Brothers Keepers

by Donald E. Westlake

  I might have noticed it earlier, except that I was sedulously keeping my gaze away from that end of the table. None of the others noticed it, being involved respectively in monastery-depiction, hostessing and professional football, except Peggy, who had neither a conversation of her own nor any reason to avoid looking at anyone. It was her interest in the proceeding that attracted my attention, and when I glanced toward the two at the end of the table she was looking coldly furious and he was looking mulish and sullen.

  How her eyes glistened when she was in a rage. Her heavy hair seemed more full, her sculptured face more slender, her expressive hands more long-fingered. And as for him, he was looking so loutish I half expected acne suddenly to begin popping out on his cheeks like bubbles on cooking fudge. They called him Alfred, so what sort of man could he be? If he had any gumption at all he’d be called Fred, or even better Al, and he would still not be good enough for her. And as an Alfred?

  As I watched—I know I should have looked away, but I didn’t —the argument heated up. They had been exchanging tight angry remarks in low voices, inaudible to anyone else, but now he distinctly said, “You would say something like that.”

  She became audible too, but still more controlled than he. “That’s exactly the way you were in Flynn’s,” she said.

  “And whose fault was that?” His voice had risen sufficiently now to attract the attention of everyone else at the table with the exception of Brother Oliver, whose proselytizing for the monastery would brook no interruption. His narration, as though for an educational film, rolled on in the form of harmony while Eileen and Alfred provided the angry tune. “It was your fault, Alfred,” she told him, “and if you had the brains God gave a gnat you’d know it was your fault.”

  “Well, I’m just not going to put up with it anymore,” he announced, and flung his napkin onto his plate. “I don’t know why you call me at all, you never like me when I’m here.”

  “Indeed I don’t,” she said.

  He leaped to his feet, and it seemed for a second as though he might raise a hand to her, but one of her brothers growled—it was exacdy that, a low warning growl—and the gesture died. “I suppose,” he said nastily, “that was the way you talked to Kenny, and that’s why you’re here at all.”

  Her face pinched in, as though he had indeed slapped her. Neither of them said anything for two or three seconds—even Brother Oliver had trailed away to silence by now—and then Alfred Broyle ran from the room, going not like someone in triumph following a smashing exit line but like someone who has shocked and embarrassed himself.

  Frank Flattery got to his feet, his intention clear, and his mother said with quick loud cheeriness, “Oh, Frank, while you’re up, would you get the dessert? There’s ice cream, dear, and Eileen made that pound cake.”

  It was a simple stratagem, but it deflected Frank. While he stood there, trying to make up his mind what to do, Eileen looked out the windows and said, with something very like sarcasm in her voice, “Well, just in time. Here comes Daddy.”

  * * *

  An enclosed motorboat, gleaming white and with green curtains on its small windows, had arrived at the small dock at the end of the lawn. It bobbed there in the churning water while a man came up out of the cabin, clambered onto the nose of the boat, picked up a coiled rope there, and jumped heavily ashore. He was stocky and meaty, with a big balding head and a heavy thrusting way of moving his body. He was wearing dark trousers and a black-and-white checked jacket, and as I watched he lashed the front of the boat to a metal projection on the dock.

  So that was Daniel Flattery: he looked strong-minded. But even as I was thinking that another man appeared at the back of the boat, tossing another rope to the first man. This new one was dressed in a ratty green sweater and baggy khaki trousers, but physically he was identical with the first: heavy, powerful, fiftyish, truculent.

  And after the second rope had also been made fast yet a third example of the type put in an appearance, this one wearing a sheepskin coat and dark green slacks. They all got out of the boat, with a lot of apparent hilarity and comradeship among them, and then the trio strode in this direction across the lawn. Tweedledee, Tweedledoh and Tweedledum—and which one was Daniel Flattery?

  * * *

  Number two, in the green sweater and khaki pants. The other two walked on around the outside of the house, with a great deal of hallooing and arm-waving as they went, and the real Daniel Flattery entered through a door somewhere away to our left. Banging doors marked his approach, as the sound of falling trees would indicate the approach of a bull elephant, and then he came into the room with the rest of us. Frank had seated himself again by now, both Broyle and dessert forgotten, and the family members greeted their patriarch with respectful if not overly warm hellos. Ignoring the lot of them, Flattery brooded first at me and then at Brother Oliver. “Well, here I am,” he told Brother Oliver at last. “Come along, we might as well get it over with.”

  Brother Oliver and I both rose, but Flattery gave me a bloodshot glare—I suspected he’d been doing some drinking on that boat—and said, “Two against one?” Pointing at Brother Oliver, he said, “You’re the Abbot. I’ll talk to you. Come along.”

  Flattery turned and stomped out of the room. Brother Oliver gestured to me to stay where I was, and off he went in Flattery’s wake. I stood at my place, feeling awkward, knowing that the family members were all feeling even more awkward than I, and then Eileen Flattery stood up and said, “Well, I’m finished anyway. Come on, Brother, I’ll give you the grand tour.”

  * * *

  “No, no and no!”

  Eileen and I had done the house and were out on the side lawn now when we heard that bellow in Daniel Flattery’s voice. I said, “Brother Oliver doesn’t seem to be getting very far with your father.”

  “No one gets very far with my father,” she said.

  I hunted around for a response. “I guess not,” I said, and yet again the conversation died.

  It had been dying with regularity for the last twenty minutes. This was a social situation so foreign to my experience of the last decade that I could barely walk, much less talk. Strolling through a strange house with a beautiful woman—if riding a train through Queens had been for me as alien as being dropped onto the planet Jupiter, this new experience was outside the known universe entirely.

  But my own cumbersomeness wasn’t the only reason for our silences. Eileen was obviously still upset about the scene with Alfred Broyle at lunch, so much so that the tiny vertical frown lines in her forehead seemed almost permanent. All through the house, we would enter a room and she would tell me what room we had entered—“This is the kitchen,” in a room featuring sink, stove and refrigerator—and I would describe it as very nice, and the silence would fall again, and we would walk on to the next room. Now we were outside on the lawn and she was pointing to trees and I was saying they were very nice.

  I had made a few faltering attempts at general conversation but they had all, like this last one concerning Brother Oliver and her father, barely survived one exchange. If I did get a response from her on my first statement I had no idea what to do next, how to follow through. Thud. Silence again.

  We were moving around toward the rear of the house. She pointed at a clump of tall slender white birches. “We planted those when I was ten,” she said. “Those birches there.”

  “You’ve both grown up to be very beautiful,” I said, and was so astounded and delighted by myself that I didn’t even care that I was immediately blushing.

  Eileen didn’t notice the blush anyway; in fact, she hardly noticed the compliment. “Thank you,” she said, with the thinnest of smiles, and pointed at a weeping willow. “That’s a weeping willow. It was here when we bought the house.”

  “It’s very nice.”

  We moved on, and eventually were at the very end of the lawn, where the water lapped at a retaining wall of gray vertical wooden planks. “That’s my father’s boat.”

&n
bsp; I took a deep breath. “You ought to stay away from Alfred Broyle,” I said.

  She looked at me with amused astonishment. “I what?”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to say anything, and then I…” I waved my arms around and looked out at the Bay. “That’s the Bay, isn’t it?”

  “What’s the matter with Alfred?”

  Peripheral vision can be a cruel thing; even though I wasn’t looking directly at her I could see her condescending smile. “Should I call him Al?”

  “Nobody can call him Al,” I said. “If they could, he’d be a different man.”

  Did peripheral vision lie, or did her expression change to one of surprised recognition? No, peripheral vision did not lie. She said, “How right you are.”

  “And I don’t like his moustache.”

  “Neither do I.”

  I looked fully at her, and she was smiling, but the smile was friendly now and not patronizing. “It’s a very weak moustache,” I said.

  “It suits him,” she said.

  “That’s the problem.”

  “So it is.”

  “Brother Behnnn-edict!”

  I turned, and Brother Oliver was just outside the back door of the house, waving at me. “Oh,” I said. “I have to go.”

  She touched my arm, a cool but friendly touch. “Thank you,” she said, “for taking an interest.”

  “It was hard not to,” I said, returning her smile, “under the circumstances.”

  “Brother Behnnn-edict!”

  “You’ve made up my mind for me,” she said. “From this moment, Alfred is out of my life.”

  “Good,” I said. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Flattery.”

  “Mrs. Bone,” she said.

  I stared at her. “What?”

  She leaned close to me, deviltry in her eyes, and with unholy glee she whispered, “I’m divorced!”

  “Oh.” And I was so astounded that I couldn’t think of another word to say. The “Kenny” mentioned by Alfred as his closing remark, that must have been the husband. Kenneth Bone. Another stupid name. I decided I didn’t like him. If this girl, a good and beautiful Irish Catholic girl from a good Catholic home, had found it necessary to divorce him, there had to be something really drastically wrong with him.

  “Brother Benedict!”

  “I have to go. Goodbye, Muh-Mi-Mi—”

  “Eileen,” she suggested.

  “Eileen. Goodbye, Eileen.”

  “Goodbye, Brother Benedict.”

  I could feel her smiling eyes on me as I hurried back across the lawn to Brother Oliver, who was in a foul mood. “That took long enough,” he said. “Ready to give up your vows, Brother?”

  “Oh, Brother Oliver,” I said. “Flattery wouldn’t change his mind?”

  Almost at once his manner thawed. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m upset at Flattery, not at you. But do come along now.”

  We walked around the house, rather than through it. I said, “Is there no hope at all?”

  “We’ll see,” he said, though without much confidence. “There’s always Dwarfmann.”

  Four

  “Brother Oliver,” I asked the next day, as we were preparing to leave the monastery, “can a dream be a sin?”

  He was brooding deeply on problems of his own—mostly, I suppose, his failure yesterday with Daniel Flattery and the anticipated meeting this afternoon at the Dwarfmann offices—and he frowned at me for some time in complete incomprehension before saying, “What? What?”

  “What I mean is,” I explained, “say there’s an action that’s a sin if you were to do it in real life. And it would be a sin of intent if you did it in a purposeful fantasy. But if it happens in a dream? Is that a sin? And if it is, what kind of sin is it?”

  “Brother Benedict,” he said, “I haven’t the vaguest idea what you think you’re talking about.”

  “I do have the vaguest idea,” I said. “That’s all I have, the vaguest idea.”

  “I think you ought to ask that question, whatever it was, of Father Banzolini when he comes to hear confessions tomorrow night.”

  “I suppose so,” I said. And what a sigh Father Banzolini would produce when I asked him—I could hear it already. Or was that me sighing?

  “Are you ready to go, Brother Benedict?”

  “Not really,” I said. “But as much as I’ll ever be.”

  “Brother Benedict,” he said, with a kind of paternal impatience, “don’t you think I know how you feel? Don’t you think I myself would rather be back to my painting, and not have to Travel Travel Travel all the time?”

  No, I did not. My own personal feeling was that Brother Oliver was getting a secret thrill out of all this Travel, that he had adjusted very quickly yesterday to the outside world, that he had enjoyed the journey back from Long Island even more than the journey out—despite the failure of our mission—and that he was positively looking forward to the Travel aspect of today’s expedition. I had seen him yesterday slip that Long Island Railroad timetable inside his robe. The retaining of souvenirs is the surest sign of a luxuriating relationship with Travel. In my opinion, that incomplete Madonna and Child figured in Brother Oliver’s current thoughts not at all.

  None of which I said aloud, just as I had not made any mention yesterday of my having noticed the timetable disappear. I contented myself with an ambiguous but not actually rebellious shrug, and I said, “Well, I suppose we might as well get going.”

  And so we went. Out to the courtyard, where Brother Leo was frowning upward at a passing airplane as though uncertain whether or not it was one of ours, and then through the great oak door and once again into the rapids of the teeming world.

  But though I went quietly, inside I was mutinous. It was bad enough that Brother Oliver was secretly enjoying all this Travel, and it was certainly bad enough that my first experience with Travel since joining the Order should have presented my mind with so many utterly indigestible experiences. What made it all so much worse was the knowledge that I shouldn’t be going through all this in the first place. I wasn’t one of Brother Oliver’s close associates, one of that small group who actually ran things here—Brothers Dexter and Clement and Hilarius filled those roles—and the only reason I was involved in this at all was that I’d been the one to notice our monastery’s name in the newspaper. That was the only reason.

  Now, that could have happened to anybody. Brother Peregrine, our former Off Broadway set designer and summer theater owner, had been the first to read Arts And Leisure. If his interests had only expanded to include arts other than those involved with the stage he might have read the architecture column himself and now he would be the one Traipsing around the world and giving love-life advice to beautiful women. Brother Hilarius, whose historical interest had led him by capillary action into the areas of coins and stamps, both of which are also covered in Arts And Leisure, had been another to read that section of the paper before it reached me, and he might have been the one to see the item. In fact Brother Valerian, he of the infamous orange Flair pen, one of whose great pleasures in life was reading panning reviews of gallery openings, had himself seen that section ahead of me. If any one of them had looked at the architecture column, any one of them, I would not be on my way out of the monastery today, I would not have taken those train rides yesterday, and I would not have had Eileen Flattery introduced into my calm and contented life.

  I couldn’t help thinking, as we closed the monastery door behind us once again, of Proverbs, XXVII, 8: “As a bird that wandereth from her nest, so is a man that wandereth from his place.” Or, as Shakespeare put it in As You Like It, “When I was at home, I was in a better place.”

  Well. At least the weather today was better than it had been recently. The clouds and clamminess had gone, leaving a royal blue sky and crisp sunlit air, the kind of weather still just possible now in mid-December. If one had to Travel, this was certainly the weather for it.

  And the time of day. Yesterday we
had started out during the morning rush hour, and so had been immersed from the outset in a whirlpool of rushing men and women. Today we were leaving at two in the afternoon, and the slackening in urgent energy was very noticeable. There were still far too many people and cars and cabs and buses and trucks, and most of them were still going too fast, but the desperate and terrifying edge was gone. The driver of a florist’s delivery truck parked in front of the monastery was actually nodding over a newspaper propped on his steering wheel, as though he were napping beside some rural stream, and the majority of his fellow citizens seemed to be rushing now out of habit rather than need.

  Our journey today would be entirely on foot. We crossed Park Avenue at the corner and walked west on 51st Street. In the block between Madison and Fifth Avenues we walked with St. Patrick’s Cathedral on our left—definitely one of ours. Though in fact it is really more brave front than working church, since its parishioners total less than three hundred souls. No one lives in midtown Manhattan, you see; the people have all been driven away to make space for office buildings.

  After Fifth Avenue we moved through Rockefeller Center, a cathedral to money containing many little chapels to Travel. At Sixth Avenue we turned left past the American Metal Climax Building—I’m not sure whether my finding that name funny is an offense against the Sixth Commandment or not—then walked three blocks past Radio City Music Hall, the Time-Life Building, the RCA Building, the Standard Oil Building and the U. S. Rubber Building to the Solinex Building. “What a lot of Buildings there are,” I said. “And yet they want more.”

  “It’s an edifice complex,” Brother Oliver explained.

  I pretended I hadn’t heard him.

  * * *

  The Solinex Building was one rectangle repeated seven million times. In glass, in chrome, and in what might have been but probably was not stone. It was set back from the public sidewalk, leaving space for a fountain with a statue in it. The statue was an abstract, but seemed to represent a one-winged airplane with measles which had just missed its landing on an aircraft carrier and was diving nose-first into the ocean. At least that’s the way it looked to me.