and alumni. The eventual report was the size of the Chicago telephone directory. It had no effect. The club was doomed and, on schedule, razed to make way for a monstrous new building.

  Those with a tragic view of life, those convinced that we are well advanced into the end times, perhaps found this incredible decision less surprising, if not less painful. Others were still stunned a year later. Members of the erstwhile aforementioned table averted their eyes when they came along Notre Dame Avenue and passed the neo-Soviet monstrosity that was arising on the sanctified site of the club. Most of them had avoided the campus entirely during the dark weeks when the wrecking ball smashed into the beloved building, reducing it to rubble. Now, a year later, they convened in late afternoon at Leahy’s Lounge in the Morris Inn where Murph the bartender had welcomed them, one or two at first, then others, finally the whole group together once more and once more engaged in the morose delectation of comparing the present unfavorably with the past.

  “To crime,” Armitage Shanks said, raising his glass.

  Half a dozen arthritic liver-spotted hands raised their drinks.

  “What have they done now?”

  “They?” The hearing-impaired Potts narrowed his eyes as he asked.

  “The administration.”

  “The only natural criminal class on campus.”

  Bingham gave a brief, tendentious account of the recently announced new ethics center to be built between Brownson Hall and the Grotto.

  “That’s a parking lot.”

  “It was once the site of St. Michael’s Laundry.”

  “Where will all the vice presidents, associate and assistant vice presidents, and the vast locust army of the provost’s office park?” The words rolled mellifluously off the tongue of Armitage Shanks.

  “They can be bussed in from far-flung parking lots.”

  “We’re overextended. How many buildings are under construction now?”

  Throughout the campus the great cranes of construction companies stood high in the sky, looking like prehistoric beasts.

  “They’ll go belly up,” Horvath said.

  “Have you gone by Disneyland lately?”

  This was Shanks’s way of referring to Eddy Street Commons, the vast construction project under way on the southern edge of the campus. There would be a mall with restaurants and retail stores, residences of various kinds, God knows what else, half a mile of newness to rub against the sensibilities of the Old Bastards.

  “An ethics center?” Potts cried. Horvath had written this on a napkin for him.

  “In medio stat virtus,” Shanks murmured.

  Bingham, who had taught law, seemed to relish the prospect of an economic crash, but then his late wife had once won the Powerball. National economic news was a serious matter to most of these old men, retired, living on fixed incomes pegged to the modest salaries they had earned in the days before Notre Dame described itself as a national Catholic research university.

  “They’re searching for Catholics.”

  At a table along the wall, Neil Delaney was nursing a glass of me
rlot, his eye on one of the television sets. Three hunch-shouldered regulars sat on bar stools, arguing with Murph about some sport or other. The Old Bastards had brought together several tables and commanded the center of the room.

  “The university endowment has taken a hit.”

  “Brandeis is selling off its art collection.”

  “The party’s over,” Bingham declared.

  Potts and Horvath were trying to remember the name of the alumnus who had pledged the money for the proposed ethics center.

  “Williams,” Shanks said. “David Williams. I had the boy in class.”

  “What year was he?”

  “’Eighty-nine, I think.”

  “How much did he give?”

  Bingham knew and said it out loud. Horvath tried to whistle.

  “What does he do, rob banks?”

  “He is a financial adviser.”

  The memory of Potts, in the surprising way of an old man’s memory, triggered by mention that Williams had graduated in 1989, delivered up a name. “Timothy Quinn. The student who disappeared.”

  Other memories zeroed in at this reminder, and the Old Bastards leaned toward one another, trying to piece together that long-ago episode. Timothy Quinn had vanished from the campus, and no trace of him was ever found. The names of others involved were recalled.

  “One became a Trappist.”

  “Chadwick’s son?”

  “No.” Potts closed his eyes. “Pelican. Pericolo.”

  “Pelligrino!” cried Horvath.

  “Patrick Pelligrino.”

  Shanks thought he had had him in class as well. “He wrote plays.”

  “For the football team?”

  A fateful remark. The collective discontent was diverted to discussion of the football team, and the topic of the long-ago disappearance of Timothy Quinn was tabled.

  10

  DAVE WILLIAMS DROPPED FATHER Carmody off at Holy Cross House after a silent drive from the Knights’ apartment. Before the old priest got out he said, “Lose some, win some, Dave. That money Pelligrino left you will mean a lot more to you now than it would have a year ago.”

  “You think I should drop by the foundation again?”

  “I’ll break your leg if you do. You told them half a year, take half a year.”

  “Father, I really don’t think I can take this money.”

  “I do. In a way you have no choice. Don’t forget, God has a sense of humor. You came here almost bust. You won’t be leaving that way.”

  Old men take a lot of time to get out of a car, even old men who want to appear younger than they are. Father Carmody exited with grunts and groans, got the earth settled beneath his feet, and then marched toward the entrance of the building. How different his advice was now than it had been earlier.

  “What’s money except a bunch of IOUs from people you don’t know?” he had said when they talked in his room at Holy Cross House. “Think of it as being robbed or having taken a bunch of bad debts. It’s an opportunity, Dave. Where neither rust nor moth consumes nor thief breaks in to steal. I don’t have to tell you what’s really important and what isn’t. Anyway, even broke, you’re better off than ninety percent of the people.”

  Dave had needed that. Had he ever confessed greed or avarice? Yet his whole career seemed based on them, counting on those vices in others, acquiring them himself.

  After leaving the priest at Holy Cross House, he drove to a parking lot near the Grotto and then sat on a bench looking at the replica of the shrine at Lourdes. There were hundreds of vigil lights aglow behind the image of Mary. Before her was a statue of Bernadette on her knees. He sat there comparing the gloom that had gathered around him during the past months with the view of life he had supposedly picked up as a student at Notre Dame. The financial crash seemed an external sign of his inner crumbling. He considered Father Carmody’s words. God has a sense of humor. If there was a laugh here, it was on David Williams, that was for sure. How easy it was to conjure up Pelligrino’s face, olive skin, thick black hair, almost good-looking, but something wrong with the symmetry of his face. Bags under his eyes even as a kid. Funny, Dave had considered suggesting that the new ethics center be named after Pelligrino.

  When had the annual card from Brother Joachim started coming? A Christmas card of the more saccharine sort, the briefest of notes, and always the scriptural reference, carefully lettered in Latin. Numquid narrabit aliquis in sepulchro misericordiam tuam et veritatem tuam in perditione. Psalm 87:12. The first several times, Dave had assumed it was an expression of seasonal cheer.

  “What’s it mean, Dave?” Bridget had asked.

  “I’ll look it up.”

  He did look it up, but fortunately Bridget had forgotten it. “Shall thy goodness be declared in the tomb, thy truth in the land of the dead?” What this lugubrious thought was meant to convey, Dave hadn’t a clue. Pat must be going stir-crazy in the monastery. At least it wasn’t the reference you saw on cards held up by zealots in stadiums, wanting to get the message onto TV.

  What he had heard in the Knights’ apartment made Pat’s annual card seem an accusation.

  During the months after Bridget’s death, when his mind turned on the last things, Dave had considered getting out of the rat race, simplifying his life, doing something like what Beth Hanrahan had done. Maybe he would go to Minneapolis and help her ladle out soup to derelicts. Memories of Beth had made that seem unwise. Of course, it had been only a romantic dream. Good-bye to the world. He got over it.

  After five minutes, he brought out the envelope and slowly read the bequest. It had been drawn up twelve years earlier, but Pat’s uncle had left him the money twenty years ago. It had amounted to slightly over two million dollars then. What would it be today? Despite himself, Dave began to calculate what years of even uninspired investing would have done to that base sum. The Minneapolis law firm that drew up the document had entrusted it to a local bank, but even so … and then the gold! He could feel his reluctance drain away. He felt like one of the pirates in Treasure Island. Then the dread returned. The money was a more ominous message than the scriptural passage.

  When he had pledged those millions to Notre Dame, Dave had thought that his generosity would offset the darker side of his life. Was Pat engaging in spiritual blackmail? How could he know how far Dave had drifted from the ideals of his youth, particularly since Bridget died?

  From his room at the Morris Inn he called Jay and asked him to join him for supper.

  “Dad! When did you get in?”

  “This morning.” A short silence. “I had a little business to take care of first.”

  “Hey, don’t apologize.”

  Funny kid. “Was I apologizing?”

  “There’s a girl I’d like you to meet. Can I bring her along?”

  “Of course.”

  With the girl, there would be no need to reassure Jay that everything was all right. All the gloom and doom in the news must have made his son wonder how things were with him. The fact that he hadn’t called to ask could be read either way, of course.

  He took a shower and a brief nap, forty winks as his father had called it. He decided to keep Pelligrino’s bequest in his pocket. Where rust and moth consume …

  The phone awoke him. Della. She would know that he had been on the job, buying, selling, looking for niches of safety for his clients in a volatile market. The computer he carried enabled him to conduct his business anywhere.

  “What’s up?”

  A little silence. “Briggs.”

  “We’re going to have to do something about him.”

  “I made a mistake, Dave.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “I told him you were in South Bend.”

  “So?”

  “He’s headed out there.”

  “Well, he’s going to miss me. I leave in the morning.”

  Maybe it was the effect of that crazy story Pelligrino had sent to the archives. It was a lot easier to think of Briggs coming fo
r him than it was to imagine Tim brandishing a hatchet.

  When he went downstairs, he thought of going into the bar first—he had a quarter hour before Jay and the girl were due—but instead he took a chair in the lobby, off in a corner, where he could watch people coming in. There was a wall of books behind the chair. Props. Who would read a book while sitting in the lobby? Maybe they were there to take to your room.

  The Morris Inn had been here when he was a student, not that he had often gone there. It had obviously been remodeled. Still, there was talk of replacing it with a grander hotel. Dave had stayed here with Bridget when they came for games; rooms in the Morris Inn were at a premium on game days, but he was already a significant benefactor of the university. The ache of loss had returned with a vengeance in recent months when things had gone into a spiral. There had been no one to whom he could express the fear he felt as the bottom seemed to drop out of a business that had always been on a rising line. Bridget had always been a worrywart about money. She never quite trusted the way he earned a living; it seemed so chancy to her. What was that saying? The vice of gambling and the virtue of insurance. Substitute investing. Couldn’t he just salt it away somewhere, forget about making it grow? Maybe a coffee can buried in the backyard?

  “Sweetheart, you spend the money and I’ll earn it.”

  Ho ho. Bridget had never gotten the hang of spending money, though she had enough of her own. She hated it when he bought the plane.

  “We don’t own it, not personally, Bridget.” That was technically true.

  Because Bridget hadn’t felt comfortable with affluence, she would have been a bulwark when things went bad. They never had gone bad before her cancer was diagnosed, though, and then eight months later she was dead. That should have brought the thoughts Father Carmody had suggested during their first conversation, but instead, after that brief romantic dream of chucking it all, he had thrown himself 24/7 into this business. Lately he had learned that somewhere along the line he had lost his self. His soul.