The Green Revolution (3 page)

Remaining as active as he had, Carmody had resisted any suggestion that he was ready for Holy Cross House, the low building on the far side of the lake to which retired and ailing and senile members of the congregation went. All very well for them, of course, and thank God there was such a bright efficient place in which they could live out their final days. He knew it was pride that prevented him from seeing himself among the residents of Holy Cross House. Eavesdropping on his inner thoughts, he feared that he heard the voice of the pharisee in the gospel thanking God that he was not like the rest of men. And then one surprising day, without fanfare, Father Hesburgh took up residence in Holy Cross House. Father Hesburgh! If the fabled longtime president of Notre Dame could live in Holy Cross House, who was Charles Carmody to resist? Besides, there was the fact that Hesburgh remained active, on campus and abroad, his demanding schedule seemingly unaltered by retirement from the presidency. Ted's failing eyesight was a handicap few even knew of, but each day he went off to his offices on the thirteenth floor of the library named for him. This seemed the best of both worlds to Charles Carmody, and soon he followed the precedent of Ted Hesburgh and moved into Holy Cross House. For a time, the parallel worked. Like Hesburgh, Carmody continued to be summoned to the main building when matters became too difficult for the youngsters there.

Undeniably, however, there had been a falling off of such summonses of late. There were dark times when Carmody felt that he was on the shelf for good, like the other residents of Holy Cross House. It was more and more difficult to think that he, like Hesburgh, was an exception. He even found himself reviewing his memories with an eye to listing the times when he had pulled the administration's chestnuts from the fire, alone or, recently, in tandem with Philip Knight. It did not help that, surveying the record of the new administration, he felt that they could only benefit from calling on the wisdom and experience of Charles Carmody.

No need to give much thought to how easily he might have spared them the ignominy of pursuing coaches no longer on the market or letting out the astronomical salary that had lured Weis back to his alma mater. Carmody remembered that the most Ara Parseghian had ever been paid as head football coach was thirty-five thousand dollars. Doubtless those who had offered the princely sum to Weis had taken comfort in his early performance. Incredibly, they had extended his contract for ten years after what increasingly looked like a lucky first season. Hubris and folly were to take their lumps in 2007.

Alumni were on the phone to Carmody increasingly as the horrors of 2007 unfolded. Ever the loyalist, Carmody had calmed the angry, encouraged the despondent, appealed to the apparently bottomless love of their alma mater in the graduates of Notre Dame. But in the private forum of his mind he permitted critical judgments to formulate themselves. This was no ordinary string of bad luck. History of the worst kind was being made by the multimillionaire head coach. Of course, Carmody kept such thoughts to himself.

*   *   *

Iggie Willis, an alumnus whose devotion to his alma mater bore some relation to his not undistinguished four years on campus, had been roused to unusual ire by the collapse of the football team. After the first loss, to Georgia Tech, Father Carmody had counseled him to take comfort in the fact that lowly Appalachian State had beaten archrival Michigan. Whatever temporary solace this afforded Willis, it evaporated when Michigan trounced Notre Dame in Ann Arbor. At least the slaughter had not occurred in the very stadium, however altered, that Rockne had built.

“Something has to be done, Father,” Willis growled after the loss to Georgia Tech. They were in Leahy's, the bar of the Morris Inn, if not drowning their sorrows then dowsing them with the balm of oblivion. At least Willis was. Carmody, as was his wont, nursed a single drink, all things to all men except in sin.

“It's only a game, Ignatius.”

“Life is a game, Father,” Willis said in homiletic tones. “A game we're meant to win.”

“The stakes are somewhat different.”

“Three quarterbacks, Father. Three quarterbacks! What in hell have they been doing during training?”

“Do you know what you get back when you give a dollar for a seventy-five-cent purchase, Willis?”

“You find me a quarterback for that price and I'll buy him.”

Father Carmody offered Willis the consolations of philosophy, or the Leahy's equivalent thereof. He recalled with uncanny accuracy past troughs in the record of Notre Dame football. What were a few losses against such memories of redemption?

But the opening loss had been followed by another and another and another … Willis began mobilizing fellow enraged alumni; he initiated a Web site and asked fellow Domers to subscribe to the expression of outraged disappointment, which, as the weeks went by, began to seem almost moderate. After the fourth loss, there were more than ten thousand subscribers to Willis's Web site. This development filled Father Carmody with foreboding. The mark, the essence, of a Notre Dame graduate was unquestioning, even blind, allegiance to the great university that had improbably arisen on the shores of St. Mary's and St. Joseph's lakes, the bifurcated bodies of water created from the one lake that figured in the original title of the institution, Notre Dame du Lac. Now on Willis's Web site began to appear what were, let us hope, unserious suggestions that Chicago alumni might know how to arrange for taking out a contract on the now odious coach whose own contract and compensation were subjects of morose delectation. Of such things did alumni chat without inhibition on CheerCheerFor
Old
NotreDame.com, the italicized adjective meant to refer to the golden era before the present debacle.

Not unsurprisingly, Father Carmody eventually got a call from the Main Building. Not from the president. Not from the provost. Not from the inflated platoon of assistant and associate presidents and provosts, not even from Genoux, his onetime protégé who was now special advisor to the president, but from one Kevin Dockery who identified himself as in the foundation and was calling on behalf of the administration.

“And what can I do for you, Mr. Dockery?”

“Are you aware of the Web site CheerCheerFor
Old
NotreDame.com?”

“Tell me about it,” Father Carmody suggested, decades of experience counseling the wisdom of indirection.

Dockery told him. “They're killing us, Father. Any number of promised donations have been put in escrow until something is done about the football team.”

“I am sure the lads are doing their best,” Father Carmody said, employing a Leahy's designation for the players.

“It's the coach they're after.”

“So what are you doing?”

“The question is, what can we do?”

“Who suggested that you call me?”

This flustered Dockery. Whatever the urgency of his concern—the current drive for contributions, one of a continuous series—it did not emanate from him.

“Perhaps you should have them get in touch with me,” Father Carmody suggested and said good-bye to Kevin Dockery with a satisfaction that would become a prominent item in his next examination of conscience.

Within the hour, his phone rang again.

“Father Carmody?”

Ah. Genoux. “Is that you, Neil? How long it's been since we talked.”

“You above all know the ceaseless business of administration, Father.”

“Ah, but that is all long since, Neil. I find myself increasingly content with the inactivity of this place. The soul, Neil. The soul. One must prepare himself to meet his maker.”

“We need your help, Father.”

“Mine?”

How sweet it was to hear the desperation in the voice of the young man, once a protégé, now all but a stranger since he had entered the inner circles.

“You know Ignatius Willis. You can get through to him.”

“Oh, I hear from him regularly.”

“You do!”

“The loyalty of old students is a touching thing, Neil.” The knife being in, he twisted it gently. “Most old students.”

Carmody let Genoux cajole and woo him for fifteen minutes before he agreed to do what he could do to get Iggie to call off his assault on Notre Dame football. As it happened, Iggie planned to fly in during the coming week.

“But you'll be too busy for us to get together,” Father Carmody had suggested when Iggie called.

“Too busy! Father, I'd cancel appointments to visit with you, and you know it. Besides, I want to give you a report on the Web site.”

“What brings you to South Bend? You're not just pretending other business in order to accommodate me.”

“Oh, no. There's other business. But that, too, can wait.”

4

Father Neil Genoux occupied an office not far from that of the president in the Main Building. His title, special advisor to the president, had a political redolence to it, fittingly enough no doubt. His was the kind of job that Father Carmody had done informally for years and years, through administrations from Cavanaugh's to the present. No title for Carmody, no office either with his name on the door, nor, Genoux was sure, had Carmody been treated so peremptorily by those he served. There were times when Genoux felt like lifting his arms before his chest, curling his hands downward, and barking. There was an old country-western song that had stuck in his memory. “
Take This Job and Shove It.”
Or words to that effect. After barking, he would belt out that song and walk out the door, cashiered, reduced to the ranks, free.

Up is down in academe and vice versa. Malcontents on the faculty regard the administration as the owners, the bosses, and themselves, more improbably still, as working stiffs. They look with resentment on those who wield, as they think, absolute power over them. Power! Those in the administration are the playthings of forces they cannot control, actors in a drama they have not rehearsed, menaced by faculty, alumni, staff, donors, conscience. More and more, Genoux found himself envying the blissful lives of the faculty. Study, teach a few courses a week, loll around chatting with students or colleagues, criticize the administration—lives of total tranquillity. Genoux had taught, he knew better, but his longing swept away realistic memories and he imagined himself back in his office in Decio, chair tipped back, looking out the window, just watching the grass grow. He would never have heard the name of Ignatius Willis then. Or even of the Weeping Willow Society.

If Genoux was at the moment unoccupied, the inactivity was not restful, for it could be broken at any moment and he sent on some mindless task. When he had been asked to take this job, he had been elated. Literally. His chest seemed to balloon at the prospect. The preparatory year followed by the grand and gaudy installation had been a time of honeymoon when all the world seemed to smile benignly on the new administration, despite the faux pas of that trip to Utah. It sometimes seemed to Genoux that he had counseled against going, not flat out, you understand, but indicating by perhaps imperceptible foot-dragging that he … Oh, the hell with it. It had been an exciting trip, and the bad publicity died quickly. There seemed to be a lesson there. A lesson they had not learned.

Genoux had taught English in a department that made chaos seem a formal garden, but he had taught against the grain. The nineteenth century was his. He wallowed in Dickens and Thackeray and Trollope, in James and Twain and Howells and a host of lesser figures who were as familiar to him as, well, family. He celebrated rather than debunked; he had had success in eliciting similar responses from his better students. In his present position, he looked back with longing on what seemed those halcyon days. It was like wanting to be living in an idealized nineteenth century. Alas, he had proved all too susceptible to the invitation to come up higher. Higher! He seemed caught in the inverted cone of the Inferno, involved in a long descent to the waiting ice. What a mistake it had been to waste their first year in office on prolonged discussions of the abominable
Vagina Monologues.
On other campuses, the problem had been dealt with summarily. The presidents of Portland and of Providence had reviewed the play and turned thumbs down. Other presidents had followed suit. A brief and outraged response followed, and then silence. By contrast, they had elevated the odious bit of pornography into the major issue of the year. There had been meetings with the faculty where the majority treated with contempt the notion that the play presented any problem whatsoever. This was a university where academic freedom was the watchword, was it not? The meetings with students had been no better. The notion that such careful consideration would endear the administration to the faculty and student body and the great world beyond seemed a bad joke in retrospect. They had actually attended a performance and been pelted with obscenties and condoms. And emerged to say that the matter was still under review!

No wonder a group of alumni, alerted to such strange goings-on, had formed themselves into the Weeping Willow Society, their Web site helpfully citing Psalm 136. In Latin!
Super flumina Babylonis, illic sedimus et flevimus cum recordaremur Sion. In salicibus in medio eius suspendimus cithara nostra.
Genoux looked it up. “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and we wept, when we remembered Sion. On the willows of that land we hung up our harps.” Their theory was that, in the matter of that lesbian play, Notre Dame was under assault from nameless secular and neo-pagan forces. The members of the group began to acquaint themselves with other matters on campus, matters of a sort that they found incredible. The Gay and Lesbian Coalition, Gender Studies, other efforts to attack an imaginary homophobia. Papers were leaked to them and appeared on their Web site. Their calm and forceful letters had respectfully asked for an appointment with the president in which he could explain such matters to them, a request that had never been granted.