Last Things Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  Epilogue

  Also by Ralph McInerny

  Copyright Page

  To Richard John Neuhaus, from first to last, and beyond

  Prologue

  The dead man was examined on the spot by the M.E. crew and by Dr. Pippen, assistant coroner. They had moved the body off the road where a horrified motorist had narrowly missed running over it. He had stopped, hesitated, but finally called the police, guarding the body from further outrage until they arrived. Of course they thought he had run over the man and had invented a fanciful tale of good citizenship to cover it. But the deceased had not been a hit-and-run victim. That had been determined before the body was moved to the sidewalk and examined more thoroughly.

  Fussell, the motorist, was telling his story for the ninth time to the gathering media. He squinted at the lights the television crews trained on him but was enjoying the attention. In each version, he remembered more details.

  “He was just lying in the street?”

  “I nearly ran over him. I almost lost control of my car trying to avoid hitting him.”

  “How could you see it was a body?”

  “At first, it was just something I didn’t want to run over. As I swerved, I saw his face.” He closed his eyes and shuddered.

  His name and address were taken, verified. He was asked what he did for a living, did he live in the neighborhood, had he ever run over anyone, did he beat his wife? The reporters were bored with him by now and were anxious to talk to the medical examiners.

  “Who’s the dead guy?”

  No one knew. The pack of reporters gravitated toward where the examination was in progress. This was the scene Phil Keegan came upon, having called Cy Horvath from the car. He got out and waded through the reporters, ignoring their questions, and headed for Pippen.

  “Why did you say murder?” he asked her. It was she who had called him.

  “Because that’s what it is?”

  “You looked at him?”

  “I was the first one here, after the squad car. His identification was in this.” She handed Phil a wallet. “And look.” She showed him a baseball bat. She was wearing rubber gloves. “This was in the street.”

  “By the body?”

  She shook her head, making her golden ponytail dance. “It was thrown out too. It was back there, maybe twenty yards. I figure the car he was thrown out of was going south.”

  No wonder Cy Horvath spoke highly of Pippen. Why someone as bright as she was doing Lubins the coroner’s work for him was a mystery. Was it for this that she had gone through medical school?

  “The world is an emergency ward,” was her answer to that. Quote, unquote, Cy.

  “You sound like an eyewitness.”

  “I talked to him.” She pointed the bat at a man who stood shivering and coatless on the steps of the house in front of which the body had been found.

  Phil started toward the man, and Pippen came along.

  “This is Captain Keegan, Mr. Sipes. Can we go inside? You’ll catch pneumonia.”

  “A policeman?”

  “Captain Keegan is chief of detectives.” She took his elbow with her gloved hand and led him up the steps. The chief of detectives followed. “Just tell him what you told me.”

  Pippen turned to go back to the body, and Keegan listened while Sipes described cleaning the snow from his front walk, facing the street, when he first heard the sound of what turned out to be the bat bouncing off the icy pavement and then a thud that filled him with apprehension.

  “I went down to the curb and looked out but couldn’t figure out what it was.”

  “Did you notice the vehicle.”

  “It was a car.”

  “Not a truck, not an SUV …”

  But Sipes was shaking his head. “A car. A sedan. Old.”

  “What make?”

  “They all look alike now.”

  “You said it was old.”

  Sipes hadn’t known what to do. He decided he ought to find out what had been dumped in the street. “I was pretty sure, but I didn’t want to turn in a false alarm.” He was going into the house for a flashlight when he heard the squeal of brakes as Fussell swerved to avoid the body.

  Keegan turned Sipes over to Officer Agnes Lamb, who had just arrived. Cy was with Pippen and the group around the body.

  The dead man’s face was caved in from a blow and there was a contusion on the back of his head as well. From hitting the street? Pippen didn’t think so. It was time to remove the body for a more thorough inspection in the morgue. The body bag was readied, and Cy and Phil huddled.

  Pippen had identified the body so Phil had been able to give Cy the name when he called him. In the wallet taken from the body was a faculty I.D. card from St. Edmund College.

  “I’ll get on this first thing,” Cy said.

  “In the morning?”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll roust a few people out of bed.”

  “Half the campus police are former members of our department.”

  If Cy Horvath were capable of expressive reactions, that would have called for one. Phil, who from long familiarity could read the Hungarian map of Horvath’s face, saw the slightest flicker in his eyes. This was Cy’s equivalent of shouting Eureka and running naked through the streets.

  1

  “You don’t know me,” she said as if he should. “I am Eleanor Wygant.”

  Father Dowling nodded. When Marie Murkin brought the visitor to the pastor’s study she had given no indication what the call might be about. After identifying herself, the woman looked around the study at the four walls of books.

  “You’re quite a reader.”

  He shrugged. This too had seemed an accusation.

  “I don’t suppose you read fiction.”

  “Occasionally.”

  “Does the name Jessica Bernardo mean anything to you?”

  “You think it should?”

  “Not necessarily. She is my niece. She has written several novels.”

  “Have they been published?”

  “They are highly thought of.”

  “But not by you.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “I read half of one and that was enough. I suppose all novels are like that now. She would call it honesty. Frankness. Showing people as they really are.”

  “And what does she think they really are?”

  “Oh, I know people aren’t saints. And I suppose a novelist wouldn’t find it easy to write about a saint. But even we ordinary people have our redeeming qualities.”

  “What novels do you like?”

  “Dickens.” She waited for his reaction. “Jane Austen. Henry
James.”

  This was a bit of a surprise. He would have thought she would mention the kind of edifying novel that was making a comeback in religious bookstores.

  “Those authors certainly didn’t write about saints.”

  “Of course not. But they didn’t celebrate the faults of their characters as if it were good to be bad.”

  This was not the judgment he had expected from this woman. Eleanor Wygant was in her sixties. She was elegantly dressed, her silver hair beautifully groomed. But a perpetual frown had etched a censorious line between her brows, and her eyes were narrowed behind her rimless glasses. Father Dowling had had his share of literary conversations in this study but never one that had begun like this. Experience suggested that this was merely an overture, a way of becoming less ill at ease in the presence of the priest. But it turned out that the real problem was connected with the overture. Eleanor Wygant wanted Father Dowling to convince her niece to give up the novel she had embarked upon.

  “You may wonder why I have come to you. I am no longer a member of your parish, but the Bernardos have always been. I am a Bernardo.”

  “I see.”

  “Jessica simply must not write it, not the way I am sure she will.”

  “A writer is unlikely to take such advice from anyone.”

  “She certainly didn’t take it from me.”

  “You’ve talked with her about it?”

  “I pleaded with her. I begged.” A sniffing sound. “I even tried to pay her not to write it.”

  “Tell me about Jessica.”

  “When she was a girl she talked of becoming a nun. She listened to me on that score.”

  “You talked her out of it.”

  “It was just a girlish fancy.”

  “Some girls have a vocation to the religious life.”

  Eleanor Wygant laughed. “Well, Jessica was not one of them.”

  “What is her new novel about?”

  “The family.”

  “Ah.”

  No doubt Thomas Wolfe’s family would have tried to head him off if they had suspected what his novels would tell the world of them. The autobiographical novel that stuck to self-revelations was one thing, but the inclusion of thinly disguised friends and relatives was seldom welcomed by the victims.

  “It’s not that we’re that much worse than others, but why parade one’s dirty laundry in public?”

  “Are you sure that’s what she intends to to?”

  A vacuum cleaner suddenly roared into life, and for a minute or two growled away in the hallway outside Father Dowling’s study but then subsided with a sigh followed by a listening silence. Marie Murkin would be miffed by the length of the visit and a conversation to which she was not privy.

  “You would think that brothers had never quarreled before. My husband and brother-in-law carried on a boyhood feud into middle age. I was almost surprised that they came to Joseph’s funeral.”

  “Joseph was your husband.”

  “He has been dead fifteen years.” Her lip trembled, and for a moment Father Dowling was afraid she was going to cry. The tap on the door was almost welcome. Marie looked in.

  “Should I make tea?”

  Father Dowling never drank tea. This, like the vacuum cleaner, was a ruse to free the pastor from a visitor overstaying her welcome.

  “What a lovely idea,” Eleanor Wygant said.

  “Is there any lemon pie left?” Father Dowling asked.

  “I have some cookies,” Marie said.

  “What kind?”

  “Oatmeal.”

  Eleanor Wygant brought her hands together in almost girlish delight. “I love oatmeal cookies.”

  So did Captain Phil Keegan, which is why Marie persisted in baking them despite the pastor’s indifference to what he ate.

  “Are you having tea, Father?” Marie asked sweetly.

  “Not this time.”

  “Why don’t I serve in the kitchen then?”

  “Just call when you’re ready.”

  If Eleanor Wygant had any sense that she was getting the bum’s rush from Marie she gave no sign of it.

  “Dare I hope, Father?” She sounded like someone in the novels she preferred.

  “Why don’t I just say this. If Jessica cares to stop by the rectory I will talk with her about her new novel.”

  Some minutes later Marie led Eleanor off to the kitchen, where she would doubtless try to pry out of her the purpose of her visit. As Father Dowling found out after the visitor had gone, it turned out that she already knew a good deal about the Bernardo family.

  “There’s only one left in the parish. Of course the name doesn’t ring a bell with you. Can they even be regarded as parishioners? You’ve never seen an envelope from them in the collection.”

  “That is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for being a parishioner.”

  Marie ignored this seminary jargon. “She comes to Mass anyway, the little woman in the green babushka, seven thirty on Sunday, most weekdays. Huddles in the back as if she’s half ashamed to be there.”

  Father Dowling had a vague image of a little old woman in a green babushka. It was not his practice in saying Mass to keep eye contact with the congregation in the manner of an emcee. “How old?”

  “About this one’s age, Eleanor.”

  “Did you think she was a little old woman too?”

  “How old do you think she is?” Marie asked.

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Add ten years. Some widows take better care of themselves than wives.”

  “I’ve noticed that.”

  Marie squinted at him. Her status had altered from grass to real widow, but she was the green babushka type nonetheless. “I hope I look half as good at her age.”

  Thin ice, this. As her employer Father Dowling knew the date of Marie’s birth but that far-off event did not seem far-off in some of Marie’s self-descriptions.

  “I suppose having children has something to do with it.”

  “Nonsense. But about the Bernardos …”

  The little old woman in the green babushka was Margaret, wife of Fulvio and mother of Jessica and two sons.

  “One’s a priest.”

  “Bernardo?”

  “Some little order. He’s on leave in California.”

  “And the other son?”

  “He teaches at St. Edmund.”

  2

  Once rival liberal arts colleges established by religious orders great and small had formed a chaplet around the city of Chicago, but if they vied for students they cooperated in other things, among them dances that provided opportunity for meeting the possible partner of one’s life. Coeducation had come to these campuses late, during the tumultuous sixties, the decade in which they began the drift from their original moorings. It was not that they repudiated their religious past; it simply became less and less relevant as nuns and priests disappeared from the staffs, lay presidents were appointed, hiring was done on a basis indistinguishable from that of other lesser institutions, which now were enjoying a buyer’s market as more and more people poured out of graduate school into a shrinking job market. In these circumstances Andrew Bernardo, with a mere master’s and not even an ABD, all but dissertation with class work for the doctorate completed, might have been grateful for his tenured position at St. Edmund’s, but in the manner of academics he engaged in pro forma grousing about the students, the salary, his class load, and the fact that he had to share an office with a colleague who seemed never to bathe. This necessitated keeping the window cracked even in the dead of winter and having a small air cleaner beside his desk whose steady hum had the added advantage of discouraging conversation. Foster was a slovenly giant who chain smoked and declaimed Shakespeare aloud at the least provocation, favoring the historical plays. No student visited him twice, if so often.

  “Tell him to take a bath,” Andrew urged Anne Gogarty, the chair of the department.

  “You’re as close to him as anyone.”

 
; “That’s my complaint.”

  “It would come more easily from you than anyone else.”

  “It should be an official demand.”

  “It’s not in the manual.”

  The faculty manual was a constant point of reference, the basis for grievances that could lead to the formation of a committee of the faculty senate and months of talk followed by inaction. Bathing by the faculty was not a requirement. That Foster was a philosopher, given to unintelligible mumbling about possible worlds’ ontology, seemed only fitting. The man could not keep his own body clean, but he spoke of the universe as a personal possession. Several times Andrew had edged close to the sensitive topic.

  “This room is so hot.”

  “It’s that machine you insist on running all the time.”

  “That has a cooling effect. And it cleanses the air.”

  Foster lit a cigarette from the burning stub of another. Andrew never complained of Foster’s smoking; the clouds of exhaled smoke did something to neutralize the effect of being downwind from his aromatic office mate.

  “Do you ever exercise?” he asked Foster on another occasion.

  “Not on purpose.”

  “You should, you know.”

  “What kind of a should is that?”

  “How many kinds are there?”

  A mistake. Foster launched into a lecture on the modalities of the deontological. Physical exercise seemed to be a mere hypothetical imperative. Andrew lauded the new wellness center that had been built by Alloy, the president, among whose achievements was to declare the campus both a smoke-free and nuclear-free zone. But faculty offices had been grandfathered, and Foster was free to puff himself to an early grave.

  “The pool is magnificent,” Andrew said. “Swimming is a marvelous tonic.” The thought of Foster clouding the chlorined water of the pool was ambiguously attractive.

  “I nearly drowned when I was a kid.”

  Was that the origin of his dread of water? “No one ever drowned in a shower.”

  “I thought you said pool.”

  “Who says pool says shower,” Andrew replied boldly.

  “Who is who?”

  “The Marquis of Queensberry.”

  “You are being facetious.”

  That was as close as he had come to recommending personal hygiene to Foster. Of course Andrew had to meet his students elsewhere, usually at a table in the cafeteria. There he sat on the morning that he had received an early telephone call from his Aunt Eleanor.