The Letter Killeth (3 page)

“Of course you couldn't connect him to Notre Dame.”

“You're wrong, you know. When he was a student at what was called Michigan College he managed to schedule a game with Notre Dame.”

“How do you know these things?”

“Constant attention to trivia. You know the name for the first three of the seven liberal arts?”

Why did such tangential things seem the very reason one wanted a higher education? When he first heard Bill's name, he had said, “Ah, window.”

“Just don't defenestrate me.”

“I'll spare you the pane.”

Mary Alice hadn't followed that, but Bill explained it to her later. “I'm surprised he didn't comment on your name.”

They both loved Roger Knight and seemed to be his favorites. After the first class of his they had attended, they came outside with him to his golf cart to find that the battery was dead. Bill plugged it in, and while it recharged he amused them by asking why the Battery in New York was called that. And why are the pitcher and catcher called a battery? How quickly the battery recharged, but they walked beside him as he drove to the apartment he shared with his brother, Philip.

“What does he do?”

“He's a private detective.”

“Come on.”

“It's true. And so am I. Or was. My being offered a chair here changed our lives.”

He asked them in, but they were shy, thinking he was just being polite. Eventually, though, they did come to know him in his now native habitat. The whole apartment seemed a study, books everywhere, but also a giant television before which Phil was often sprawled in a beanbag chair watching some game or another. Mary Alice's father would have liked Phil. She didn't want to think what he would make of Roger Knight.

*   *   *

“Crawford was born in Rome, son of the sculptor who made the figure of Liberty atop the Capitol in Washington. His aunt was Julia Ward Howe. Although he was raised in Rome, he didn't become a Catholic until he went to India as a journalist. His first novel was based on his experience there. He lectured at Notre Dame in 1897.”

That is how the class on F. Marion Crawford began. Roger Knight's courses always related, one way or another, to the past of Notre Dame, and this was no exception, although there had only been that one visit to the campus by the author who in his day had known a popularity that was the envy of Henry James. Roger began with a discussion of
With the Immortals.

“An unusual novel, not really a novel at all, but a sort of philosophical dialogue. I have always thought that the figure of Samuel Johnson is the most successful. We will be considering Crawford's theory of fiction later.”

Mary Alice had written a profile of Roger Knight for
Via Media.
It gave her a chance to quiz him about his past. It turned out to be even more exotic than she had imagined. He and his older brother had been orphaned, but Phil had been old enough to keep them together and raise Roger. Had Roger always been so fat?

“I was briefly thin in the navy.”

“The navy!”

“I enlisted after I got my doctorate at Princeton.”

“In what?”

“They called it philosophy.”

He had still been a teenager when he got his Ph.D. His age and his avoirdupois had made getting a teaching position difficult, and rather than subsist on postdoctoral fellowships, he had slimmed down enough to join the navy. Meanwhile, Phil had become a very successful private investigator. After Roger's discharge from the navy they settled in Rye, New York. Roger, too, got a private investigator's license, and they had accepted only cases of unusual interest. Their undemanding life had enabled Roger to pursue the life of the mind, and via the Internet he was in contact with kindred spirits around the globe. It was his monograph on Baron Corvo and its surprising popularity that had brought him to the attention of Father Carmody, who nominated Roger for the Huneker Chair in Catholic Studies, the funding for which Carmody had secured from a Philadelphia alumnus.

“Who is Baron Corvo?” Mary Alice asked.

“Was. His real name was Frederick Rolfe.” And he told her a thing or two about the disenchanted convert to Catholicism.

“You should give a course on him.”

“I have.”

“I suppose you've given one on Huneker, too.”

“Not yet.”

Several agnostic courses in graduate school had been the prelude to Roger's own conversion to Catholicism. “Philosophy has been called the formulation of bad arguments for what you already believe. That is certainly true of disbelief.”

*   *   *

“My father is here,” Bill told Mary Alice after Roger's class today.

“In this weather? What's going on?”

“He came on impulse. He usually does.”

She waited. Would he want her to meet his father? He seemed to be asking himself the same question.

“You could have dinner with us tonight. At the Morris Inn.”

“Should I dress up?”

He laughed. “Wait until you meet my father.”

5

When Father Carmody arrived with Quirk in tow, he displayed the letter the provost had received. Phil levered himself out of his beanbag chair and took the letter from Roger.

“A joke?”

“Who knows? Several other administrators and one faculty member received similar notes, apparently. I haven't seen them. Another went to Charlie Weis.”

“Weis!”

Quirk seemed indifferent to Father Carmody's mission. He stood, smiling at Roger and shaking his head.

“Is it true?”

“That depends on what you mean by ‘it.'”

“You're interested in F. Marion Crawford?”

“I am giving a course on him this semester.”

“You are! That's wonderful. I never even heard his name when I was a student here.”

Father Carmody rolled his eyes and took Phil into the study.

“Have you ever been to the Villa Crawford in Sorrento?” Quirk asked Roger.

“You have.”

“Several times. I have a great idea. Father Carmody tells me you are just the one to propose it to the administration.”

“I think he's pulling your leg.”

Quirk ignored this. When he had entered, he had thrown back the hood of his parka, a commodious jacket with
NOTRE DAME SWIMMING
emblazoned on it. Roger commented on this.

“I was on the swimming team. Of course, there was only the pool in Rockne then.”

“What is your great idea?”

Quirk rubbed his head as if to verify that it was hairless. He had not stopped smiling since he came in. Now he grew serious. Roger was aware of the many countries in which Notre Dame students could spend a year abroad. St. Mary's has a Rome program, and so does Architecture. What was needed was a place with associations with Notre Dame.

“Notre Dame as it was. Notre Dame as it should be.”

“Is the villa for sale?”

“Everything is for sale.”

“Isn't it a convent?”

Quirk tapped the tip of his nose. “I have reason to think that Notre Dame could buy the place.”

“Villa Quirk?”

“What do you mean?”

“Most donors like their name given to the buildings they provide the university.”

“Oh no no no. Good Lord, I don't have that kind of money.”

“What kind of money would be involved?”

“Euros.” His eyes widened and he laughed. “You mean, how much? Like everything, that is negotiable.”

Roger was beginning to realize that Father Carmody had palmed this enthusiast off on him. Despite Quirk's easy confidence that the villa Crawford had built in Sorrento on the princely proceeds of his fiction could be bought, Roger did not get the impression that Quirk was a practical man. The way he spoke of the purchasability of whatever one might covet and his vagueness as to what sum would be needed if his improbable scheme were adopted did not suggest a man at home in the rough-and-tumble world of buying and selling.

By this time, he had got Quirk into a chair and was trying not to glance enviously to where Phil and Father Carmody were huddled in conversation. Roger's curiosity had been aroused by the letter the old priest had brought, and he was almost as struck as Phil had been to hear that such a threat had been made to the football coach as well. Charlie Weis had taken Notre Dame football from the nadir to the peaks in a single year. Already, he was spoken of in the same breath as Knute Rockne, a comparison he of course dismissed. But he was indisputably a national figure, and the news that threats had been made on him, particularly after the Fiesta Bowl debacle, would be broadcast from coast to coast. Quirk, on the other hand, was completely absorbed in his quixotic project. Had he even understood the import of these threatening letters? Given the potential for bad publicity for the university, it was probably just as well Quirk seemed unaware of this.

“So you're an alumnus.”

“Do you know that Father Carmody actually remembered me? Incredible. I was not, I can tell you, a campus luminary during my time here.”

“And what have you done since graduating?”

“Wondering how I could have been so little interested in Notre Dame during the years I was here. A student's four years on campus are over almost as soon as they begin. You would be surprised how small a part of a student's interest is engaged in the classes he takes, in learning. Before you know it, you graduate and get swept up in life. Gradually it dawns on you that you all but wasted the opportunity of a lifetime. I have resolved to make up for that.”

“Hence your interest in F. Marion Crawford?”

“Yes.” He paused. “I collect Notre Dame memorabilia. Books about the place. I have someone who keeps on the lookout for me. She came upon a mention of Notre Dame in a biography of Crawford. You know he lectured here?”

“So did Henry James and William Butler Yeats.”

“But they weren't Catholics! Have you read the chapter on Crawford in Louis Auchincloss's
The Man Behind the Book
? I wonder how much of Crawford he actually read. And he doesn't even mention his conversion to Catholicism.” Quirk might have pronounced that scandalous sentence in italics.

“You yourself have read Crawford?”

“I have everything but a title or two. There were two complete editions, and he was very popular, so most of the books are easily found. But there are some that are very rare.”

“I got my set for a song.”

Quirk was on his feet. “Could I see it?”

Roger wished he had brought his chair from his study, the one he could wheel around in without getting to his feet. He rose slowly and with an effort.

“How much do you weigh?” Quirk asked wondrously.

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“Whether I can get my brother to read the scale.” He patted his rotund circumference. “I can't see it.”

Roger waddled into his study, got into the specially built chair that made him mobile, and turned to find that Quirk had stopped in the doorway. His mouth was open as he looked around.

“What a room!”

“That wall is fiction. You will find Crawford there.”

Quirk found them, ran his finger along their spines. “The Collier edition.”

“The library has a good selection. I couldn't teach the course otherwise.”

“He should be reprinted.”

“Another costly project. I wonder how many would be interested in his style of fiction now.”

“How can we know if he isn't available?”

“That doesn't sound like a premise any publisher would be willing to proceed on.”

“Notre Dame Press should do it.”

“Perhaps, with a subsidy…” Roger was beginning to feel the beginnings of impatience. He could have tolerated Quirk's enthusiasm if he would not far rather have been talking with Phil and Father Carmody of the threatening letter the priest had brought. Obviously, he wanted Phil to look into the matter.

“You're right, of course. But first things first. I mean the Villa Crawford. As it happens, I do have an idea where the money to buy it could be gotten.”

“That wouldn't settle the matter, of course.”

“This morning at the Morris Inn—I'm staying there—I ran into a classmate I had not seen in years. He lives a very simple life by the looks of him, and while he was here few people had any inkling of his background. He is rich as Croesus. Inherited money. I had an uncle who worked for his father, that's how I got the story. Manfred swore me to secrecy when I mentioned it to him.”

“Manfred?”

“Manfred Fenster.”

6

In a dull time, even a small task is welcome. Phil Knight felt that he and Father Carmody were colluding in making a mountain out of a molehill by pretending that the threatening letter the provost had received was anything more than a prank. What made it hard to dismiss was the fact that a similar threat had been made against the football coach.

“You really think there's anything to it, Father?”

“Even as a hoax it could make bad publicity for the university.”

“Maybe that's the idea. Just a little rumble in the media.”

“That's where you come in, Phil. Those letters have to be collected and their recipients warned against making them known.” Father Carmody paused. “How many people already know of them? Someone is sure to say something that will be picked up by the press.”

There seemed to be four letters in all:

to the provost

to the dean of Arts & Letters

to the football coach

to Professor Oscar Wack

“Who's he, Roger?”

Roger smiled. “He teaches theory.”

“Theory of what?”

“He's in the English department. I think he has joint appointments in theology and law. He is a tireless writer to campus publications. That is odd since he is, as they say, widely published in his field. Cabalistic pieces on various works of literature. I am told he despises me.”