Free Sham Rock by Ralph McInerny

wish I could.”
    â€œI suppose this has affected your profession.”
    David Williams’s eyes had lifted dramatically. But then, in his student days, he had been a regular feature on the stage of Washington Hall.
    â€œTell me about Brother Joachim,” Roger had suggested. This was before he had insisted that David Williams read the confessional story written by Williams’s old roommate, now Brother Joachim of Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky.
    â€œBrilliant,” David had said. “The star of our class. You should read the plays he wrote, as a sophomore and junior. Incredible.”
    â€œ Behind the Bricks, ” Father Carmody had said. “A tour de force.”
    Greg Walsh had unearthed a copy of the play from the archives, and Roger read it with fascination. There was an odd triangulation at work here: David Williams and his classmates of yore, David Willliams in his present plight—Father Carmody had told Roger of the troubles in Williams’s financial empire—and his son, Jay, with the commendable Amanda.
    â€œYour name is a gerundive,” he told her.
    â€œExplain.”
    â€œShe who must be loved.”

    No sooner had he said it than he felt embarrassed. Not that any woman student of his had ever misunderstood his chivalrous attitude toward the gentler sex. Roger thought in such phrases, with all the earnestness of the celibate. Phil had never married, and, as for Roger, he felt as eligible as Dr. Johnson for the role of swain. Call it sublimation, call it what you will, his regard for the female of the species, young, middle-aged, or mature, amounted to an idealization. Woman as the muse of man, half angel, a suggestion of a better world. The earthiest of poets had felt this, and Roger, no poet, felt it, too.
    â€œJay is your task,” he said to Amanda. “You must be his Beatrice.”
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    â€œI’ve been thinking about the disappearance of Timothy Quinn,” Roger said to Father Carmody.
    He had picked the old priest up at Holy Cross House, and they had gone to Leahy’s in the Morris Inn, where Murph the bartender had some sense of Father Carmody’s former eminence on campus and treated him accordingly.
    â€œCourvoisier, Murph. In a snifter.”
    Murph looked mournfully at Roger, expecting, and getting, his request for a Diet Coke.
    â€œWhat do you want to know, Roger?”
    â€œTell me the details about his disappearance. The newspaper accounts raise so many questions, and of course Brother Joachim’s story raises more.”
    Father Carmody shrugged that off. “There’s little to tell. He was carousing with fellow students in downtown South Bend, left early and alone, and was never seen again.”
    â€œExcept by Pelligrino.”

    â€œThe story? It’s fiction, Roger.”
    â€œWhat efforts were made to find him?”
    â€œIf money could have done it he would have been found. I tried to persuade his aunt that the expenditure was pointless.”
    â€œPointless.”
    â€œThe boy was dead. I was certain of that from the beginning.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œWhy was I certain? Experience. We have, thank God, had few such instances, but disappearances were always resolved by dissipation, accident, whatever, but almost always death. It is not easy for somebody to become nobody.”
    â€œSo the search was ended.”
    â€œEventually.”
    â€œWhat family was there?”
    â€œOf the Quinns? Innumerable, if you spread wide enough a net. None, if you mean immediate. The aunt who survived him.”
    â€œWhat was she like?”
    Father Carmody inhaled the vapors from the snifter that Murph had placed before him and smiled. “You assume I knew her.”
    â€œDidn’t you?”
    â€œYes. Her husband and I were in the seminary together.”
    â€œThe seminary!”
    â€œOh, he was never ordained, Gerry Quinn. Sometimes I think he was too good to be a priest.