Irish Coffee (3 page)

ROGER HAD BEEN THOROUGHLY
briefed by Fred Neville on Griselda's threat to leave the team.

“She is a real student, and thank God for it, but the thing about Notre Dame is that athletes are students. Well, most of them. Of course I understand that Griselda should be excited about the world you've opened up to her.”

“What am I to say to her?”

“That she can do both. She will be pressured to turn pro after she graduates but she can deal with that when the time comes. Roger, it would be a disaster if she left the team.”

“I should think you would be a persuasive argument for doing both, Fred. You are far more interesting to talk with than some of my strictly academic colleagues.”

Fred tried not to beam but he was clearly delighted by such praise. And Roger meant it. Any surprise he had felt that the assistant sports information director was a learned devotee of literature had long since passed. Phil might be surprised at Fred's dual competency but Roger had learned that Fred's heart was in the authors they discussed. A mention of the dictionary Baron Corvo described at the beginning of
Hadrian VII
had fascinated Fred and he had drawn on his undergraduate minor in classics to a spoofing version of his own.

“The point is to create a bogus Latin vocabulary. What do you suppose
sububi
means?”

“Tell me.”

“Underwear.
Sub
and
ubi.
‘Overhead' is
supercaput
.”

Roger suggested a mad meaning for
propter quid
. “An athlete's chaw.”

Pretty bad, but that was the point. “Do you know Ambrose Bierce's
Devil's Dictionary
?”

He was trying to deflect Fred from the reason for his visit. Roger had no stomach for advising Griselda in so important a matter but Fred enlisted Phil, who was shocked by the possibility that Griselda might quit the basketball team.

“You've got to talk sense to her, Roger.”

But it was with foreboding that Roger asked Griselda to wait for him after class. Other students hung on and Roger welcomed this, half-hoping that Griselda would have to leave. But she remained. They went again to the eatery in Grace.

It was an Indian summer day. The trees were gold and brown, sun shone, a banner hanging from the windows of Zahm Hall flapped in the slight breeze.
God Made Notre Dame #1
. An acceptable assertion in Mariology at least.

“Does the phrase
men sana in corpore sano
mean anything to you?”

“I never took Spanish. Not yet,” she added.

He did not correct her. “You have caused despair in the athletic department.”

“So Fred talked to you.”

“If you'd rather not…”

“Of course I want to talk to you. Fred tried to but he's in love and isn't thinking straight.”

“Griselda, he took you to dinner in the line of duty.”

She stared at him a moment before laughing merrily. “Not with me!”

Roger was confused. He had no idea what Griselda had meant. So far as he knew, Fred was as confirmed a bachelor as himself and Phil.

“You know who I mean,” Griselda said.

Roger found that he was unwilling to discuss this surprising suggestion. Phil had told Roger of Marjorie's attempt at matchmaking. Had she succeeded with Fred? It would have seemed a breach of friendship to talk about it with Griselda.

“Let's get back to you.”

He formulated for her the argument Fred had sketched, one Roger truly believed in. Nature had put enmity between himself and sports and he had never developed a fan's interests, but he almost envied Phil's and Fred's enthusiasm for sports.

“When I was in the navy I had to pass a swimming test.”

“You were in the navy?”

“Only briefly.”

“But that's wonderful. Tell me about it.”

His naval career, however thwarted, provided a surprising wedge. Roger could see that Griselda imagined him fit and trim in bell-bottoms, his hat cocked jauntily on his head. He could read in her expression an imagined prowess in himself.

“I spent most of my enlistment in the base library reading.”

“Even then you did both.”

“Exactly.” Well, perhaps inexactly. No need to tell her of his ignominious exit from the navy. At the time he had felt a twinge of disappointment. It was rather a good library of its kind.

“And you can do both. Think of how well you are doing in my class.”

“Your class is unique.” She thought for a moment. “There aren't a lot of other classes I would want to take if I had more time. I'd like to major in Roger Knight.”

“You have to know what professors to take. I could advise you. But there is really no reason for you to let down the basketball team. Sports are part of Notre Dame. You are very fortunate that you can represent the university.”

“I do like to play.”

“Because you do it well. I would never forgive myself if your interest in my class led to your deserting the team.”

“What are you teaching next semester?”

“Dante and Ezra Pound.”

“Wow.”

The conversation had taken a happy turn. He told her about T. S. Eliot's lectures on the metaphysical poets, of Santayana's little book
Three Philosophical Poets
. He told her of Pound's editing of
The Waste Land
and the implied comparison represented by his own cantos. Griselda hunched over the table, fascinated.

“I want to be like you,” she said. “I told you that before and I meant it.”

“When is basketball season over?”

“I'll have most of next semester to myself.”

“So there you are.”

She nodded. “If you could pass swimming, I can play basketball.”

And so the crisis passed and Griselda continued to play, becoming even more impressive than before, executing the plays, the commander on the floor. Muffin McGraw was grateful.

“Some professors might have encouraged her to quit.”

“Oh, I doubt that.”

“It is a demanding schedule, but Griselda handles basketball and her classes better than anyone I've known. She doesn't even have a tutor.”

Fred just shook his hand wordlessly, his expression telling the gratitude he felt. Roger did not mention that his floating the length of the pool was his greatest achievement as a naval swimmer. Griselda had made more of that feat than it deserved but it seemed an innocent deception.

“That kid will be a pro,” Phil said, watching Griselda lead the Lady Irish to victory over the fabled University of Connecticut's women's basketball team. They were called UConn, which suggested Alaska, but Griselda put the freeze on them.

“We'll see.”

And then tragedy struck.

In the second week of November, Fred did not appear at his desk in the Joyce Center. On the second day, when there was no response to messages left on his telephone, Roger went to check. He persuaded the caretaker of the building to let him into the apartment, a flashing display of his private detective's license the open sesame. Fred Neville lay dead in his bed.

THE WAKE FOR FRED NEVILLE
was held in Hickey's Funeral Home on Cleveland Road and all Notre Dame teams were heavily represented by coaches and players, something Phil took great pride in.

“What a turnout, Roger.”

Fred's parents were equally impressed. Mr. and Mrs. Neville had flown in from their retirement home in Phoenix, stunned by the news. At their age, it was their own death that had seemed proximate, and now their only son was dead at the height of his powers.

“He e-mailed us everything he wrote,” Mr. Neville said. Mrs. Neville, a little woman with large almond eyes, nodded.

“Everything.”

“He will be sorely missed,” Roger assured them. It was a phrase the Nevilles would hear again and again during the taxing hours of the wake. Father Molloy came to lead the rosary, one of several dozen members of the Holy Cross community who came to pay their respects. Monk Molloy had been a basketball player in his day and not even the presidency of Notre Dame could compete with that fact in his personal estimation. He was still a familiar figure on the outdoor courts for pickup games and never missed a home game when he was in town, sitting in taciturn appraisal as priests around him leapt up and cheered at any provocation. But Monk sat with folded arms in more contemplative appreciation of the feats of the team.

Roger had seen Marjorie Shuster enter the viewing room and sign the book and he crossed the room to join her. She turned her large sad eyes on him.

“Have you seen Mary?”

“Isn't she with you?”

“She came early. She said she wanted to be here for the whole four hours.” There was that in Marjorie's tone that filled Roger with apprehension. “Look, she's on the prie-dieu.”

And there indeed she was, clad all in black with a black mantilla on her head as she stared in desolation at the body of Fred Neville. She might have been a widow.

That, as it turned out, was the explanation of Marjorie's tone. She leaned toward Roger and whispered, “She says they were engaged.”

“Engaged.”

“Can you believe it?”

The thought disturbed Roger's prayers when he himself lowered his enormous body onto the prie-dieu before the open casket and stared at the body of his friend. Mary was now seated prominently in the second seat in the front row and when Father Molloy sat beside her before beginning the rosary she wept silently. The puzzled Nevilles sat in the same row. Mary embraced Mrs. Neville and lifted her face for Mr. Neville's kiss. His dry lips pressed against her mantilla. They were clearly as surprised as Marjorie. Few in the room failed to notice Mary's mourning apparel and her look of unutterable grief. Roger and Phil took Marjorie home for a fortifying drink.

“Just a little Jameson's,” she said. “No, make it a lot.”

“Ice?”

“Water. Just a little.”

And then she told her story. Mary had been hysterical when she heard the news, already something of a surprise, and then she had told her mother she was engaged to marry Fred.

“She claims they had been engaged for months.”

“Claims?”

“I know nothing about it.”

“Do daughters always tell such secrets to their mothers?”

“They do when they live as close as we do. We have no secrets.”

“The night she was here and Fred came in she acted as if she didn't know him.”

“I said the same thing. Apparently, she was peeved because he came in with Griselda Novak!”

The ways of women were a mystery to the Knight brothers. “I wonder if Fred knew.”

But Roger remembered Griselda's remark about Fred being in love. Had she meant Mary Shuster? He went into his study and made a call.

“Isn't it awful?” Griselda said. “I saw you at the wake but didn't get a chance to talk to you.”

“You remember Mary Shuster, the woman who was here the night…”

“She's his girl. Or she was. I often caught them smooching in his office. She visited him there a lot.”

This would be confirmed by others in the Joyce Center. Marjorie and the Knights seemed the only ones who hadn't known of Fred and Mary. When his desk was opened some days later, her photograph was found.

Marjorie said, “Why would she keep it a secret? The reason she gave made no sense.”

“What was that?”

Marjorie hesitated. “She said I nagged her so much about being single she didn't want me whooping it up if she told me.”

“Of course she would have told you eventually.”

“Look at what
eventually
turned out to mean. The girl is making a spectacle of herself.”

“You can't blame her for mourning Fred.”

“All in black? She never brought him home, not once, to introduce him to her mother. If I knew nothing about it, who did? And there she was, acting like a widow. How can you be a widow if you never married?”

“Our Mutual Friend,”
Roger murmured.

The reference sailed past Marjorie. “Oh, I know, I know. It isn't that I didn't like the man, what I knew of him, God rest his soul. She did this out of spite.”

“Now, Marjorie.”

“Well, what am I to think? Keeping something like this from her own mother. If it's even true. Do you have any more of this, Phil?”

“A little.”

“That's all I want.”

Marjorie seemed intent on having an Irish wake for Fred Neville, the son-in-law that might have been.

“I suppose it's a blessing, God forgive me. What did he die of?”

Phil said, “He died in his sleep.”

Phil drove Marjorie home and Roger asked to be taken along. “Drop me at Hickey's, Phil.”

“You're going back there? Talk to Mary, please.”

Thus it was that Roger was at the funeral home when Naomi McTear appeared.

She was a slender girl with thick red hair worn to her shoulders, familiar as the breathless reporter from the sidelines at televised football games, the one that buttonholed a coach as he was heading for the locker room at halftime. Her dress was modish, festive rather than mourning. She stood in the open door of the viewing room and looked around at the depleted group. Then she saw the Nevilles and walked rapidly to them as if she were going to conduct an interview. She gathered Mrs. Neville into her arms, her left hand splayed on the back of the smaller woman. She was wearing the biggest diamond Roger had ever seen.

“Phyllis,” she sobbed.

“Naomi.”

Then she turned to Mr. Neville. “Oh, Arthur, Arthur.” It was he who embraced her and she looked up at him, all tears. Then she glanced at the casket and shuddered. She broke free and went to the casket where she stood, hands at her hips, staring at the body. Not ten feet away, Mary Shuster studied the new arrival. She had seen the greeting she received from the Nevilles—who hadn't? Someone approached the Nevilles and then the word went around.

“She's Fred's fiancée. Naomi McTear.”