Brothers Keepers Page 24

  So I had to open the packages. I started with the smallest, and it unwrapped to display an alarm clock, a travel alarm clock that folded shut into a tan leatherette square clam. Open, it was a wind-up alarm clock with a neat squarish face and, when I tested it, a discreet but no doubt effective buzz. “That’s very nice,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “You really like it?”

  “Yes, I do, honestly.” I tried to put as much enthusiasm into my voice and face as possible.

  “You were a real problem,” she told me. “It’s hard to know what to get someone who doesn’t have anything.”

  I went on to open the second package, and this present was a razor, an electric razor with an infinity of settings. “Ah,” I said, constructing fervor again. “I’ll cut myself no more.”

  “And you can use it without plugging it in,” she explained, her fingers intermixing with mine as she pointed out the razor’s features. “You can either plug it in like any razor, or you can take it with you when you travel, and it will run for days and days without recharging.”

  “That’s great,” I said, and opened the largest package of all, and it was luggage, a tan vinyl overnight bag. “Ah hah,” I said. “Something to put everything else in.”

  “Do you really like everything?” she asked me.

  “I like everything,” I told her, and then I told her a truth: “And I’m madly in love with you.”

  * * *

  Now I lived from moment to moment, like a blind man coming down a mountain. I awoke each morning full of tension and uncertainty and the wisps of bad dreams, I soothed myself with rum drinks each afternoon, and I devoted myself to the truth of my love for Eileen each evening and night. My problems were critical but not urgent, severe but insoluble. There seemed nothing I could do to help either myself or the monastery, so I settled into fretful inactivity instead, trying not to think.

  On Sunday we went to Mass, all four of us from the house. There was a small ancient vine-covered church in the nearby town of Loiza Aldea, but this Mass attendance was as much a tourist expedition as a religious requirement, so we drove past that church and on the twenty miles to San Juan and the Cathedral of San Juan Bautista, which features primarily the marble tomb of Ponce de Léon inside, and a statue of the same fellow out front, pointing rather languidly into the middle distance. (Aside from his famous search for the fountain of youth, instead of which he discovered Florida, Ponce de Léon was the first Spanish governor of Puerto Rico.)

  The Mass we attended there seemed an older and richer rite than what I was used to in New York, somehow more properly Roman Catholic and yet much more remote. I had thought I might be embarrassed there, or alternatively that I might take the opportunity to seek guidance, but this version of God seemed unlikely to cast either an Eye or an Ear in the direction of some insignificant sex-struck erring monk; it would take fire and blood to attract the attention of this southern God.

  Coming back from Mass, we stopped along the way for lunch and drinks, then continued on with Neal driving while Eileen and I were stowed together in the back seat. I touched her leg, which was my frequent habit, and she pushed my hand away. I said, “What’s the matter?”

  “Not right after Mass,” she said. She wouldn’t look at me, but frowned out her window instead. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Do you mean, never on Sunday?” The rum I’d taken on at lunch made me think things were funny.

  “Not this Sunday,” she said, and the way she frowned made her look like a stranger.

  * * *

  We did, actually, late that evening, but there was a difference in it. My week of sex had awakened a hunger in me that had been dormant for a long long time, so that my hands seemed always now to be reaching out in Eileen’s direction and I wasn’t of a mind to be critical or analytical about individual encounters, but even I could tell this particular exercise lacked something. Eileen was more clinging and yet more removed, and I felt simultaneously sated and starved. We were like actors who had toured in a play together years ago and who now, on returning to the stage after a long absence, discovered that they remember all the lines and all the bits of stage business but have forgotten why they chose to do this play in the first place.

  * * *

  In the morning I called American Airlines. Eileen was not yet awake, and I spoke softly when I asked for a seat on the next plane leaving for New York. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the Spanish-accented voice, “we’re all booked for today.”

  “Tomorrow, then.”

  “Booked solid, sir,” she said. She managed to sound both cheerful and regretful at the same time. “I could put you on standby, if you like, but I don’t think there’s much hope, to be honest with you.”

  This was absurd. Finally I wanted to Travel, and the gods of Travel wouldn’t permit it. I said, “Well, when can you book me?”

  “Let me see, sir. Mm-hm, mm-hum. We could give you a seat on Wednesday morning’s flight.”

  “Wednesday.” And this was barely into Monday: what would I do for the next two days?

  “That’s right, sir. Do you wish to make a reservation?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That would be Wednesday, the three one of December,” she said.

  The three one of December. New Year’s Eve, the last day of the deadline for the monastery. “That’s right,” I said.

  * * *

  So I was going; but where? Back to the monastery?

  They’d take me back, I knew that, no matter what I had done during my time on the outside, but could I accept my presence there ever again? If the monastery, if its existence and its destruction (and my failure to stop that destruction), was a perpetual barrier between Eileen and me—and it was—wouldn’t it be just as much a barrier between the Order and me? When my brothers, some time this coming spring, were driven from their home to new quarters in some phased-out Job Corps campus or bankrupt soft-drink plant, how could I possibly include myself? How could I live among them there? I had been their last hope, and I had failed.

  At first I’d thought my choice was between Eileen and the monastery, but in truth my range of options wasn’t even so broad as all that. I couldn’t possibly stay with Eileen if the loss of the monastery was a permanent fact between us, but neither could I save the monastery by giving up Eileen. I was giving her up, I was doing it now, but that was only because the very silly idea of our being together had run its course. I had to leave, but my reasons were private ones and I couldn’t use our separation to save the monastery. I couldn’t bring myself to fulfill Dan Flattery’s other demand. I just couldn’t tell her I had lied.

  Of course, I should have done so. As Roger Dwarfmann had said, citing Scripture for his purpose, “Let us do evil, that good may come.” But I couldn’t do it, and that was my failure. I couldn’t go away leaving her to believe I was a liar and a con man, who had cheated her, who had not loved her.

  * * *

  She got up late that day, while I sat on the beach in front of the house—I’d carry quite a startling tan with me back to the cold dark northeast—rehearsing different ways to tell her that I couldn’t stay, that I was wrong for this world and any of her worlds. I was a monk again, whether I went back to the Crispinite Order or not. I would have to find some such place for myself; it was what I was fit for. Perhaps that Dismal Order of ex-thugs Brother Silas had told me about would take me in—I could join those felonious monks in whatever substitute San Quentin now housed them.

  What on earth was I going to say to Eileen?

  “I love you, but I can’t stay.”

  “I was content and happy before all this started, and now I’m confused and miserable. Maybe I’m merely a coward, but I have to try to get back to where I was before.”

  “The monastery, that simple stupid building, stands between us and always will, particularly once it’s been torn down.”

  “You won’t want me forever. I’m merely a rest period between your struggles to find some way to live
your own life.”

  “You knew yesterday, you knew last night, that we’re finished, it’s only a matter of time.”

  She came out at last from the house, wearing her lavender bathing suit under her blue terrycloth robe, and looking at her I knew the transition back to celibacy was going to be a difficult one. But it had been difficult the first time, ten years ago, until gradually the itch had faded, as it would do again; abstinence makes the heart grow colder.

  She was carrying a glass in her hand, obviously one of our rum drinks, which was unusual this early in the day. She was also very pinched-looking around the mouth and eyes, as though she’d lost the ability to withstand the sun and now it was beginning to shrivel her. And the look in her eyes was both tender and hard. When she reached me, she knelt beside me in the sand and said, “I want to talk to you.”

  “I have to tell you something,” I said.

  “Me first. You have to go back.”

  Suddenly it seemed too abrupt. My stomach fluttered, I needed things to slow down. “I do love you,” I said, and reached out for her hand.

  She wouldn’t let me touch her. “I know that,” she said, “but you can’t stay. It isn’t any good for either of us.” Then she said, “All I’ve done is louse you up, make you confused and unhappy. You have to get back to where you were before I came along.”

  Then she said, “That monastery building, that hateful place, it won’t let us get together.”

  Then she said, “I’m not a forever person, and you are. I’m always either running to something or away from something. I’ll be that way all my life. If you stay with me, someday I’ll walk out on you and that’s a guilt I wouldn’t be able to stand.”

  Then she said, “You know I’m right. You knew it yesterday, that we can’t go on.”

  She had taken all my lines. I said, “I have a reservation on the morning plane Wednesday.”

  * * *

  Eileen drove me to the airport. I had slept the last two nights on that wicker sofa in the living room, I had avoided all rum since making my decision, and I was dressed again in my robe and sandals. I was also a physical wreck from lack of sleep, an emotional wreck on general principles, and a moral wreck in that I craved Eileen’s body just as much as ever. More. We had had a week together, and turning off that faucet was easier said than done. Her nearness in the Pinto made me quiver.

  But I was strong—or weak, depending on your point of view—and I didn’t alter my decision. We arrived at the airport, Eileen walked me as far as the security checkpoint, and we said goodbye without touching. A handshake would have been ridiculous, and anything more would have been far too dangerous.

  At the end, as I was about to leave her, she said, “I’m sorry. Char—I’m sorry, Brother Benedict. For everything the Flattery family has done to you.”

  “The Flattery family gave me love and adventure,” I said. “What’s that to be sorry for? I’ll remember you the rest of my life, Eileen, and not just in my prayers.”

  Then she kissed me, on the mouth, and ran. It’s a good thing she ran.

  Fifteen

  My seatmate on the flight back was a skinny cranky-looking man of about fifty, who gave me one short curt glance when I took my aisle seat and then returned to his dour survey of the world outside his window.

  The plane was less than half full, and most of the passengers—like the one next to me—were men Traveling alone. All holiday Travelers had presumably arrived at their destinations by now, leaving only these few solitary wanderers who were no doubt involved in Business Trips.

  The plane took off, the stewardess provided my seatmate with Jack Daniel’s on the rocks and me with a cup of very weak tea, and for some time we Traveled in silence. The Jack Daniel’s was methodically dealt with and replaced by another just like it; I rather liked the little bottles, but could think of no way to ask if I might have the empties. I read the airline’s house magazine, I did the puzzles in it, and wondered how the Razas family was getting along. This was certainly a very different trip.

  My seatmate pulled stolidly at his Jack Daniel’s, emptying one little bottle after another, behaving not as though he were enjoying the drinks but as though they were a duty he was required to perform. Something midway between medicine and ritual. He drank and drank, in small and steady sips that were never ostentatious, never great thirsty gulps, but which in their inexorability suggested he could rid the world entirely of its store of Jack Daniel’s if he put his mind to it.

  I finished the magazine, returned it to its pocket in the seat-back in front of me, and my neighbor said, in tones of the deepest disgust, “Travel. Gah.”

  I looked at him in some surprise, and found him giving a brooding glare at the seat in front of him, seeming to consider whether or not to bite it. He probably hadn’t been speaking to me, but I was a bit curious about him and a bit bored (and trying very hard not to think about how much I wanted to leap from this plane and swim madly back to her and attach myself to her like a shirt full of static electricity), and so I said, “Don’t you care for Travel?”

  “I hate it,” he said, in such a flat hoarse way that I instinctively drew a bit back from him. He went on glaring straight ahead, but now his near eye glittered as though his only pleasure in life was the contemplation of his hatred of Travel.

  I said, “I suppose, though, people do get used to it.”

  Now he turned to stare at me, and I saw that his eyes were somewhat bloodshot. Also, his cheeks were drawn, his hair was thin atop his narrow skull, and the flesh around his temples seemed gray. He reminded me of the Marley knocker. He said, “Used to it? I’m used to it, oh, yes, I’m used to it.”

  “You are?”

  “I do over a quarter million miles a year,” he informed me.

  “Good God! I mean, uh, good gracious. Why?”

  “Have to,” he said. He took one of his remorseless sips of Jack Daniel’s.

  “But if you hate Travel so much, why—”

  “Have to!”

  Violence seemed very possible from this gentleman, but my curiosity overcame my caution. “But why?” I persisted.

  Sip. Brood. Sip. “I’m a Travel agent.” He spoke more quietly, but also more desperately. “The airlines ship me, the hotels put me up, the restaurants feed me. And I have to do it, I have to know what’s out there.” He turned his head to glare out the window, hurling his hatred at everything “out there.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I know very little about Travel, and—”

  “You’re a lucky man,” he told me. “In my business, it’s Travel or perish. The customer comes in, the customer says, ‘What’s the best hotel in Quito?’ Well, say no one in my office has been to Quito in ten years, and we tell him the Asuncion. So he books it, because we don’t know the family that ran the Asuncion sold it three years ago to a Brazilian hotel chain and they’re running it into the ground. Is that a customer I’ll ever see again?”

  “I suppose not,” I said.

  “I suppose not,” he echoed, but his sarcasm—if that’s what it was—seemed more directed at life in general than at me. “I’m selling the world,” he said. “You know what that means?” He held out one of his bony hands between us, cupped the fingers around an imaginary globe, hefting that imaginary globe in the palm of his hand. “The world is my stock-in-trade, and I have to know my inventory.”

  “I see,” I said. I looked on him now with combined pity and awe. “And do all Travel agents have to go through this?”

  “Pah!” he answered, and rattled the ice cubes in his empty glass at the passing stewardess.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and glanced at me. “And you, sir?”

  “Of course for him,” growled my neighbor.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I really don’t—I don’t have any money.”

  “You’re my guest,” he told me, and glowered at the stewardess. “He’s my guest.”

  “Yes, Mr. Schumacher,” she said, casting her smile uselessly
against the rock cliff of his face, and moved briskly away, her thighs stroking one another within her tiny uniform skirt. I watched her stride along the aisle, realizing fatalistically that I would be fantasizing myself in bed with the next three hundred women I saw, and I was grateful when my seatmate, Mr. Schumacher, distracted me by saying, bitterly, “They all know me.”

  Could it be so terrible to be known by such an attractive girl? Wishing my thoughts elsewhere, I turned to him and said, “You were saying, about other Travel agents…”

  “I was saying, ‘Pah!’ ” he told me. “Glorified clerks, most of them. Writing an airline ticket to Disneyworld about strains the limits of their capacity. I am a Travel agent. My card.”

  He conjured the card from an inner pocket with a practiced stroke, extending it to me between the second and third fingers of his hand, and I took it to find a stylized globe centered in the rectangle, surrounded by the firm’s name: Schumacher & Sons. Across the bottom were two small lines of print reading, “Offices in New York, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, Caracas, Tokyo, Munich, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Toronto, Mexico City and Sydney.” On the upper right, in simple small block lettering, was the name, “Irwin Schumacher.”

  I was still studying this card, which managed to be so fact-filled and yet so uncluttered—unlike, for instance, Father Banzolini’s tear sheets—when the stewardess returned with our drinks. She assisted me in lowering my little table from the seat back in front of me, which gave us a proximity I regretfully found delightful, and then gave me my glass of ice cubes and two little Jack Daniel’s bottles. Well, it was one way to get my empties; souvenirs of my Travels, to put next to Brother Oliver’s railroad timetable.