Sham Rock

by Ralph McInerny

  “Is he on the phone?”

  “He’s here.”

  “Show him in.”

  This was a surprise. Dave had met Mame’s husband once or twice but knew him mainly through the filter of Mame’s description of their marriage. He rose to meet his visitor. Childers strode across the room, full of the pride of life, and thrust a hand at David.

  “Wilfrid Childers. We’ve met. Forgive this impromptu call, but I was in the building …”

  “Not at all. Delighted to see you. Would you like coffee?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  Dave nodded to Della, and Childers sat and looked around. “Nice office.”

  “If I can keep it.”

  Childers looked at him, rubbed his face with his hand, shook his head. “It’s been bad for a lot of people. How’s the market today?”

  “Pretty much like yesterday.”

  Della brought the coffee; they sipped. Childers put down his cup. “I didn’t come to discuss the market, Williams. There’s something you should know about Mame and me. As you know, we’re divorced. It seemed right at the time. Now second thoughts occur.” He said all this in a rush, as if he had rehearsed it.

  Dave settled back, unable completely to erase the image of Mame seated in that same chair just hours before. There seemed no need to respond to what Childers had said.

  “You can understand why I’m telling you this.”

  “I think I’d like an explanation.”

  “I know you’ve been seeing a bit of Mame. Why not? She’s a free woman, and a damned attractive one.” He paused. “You’ve been up in Connecticut?”

  “Wonderful place.”

  “People just drive in and want to buy it. Sometimes I think I miss it more than I miss Mame.” He frowned. “That’s a joke. A bad joke.” A pensive look came over his ruddy face. “I know Mame has lost money. What would you say to my opening an account with you?”

  “Surely you have a financial adviser?”

  “Advisers. I’m not suggesting I would go exclusively with you. How much did Mame lose?”

  “I can hardly tell you that.”

  Childers thought about it. “Of course not. My point is that if a client loses, you lose. Right?”

  “Sometimes I lose the client.”

  “Would you like to gain one?”

  The offer was such an obvious ploy that Dave figured he was meant not only to see that but, seeing it, to leave it uncommented on. Childers bursts into his office, informs him that he is having second thoughts about being divorced from Mame, then offers to open an account with a man who had lost a considerable sum of his former wife’s money. Obvious as it was, it was less crude than simply offering him money to leave Mame alone.

  “There’s no need to open an account with me, Wilfrid.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s because of me and Mame, isn’t it?”

  “Are you going to marry her?”

  Dave was silent for a moment. “We’ve talked about it, yes.”

  “And?”

  “I think I’ve said enough. I can imagine how difficult it is for you to ask these questions. You have the answer you came for.”

  Childers considered that. Let him put two and two together for himself. Apparently he did. He rose. “I know what she’s like. Don’t marry her.”

  Childers’s expression was pathetic. Is it only when we’ve lost something that we want it? He thought of Bridget. Compared to his own attitude toward Mame, Childers’s seemed almost noble.

  “I don’t know what I’d do if she married again.”

  What was he to say to that?

  “Don’t think that I’m threatening you.”

  “Because you are?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You problem is with Mame, not me.”

  “And you’re her problem.” He stood. “I feel like a fool, but I’m glad I came.”

  “So am I.”

  They actually shook hands again. May the best man win? Take your wife, please. On the way to the door, Childers turned. “I meant that about opening an account with you.”

  Dave lifted his hands, displaying his palms, and then Childers was gone.

  The midtown bar was packed with the late afternoon crowd, stags at eve mainly, but one or two women.

  Mame was waiting for him inside the door. “This place is a zoo, Dave. We’ll never get a table.”

  “Let’s go somewhere else.”

  “I know a place.”

  Outside she hailed a cab, and when they got in she gave her own address. Her knees were pressed against his. He pressed back. Wilfrid’s visit to his office seemed to have conferred invulnerability on him. No need to invoke Father Carmody’s imaginary veto now. He could always play the Wilfrid card. Going to her place no longer seemed compromising. He had tired of his role as the pursued lover, and Wilfrid had provided him with a defense..

  When they emerged from the elevator into her front hall, she cried, “Oh, this is so much better.”

  He took her coat. She lifted her face and, why not, he gave her a passionate kiss. She stepped back, eyes widened. “You make the drinks. I’ll be right back.”

  He was sipping his drink when she floated into the living room barefoot, wearing a silken robe that rose and fell with her movements.

  “Comfortable?” he asked, handing her a glass.

  “I’m always comfortable with you.”

  She sat next to him, and again her knees pressed against his. She lifted her face. Why not? He took her in his arms and was filled with a fierce ardor. His role now seemed that of the macho male who takes his pleasure where he finds it, flitting from flower to flower. Not that this would lead to anything. He would lose his advantage if they went down the hall. Ten minutes later, he was still telling himself that as they went down the hall to her bedroom.

  Afterward she was in a playful mood, and he held her tightly, almost in self-defense. Then like an idiot he just blurted it out. “Wilfrid came to my office this afternoon.”

  She sprang free and, kneeling on the bed, glared down at him. “That is a very bad joke.”

  “I wish it were. He told me he regrets the divorce.”

  He had never seen her throw a real tantrum before. Her anger was directed against Wilfrid, at least at first, but he came in for his share of vituperation. Why hadn’t he told her that immediately? Why hadn’t he … She didn’t know what he should have done, only that he should have done it. Finally she subsided and tried to snuggle, whimpering in his arms.

  “He’s just trying to make trouble.”

  “He seemed quite in earnest.”

  “He’s always in earnest.”

  “He offered to open an account with me.”

  “Surely you didn’t agree.”

  “I never divulge professional confidences.”

  After a long minute, she smiled. “You already have.”

  If once, why not twice? He could hate himself afterward twice as much. Even during, there was the nagging thought that he would have to go to confession. This wasn’t wrong because he had to confess it, humbling as that was. He had to confess because it was wrong. No need to go into that with Mame. Think of it as a professional secret.

  14

  IT WAS GREG WALSH WHO BECAME interested in the diary that had been included in the stuff Brother Joachim had sent to the archives.

  “I had forgotten that,” Roger said. “Weren’t most of the pages empty?”

  “Yes.” Greg pushed the diary across the table to Roger. They were seated at a table in the archives. Greg had taken on some of the characteristics of the treasures he spent the day with, musty, timeless, at least of another time.

  Roger read the entry Greg indicated. “Infans sepelitur.” He looked at Greg. “We found a hatchet, and perhaps the remains of a baby.”

  “Maybe he named the hatchet. Like Excalibur.”

  Roger looked at the previous page in the diary. “‘DW! Oh, God, God.’”

  “What do y
ou make of it?”

  “He seems to have known Latin.”

  Roger shut the diary and laid his enormous hand on its padded cover, as if the diary would communicate with him. “Let me take this, Greg. I’ll sign out for it.”

  “When I stop trusting you I’ll enter the monastery myself.”

  Having gone down in the elevator, through the stile, and into the lobby of the Hesburgh Library, Roger realized that he was cradling the diary. Infans sepelitur. The baby is buried. Strange—but then all those long-ago events were strange when one tried to piece them together after a lapse of two decades. Phil had lost patience with the whole thing and growled when Roger brought home the diary. The reappearance of Timothy Quinn in Beth Hanrahan’s center still rankled. He felt that he had been toyed with. He reminded Roger of the silly damned poem he had received.

  “That was from a current student.”

  “The son of Dave Williams.” He said it as if saying QED. “It runs in the family.”

  “The diary is Pelligrino’s.”

  “The whole bunch of them were living in a dream world.”

  Roger took the diary into his study and got settled in the specially built chair that enabled him to propel himself about the room, from desk to computer to bookshelves and back. A code? No. He was being influenced by Phil’s reminder of the poem Jay Williams had slipped under his door to test his investigative powers. The entry could not refer to the hatchet they had found after following Brother Joachim’s instructions as Greg had thought. Recalling that scene, with Phil and Jimmy Stewart stepping back from the hole so that he and Father Carmody could see what they had unearthed, Roger remembered the sense of letdown. They had dreaded discovering human remains, and all they found was a hatchet. Or so at first they had thought. He really should tell the whole story to Greg. The whole point of Joachim’s communication had been to lead them to those remains. That seemed no more far-fetched than any other explanation that occurred.

  “I’m going out,” he said to Phil as he emerged from his study.

  “You just got home.”

  “I want to talk to Father Carmody.”

  “Use the phone.”

  “I want him to see this.” Roger stuffed the diary into the pocket of his enormous jacket.

  “He’ll think you’re crazy.”

  “Well, you already do.”

  Phil softened. “Want me to come with you?”

  “One crazy brother in the family is enough.”

  He went out and got into his golf cart and started off. It was a crime not to be outside during this perfect autumn. The trees on campus, those along the road, were in glorious color. The conjunction of death and beauty was odd, but soon these lovely leaves would be lying lifeless on the ground, robbed of color, les feuilles mortes, being raked up, sucked into bags, ground almost to dust. Dust. The ultimate destiny of living things.

  Autumn thoughts. Take any well-defined space, a campus, say, and think of the hundreds of dramas that had been enacted there. Thousands. More. Most of them concealed from the gaze of others. Even now, who knew what moral crises were forming among the students, the faculty, everyone connected with Notre Dame? Would any of them be entered enigmatically in diaries to confuse a fat former private investigator sometime in the future?

  Father Carmody sat smoking in a chair outside the entrance. He looked up. Roger stopped and inhaled, acknowledging the aroma of the cigar.

  “I am told that there is an ordinance against burning leaves,” Father Carmody said.

  “In South Bend.”

  “Did you have bonfires when you were a kid?”

  “Phil and I had them until we came here.”

  “You want to talk.”

  “Finish your cigar.”

  Father Carmody got angrily to his feet. “I can smoke inside!”

  Roger followed the priest inside; Father Carmody trailed a defiant cloud of smoke like a wood-burning locomotive of yore down the long corridor to his room. Once there, Roger had trouble extricating the diary from his pocket.

  “What’s that?”

  Roger opened it to the page that had caught Greg Walsh’s eye and handed the book to the priest.

  Father Carmody read it standing; he looked at Roger, then sat down with a sigh. “Who else has seen this?”

  “Greg Walsh.”

  “It has to go no farther. Will you agree to that?”

  Roger had lowered himself onto the sofa, which was wide enough to accommodate him. “Certainly. And I’m sure you’ll tell me why.”

  Father Carmody became lost in thought. He mumbled to himself as if involved in a debate. When it came to an end, he did not seem to like its outcome. “She told me in confidence. Not under the seal, but even so. Nonetheless, you have stumbled on this. Your curiosity is aroused. You will not let it go. You could stir up much unpleasantness.”

  Roger waited.

  “Take a case. Two undergraduates, one male, one female, fall in love. They are not debauchees, but the flesh is weak. Do you follow me?”

  Roger nodded.

  “Debauchees would have taken what are called precautions. Of course this couple did not.”

  “She became pregnant.”

  “Exactly, and of course was surprised.”

  “And then?” Roger felt caught up in this, eager to hear what had happened next.

  “A miscarriage. Not an abortion, a miscarriage.”

  “Infans sepelitur.”

  Roger’s eyes misted as he imagined the scene, a distraught young woman, her previous dilemma giving way to this, a child who would never come to term. Had she been alone when she buried her inchoative child? Did he dare to put the question to Father Carmody? Clearly the priest was maneuvering through dangerous moral territory, saying as much as he had.

  “Is this what Brother Joachim wanted us to know?” Roger asked.

  “You may very well think so.”

  15

  “SHE WAS PART OF THAT GROUP,” Amanda said when Jay told her of the note he had received from Mame Childers. “Timothy Quinn and friends.”

  He should have remembered that. When he and his father had talked of those long-ago friends, the disappearing classmate, he had mentioned Mame, and Jay had asked if she was the girl all three of them had been after. A bad guess. “She was Casey’s girl,” his father had said. In her note, Mrs. Childers had made a lot of the fact that she and his father were old friends. Why didn’t she just say classmates? But then she had been a St. Mary’s girl, not a Notre Dame student.

  “The next time you’re in New York, do come see me,” she had written.”I am planning a little surprise for your father.” Her address was on the Upper East Side.

  “She’s a client of mine,” his father said when Jay asked who Mame Childers was. “Why do you ask about her?”

  “I told you Larry Briggs mentioned her. Wasn’t she a classmate of yours?” Acting dumb seemed the best course. He didn’t want to spoil any surprise Mame Childers was planning for his father.

  “Well, she was one of our bunch. On the edge of it, really.”

  “Where does she live?” Jay asked, being clever.

  “New York.” His father obviously didn’t like this topic. “Jay, I may not have to let the condo on Longboat go.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Finding a buyer has proved difficult.”

  “Dad, I’ll buy it.”

  His father looked as if he were going to cry. “I appreciate it, Jay, but let’s hold off on that. I may be able to hang on to it.”

  This was the most positive indication Jay had had that his father was in trouble. The poor guy. If Jay still missed his mother, how must his dad feel? Being a bachelor was one thing, but after you’ve had a wife and family, it must be really rough. Being clobbered by the market would make that loneliness even harder to bear. It occurred to Jay that he wasn’t much support for his father.

  “Maybe he’ll marry again,” Amanda said when he spoke of his dad’s loneliness.
r />   “Never!” What a crazy idea.

  “Jay, how old is he? He’s young. He’s good-looking. Too bad it doesn’t run in the family.”

  It was not the sort of thing he could ever joke about. The three of them. David, Bridget, Jay, had been drawn even closer together during his mother’s last illness. He remembered when she had come home from Sloan-Kettering the final time. His dad had been told that nothing more could be done for her and was agonizing over whether to tell her that.

  “Geez, don’t do that, Dad.”

  “We always said we wouldn’t keep that sort of thing a secret from one another.”

  “Would you want to be told there was no hope left for you?”

  “Of course I would.” He didn’t sound like he meant it, though.

  In the event, there had been no need to tell her. What else would she think when no further appointments had been made? At that time, she had only two weeks to live, and either Jay or his father was with her at all times. They were both there when she died, expelling a last breath that seemed to subside into a small guttural noise, then nothing. They had waited for her to take another breath, but there was only an eerie stillness. It was all over.

  Jay had been a sophomore in high school at the time. He had never had to face anything that awful in his life before, but it was he who had to comfort his father. As they followed her casket down the aisle after her funeral Mass, his father had begun to weep uncontrollably, and Jay supported him out to the undertaker’s limo.

  In the following months, his father put in longer and longer hours at work. He looked like the wrath of God. Eventually his grief subsided, or he got it under control, and he and Jay did things together, ball games, movies, a raunchy Broadway musical. He was almost embarrassed by his father’s laughter at all the smutty jokes. Still, it was probably good therapy. That closeness couldn’t be kept up when Jay went off to South Bend. The two of them would have to do their grieving in private.

  If nothing else, Mrs. Childers’s note made him curious. He gave her a call and told her he would be in the city if she wanted to get together.

  “Oh, how wonderful. Are you old enough to drink?”

  “Hey.”