Read Online Green Thumb by Ralph McInerny - Free Book Online Page B

it came from another it might elicit more sympathy, but no one can plead his own case without weakening it. Besides, Carmody did not see his own life as one of failure. There are seasons in human life and he accepted the one in which he now found himself.
    â€œYou must pray for him, Dennis.”
    â€œThat is difficult. I knew him.”
    â€œAll the more meritorious.”
    Grantley held his glass to the light as if to verify its emptiness. Carmody did not take the hint. He stood.
    â€œYou better get to your bed, Dennis.”
    â€œIt isn’t nine o’clock.”
    â€œThat is the witching hour here.”
    â€œI don’t know how you can stand this place.”
    â€œThere were no empty rooms in the firehouse.”
    That was mean, and in repayment Father Carmody accompanied Grantley to the front entrance and through the sliding doors into the summer night.
    â€œDon’t tell me you walked.”
    â€œThey make me park my car off campus now.”
    â€œYou should get a bicycle.”
    Another mean remark. Grantley’s artifical knees would have made biking painful. Father Carmody patted his visitor on the back and sent him shuffling into the night. Back in his room he offered up a prayer in reparation for his lack of sympathy with Dennis Grantley. And for the repose of the soul of Mortimer Sadler.

14
    The archives of the university of Notre Dame are located on the sixth floor of the Hesburgh Library. When the library was opened in 1963 it was vaguely called the Memorial Library, and donors of various degrees and dimensions were commemorated on plaques throughout the building. The first archivist, Father McEvoy, a distinguished if curmudgeonly historian, died at his post and was found one Monday morning at his desk. Eventually, the name of the library was changed to honor Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, the legendary president of the university who had retired, after decades in office, into an aerie on the thirteenth floor along with his long-time associate, Edmund Joyce, ostensibly to enjoy such years of leisure as might be left them. In any event, Hesburgh’s career had accelerated in his supposed retirement, and while he studiously attempted to keep in the background his successors were faced with the formidably eclipsing fact of his presence.
    As they awaited a building commensurate with their holdings, the archives continued to operate in their original quarters in the library, since expanded by various timorous forays into abutting territory, until almost the entire sixth floor was at the disposal of the archives. It was not enough. The denizens and votaries of the archives lived in the expectation that the day would come when quarters proportionate to the extent and value of its holdings would be provided. Among them was Greg Whelan.
    Like many who are employed in university libraries, Whelan’s career had been a varied one. He had a Ph.D. in classics but because of a debilitating stammer, it had proved useless to him so far as employment went. He then acquired an LL.B. in the quixotic hope that preparing himself for a forensic career would somehow loosen his tongue and turn him overnight into a Demosthenes of the courtroom. It had not. In the end he got a degree in library science, was hired by the Notre Dame archives, and ever since had enjoyed the happiest days of his life. Not least among the reasons for this was his friendship with Roger Knight.
    Doubtless a hundred useless theories could be devised to account for the fact that with Roger, Greg Whelan’s stammer ceased and the two unusual individuals conversed with an ease and range that would have been the marvel of any witnesses, if witnesses would not have rendered Greg Whelan mute. A chance remark of Roger’s had unleashed him on such holdings of the archives as might cast light on the demise of Mortimer Sadler.
    For much of the university’s history a publication called The Scholastic had been the campus