Sham Rock (7 page)

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Authors: Ralph McInerny

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BOOK: Sham Rock
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ROGER KNIGHT WAS IN A MEDITATIVE mood, his thoughts crowding one another for position, all of them having to do with the materials Greg Walsh had received at the archives, with Father Carmody's suggestion that those materials be consigned to the dusty oblivion of the archives and forgotten, and with David Williams's odd reaction to the news that he was the recipient of a regal bequest from a former classmate, now a Trappist monk, who moreover had committed to paper a supposedly fictional account of the disappearance of a classmate, his rival for a St. Mary's girl. The spot where the hatchet was supposedly buried might contain something more gruesome. Roger had told Jay that he had met his father.
“He's giving a building to Notre Dame. A new ethics center,” Jay said.
“We already have an ethics center.”
“But they don't have a building.”
To Roger the proposed building meant being deprived of a parking space for the golf cart in which he got around campus. Ah, the convenience of being able to wheel almost to his office door, take a few steps involving only one stair, and a minute later lower himself into the welcome embrace of his huge specially constructed desk chair.
Jay was difficult to understand. He had come to Roger's seminar
as the guest of the lovely Amanda, and he had hardly settled in before he began to ask questions, doubtless meant to impress her. Jay had that strange confidence of the almost illiterate, a philosophy major—but that seemed redundant. His manner was that of an amused onlooker for whom Roger and what he had to say seemed to constitute evidence of some crime. It was tempting to make Jay the target of the discontent he felt at the loss of his parking space.
There is a kind of student whose curiosity bespeaks incredulity, as if any response to a question would add to the ridiculousness of what was being discussed. So it had been with Roger's account of the ancient theory of the elements and their origin in the pre-Socratics. Empedocles had summed it up in his theory of the four elements, fire, air, earth, and water, with love and strife to generate activity, but Roger had driven the theory back to Thales and water, Anaximenes and air. Heraclitus and fire. Roger had suggested continuity with the modern periodic table of elements.
“Our current view,” he had remarked. “Perhaps destined to go the way of these ancient views.”
“Tell us about air,” Jay had urged, and Roger, feeling manipulated, obliged to feed Jay's skepticism. Doubtless he had overstated the resemblance between those ancient views and the table students of chemistry nowadays memorized.
“The theory is essentially the same. However many, there is an alphabet from which the things of our experience are composed.”
Jay Williams smiled with tolerant incredulity, and Roger felt pusillanimous in noting Amanda's impatience with her admirer's attitude.
She had sought him out, apologetic. “I thought Jay would enjoy the course.”
“And so he does.”
“He's a philosophy major,” she said, as if in exculpation.
 
 
It was the fact that the father, David Williams, was a financial adviser that had captured Roger's attention.
“You must explain the current chaos to me,” Roger had said to him.
“I wish I could.”
“I suppose this has affected your profession.”
David Williams's eyes had lifted dramatically. But then, in his student days, he had been a regular feature on the stage of Washington Hall.
“Tell me about Brother Joachim,” Roger had suggested. This was before he had insisted that David Williams read the confessional story written by Williams's old roommate, now Brother Joachim of Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky.
“Brilliant,” David had said. “The star of our class. You should read the plays he wrote, as a sophomore and junior. Incredible.”
“
Behind the Bricks,
” Father Carmody had said. “A tour de force.”
Greg Walsh had unearthed a copy of the play from the archives, and Roger read it with fascination. There was an odd triangulation at work here: David Williams and his classmates of yore, David Willliams in his present plight—Father Carmody had told Roger of the troubles in Williams's financial empire—and his son, Jay, with the commendable Amanda.
“Your name is a gerundive,” he told her.
“Explain.”
“She who must be loved.”
No sooner had he said it than he felt embarrassed. Not that any woman student of his had ever misunderstood his chivalrous attitude toward the gentler sex. Roger thought in such phrases, with all the earnestness of the celibate. Phil had never married, and, as for Roger, he felt as eligible as Dr. Johnson for the role of swain. Call it sublimation, call it what you will, his regard for the female of the species, young, middle-aged, or mature, amounted to an idealization. Woman as the muse of man, half angel, a suggestion of a better world. The earthiest of poets had felt this, and Roger, no poet, felt it, too.
“Jay is your task,” he said to Amanda. “You must be his Beatrice.”
 
 
“I've been thinking about the disappearance of Timothy Quinn,” Roger said to Father Carmody.
He had picked the old priest up at Holy Cross House, and they had gone to Leahy's in the Morris Inn, where Murph the bartender had some sense of Father Carmody's former eminence on campus and treated him accordingly.
“Courvoisier, Murph. In a snifter.”
Murph looked mournfully at Roger, expecting, and getting, his request for a Diet Coke.
“What do you want to know, Roger?”
“Tell me the details about his disappearance. The newspaper accounts raise so many questions, and of course Brother Joachim's story raises more.”
Father Carmody shrugged that off. “There's little to tell. He was carousing with fellow students in downtown South Bend, left early and alone, and was never seen again.”
“Except by Pelligrino.”
“The story? It's fiction, Roger.”
“What efforts were made to find him?”
“If money could have done it he would have been found. I tried to persuade his aunt that the expenditure was pointless.”
“Pointless.”
“The boy was dead. I was certain of that from the beginning.”
“Why?”
“Why was I certain? Experience. We have, thank God, had few such instances, but disappearances were always resolved by dissipation, accident, whatever, but almost always death. It is not easy for somebody to become nobody.”
“So the search was ended.”
“Eventually.”
“What family was there?”
“Of the Quinns? Innumerable, if you spread wide enough a net. None, if you mean immediate. The aunt who survived him.”
“What was she like?”
Father Carmody inhaled the vapors from the snifter that Murph had placed before him and smiled. “You assume I knew her.”
“Didn't you?”
“Yes. Her husband and I were in the seminary together.”
“The seminary!”
“Oh, he was never ordained, Gerry Quinn. Sometimes I think he was too good to be a priest. Don't quote me. In a seminary, a man who scrupulously keeps the rule is an oddball. A holy oddball. His very conscientiousness tells against him. Not that anyone would question a man's vocation because he was faithful to the rule. It doesn't work that way. In any case, he was let go. He took tonsure and some minor orders, and that was that.”
“What did he do when he left the seminary?”
“Married a wife and lived happily ever after. He was dead when his nephew disappeared, but the widow was devoted to Timothy.”
“And spared no expense to find her disappeared nephew.”
“It was as if her purpose in life had been torn from her.”
“What about the girl, Beth Hanrahan?”
“A saint.” Father Carmody sipped his brandy. “An uncomfortable saint. Do you know of Dorothy Day?”
Roger nodded.
“Like that. Not a barrel of laughs, but good as gold.”
Father Carmody's effort to think the story Joachim had sent was pure fiction seemed a willing suspension of belief. Joachim had used the actual names of himself and his friends.
 
 
Two days later, a sheet of paper was slipped under the doors of three offices in Brownson. Roger read his with a tolerant smile.
An Ancient Poet
New to Me
And why should I have known him?
X as in Unknown was He
Intent to Read the Universe
Matter and All the Rest,
Encoded His Thought in Verse
Numbered Lines His Sly Bequest
Each Can Read Them as He Will
Some with a Special Skill.
MAME CHILDERS, NÉE SAYERS, LIVED in an apartment on the Upper East Side that occupied the entire twelfth floor. Huge. A wonderful place in which to entertain, dinners, cocktail parities, informal little seminars with artists, writers, politicians. Financial advisers. She threw back her head and directed smoke at the ceiling. When she bent over an ashtray to stub out her cigarette, her eyes went around the vast, beautifully furnished living room. Not much of a view, unless you liked reservoirs and the endless construction work on the Museum of Modern Art. She didn't have to close her eyes to imagine Dave Williams on his feet before that bookcase, speaking with quiet authority to the half-dozen people she had gathered to hear him. How possessive she had felt. And with good reason.
“Who advises you now?” he had asked her over lunch the first time they had seen one another since South Bend. Mame felt she was recapturing an earlier role.
She liked the way he frowned when she told him she had left things in the hands of Wilfrid's advisers.
“Wilfrid?”
“My husband.”
“I'm sorry.”
“For what?”
“When did he …” His expression finished the question.
“Dave, he's not dead. We're divorced. And still friends. More or less.”
She had resolved to get that on the table right away, and she was prepared for the reaction he tried to hide. In the world in which they had been raised, divorce and marriage did not go together like a horse and carriage.
“You're saying he still handles your money.”
“Not personally, but I stayed with the same group after things were divided up.”
If she had resolved to ease into full disclosure about her marital status, she parceled out information about how much she had emerged with from her marriage. Wilfrid had been generous, but then he was the libertine. Running around was one thing—she supposed most men were unable to say no—but for Wilfrid to have stashed a mistress two streets away verged on contempt. It was odd that their divorce had given Wilfrid an excuse to disencumber himself of all his romantic chains. Whenever they met he wore a penitent's smile.
“I don't blame you,” he said.
“Blame me!”
“I gave you cause. All that's over now, you know.”
“Oh, for heaven's sake.”
Wilfrid had loved to have her talk about her Catholic girlhood, of graduating from St. Mary's College. City boy that he was, he thought that the college's location in Indiana would be as exotic as the fact that it was Catholic. How few native New Yorkers there are, though, and they have to come from somewhere, and why not from Indiana?
“An all-women's college?”
“Across the road from Notre Dame.”
She had trilled on about the wonderful odds for a St. Mary's girl with the seven-to-one ratio of male to female.
“Even so, you didn't marry one.”
“He got away.”
Little bleats of incredulity whenever she mentioned this. Mame Childers not getting anything she wanted? Impossible. It became a line in her standard repertoire. Repetition altered her memory of those days, and she could half believe that it was she rather than Beth Hanrahan who had been such a great hit on the campus across the road. Of course, Beth had been an actress, on and off the stage, and her role from junior year on had been that of the perplexed Venus trying to decide between vying suitors. Dave Williams had been one of them. Mame had actually thought,
If Beth discards Dave, he's mine
. Seconds.
Dave Williams had to think, or maybe that was a pretense, when Mame mentioned Beth Hanrahan.
“David, she was wild about you. Of course, we all were.”
How manipulable men are, particularly hardheaded practical men. Take them away from business and they were like boys again.
So it had begun, a Manhattan romance, plays, concerts, eating out, talking, talking. Well, Dave talking. Silence, a listening silence, is the great seducer.
She explained why Wilfrid didn't matter. “We were never really married, Dave. Not in our sense.”
“Will you marry again?”
“I haven't been asked.”
Bold that, but he was remembering something. He had it. “Dr. Johnson said that to marry again is the triumph of hope over experience.”
“What did he know?”
“Well, he didn't marry again after his wife died.”
An observation, a policy statement, a muted warning off? Mame couldn't tell.
“How much you know, Dave.”
“Notre Dame '89.”
She put her hand on his. “St. Mary's '89.”
It might have been a ceremony. That night he came home with her. “Mame,” he began, when they were in the elevator. She put her fingers on his lips. He kissed them away. Later he said, “I don't go to bed with all my clients.”
“Is that how you think of me, a client?”
Still later, looking at him asleep beside her, she thought, well, it had taken time, but at last she had edged out Beth Hanrahan.
“Where did you live when you were married?” he asked at breakfast.
“Here.”
He just looked at her. Was he thinking that he had taken Wilfrid's place, in the same bed … No one else had ever done that. Her few lapses had been in far-off places where they hadn't seemed to count. It was a mistake to bring him here. She saw that now. Dear God, what would Wilfrid think?
“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.

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