“They’re having a smoke,” Melissa explained, joining him at the window.
“But she doesn’t smoke.”
“Where there’s fire…”
He turned to her angrily. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
* * *
Melissa retreated, but later, she was glad she had given him advance warning. Anyone with eyes to see knew about Kilmartin and Deirdre. Arne Jensen knew.
“She must be crazy,” Arne said.
“What have you got against Kilmartin?”
“He’s a poet. You should remind her of the wives of poets.”
This was odd coming from Arne, who was in Kilmartin’s poetry writing course and kept a notebook he refused to let Melissa see.
“I show you mine.”
“You’ve been at it for a while.”
“But first things are often best.”
He hugged his notebook to his chest, preventing her from taking it. Was she really that interested? After classes began, he kept dropping by the office of Celtic Studies to talk to her. She was a year older than he was. She hoped he didn’t think she was even older than that since he was a senior and she was a second-year graduate student. Precocious but not a prodigy. He seemed not to think about it, nor did she, until she accepted first an invitation to lunch at the eatery in Grace, the building next to Flanner, and then a night at a sports bar to watch Notre Dame play at Nebraska. The unseen notebook made her curious.
“So when do I see your poems?”
He actually looked around to see if she had been heard. Well, he had to be careful. He would be going to medical school in the fall. He was not ashamed that he liked poetry, he just didn’t want anyone to know that he was trying to write it too. Of course he had to hand things in to Kilmartin.
It was the poet’s ego-shattering practice to read student work to the class and comment on it, anonymously, of course, but the idea was that everyone could profit from what he had to say about a particular effort. Presumably nobody other than the author knew whose work Kilmartin was dissecting, but when Arne’s came up, Melissa was sure it was his. For one thing, his face was suffused in a blush before he brought both hands like blinkers to the sides of his face.
Your honeyed appellation is sweet upon my ear.
Having read the line once, Kilmartin paused, then read it again, just the one line. There was a stirring among the students. The next time he read it, there was a muffled laugh.
“None of that now,” Kilmartin said, but his eyes were merry. “Let’s talk about this line.”
He talked about it for forty-five minutes, commenting on the use of so recherché a term as “appellation” and calling attention to the rhythm of the line. Ta tum ta ta ta tum ta ta tum ta ta ta tum. Is that how it should be scanned? Or was it a variation on iambic pentameter? Perhaps it could be read as an Alexandrine? The single line was all the text he needed for all this. And more.
“A problematical line here or there may be unavoidable. May be. I doubt it. You must know the rhythm of your lines.”
Kilmartin’s assignments stressed writing in demanding forms. Triolets for starters, then more complicated ones, villanelles, sonnets, Shakespearian and Petrarchan. As Melissa explained to Arne, even if you never wrote a decent poem yourself, you would begin to understand poetry from the poet’s point of view and that was priceless.
He made a face. “From one poet’s point of view anyway.”
If she’d had any doubt that the single line dissected was Arne’s, that peevish remark would have removed it. A week later she managed to peek into his notebook. He sat beside her in class and normally shielded it from view, but a threatened sneeze sent his hand in search of his handkerchief and the line Kilmartin had analyzed stood solitary on the page. Under a single word, apparently the title. Melissa.
Her breath caught. Good grief, was he writing a poem to her? After Kilmartin’s analysis the line was stamped on her memory but she would have retained it anyway, guessing that it was Arne’s. She was dying to ask him about it, but she couldn’t. The sneeze never happened, his notebook was again shielded from her sight. She found it oddly exhilarating that someone had even started a poem about her. Suddenly she felt a new tenderness toward the tall blue-eyed future physician.
Under “Melissa” in the dictionary is to be found: “1. Class. Myth. The sister of Amalthea who nourished the infant Zeus with honey.” In Greek melissa means “bee,” in Latin “honey.” Had Arne looked it up, was that the explanation of his line? Melissa now found it to be a wonderful line. Later in the Huddle, under the roar of voices, she murmured, “Your honeyed appellation is sweet upon my ear.” Arne leaned forward and cupped his ear. She repeated it. Blood rushed to his face and he stared at her.
“I like it,” she said.
He shrugged. He wanted to pretend the line was not his. But she knew better. She felt like his muse when they crossed the campus to the dining hall.
* * *
Back in Flanner, when Melissa returned from the Huddle, Professor Maloney informed her with an air in which triumph warred with indifference that he had been invited to have breakfast on the morning of the game with the president.
“Is the president coming?”
“Of the university!” Her misunderstanding robbed the announcement of its importance.
“But what’s it all about?”
“Damned if I know.”
2
James Elliot ’76 had majored in economics, learning everything he had to forget in order to make a success of the business he had nurtured from idea to affluence. ELLIOT’S WASTE was one of several that competed for the trash business in central Michigan. The business made a quantum jump when Elliot, anticipating the rage for recycling, had outbid his competitors in the suburban market. With nine locations and twelve fleets of trucks, Elliot’s vehicles rolled through the suburbs at the crack of dawn, their crews meeting the demanding schedule set them as they gathered up the debris that is a major product of an affluent civilization. He had toyed with the idea of calling the business ELLIOT’S GARBAGGIO but his wife Diane had nixed that.
“You’re not Italian.”
“Is garbaggio Italian?”
“Just call it what it is.”
“A garbage business.”
“A waste business.”
A rose by any other name, Elliot figured, not voicing the thought Diane had not reacted negatively when he hit on ELLIOT’S WASTE as the name of the firm. The allusion was intended. At Notre Dame, he had taken a course from Malachy O’Neill, a legendary professor of English, worthy successor to the sainted Frank O’Malley. Just getting into that course had represented a triumph and he was predisposed to be impressed. There were students who spent four years at Notre Dame trying unsuccessfully to be admitted to O’Neill’s course in Catholic Writers. Elliot had not left matters to chance.
“I knew your father,” O’Neill said when Elliot got next to him at the bar in the Morris Inn and introduced himself. O’Neill lived on campus, in an apartment over the original art museum. He ate on campus, he slept on campus, he taught on campus, he spent hours in the pay café in the South Dining Hall, whiling away the time with groups of admiring undergraduates. At Christmas, he boarded the South Shore to Chicago to be with his sister. During the long summer vacation, he took up his station on the shore of St. Joseph’s lake, where he unfolded his beach chair beneath an umbrella and, with a thermos of gin and tonic within reach, reread the authors he loved.
“But my father graduated in 1958,” James Elliot had said, and as soon as he said it he was sorry. O’Neill turned pale gray eyes on him.
“We were undergraduates together. I graduated in ’61,” O’Neill murmured. “I was not suggesting that I taught your father. But I knew him. I remember him.”
“I want to get into your course.”
“Why?”
“It can’t be as good as they say.”
“It isn’t. What’s your major?”
A second moment of truth when he might have lied. But he didn’t. “Economics.”
O’Neill nodded. Elliot was to learn that O’Neill did not favor English majors. Like graduate students, they tended to hold him in disdain. O’Neill’s contagious enthusiasm for the authors he discussed seemed unprofessional to those who hoped to make a career out of rendering literature unpalatable.
“Literature is not a specialty,” O’Neill would often repeat. “Specialists despised Dickens in his day.”
But the major reason for the negative judgment of O’Neill was that he never published.
“My job is to teach the students in front of me, not address anonymous strangers in print.”
After James Elliot succeeded in being admitted to O’Neill’s course, he felt a small letdown. How would he do in such a course? He had been humbled by philosophy and had his faith tested by theology. The only reason he was in the Arts College was that Economics was located there. He had thought of switching to business, but his father vetoed that.
“You’d be fighting the last war.”
“In the business school?”
“A manner of speaking. Generals fight old wars. Business schools teach outmoded methods. Stay where you are.”
He asked his father, “Do you remember Malachy O’Neill?”
“The tennis player?”
“Did he play tennis?”
“He did when I knew him.”
O’Neill was a spare man of middle height, always impeccably dressed, pale red hair rising from his forehead in a series of waves that gave him a Woody the Woodpecker look from the side. It was barely possible to imagine him on the tennis courts in the past, but O’Neill had been abusing his body for decades and avoided all exercise but walking. Guesses were made on the number of cigarettes he smoked in the course of the day. He smoked everywhere but in church, and his average for a fifty-minute class was seven Pall Malls. It was in O’Neill’s class that James was introduced to The Wasteland.
“T. S. Eliot is a Catholic author,” O’Neill decreed. “He’s more Catholic than Joyce.”
Reading Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist with O’Neill was an unforgettable experience. The course made an indelible impression on James Elliot, fostering a love of literature that only increased with the years. He bought first editions of the authors he loved, but he preferred reading them in paperback editions. Now in his fifties, his four children grown—the youngest a junior at Notre Dame—he had more money than he would ever need and stood to make a great deal more if he sold his business to a conglomerate that was out to monopolize the trash business in the Midwest. In any case, the business now ran itself. His son William was his less than enthusiastic successor and was in favor of selling ELLIOT WASTE to MIDSTATES REMOVALS. There was a small family foundation, managed by his son Gregory. His daughter Dolores had married a physician and young Brian had said he wanted to be a priest. Of course that was some years ago.
It was James Elliot’s regret that none of his children had been able to take a class taught by Malachy O’Neill. The man had burned out by the time the oldest arrived on campus, alcohol and tobacco exacting their toll. One day he collapsed while lecturing on Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. The funeral had been a Notre Dame event. Sacred Heart could not contain all the alumni who returned for the occasion. James Elliot was there. It was two years later that the provost called on him in his room in the Morris Inn during a football weekend, bringing along David Simmons.
“David is with the Notre Dame foundation,” the provost said. “He has something he would like to talk with you about. I hope you find it interesting.”
“I was in one of the last classes Malachy O’Neill taught,” Simmons said.
There was the Open Sesame. James wanted all the details and Simmons supplied them, speaking with obvious warmth of the deceased professor.
“There ought to be a memorial to him,” Simmons said. “Something fitting.”
“What did you have in mind?”
David Simmons would not have been as successful at what he did if he gave straight answers to questions like that. The discussion had continued. James Elliot was disposed to be generous to his alma mater; he did not need to be persuaded that Malachy O’Neill should be immortalized on the campus where he had taught to such effect. They discussed a building, they discussed an endowed professorship, they discussed a Notre Dame edition of the authors O’Neill had taught. A building seemed inappropriate, but a Malachy O’Neill Chair in Catholic Literature had been established, with mixed results. Geoffrey Sauer, the person hired, was a Joyce scholar who had written an unreadable book on Finnegan’s Wake. He was said to be translating Joyce into Esperanto, but that might have been a joke. As a teacher, he was deadly and undergraduates could not be bribed to take his courses. He was everything that Malachy O’Neill had avoided becoming. The special edition of Malachy’s favorite authors was published by the university press, but James Elliot was far from satisfied that he had paid his debt to a beloved professor. “The endowed chair was a mistake.”
David Simmons nodded. And waited.
“There has to be something else.”
But what it would be remained undetermined. For the next year, the conversation between James Elliot and Simmons resumed whenever James was on campus.
“I think I may have it,” Simmons had said in September.
“What is it?”
“Will you be here for the Michigan game?”
“Of course.”
“Can you save some time for me then?”
“I intend to go to the pep rally.”
“How about breakfast on Saturday morning?”
“Where?”
“In the Morris Inn. The president would like to join us.”
3
The Knight brothers had met James Elliott in the line of duty.
Philip Knight was in some ways happier than his brother when Roger was named Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies at Notre Dame. In an electronic age, location had become virtual and Phil was running his private investigation agency out of Rye, having moved up the Hudson after being mugged a second time in Manhattan. An 800 number advertised in the yellow pages of selected cities across the nation brought him sufficient inquiries from which to choose his clients. When feasible Roger accompanied him on the cases he took, and given Roger’s bulk this meant taking the specially converted van in which, unlike public transportation, Roger could be comfortable. Last August, on one of their rare excursions since moving to South Bend, they had driven up into central Michigan in response to an appeal from James Elliot. Phil was susceptible because there was a connection between Elliot’s appeal and Notre Dame.
“I’m a domer,” Elliot had said without preamble. Philip looked at Roger for help.
“An alumnus of Notre Dame,” Roger explained. “Named from the golden dome atop the main building.”
“Class of ’76,” Elliot said.
Of course the Knight brothers had met Notre Dame alumni before their move to the Midwest. They were acquainted with the phenomenon of the “subway alumnus,” the fan who cheered on Notre Dame teams from a distance but who may never have been near the school itself. Many universities have a mystique, loyal alumni are not unknown, but there is no other school from which thousands of complete strangers award themselves honorary degrees. By contrast, the Elliot family was in its third generation at Notre Dame. There might have been a bit of a chip on James Elliot’s shoulder when he mentioned the source of the family wealth to the Knights.
“Waste.”
“Waste?”
“Trash. Debris. Garbage.” He pointed to a map on the wall. “ELLIOT WASTE. We dominate central Michigan.”
James Elliot’s reason for wanting to enlist the services of a private investigator was not readily classifiable. Before agreeing to come to Michigan, Philip had determined that neither the suspected infidelity of a spouse nor a runaway child was involved. He was assured that the task was important and honorable.
“Perhaps you know of the tremendous influence Malachy O’Neill had on his students.”
“I have heard stories about him,” Roger said.
James Elliot shook his head impatiently. “Nothing short of knowing the man could convey the strength of his influence. What I want you to do involves Professor O’Neill.”
When James Elliot eventually revealed why he had brought Philip Knight all the way to Midlothian, Michigan, silence settled over the office. Elliot wanted Phil to find out whether or not an alumnus named Weber had indeed been a student of O’Neill’s and was in the classroom when the great man collapsed and died. Donald Weber was a native of Midlothian, a classmate of Elliot’s who had returned to his hometown to teach on the local campus. Clearly a boyish rivalry between Weber and Elliot had survived into middle life.
“The man is my age! He was back there then as a graduate student, a retarded one, as he himself puts it. But I know O’Neill wouldn’t let a graduate student into his class.”
“But Weber says he was?”
“And I don’t believe him.”
“Can’t you simply call the registrar and ask?”
“No! Weber’s niece works in the registrar’s office. This has to be done discreetly.” Sadness descended on him. “He may be telling the truth.”
It was Elliot’s inflated fear that any direct inquiry by himself, or by anyone connected with himself, would be relayed to his classmate. If Weber’s claim was true, Weber’s advantage would be intolerably increased. If it was false, Elliot did not want his foe to be forewarned.
“Does it matter that much?”
“Oh yes. It matters. The memory of a great man should not be tainted by false claims and imagined associations.”
It has been said that the intensity of academic disputes can only be appreciated when one knows the triviality of what is at stake. Perhaps the rivalries within any group seem petty and absurd to outsiders. In any case, the seriousness with which James Elliot regarded the possibly fictitious claim of Donald Weber to have been there when the great O’Neill had fallen could not be denied. The sum of money he offered for this information underscored its importance to him.
Celt and Pepper Page 2