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the Weeping Willows wished to discuss they already knew of with alarming accuracy.
    â€œSomeone is leaking information.”
    Carmody shook his head even as he shook a cigarette from the package he had picked up from the table beside him.
    â€œMaybe the white paper. One of the silliest documents I ever read. Cardinal Newman responsible for the secularization of Catholic universities!”
    â€œHow did you get hold of it?”
    â€œThe Weeping Willow people brought it to me. They were certain it was a hoax.”
    â€œBut where did they get hold of it?”
    â€œDo you really think that’s the problem?”
    Carmody lit his cigarette and dragged on it with relish, eyes closed. A moment later, great clouds of smoke issued from his mouth and nose. Genoux felt he was in a time warp, Witte with his cigar, Carmody with his cigarettes. Carmody noticed his reaction.
    â€œThey can’t very well tell Ted not to smoke. He opened the way for the rest of us.”
    Any thought Genoux had had of snitching when he went back to the Main Building fled like Carmody’s exhaled smoke. He hadn’t come over here as fire inspector anyway. He began to explain the problem, from the viewpoint of the administration. In any conversation, all the documentation the group had gathered would have to be acknowledged as genuine.
    â€œThey already know that. They want to know what you’re going to do about those things.”
    Do? It was all the undoing that would have to be done that was the problem, decades of trimming decisions, dancing away from the Catholic character of the place, Oh, not in statements, of course, but in the way things had been done. Carmody saw the problem.
    â€œYou have to start unraveling it, Father.”
    â€œCan you imagine the publicity?”
    â€œEasily. You would be pilloried, on campus and off. People would begin to think we mean it when we say that Notre Dame is a Catholic university where things that go on elsewhere are simply out of place.”
    Genoux looked bleakly out the window, across the lake at the golden dome glittering in the sunlight, at the great statue of Mary atop it. What other advice had he imagined Carmody would give him? Hang tough, ignore the faculty and press, keep talking about the Catholic character of the university?
    â€œFather Witte says we’re going to hell in a handbasket.”
    â€œHe’s thought that for years. He blames me, at least in part.”
    â€œThat’s not fair.” Genoux might have been defending himself.
    â€œAccurate criticism always seems unfair.”
    On his way back to his special parking place in the shadow of the Main Building, Genoux found himself envying the men whose lives had brought them at last to the peaceful redoubt of Holy Cross House. He wished he were as old as he felt.

5
    Professor Guido Senzamacula, despite his name, was professor of French, his speciality Paul Claudel and other figures of the French Catholic renaissance of the early twentieth century. He had been born in Sicily, on the southern coast, a few miles from the birthplace of Pirandello, whose writings he found at once fascinating and perverse. Anti-art, at least the plays. He loved the novelle since they evoked his native province and its dialect. His degree was from the Sorbonne, and he had begun his teaching career in Rome, where he had met Father Carmody, whose tales of Notre Dame had fascinated him. He’d had the priest repeat the salaries paid professors several times, incredulous. The first years on campus, when winter came, made Senzamacula think he had made a terrible mistake. He had taught Italian as well as French then, before the department became specialized. At that time, he had no courses in Italian literature; few students advanced far enough for that. He had long since been relieved of the drudgery of teaching grammar, that task given to a host of part-time people with odd titles—assistant academic specialist,