“No bioengineering!” Briggs was taller than he seemed, but then he had the look of an alighting bird when he appeared at Dave’s office. Dave agreed, no bioengineering.
The money they were talking about had come to Briggs from his wife, Philippa, a pudgy little lady with a pursy smile. Briggs and his wife had sold off her father’s wholesale liquor business for a very large number and turned it over to Dave.
“I don’t want to think about it, Dave.”
“I’ll do the thinking.”
The problem was that Briggs didn’t have a lot to think about apart from his investments. Several times a week he came to the office, just curious, how we doing, how are things going? Della Portiere, Dave’s administrative assistant, would put Briggs in a little room where he could watch the fluctuating prices of stocks fly by on the screen. He even grew philosophical about what those altering numbers meant.
“Zillions of sales all over the country all day long. How can they talk of the ‘market’ as if it were someone?”
It was true, they all did talk that way. When trading was over for the day there was speculation as to what the market was saying, what it was reacting to, pondering the matter as ancient Romans had probed the entrails of birds.
“It is someone, Larry. It’s you, me, and all the others.”
An interested client is an interesting thing, up to a point. Briggs became a pain in the neck. He would have liked weekly reports, daily reports, if Dave had been willing to supply them. Still, all had gone well while Briggs’s investments were increasing in value. Besides, Briggs could always be diverted by talk about Notre Dame.
“Your son’s out there, isn’t he?” he asked Dave.
“Junior year.”
“So you trust the place?”
“What do you mean?”
Briggs’s eyes narrowed. “It’s no longer the school I attended.”
“The football team will come back.”
Possibly, but it was the secular drift of the university that pained Briggs. He had stories. He had informants. He was outraged about all the waffling on the Vagina Monologues.
“I didn’t know they could talk, Larry.”
All wrong. Larry was serious, very serious. The current administration at Notre Dame was betraying his alma mater. With any other alumnus, Dave might have discussed such matters, but Larry Briggs was too intense. The decline in the value of his investments had robbed him of any sense of humor he might have had.
“Almost every day,” Della said when he asked her about Briggs. “He wants to know how your other clients are doing.”
No need to tell Della not to feed Briggs’s curiosity. “Set up an appointment, Della.”
Sometimes he felt that he had become Briggs’s therapist. Briggs acted like a bettor at the track who wanted his money back after his horse had lost. Well, Dave felt the same way. Maybe he could get some of the money the government was throwing around. Successful as he had been, his operation was minuscule compared to the giants who had fallen. He had actually thought of making a first payment on this visit to Notre Dame, as a matter of honor, or perhaps of self-deception, but Fenway’s condescension drove that thought away.
“A half year at the outside,” he said.
“Of course. Keep me posted.”
“I suppose you’ve had lots of this.”
Fenway’s brows rose in a question.
“Postponed gifts.”
“You’d be surprised,” Fenway said. He didn’t say how.
Outside Grace, a chill wind caught him, and Williams drew his coat close about him. He wished now he had called Fenway, convinced that on the phone he could have handled the situation better. Even so, he felt relief that he was relieved, if only for the present, of his pledge to the university. When he had made it, there had been an item on the Notre Dame Web page. David Williams, Class of 1989, pledges twenty million dollars for new ethics center building. At least Fenway hadn’t reminded him of that.
He turned, shielding himself from the wind, and got out his cell phone. Call Jay? Thoughts of Mame assailed him. Moreover, his son had of late adopted a condescending attitude toward the way he made a living.
“Usury, Dad.”
“Nonsense.”
“Money shouldn’t make more money.”
“Thank God it does.” Or at least it had.
He scrolled through his addresses. Ah. Father Carmody. He punched the number.
4
AS A MEMBER OF THE CONGREGATION of Holy Cross, Father Carmody had taken the three vows of religion. That had been long, long ago, and none of those vows had sat heavily on his shoulders over the years. Poverty, chastity, obedience. Well, maybe obedience, but then he had always been in the inner circle, commanding obedience rather than observing it. Through a series of presidencies he had been a man in the background, the éminence grise, finding unperceived power more satisfying than the public kind. However, that role had diminished of late; indeed, under the new administration it had all but disappeared. The calls on his presumed wisdom had declined ever since he voiced concern about concentration on the university’s endowment. The sum had risen astronomically, and its further increase seemed to become an end in itself.
“What would you suggest, Father?”
“Using it. Lower the tuition, for example.”
This obvious suggestion had been regarded as Pickwickian. Or would have been if anyone still read Dickens. Try naive.
What could the vow of poverty mean if it were lived in an increasingly rich institution? Not that poverty had ever had much bite to it. It had come to mean lack of concern for the source of the money that provided them a carefree existence. Everyone had his own automobile now, traveled at will, lacked nothing really. Three squares and a good bed didn’t begin to cover it.
“Not everyone has taken the vow of poverty, Father.”
The laypeople in the administration certainly hadn’t. They were remunerated on the scale of officers in a major corporation, heady sums, plus all the perks of office. Faculty salaries, too, had risen to giddy heights, even as fewer demands were made on professors. Perhaps the adjunct faculty could be called poor, those temporaries who enabled the tenured faculty to reduce what was referred to as their teaching “load.” The term suggested that the faculty were hod carriers, sweating under their burden. That burden was typically two courses a semester now, scheduled on two days of the week. When retirement came, who would be able to tell the difference?
“It frees them for research, Father.”
“Research” had become a sacred term. “A national Catholic research university” was now the preferred description of the place. Why not simply “scholarship”? “Research” suggested to Carmody someone in a lab coat frowning at a beaker held up to the light. Around 1920, Father Nieuwland had discovered the formula for synthetic rubber, and a mural depicting the man at work in his laboratory had adorned a wall in the pay cafeteria in the South Dining Hall. What could be the equivalent of that in theology or English or history? Oh, he knew the responses to that, having groused about it often enough.
Had he become a crank? He had certainly become old. He lived now in Holy Cross House across the lake from campus, where elderly members of the Congregation went to spend their final years. How many of the faculty did he know now? Or members of the administration, for that matter. It was difficult to avoid the realization that he had been put out to pasture. Not that he considered himself a typical resident of Holy Cross House. His health was good, thanks to a lifetime of smoking and intermittent total abstinence. He still had a lot of miles in him, but what was the good of that if he wasn’t called upon? Thank God for Roger and Phil Knight.
One of his last contributions to the university was to get the endowed chair that had brought Roger to Notre Dame. The chair was named after Huneker, a Philadelphia author, mainly music criticism, whose work not even the descendants who had come up with the money for the chair had read, or were ever likely to. It was the thought of thei
r name being commemorated by an endowed chair that swayed them. No need to dwell on Huneker’s less than edifying life. Not much of a Catholic when the chips were down. Never mind; the object was to have a place into which the corpulent Roger could be put.
There had been opposition, of course. The faculty no longer sat still for appointments made from on high. That had been turned to Roger’s advantage. He was what he himself called a free variable, a member of no department, an entity unto himself who taught whatever he felt fitted under the aegis of Catholic Studies.
Father Carmody’s last coup, as it now seemed, was to direct the money Dave Williams wanted to give the university into support for the Center for Ethics and Culture. What might the center not do with a new building and secure funding? How odd that he was thinking of that when Dave Williams called.
“Long time no see.”
“How about now, Father?”
“Now? Are you on campus?”
He was. Carmody told him to come ahead.
He went outside the front entrance and claimed the chair in which Ted Hesburgh smoked his evening cigar.
There had been talk in recent weeks about the country’s financial situation. Only old Keenan could have pretended to understand what was going on, but he was deep in dementia, beyond the economics that had occupied him in the classroom. His last pronouncement had been that the country was going to hell in a handbasket. He meant financially. It was too bad he wasn’t lucid enough to see his prediction coming true.
In a previous conversation, Dave Williams had dismissed such fears. “There are too many safeguards, Father. Regulations, watchdogs. The country learned its lesson from the Great Depression.”
Carmody had no independent view on that. After all, he was told that the universe had been expanding ever since the Big Bang. It seemed to be a theological point that eventually there would be a great collapse.
Ten minutes after Father Carmody settled into his chair, Dave Williams drove up, parked, and came bouncing across to him.
They talked in Carmody’s room; they went on to Sorin’s in the Morris Inn; afterward they would stop by the Knights’.
“It’s bad, Father.” The bounce had gone out of Dave when they settled down to talk.
By the time they got to the Morris Inn, Carmody had the impression that Dave was ruined.
“Oh, no. Personally, I’m not in bad shape. I may soon be out of business, though.”
And do what?
Dave didn’t know. He seemed almost bewildered. “I may be sued.” To his credit he seemed at least as dismayed by the fate of his clients. “Of course, I have to postpone my gift for the ethics building.”
“We don’t need an ethics building.”
“But you argued for it.”
“Only to prevent your money from going to something else. There are too damned many new buildings as it is.”
5
JUST AS BOOK DEALERS ARE REGULARLY approached by owners of old but worthless books, thinking they have a treasure, so the archivist’s professional appraisal of gifts will often differ from the donor’s assumptions. Greg Walsh, associate archivist at Notre Dame, had come to regard donations from old grads with skepticism. Memorabilia of old sports events were a constant item, but how many accounts of the famous 10–10 tie between Notre Dame and Michigan State do you need? Letters were another thing, and diaries even better. Greg had been puzzled when the neatly wrapped package arrived from Our Lady of Gethsemani, a Trappist abbey in Kentucky. Cheese? No, it contained items that Patrick Pelligrino, now Brother Joachim, Notre Dame ’89, hoped the archives would find of interest. Greg put them away for a duller day, when he could pore over the contents, hopeful that the box contained good things.
It was on a rainy Saturday afternoon, in an empty archives, that Greg again opened the box. Among the things it contained was a sealed manila envelope, bulky, and a slimmer addressed envelope. He set them aside and sorted through the playbills and course notes, a dozen newspaper clippings about a missing student, and a diary that disappointed since the entries were sparse, scattered through the little book with a padded cover on which “1988” was embossed in faded gold. Finally he opened the larger sealed envelope. The sheaf of elegantly handwritten pages bore the printed title De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Speak well of the dead. It proved to be a story, and it was dedicated “To Timothy Quinn, requiescat in pace.” The newspaper clippings had concerned the disappearance of Quinn. Arranged chronologically, they moved from first notices of the missing Notre Dame student through the attempts to discover where he was to the announcement some months later that the search had been ended. Timothy Quinn was presumed dead, although his remains had never been found. Greg settled back and, without great anticipation, began to read the story.
The setting was the Notre Dame campus, the time some decades ago, and the story told of the rivalry of several young men for the attentions of the same girl. The narrator was Patrick, who was enamored of Beth, and his rivals were Dave and Timothy. The plot seemed to turn on which of them would win the girl, and the narrator developed nicely the way a common love had led to a falling-out among the three friends, the turning point being when Patrick became the distraught girl’s unwilling confidante. Her trouble was not stated explicitly, but it seemed clear that she had become pregnant. By whom? Not the narrator, who is crushed by what the girl tells him. Having consoled her as best he can, he hurries off to confront Timothy and tell him that he must do the honorable thing. A vivid word picture of Timothy’s enraged reaction makes it clear that he is not the villain. If neither of them, then who? David. The shared knowledge makes allies of the two until Patrick realizes that Timothy has violence in mind. He takes from the wall on which it hangs a hatchet, an award he had won as a Boy Scout. Seeing that Timothy’s rage has become homicidal, Patrick struggles with him, trying to wrest the hatchet from him. An enraged Timothy strikes Patrick, knocking him out. When the narrator comes to, he dashes to Dave’s room. Dave is sitting on his bed, holding the hatchet.
“Where is he?”
“Gone.”
The denouement was disappointing. Having brought his story to this pitch, Patrick all but abandoned it. “I never saw Timothy alive again after our struggle.” The end? That seemed to be it. Not quite. A line was drawn across the page and then: “I buried him and his hatchet.” Beneath were instructions on where the hatchet and body could be found buried near the Log Chapel.
The names of the characters in the story were the names of two of Pelligrino’s classmates. Why would a monk write such a story? It seemed to be a fictionalized account of a real happening. The manuscript was one he must show Roger Knight. Meanwhile, he gathered all he could find in the archives about Quinn, most of it duplicates of what Brother Joachim had sent.
“Something interesting has come in,” he said to Roger over the phone.
“Ah.”
“Are you busy now?”
“You have piqued my interest.”
To bring Roger across campus to the library on such a day as this was out of the question. If Mohammed could not come to the mountain, the mountain must go to him. In this case Roger was the mountain. Only for the Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies would Greg have removed something from the archives. Of course, the Joachim donation had not yet been officially registered. That was the small moral loophole through which Greg Walsh wriggled when he set off for the Knights’ apartment with a carton on the passenger seat beside him.
Philip Knight was sprawled in a beanbag chair in front of the television, watching a game that seemed to give him pain. In far-off California, Southern Cal was inflicting yet another humiliation on the Fighting Irish. Roger took Greg into his study, and it was there that the Joachim donation was examined.
Greg presented the materials in order of increasing importance, first the newspaper clippings. The tale of Timothy Quinn prompted memories of more recent student disappearances, each of which had ended in the discovery of the body, both apparent suicides. The c
ase of Timothy Quinn was different, very different.
After the newspaper clippings, Greg showed Roger the diary. The enormous Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies leafed through the little book, reading the scattered entries. Pelligrino had made constant use of initials. BH appeared to be a St. Mary’s student, an object of interest to the three classmates, PP, TQ, and DW. She had appeared in several plays with the three young men. There was also a CW and an MS. Roger looked quizzically at Greg, who handed his friend the envelope.
“Have you read the story?” Roger asked as he took it.
“Yes.”
It was difficult to tell if Roger, as he read, found it interesting. When the narrative collapsed without resolving its apparent point, he frowned.
Greg handed him the final typed page. It read, “The above is an account of the disappearance of Timothy Quinn. This weighs upon my soul.” The writer went on to say that he had resolved to spend his life doing penance for the foul deed.
“Why?” Greg asked.
“I suppose many monks regard their lives as a form of penance for past sins.”
“I meant penance for what.”
It was inescapable that Brother Joachim counted on the contents of the box being read, most notably the abruptly ended story.
“No other manuscript?
“No.”
“There is no mention of Quinn’s death in the story.”
“The hatchet and the body?”
“That seems to be what is weighing on his soul.”
What was the point of all the obfuscation? A twenty-year-old disappearance, the writer apparently considering himself responsible, for that and even for the death of Timothy Quinn. Did the Trappist monk expect to be taken from the monastery, tried, and confined in another sort of cell? He was clearly pointing an accusing finger at David Williams.
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