The Death of a Joyce Scholar

by Bartholomew Gill

  It was half-six when McGarr got home, and Noreen had not yet arrived. Without pausing for a lager, he retrieved Ulysses from the bedroom upstairs and went right out to the back garden, where the high walls would shield him from the wind. It had brisked up around noon and had been building ever since. Tomorrow the weather would change, and he had spent far too many good days inside, as it was.

  He set a comfortable chair in a patch of the brightest sun, loosened his tie, and sat. The heat was intense there and was soon baking him so agreeably that for a while he was not moved to open the book. During that time he heard a noise on top of the wall in back of him, a low whine and some panting, and he was soon joined by the P.M., the Garda veteran from the next house. The dog nuzzled his hand, received its requisite evening greeting, and then settled in the shadow of the chair and dozed off.

  In his earlier attempts to read Ulysses, McGarr had discovered that the only availing approach for the novice reader was to consult the “guide” often and in depth. But he now found himself forgetting the many allusions to symbol, history, and myth and merely “listening” to the words on the page, much as he would listen to a piece of music.

  It was a peculiarly Irish song, he understood from the first page, and a particularly Dublin ditty—now melodic and fine, later rough and raspy, then rambling and vague and what McGarr thought of as ethereal, counterbalanced by a focus as sharp and unsparing as any microscope. From the books that a certain literary martinet of a schoolmaster had forced upon him long before, and from years of recreational reading, he understood that Ulysses must have been for its time and was most probably still a tour de force, containing more literary devices than he could name or explain. He couldn’t keep himself from concentrating on the “voice,” or rather the “voices”; they were whispering and singing and chanting and cursing and praying and now stating bluntly in journalese or implying in ad lingo or slyly insinuating, like a whisper in the ear, propositions, avowals, invocations, promises, directives, observations, and whatnot, all in such a heady, ever-changing concoction that after several dozen pages McGarr decided it was more than mere song.

  The novel reminded him of the complex weave of voices raised in complaint, laughter, song, noise, and lament that he had heard all his life in one or another Dublin licensed premises, which could not have changed since Joyce’s era. And it was little wonder that—as Flood had said—the more complete book (Finnegan’s Wake) was the story of the dream of a Dublin publican. McGarr was entertained mightily and did not stop on page 100, when Leopold Bloom—Dublin Jew man and one of the two major characters—approached the cemetery in Glasnevin and another character pointed toward Bengal Terrace:

  —That is where Childs was murdered, he said. The last house.

  —So it is, Mr. Dedalus said. A gruesome case. Seymour Bushes got him off. Murdered his brother. Or so they said.

  —The crown had no evidence, Mr. Power said.

  —Only circumstantial, Martin Cunningham added. That’s the maxim of the law. Better for ninety-nine guilty to escape than for one innocent person to be wrongfully condemned.

  They looked. Murderer’s ground. It passed darkly. Shuttered, tenantless, unweeded garden. Whole place gone to hell. Wrongfully condemned. Murder. The murderer’s image in the eye of the murdered. They love reading about it. Man’s head found in a garden. Her clothing consisted of. How she met her death. Recent outrage. The weapon used. Murderer is still at large, clues. A shoelace. The body to be exhumed. Murder will out.

  McGarr read on, even though it occurred to him that such a reference would not have been lost upon (and had not been mentioned by) Fergus Flood or David Holderness or, for that matter, the only literateuse involved in the case: the comely Catty Doyle.

  Could she have chosen to reside in De Courcy Square that shared an alley with Bengal Terrace because…? And what motive might she have had to murder Coyle beyond possessing a number of signed, first-edition Kevin Coyle volumes that with the man’s death would doubtless increase in value? McGarr did not actually know that the books belonged to Catty; Bresnahan had reported overhearing the three women discussing the situation, as though the books were mutual property, but the fact of the matter was, they were actually in Sittonn’s possession.

  And then Doyle had been Kevin Coyle’s editor, and on that basis had lost by his death perhaps more than anybody save his wife and Maura Flood, who had been another of his lovers and had seemed genuinely saddened by his death. McGarr wondered if Doyle made it a point to know all of her writers in the flesh, so to speak, and if such practice was standard to the publishing industry. He would have to take to writing books.

  Or might the same feminist triumvirate have tired of Coyle’s antics and decreed his end? No, again. They might have attempted to alter his…behavior, but would they have done him mortal harm? Sittonn’s having dropped Catty off at De Courcy Square after their “date” put her on the scene. Had it been straight home for Sittonn? McGarr would have to find out.

  In any case, McGarr was—as he had suspected from the first—solidly on literary turf, and he now found it passing strange that nobody had mentioned the murder that was spoken of in the novel and Coyle’s death there nearly in the very same spot: Flood, who taught Joyce in university; Holderness, who was the research student in literature; Catty Doyle, who most probably knew Ulysses, or who would have been informed of the distinction of her address by either of her male lovers. Even from the little McGarr knew of academics, he could scarcely imagine a practicing Joyce scholar resisting the opportunity of displaying his erudition to the likes of a Catty Doyle.

  Or, fully understanding that eventually the correlation would come to light, could the three women have so arranged Coyle’s demise as to suggest an academic connection? To implicate Flood and/or Holderness?

  It was then that McGarr glanced up from the book and saw the large, bearded Rabbi Viner peering over the wall.

  “Caught in the act. I should fetch me camera. It’s a shot for the papers, so it is. They could run it front page: ‘Murder Squad Chief Closet Ineffectual.’ Given the errata rife in those pages, people’d think it a typo. They’d also get letters from the country, whole barge loads, demanding your resignation. I quote, ‘To think of the cheek of the man, masquerading as a top Guard, when in fact he was photographed center forward in his back garden reading a bloody boook of all immarh-al t’ings. Question: Did it have pictures, and of what, and of whose anatomy, and don’t give me that bull it’s about forensics. Or smutty jokes about aborigines and Kerrymen? And finally, was it written, edited, produced, or printed in the U.K. or the USA?’ Pronounced, ‘Uck’ and ‘Ooza.’”

  McGarr smiled. Viner wasn’t half wrong: sure, an EEC study had just discovered that the Irish bought and read more books per capita than any other European nation, but McGarr did not doubt that Irish bibliophiles were a narrow elite who indulged themselves heroically. He knew of whole voting districts in Dublin that were virtually book-free. People there never read more than the price of hake. Or porter.

  “So, what’s the title, and if you tell me it’s Pathological Curiosities or, rather, Curiosities of Pathology, I’ll never speak to you again, so help me, Dante.”

  McGarr sighed. Viner was irrepressible. Worse, he was cultivated, and his roots in Dublin were as long-standing as McGarr’s own. McGarr could lie and say he was re-reading Ulysses, “…as I do every so often,” but lying wasn’t his style, especially to a man of the cloth who was also a good friend and an entertaining neighbor.

  Sheepishly he said, “It’s Ulysses.”

  “Ah, the Kevin Coyle case,” Viner said with an alacrity that revealed his purpose in disturbing McGarr. Like most Dubliners, there was little in the city that was not of interest to him, especially murder, and McGarr could imagine Viner, for all his undoubted discretion, confiding to an intimate, “Peter McGarr is my immediate neighbor. I speak to him daily and—”

  McGarr said nothing and kept his eyes in the book.

  �
��To think that Flood would throw away so much…position, academic acclaim, his little business there in Nassau Street. What does he call it? Joyce’s Ireland, I think. And him with a handsome wife and child. Is it her it was over?”

  McGarr tried to raise his head slowly.

  “It’s in all the papers:”

  McGarr couldn’t keep the surprise from his face.

  “I’ll go get them if you’d like. Splashed all over the front page of the Press.”

  “Charged?”

  “No—not exactly charged. But they’re aware that Flood has been helping you in the investigation, and…” Viner’s glance at McGarr was expectant and hopeful. “Helping” was the euphemism used to imply that a person, while not charged with a crime, was being interviewed in that connection.

  “And to think to have come to a foreign land,” Viner went on hopefully, the declining sun making his face look round and moonish over the top of the wall, “and established a brilliant career, only to have such a thing happen in the middle, the very best part of his life.” Viner himself was approaching fifty, and mid-life potentialities were a present concern.

  But it was the earlier allusion that pricked McGarr’s interest. “Foreign land?”

  “Sure you knew, Superintendent McGarr, that your helper is an American?” Again Viner tried to read McGarr’s face. “From some place out on the Great Plains. Iowa, I believe. Or Nebraska. Don’t you like the names they have over there? Listen to the sound of that: Ne-bras-ka,” he intoned. “Why, the very sound of it conjures up visions of rolling, windy, treeless hills with solitary farmhouses and immense barns and nothing but an horizon sweep of buffalo dung.”

  Opined McGarr, “The buffalo has been largely extincted, I hear.”

  “A progressive people, the Americans. Nobody would say they’re not. And a Jew—Flood, I mean. In the beginning here—his at Trinity, mine in my congregation—I saw a good deal of him. But like others who have come to this seductive little isle, he soon became more Irish than the Irish.” It was a phrase an historian had used to describe what had happened to the early Normans in Ireland. “And I regret to say I lost him. Entreaties ignored. Cards, letters, the same. He sends me a few quid every year with a little note that we should—”

  As Viner spoke on, McGarr reconsidered Fergus Flood—an American, he who had seemed so much the urbane, educated Dub, right down to the Ath Cliath dialect he seemed able to employ at will and condescendingly? He had the accent, the gestures, and the mannerisms down pat (or, rather, Paddy), and McGarr wondered immediately what else he might have “adopted” in regard to the death of his colleague and rival, Kevin Coyle. Flood hadn’t told them all of the truth. Of that McGarr was certain.

  Standing, he said, “Excuse me, Sol—I must use the phone.”

  Viner gloated, “You mean you didn’t know Flood was a tribesman of mine? Or is it the American connection? You know, I bumped into him on D’Olier Street a couple of years ago and was amazed how he carried off the donnish, Foxrock bit without batting an eye. To me who knew, mind. But then, I’m but a poor man of God. Trusting, compassionate, believing. You, however, are a nag of another—”

  The back door closed. McGarr liked Viner, he enjoyed his company, often sought him out. But, to appropriate an American turn of phrase, Viner could also be a humongous (albeit helpful) pain in the arse, especially when he was right.

  McGarr dialed three different numbers and finally found McKeon at his favorite pub. “Didn’t I see the name of an American reporter on the list that Hughie got from Joyce’s Ireland and Bloomsday Tours?”

  “You did indeed. Boston Globe. Goldfarb’s the name. He’s on assignment in the North. They sent him down here for a contradiction.”

  McGarr waited. The pub was busy and filled with noise.

  “A working breather, he said they called the Bloomsday thing, which reminds me. How dare you disturb me while I’m on orificial business?”

  “He still here?”

  “Goldfarb? As of this morning. You busy, or is the wife in state? Why don’t you pop down here, and we’ll—”

  “I’d like you to phone him up. Make it sound like a tip for a story, you know, him having been helpful and all. Tell him that it’s come to light that Professor Fergus Flood of Trinity College is actually a Jewish American from someplace like Iowa or Nebraska, and you thought it might be a story he’d be interested in. If he’s any class of journalist, he’ll know about Flood and the Coyle case.”

  There was a pause, and then, “Flood?”

  “None other.”

  “Christ—I’m slippin’. The bugger codded me. I would have sworn he was one of us.”

  There it was again. “Me too, but we’ll let the press sort him out. Somebody with contacts better than ours.”

  McGarr had no sooner settled himself back in the chair at the corner of the garden than Noreen appeared. She was wearing a deep orange dress, just the color of her hair, and he could tell from her step as she approached him that she had been drinking. He wondered where and with whom, though he knew better than to ask. She would not be questioned on her actions, especially when in her cups.

  Hand on hip, she stopped before him, looking ravishing, like flame, in the golden hues of the setting sun. Her green eyes flickered down on the book. “So—I’m glad to see you’ve gotten to it at last. I’d be mortified to have a husband of mine admit in public that he hadn’t read Ulysses.”

  Me? he wanted to say. I’ve been trying to read the thing for days now.

  “And you needn’t bother me tonight. I must get my rest. Tomorrow’s the book launching at the Shelbourne.”

  Him bother her?

  “I stopped by and helped Catty arrange the flowers.” Raising her chin, she presented McGarr with the profile of her face, which was striking: the aquiline nose; high forehead; a definite, if small, chin below a slightly protrusive upper lip. “An intelligent and talented and beautiful young woman, don’t you think?”

  McGarr waited until the turquoise of her eyes flashed down on him for an opinion. “Her? G’wan,” he said in his most obvious Dublin dialect. “She’s a scrawny dark mot, all bone and gristle. Blue veins, didn’t you notice? She’ll age, so, and fast. Like a quayside mist.”

  “Blue veins where?”

  “Her legs. The side of her neck, which she conceals with her hair.”

  “Well, it’s true that she has fine skin. Today she was wearing a full-skirted dress of exquisite pink crinoline.” Pink was a color Noreen believed she could not wear. “It must have cost heaps. She looked like a little…” The green eyes searched the top of the wall, her smooth brow glowered. In three months she would be thirty, and already they were in full, if covert, crisis.

  “Doll?” he suggested.

  “No, not doll. Do you think I’d ever say that about one of my—”

  “Friends?”

  Her nostrils flared and the interesting curves of her chest heaved as she tried to clear the thought through the haze of the wine.

  “Acquaintance? Associate? Don’t tell me Dawson Galleries, Limited, is actually hanging canvases at this authorless book launching?”

  The twilight flared briefly in her eyes. “It’s the premiere cultural event of late summer. A coup, really. Everybody’ll be there, and the other gallery owners will be green.”

  Better than pink, he thought. “What’s she like?”

  “Catty? Most professional. Everything has to be just so and she certainly knows how to build a media event. I suspect that years from now publishing people will speak of the launching of Phon/Antiphon with a kind of awe. If, however, you mean from a police perspective, you offend me. How you could suspect such a considerate, intelligent, and tasteful young woman of anything but the highest motives and impeccable conduct, points up what I have long considered perhaps your most distressing flaw.”

  His baldness? His stature? His incipient obesity? McGarr awaited the punch line, as it were, with no little trepidation.

  “Your
conception of human nature, which is debased. Warped, I should imagine, from your dealings with the dark side of human experience. This may come as a surprise to you, but not everybody compromises her integrity.”

  McGarr reflected on the bookcase of Kevin Coyle volumes in Mary Sittonn’s antique shop, Catty Doyle’s extraprofessional approach to Kevin Coyle and David Holderness and her complex relationship with her “sisters,” especially with Sittonn, who had tattooed her shoulder with what McGarr suspected was a Catty logo. But he mentioned none of that. “What does one wear to such an event?” he asked instead.

  Noreen had begun making her way grandly toward the house, taking precise steps, fanning her dress with her hands. “Oh—stylish, trendy things,” which meant that a large box containing at least one extravagantly priced item sat in the hallway.

  Pity, for him a poor summer suit would have to suffice.

  “Why, are you thinking of attending?”

  “Perhaps,” he lied. She could count on him.

  She stopped and turned. “In what capacity, may I ask?”

  McGarr raised the book, “Police artist manqué, what else?”

  “What about the suit?”

  “Your choice.”

  She smiled slightly. “But please, Peter, no—”

  “Gaffs,” he supplied.

  “And if you have to play Grand Inquisitor, try not to make it—”

  “While you’re involved in a sale.”

  “No—to hell with sales. I mean obvious.” There was another pause before she asked, “Hungry?”

  He knew what that meant too. “Not really.”

  “Good. I’m shattered, really, and there’s that roast in the fridge. Would you mind…?”

  “Not at all. Get some sleep. I’d like to put a bit of the book by before I come to bed. If I’m hungry, I’ll help myself.”

  But McGarr never got to his roast. From the garden he removed himself to the study, then to the sitting room, where, after midnight, he lit a small fire in the grate to dispel the chill, and finally to a tall, wing-back chair in the bedroom, where Noreen was already in bed and he hoped he would soon doze off.