Free Sham Rock by Ralph McInerny Page A

Don’t quote me. In a seminary, a man who scrupulously keeps the rule is an oddball. A holy oddball. His very conscientiousness tells against him. Not that anyone would question a man’s vocation because he was faithful to the rule. It doesn’t work that way. In any case, he was let go. He took tonsure and some minor orders, and that was that.”
    â€œWhat did he do when he left the seminary?”

    â€œMarried a wife and lived happily ever after. He was dead when his nephew disappeared, but the widow was devoted to Timothy.”
    â€œAnd spared no expense to find her disappeared nephew.”
    â€œIt was as if her purpose in life had been torn from her.”
    â€œWhat about the girl, Beth Hanrahan?”
    â€œA saint.” Father Carmody sipped his brandy. “An uncomfortable saint. Do you know of Dorothy Day?”
    Roger nodded.
    â€œLike that. Not a barrel of laughs, but good as gold.”
    Father Carmody’s effort to think the story Joachim had sent was pure fiction seemed a willing suspension of belief. Joachim had used the actual names of himself and his friends.
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    Two days later, a sheet of paper was slipped under the doors of three offices in Brownson. Roger read his with a tolerant smile.

    An Ancient Poet
New to Me
And why should I have known him?
X as in Unknown was He
Intent to Read the Universe
Matter and All the Rest,
Encoded His Thought in Verse
Numbered Lines His Sly Bequest
Each Can Read Them as He Will
Some with a Special Skill.

14
    MAME CHILDERS, NÉE SAYERS, LIVED in an apartment on the Upper East Side that occupied the entire twelfth floor. Huge. A wonderful place in which to entertain, dinners, cocktail parities, informal little seminars with artists, writers, politicians. Financial advisers. She threw back her head and directed smoke at the ceiling. When she bent over an ashtray to stub out her cigarette, her eyes went around the vast, beautifully furnished living room. Not much of a view, unless you liked reservoirs and the endless construction work on the Museum of Modern Art. She didn’t have to close her eyes to imagine Dave Williams on his feet before that bookcase, speaking with quiet authority to the half-dozen people she had gathered to hear him. How possessive she had felt. And with good reason.
    â€œWho advises you now?” he had asked her over lunch the first time they had seen one another since South Bend. Mame felt she was recapturing an earlier role.
    She liked the way he frowned when she told him she had left things in the hands of Wilfrid’s advisers.
    â€œWilfrid?”
    â€œMy husband.”
    â€œI’m sorry.”
    â€œFor what?”
    â€œWhen did he …” His expression finished the question.

    â€œDave, he’s not dead. We’re divorced. And still friends. More or less.”
    She had resolved to get that on the table right away, and she was prepared for the reaction he tried to hide. In the world in which they had been raised, divorce and marriage did not go together like a horse and carriage.
    â€œYou’re saying he still handles your money.”
    â€œNot personally, but I stayed with the same group after things were divided up.”
    If she had resolved to ease into full disclosure about her marital status, she parceled out information about how much she had emerged with from her marriage. Wilfrid had been generous, but then he was the libertine. Running around was one thing—she supposed most men were unable to say no—but for Wilfrid to have stashed a mistress two streets away verged on contempt. It was odd that their divorce had given Wilfrid an excuse to disencumber himself of all his romantic chains. Whenever they met he wore a penitent’s smile.
    â€œI don’t blame you,” he said.
    â€œBlame me!”
    â€œI gave you cause. All that’s over now, you know.”
    â€œOh, for heaven’s sake.”
    Wilfrid had loved to have her