A FINANCIAL ADVISER LEARNS TO radiate confidence whether he feels it or not, but David Williams, talking with Fenway in the Notre Dame Foundation, doubted that his manner was convincing.
“Of course, many have been hit pretty hard,” Fenway said.
“Has the university been affected?”
“Surprisingly little, but then we've always had a conservative investment policy.”
Williams nodded. What a smug bastard Fenway was. Williams had always described his own operation as conservative, prudent. Indeed, it had been. The tsunami that had swept away a significant fraction of his personal wealth as well as much that had been entrusted to him by others had come as an act of God. Overnight, it sometimes seemed, blue chips plummeted, the most solid investments melted away, great firms folded, banks closed, there was panic in Congress and in the administration. Of course, reversal had always been a logical possibility. What goes up can come down. Reminding clients of such elementary truths, he had ceased believing in them himself, as if the law of gravity had been abrogated. So many simple truths had been brought home by the crash.
“How much of a delay are you thinking of?” Fenway asked.
“Construction hasn't started, has it?”
“Oh my, no. We never begin building until we have three-quarters of the total cost in hand.”
“A wise policy. I would say half a year at least.”
A guess, of course. How demeaning to have to say this to Fenway. In their earlier meetings, Williams had been a golden boy of the financial world, one of the alumni the foundation had courted.
Fenway nodded. “Then we won't look for alternative donors.”
Alternative donors for the proposed Williams Center for Ethics? Of course, it would be named for him only if he came up with the amount he had pledged. There was some consolation to be derived from the fact that his schedule of donations had not kicked in before the roof fell in on him.
It was sobering to think that it was less than a year ago that he had sat in this very office and worked out the details with Fenway. Afterward, he had been taken to the provost and then the president and thanked for his generosity. Had he imagined that all that praise and gratitude amounted to a plenary indulgence? He was sure that Fenway would not want to parade him through the Main Building today. He felt like a welsher, even though he wasn't. For months now he had been reviewing his moves, the advice he had given, and even in retrospect it all seemed sensible. Would he advise differently todayâif people continued to entrust their money to him?
It was difficult to know how much Fenway guessed about his circumstances. Some of his clients were in revolt, and he could hardly blame them. Those he had acquired through Mame Childers were taking the downturn stoically enough. Only Briggs, a Domer who had graduated a few years after Dave, was suddenly aghast at what was happening to his investments . He had become almost unstrung
when the decline had taken 20 percent of what he had entrusted to Dave. At the outset, Briggs had specified that he didn't want to invest in any morally questionable corporations.
“No bioengineering!” Briggs was taller than he seemed, but then he had the look of an alighting bird when he appeared at Dave's office. Dave agreed, no bioengineering.
The money they were talking about had come to Briggs from his wife, Philippa, a pudgy little lady with a pursy smile. Briggs and his wife had sold off her father's wholesale liquor business for a very large number and turned it over to Dave.
“I don't want to think about it, Dave.”
“I'll do the thinking.”
The problem was that Briggs didn't have a lot to think about apart from his investments. Several times a week he came to the office, just curious, how we doing, how are things going? Della Portiere, Dave's administrative assistant, would put Briggs in a little room where he could watch the fluctuating prices of stocks fly by on the screen. He even grew philosophical about what those altering numbers meant.
“Zillions of sales all over the country all day long. How can they talk of the âmarket' as if it were someone?”
It was true, they all did talk that way. When trading was over for the day there was speculation as to what the market was saying, what it was reacting to, pondering the matter as ancient Romans had probed the entrails of birds.
“It
is
someone, Larry. It's you, me, and all the others.”
An interested client is an interesting thing, up to a point. Briggs became a pain in the neck. He would have liked weekly reports, daily reports, if Dave had been willing to supply them. Still, all had
gone well while Briggs's investments were increasing in value. Besides, Briggs could always be diverted by talk about Notre Dame.
“Your son's out there, isn't he?” he asked Dave.
“Junior year.”
“So you trust the place?”
“What do you mean?”
Briggs's eyes narrowed. “It's no longer the school I attended.”
“The football team will come back.”
Possibly, but it was the secular drift of the university that pained Briggs. He had stories. He had informants. He was outraged about all the waffling on the
Vagina Monologues
.
“I didn't know they could talk, Larry.”
All wrong. Larry was serious, very serious. The current administration at Notre Dame was betraying his alma mater. With any other alumnus, Dave might have discussed such matters, but Larry Briggs was too intense. The decline in the value of his investments had robbed him of any sense of humor he might have had.
“Almost every day,” Della said when he asked her about Briggs. “He wants to know how your other clients are doing.”
No need to tell Della not to feed Briggs's curiosity. “Set up an appointment, Della.”
Sometimes he felt that he had become Briggs's therapist. Briggs acted like a bettor at the track who wanted his money back after his horse had lost. Well, Dave felt the same way. Maybe he could get some of the money the government was throwing around. Successful as he had been, his operation was minuscule compared to the giants who had fallen. He had actually thought of making a first payment on this visit to Notre Dame, as a matter of honor, or perhaps of self-deception, but Fenway's condescension drove that thought away.
“A half year at the outside,” he said.
“Of course. Keep me posted.”
“I suppose you've had lots of this.”
Fenway's brows rose in a question.
“Postponed gifts.”
“You'd be surprised,” Fenway said. He didn't say how.
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Outside Grace, a chill wind caught him, and Williams drew his coat close about him. He wished now he had called Fenway, convinced that on the phone he could have handled the situation better. Even so, he felt relief that he was relieved, if only for the present, of his pledge to the university. When he had made it, there had been an item on the Notre Dame Web page. David Williams, Class of 1989, pledges twenty million dollars for new ethics center building. At least Fenway hadn't reminded him of that.
He turned, shielding himself from the wind, and got out his cell phone. Call Jay? Thoughts of Mame assailed him. Moreover, his son had of late adopted a condescending attitude toward the way he made a living.
“Usury, Dad.”
“Nonsense.”
“Money shouldn't make more money.”
“Thank God it does.” Or at least it had.
He scrolled through his addresses. Ah. Father Carmody. He punched the number.
AS A MEMBER OF THE CONGREGATION of Holy Cross, Father Carmody had taken the three vows of religion. That had been long, long ago, and none of those vows had sat heavily on his shoulders over the years. Poverty, chastity, obedience. Well, maybe obedience, but then he had always been in the inner circle, commanding obedience rather than observing it. Through a series of presidencies he had been a man in the background, the éminence grise, finding unperceived power more satisfying than the public kind. However, that role had diminished of late; indeed, under the new administration it had all but disappeared. The calls on his presumed wisdom had declined ever since he voiced concern about concentration on the university's endowment. The sum had risen astronomically, and its further increase seemed to become an end in itself.
“What would you suggest, Father?”
“Using it. Lower the tuition, for example.”
This obvious suggestion had been regarded as Pickwickian. Or would have been if anyone still read Dickens. Try naive.
What could the vow of poverty mean if it were lived in an increasingly rich institution? Not that poverty had ever had much bite to it. It had come to mean lack of concern for the source of the money that provided them a carefree existence. Everyone had his
own automobile now, traveled at will, lacked nothing really. Three squares and a good bed didn't begin to cover it.
“Not everyone has taken the vow of poverty, Father.”
The laypeople in the administration certainly hadn't. They were remunerated on the scale of officers in a major corporation, heady sums, plus all the perks of office. Faculty salaries, too, had risen to giddy heights, even as fewer demands were made on professors. Perhaps the adjunct faculty could be called poor, those temporaries who enabled the tenured faculty to reduce what was referred to as their teaching “load.” The term suggested that the faculty were hod carriers, sweating under their burden. That burden was typically two courses a semester now, scheduled on two days of the week. When retirement came, who would be able to tell the difference?
“It frees them for research, Father.”
“Research” had become a sacred term. “A national Catholic research university” was now the preferred description of the place. Why not simply “scholarship”? “Research” suggested to Carmody someone in a lab coat frowning at a beaker held up to the light. Around 1920, Father Nieuwland had discovered the formula for synthetic rubber, and a mural depicting the man at work in his laboratory had adorned a wall in the pay cafeteria in the South Dining Hall. What could be the equivalent of that in theology or English or history? Oh, he knew the responses to that, having groused about it often enough.
Had he become a crank? He had certainly become old. He lived now in Holy Cross House across the lake from campus, where elderly members of the Congregation went to spend their final years. How many of the faculty did he know now? Or members of the administration, for that matter. It was difficult to avoid the realization that he had been put out to pasture. Not that he considered himself
a typical resident of Holy Cross House. His health was good, thanks to a lifetime of smoking and intermittent total abstinence. He still had a lot of miles in him, but what was the good of that if he wasn't called upon? Thank God for Roger and Phil Knight.
One of his last contributions to the university was to get the endowed chair that had brought Roger to Notre Dame. The chair was named after Huneker, a Philadelphia author, mainly music criticism, whose work not even the descendants who had come up with the money for the chair had read, or were ever likely to. It was the thought of their name being commemorated by an endowed chair that swayed them. No need to dwell on Huneker's less than edifying life. Not much of a Catholic when the chips were down. Never mind; the object was to have a place into which the corpulent Roger could be put.
There had been opposition, of course. The faculty no longer sat still for appointments made from on high. That had been turned to Roger's advantage. He was what he himself called a free variable, a member of no department, an entity unto himself who taught whatever he felt fitted under the aegis of Catholic Studies.
Father Carmody's last coup, as it now seemed, was to direct the money Dave Williams wanted to give the university into support for the Center for Ethics and Culture. What might the center not do with a new building and secure funding? How odd that he was thinking of that when Dave Williams called.
“Long time no see.”
“How about now, Father?”
“Now? Are you on campus?”
He was. Carmody told him to come ahead.
He went outside the front entrance and claimed the chair in which Ted Hesburgh smoked his evening cigar.
There had been talk in recent weeks about the country's financial situation. Only old Keenan could have pretended to understand what was going on, but he was deep in dementia, beyond the economics that had occupied him in the classroom. His last pronouncement had been that the country was going to hell in a handbasket. He meant financially. It was too bad he wasn't lucid enough to see his prediction coming true.
In a previous conversation, Dave Williams had dismissed such fears. “There are too many safeguards, Father. Regulations, watchdogs. The country learned its lesson from the Great Depression.”
Carmody had no independent view on that. After all, he was told that the universe had been expanding ever since the Big Bang. It seemed to be a theological point that eventually there would be a great collapse.
Ten minutes after Father Carmody settled into his chair, Dave Williams drove up, parked, and came bouncing across to him.
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They talked in Carmody's room; they went on to Sorin's in the Morris Inn; afterward they would stop by the Knights'.
“It's bad, Father.” The bounce had gone out of Dave when they settled down to talk.
By the time they got to the Morris Inn, Carmody had the impression that Dave was ruined.
“Oh, no. Personally, I'm not in bad shape. I may soon be out of business, though.”
And do what?
Dave didn't know. He seemed almost bewildered. “I may be sued.” To his credit he seemed at least as dismayed by the fate of
his clients. “Of course, I have to postpone my gift for the ethics building.”
“We don't need an ethics building.”
“But you argued for it.”
“Only to prevent your money from going to something else. There are too damned many new buildings as it is.”