Brothers Keepers

by Donald E. Westlake

  Oh, yes, a woodcarver. Lean Josephs striding next to plump mules bearing plumper Marys, androgynous angels rolling massive boulders from allusive cave entrances, wise men on camels, saints on their knees, martyrs on their last legs, all were discovered by his busy knife lurking in this or that stray piece of wood. And Christs, how many Christs: Christ blessing, Christ fasting, Christ preaching, Christ rising from the dead, Christ permitting the washing of His feet, Christ carrying His cross, Christ attached to His cross, Christ being taken down from His cross.

  If Brother Eli were ever to become Abbot, none of us would be safe.

  Our business now was quickly transacted. Brother Eli gave me a quick greeting, a quick sixty cents, and a quick farewell, before returning to the Madonna and Child emerging from this latest block of wood. (Shades of Brother Oliver!) And out I went.

  Was it my imagination, or was the world different tonight from the normal Saturday evening? The usual glitter seemed harsher somehow, the gaiety more frantic. Danger and lunacy seemed to lurk behind every facade and every face on Lexington Avenue. I strode more rapidly than is my wont, I took less pleasure in this excursion, and even the newsie who sold me my paper seemed less familiar and less friendly tonight. “Evening, Father,” he said, as usual, but somehow the tone was different.

  On the way back, I paused at my regular trash basket to rid myself of the unwanted sections of the paper. Classified, Travel, Business, the advertising supplements. But then I paused at Real Estate. Might it be a good idea to keep that section? Perhaps a greater familiarity with the world of real estate would be useful to us in the weeks ahead. I returned it to the bundle of saved sections, and hurried homeward.

  She must have been lying in wait for me. I was coming along 51st Street, barely half a block from home, when Eileen Bone stepped out of an automobile parked some distance ahead, walked around the hood of the car, and stopped on the sidewalk to wait for me.

  She was perhaps twelve paces away, close enough for me to see her clearly in the streetlight glow, but far enough so that I could have taken evasive action. I could have turned about, for instance, walked back to Lexington, left to 52nd Street, left to Park Avenue, left past the Buttock Boutique, and thence half a block home. All in all, that’s probably exactly what I should have done.

  Well, I didn’t. I continued the twelve paces forward, holding tightly to my newspaper and looking directly at her. She was wearing pants, and a dark-colored sweater, and some sort of hip-length jacket. She looked tall and slender and darkly beautiful. She was the refined essence of every electric peril I had sensed in the world tonight.

  I stopped when I reached her. It didn’t seem possible merely to nod and say hello and walk on by, so I stopped. But I didn’t speak.

  She did. “Hello, Brother Benedict,” she said, and both her smile and her tone of voice were far too complex for me to unravel. Several kinds of humor and several kinds of somberness were so entwined in her voice, her eyes, the set of her head, the lines of her lips, that I merely let it all wash over me like a Russian symphony and didn’t even seek for meaning. “I’ll drive you home,” she said.

  “It isn’t far,” I said.

  “We’ll make it far,” she said. Then she looked slightly more somber, slightly less humorous. “I want to talk to you, Brother Benedict.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I have strict orders to return to—”

  “About your monastery,” she said. “About the sale. I might be able to help.”

  That stopped me. Frowning at her, trying to read her despite the complexity, I said, “Why?”

  “You mean how,” she said.

  “No, I mean why. It’s your father that’s selling the place.”

  “That might be a good reason right there,” she said. “And there might be others. I’m hoping you’ll tell me.”

  “Brother Oliver is the one who—”

  “You, Brother Benedict.” Humor was returning, glinting in her eyes and creating soft pale shadings on her cheekbones. “I have a sense of trust in you,” she said. “If anyone can tell me the monastery’s side of all this, you’re that one.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “If you were to come tomorrow, possibly I—”

  “I’m here now. I might change my mind by tomorrow.”

  “Come into the monastery, then, I’ll show you ar—”

  “No, Brother Benedict,” she said. “My turf, not yours.” And she gestured at her car. It was as long and sleek and graceful and competent and gleaming as she herself, and she was right about it. It matched her, as my monastery matched me.

  I said, “I don’t think I could get permission to—”

  “Why get permission? We’ll talk for ten minutes, and I’ll drop you off at your door.”

  I shook my head. “No. We have rules.”

  She was becoming impatient with me. “I’m beginning to be sorry I came here, Brother Benedict. Maybe my brother’s right about you people, it doesn’t matter what happens to you one way or the other.”

  “I’ll ask,” I said. I gestured with the newspaper, displaying it, saying, “I’ll bring this in, and I’ll ask Brother Oliver.”

  She studied me, frowning, as though trying to decide whether my insistence was weakness or strength. Then abruptly she nodded and said, “All right. I’ll be waiting out front.”

  * * *

  I found Brother Oliver in the calefactory, watching Brothers Peregrine and Quillon in a boxing match. The purpose was salubrity rather than belligerence, this being an exercise campaign initiated by Brother Mallory, the former welterweight, who was quadrupling now as referee, trainer and both seconds. Brother Peregrine, our onetime summer theater operator, merely looked absurd in his long brown robe and huge sixteen-ounce boxing gloves, floundering around like a marionette with tangled strings, but Brother Quillon looked bizarre. They were circling one another like a binary star, with Brother Mallory bobbing and weaving intently around them as though an incredible display of fisticuffs were taking place somewhere or other. In truth, Brother Quillon backed in great eccentric circles, his eyes very round and his mouth very open and both boxing gloves held out in midair in front of himself, while Brother Peregrine stalked along in his wake, delivering confused flurries of punches at Brother Quillon’s gloves.

  I waited till a round had completed itself before attracting Brother Oliver’s attention. While Brother Mallory bounded from corner to corner, giving his pugilists good advice and firm reassurance, I told Brother Oliver what I had found outside. “Hmm,” he said, and frowned. “What did she want?”

  I repeated the conversation, and her invitation, and the threat that she might change her mind by tomorrow. “The question is,” I finished, “should I go?”

  Brother Oliver thought it over. The next round had begun, and he watched as he pondered. Out in the middle of the floor Brother Peregrine’s face was becoming very red, while Brother Quillon’s was dead white.

  “I think,” Brother Oliver said at last, “you should go.”

  “You do?”

  “I see no harm in it,” he said.

  I did. I wasn’t exactly sure what the harm was, but I saw it or felt it or tasted it; I sensed it with some sense or another, and I was torn about what to do. I’d been hoping Brother Oliver would refuse to let me out, thereby taking the decision out of my hands. But he was giving me permission, and now what was I going to do?

  “All right, Brother Oliver,” I said, not happily, and left the scene of battle.

  So I would Travel. That was clearly where my duty lay, if by means of my Traveling I could at all help to save the monastery. And, I must admit, it was also what I really wanted to do, despite our Order’s thoughts on the subject, despite Father Banzolini’s warnings, and despite my own awareness that I was becoming very badly addicted. Very badly addicted. “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist,” Saint Augustine wrote in Enchiridion. Or, putting it another way, “I can resist anything,” said Oscar
Wilde, “except temptation.”

  * * *

  It was awkward getting into the car. Through some miracle of design the seat managed to be several inches below street level, and the door opening was a weirdly shaped parallelogram through which it would have been difficult to pass anything larger than a doughnut. However, I did effect entry, though without much grace; at the last I had to release all my hand-holds and simply drop backwards the last few inches onto the white upholstery. Then I tucked my knees up under my chin, tucked my robe under my legs, and practically had to leave the car again in order to reach the handle so I could close the door.

  Mrs. Bone—I thought it safest to think of her under that heading—watched my progress with amusement. “I guess you’re not used to this kind of car,” she said, when I finally completed my labors.

  “I’m not used to any kind of car,” I told her. “This is my first automobile ride in over ten years.”

  She raised a surprised eyebrow. “Is that right? How do you like it so far?”

  Shifting position, I said, “I didn’t remember the seats as being so uncomfortable.”

  More surprise, plus amusement, “Un-comfortable? The people at General Motors will be sorry to hear that.”

  “I suppose one gets used to it,” I said.

  “That must be it,” she agreed, and shifted the gear, and away from the curb we moved.

  The sensation was pleasant, if more startling than Travel by train. The outer world was very close, almost as close as if one were on foot, but it was approaching and receding much more rapidly. Mrs. Bone’s delicate hands made small adjustments of the steering wheel and we crashed into none of the obstacles that leaped into our path.

  Neither of us spoke at first. Mrs. Bone was concentrating on her driving, and so was I. We Traveled north to 55th Street, where we turned left under a traffic light that I thought of as having already switched from amber to red, we made a green light at Madison Avenue, and we came to a stop rather reluctantly before a red light at Fifth. During this time I studied her profile in those instants when I could spare some attention from our driving, and I realized that in my dreams I had altered her somewhat. I had made her more ethereal somehow, more liquid, softer and slower and less totally present.

  The process of comparison brought to mind again the content of that dream—as well as my waking thoughts the following morning—and I’m afraid I must have had a rather ambiguous expression on my face when she turned to look at me while waiting for the Fifth Avenue light to change. Her own expression became quizzical, and she said, “Yes?”

  “Nothing,” I said, and looked away. Out the windshield, somewhere, looking at the lights and darkness of Saturday night. “Where are we going?”

  “For a drive.” The light having changed, she glided us forward.

  As we continued west on 55th Street I forced myself to concentrate my attention on the car. It was one of those small luxury vehicles I would occasionally see advertised on the television—an impression of great massive form, yet in actual fact it was very low to the ground and could only comfortably accommodate two people. There was a back seat, but it wouldn’t be much use to anybody with legs. Still, in the most wasteful and pretentious and transitory way possible, it did suggest that combination of wealth and self-indulgence that is called luxury.

  And Mrs. Bone, of course, was exactly like the girls usually filmed with these cars on television.

  A red light at Sixth Avenue. The car stopped, Mrs. Bone glanced at me again, and by God I was looking at her, no doubt with the same equivocal expression as before. And I had been trying to think about the car.

  She frowned at me. “How long have you been a monk?”

  “Ten years.”

  The light changed; she spun the wheel and we turned right onto Sixth Avenue. “Well,” she said, her eyes on her driving, “that’s either too long or not long enough.”

  There was nothing I could possibly say to that, so I turned away, looking out at the traffic, seeing in front of us now a yellow taxicab with a bumper sticker reading Put Christ Back In Christmas. An excellent sentiment, only slightly marred by the fact the lettering was colored red and white and blue, as though Christ were a good American running for reelection. But it’s the thought that counts, however muddled.

  Finishing with the bumper sticker, I looked out my side window at the activities of the world. It was not yet eleven o’clock on Saturday night, the thirteenth of December, and the streets were full of people, most of them couples, most of them holding hands. The pagan Christmas icons—pictures of that fat red-garbed god of plenty—were displayed in store windows everywhere, but most of the pedestrians seemed concerned with more personal pleasures: movies, the theater, a nightclub, a late dinner out. Neither of our Western gods—Christ and Santa Claus, the ascetic and the voluptuary—seemed much in the thoughts of the citizenry tonight.

  Put Christ back in Christmas. The next thing they’ll say is, Put Jehovah Back In Justice. Think about that for a minute.

  How the gods change. Or, to phrase it more exactly, how our image of God changes. Long ago, human beings became uneasy with that stern and unforgiving God the Father, the thunderbolt who lashed out so violently and unpredictably. Western man replaced Him with Christ, a more human God, a kind of supernatural Best Friend, a Buddy who would take the rap for us. (The Holy Ghost has always been too…ghostlike, to pick up many fans. What’s His personality, where’s the character hook, where’s the worshipper identification?)

  But even Christ carries with Him that sense of austerity, that implication of duty and risk and the possibility of truly horrible loss. So on comes jolly Santa Claus, a god so easygoing he doesn’t even ask us to believe in him. With that belly and that nose, he surely eats too much and drinks too much, and more than likely pinches the waitress’s bottom as well. But it doesn’t matter, it’s all harmless fun, the romping child in all of us. Bit by bit over the centuries we have humanized God until we have finally brought Him down to our own level and then some; today, with Santa Claus, we can not only worship ourselves but the silliest part of ourselves.

  “Four cents for your thoughts.”

  Startled, I twisted my head around to gape at Mrs. Bone. “What?”

  “Inflation,” she explained. “You were brooding about something.”

  I rubbed my hand over my face. “I was thinking about Christ,” I said.

  “I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just quoting the Smothers Brothers. We could talk now, if you’re ready to come back to the Church Militant.”

  I looked around, and we were no longer in the city, which made not the slightest sense. It is true that over the years my habit of meditation has improved to where I can almost automatically shut out the natural world completely, but I do retain an awareness of time, at least roughly. And I hadn’t been thinking about the manifestations of God for more than three or four minutes, of that I was positive.

  Yet here we were in the country. Or not quite the country. Trees and greenery surrounded us, but we were also amid fairly heavy traffic, all moving in the same direction, and the darkness out there was spotted with frequent streetlights. “Where are we?”

  “On the Drive in Central Park,” she said. “We can circle in here and have our chat without being distracted by traffic.”

  “You want to talk while Traveling?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m willing to try.”

  “Good.” She adjusted her position, as though settling down for some serious activity, and kept her eyes on the cars ahead while she talked. “Your position is,” she said, “that your lease with my father ran out, and my father sold the land, and you people will be evicted so the new owner can tear down the monastery.”

  “That’s the position, all right.”

  “Why shouldn’t it happen?”

  “I beg pardon?”

  She shrug
ged, still watching the road. “My father’s a decent man,” she said. “In his way. He owns property and he wants to sell it. Nothing wrong with that. These other people—what are they called?”

  “Dwarfmann.”

  “No, the little word.”

  “Dimp.”

  “Yes. Dimp is a useful functional part of our social system, providing jobs for the working man, putting capital to work, increasing the value of the city and the state and the nation. Nothing wrong with them either. Now, you people, you neither sow nor reap, do you? You’re decent, too, you don’t harm anybody, but what do you have to offer that’s stronger than either my father’s property rights or Dimp’s usefulness to society?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t think of anything.”

  “So why not just pack up and move? Why make a fuss?”

  I didn’t know how to deal with such questions. “If you’re asking me,” I said, “to justify my existence on the basis of my usefulness, then I guess I don’t have any justification at all.”

  “What other basis is there?”

  “Oh, you can’t mean that,” I said. “Do you really mean that usefulness is the only thing that matters?”

  She glanced at me, with a quick ironic smile, and faced the traffic again. “And do you really intend to talk about beauty and truth?”

  “I don’t know what I intend to talk about,” I said. Then I said, “This is a nice car.”

  She frowned, but didn’t look at me. “Meaning what?”

  “A cheaper, less attractive car would perform the same function.”

  Now she did look at me, and her smile was almost savage. “So. You admit it. You are a luxury.”

  “Am I?”

  “We all like luxuries,” she said, “as you just pointed out. But wouldn’t you have to agree yourself that where luxury and function clash, it must be luxury that gives way?”