Sham Rock

by Ralph McInerny

  “How many books do you own, Casey?”

  “I never counted them.”

  Casey showed him the cot in the third bedroom. “You can pretend you’re Brother Joachim.”

  So there was his opening, if he wanted it. “He gave some stuff to the Notre Dame archives.”

  “They’ve asked for my papers.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Casey laughed. “That was my reaction. I didn’t know anyone there was following my career.”

  “You can’t walk through an airport without being reminded.”

  “No kidding.” Casey grinned as if he were surprised that he had millions of readers.

  Downstairs again, Casey opened the refrigerator. “I have beer.”

  “Are you having one?”

  “It’s my reward for finishing my daily pages.”

  They took their beer out onto a veranda with a nice view of the Gulf.

  “Casey, you’ve got it good.”

  “You said it was a dump.”

  “Envy. Do you ever spend any money?”

  “That’s Peaches’s department.”

  “How is she?”

  “Wait and see. What did Pat give to the archives?”

  “Remember Quinn?”

  Casey had to think. “Our missing classmate. I wonder what happened to him.”

  “Pat seems to be suggesting that he’s buried by the Log Chapel.”

  “The Log Chapel.” Casey shook his head. He had the look of an alumnus about to start remembering the good old days.

  “A boulder marks the spot.”

  Still Casey did not react. Instead he said, “Pat could have become a writer, Dave. He already was one. I wonder why he didn’t keep at it. How many years before he went into the monastery?”

  Dave let it go. Maybe Casey’s was the right reaction to Pat Pelligrino’s veiled suggestion that Dave had killed Timothy Quinn. Where he should have headed, during his frantic peregrinations, was Gethsemani Abbey to ask Pat what the hell he was trying to do with that story, with the bequest. The fact was, he dreaded such an encounter.

  “So you’re selling your place?” Casey asked.

  “Want to buy it? I’ll throw in a boat.”

  “I thought you were closing on the condo.”

  “It fell through. I was practically giving it away, and they wanted another reduction.”

  “This is no time to sell a house. Ask Peaches.”

  The big surprise was that Peaches was pregnant. She was maybe ten years younger than Casey, so that wasn’t the surprise. It was the thought of his own son, Jay, a student at Notre Dame, that hit him, and here was Casey expecting his first child.

  “As far as I know.”

  Peaches stuck out her tongue at him. “So the deal on the house fell through,” she said.

  “Why don’t you two buy it? If I’m going to be robbed, I’d rather be robbed by friends.”

  “We’re happy where we are.”

  “How’s the realty business?”

  “The market is glutted. It’s a good time to buy, but buyers are scarce.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “How’s this slump affecting you, Dave?” Casey asked.

  They were at table in the Columbia Restaurant on St. Armand’s Circle on Lido Key. The place was full; no sign of a slump here. Casey poured the last of the wine and ordered another bottle.

  “Casey!”

  “Peaches, think of it as a class reunion. It’s our duty to get bombed.”

  “Then I’m driving.”

  “Of course you are. And I’ll take care of the approach shots.” His eyebrows danced like Groucho’s.

  “Do you still golf, Casey?”

  “Only twice a week.”

  “You must be looking forward to retirement.”

  “I’m looking forward to Junior.”

  They drank to that. They drank to lots of things. Dave went back with them to Siesta Key and his cot in the third bedroom, sleeping in his shorts, feeling like an undergraduate again. He would check out of the motel in the morning.

  13

  ROGER KNIGHT WAS IN A MEDITATIVE mood, his thoughts crowding one another for position, all of them having to do with the materials Greg Walsh had received at the archives, with Father Carmody’s suggestion that those materials be consigned to the dusty oblivion of the archives and forgotten, and with David Williams’s odd reaction to the news that he was the recipient of a regal bequest from a former classmate, now a Trappist monk, who moreover had committed to paper a supposedly fictional account of the disappearance of a classmate, his rival for a St. Mary’s girl. The spot where the hatchet was supposedly buried might contain something more gruesome. Roger had told Jay that he had met his father.

  “He’s giving a building to Notre Dame. A new ethics center,” Jay said.

  “We already have an ethics center.”

  “But they don’t have a building.”

  To Roger the proposed building meant being deprived of a parking space for the golf cart in which he got around campus. Ah, the convenience of being able to wheel almost to his office door, take a few steps involving only one stair, and a minute later lower himself into the welcome embrace of his huge specially constructed desk chair.

  Jay was difficult to understand. He had come to Roger’s seminar as the guest of the lovely Amanda, and he had hardly settled in before he began to ask questions, doubtless meant to impress her. Jay had that strange confidence of the almost illiterate, a philosophy major—but that seemed redundant. His manner was that of an amused onlooker for whom Roger and what he had to say seemed to constitute evidence of some crime. It was tempting to make Jay the target of the discontent he felt at the loss of his parking space.

  There is a kind of student whose curiosity bespeaks incredulity, as if any response to a question would add to the ridiculousness of what was being discussed. So it had been with Roger’s account of the ancient theory of the elements and their origin in the pre-Socratics. Empedocles had summed it up in his theory of the four elements, fire, air, earth, and water, with love and strife to generate activity, but Roger had driven the theory back to Thales and water, Anaximenes and air. Heraclitus and fire. Roger had suggested continuity with the modern periodic table of elements.

  “Our current view,” he had remarked. “Perhaps destined to go the way of these ancient views.”

  “Tell us about air,” Jay had urged, and Roger, feeling manipulated, obliged to feed Jay’s skepticism. Doubtless he had overstated the resemblance between those ancient views and the table students of chemistry nowadays memorized.

  “The theory is essentially the same. However many, there is an alphabet from which the things of our experience are composed.”

  Jay Williams smiled with tolerant incredulity, and Roger felt pusillanimous in noting Amanda’s impatience with her admirer’s attitude.

  She had sought him out, apologetic. “I thought Jay would enjoy the course.”

  “And so he does.”

  “He’s a philosophy major,” she said, as if in exculpation.

  It was the fact that the father, David Williams, was a financial adviser that had captured Roger’s attention.

  “You must explain the current chaos to me,” Roger had said to him.

  “I wish I could.”

  “I suppose this has affected your profession.”

  David Williams’s eyes had lifted dramatically. But then, in his student days, he had been a regular feature on the stage of Washington Hall.

  “Tell me about Brother Joachim,” Roger had suggested. This was before he had insisted that David Williams read the confessional story written by Williams’s old roommate, now Brother Joachim of Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky.

  “Brilliant,” David had said. “The star of our class. You should read the plays he wrote, as a sophomore and junior. Incredible.”

  “Behind the Bricks,” Father Carmody had said. “A tour de force.”

  Greg Walsh had une
arthed a copy of the play from the archives, and Roger read it with fascination. There was an odd triangulation at work here: David Williams and his classmates of yore, David Willliams in his present plight—Father Carmody had told Roger of the troubles in Williams’s financial empire—and his son, Jay, with the commendable Amanda.

  “Your name is a gerundive,” he told her.

  “Explain.”

  “She who must be loved.”

  No sooner had he said it than he felt embarrassed. Not that any woman student of his had ever misunderstood his chivalrous attitude toward the gentler sex. Roger thought in such phrases, with all the earnestness of the celibate. Phil had never married, and, as for Roger, he felt as eligible as Dr. Johnson for the role of swain. Call it sublimation, call it what you will, his regard for the female of the species, young, middle-aged, or mature, amounted to an idealization. Woman as the muse of man, half angel, a suggestion of a better world. The earthiest of poets had felt this, and Roger, no poet, felt it, too.

  “Jay is your task,” he said to Amanda. “You must be his Beatrice.”

  “I’ve been thinking about the disappearance of Timothy Quinn,” Roger said to Father Carmody.

  He had picked the old priest up at Holy Cross House, and they had gone to Leahy’s in the Morris Inn, where Murph the bartender had some sense of Father Carmody’s former eminence on campus and treated him accordingly.

  “Courvoisier, Murph. In a snifter.”

  Murph looked mournfully at Roger, expecting, and getting, his request for a Diet Coke.

  “What do you want to know, Roger?”

  “Tell me the details about his disappearance. The newspaper accounts raise so many questions, and of course Brother Joachim’s story raises more.”

  Father Carmody shrugged that off. “There’s little to tell. He was carousing with fellow students in downtown South Bend, left early and alone, and was never seen again.”

  “Except by Pelligrino.”

  “The story? It’s fiction, Roger.”

  “What efforts were made to find him?”

  “If money could have done it he would have been found. I tried to persuade his aunt that the expenditure was pointless.”

  “Pointless.”

  “The boy was dead. I was certain of that from the beginning.”

  “Why?”

  “Why was I certain? Experience. We have, thank God, had few such instances, but disappearances were always resolved by dissipation, accident, whatever, but almost always death. It is not easy for somebody to become nobody.”

  “So the search was ended.”

  “Eventually.”

  “What family was there?”

  “Of the Quinns? Innumerable, if you spread wide enough a net. None, if you mean immediate. The aunt who survived him.”

  “What was she like?”

  Father Carmody inhaled the vapors from the snifter that Murph had placed before him and smiled. “You assume I knew her.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Yes. Her husband and I were in the seminary together.”

  “The seminary!”

  “Oh, he was never ordained, Gerry Quinn. Sometimes I think he was too good to be a priest. Don’t quote me. In a seminary, a man who scrupulously keeps the rule is an oddball. A holy oddball. His very conscientiousness tells against him. Not that anyone would question a man’s vocation because he was faithful to the rule. It doesn’t work that way. In any case, he was let go. He took tonsure and some minor orders, and that was that.”

  “What did he do when he left the seminary?”

  “Married a wife and lived happily ever after. He was dead when his nephew disappeared, but the widow was devoted to Timothy.”

  “And spared no expense to find her disappeared nephew.”

  “It was as if her purpose in life had been torn from her.”

  “What about the girl, Beth Hanrahan?”

  “A saint.” Father Carmody sipped his brandy. “An uncomfortable saint. Do you know of Dorothy Day?”

  Roger nodded.

  “Like that. Not a barrel of laughs, but good as gold.”

  Father Carmody’s effort to think the story Joachim had sent was pure fiction seemed a willing suspension of belief. Joachim had used the actual names of himself and his friends.

  Two days later, a sheet of paper was slipped under the doors of three offices in Brownson. Roger read his with a tolerant smile.

  An Ancient Poet

  New to Me

  And why should I have known him?

  X as in Unknown was He

  Intent to Read the Universe

  Matter and All the Rest,

  Encoded His Thought in Verse

  Numbered Lines His Sly Bequest

  Each Can Read Them as He Will

  Some with a Special Skill.

  14

  MAME CHILDERS, NÉE SAYERS, LIVED in an apartment on the Upper East Side that occupied the entire twelfth floor. Huge. A wonderful place in which to entertain, dinners, cocktail parities, informal little seminars with artists, writers, politicians. Financial advisers. She threw back her head and directed smoke at the ceiling. When she bent over an ashtray to stub out her cigarette, her eyes went around the vast, beautifully furnished living room. Not much of a view, unless you liked reservoirs and the endless construction work on the Museum of Modern Art. She didn’t have to close her eyes to imagine Dave Williams on his feet before that bookcase, speaking with quiet authority to the half-dozen people she had gathered to hear him. How possessive she had felt. And with good reason.

  “Who advises you now?” he had asked her over lunch the first time they had seen one another since South Bend. Mame felt she was recapturing an earlier role.

  She liked the way he frowned when she told him she had left things in the hands of Wilfrid’s advisers.

  “Wilfrid?”

  “My husband.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “When did he …” His expression finished the question.

  “Dave, he’s not dead. We’re divorced. And still friends. More or less.”

  She had resolved to get that on the table right away, and she was prepared for the reaction he tried to hide. In the world in which they had been raised, divorce and marriage did not go together like a horse and carriage.

  “You’re saying he still handles your money.”

  “Not personally, but I stayed with the same group after things were divided up.”

  If she had resolved to ease into full disclosure about her marital status, she parceled out information about how much she had emerged with from her marriage. Wilfrid had been generous, but then he was the libertine. Running around was one thing—she supposed most men were unable to say no—but for Wilfrid to have stashed a mistress two streets away verged on contempt. It was odd that their divorce had given Wilfrid an excuse to disencumber himself of all his romantic chains. Whenever they met he wore a penitent’s smile.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said.

  “Blame me!”

  “I gave you cause. All that’s over now, you know.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

  Wilfrid had loved to have her talk about her Catholic girlhood, of graduating from St. Mary’s College. City boy that he was, he thought that the college’s location in Indiana would be as exotic as the fact that it was Catholic. How few native New Yorkers there are, though, and they have to come from somewhere, and why not from Indiana?

  “An all-women’s college?”

  “Across the road from Notre Dame.”

  She had trilled on about the wonderful odds for a St. Mary’s girl with the seven-to-one ratio of male to female.

  “Even so, you didn’t marry one.”

  “He got away.”

  Little bleats of incredulity whenever she mentioned this. Mame Childers not getting anything she wanted? Impossible. It became a line in her standard repertoire. Repetition altered her memory of those days, and she could
half believe that it was she rather than Beth Hanrahan who had been such a great hit on the campus across the road. Of course, Beth had been an actress, on and off the stage, and her role from junior year on had been that of the perplexed Venus trying to decide between vying suitors. Dave Williams had been one of them. Mame had actually thought, If Beth discards Dave, he’s mine. Seconds.

  Dave Williams had to think, or maybe that was a pretense, when Mame mentioned Beth Hanrahan.

  “David, she was wild about you. Of course, we all were.”

  How manipulable men are, particularly hardheaded practical men. Take them away from business and they were like boys again.

  So it had begun, a Manhattan romance, plays, concerts, eating out, talking, talking. Well, Dave talking. Silence, a listening silence, is the great seducer.

  She explained why Wilfrid didn’t matter. “We were never really married, Dave. Not in our sense.”

  “Will you marry again?”

  “I haven’t been asked.”

  Bold that, but he was remembering something. He had it. “Dr. Johnson said that to marry again is the triumph of hope over experience.”

  “What did he know?”

  “Well, he didn’t marry again after his wife died.”

  An observation, a policy statement, a muted warning off? Mame couldn’t tell.

  “How much you know, Dave.”

  “Notre Dame ’89.”

  She put her hand on his. “St. Mary’s ’89.”

  It might have been a ceremony. That night he came home with her. “Mame,” he began, when they were in the elevator. She put her fingers on his lips. He kissed them away. Later he said, “I don’t go to bed with all my clients.”

  “Is that how you think of me, a client?”

  Still later, looking at him asleep beside her, she thought, well, it had taken time, but at last she had edged out Beth Hanrahan.

  “Where did you live when you were married?” he asked at breakfast.

  “Here.”

  He just looked at her. Was he thinking that he had taken Wilfrid’s place, in the same bed … No one else had ever done that. Her few lapses had been in far-off places where they hadn’t seemed to count. It was a mistake to bring him here. She saw that now. Dear God, what would Wilfrid think?