Brothers Keepers

by Donald E. Westlake

  “What’s the matter with these people?” She was really bridling at that.

  “Nothing,” I said forcefully. “I think they’re all terrific.”

  The phone had been crackling petulantly for a while now, like a mosquito locked in a medicine cabinet, and Eileen spoke abruptly and severely at it, saying, “Will you wait just one minute?”

  I said, “Does he deny about that clause? Did you ask him about the clause?”

  She ignored that. Palming the phone again, she said to me, “Now, what’s this about the people around here? They’ve treated you all right, haven’t they?”

  “They’re fine people,” I said. Me and my big mouth. “And they don’t have anything to do with any of this. The point is—”

  “The point is,” she said, “this doesn’t have anything to do with people punching one another and all this mystery movie nonsense about microphones and arson and all that silliness. You just think you’re better than we are.”

  “No, I don’t, I—”

  “You think we’re silly useless people who don’t have any reason to be alive, and you’re some sort of saint. A whole bunch of saints there on Park Avenue.”

  Knowing that she was accusing me of attitudes toward her friends that she herself held—or why else was she constantly trying to get away from them?—didn’t help me a bit. “I never said I was a saint, or any of us was—”

  She slammed the phone into its cradle, ending the call, and jumped to her feet. “You think you can shame me into helping you?”

  “The clause!” I wailed, pointing at the phone. “You didn’t ask him about the clause!”

  “Just look at yourself!” she challenged me. “Just how holy are you? You come down here like any con man, you jump into the sack with me, you try to turn me against my own family, turn me against my friends, and you’re the biggest fake of all!”

  “I never tried to—”

  But I was wasting my breath. Turning on her heel, she marched away into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her, shaking the house. And the click I heard an instant later was the lock.

  * * *

  I was still standing there, trying to figure out what words exactly I wanted to try speaking through that locked door, when the phone rang. I looked at it, looked at the door, and it rang again.

  No, she wasn’t coming out. Not for me, not for a ringing phone, not for anything.

  On the third ring I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Is my daughter there? Eileen, let me speak to Eileen.” It was a heavy and angry and yet hesitant voice.

  I said, “I’m not sure, uh…Hold on. I’ll just—”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Is that the monk?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Just what the hell are you up to? You’re pretty goddam cute, aren’t you, attacking a man through his family.”

  “I what?” I was so flabbergasted I couldn’t think of any answer at all.

  “Do you call that Christian behavior?”

  “Me!”

  “Listen,” he said, “I never said I was a saint. I’m just a fella trying to make it in one world at a time. This Dwarfmann deal here, this could pull me out of a real hole.”

  “The lease says—”

  “Yeah, the lease,” he said. “Does the lease tell you where I get my interest payments? I got loans outstanding, I got earth-moving equipment, I got heavy construction equipment, all of that stuff has to get paid for. You think I go to Mack Truck, I go to Caterpillar, I pull seventy-two grand out of my pocket and I say, ‘Give me one of the big yellow things with the tires?’ You think that’s the way it works?”

  “I have no idea how it—”

  “No, you don’t, I know damn well you don’t. You hang around, you burn candles, you pray a lot, you got it made. Me, I’m financed up to my earlobes. I got major equipment, the interest alone costs me forty-one hundred dollars a month, I got no job to put them on. I default on the payments, they come take the stuff back, I lose the entire investment. And when another major job comes along, can I bid? Without equipment? Don’t make me laugh.”

  “I’m not trying to make you—”

  “Inflation’s wiping me out,” he said. “It isn’t enough I backed the wrong candidates all over Nassau County, there’s no mortgage money anywhere. Nobody’s building. You want me to tell you about trade unions?”

  “No, I don’t think I—”

  “No, that’s right. You don’t want to hear any of that shit. My red corpuscles are blowing up like firecrackers, I got a life expectancy of fifteen minutes, all you want is you should go sing Gregorian chants on Park Avenue. Why on Park Avenue?”

  “We don’t sing Gregor—”

  “WHY ON PARK AVENUE? WHAT IN THE NAME OF CHRIST ARE YOU DOING ON PARK AVENUE?”

  “We were there first,” I said.

  “Oh, my bleeding ass,” he said.

  “I’m sorry about your financial problems,” I said. “I know you wouldn’t go to these extreme measures if it wasn’t—”

  “Shut up,” he said, but he said it quietly, almost calmly.

  “What?”

  “You talk about extreme measures,” he said. “You’re turning my daughter against me.”

  “No, I’m not. I—”

  “Don’t tell me what you’re doing, you pasty-faced twit, you’re turning my goddam daughter against me!”

  “You mean by telling her the truth?”

  “Self-righteous son of a bitch.”

  “I’ll tell Eileen you’re on the phone.”

  “No,” he said, even more quietly and calmly than before. “Wait a minute. I want to make you a deal.”

  “A deal?”

  “What’s a construction business, right? It’s only been in the family three generations, so it goes under, so what? I got a piece of a wholesale liquor business, I’m not gonna starve, right?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “If you say so,” I said.

  “So here’s the deal,” he said. “You tell my daughter you were lying.”

  “I couldn’t possibly—”

  “Hear me out,” he said. “My little girl is very important to me, and what I would most like to do is come break your arms and your legs. But that wouldn’t do me any good.”

  “Me either.”

  “I don’t care about you. Now, listen. You tell her you were lying, and you make damn sure she believes it. And then you go back to your goddam monastery, and you stay away from my daughter the rest of your life.”

  “Mr. Flattery, I can’t—”

  “You can listen. What you get in return is a copy of the lease.”

  I was silent. There wasn’t a thing I could think of to say.

  “With the option clause,” he said. “Before the first of the year.”

  I went on being silent. There went on being nothing for me to say.

  “Well? Is it a deal?”

  The lady or the monastery. “Um,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you know? You think you’re in love with her? You’re a monk!”

  “I know what I am,” I said, although it wasn’t the strict truth.

  “How long you think you’d stay with her? Or her with you?”

  I looked at the closed bedroom door. “I don’t know,” I said. Particularly if the price for keeping her was the loss of the monastery.

  (And the monastery? If the price of keeping that was the loss of Eileen?)

  “It’s a good deal,” Flattery was saying, “better than you deserve. You gonna take it?”

  “I’ll, uh, I’ll call you back,” I said, and hung up on his squawking voice. “Rum,” I said, in distraction, and went away to the kitchen.

  Fourteen

  “And a very merry Christmas to you,” said a female voice, and I opened rum-bleary eyes to see Sheila Foney sitting on the coffee table next to me, holding a glass of creamy foam out in my direction.
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  I gestured several of my pudgy right hands toward the glass. “What’s that?”

  “The cure,” she said. “Can you sit up and take nourishment?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Yesterday, after the fight with Eileen and the phone conversation with her father, I had done a certain amount of rum drinking. After Eileen suddenly burst out of the bedroom and out of the house and into the Pinto and away from here I did some more rum drinking. Then Sheila and Neal had come back from wherever they’d been, received a blurry headline from me about the fight—I’d offered no details, though they’d both encouraged me—and they’d taken me more or less under their combined wing. A Christmas Eve party was scheduled for the evening over at the Latterals’ place, and they’d urged me to attend it with them, but I hadn’t wanted to go anywhere without Eileen. Besides, what if I went out to a party and she came back here to make up? So I’d stayed home, with the rum bottle, and I’d done a lot of indiscriminate meditation, some of which had left tracks in my brain.

  And on what had I dwelt? Christmas in the tropics, for one thing, beginning with the standard reaction of the northeasterner that a snowless Christmas amid warmth and palm trees was somehow “wrong,” followed by the sudden realization that palm trees were an almost inevitable part of all manger scenes, that there had been no snow in Bethlehem, and that the first Christmas of all had taken place in at least a semi-tropical setting.

  I had also brooded on the choice I’d been given between saving the monastery and keeping Eileen, and on the general question of secular love, and on the Church’s ambiguous position in re fornication. (Married sex is sanctified and adulterous sex is condemned, but that leaves much of the world’s sex in Limbo. Eileen, for instance, had never been married in the Church and was not at this point married either in or out of it, so what we’d been doing was morally neutral, though most priests would have lowered their eyebrows at the idea of it.)

  Meditation under the influence of rum tends to be more wide-ranging but less substantive than meditation taken straight. Aside from the above matters, I had brooded on several lesser topics from time to time, until finally I had staggered into the living room and onto this couch, not wanting to use the bed before having peacefully concluded the argument with Eileen.

  Who had not come home before I’d faded out, my last remembered thoughts having been on the comparative textures of glass and wicker. Was she home now? Sitting up, which activated a sudden violent headache, I said, “Ow! Is Eileen back?”

  “Not yet.”

  What an incredible headache. “Ow!” I said again, and clutched my temples. “Do we have any aspirin?”

  She held out the hand not holding the glass of foam, and two white pills were in the palm.

  “Ah,” I said, and made the mistake of nodding. Then I made the mistake of squinting. “You’ve seen these symptoms before,” I suggested.

  “It’s a regular epidemic. Here. Drink them down with this.”

  I took the aspirin gladly, the glass of foam more dubiously. “What’s in it?”

  “Drink.”

  So I drank. Somewhere inside the foam was a sweet liquid with tastes that might have been milk, and egg, and sugar, and…rum? No. Impossible.

  “Drink it all.”

  I gasped for breath, then drained the glass. “Gaaaa,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Taking the glass from me and getting to her feet as she said, “You still want the recipe?”

  “Not even a little bit,” I said.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry,” Eileen said.

  I was lying on the beach in front of the house, absorbing sun. Opening my eyes, shielding them with both hands, I saw Eileen seated beside me, looking troubled and contrite.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “I couldn’t handle it,” she said, “so I picked a fight.”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  She gave me a hesitant smile. “Can we start over?”

  “Sure. You couldn’t handle what?”

  “The whole thing about you and my father.” She turned away and looked out at sea, letting sand run through her fingers. “I just can’t deal with that,” she said.

  I sat up. It was late afternoon now, I had done much eating and much resting and I was quite recovered from last night, thank you. What I wasn’t recovered from was Eileen. Reaching out to touch her leg, I said, “What can’t you deal with? Tell me about it.”

  She looked at me, upset and intense, then turned quickly away again. “You want me to choose between you and my father.”

  “No, I don’t. I really don’t.”

  “You really do.” When she faced me again, I could see from the skin around her eyes that she’d been doing a lot of crying. “You say he’s lying and he says you’re lying, and I have to choose which one of you I believe.”

  Which was perfectly true, of course, so what could I say? Nothing. That’s what I said.

  “How can I make a choice like that?”

  “Maybe you can’t,” I said.

  She turned away again, releasing me from her staring eyes, and said, “I don’t know who’s right or wrong about that monastery, I don’t know if they should be allowed to stay or forced to go or what should happen. All I know is—” And she looked at me again, and reached out to clutch my hand, “—it has to be without us. If we’re going to make anything of us, Charlie and Eileen, you and me, we have to stay away from it.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “It can’t be part of our lives,” she said.

  “You’re right,” I said.

  * * *

  But now the monastery was filling my thoughts. If I were there at this instant, at this instant, at this instant, what would I be doing, what would the others be doing, what would be happening? The sound of Brother Eli whittling roused me on the beach, and when I turned my head it was Sheila buffing her nails. An airplane flew over, a black dart high in the blue sky, and I could almost see the bulky shape of Brother Leo, leaning backward to point his nose and chin toward Heaven. “Boeing,” he would say. “Seven-forty-seven.” One of ours.

  Christmas Day. This was Christmas Day? Eating and drinking with a lot of pagan Irishmen on a tropic island that hadn’t even existed when Christ was born. “There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed,” Luke, chapter two, that’s why Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem, where there failed to be room in the inn; and Puerto Rico was no part of that world.

  Neither was New York, of course, and neither was my monastery, but that didn’t seem to matter. Christmas was Christmas in New York; here it was an appendix.

  I’m not even sure I mean that in a religious sense, though certainly in the monastery we did keep the holiday holy. Traditionally, we have had moderately good seats reserved for us at the midnight Mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a tradition that goes back, I believe, to the Cathedral’s beginning in 1879. Following Mass, it has been our custom to return to the monastery and to gather in the chapel for silent meditation until dawn, when we take a light snack of bread and tea and go to bed. At eleven we arise, have more bread and tea, and spend the daylight hours in our courtyard, regardless of the weather, in group prayers and hymns. (Occasionally in recent years Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer leaps our wall from a passing transistor radio to tangle with our Adeste Fideles, but so far we have beaten back all such incursions.) And then we have dinner.

  Ah, dinner. It is purgatory for Brother Leo, hell for his assistants, and heaven for the rest of us. It is our only grand meal of the year, and its memory easily sustains us for the next three hundred sixty-four days. Brother Leo provides the suckling pig, the roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, the yams, the brussel sprouts, the broccoli au gratin, the asparagus with hollandaise sauce, the baked potatoes in their rough thick jackets streaming butter. Brother Thaddeus produces one or another of his seafood specialties for our first course: oysters Rockefeller, perhaps, o
r a shrimp bisque, or trout in white wine. And to finish, Brother Quillon puts out pie after pie like a compulsive stutterer: apple pie, mince pie, cherry pie, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, pear pie.

  Then there’s the wine. Our undercroft has been well stocked now for centuries, and it isn’t often we really make use of it, but what is a more joyous time for celebration than the birth of our Lord and Savior? And so the wines come up for our table: German white with the first course, French red with the main course, Italian liqueurs with dessert, Spanish brandy and Portuguese port with Brother Valerian’s coffee.

  We don’t exchange presents, of course. Individually we have nothing, and can give nothing, and can accept nothing. Besides, the fat red god is not our God, and it’s our God Whose birth we are celebrating.

  It feels strange to talk about our community in a religious sense. We’re a religious brotherhood, but we don’t carry on about it. Similarly, we all of us dwell in a world ruled by the law of gravity, and every day of our lives we make one or more decisions based on the law of gravity, but how often do we talk about or think about gravity? It is simply a given, a basic postulate of our lives, and there’d be something foolish and self-conscious in an extended dissertation on the subject.

  It isn’t that I believe that God requires me to be a Crispinite monk, though I do believe He requires all of us to keep our promises. I merely believe that God exists, that this world is His, and that He has provided a place in His world for each of us if we will but seek it out. For the last ten years, it has seemed to me that God’s place for me in His world was on Park Avenue between 51st and 52nd Streets. I have been happy there, and I have been delighted, once a year, to celebrate the birth of the One who made everything, to honor that birth with ritual and prayer and fasting, to welcome it with song, and to celebrate it with a communal feast.

  But not this year. This year I was on a humid island in the dominion of North Pole Fats, in that great outer world where I don’t know what Christmas is supposed to mean.

  Dinner in the rented house on the beach consisted of chicken parts on a bed of stewed tomatoes and rice, fried plantains, and a rather nice California white wine in a big glass jug. Eileen and I ate all this alone, Neal and Sheila having tactfully vacated the place so we could kiss and make up. It was a pleasant meal, but when after the coffee Eileen handed me three gift-wrapped packages I couldn’t think what they were for. “Your Christmas presents, dummy,” she had to tell me, and then I had to admit I hadn’t bought or made or invented anything at all for her. “You’re my Christmas present,” she said, unoriginally but passionately, and she kissed me again.