Brothers Keepers Read online

  “And you’d damn well better stay there.”

  “But why’s she coming here?”

  “She got upset,” he said. “When you left, you bastard. So she booked on the next flight out. Alfred Broyle’s meeting her at Kennedy, he’s probably picked her up already by now.”

  Alfred Broyle. Was that the future I’d left her to? “Oh, I’d better get out of here before she arrives,” I said.

  “You’d better get out of here now. You and all your buddies.”

  “With the lease,” I said.

  “No! Goddamit, I told you on the phone the situation I’m—”

  “That’s all right,” I said. Suddenly stronger, suddenly sure of myself, I rose from the chair and approached him saying, “You’re smart with money, you’ve got other businesses, you know you’ll work it out. And you’re going to give us the lease. Not because of Eileen or anything my friends are saying to your friends or any of that other stuff. You’re going to give me the lease because it’s right to give it to me and it would be wrong not to.”

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. I stood looking at him, and he stood looking at me. I had no idea if I was right or wrong, but we were down to the final moment and this was all I had left. I said nothing more because there was nothing more to say.

  So Flattery had to break the silence himself, which he finally did by saying, a bit more softly than before, “You’d better get out of here. Eileen’s going to show up.”

  “Eileen has nothing to do with this,” I said, astonished to realize I was telling the truth. “It’s you and me and the lease and that’s all it is.”

  That made him frown. “You? Why you in goddam particular? What’s so special about you?”

  “I’m in your hair,” I said.

  “You can say that again.”

  “Anybody can cheat an anonymous group,” I told him. “It’s like bombing civilians, it’s easy. But now it’s two people, it’s you and me, and we’re facing each other, and you have to tell me what you’re going to do.”

  He thought about that for a long time, while various emotions crossed his face, some of them of an apparently violent nature, others less so. Suddenly, abruptly, he turned away from me and wriggled around his desk to sit in the chair—he automatically, I noticed, tilted his head to the left. Pulling a pad of white paper toward himself he said, “I don’t have the lease here, it’s in my safe deposit box.”

  “I thought it probably was.”

  “I’ll give you a handwritten promise now,” he said, “to deliver the lease to you as soon as practical tomorrow. No, tomorrow’s a holiday. Friday.”

  “And will you acknowledge in this letter that we have an exclusive renewal option?”

  He frowned at me. “I hate you,” he said.

  “But you will.”

  “Yes, you son of a bitch, I will.”

  He bent his head to write, and a sudden pounding started at the door. It’s Eileen, I thought, and my legs grew weak. Flattery, looking up in irritation from his writing, pointed the back of his pen at the door and said, “See who the hell that is.”

  “All right.”

  I unlocked the door and it was not Eileen but her mother, who came bustling worriedly into the room, saying, “Dan, some fellow in a long robe just punched Frank.”

  He gave her a look of such extreme exasperation that she recoiled a step. “What?”

  “A robe like this gen—” She gave me a closer look. “Oh, you’re that Brother.”

  “Hello, again.”

  “Oh,” she said, remembering even more about me, “you’re that Brother.”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said.

  “Margaret, get the hell out of here,” Flattery said. “Let Frank fight his own fights.”

  Giving me several bewildered and mistrustful—yet curious—glances, Mrs. Flattery retired again, I relocked the door, and Dan Flattery went on with his writing.

  It didn’t take him much longer, and then he extended the paper across the desk to me, saying, “I suppose you want to read it.”

  “I might as well,” I said.

  It was exactly as Flattery had described it. “Thank you,” I said.

  He rose from behind the desk, managing without apparent effort not to remove his right shoulder on the air-conditioner. “Let me tell you something,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me,” he said. “I didn’t give you that on moral grounds. I’m a pragmatic man with responsibilities and you can go shove morals up your ass. I’m turning over the lease because I want that monastery standing, I want it right where it is with its wall around it and you inside it and I want it to stay that way. Because if I ever see you on the street I swear by that cross you carry I’ll run you down.”

  “Um,” I said.

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  * * *

  It was not at all easy to turn fifteen monks and Mr. Schumacher from partygoers into Travelers again. They were all of them happy right where they were. I had to explain to Brother Oliver about Eileen being on her way here, and then he added his own authority and sense of urgency to my panic, and the brown robes began at last to separate themselves from the party.

  I went outside and stood by the bus, trying not to look toward the road. What would I do if a car came down that dark street, slowing to make the turn into this driveway? I should get into the bus, that’s what I should do, and stay there in the dark, not even looking out the window. That’s what I should do. That’s what I should do.

  The Brothers trailed out of the house, one at a time, every one of them combining reluctance to leave the party with joy at our success. The monastery was saved! Wasn’t that supposed to be the point of all this?

  It was for the others. “Wonderful,” they told me. “Congratulations. I don’t know how you did it,” and things of that sort. They patted my arm, they shook my hand, they smiled at me. They loved me, and I kept looking toward the road, and no car came.

  Brother Mallory came out of the house, smiling, licking a skinned knuckle. “What a night,” he said. “I’ll never forget you, Brother Benedict.”

  Brother Oliver and Mr. Schumacher came out last, arm in arm. They came smiling and beaming over to me, and Brother Oliver stood with me while Mr. Schumacher got into the bus. I looked out at the road.

  Brother Oliver said, “It isn’t a prison. You can leave if you want.”

  “I know that. I don’t want. It’s just—Alfred Broyle, that’s all.”

  There was no way he could understand what I meant, so he simply patted my arm and murmured some nonsense. I said to him, “If there was any way it could work, I’d stay here right now. Any way at all. But I’m no good for her, and after a while she wouldn’t be any good for me, and after we were done with one another we’d both be spoiled for any kind of life. I’m just sorry to be leaving her to—without things worked out for her.”

  “But what does this mean for your vocation, Brother? Your beliefs?”

  “Brother Oliver,” I said, “to be honest with you I don’t know anymore what I believe. I don’t know if I believe in God or just in peace and quiet. All I know for sure is, whatever I believe in, it isn’t out here. The only place I’ve ever found it is in that monastery.”

  The bus driver honked his horn at us. He was grumpy, having expected us all to stay until after midnight and having been found just now doing the twist in the dining room. Having honked our attention, he called out the open door to us, “You two coming or not?”

  “We’re coming,” I said. “Come on, Brother Oliver.”

  * * *

  We were half a block from the house when a car passed us going the other way. I stood and craned my neck to watch out the bus’s rear window. The car turned in at the driveway, where the party was still going on.

  * * *

  Saturday, nine P.M. I sat in my pew in the chapel, waiting to see Father Banzolini for the firs
t time since I’d gone away to Puerto Rico, and what a lot of sins I had to confess. I should have been rehearsing those sins in fear and contrition right now, but I wasn’t; instead, I was smiling around at my familiar surroundings with relief and delight.

  Home. I was home, and to stay. I wouldn’t even be Traveling for the Sunday Times anymore, having cheerfully abdicated that function to Brother Flavian. (Let him worry about censorship from now on!) The outside world was already receding from my mind and I was becoming again what I had always been. (Before Brothers Clemence, Silas, Thaddeus had become monks they had been lawyer, thief, mariner. Before I had become a monk, I had been a monk who didn’t know he was a monk.)

  The Confessional curtain rustled and out came Brother Gideon, in his stiff new robe and his soft new smile. I took his place in the dark booth, next to Father Banzolini’s ear, and began belatedly to organize my thoughts. “Bless me, Father,” I said, “for it’s a long story.”

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