The Green Revolution (7 page)

“That was no girl, that was Pearl.” He hadn't missed a beat. Sometimes he amazed even himself. Old quick-witted Iggie.

“You're being talked about.” The paper came down and her eyes drilled into him as if she were the dentist, not he.

“So who told you I had lunch with my secretary?”

“How is Prissy supposed to know this glamorous Amazon is your secretary?”

“Maybe I'll put her in uniform.”

“How often does this happen?”

He got up and crossed the room and sat beside her on the couch. “Oh, Miriam, not you. The green-eyed monster?”

She might have been one of his patients, rigid in the chair, awaiting the bad news while he studied the X-rays. But he did manage to get his arm around her shoulders. Even so, it was five minutes before she scrunched down sufficiently for him to kiss her. Right then and there, Iggie resolved that it was all over with Pearl.

Pearl proved surprisingly intractable.

“Pearl, we were seen by a friend of my wife's!”

“Having lunch at Chesterfield's. It could have been worse.”

A woman is a ruthless thing when she's got you in her clutches. Iggie had thought that Pearl could handle a little fling without making a federal case of it. The next thing he knew, she was crying. He quickly shut the door of his office. For a moment he wanted to strangle her. What had he ever seen in her? Of course she had a little history, a divorce threatened, but that had seemed a recommendation. She had been around the block a time or two. Just a guess, but he had gathered from what she had said that it was her husband who was talking divorce.

“He's even looked into annulments.”

“Then you'd really be free.”

Of course, she had misunderstood his meaning, but the result of the misunderstanding had been so torrid he hadn't clarified his remark.

After the two close calls, Iggie was the soul of discretion. They never went back to Chesterfield's, and why rent a motel when Pearl had such a convenient apartment? Looking back on it, reading Miriam's farewell address, he couldn't believe how stupid he'd been. A man his age, off on a romp with his secretary. Madness. It was over, by God, and he meant over. Then he found the letter Pearl had written Miriam pinned to his pillow. It looked as if Miriam had taken several stabs at it before securing it.

‘I know that Ignatius has spoken to you of me. The last thing I want is to come between a man and his wife. I know how traumatic talk of divorce can be and have stopped Ignatius every time he has talked of leaving you …

He had torn the thing into shreds and flushed it down the toilet. He had come home with a buzz on, but now he was clearheaded and sober. And frightened. He just wasn't the kind of man whose wife walked out on him. He was a Notre Dame man! He had to get Miriam back—but how could he unload Pearl?

It all became a great deal more complicated when a big guy in a towel confronted him in the club locker room after a phenomenally awful round.

“I remember you,” the man said.

Iggie found his glasses and put them on, adopting his professional smile.

“From South Bend.”

“A Domer!” Iggie stood, managing to catch his towel before he would look like Adam in Eden, before the fall. “What year?”

“I lived in Alumni Hall.”

“So did I!”

“I know.”

“So what's your name?”

“George Wintheiser.”

Iggie nearly dropped his towel again. Pearl's name was Wintheiser.

“Weren't you on the team?” he managed to say.

Wintheiser bent and looked him in the steamy glasses. “Leave my wife alone.”

He went off to his locker, and Iggie darted back into the shower. Could all great Neptune's ocean wash this guilt from off his soul? He stood under water as cold as he could stand. He warmed it up a little and remained under the shower. He was still wearing his glasses. Oh, to hell with it. He wanted to make damned sure Wintheiser had dressed and left before he got out of the shower.

“I met your husband,” he said to Pearl the next day.

“I'm getting a divorce.”

“Come on, you're Catholic.”

“You sound like George.”

“What happened between you two, Pearl?” He tried for a concerned tone, the tone of a man anxious to help her in her troubles.

“What did he say happened?”

“No need to go into that.”

It was an inspiration. He had transferred his panic to Pearl.

“I think he wants to get back together with you.”

“Did he say that?”

“Pearl, he spoke in confidence. One Notre Dame man to another.”

“To hell with Notre Dame.”

“You can't mean that.”

This time her sobbing did not unnerve him. He patted her shoulder and managed to keep his hand from sliding down her back.

“Give it another chance, Pearl.”

It worked! Well, at least it cooled any ardor Pearl had felt for him. She apparently thought he knew all sorts of things he didn't. Ignorance is power.

With half his problem settled, he began telephoning Miriam regularly at her mother's.

“What did you tell her, sweetheart?”

“Is that all that bothers you?”

“Come home. Please.”

He sent her flowers, using their regular florist. He asked her to come to the Boston College game with him.

That was before the disastrous season began. Iggie would never have admitted it to himself, but he welcomed the vast distraction of the string of defeats with which the Notre Dame season began. He felt betrayed rather than a traitor. It was a good warm feeling. He got the fellow who had computerized his billing system to set up the Web site CheerCheerFor
Old
NotreDame. The response was terrific. He flew back and forth to South Bend, a man with a mission. Charlie Weis had become his scapegoat.

10

Rimini was surprised and flattered that Wintheiser even knew that he had once been on the team, a member of the sacrificial squad that the varsity team played against in preparation for games. Nonetheless, aching, covered with mud and grass stains, the young Rimini had hobbled from the practice field on those long-ago afternoons, his helmet swinging from his hand, with the sense that he was an integral part of Notre Dame football. One step up from a tackling dummy, but what the hell, it had prepared him for life. He had never been able to duplicate that sense of exhausted achievement.

“Where would we have been without you guys?” Wintheiser had said in response to Rimini's self-deprecating remark. It was a sports banquet kind of remark, but Rimini appreciated it nonetheless. He had reached an age when he grasped at any laurel offered.

Not that he and the enormous Wintheiser had been students at the same time. Wintheiser was fifteen, twenty years younger. Still, there seemed an easy camaraderie between them when Wintheiser came to Rimini's office in Decio.

“Not many former players on the faculty, are there?”

Rimini might have said something unforgivable, his loyalties pulled between memories of those long-ago afternoons when he had been buffeted and knocked about by larger men and the ethereal ivory tower of academe to which one was admitted on the basis of brain, not brawn.

“Not many Renaissance men,” Rimini replied.

Wintheiser was looking at Rimini's framed degrees, prominently displayed on what little wall space the office had.

“My degree is from the University of Chicago,” Wintheiser said.

“Didn't you graduate from here?”

“I meant my doctorate.”

Doctorate? Chicago? “What was your field?”

“Ancient languages. Hittite, mainly.”

“Hittite! What do you do with that?”

“Not much. I helped my director put together his Hittite dictionary.”

“And then?”

“I'm a commentator on ESPN. I'm surprised you didn't know that.”

Rimini felt as if he had flunked a test. ESPN! It was a channel Rimini loathed, all those chattering panels, old jocks breaking one another up, pontificating about coming games, at last above the fray where no umpire would throw a flag if they made mistakes. “Of course,” he said weakly, and then wished he hadn't.

“My main income is from commercials.”

“So you're back for the game,” Rimini said, trying to regain his sense of ease with this giant of a man. Hittite, ESPN, commercials—what was the world coming to?

“What do you make of all the agitation about the team?” Wintheiser asked.

The team. Our team. Rimini had put his guest in his reading chair, legs crossed, huge shoes on display, and himself at his desk. The whistles of yesteryear, the crack and thump of padded body hitting padded body, seemed to echo in the office.

“Adversity is a tough school.”

Wintheiser liked that. “Absolutely. Those kids are playing their hearts out, and what thanks do they get? Self-appointed experts. Know-it-alls. It's like ESPN. You ever watch Kornheiser?”

It was a rhetorical question.

“So what are we going to do about it?” This was not a rhetorical question.

“I suspect you have some ideas.”

Wintheiser had ideas. He knew about Lipschutz's demand that football be dropped. He knew about Iggie Willis's Web site.

“Don't forget the Weeping Willows.”

“Who are they?”

“Concerned alumni.” Rimini said it with a sneer. “They're shocked—shocked—at the new Notre Dame. First it was the
Vagina Monologues.
”

“What a bunch of garbage.”

Wintheiser seemed to mean the play. Rimini let it go. “Then it was the percentage of Catholics on the faculty.”

“Is that a problem?”

“They seem to think so.”

“I can't believe what has happened to the Catholic Church,” Wintheiser said through clinched teeth. “Libertine priests, annulments…” He seemed to have run out of breath.

“Now they want to know how many Catholics are on the football team. And how many Irish.”

“You're kidding.”

“I wish I were. How many Catholics were on the team when you played?”

“We always went to Mass together on Saturday mornings. In the chapel at Moreau Seminary.”

Rimini had forgotten that practice, which had apparently gone the way of many others that had once characterized football at Notre Dame.

“Lou came. The whole coaching staff.”

“I wonder if there are any Catholics on the team now?”

“There are no atheists in foxholes.”

They observed a moment of silence.

“So what exactly are your ideas, George?” Or should he have said Dr. Wintheiser?

“The best defense is a good offense.”

Rimini nodded. Even clichés have their role to play in polite conversation. He wondered if Wintheiser could translate his remark into Hittite.

What Wintheiser thought would be helpful was to make fun of the critics, lampoon them, hold them up to ridicule.

“You know any kids on these alternative campus papers?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Good. Let's unleash them on these yo-yos. Cartoons, funny names, the whole thing. Picket their classes. Kids will know what to do.”

“I'll get right on it.”

Wintheiser rose. Standing, he need only lift his arms and he could touch the ceiling.

“Here's my cell phone number,” Wintheiser said, putting a card on the desk. “Keep me posted.”

Alone, without the thought that he and Wintheiser were acting as a team, he wondered how he could implement Wintheiser's idea.
Advocata Nostra
was out, and the other conservative paper. The
Observer
? Forget it. Then he had it.
Common Sense
. They were furious with the efforts of Weeping Willow to turn back the clock as far as Catholicism went. Did they give a damn about football? Then he remembered the several cutting remarks about Roger Knight that had appeared in
Common Sense
 … and Roger's name had appeared on the list of professors supporting Lipschutz. How to approach them? Ah. Gordie Finlayson was the faculty advisor of
Common Sense
. His poems often appeared in its pages. Finlayson nursed a deep hatred for all chaired professors. Maybe that had been the reason for those slams at Knight.

He would talk to Finlayson. Let the campaign begin.

11

It should have been easier to track down football players to interview, but Bartholomew Hanlon found them an elusive bunch. Their size alone should have made them easy to spot, but then many of them allegedly went around campus in electric carts, so their height was hidden. Did they eat in dining halls with mere mortals?

“Why do you ask?” The young man's shaved head gave him an infantile look, as if he were still awaiting his first growth.

“I'm a reporter.”

The bald one backed away. “We're not supposed to talk with reporters.”

“You're on the team?”

Bartholomew's incredulous tone didn't help. “I'm the kicker.”

“Of course. I didn't recognize you out of uniform.”

Bartholomew had fallen into conversation with John Wesley just outside the South Dining Hall. Now he led him to a bench, where Wesley reluctantly sat down. Bartholomew got out a notebook.

“Nothing about football.”

“Absolutely not.”

Bartholomew realized that he was being less than truthful. In fact, he was lying. He had got hold of a team roster and then checked out the names in the campus phone book. Few players seemed to live on campus. Wesley, however accidentally encountered, was thus a real prize.

“How did you become a kicker?”

Wesley started to rise. “I mean it. Coach doesn't want us giving interviews.”

“I don't blame him.”

“What do you mean?” Wesley sat again and looked at him narrowly. “No games. We can't talk about them.”

“No football, period. What hall do you live in?”