The Letter Killeth (2 page)

“For the most part, simply restored it to its original condition. Not these grand offices, of course. Come.”

In the elevator, he asked Quirk what he had wanted to talk to the provost about.

“Does the name F. Marion Crawford mean anything to you?”

“Is the pope German? Come on. We're going to visit the Knight brothers.”

2

Beauty lies, not in the eye of the beholder nor in the mere thereness of the beheld, but in some complicated relation between the two. In fact, the beloved thing itself, or the person herself, is seldom seen at all, if seeing lies in mere perception. What wife ever sees her husband as does some neutral observer, if such there be? What husband who might say of the wife of his bosom that she walks in beauty like the night imagines that he is describing her for all to see? Third parties are notoriously mystified by what draws this man to this woman. They may have eyes to see but are unable to see what for the smitten is all in all.

Such thoughts and their expression characterized the discussion of the University Club of Notre Dame as the members sought to deal with the news that the dear squat building, the dining room with its vaulted roof, and the poky backroom bar, where the discussions went on, were all doomed to destruction. An edict had gone out from the Main Building announcing that the club would be razed to make way for an extension of Engineering, and the outraged members of the club were thrust into the position of one whose spouse is spoken of by a stranger.

In the dining room, at the facetiously named Algonquin table, in a corner where the self-described Old Bastards met for lunch, and at other tables where more random diners congregated, the sense that a Sword of Damocles hung over this familiar setting provided the common subject of the day. There is a music of anger, largely percussive and profane, and the club had swelled with it ever since the judgment had been circulated to the members.

The administrator with the hyphenated name was subjected to imaginative abuse.

“Who is he?” demanded Potts, professor emeritus of philosophy, surveying the other OBs with a rheumy eye.

“What do you mean, who is he?” Wheeler barked, as if his anger could be directed at Potts.

“I mean I never heard of him. How long has he been here?”

Potts had celebrated the golden anniversary of his joining the faculty, and anyone with less than a quarter of a century on campus had for him the status of an unregistered alien. Someone guessed, and Potts snorted.

“I knew Montana,” Armitage Shanks said.

“The quarterback?”

“The architect. Frank Montana. He designed this building.”

“Is he to blame for the acoustics?”

How sweetly sad it was to think that once complaints about the acoustics in the dining room might have provided topic enough to get them through a meal.

“Speak well of the dead,” Shanks advised. “There's nothing wrong with the acoustics. It's your hearing that is defective.”

“What?”

“Can he be stopped?”

“Who?”

“The man you don't know. The man who has no sense of the tradition of this place. He thinks it is just a building that can be torn down and replaced with another.”

“It can be and it will be.” Bingham, late of the law school, spoke with the mordant satisfaction of a magistrate invoking the death penalty. “We have been put in the position of those poor widows who learn that a new highway will be run through their living room. Eminent domain. Protests are useless.”

A special meeting of the membership had been called, a committee formed, and an elaborate report prepared and sent to the Main Building. Its only result had been a statement that a new place might possibly be found for the club. Perhaps a donor could be found …

“A donor gave the money for this building!” Potts cried.

The Gore family had financed the building of the club with the understanding that a massive collection of beer steins would be housed there. And so they were, enshrined in a number of glass cases in the wall that separated the sunken dining room from a series of all-purpose rooms on a higher level.

“Have they been told?” Bingham asked.

“The original donor is dead.”

“His family, then?”

“They are not pleased.”

“They should be furious. Is there a statute of limitations on the recognition of benefactions?”

All looked to Bingham. He shrugged. “If they want to tear this place down, nothing can stop them.”

“It'll be the Grotto next. Or Sacred Heart Basilica.”

“The Main Building could simply be burned. That's a tradition.”

The predecessor of the Main Building had gone up in flames in 1879 and within a year been replaced by the present edifice. Father Sorin, the founder of the university, had been away from campus when the terrible news came to him, and he returned immediately, vowing to rebuild within a year, and so he had.

“Where is Sorin now?” Potts asked piously.

“The question is theological.”

“In the community cemetery.”

Plaisance sighed. “It is enough to make one half in love with easeful death.”

“Nothing lasts.”

“The place has fallen into the hands of barbarians.”

On and on went the discussion, engaged in with the peculiar satisfaction that morose delectation provides. Plaisance had come as near as any of them to the admission that this latest outrage promised to provide the subject of discussion for many future meals at the Old Bastards' table.

“We should march on the Main Building in protest.”

“We could let our hair grow, and our beards. Only the unruly get a hearing.”

“Not even God could grow your hair, Potts.”

“What?”

They were interrupted by Debbie, the hostess, offering more coffee. The thought of consuming more liquid caused unease, as she knew it would. They looked around and noticed as if with surprise that they were the last occupants of the dining room.

“We're going, we're going.”

“Watch your language.”

3

Bill Fenster's grandfather had made a fortune during World War II as a defense contractor, although to his dying day he described the conflict as Mr. Roosevelt's war. With the coming of peace, he had sold off everything and invested so wisely and widely that he had provided for his progeny into the second and third generation, and doubtless far beyond. In the postwar period, Grandpa Fenster had lent his support to the John Birch Society and to the campaign to get the United States out of the UN and the UN out of the United States. Bill's father, perhaps in reaction, had drifted leftward and worked for the doomed Gene McCarthy campaign. McCarthy's defeat and the later debacle of George McGovern had cured Bill's father of politics and provided his grandfather with satisfaction at this proof of his son's naïveté. The son, Manfred, called Fred, had then turned to religion and spent much of the year traveling to reported new apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. When Bill was accepted at Notre Dame, his father had attributed this to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, whereas his grandfather was certain that in his generosity to the university lay the explanation. Thank God he hadn't put the family name on any buildings.

“Don't make my mistake,” his father advised Bill.

“How so?”

“I never had to earn my living. Neither will you. I have come to think that money is a curse.”

“You could disinherit me.”

“Not even your grandfather could have done that. I'm afraid you're doomed to affluence. I have found that the best way is to live as if one were poor.”

Bill's mother had died when he was four, worn out after a series of miscarriages when she was trying desperately to provide a brother or sister for him.

“Actually, she had dreamed of a huge family. Eight, nine, even more.”

His father had never remarried. It was surprising he hadn't entered a monastery. He spent a week every year with the Trappists in Gethsemani, Kentucky. Bill had joined him there for a few days, once.

“It's not what it was,” his father said afterward.

Bill said nothing. He had found it unnerving to be off in the woods like that, life on the farm, sort of, except for the services in church when the high-pitched keening voices rose to where he and his father knelt in the visitors' loft in the middle of the night. They could have used a second bass or two. It turned out that his father thought the life was not austere enough.

“It was like marine boot camp when I first went there. Their heads were shaved, total silence, no Muzak in the guests' refectory.”

His father mimicked the life of a poor man and was half a priest himself, saying the office in Latin every day. It was from one of the readings in Advent that his father had typed out a text from Isaiah for Bill to translate when he had been in prep school: “Et aures tuae audient verbum post tergum monentis: ‘Haec est via, ambulate in ea, et non declinetis neque ad dexteram neque ad sinistram.'” It had become Bill's motto and hung framed over his desk at Notre Dame.

“What's it mean?” Hogan, his roommate, asked.

“I thought you took Latin.”

“In high school.”

“It says, ‘Your ears will hear a voice behind you warning: This is the way, walk in it, and do not turn either to right or left.”

It wasn't political advice, of course, but Bill took it that way, too, determined to avoid the opposite extremes his grandfather and father had embraced. But he had accepted his father's advice about keeping secret that he already had the wealth most of his classmates dreamed of acquiring. He himself had financed the alternative campus paper he and Mary Alice and Hogan and some others had started. The
Via Media.

“The donor prefers to remain anonymous,” he said, which was true enough.

They put the quote from Isaiah on the masthead, in Latin. Recent issues had been concerned with the fate of the University Club, suggesting that the decision to tear it down and replace it was not only autocratic but indicative of a worrisome trend toward running Notre Dame as if it were a business. “The Bottom Line” was a regular feature in the irregularly appearing newspaper, chronicling the salaries of administrators and coaches, the swollen endowment that was never used to bring down the cost of a Notre Dame education to students. Nothing strident, just the chiding voice of reason. Bill had become a bit of an amateur in the history of the university. Sometimes he reminded himself of his father lamenting what had happened to the Trappists.

*   *   *

His father's visits to the campus were always unannounced. He would call from the Morris Inn and ask Bill to have lunch with him there. Today Bill found his father seated in the lobby. He rose and shuffled toward his son. Worn corduroy pants, baggy cable-knit sweater, tousled hair almost all gray now, he really looked like the poor man that he had wanted to let out of the very rich man he was.

“It was spur of the moment,” he said unnecessarily, when they had been shown to their table near a window that looked out on the snowy world. “I forgot how cold it is here in February.”

“There's not much going on.”

“I want to look into the Catholic Worker House in town. Have you ever been there?”

“What is it?”

“Dorothy Day. Surely you've heard of her.”

“Notre Dame gave her the Laetare Medal.”

“That's hardly her claim to fame. Not that fame is what she wanted.”

So Bill got an account of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and the Catholic Worker movement that still went on years after the deaths of its saintly founders.

“I ran into a classmate of mine,” his father said, changing the subject. “It's the risk you run.”

His father never returned for alumni reunions; he never came for football games. Yet he was a proud if critical alumnus. Bill had not told his father of founding
Via Media.
He hadn't told him of Mary Alice either.

“A fellow named Quirk. Why he remembered me, I don't know. It's even more surprising that I remembered him.”

4

Mary Alice Frangipani was the eldest of six Frangipanis, a native of Morristown, New Jersey, where her father was senior partner in the law firm that bore his name. He had graduated from Seton Hall, but his unfulfilled dream had been to go to Notre Dame, and sometimes Mary Alice felt she was living out his dream. He called every other day, avid for a blow-by-blow account of her life on the campus that was for him the earthly paradise. He attended every Notre Dame football game, at home and away, but Mary Alice did not find his passion for athletics contagious. Her father was wild about Charlie Weis.

“Do you know what they're paying him?”

“He's worth every nickel of it whatever it is.”

“It started at two million dollars. Who knows what it is now?”

The whole family had attended the Fiesta Bowl on January 2, flying out in her father's Learjet. Her father had been in ecstasy. He attributed the outcome to bigoted officials. You would have thought they were all obtaining a plenary indulgence for cheering on the Fighting Irish.

Her major had been English until, in disgust, she had switched to the Program of Liberal Studies. Her father had thought English was a quixotic major, but the switch baffled him even more.

“What can you do with it?”

“Nothing.”

“You better marry a rich man.”

She thought vaguely of graduate school, maybe philosophy. If that thought was vague, anything beyond was vaguer still. Did she want to be a professor? The one professor she unequivocally admired was Roger Knight, and he was anything but typical. It was in one of Knight's classes that she had met Bill Fenster. They were taking another this semester, devoted to F. Marion Crawford. Neither of them had admitted that they didn't have the faintest idea who F. Marion Crawford was. Roger Knight could make a class on Edgar Rice Burroughs exciting. She had told him as much.