Irish Gilt
Authors: Ralph McInerny
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Contents
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For Chris and Jen Kaczor
PART ONE
F
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1
April was the cruelest month for Philip Knight. The basketball season was over, including the bookstore tournament; the hockey schedule was complete; baseball lay in the future, as did spring football practice. Bleak weeks without the diversion of Notre Dame sports confronted him.
“They might as well shut the place down, Roger.”
“You could sit in on a few classes.”
Philip gave him a cold eye. “Yours?”
“No, no, I didn't mean mine.”
“What's this?” Phil asked, picking up a sheaf of stapled pages.
“My syllabus.”
Phil waited.
“An outline of the course.”
“So students know where you're going?”
“Not just the students.”
Roger was giving a course on the life and writings of the once famous Father John Zahm, now all but forgotten on the campus where he had been a massive presence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Poor Phil had probably already heard enough about Zahm right here in their apartment.
“I could take a vacation, I suppose.”
“Where would you go?”
For a moment there was a spark in Phil's eye as possibilities occurred to him, but soon the spark went out. “I don't want to go on vacation.”
“Of course not. Who would want to leave Notre Dame?”
Not Roger Knight, certainly. Since his appointment several years ago to the Huneker Chair in Catholic Studies, he felt that his life had become a vacation. He had a magnificent library at his disposal; he had the university archives in which to wallow; he offered courses in whatever struck his fancy and was blessed with bright and interested students. Nonetheless, he could sympathize with Phil. When they moved to Notre Dame, Phil had sharply reduced the workload of his already very selective private investigations agency, the better to devote himself to the athletic seasons of the university. Now April had come, though, and the immediate prospect was a period without sports.
“Golf?”
“It's too soon. This is northern Indiana, you know.”
“If you had a client⦔
Phil had always selected his cases carefully, but he had never before thought of them as going on vacation.
“Phil, you might write your memoirs.”
Phil leapt to his feet. “I think I'll go work out.”
Roger nodded, as if in approval. The fact was that he regarded exercise as frivolous, particularly in its current almost religious form. “The aim is now dubbed wellness. I suppose it's not the first time an adverb was transformed into a substantive.” That was the extent of his musings on the matter.
Phil fled, but not to exercise. Under the outgoing president, Monk Malloy, a dozen buildings had gone up that might have served as the priest's monument, but perhaps he thought the massive exercise center was his real claim to a permanent place in the institutional memory. There, at any hour of the day and well into the night, students and faculty and alumni huffed and puffed as they pointlessly trod treadmills with earphones clamped to their heads, going nowhere with a teleological grimace on their sweating faces. Glazed eyes peered into a future where a trim and agile self awaited. Such strenuous activity, unrelated to any athletic contest, struck even Phil as manic. He did look in, but only for a minute or two. Then he went on to the Loftus Center and Lefty Smith, the former hockey coach whose twilight years were devoted to managing the lesser exercise center that catered to the elderly and townspeople. Bald, balloonlike, and gentle as only one who had played a vicious sport could be, Lefty seemed the Before in an advertisement for getting in shape.
“Here he is!” Lefty cried when Phil looked into the office, which was filled with trophies and photos and other memorabilia. “This is Phil Knight.”
A man who had occupied a chair across from Lefty's desk rose. His body had the deferential bent of a very tall man. “Boris Henry.” He put out his hand, and Phil took it. A former hockey player?
Henry laughed when Phil put this thought into words. “Student manager. I tried out as a walk-on.”
“Skate-on,” Lefty corrected. Confidingly to Phil, he added, “Weak ankles.”
Phil took a chair and listened to a recital of the seasons during which Henry had been student manager of the hockey team. He and Lefty seemed determined to top one another's memories. How could accounts of his old cases compete with stories like these? It was nearing noon, and Lefty suggested that they adjourn to the University Club for lunch.
At the club, they descended into the dining room and followed the rhythmic passage of Debbie, the hostess, among the tables, under the arched ceiling, to a table near the bar where aging jocks and athletic enthusiasts congregated daily. Ray Brach and Roland Kelly were already in place at the round table, which had been dubbed, ironically, the Algonquin Table by the late Jim Carberry. Phil sat down next to Henry and asked him what brought him back to campus.
“Nostalgia.”
Phil nodded. The loyalty of Notre Dame alumni was legendary and increased exponentially with former athletes.
“What do you know of Father Zahm?” Henry asked, ignoring the wider conversation.
“Zahm?” Phil looked warily at Henry. Had he been put up to this line of talk? But how could Lefty know what Roger was currently teaching? Al Syewczyk had arrived, and no one else seemed to have heard Henry over the increasing banter.
“I've heard of him.”
Henry launched into an impassioned paean of praise for John Zahm, CSC, a giant of a priest a century ago. Zahm had lost a legendary quarrel about the direction of the university and had receded into writing and adventure. “He and Teddy Roosevelt were like that,” Henry said, bringing two fingers together.
Phil was wary. He had not escaped the apartment in the expectation of running into a Zahm enthusiast. It was Henry's conviction that Notre Dame had not done enough to honor the priest.
“Isn't there a hall named after him?”
Henry made a face. “A residence hall! How can that possibly be sufficient honor for such a renaissance man? There should be a Zahm Institute, a collection of all his books and papers, a special library, fellowships⦔
“You should talk to my brother.”
A look of puzzlement formed on Henry's face and then faded. “Knight!” he said. “Are you related to Roger Knight?” If Henry had been intense before learning that Phil and Roger were brothers, he now became truly excited. “I have to meet him.”
Phil caught Lefty's eye, but the coach's expression told him nothing. Had this been arranged? Throughout the lunch, Henry babbled in Phil's ear, excluding him from the more interesting talk of the others. The only escape lay in promising to introduce Boris Henry to Roger.
2
Lines of students came and went to classes in DeBartolo throughout the day, ants picking up and carrying away such crumbs of learning as were dispensed there. As he approached the classroom building, Josh Daley's step quickened at the sight of a swishing ponytail on the crowded walk before him. It was attached to the beautifully molded head of Rebecca de Vega Nobile, Beatrice to his aching heart, Laura to his sad, unsent efforts to convey to her in poetry his exalted feelings. Before he could reach her, several young men vied for the privilege of holding the door open for her. She swept regally in, blessing the victor with a smile, and then was gone.
Inside the building himself, Josh took the stairs to the second floor and shouldered his way through student traffic to the room where the class in Continental epistemology met. Continental epistemology! Josh found the course baffling. He had signed up for it when he overheard Rebecca announcing that she was enrolling in the course. Josh's major was history. Abstractions sailed over his head; he wanted anecdotes and events, the reassuring facts of actions and great deeds. Only infatuation could explain his suffering through lectures on the continuing influence of the Cartesian cogito on European thought. The class was taught by a mumbling bearded philosopher named Tenet, whose half-audible drone made Josh feel like an eavesdropper.
At the door of the classroom, he surveyed the rows of desks that descended toward the lectern where Tenet was shuffling papers, from time to time glancing at the clock that would digitally inform him to begin. Rebecca, as usual, was in the first row. She followed the lectures as if the course exceeded all her expectations. It was the rare meeting in which she did not raise a question that sent Tenet off on a tangent of irrelevancy. Josh pushed along the second row and sat behind her with an air of triumph. She did not know he existed. She did not know that she was the reason for his taking this penitential course. Scenarios in which he would introduce himself provided material for saving daydreams during Tenet's drivel.
The clock clicked, and Tenet began the lecture with a question. “Who of you knows of the Treaty of Westphalia?”
Josh straightened in his seat. The Treaty of Westphalia! Without thinking, he raised his hand. Tenet seemed startled, as if his question had been meant to be rhetorical. He consulted the mug shots on the lectern. “Daley?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And what was the Treaty of Westphalia?”
Among other things, it was the subject of Josh's senior thesis. He rattled off a brief account of the treaty that had ended the religious wars of Europe.
Something happened to Tenet's beard. He seemed to be smiling. “And who were the signatories?”
For ten minutes there was an exchange between the professor and this knowledgeable student. Josh was wholly at ease because he was scarcely conscious that it was he who was holding forth in this course on Continental epistemology. In the row ahead of him, Rebecca turned, and her great green eyes looked at him with curiosity and admiration. Suddenly, Josh was brought back to himself and to the preposterous fact that he was speaking up in a philosophy course. It was history that was the issue, though, and history was his bailiwick.