Sham Rock

by Ralph McInerny

  It was surprising to find that John Donne had spent two nights in the guesthouse. Quinn? Lawrence Briggs had also been there.

  “How long did Briggs stay?”

  “Just the one night, apparently. He left without telling me. Of course, there was a great deal of commotion when they brought Dave Williams to the infirmary.”

  The guest master talked of Briggs while Roger continued to look at the registry. There was no entry for Jay Williams.

  Phil put through a call to Father Carmody, to let him know that recent events in Kentucky posed no threat to Notre Dame’s reputation. Roger wandered outside and got into the little battery-powered vehicle that was at his disposal and moved out silently along the road. The vehicle itself was a Trappist of sorts, hardly a purr out of it. Its speed was conducive to thought.

  He drove to within six feet of the steps leading to the front porch of the hermitage. What spiritual dramas had been enacted here? He recalled the photograph of Merton and Maritain on the wall inside. There are sacred spaces, churches, hermitages. Log chapels. A murder in such a place was akin to sacrilege.

  “There was a Notre Dame student down here at the time,” Phil said.

  “Who?”

  “The guest master didn’t register him. He was just here for the day, apparently.”

  Jay Williams? He had left campus …

  “Father Carmody wants Williams’s body brought back to Notre Dame for burial.”

  “I wonder if Jay Williams would agree to that.”

  “He already has. Carmody asked him when he gave him the sad news. But only if his mother could be reburied there.”

  When they returned, Phil took the stick of firewood with him, along with a plaster cast of some shoe prints at the back entrance to the hermitage. Street shoes. Not the shoes of a monk.

  3

  A GARBLED VERSION OF WHAT HAD happened in the hermitage at Gethsemani Abbey had reached the Old Bastards and was Topic A at their table in Leahy’s.

  “Emil Chadwick’s son is a monk there,” Armitage Shanks reminded them.

  “Are you accusing him?”

  Potts was indignant. “Emil wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “Tell it to Spider-Man.”

  “Spider-Man?” Bingham had surprised them all.

  “Did you ever hear the story of the man who went to Lourdes and got sick?”

  Horvath threw up his hands. “Father Sorin would have attacked you with a piece of firewood if he heard you say such a thing.”

  The devotion of the founder of Notre Dame to Our Lady of Lourdes was well known. The Grotto on campus, a replica of the original in the little town in the Pyrenees, attested to that.

  “Did you ever go there, Horvath?”

  “Lourdes? Not yet.”

  The thought of the hobbling Horvath boarding a plane to fly off to the distant shrine filled them all with glee.

  Armitage Shanks rapped the table for order. “The question is, what will happen next in this unfolding saga of selected members of the class of 1989?”

  “Isn’t David Williams the man who promised twenty million dollars to Notre Dame?”

  “He is.”

  “For a new ethics center. We have discussed this.”

  “But since then he has been murdered in a monastery while visiting his classmate the monk.”

  “There is a connection?”

  “Everything is connected,” Potts proclaimed.

  “Except your hearing aid.”

  Called to replenish their drinks, Murph the bartender asked if they had heard the latest. Six attentive pairs of eyes lifted to him.

  “The bar and restaurant will be open on Thanksgiving.”

  “On a holy day?”

  “Murph, you should spend that day in the bosom of your family. You do have one?”

  “Bosom?”

  “Get out of here.”

  “They’re hiring a substitute for the day.”

  “Murph, there is no substitute for you,” Armitage said unctuously.

  “There’s scarcely an original.”

  “Will your substitute be male or female?”

  “They won’t know until after the operation.”

  “Keep it up, Murph, and we’ll make you an honorary Old Bastard.”

  “I’m overwhelmed.” He went back to his bar.

  “Why is no one simply whelmed?” Horvath asked.

  Bingham asked for attention. “The Knight brothers went off to the monastery. On behalf of the university.”

  “Who are the Knight brothers?”

  “Doris Day’s cousins.”

  “Doris Day!” The old faces lit up with memories of the lilting songs of that lovely chanteuse. Of course Bingham had to spoil it.

  “Oscar Levant said he had known her before she was a virgin.”

  The groans and hissing drew the attention of other patrons. Then their drinks arrived and the noise subsided. The groans began again when Bingham said that if he had become a monk he would have taken for his name in religion Brother Darwin.

  4

  WHEN BETH GOT THE NEWS OF THE death of Dave Williams in the Trappist monastery in Kentucky from Casey, she left her office and went upstairs to her studio. A gray sky was visible through the skylight, matching her mood. The man by whom she had become pregnant was dead, the father of her stillborn infant. Had Joachim told him the full story?

  Beth resolved to have a Mass said for Dave Williams. After a period during which it had been hoped that Dave might recover, he had succumbed to a clot in the brain. At first Beth had thought what a blessing it was to leave the world in such surroundings, but Dave had left it for all practical purposes when he had been hit over the head.

  “He had a priest?”

  “He was surrounded by priests. Even his doctor was a priest. Brother Bernard.”

  Beth took consolation from that. A monk who was a doctor would know when his role as priest should come into play.

  Casey seemed almost sheepish about telling her that he was a father of a bouncing boy. Peaches was doing well.

  “Peaches?”

  “My wife. Patricia. They always called her Peaches. She wants to name our son David.” He didn’t sound excited by the idea.

  “Did she know him?”

  “Oh, sure. He had a place down here, he and Bridget.”

  “Bridget?”

  “His late wife.”

  “Were there children?”

  “One son. At Notre Dame.”

  How little she knew of those long-lost friends, suddenly found again because Pat Pelligrino had stirred things up with his gift to the Notre Dame archives.

  “You’ll tell Quinn, won’t you?”

  “He’s not here at the moment.”

  “Not back yet? He came to see me.”

  “In Florida?”

  “Just passing through. He didn’t stick around long enough to meet Peaches.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “Back there eventually. Via Gethsemani.”

  The portrait she had been doing was missing from her easel when she got back from Notre Dame. Beth shook her head. Could anyone sustain hatred for decades? Apparently Tim could. Well, say it, she still felt for Dave what she had felt long ago.

  After hanging up, Beth looked around to see who could look after things while she ran up to Holy Rosary. If only Q were around when she needed him. Had Houdini ever made himself disappear? It seemed to be Q’s only trick.

  “Me?” asked Foster when she spoke to him. Bald as an egg, roly-poly, hardly over five feet high, he was a contrast to the withered physiques of the other guests. Foster had taken over in the kitchen when Q was nowhere to be found. A secret drinker, he stashed his bottle among the foodstuffs in the cupboards. The cheapest of wines, bought with the proceeds from his daily panhandling. He claimed to be on the wagon, of course. Beth had become patient with drinkers, for the most part. There was often the beginning of true humility in their inability to master alcohol. Knowing
they were unable to control their longing for drink, hating the habit, they were open to the only real help there is.

  “You can do it,” she told Foster.

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “An hour at most.”

  Foster looked around, as if wondering what he would do should there be an uprising among the guests. It was midafternoon, a dead time. The television was on, ignored by dozing guests. Many were over in the residence, napping, sleeping it off, any kind of unconsciousness in a pinch. Our Lady of the Road left rehabilitation to others, accepting the present condition of the men who wandered in, not preaching to them, but hoping they would find in the depths to which they had sunk a saving sign of being a creature.

  Foster was rummaging in the kitchen cupboard when she went out the door.

  Father Romanus did not express surprise when Beth showed up at the rectory, although this was not the usual day for their weekly talk. He was the third Dominican from whom she had sought direction—first Justin, then Reynolds, red haired, his habit big as a tent, baby faced, and the wisest of them all. His name in religion was Thomas Aquinas. Romanus was solid, incapable of surprise, full of knowledge of Teresa of Ávila. Beth hadn’t hit if off with St. Catherine of Siena, but Teresa of Ávila never failed her.

  “I want to have a Mass said. For the father of my child.”

  He had taken her into one of the rectory parlors, furnished in basic Dominican, and didn’t ask her what that meant. Years ago Beth had joined what was then called the Third Order of St. Dominic, but Justin had told her she needn’t come to the meetings. Once had been enough. How good the others were, how uneventful their lives. Ordinary people. Is there any other kind? Well, there was the kind who came as guests to Our Lady of the Road. At the meeting someone had grumped about catering to all the drunks in the area. “Feed them and there will be more.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Beth had said.

  That guy would have been the ruin of her. How superior she had felt answering him, as if she were a model of anything. So she had become a freelance lay Dominican, her weekly conferences her lifeline. At the same meeting a woman had gushed over the fact that when they died they could be buried in the Dominican habit.

  “Why wait?”

  Oh, she had been terrible. Father Justin had agreed. She had all she could handle at Our Lady of the Road. Any temptation to smugness there was quickly knocked out of her.

  Justin had approved of her observing the birthday of her miscarried child. “Ask her to pray for you.”

  It wasn’t until Justin was replaced by Thomas Aquinas Reynolds that Beth had someone willing to talk about the condition of the departed souls. He was full of lore from Aquinas, the Summa, other works, commentaries on Scripture.

  “How can they remember us if they lack the physical presuppositions of memory, you ask? Call it the brain. That’s dust now. But we pray to the saints, for particular favors. If they had no memory of the world we’re in they wouldn’t get it at all.”

  Those sessions had been almost fun, but the priest was not into idle speculation. His firm guide was Scripture, what the Church taught, and no wild guessing about or imagining the next world. “It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead.” And it was a two-way street.

  Beth had baptized her baby and named her Mary.

  Romanus knew her story. Each of her advisers had; how else could they understand why she lived the way she did? The priest had uncapped a fat old-fashioned fountain pen and drawn a little pad toward him. “Name?”

  He meant David’s. She told him; his pen scratched on the pad. He actually blotted it. When had she last seen that? She told him what she knew of David’s death, that he had died in a Trappist abbey.

  “So did St. Thomas Aquinas. When’s the funeral?”

  “Father, I don’t see how I can go. I’m sure it will be at Notre Dame.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  She explained about Q’s absence and described Foster.

  “He often drops by.”

  “Foster?”

  “For a handout. Look, Beth, go to the funeral. If it comes to that, I will look after things down there myself.”

  “Oh, would you?”

  “Are you doubting my word?” But he smiled when he asked.

  Walking back, she tried to feel more grateful than she was. She was almost reluctant to return to Notre Dame so soon after being there and coming away with the feeling that talking with Father Carmody, her alpha and omega, had put a fitting end to all that had happened. Still, of course she would go. How could she not? When she got back to Our Lady of the Road, she went up to her studio. The phone was ringing. It was Father Carmody.

  5

  JAY WILLIAMS WAS HAPPY TO LEAVE arrangements to Father Carmody, who had the body brought back to Notre Dame, made arrangements with Hickey the undertaker, and secured a plot in Cedar Grove Cemetery on what had been the sixteenth fairway when Dave Williams had played the course as a student. Then he made arrangements with Father Rocca, rector of Sacred Heart Basilica, for the funeral.

  “You’ll be saying the Mass, Father?” Father Rocca asked.

  “Yes, Peter.” He waited, tense, but that was all. He had been afraid the rector might volunteer to assist. He might have wanted to concelebrate.

  “I’ll be in the sanctuary.”

  “Thank God,” he said fervently.

  That done, he settled down to call the names on the little list he had made.

  “Casey Winthrop called me, Father,” Beth said when he got through to her. “Of course I’m coming.”

  “Bring Quinn.”

  “Father, he’s disappeared.”

  “Not again!”

  “Casey saw him in Florida.”

  “I hope Casey can come.”

  “He’s just become a father.”

  Pray hold me excused? No, Casey said he had expected the call ever since leaving Gethsemani.

  “I’ll want to hear all about your visit there,” Father Carmody told him. So would Phil Knight.

  “What’s to tell? I want my son baptized at Notre Dame.”

  “If you’re asking me to do it, the answer is yes.”

  “Great.”

  He had had few chances for pastoral work over the years, a wedding now and again, lately funerals, hearing confessions in Sacred Heart. How long had it been since he had baptized a baby?

  Father Carmody called the abbot to tell him that he hoped Father Joachim could come to the funeral. The abbot said it had been almost like losing one of his monks when David Williams died in the infirmary.

  “He will be buried here, of course,” Carmody said.

  “Here?”

  “At Notre Dame.”

  He was half afraid the abbot would suggest burying David Williams in with a bunch of monks. Of course, that was unlikely. How many nonmembers of the Congregation had been buried in their community cemetery? Not that there were a lot of requests.

  “You want Joachim to say the Mass?” the abbot asked.

  Father Carmody had not expected this, but what else would the abbot think? Otherwise attending the funeral might have seemed to him a mere pleasure trip. He shut his eyes and said, “We’ll concelebrate.”

  It was beginning to look like a very small funeral. Would there be enough of David’s old classmates to act as pallbearers? Next was Wheeling, current president of the class of 1989. He would spread the word.

  Mame Childers reacted like Mame Childers. “Oh my God. Father, I had a premonition. I’ve often had them in the past. I knew it was too good to last. Nothing works out for me.”

  Well, grief is often self-referential.

  “Has Jay been told, Father? His son?”

  “You know him?”

  “Of course I know him. We’ve become quite friends. It seemed the prudent thing to do.”

  Father Carmody forbore asking her how her monsignor was doing. Let her cherish the thought that she and David Williams would have married. The old
priest had not had an opportunity to discuss Mame’s letter from Monsignor Sparrow with Dave.

  The reminder of the son diverted him to Roger Knight.

  Phil answered. “He’s sleeping, Father. He’s all tuckered out.”

  “Sounds like a failed automobile.”

  A long pause. Phil would think he was getting as bad as Roger.

  “Have him call me, will you, Phil?”

  “Are you watching the game?”

  “With the sound off.” The picture, too. What game was Phil referring to? The man was such a sports nut it might have been lacrosse.

  Father Carmody realized that he was enjoying being in charge, arranging things. Some of the old zest came back. He still had a few miles in him. Then he thought of the few miles that separated Holy Cross House from the community cemetery. How long would it be before he was taken there from his own funeral Mass and interred with his brothers in religion, the strains of the Salve Regina sweetening the winter air? Winter? Make it summer. The summer after next. Or later. He went back to his list.

  6

  EMIL CHADWICK WAS DOZING OVER The Devil’s Dictionary in his office in Brownson Hall; that is, the book was open on his lap, his eyes were closed, and he was aware of a familiar sound, the tolling of the bells of nearby Sacred Heart Basilica. He was almost as close to them as Quasimodo, but it was not only defective hearing that now made their sound more faint.

  There had been a time in his life, say from around fifty to seventy-five, when the solemn tolling of those bells marked another entry in his personal necrology, another colleague gone, or another faculty spouse. Of course he had gone to such funeral Masses and as often as not on to the cemetery for the burial. The ultimate test of collegiality. He had buried friends and enemies alike. The bells no longer tolled for him. He was the sole survivor of those who had been on the faculty in his golden years. Unsurprisingly, given recent events, he remembered the tolling of those bells when there had been a memorial service for the supposedly late Timothy Quinn. Perhaps, like Huckleberry, young Quinn had taken some mordant pleasure, if only belated, in the thought of his own funeral. Chadwick stirred. There were times when he felt that his own funeral had already occurred. He opened his eyes and glanced at the book on his lap, only the top third of which was visible over the arc of his stomach.