Brothers Keepers

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Mrs. Bone, I don’t—”

  “Call me Eileen,” she said.

  I took a breath. “I think I’d rather call you Mrs. Bone,” I told her.

  Again she turned her eyes from the traffic, this time giving me a searching look. In a softer voice she said, “Am I an occasion of sin for you, Brother Benedict?”

  I didn’t answer immediately. She watched the road again. I said, “I never really knew what the phrase ‘occasion of sin’ meant.”

  She laughed, but in a friendly way, and said, “I’m not sure, but I think that may be the nicest thing anybody ever said to me.” Then she suddenly leaned over the wheel, determination clenching her features, and the car surged forward. We rocked around a clopping hansom cab, threaded through a minefield of moving cars, and suddenly turned off, coming to a stop in an otherwise empty parking lot. Darkness surrounded us, but I could see her face when she turned to me, saying, “You’ve got to help me, Brother Benedict. I want to help you, I really do, but first you have to help me.”

  “How? In what way?” I responded to her intensity with a helpless intensity of my own. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “Don’t you realize,” she said, “that those are my father’s arguments? I want you to beat them down, Brother Benedict, I want you to win the battle for my allegiance. I am the sincerest of Flatterys, I want to help you, but I can’t do it unless I can believe it’s right to go against my father.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not very good at argument. Now I wish I were.”

  “I’m not asking to be conned,” she said. “I don’t want you to bring out some clever Jesuit to sell me a bill of goods. I want honesty. I can help your monastery, Brother Benedict, believe me I can, but you’ll have to convince me I ought to.”

  “How can you help? What could you possibly do?”

  “Never mind. Just take my word for it. And convince me, Brother Benedict.” And she sat there, leaning sideways toward me, her burning eyes staring at me in the darkness.

  Never had my mind been such a blank. Convince her? Beat down her father’s arguments about the usefulness of usefulness, and the luxury of everything else? There were no words in my mind, no words at all, and certainly no words in my mouth. Staring at her, into those unblinking eyes, all I could do was pray for a distraction.

  God answered my prayer almost at once. We were mugged.

  * * *

  They yanked both doors open at the same instant, two tall skinny black boys with flashing knives in their hands. “Okay, Jack, get outa there,” one of them said, and the other one said, “Come on out, honey, and meet the man.”

  Only Eileen was the one they called Jack, and I was the one they called honey.

  It was an easy mistake. Eileen was driving, she was wearing pants, and my robe undoubtedly looked like a dress in the uncertain light.

  But that realization came to me later, when I had more leisure to reflect on the situation. At that moment, all I could think was, They’re not going to hurt Eileen!

  The car was just as difficult to leave as it had been to enter. I squirmed out, clutching parts of it here and there to hoist myself up to ground level, and when I finally did get out and upright I stomped my attacker on the foot. The sneakered foot.

  He wouldn’t have been so careless if he hadn’t thought I was a girl. He would have stayed farther away from me. But probably having some unseemly ideas about actions he would take toward me, he had stood very close while I was getting out of the car, and that was why he was now hopping around on one foot, clutching the other with both hands and yipping like a dog that’s been hit with a stone.

  Now the other one, menacing Eileen. There was one advantage in a car as low as this; when in a hurry, you didn’t have to go around it. Hiking up my skirts, I ran over the hood and fell on the other mugger like the Red Sea on the armies of Egypt.

  Why, the nasty little creature, he tried to stick me with that knife of his. And me a man of the cloth. I whomped him two or three times, wishing I had Brother Mallory’s expertise in punching people, and then he wriggled out from underneath me, got to his feet and took to his heels, disappearing almost at once into the surrounding darkness.

  I struggled up, tripping over my own robe and running forward into the rear fender of the car. The second time, climbing up the automobile, I made it to my feet and looked across the auto roof to see the other one hobbling away as well. He gave one dirty look over his shoulder—aggrieved, that’s what he was—and then he too was gone.

  Panting, bewildered, I looked around and saw Eileen sagging against the side of the car. Her eyes seemed to be closed. I took two sudden strides to her, grabbed her by both shoulders, and cried out, “Eileen! Eileen!”

  Her eyes opened. Beneath my hands her body was trembling. “My goodness,” she said, in a much smaller and younger voice than I’d ever heard from her before.

  “Are you all right?”

  “—I—” She was more bewildered than I was, more thunder-struck. “I’m not…cut or anything, I’m…Oh!” And she squeezed her eyes shut again, the trembling becoming much worse.

  “Eileen,” I said, and pulled her in close, putting my arms tight around her to contain the trembling. My face was in her hair.

  We both sensed the change. This slender body in my arms… the fragrance of this hair.…There is nothing else like it on earth, and I’d been celibate a long long time.

  We drew back from one another. She wouldn’t look at me, and I was just as glad not to have to meet her eyes. She cleared her throat and said, “I’ll, uh, drive you home. I mean, to the monastery.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “To the monastery,” she repeated, and fumbled herself back into the car.

  Seven

  Sunday Mass. We had no regular celebrant, different priests from St. Patrick’s taking turns at saying Mass in our little chapel. One of the newer young clerical clerics from the diocesan office officiated today, and after reading the gospel he asked us all, at Brother Oliver’s request, to stay at the end of Mass for an announcement.

  Even through the fevered swamp my brain had become since last night’s occurrence with Eileen Flattery Bone, I could sense the unhappy atmosphere that filled the chapel while we all waited for the completion of Mass. Those of us who already knew what the announcement would be were of course saddened and disheartened at the necessity of making it, while those who did not yet know the details could certainly see, from the faces of Brother Oliver and we few others, that the announcement would be a gloomy one.

  For me, it seemed doubly gloomy. I felt I was losing this home in two ways, both to the wrecker’s ball and to my own frailty. Neither Eileen nor I had spoken a word on the drive back last night, except that as I was hoisting myself from the car at the end she did say, in a small and toneless voice, “Thank you.” I had been unable to make any response at all, but had simply stumbled inside, where I’d pleaded fatigue and emotional upset with Brother Oliver, who of course had been waiting for me, anxious to know what Daniel Flattery’s daughter had come after. I still hadn’t told him, but would do so after Mass and his announcement. He would have to help me decide what to do.

  It was strange all at once to have to think about my future. For ten years my future had merely been the present in finite repetition, and I had been happy and content. Now, without warning, I faced an unknown and unknowable future. Everything in my life was crumbling. Would this monastery be taken away, torn down to the ground? Would I be forced by the changes in my own mind to leave the monastery, no matter whether the building was saved or not? What was going to happen tomorrow? What did I want to happen tomorrow?

  I had done little sleeping last night, and those questions had been ever-present in my mind, yet I still was nowhere near an answer. The habit of meditation, which had given me a brain (I like to think) as orderly as my room, had deserted me in my hour of need. My brain today was fudge. It was worse than fudge; it was last fall’s macaroni salad accident
ally left behind in the summer cottage and not found until this spring.

  The Mass was nearing its end. When I finished telling the whole truth to Brother Oliver, as I would of course have to do, would he tell me to leave? He might, I wouldn’t blame him. He might tell me to return to the outer world until I had become more secure again in my vocation. It was a possibility I’d already thought of for myself, without the slightest sense of pleasure or anticipation.

  What did I want—what did I actually want for myself? I wanted the last week to cease to exist; I wanted it removed from history. I wanted to go directly from the Saturday night a week ago when I had in blissful ignorance brought that newspaper into these walls, directly from that Saturday to this Sunday, this morning, with nothing in between. No Travel, no Eileen, no threat to the monastery, none of it. That was what I wanted, and if I couldn’t get it I just didn’t have any alternate selection.

  “Go, the Mass is finished.” But we stayed. The priest departed, and Brother Oliver stood up from his place in the front row and turned to face us. He looked heavier and older and more care-worn than his usual self, and when he spoke his voice was so low I could barely hear him.

  In fact, I didn’t listen. I knew what he had to say, that stony center of fact that he would surround with cushioning layers of doubt and probability, and I spent the time instead looking about me at this place and the people in it.

  Our chapel, like the rest of our building, was designed by Israel Zapatero and intended to be occupied by no more than twenty men. A long narrow shoebox of a room, its stone floor, stone walls, rough plank ceiling and narrow vertical windows were all part of the original plan, but other elements had been added in the two centuries since. The only one of Abbot Jacob’s stained-glass windows to remain out of the attic was here, centered above the plain table of an altar at the front of the room; a flowerlike abstract design in many colors, it had apparently been done shortly after some well-meaning relative had sent Abbot Jacob a compass and protractor.

  More additions. The bas-relief Stations of the Cross lining both side walls were the work of some long-ago Abbot whose name I never knew, but who was also undoubtedly responsible for the bas-relief of St. Christopher carrying the Christ Child over the waters in our upstairs bathroom. Electrification had been delayed in this wing until the mid-twenties, when those brasslike helmet affairs had been attached to the corners of the ceiling, giving us a soft indirect lighting that almost perfectly duplicated the candlelight it had replaced. Due to the narrowness of the side windows, and the nonfunctional nature of Abbot Jacob’s stained-glass window—it had been affixed to a blank stone wall—the lights were needed as much in the daytime as at night.

  The pews were a fairly recent addition; until about 1890 there had been no seating in here at all, and those attending Mass either stood or knelt on the stone floor. At that time, according to a story Brother Hilarius once told me, a church in Brooklyn underwent a severe fire, and the singed remnants of several pews had been given to our monastery. The Brother Jerome of that period had salvaged pew lengths each long enough for two people and had set ten of them in here, five on each side of a central aisle. Since there were only sixteen of us now, the last row was not in present use.

  I was seated in the fourth row, against the right wall, from where I could see all my fellow brothers. In the front row, Brother Dexter was farthest to the left, his banker’s features less confident than usual as he watched and listened to Brother Oliver, who had been sitting next to him. Across the aisle on my side were Brothers Clemence and Hilarius, Clemence with his face toward Brother Oliver, Hilarius with his head bent and face hidden.

  In the second row began those who were hearing the story for the first time. Brothers Valerian and Peregrine on the left, Mallory and Jerome on the right. Valerian, whose fleshy face I had often thought self-indulgent and whose orange Flair pen I had stolen out of pique, looked so stunned that I couldn’t help forgiving his having done that crossword puzzle. Peregrine, whose face was a bit too finely chiseled, too self-consciously actorish, but who had in fact been a set designer and summer theater operator rather than actor, seemed incapable of believing what he was hearing; as though he were being told the show would not after all go on. On this side of the aisle I could only see the broad backs and shoulders of Brothers Mallory and Jerome, the ex-boxer and the current handyman, like a pair of football players sitting on the bench.

  In the third row, the faces were more expressive. Brothers Quillon and Leo were on the left, and Quillon looked crushed; Leo, on the other hand, looked enraged, as though he might lift that heavy fat forearm of his very soon and start pounding somebody into the ground. On the right, directly in front of me, were Brothers Silas and Flavian. Silas, onetime burglar and pickpocket, onetime author of his criminal autobiography, hunched lower and lower into himself as Brother Oliver talked, as though he’d just been picked up on a bum rap and was girding himself to tough it out without a word. Brother Flavian, the firebrand, started almost at once hopping up and down, coming very nearly to his feet, burning with the need to speak; the way he’d acted when he’d denounced my “censorship” and Brother Clemence had lawyered him to distraction.

  Farthest to my left, across the aisle, were our two ancient Brothers, Thaddeus and Zebulon. Thaddeus, a large stocky man who had been a merchant seaman for years and years, had become sort of loose and shambling and disorganized in his old age, like an old car that hasn’t been cared for very well. Brother Zebulon had shrunk with age instead, becoming tinier and more brittle almost every day. Both of them watched and listened with frowning concentration, as though unable to really come to grips with what was being said.

  On my side of the aisle, seated next to me, was Brother Eli, whose face had the impassivity of a spectator at an automobile accident, but beneath whose impassivity I thought I could detect the fatalism, the nihilism, he so much struggled against, that turn-off drop-out conviction of his generation that stupidity and destruction are inevitable, that there’s no point in struggle. Brother Eli’s faith, I saw, was just as necessary and yet tenuous as my own.

  Brother Oliver finished by saying, as he had to, “And please give us your prayers.” And before he could sit down, or take another breath, Brother Flavian was on his feet, bursting up so precipitously he almost shot over the back of the pew and landed on Brother Jerome. “Prayers!” he shouted. “Of course we’ll pray! But we have to do more than that!”

  “We are doing more than that, Brother,” Brother Oliver said. “I’ve just told you what we’ve done so far.”

  “We need public opinion on our side!” Brother Flavian cried, waving his arms about.

  “Shaking one’s fist in church is not quite the thing, Brother Flavian,” Brother Oliver told him mildly.

  “We have to do something,” Brother Flavian insisted.

  Brother Clemence got wearily to his feet, like Clarence Darrow in Tennessee. “If you’ll excuse me, Brother Oliver,” he said. “Brother Flavian, we are doing something, as Brother Oliver already outlined. Would you like me to repeat it, with another point-by-point summary?”

  Brother Flavian waved that away with agitated—but unclenched—hands. “We have to do more. Why don’t we picket them? Contact the media, get out there on the sidewalk with signs, bring our message to the public. They wouldn’t dare make a move against us! Monks in a monastery?”

  “I’m afraid they would,” Brother Oliver said. “Mr. Snopes told me he didn’t care about public opinion because he wasn’t running for office, and I’m afraid I believe him.”

  Brother Peregrine jumped up. “Couldn’t we raise the money somehow, buy the place ourselves? Couldn’t we, oh, I don’t know, maybe put on a show?”

  “There’s too much money involved,” Brother Oliver said, and turned to Brother Dexter for confirmation.

  Brother Dexter didn’t stand, but he did half-turn in his pew to nod back at all of us and say, “Land value in this neighborhood is in the range of twenty thousa
nd dollars a frontage foot. Just our own parcel would cost over two million dollars.”

  That was a sobering number, and there was a brief unhappy silence, ended by Brother Leo, who demanded, “How did this happen anyway? If the lease ran out, why didn’t we know about it ahead of time?”

  “I must take the blame,” Brother Oliver said, and spread his hands helplessly.

  “No,” said Brother Hilarius. Rising, he spoke directly across the way to Brother Leo, saying, “A ninety-nine-year lease doesn’t call attention to itself like a three-minute egg.”

  Brother Leo was not appeased. “Somebody should have known about it,” he said. “Where is this lease anyway? Who has it?”

  “I should have it,” Brother Oliver admitted, “but it’s disappeared. I’ve searched high and low.”

  “If any of you knows where it is,” Brother Clemence added, “I wish you’d tell us. I’ve been wanting to take a look at the wording.”

  Brother Silas, betraying his background, said, “Maybe it was stolen.”

  Brother Clemence frowned at him. “What for?”

  “So you can’t take a look at the wording.”

  Brother Valerian said, impatiently, “Now, Brothers, there’s no reason to get paranoid. From the sound of things, we have trouble enough as it is.”

  Brother Thaddeus, whose years of Traveling with the Merchant Marine had perhaps inured him to the thought of abrupt transitions more than the rest of us, said, “Brother Oliver, what happens if we don’t save the place? Where do we go from here?”

  Brother Quillon turned about to shake his head at Brother Thaddeus and say, disapprovingly, “That’s very defeatist, Brother. We should be positive in our thinking.”

  “We have to consider the weather ahead,” Brother Thaddeus told him gruffly, “no matter what it is.”

  Brother Oliver said, “That’s true. And Dimp has committed itself to finding a suitable replacement structure for us, and to assisting us in making the move. They first suggested a college campus upstate, and this morning, a messenger brought photographs and a proposal for a building in Pennsylvania which actually was at one time a monastery.”