Irish Alibi (3 page)

“Our sister, Sarah,” Eugene said. “What's your name, Yank?”

So it was her identical twin brothers who introduced her to Caleb, or thought they had. Neither she nor Caleb corrected their impression. Sarah had noticed the use of “Yank.” Though spoken in a friendly way, the word held the promise of enmity.

Later, Caleb admitted that at least when her brothers were in uniform he could tell them apart. Because of the numbers.

*   *   *

Caleb had told her of his visit to his uncle in Atlanta, and meeting the adopted Southerner was a bonus of the evening. When Magnus left her side to join his classmate, she said to Caleb, “I know where you're taking us.”

“It's a surprise for Magnus.”

At the door of the Knights' apartment, the four of them stood in the gathering dark, waiting for the bell to be answered.

“Who lives here?” Magnus asked.

“One of my professors.”

Quintin groaned.

“A fellow author,” Sarah said. Caleb had read the inscription his uncle had written in the book he wanted put into Roger Knight's hands.

And then the door opened and the huge figure of Roger Knight, or a significant portion of it, was framed in the doorway, silhouetted against the light from within.

“Caleb,” he cried. “And who have we here?”

Introductions were made as they entered. Philip was the tall brother, Father Carmody the priest.

4

Fortified with the drinks he'd had in the press box, along with the beer Caleb had given him, Magnus rose to hitherto unachieved conversational heights during the next few hours spent in the apartment of the Knight brothers. Even Father Carmody seemed interested.

First of all, there was Roger, a blimp of a man, but for all that everything Caleb had claimed, and more. Roger seemed surprised that Magnus had actually read his monograph on Baron Corvo.

“Had you ever heard of him while you were at Notre Dame?”

“Did you know Richard Sullivan?”

“Only by reputation.”

“He was a member of the English department during the golden years. Stories, novels, but above all his book on Notre Dame.”

“I know that, of course.”

“All the royalties went to the university. There was a true Notre Dame man.”

“My royalties from Corvo would not have added much to the current affluence.”

There was a topic that Magnus could have run with. Like most alumni, he was at once overwhelmed and slightly repelled by the visible wealth the university had come into since his days on campus. It is difficult for anyone other than a Franciscan to sing the praises of poverty, and Magnus was himself anything but an unworldly man, but the conspicuous signs of wealth that had transformed the Notre Dame campus struck him as out of keeping with any effort to convey to students that they had here no lasting city.

He had just prompted a reaction from Roger to
Irish Icons
when Philip Knight asked Magnus what he had thought of the game. Switching gears with the ease granted him by the alcohol he had consumed, Magnus tipped back his head, looking up at Philip, and began pontificating on sports. Here he was an acknowledged expert, and in Philip Knight he had an interlocutor worthy of his steel.

“College sports have changed beyond recognition. Coaches are not shy to say that they are looking for recruits who want to play on Sundays. Future pros, that is. The campuses have become the minor leagues of the NFL.”

“Was there interhall football when you were here?” the lovely Sarah asked.

“Yes. But no Bookstore Tournament!”

Sometimes an indirect answer is the best response. Magnus had taken no part in athletics during his time at Notre Dame. But then neither had Charlie Weis. Basketball or football, the point was that once young men who were students had engaged in sports in their spare time.

“When do athletes get a shot at an education nowadays?”

He reined himself in. He sounded too much like Jeremiah. And the truth was that he had delighted in the afternoon's contest and in Notre Dame's triumph over the visiting team. He only hoped his account would sound more neutral than he had felt while sending it in. Father Carmody detached himself from Caleb and joined them.

“What's this about student athletes?”

“I'm Magnus O'Toole, Father.”

“I know.”

Surely the priest wouldn't remember him as a student. “You've read my book?”

“I don't read anymore. Only re-read. You were here in the late seventies, '75, '76.…”

“1977!”

“My memory is going,” the old priest said. “Writing that column for the
Observer
proved fateful, didn't it? Still with the
Constitution
?”

Magnus was delighted by the thought that his less than stellar career had been monitored on his old campus.

“It must be in the genes,” Father Carmody said.

“How so?”

“Haven't you read your nephew's article on General Sherman and Notre Dame?”

“Caleb!” Magnus cried. “Come here. What's this about an article?”

Roger Knight produced the latest issue of the
Irish Rover
, opened to Caleb's article. Magnus took it and read it with moving lips.

“Wonderful, wonderful. Quintin, come here. Look at this.” He said to Father Carmody, “Quintin Kelly, Father. A classmate.”

The old priest peered at Quintin, who had large black eyes and olive skin and was bald in a way that had become fashionable. “You lived in Dillon. What are you doing now?”

Quentin seemed embarrassed with the priest, a reminder of his more orderly youth.

Magnus would have liked to hear Quentin's answer to Father Carmody's question—it occurred to him that he hadn't asked Quintin about himself—but Roger Knight had taken his arm.

“Would you like to see my modest Civil War collection?”

And off they went to the study, where Roger settled himself into a commodious wheeled chair and then began to move along the shelves, drawing Magnus's attention to what he had.

“Mathew Brady!”

Magnus opened a volume and began to leaf through it, studying the haunting photographs Brady had taken. “This must have been the first generation of the camera.”

This earned him a little lecture on the transition from daguerreotype to photograph.

“Have you been through the tunnel that leads from the Morris Inn to the McKenna Center? The walls are lined with old photographs of this place.”

“I didn't know there was a tunnel.”

Roger smiled. “It's not a heating tunnel, you know. But there is a whole subterranean network of heating tunnels beneath the campus. They were featured in one of the Father Dowling mysteries.”

“I've never heard of them.”

“Are you a native of the South?”

“I was raised in Minneapolis.”

“I've been trying to place your accent.”

“I see you have Shelby Foote.”

“Oh yes. Always a Confederate spin, but delightful reading.”

*   *   *

Later Magnus was elated to learn that Sarah was from Memphis and from a great Southern family.

“The Kincades,” he repeated, letting his lids drop in recognition.

“When Caleb told me his name was Lanier, you can imagine what I thought.”

And so they commemorated Sidney Lanier, raising a bumper of merlot to the memory of the writer.

“And how long have you been in Atlanta?”

“I feel I was born there.”

“Honestly, whenever I'm in Atlanta, I feel I'm”—she looked around, then leaned toward him and whispered—“in a Northern city.”

Magnus knew what she meant. He would infinitely rather be in some such place as Savannah or Charleston or, for that matter, Memphis, all of them unequivocally Southern. Sarah was right, Atlanta had changed, and you could name all the streets Peachtree and it wouldn't disguise it. In the parish where he didn't go to Mass, there had been an influx of New Englanders, along with well-paying jobs in the electronics industry they had brought with them. The pastor, too, was an import who sounded like someone imitating JFK.

“Is Mrs. O'Toole with you?” Sarah asked.

“Not this trip. How long have you known Caleb?”

“Oh, we're old friends.”

Magnus did not lift his hand in benediction, though he certainly wanted to. A sudden wave of sadness swept over him, and he had a momentary vision of the contrast between a couple's hopeful beginnings and the reality of their future. Sarah had asked about Mrs. O'Toole. Mimi would never answer to that. For that matter, she no longer answered to Mimi.

“Call me Madeline, for God's sake.”

And not Madeline O'Toole, either. She found his family name comic. She published her novels under the pen name Madeline Butler.

5

From the Knights' apartment, Magnus and Quintin followed a diagonal though not particularly straight line across the campus to the Morris Inn.

“You got into the Morris Inn on a game day!” Quintin stopped walking as he said this, though he seemed to continue to move in place.

“No, no. My car is in the lot there.”

“Where are we going?”

“Let's check out the Morris Inn first.”

They checked out the Morris Inn. They ended in the great tent erected behind the hotel to accommodate the influx of thirsty fans. Magnus seemed surprised that the temporary bar did not have single malt scotch.

“Give me something domestic, then.”

They found an outside table, and Magnus lifted his glass to the starry heavens above. He was filled with euphoria. His return to his alma mater had been, if he said so himself, a triumph. He had sold a lot of books; he had watched a Notre Dame victory; he had met the much touted Roger Knight as well as the Southern belle who seemed so attached to his nephew Caleb. Once more he felt a fleeting sadness. But who would not be immobilized if he knew the future?

“I didn't realize for some time that Madeline was your wife.”

Quintin's statement came accompanied by background noise—other conversations, music, the constant coming and going of festive fans—and was apparently part of a narrative he had begun while Magnus was studying the sky. He lowered his gaze and looked at Quintin with both eyes.

“You know Madeline?”

“As Madeline Butler. She's one of my authors.”

“Your authors?”

Quintin Kelly, it emerged, owned the publishing house in Athens, Georgia, that brought out the gaudy paperbacks Madeline wrote and Magnus considered a travesty. Madeline had invoked
Gone with the Wind
as her model.

“The O'Haras were Catholic!” Magnus had responded. It seemed a time for irrelevancies.

“You're just jealous.”

“Of course I'm jealous.” She knew his dream of writing a real book rather than the ephemeral column on the sports page, where like all his ilk he affected omniscience and turned athletics into an accountant's nightmare, a blur of statistics. And all along Madeline had been nursing the dream of becoming the successor of Margaret Mitchell. (Another Catholic, by the way, of sorts.)

“What does that have to do with anything?”

That first quarrel had been occasioned by her first novel. She presented it to him like an illegitimate child. He had no idea that she had written it, let alone found a publisher, and here it was, a bulky paperback on whose cover some demanding position from the Kama Sutra seemed illustrated.

He got over it, more or less. After all, why should he be threatened by a piece of schlock like this? But
Passion's Dregs
was followed by
Maid in Vicksburg
and
Dancing in Charleston.
They were shameless exploitations of the Civil War period, turning the great campaign into a crusade of concupiscence. With prosperity, Madeline rented an office in a high-rise near a suburban mall; she went off on writing vacations; she bought a beach house on Siesta Key. Magnus felt unmanned. They became estranged.

He had forgotten how beautiful she was, and the publicity photos used to promote her books came as almost a surprise. Her brunette hair framed her face; her eyes smoldered; her mouth seemed pursed for a kiss.

“You look like Vivien Leigh,” he told her.

“The general's wife?”

It is odd to have to remember that you love your wife. And now a classmate he scarcely remembered was telling him that there was something going on between him and Madeline.

“I never made the connection,” Quintin said, hunching over the table, which tilted under the pressure of his elbows. He lifted his glass high as if to preserve its contents in an unstable world. “Of course, she signed the contract Madeline O'Toole, but why was I supposed to think a Southern girl was married to you?”

“You sonofabitch.”

Quintin ignored this. His expression was not unlike that of the counselor to whom Magnus and Madeline had taken their grievances. They had both loathed the smug marital negotiator who had looked blank when Magnus told him that marriage was a sacrament.

“For better or worse!”

“You can say that again,” Madeline said.

But for the nonce, he and Madeline were on the same side, allied against this intruder. They could carry on their argument without a third party.

“We should have gone to a priest,” Magnus said.

“That's what got us into this in the first place.”

“We'll have children.”

“No, we won't.”

“Madeline, you're my wife.”

“That's what's at issue.”

She spoke now with the authority of commercial success. By comparison, he felt like a hack, his studied prose destined for the garbage dumps of Atlanta. How bitter to think now that he had written
Irish Icons
in an effort to establish parity with his wife.

“She wants to get an annulment,” Quintin said.