Roger, wrapped in a massive apron, let them into the apartment, which seemed filled with steam. Beth Hanrahan came forward to greet the priest. She told him where she was staying.
“Good Lord.”
He settled into what Roger called “his” chair and took the glass Phil handed him, brought it under his nose, and inhaled. “Happy days.” He paused, aware of the inappropriateness of his toast. “You know what I mean.”
Phil lifted his drink, and Roger and Beth toasted with their lemonade.
“I suppose you have to be a teetotaler,” Carmody growled to Beth.
“Living among alcoholics is a sobering experience.”
“I could tell you some tales myself, but I don’t want to shock you.”
“Do you know any Dominicans, Father?”
Carmody shifted in his chair. “A few.”
“Dogs of the Lord,” Roger said. “Domini canes.”
In the ensuing silence, Father Carmody sipped his drink. “Why do you ask?”
“They’ve been very helpful to me in Minneapolis.”
“They were the beatniks of their day when they began. Mendicants. A fancy name for panhandlers.”
Beth laughed and told them about Foster, the cook who had replaced Timothy Quinn.
“Too bad Quinn won’t be here. I’m short a pallbearer.”
“I wonder if he would come if he knew.”
“Why do you say that?”
Beth thought about it for a moment. “He made a great show of hating David’s guts.”
“Whatever for?” Carmody asked, then wanted to bite his tongue.
“It’s easy to hate someone when you never see him,” Beth said.
“It’s easier when you do,” the old priest said, then grinned at his own riposte.
There was red wine with the spaghetti and a huge platter of garlic bread. Roger had spread a checkered cloth, and the napkins were of the same material. Two candles glowed, prompting Carmody to tell a story of his seminary days, of how cold the chapel was in the morning, and the classmate who longed for a high Mass.
“Six candles then,” he said. “Warmer.” He looked around. “Not very funny. You’d be surprised what can amuse a seminarian.”
After they had eaten, Beth helped Roger clean up, and Father Carmody went as if reluctantly into the television room with Phil.
“Did you ever watch Australian footfall, Father?”
“Only standing on my head.”
“Of course, it’s taped.”
So were the players. They looked like the walking wounded of Gallipoli. What a brutal game.
Later, Beth managed to get him aside. “Father, I hope you won’t think this is crazy, but I’ll ask anyway.”
He steeled himself for something odd, and it was odd. She wondered if he could possibly, while she was here, and given the occasion, bless the little grave by the back wall of the Log Chapel. He put a hand on her arm and nodded.
Mame was surprised when Wilfrid called to ask if she was going to Dave Williams’s funeral. “How did you know he died?”
“It was in the Times.”
Wilfrid wanted to come along.
“What on earth for?”
“I’m married to one of his clients.”
For a change, Mame wasn’t annoyed by this pretense that theirs was merely a temporary separation. Life with Wilfrid had been all right as long as he kept zipped up elsewhere. Well, who knows? The death of Dave Williams had cleared her emotional landscape. If there was a next time, she would call in Monsignor Sparrow. She felt she owed him that.
So they went to South Bend together. He got the loan of someone’s plane, and they were whisked out in less than two hours. The plane would stay for them. Their rented car awaited them.
She had reserved a room at the Morris Inn, and there seemed no reason for Wilfrid to ask for another. Twin beds.
“It’s the least I can do. You saved me plane fare.”
He grinned like a boy.
“Don’t get any ideas. Remember, we’re here for a funeral.”
Flying out, it had occurred to her that there was something weird about Wilfrid coming to Dave’s funeral. He had hated Dave. He had tried to buy him off by opening an account with him. Mame solved the mystery by imagining that Will thought Dave’s death cleared the way for their reunion. It looked like that was just what it was doing. Sometime during the night, she slipped into his bed, figuring they were as married now as they had ever been.
10
THE BELLS OF SACRED HEART WERE tolling mournfully as Beth Hanrahan made her way across campus from the residence hall in which she had spent the night. A light snow had fallen, leaving a soft blanket through which spears of grass emerged in a confusion of seasons. VENITE AD ME OMNES, read the legend on the statue of Jesus in front of the Main Building. A hearse was parked before the basilica, and other somber vehicles stood all in a row. A group of people clustered below the steps leading to the main entrance, the unmistakable figure of Roger Knight among them.
“Buon giorno,” Roger said when she came up to him.
“Isn’t that a pizza?” said the old man beside him, leaning on his walker.
“Emil, this is Beth Hanrahan.”
“How you have changed, my dear.” Then she remembered Professor Chadwick. She felt she was present at the general resurrection. She patted one of his hands that gripped the handle of the walker.
“I was afraid I would be late.”
Professor Chadwick said, “Only one person need be late for a funeral.”
“Hawthorne,” Beth cried, suddenly remembering. She squeezed his hand.
“My scarlet letter gives me away.”
Up the road, beyond the row of funereal vehicles, a large car arrived, the back doors were opened, and a man and woman emerged, she gorgeous in black, her face veiled. She hesitated before moving toward the basilica. When she did, the man followed like a bodyguard. She was about to go past their little group when she stopped.
“Beth!”
Beth felt frowsy indeed when addressed by this fashion plate. The veil was lifted.
“Mame?”
Mame flew at her and gathered her in her arms. Her escort remained discreetly in the background. He looked vaguely familiar to Beth.
“Your husband?”
“As was.” When Mame stepped back, there were tears in her eyes. “Wilfrid. You were at our wedding.”
“That’s right.”
“I can’t believe that this has happened.” She had turned to Roger. “What is being done to find out who did this?”
“Everything possible.”
“I should hope so.” She turned back to Beth. “Dave and I had become such friends of late.” She dabbed at her unveiled eyes. The remark seemed freighted with meaning. Beth realized that Mame’s getup almost suggested a mourning widow. “Is everyone here?”
No need to explain who everyone was.
“I don’t see Timothy Quinn.”
Above them, the mournful bells tolled on. The back door of the hearse was opened, revealing the casket. Silence fell. One of the undertaker’s minions passed among them, suggesting that they go inside.
Mame said to Roger, in a whisper, “Is Jay here?”
He pointed. Jay Williams and three others were gathered around the open door of the hearse. Mame with a sigh identified him for Beth (“A dear boy”). Casey, looking uncomfortable in a suit, was there, too, and two others who turned out to be classmates Father Carmody had pressed into service as pallbearers. Peaches, all bundled up, held an equally bundled-up baby. All the women gathered around her.
Mame returned to Roger and said, “For heaven’s sakes. What’s he doing here?”
The man she indicated was off on the edge of the gathering. “Who is he?”
“Larry Briggs.” She made a face when she said it.
Roger was surprised. Briggs didn’t look at all like the man the guest at the monastery master had described.
The others there a
t the entrance of the basilica comprised students, middle-aged couples, and a little band of ancient men, muttering among themselves. They might have been connoisseurs of funerals, lugubrious attendants at such events, as if they could not wait for their own. The undertaker was becoming insistent, and they went inside. Professor Chadwick was helped up the steps by Roger Knight, who needed help himself and got it from Beth. Inside, Professor Chadwick followed his walker up the aisle and they followed him.
“I cannot believe he’s here,” Mame said. Her flawless face had become a mask of fury.
Beth looked where Mame was looking and saw in a pew a tall stooped man, half turned toward them, who seemed intent on ignoring Mame. They moved slowly beyond him.
“Who is he?”
“Dave’s nemesis. Larry Briggs.” Mame almost hissed the words. “Why is he here?”
“Did he know Dave?”
“No!” After a pace or two, “Not in that sense. He was a client.”
When they reached the front of the church, with reserved pews on each side, Professor Chadwick looked at Roger. “Bride or groom?”
Roger steered him into a pew on the left, and Beth, in the interests of balance, went with Mame and her husband into the second one on the right.
Mame sat, but when Beth knelt, she did, too. Wilfrid remained seated. The bells ceased tolling, and minutes later, from the sacristy, a procession emerged: priests, attendants, Father Carmody, beautifully vested, at the end. All rose. The procession went down a side aisle to the entrance where the casket now stood, and soon Father Carmody, after fussing with the microphone pinned to his chasuble, began to read from a book that an officious little fellow in cassock and surplice held before him. That done, a white cloth was draped over the casket, and Father Carmody led his fellow ministers up the aisle, the casket pushed after them by the pallbearers.
Another prayer from the steps of the sanctuary, and then Father Carmody moved to the presider’s chair, where he was flanked by two tall ascetic priests with closely shaved heads. The little fellow in cassock and surplice stood by to smooth things, apparently the master of ceremonies, and another priest with a noble forehead, the rector of the basilica, wearing an alb, looked out over the congregation with dark expressive eyes. The familiar prayers of the Mass began. The first reading was done by a lovely young woman (“That must be Amanda,” Mame whispered), the second by Roger Knight, who lumbered forward, climbed to the pulpit, and wedged himself in. Next, the gospel was read by Father Carmody, the story of the widow of Naim, and they all sat for the homily.
Father Carmody had not adopted the recent practice of canonizing the departed, depicting them as already enjoying heavenly bliss, but then he believed in purgatory. He spoke of Notre Dame and David Williams’s formative years there and went on to speak of the fragility of life, and the inevitability of death, which comes like a thief in the night. (“Carrying a piece of firewood,” Mame whispered.) They were all urged to draw profit from this salutary reminder of our common mortality, and that was pretty much it. From then on the Mass continued, interrupted now and then by the filling of the censer, which produced great clouds of smoke. Once Father Carmody came down and circled the casket, throwing up scented billows as he blessed it with the swinging censer.
“I had a late breakfast,” Mame whispered when Beth rose to go up to receive communion.
Returned to her pew, kneeling, her face in her hands, Beth prayed to her sacramental Lord. Distracting thoughts came. Mame might be dressed for the role, but if anyone here was the ersatz widow, it was she herself. The sight of Dave’s son, first outside the basilica, then kneeling in the pew before her, made her realize that he was the half brother of the daughter she would have had. For the first time she prayed fervently for her lover of so many years ago. The overwhelming sadness of things brought tears to her eyes, and she let them come. Where can you cry without exciting curiosity if not at a funeral? The irregular bond with Dave so many years ago, the link of that miscarried child buried in shame by the Log Chapel, their later lives, which, in Dave’s case, had produced the fine young fellow in front of her—and now Dave was dead, murdered. She wished she shared Mame’s urgency that the culprit be found. She prayed for Q as well, wandering about, if not a lost soul, on his way to it.
Then it was over. They sang “Notre Dame, Our Mother”; they followed the casket back down the aisle.
“He’s gone,” Mame said. Apparently she meant the man named Briggs.
Outside, the casket was slid into the hearse, and Father Carmody and the two monks with him—Roger had told Beth who they were—got into a car to be driven to Cedar Grove Cemetery. Beth and Mame followed Roger’s golf cart, Chadwick seated at his side, for the short walk to the cemetery.
“I loved him, Beth,” Mame said, out of the blue. Wilfrid seemed not to have heard.
Beth found herself resenting Mame’s widow’s weeds and the proprietary air with which she spoke of David Williams. “We all did.”
11
DAVID WILLIAMS WAS TO BE BURIED in the section of Cedar Grove Cemetery that had been carved out of the former Burke Golf Course, a section reached by a road angling around the sexton’s shed. By the time the walking mourners entered the cemetery, Mame was regretting that they had sent the car back to the Morris Inn. Beth was unfazed by the walking.
“What kind of shoes are those?” Mame asked her.
“I don’t know.”
“Where did you buy them?”
“Someone gave them to me.” Immediately Beth regretted the remark. It sounded sanctimonious; maybe it was. It was difficult not to be impressed by Mame’s outfit, although those shoes were certainly not made for walking.
“I wish I’d brought gym shoes,” Mame said bravely.
Behind them, Casey, now carrying the baby, was walking with Peaches. He had introduced her to everyone, proud as punch. Now he was urging Jay to come visit them on Siesta Key. “Not in the morning, though. I write in the morning.” The planned talk had been canceled as well as the play, giving way to the demands of fatherhood and Casey’s writing schedule.
“I read Tumbleweed,” Jay told him.
“Wait until you see the sequel.”
When they entered Cedar Grove Cemetery, the two Trappists were far ahead, moving along at a brisk pace, and in the middle distance, Roger Knight’s golf cart, he at the wheel, Professor Chadwick as copilot, was just making the turn at the sexton’s building. Backhoes and other cemetery machinery stood half hidden in a fenced-off area to the right. From the open doors of the sexton’s shed, several men stared out at them, the cemetery grounds crew. Beth looked at them as Roger had. One of them, wearing a Cubs cap, turned abruptly away, but not before Beth recognized him. So Q had come to the funeral after all.
They arrived at the gravesite. On the road beside it, the hearse and another black vehicle were parked. The casket already stood on a lowering device over the open grave. Father Carmody, wearing a cope now from which a gorgeous stole emerged, waited impatiently. Philip Knight stood with another man a few feet off. Then they all gathered around the grave.
The words Father Carmody read were whipped away by a breeze that had sprung up, the ribbon marker in his book fluttering like a pennant. Beth looked down into the scarcely concealed hole, and all the consoling ceremonies could not disguise the grim fact that they were going to put David Williams into the ground and cover his casket with dirt. She inhaled deeply and lifted her eyes to the old priest, who was having trouble preventing the breeze from turning the pages of his prayer book. Jay Williams had been directed to a place immediately to the right of Father Carmody. Beth noticed the man Mame had identified as Briggs on the edge of the little group, seemingly keeping a distance from Mame. What would she say if she saw him? How could she not? She had slipped off one shoe and stood somewhat lopsided next to Beth.
Roger Knight was distracted as he stood beside Chadwick. Looking across the grave at Jay Williams, he recalled Phil’s speculation. Amanda stood just behind him
, her eyes wide with unease. Jay had worried about his father, ostensibly because of the effects of the financial meltdown on him. He did not think that was the sole explanation of his father’s behavior, though, and had actually asked if Phil could find out what was wrong. He had apparently turned to Ziggy Cobalt as an alternative. If so, Jay would have found out disturbing things. That his father had been interested in Mame Childers must have devastated his son, who thought it a betrayal of his mother. How deep had his resentment been?
One thing, however, had been cleared up. It was the presence of an unidentified Notre Dame student at Gethsemani that had provided the middle term for Phil’s speculation about Jay Williams. That student had been a reporter for the Irish Rover, who had gone to the monastery in the hope of interviewing Brother Joachim. The events in the hermitage had made that impossible. The intrepid reporter had not known of those events—what a scoop he might have had—except indirectly. When his request was denied, he beat it back to South Bend to write a story about his failure to interview the Notre Dame grad who had become a Trappist monk.
Beside Roger, Chadwick was leaning over his walker. He should have stayed in the golf cart. “I want to check out the neighborhood, Roger. Our plot is near here.”
The neighborhood now included two elegant mausolea, which blocked the view of the golden dome from where they stood. What must it be like to know the exact place where one would eventually be laid to rest?
Father Carmody had closed his book and was now vigorously sprinkling holy water on the casket. He then passed the sprinkler to Jay.
Roger felt a tap on his shoulder and turned. Phil. His brother moved his head, and Roger stepped back. Phil whispered that the distinguished stranger standing a few feet off, of the group but not in it, was Wilfrid Childers, keeping his distance. Had he recognized Phil from their encounter in Connecticut?
“Timothy Quinn seems to have joined the sexton’s crew, Phil.”
“He’s here?”
Quinn had emerged from the sexton’s shed and now stood ten yards away, even less in the group than the elegant Wilfrid Childers who had caught Phil’s attention.
Sham Rock Page 20
