The Green Revolution (11 page)

“Mrs. O'Toole?” She looked up at Roger hovering over her, some alarm mixed with the pleasure she took from the effect this was having on the others there on the patio.

“Professor Knight!” she cried, like the starter at a tournament announcing the next player.

Roger with great concentration managed to get his nether half into the wrought-iron chair. A tight fit, a very tight fit. Not a chair for the endowed. Mimi O'Toole half rose to her feet, as if she meant to help him, but when he settled in she sat back down. Would he like a Bloody Mary? It was what she was having. From her glass, celery sprouted; pickles and olives floated about; two straws rose from the foliage.

“Is it nonalcoholic?” he asked. It might have been some vegetarian drink.

“It better not be. Such a weekend.”

A harried waitress came to ask Roger what he would drink. The suggestion was iced tea. It seemed the path of least resistance. They ordered food then, too. “Diners on the patio are easily forgotten,” Mimi explained. “Another of these,” she said to the waitress, tapping her glass.

The further harried waitress scuttled away.

“Now then.” Mimi crossed her arms on the table and leaned toward Roger. “I want to hear all about your book on Baron Corvo.”

“I'm surprised you've even heard of it.”

“If it hadn't been mentioned in your bio in the booklet identifying all the endowed professors, I never would have known of it.”

Roger had no experience of the enthusiastic reader; his was scarcely the kind of book that called for personal appearances and signings.

“Did you know him personally, Professor?”

Roger was taken aback. Baron Corvo's misspent life had long been over before Roger's began.

“He lived in Venice, you know.”

Mimi made a face and sat back. “I hate Venice.” She leaned forward again and whispered, “The smell.”

“There's some truth in that.”

“Did he have children?”

It was clear that Mimi O'Toole knew nothing of Baron Corvo. If she had read his book, it must have been upside down. Desperate for an alternative topic, he asked her if she had known Iggie Willis. Her mouth dropped open and her pretty green eyes widened.

“Of course I knew him. He has been pestering us to join him in an effort to fire the coach. Such an excitable man. And he was a dentist.”

“They're having difficulty locating the widow.”

“Was it his heart?”

The coroner's verdict was not yet firm, but Roger thought the heart must have been involved in Iggie's death—by stopping, at least.

“Francis, my husband, has had a quadruple bypass. He's supposed to exercise and eat sensibly, but he just won't. He keeps saying, ‘I could already be dead. Fifty years ago I would have been dead.' He says his life is like continuing the play after a flag has been thrown on the other team.”

“That's good,” Roger said.

“He says we should now call him OT.”

“What does your husband do?”

She sat back. “Well, I'm not often asked that question.” Then, after a moment, “Isn't it strange? The trustees don't know the faculty and the faculty don't know the trustees.”

“You shouldn't judge the faculty by me.”

Roger sat on for half an hour, feeling he was performing a favor for Father Genoux, doing his bit for Notre Dame, but it was a painful lunch. Mimi O'Toole was a lovely person in many ways, Roger was sure of that. There was an expensive look about her. Roger had no idea how old she was or what went on beneath her perhaps artfully blond hair. The green eyes were her best feature.

Two men emerged from the tent and came along the path to the patio.

“Frank!” Mimi cried as they approached. “Frank Parkman!”

Parkman introduced the man with him. Professor Rimini. Mimi then presented Roger to them.

“Oh, Mr. Parkman and I are old friends,” Roger said.

“So are we,” Mimi said.

At the moment, Roger was more interested in Rimini. Bartholomew Hanlon's interview had appeared in
Advocata Nostra.

Rimini said they were getting together with other former players. It was time someone spoke up in defense of the team.

Parkman took the hand Mimi offered and held it perhaps a trifle longer than necessary. And then he and Rimini were gone.

“Why don't we have more alumni like that?” Mimi O'Toole sighed.

“You were students here together.”

She hesitated. “Yes. We were here together.”

5

“This makes us almost accomplices, Phil,” Roger said when he had read the newspaper account of Willis's death.

“In suicide?”

“That isn't what it says.”

“Grafton, Roger. Jimmy is staying with suicide. The guy drank himself to death. He was pouring it down as if there were no tomorrow. Well, for him, there wasn't.”

“What about the towel?”

Phil didn't know. Jimmy Stewart didn't know. Feeney, the coroner, didn't know.

“He didn't choke to death,” Feeney had said. From him that was a strong statement. His job put few demands on his medical knowledge, and he had become fascinated with the many logically possible explanations of events.

“Could he have stuffed it in his own mouth?”

Feeney's caution had returned. “He had thrown up sometime before he died. His shoes.”

“Just wiping his mouth,” Jimmy suggested.

Jimmy didn't like it, and neither did Phil. Sometimes he wished he had followed Father Carmody's suggestion and gotten rid of the towel.

Roger became fascinated with the enigma of the towel from the ball washer on the first tee.

“Someone went up there to get it and brought it back to the putting green.”

“Where Willis was probably already dead.”

“That's guessing.”

“The towel didn't kill him, Roger.”

Somehow that towel seemed connected, not only with Willis's Web site, but with all the other agitation that had been going on because of the football team's losing streak.

*   *   *

It could not be said that Roger had slipped away from the party Saturday night, but he had gone off to bed without fanfare, put in earplugs, and was soon asleep. Thus he had no idea when Iggie Willis had left, or whether he had gone alone or not. Reading Grafton's story was thus somewhat like reading of events in the next county. With the great difference that Roger knew quite well that Iggie, who had arrived at the party less than sober, throughout the night had poured drink after drink into himself. Roger remembered that Father Carmody had chided him about it. Thank God, Iggie hadn't been driving. Even so, it was hard to imagine anyone in his condition covering the distance from the apartment to the practice putting green next to Rockne.

“How was your lunch, Roger?” Phil asked him Monday evening.

“Memorable.”

6

“Like he was lining up a putt,” Bingham said, tipping his head so it was parallel to the table.

“In the dark?”

“I always close my eyes when I putt,” Horvath said.

“You haven't putted in years.”

“The remark has cloacal connotations,” Armitage Shanks said.

“Putt, putt,” said Bingham.

“What?” Potts asked. He was deaf and refused to do anything about it except cup his ear.

“I had an uncle who died on the golf course,” Horvath mused.

“He was drunk as a lord,” Potts said out of his private world.

“My uncle?”

This lugubrious conversation at the Old Bastards table at the University Club had been triggered by Grafton's creative article in the local paper.

“I don't even believe the obituaries in that rag.”

“You'd think the man had been killed.”

“He doesn't quite say that.”

“He doesn't quite say anything.”

These ancient gentlemen, now emeriti, had graced the faculty in what they all agreed was a better time, all but Bingham, who had taught law and had a contrary streak. They were either single or had lost their wives (“Or both,” Bingham amended) and had lived into a time they did not understand. When most of them had arrived, there were three or four thousand students and fewer than half the buildings, and those now the least gaudy on campus. Current members of their respective departments did not know them; they were strangers in a strange land, a group of incompatible old men who took mordant comfort in one another's company. The club and their twice-weekly luncheons there had become a refuge and a tradition. Now the club, the one place on campus where they were still known and more or less welcomed, was scheduled to be razed.

Debbie came to the table. “Okay, which one of you did it?”

“Rephrase the question,” Bingham suggested.

Debbie sat. She supposed there was some psychological explanation of it, but she liked these old guys. “The corpse on the putting green.” She laughed. “That sounds like Agatha Christie.”

“He was drunk as a lord,” Potts said again.

“At the Algonquin table they're talking about his Web site.”

Half a dozen pairs of eyes looked at her, waiting.

“On the Web. The computer. The World Wide Web.”

“Ah, what a tangled web we weave…” Shanks intoned.

“It's a way of getting in touch with the alumni,” Debbie said. “He was demanding that Weis be fired.”

“Who's Weis?”

“So soon old and so late Weis.”

“What do our distinguished colleagues at the Algonquin table say about this Web site?”

“They think it's a nutty effort, but they like it.”

“Fire them all,” Potts said. “Tear down all the buildings. Tear down the damned stadium while they're at it.”

“You're thinking of Lipschutz,” Debbie said.

“I hope not.”

“He wants the athletic programs abandoned. Back to amateur sports.”

“Who's Lipschutz?” Horvath asked.

“One of the young men.”

Debbie gave up. Lipschutz was as old as her father.

“Maybe you should sign on with the Weeping Willows.”

“There is a willow grows aslant a brook…” Shanks again.

“How about another round?” Debbie suggested as she rose.

“On the house?”

“Oh, you can have them right here.”

Rhythmically she walked away, her graceful movements registered by six pairs of weak eyes that, for a moment, were filled with memories of better times indeed.

It was over that unlooked-for extra round of drinks that Armitage Shanks made his suggestion.

“Everyone is protesting and demonstrating,” he first observed.

“Madness,” Bingham said.

“No doubt. But there can be method in madness. Who has a greater grievance than we?”

His table companions nodded in agreement, although whether they were in agreement as to what their greater grievance might be was unclear.

“This club,” Shanks went on. An ice cube had got into his mouth when he took a pull on his drink, and he spat it back into the glass. “Are we to sit complacently by until they arrive with the wrecking ball? Are we to go as lambs to the slaughter.
Allons, enfants!
”

“What?” Potts asked.

“We can chain someone to the front door.”

“Who?”

“Potts?”

“Gentlemen,” Armitage Shanks said with some solemnity. “This is a time for solidarity. We must act as one.”

“Doing what?”

“Let's ask Debbie.”

7

Frank Parkman was in far-off California when the new issue of
Advocata Nostra
arrived, but what are several thousand miles in the electronic age? He read Bartholomew Hanlon's article on the football team and Catholicism. It was a Tower of Pisa raised on a brick or two, tilted away from the neutral attitude Bartholomew affected. Parkman put through a call to South Bend.

“I wish you'd talked to me before writing that story, Bartholomew. I have learned the religious affiliations of the whole roster.”

“The team can't talk to reporters.”

“Well, you talked to two of them. You couldn't have made better choices.”

A Methodist and a Muslim? No, Parkman meant their prowess at football. Wesley was the high scorer on the team, not unusual for kickers, and in a year when field goals outnumbered touchdowns, Wesley's numbers rose weekly. As for Natashi, “God only knows what the man could do if only we had a quarterback who could throw the ball. You wouldn't remember Biletnikoff.”

“No,” Bartholomew agreed.

“A legend. He could catch anything.”

“A Catholic?”

“Ho ho. You know, I wouldn't be surprised. It doesn't matter, he played for Oakland.”

However flawed, Bartholomew's article was a public introduction of the topic. What Parkman had learned was that the percentage of Catholics on the football team was lower than on the faculty.

“Wow.”

“It doesn't mean much. What are they now but hired guns? It's like finding out that non-Catholics outnumber Catholics in maintenance, or on the grounds crew. Even so, it makes a strong rhetorical point.”

*   *   *

After a distinguished career in the law and on the bench, Frank Parkman had looked forward to an indolent retirement, hours spent among the books he had acquired over the years, taking up again interests he had first acquired in college. He had not been a gung-ho alumnus of Notre Dame. He contributed, of course—given the persistence of the Notre Dame Foundation, it would have been difficult not to—but he was an infrequent presence at the Los Angeles Notre Dame Club. He had nothing against football or drinking but chose not to think that they alone were what bound him to his alma mater. Marie was dead now, and Frank's reading and the general nostalgia of his time of life turned his thoughts back to South Bend.

The Notre Dame Web site was a gaudy affair, and, of course, it purveyed the official view of what was going on. Parkman subscribed to the
Observer
and was startled at the editorial assumptions that guided the campus paper. Surely this was a minority view. Still, he talked with several kindred spirits, and some contacts were made with members of the board, without result. When several letters of inquiry, letters that had practically begged to be persuaded that things were not as they seemed on campus, went unanswered and unacknowledged, the Weeping Willow Society was formed. It now seemed undeniable that Notre Dame was on a dangerous path.