“I spent a year redecorating,” she lied.
It hadn’t helped. Maybe in “their” sense she had never really been married, but he had the look of an adulterer, not a lover. She never made that mistake again. She began to speak of putting the apartment on the market.
“You’d just have to buy another.”
“Maybe I would settle down in the place in Connecticut.”
The next time they went there, but it was almost as bad. The one thing Wilfrid had resisted, unsuccessfully, was letting her have the place in Connecticut. It had been far more his than theirs. He had spent weekends doing maintenance, fussing around the property, directing old Fitz as the grumbling caretaker trimmed trees, made flower beds, painted the little cabin that had been Mame’s special place. It was fifty yards from the main house, reached by a wonderful little winding path, emerging suddenly like something in a fairy tale. Dave loved her office there. How delighted he had been to see so many of Casey’s books on her shelves.
“Are you still in touch with him, Dave?”
“He’s become a recluse on Siesta Key. He and Peaches.”
“Peaches!”
“His wife. Much younger. I have a place on Longboat.”
She had stayed at the Longboat Key Club, which, he told her, was not a mile from his place.
“I’d love to see it,” she said.
They did spend some wonderful days on Longboat Key. It had the added attraction of being far from Manhattan, and Wilfrid.
“Why don’t we call Casey?” she said one day.
“Another time.”
She seemed to be his secret, which had its attractions. On the other hand, it suggested that he was not comfortable in their relationship.
“You should marry again,” she said boldly, busying herself tidying up while she said it.
Silence. It had been three years since his wife, Bridget, had died. He never talked about her. Sometimes Mame felt that Bridget was the one he didn’t want to know about them. It was going to take time, she could see that, but she could be patient.
Meanwhile, he did wonders with the money she entrusted to him. Did he think it was everything? Wilfrid hadn’t liked it when she said she wanted to move some money into David Williams’s care.
“Never heard of him.”
“We were in school together.”
Jason, his partner, had heard of Dave. So had Pincus, their common financial adviser.
“A good man. He’s doing very well.” Pincus brightened. “You put that amount with him and we’ll have a contest to see who’s the better adviser.”
That made it sound like a game. Then again, what else is investing?
“He’s an old friend. From college.”
Pincus didn’t like that. “Never do business with friends.”
She put her hand on his arm. “I thought you loved me.”
“Not while I’m handling your money.”
It seemed disloyal, letting Pincus see the reports Dave sent her. He wrinkled his nose. “He’s beating me. Not that I would put you into some of these things. Hedge funds are pretty volatile.”
Hedge funds. It sounded like an item in the Connecticut place budget. Dave had tried to explain them to her, seeking her go-ahead.
“David, I am in your hands.” She leaned toward him and kissed the tip of his nose.
Many of the investments Dave had made for her turned out to be volatile. To his credit, Pincus hadn’t crowed when Dave’s reports began to detail losses.
“Temporary,” he assured her. “The market is adjusting itself.”
Bad financial news had seemed a good time to bring things out into the open.
“It’s been over a year, Dave.”
“What?”
“Us.”
She waited. He looked away.
“Is that your answer?”
“What’s the question?”
“The one a man puts to a woman.”
“Mame, you’re divorced.”
She dropped her chin and looked at him over her half-glasses. “You know I was never really married.”
He looked at her for a moment. “I talked with a priest about that.”
“You did!”
“Father Carmody, at Notre Dame. A nonsacramental marriage can be a real marriage.”
“That’s his opinion?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you ask him?”
It was his turn to tuck in his chin.
“I want another opinion, Dave.”
She got it from a fussy monsignor in a church near Sutton Place. He called it the Church of the United Nations and was full of stories about important people who showed up for Mass.
“No problem, my dear,” he assured Mame when she explained her situation.
“You’re sure? The man has been told otherwise.”
Monsignor Sparrow was incensed. “I serve on the archdiocesan marriage court.”
“We could be married here?”
That raised the delicate matter of her nonattendance at Mass. She couldn’t remember the last time she had gone to confession. So she told him about St. Mary’s and Notre Dame and her civil marriage and how she and Dave had been students together. “This is my chance to get back on track, Monsignor.”
“Good. Good.”
Only it was bad, bad. Dave wasn’t going to let a New York monsignor second-guess his precious Father Carmody.
There was more.
“Mame, I never proposed.”
“I’m just a hot little affair?”
“It’s over, Mame. It has to be. I can’t keep confessing the same sin over and over and pretend I’m truly sorry.”
“Sin!”
He meant it. All those wonderful times meant only sin to him.
“It doesn’t have to be a sin.” Did she have to come right out and say it? Marry me and everything is fine. A sin becomes a virtue.
“Please don’t laugh, Mame, but I still feel married. I think of Bridget all the time.”
“All the time?” She widened her eyes.
At first, calmly, she had described him to himself. A member of the archdiocesan marriage court of New York had told her there was no impediment to her marrying again, but Dave stuck with an off-the-cuff remark of an old priest at Notre Dame. Didn’t he see that their love was a prelude to something permanent, not an affair? A pardonable anticipation.
“Did the monsignor tell you that, too?”
She remained calm. “I admire and respect your devotion to Bridget, but Dave, she’s not your wife anymore. Until death do us part, remember? Don’t turn what I am sure are wonderful memories into an impediment to future happiness.”
It was an argument she was bound to lose, because such things are never settled by arguments. What had been hesitation, reluctance, became coldness. They saw one another less. Meanwhile, the money she had entrusted to him was melting away. Pincus urged her to pull out. He was riding out the meltdown pretty well. However, she had decided something she would never express to Pincus. She wanted David to go smash, lose all her money, hit bottom, become vulnerable again. She sent him an e-mail saying that Larry Briggs was urging her and several of those she had directed to him to consider a class action suit. Dave was still falling, not yet at rock bottom.
She had contacted Casey Winthrop on her own, invoking old times and telling him how much she enjoyed reading him. On a trip to Florida, she visited him and Peaches. She didn’t mention David Williams. His name came up later when Peaches attached to an e-mail the notice that Dave’s place on Longboat Key was on the market.
“If it drops another hundred thousand, I may make a bid.”
When Larry Briggs called, asking if she knew where in the world Dave Williams was, Mame was almost flattered that she should be expected to know.
“Get him on his cell phone.”
“I want to speak to him face-to-face.”
“I know the feeling. He could be in Florida. He has a condo on Longboat Key and a cl
assmate on Siesta Key.”
“What’s his name?”
“Casey Winthrop. Would you like his number?”
“How much did he lose for you?”
“The market will come back.”
Briggs tried to laugh, unsuccessfully. Mame had half a mind to call Flip and tell her to keep her husband away from windows in high buildings.
15
EMIL CHADWICK HAD A LITTLE house—they called it a villa for reasons into which he did not probe—in Holy Cross Village, across Highway 31 from the campus. He had joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1955, a fact that sometimes surprised even himself. Not that he had come here, but that it was so long ago.
Once he’d had a wife, but those married years were sandwiched between long pre and post stretches until he could almost believe that he had always been a bachelor. Almost. He still dreamt of Maude; he talked to her all the time, out loud, why not? He lived alone. The house in which he and Maude raised the kids had seemed haunted after she died. Not that he minded the ghosts. It was no place in which to live alone. Even so, he hung in there until five years ago when he had been offered his villa and took it almost without forethought, as if it were his destiny. He brought his ghosts along. “This is my final address,” he would say, sometimes in company. When he went gaga, they could just roll him down the road and put him in the special care unit.
It was called a retirement village. That meant they had all come here to die.
“Like Holy Cross House,” Father Carmody said cheerily.
“I never thought you would go there, Father.”
“I am in the place but not of it.”
It was the vanity of age to think that one was not like the rest of men. Chadwick felt the same way in the village. He seldom ate with the others, although there was a choice of restaurants. The food was fine, but the company … Those who had come into the village after he did were required to take so many meals a month, but Chadwick was free of that, thank God. It was amazing what one could do with a microwave. He had been fending for himself since Maude died, so that wasn’t much of a change.
“You’ve been grandfathered,” Carmody said.
“In every sense of the term.”
He had three grandchildren. One son was a seminary professor, a layman who had thought he had a vocation and, when that proved not to be the case, stayed on as a member of the faculty. Emil couldn’t understand why Nick did not go on to ordination. Carmody had talked with Nick about it. “Scruples,” Carmody said to Emil. Maurice, his oldest, was a monk in Kentucky, a Trappist. He figured the kids had got religion from their mother, who had converted when they married and acquired the zeal of a convert. Maggie lived with her family in Portland. She called him once a week, but it was a long trip from Oregon, and he seldom saw her or her husband, Bill, or the children.
Roger Knight had seemed surprised when Emil first mentioned his children. Well, only old-timers like Carmody would remember Maude. Sometimes he strolled around Cedar Grove Cemetery, on Notre Dame Avenue, going from grave to grave, conducting a posthumous faculty meeting. He had not thought death had undone so many. All of his contemporaries lay there, as did Maude, with a place beside her reserved for him. His name was on the stone next to hers, with only his birth date. February 9, 1931. Colleagues who weren’t buried in Cedar Grove, those who were members of the Congregation of Holy Cross, were buried in the community cemetery, which was on the road that led to St. Mary’s. Most of the priests lying there had died since Emil joined the faculty. He would pedal out there on his three-wheeled cycle, stand at the south end, where Father Sorin’s grave was, and look out over the rows and rows of identical white crosses. Keats was hardly more than a boy when he fell half in love with easeful death. Chadwick knew the feeling.
An old man is a bundle of memories, and it was a pleasure to just sit still and let them come. No need to stir them up; they always seemed to be waiting for him. At night, he would often put down his book, turn off the lights, and sit on in the dark, remembering. In his Brownson office, a favorite book could induce long thoughts, and he would lay it open on his chest, close his eyes, and just think. When the first message came, he had been undisturbed by the whispering in the hall. When the sheet came under his door, he ignored it. Doubtless more administrative nonsense. He had turned in his chair to see the couple leave the building.
The second message had come at night when he was meditating in his unlit office. Napping actually, but that was all right. Had he been wakened by the sound in the hall? The light beneath the door was broken and a sheet slipped under. He had turned in his chair and looked out toward the parking lot, and then a young man came into the light before hurrying away.
He hadn’t mentioned those kids when he and Roger and Sarah had talked about the messages. Your days are numbered. He might have sent the message to himself. Once he had read a novel in which a character composed fortune cookie messages for herself, allowing a sufficient gap between composition and reading to ensure surprise.
He sat on for half an hour before turning on his desk lamp and fetching the sheet of paper. Dear God, what a dreadful poem.
They discussed it the following day, he and Sarah and Roger. Sarah professed to be upset, but then she was an excitable young lady. One of his few informants left in her department had assured Chadwick that Sarah would be offered the tenured position. Chadwick had been sworn to secrecy, of course, but he knew all about academic secrecy. Sarah was convinced that the flat tires and Emil’s bicycle pump were part of the campaign to drive her crazy.
“Why is one driven crazy? I always preferred walking.”
She was not to be diverted. Roger, to Emil’s surprise, agreed with her that the flat tires were integral to the plot. “It’s plain as a pikestaff.”
Emil threw up his hands and roared with delight. They were still discussing the ways in which a pikestaff was plain when Sarah left them in disgust.
“I saw the boy who left that poem, Roger.”
“I think I know who he is.”
“There was a girl with him the first time.”
“Not the second?”
“No.”
“Good.”
16
“I’M A FRIEND OF YOUR FATHER’S,” the voice on the phone said. It was midmorning; Jay had been sleeping in and resented the ringing of the phone. “Larry Briggs. Perhaps he’s mentioned me.”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“Is he still on campus?”
Jay sat up in bed and opened his eyes. Until he did that, he had been hoping he could just fall back and into sleep again. He told Larry Briggs that his father had flown out yesterday.
“Damn.”
“I can give you his cell phone number.”
“I have that!”
“Well …”
“I’d like to talk with you.”
“Okay.”
“I meant face-to-face. How about lunch?”
Geez. “Were you a classmate of Dad’s?”
“Almost.”
They met in the student center, where there were four choices of cholesterol. Briggs stood out like a figure in one of the old pictures of Notre Dame. He was stoop-shouldered as if he had just put down the globe and hadn’t straightened up yet. Funny-looking suit, wild tie, a lean and hungry look. After shaking hands, they got into line and moved along until they ordered.
“What noise,” Briggs said as they waited for their orders to appear.
It was noisy. Jay had stopped noticing.
They found a table, and Briggs looked at the contents of his tray. He plucked a french fry from the little bag. “I’m a client of your father’s.”
Jay nodded and took a bite of his burger.
“I’ve lost a lot of money.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I trusted him. We all trusted him.” Briggs picked up another french fry and flourished it as if he were directing the Ronald McDonald band.
Jay didn’t know what to say. “You came out
here to see him?”
“I think he’s dodging me. Mame Childers is protecting him.”
“Who is Mame Childers?”
Briggs looked as if he were about to say something, then waved away the question.
Jay sat back. Briggs looked a little spacey to him. Large tragic eyes, his nose crooked, his mouth working as if he were eating, which he wasn’t. Jay got out his phone. “I’ll see if I can get hold of him.”
“No! Don’t do that. I want to surprise him.”
Surprise him? Why should a client be a surprise? Jay punched the number anyway. His father answered after three rings.
“Dad, a man named Larry Briggs is here on campus. He came here hoping to see you. What’s it all about?”
Briggs followed what Jay was saying, his hands opening and closing.
“He’s there?”
“Sitting across the table from me.”
“Let me talk to him.”
Jay handed the phone across the table, but Briggs backed away from it, shaking his head. What a weirdo Briggs was. He reminded Jay of a lurking figure in a horror movie, the secret sharer, put off by everyone and everything.
“He doesn’t want to talk on the phone, Dad.”
A longish silence. “Tell him I will expect to see him at my office.” “Is that where you are?”
“I will be by the time he gets back.”
Briggs got to his feet when Jay snapped his phone shut. Jay gave him the message.
“Did he say where he is?”
Jay was liking this less and less. “He said to meet him at his office.”
Briggs stared down at Jay. His long-fingered hands closed on the back of his chair. “Your father’s son,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Briggs just shook his head, then picked up the little sack of french fries and took it with him as he wound his way among the tables to the door.
Jay put through another call to his father. “He’s gone.”
“I’m sorry he bothered you, Jay. He’s pretty upset by what the market has been doing.”
“He’s a nut.”
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