Irish Alibi (4 page)

“Over my dead body!”

“That's not necessary.”

“Till death do us part. I'd fight it all the way to the Vatican.”

“Magnus, you can't feel any worse about this than I do.”

“That's what you think.”

“I had no idea she had a husband, not at first.”

Incredibly, Magnus found himself listening to Quintin recount how he had met Madeline, the week on Longboat Key, the rendezvous in Savannah.

“Savannah!”

“We wanted a neutral site.”

“I want another drink.”

“The bar is closed.”

“We'll go to my place.”

His place was a condo east of campus owned by the megacorporation that owned the paper. Magnus drove with exaggerated caution, and they made it. He had a bottle of single malt scotch there, and as they opened it, Magnus had the odd thought that the two of them were conspiring against the collapse of Western civilization. He was developing this thought when he passed out.

6

Phil drove Father Carmody back to Holy Cross House, where the old priest lived, in the place, but not of it. It was there that priests of the Congregation of Holy Cross went when their careers were over and nothing lay ahead but the big exit. It was an exit many of them would not be aware of, their minds and memories having disembarked while the body continued the journey that would eventually end in the community cemetery along the road that connected Notre Dame and St. Mary's.

“How can you remember so many alumni, Father?”

“Most it would be hard to forget.”

“He sent Roger a copy of his book.”

“Kelly?”

“No, Magnus. Does Quintin Kelly write, too?”

“He tells me he's in publishing. Do people still read?”

They rounded the lake, and at the entrance of Holy Cross House, Father Carmody insisted that he needed no further help. Imagine coming into the place supported by Philip Knight. Everyone would assume that he was on the fast track to becoming gaga.

So it was a ramrod-straight, chin-uplifted Father Carmody who sailed past the circular nurses' counter, giving a jaunty wave to the uniformed nurse, and continued down the corridor to his room. He did not turn on the light after he went in and shut the door. His windows gave him an unequaled view of the campus across the lake. He stood contemplating the scene of his youth and of most of his active years. The golden dome glowed in the night, and the giant statue of Our Lady—Notre Dame du Lac—above it. Through the trees, the lamps along the road seemed to twinkle in the movement of the branches, and the windows of buildings emitted little squares of light into the darkness. His throat constricted. He swallowed. He murmured a Memorare to the Lady on the dome, then sat, still wearing his jacket, and let the long long thoughts come.

What would he have made of himself now if he had been granted a prescient vision twenty, thirty years ago? Like most members of the Congregation still engaged in the daily tasks of the university, he would have regarded his confreres here across the lake as in the anteroom of eternity, living out their last days in bodies grown bent and twisted and aching, a vacant stare for visitors, or a little half smile in the hope of being recognized for what they once had been. It was that estimate of his present self that he rejected, and now, in the night, alone with God and the past, he could admit it was a species of pride. Why did he continue to insist that he was unlike the rest of men, an exception to the rule of the house, still vigorous and alive and caught up in the work of the university? By and large this was self-delusion, and looking with moist-eyed tenderness out his window, he could admit it.

Bah. He drove these thoughts away. He was becoming a philosopher, that last refuge of the bewildered. He stood, started toward the light switch, but then stopped. Once more he sat, as if the night held thoughts that would only be driven away by light. Thank God for the Knight brothers. Bringing Roger to campus as the Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies had been among the final coups of Carmody's behind-the-scenes career at Notre Dame. A Philadelphia family with long connections with the university, now in a third generation drifted far from their youthful ideals, had been prompted to offer a propitiatory gift to Notre Dame—not that he had put it so baldly, but years in the game had taught him that generosity often springs from remorse—and the all but forgotten figure of Huneker had proved to be the hook on which to hang the benefaction.

“Who is Huneker?” he was asked while dining with representatives of three generations of the family and moving in for the kill.

“One of the first tasks of the occupant of your chair will be to bring Huneker to the attention of a new generation of Catholics.”

Huneker's own ambiguous relation to the faith had made him seem an appropriate sponsor for this family's gift.

“Why not a memorial to a professor who taught us there?” the senior member of the family asked.

“Like?”

The old man's eyes roved in search of a memory. “Richard Sullivan?”

“Ah, Dick. Wonderful man. You had him in class?”

He had had him in class. He was allowed to reminisce some more, and then, one more proof that the apparently contingent flux of events is governed by a wise providence, he recalled Sullivan's enthusiasm for Baron Corvo. Father Carmody plucked Roger Knight's monograph on that author from his bag and put it into the hands of the wise old man. Before they rose from the table, the deal had been struck. The money would be forthcoming, the chair would honor Huneker and be devoted to Catholic studies—a free variable not tied down to any department—and Father Carmody promised to secure Roger Knight as the first occupant of the chair.

And so he had gone to Rye to talk with Roger in the country retreat to which the two brothers had moved from Manhattan after Phil had been mugged for the third time. Phil was a private investigator who now took on only clients whose problems promised more than passing interest. His location did not matter; his office was notional rather than real: an 800 number contained in a quarter-page ad in the yellow pages of the directories of a few selected cities. Phil went where the work was, with Roger often in tow.

The size of the younger brother had given Father Carmody pause. There are fat people whose avoirdupois is carried as a temporary and shameful aberration and in whom the hope of slimming down to their putative natural size still flickers and will not die, however doomed to unfulfillment. Then there are those who, like Roger Knight, wear the enormity of their flesh as a destiny, an object of gentle self-mockery, to be sure, but for all that accepted, even celebrated. Father Carmody concluded that Roger was precisely the weight he ought to be. But could he be moved?

“The academic world was bad enough when I was a part of it, Father. It has only grown worse.”

“We are talking of Notre Dame. Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

“You will love it.” He turned to Phil. “I need not mention that every sport in its season is played there.”

Phil knew. He was already in his way a Subway alumnus, although, unlike Roger, he was not Catholic. Father Carmody devoted ten minutes to a brisk exchange of athletic information with Phil, then turned again to Roger.

“Tell me how you came into the Church.”

“Sideways.” A smile, but then he became serious.

Roger's story might have been Paul Claudel's or Jacques Maritain's a century earlier. If the outlook that dominated the academic world was true, if we were but random collections of electric charges, clusters of matter however complicated, destined to disintegrate without sequel, the individual human life would be by definition meaningless. But if life were indeed meaningless, men would not insist on developing theories that it is meaningless, thus granting it meaning of a sort. Such thoughts were the beginning. Roger's interest survived an unsatisfying visit to campus ministry; he read himself into the Church along a path Father Carmody had known many to follow: Chesterton, Belloc, C. S. Lewis, Josef Pieper.

“And of course Jacques Maritain.”

“We have a Jacques Maritain Center, you know.”

“I often consult its Web site.”

It would be too much to say that the Web was what had snared Roger Knight for Notre Dame, but it would be to say too little not to acknowledge the role of that virtual electronic world unknown to Father Carmody.

And so the Knights had come to Notre Dame. From time to time, Father Carmody had enlisted Philip's professional help to extricate the university from some potential embarrassment. He had become a frequent guest in the Knight apartment, his visits eased by the fact that Philip would come fetch him and take him back to Holy Cross House afterward. As he had done tonight.

Sitting in his room, which seemed gradually to have illumined as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, Father Carmody thought of the little group that had gathered at the Knights' after the game. Magnus O'Toole, the stubby sportswriter whose beard seemed a mask rather than an adornment, had been full of the pride of authorship because of the little book he had cobbled together. But his deference to Roger had balanced this pardonable vanity. Magnus's nephew, Caleb, a fine boy, had been with a girl who clearly ranked their friendship higher than he did, Sarah Kincade. Her accent made Magnus's even more comical.

Kincade, Kincade. There had been Kincades at Notre Dame. Southerners of the deepest dye. A memory came, and with it a smile. Would it have been Sarah's father who had draped a huge piece of white canvas over the statue of Father Corby in protest against this indirect adulation of the Union cause? Discipline had been more than a word in those days, rules that were rigidly enforced rather than procedures with which to negotiate oneself out of a charge. Kincade had been lucky that he wasn't sent packing back to Memphis. Fortunately for him, Father Carmody had been there to intervene. He visited the prefect of discipline in his room, not his office.

“The rule is clear, Charles. I have no choice.”

“If it was that clear, we wouldn't need a prefect of discipline.”

“What are you suggesting?”

What Father Carmody was suggesting was that they put this little peccadillo in perspective. What was the big picture? Kincade was from Memphis, a son of the South; Notre Dame was a national university, but representation from the states of the old Confederacy was hardly what it should be. If Notre Dame got a reputation as hostile to the understandable pride of a noble if defeated enemy, the Mason-Dixon line would become the Berlin Wall.

He had gone on, even after he knew he had won the argument, caught up in the rhetoric of the case. Who cannot surprise in himself a sympathy for the Southern cause?

Before he got up to prepare for bed in a room that no longer had need of electric light, he thought of Quintin Kelly. Now in publishing, he had said. A nice fellow. But there was that look about him one sometimes saw on the faces of men waiting nervously in line to go to confession. Kelly was troubled in some way, and Father Carmody regretted that the circumstances had not been such that he might have gotten in a little pastoral work.

7

The Kincade twins, identical in size, weight, and even the cut of their red hair, had with admirable foresight arranged to meet with the Georgia Tech cheerleaders after the game and invited them for dinner.

“We can't go dressed like this,” Babette Ashley squealed.

“More's the pity,” Malcolm said. “How long will it take you to change?”

There were eight girls in the cheerleader squadron. It seemed excessive to invite them all, but the problem posed by cutting two from the herd was insurmountable. Besides, 8:2 odds had its attractions.

Babette was an old acquaintance if not friend of the twins, and the means of effecting the invitation.

“Where are the other boys?” the girls asked in chorus when seven of them along with Malcolm had been jammed into the back of the vehicle. Babette was up front with Eugene.

“Where do you think we're going?”

“I can't tell you two apart.”

“Why should you?”

Malcolm had approved of Eugene's decision to scare up some other males. With just the two of them, this could become a farce. Finding a restaurant able to take them on such a day was of course out of the question. The solution was to repair to the dorm and have food brought in. Malcolm thoughtfully loaded several cases of contraband beer aboard so that the pizza and spaghetti did not go unaccompanied into the digestive systems of these increasingly jubilant young people. Additional males proved no problem, of course. Quite the opposite; now it was the girls who were the beneficiaries of favorable odds.

One might reasonably ask how the party would have developed had not one of the late invitees brought a copy of the current issue of the
Irish Rover
. Attention was drawn to the article on General Sherman and Notre Dame by Caleb Lanier.

“Let me see that,” Malcolm demanded. He read in disbelief. Even if partially true, the burden of the story seemed a studied insult to the flowers of young Southern womanhood they were now plying with pasta and beer.

“We know him,” Eugene said. “Football.”

“A Yankee,” Malcolm explained to their guests. But other copies of the offending issue had been brought, and the contents of the article were soon known to all.

“Notre Dame actually welcomed General Sherman here?” Babette spoke with indignation.

The eight Southern belles were profoundly offended. And what of themselves? Were they not compromised by fraternizing with the apparent enemy? What would Scarlett have said?

“We're as Southern as you are,” Malcom insisted.

“At least,” Eugene drawled.

“Then do something!” Babette demanded.

“But what?”

Babette didn't know. Neither did the other girls. Still, their demand seemed only reasonable. The question was how they could effectively demonstrate to these fine young women that they, had they been around at the time, would have protested the visit of the general whose scorched-earth policy as he marched to the sea was an ineradicable item in the annals of infamy.