Brothers Keepers Read online

  “Oh,” I said. Public speaking is not my strong suit; I would never have done well in a preaching order. I looked around at the curious and expectant faces, cleared my throat two or three times, and said, “Well.”

  The faces remained curious and expectant.

  There was nothing to do but blurt. So I blurted: “They’re going to tear down the monastery!”

  All three Brothers jumped, as though their chairs had been electrified. Brother Clemence said, “What!” Brother Dexter said, “No!” Brother Hilarius said, “Impossible!”

  But Brother Oliver, at the head of the table, was sadly nodding. “I’m afraid it’s true,” he said.

  Brother Clemence said, “Who is going to tear it down?”

  “Certainly not the Flatterys,” said Brother Hilarius.

  Brother Oliver told them, “Someone named Dwarfmann.”

  “That’s absurd,” said Brother Dexter, and Brother Hilarius said, “No one named Dwarfmann owns this monastery. It’s the property of the Flatterys.”

  “No longer,” said Brother Oliver.

  Brother Clemence, who used to be a Wall Street lawyer before his conversion from the things of Caesar, said, “Flattery? Dwarfmann? Who are these people?”

  Brother Oliver said, “Perhaps Brother Hilarius should give us the historical background.”

  “Excellent idea,” said Brother Clemence, and now we all turned our curious and expectant faces toward Brother Hilarius.

  Who was not at all daunted by public speaking. “Of course,” he said. A humorless stolid phlegmatic man with a heavy flat-footed way of standing and walking, he was utterly unlike his name, but then so was the saint he’d been called after, who had been Pope from 461 to 468. Brother Hilarius, a onetime department store clerk, was our monastery historian.

  Speaking now in a methodical monotone, Brother Hilarius told us, “Our Founder, the Blessed Zapatero, established this monastery in 1777, taking a ninety-nine-year lease on the land, which was then owned by one Colton Van deWitt. The Van deWitts daughtered out during the Civil War, and the—”

  Brother Oliver said, “Daughtered out?” He looked helpless, the way he had the time Brother Mallory had suggested he do a painting which was not of a Madonna and Child.

  “The line eventually produced no sons,” Brother Hilarius explained, “and therefore the name ceased to exist. During the Civil War, ownership of our land passed to a good Irish Catholic family named Flattery, who have retained title to this day.”

  Brother Clemence asked, “Do we pay any rent?” A heavyset roguish man with a great unmowed field of white hair all over his head, Brother Clemence still looked like the expensive attorney he used to be, and he still took huge delight in argument for its own sake, the more nitpicking and the less substantive the better. He had been on my side in the great censorship controversy, more than once in the course of it reducing firebrand Brother Flavian to sputtering speechlessness. From the glint in his eye when he asked now about rent, I suspected he had some sort of legal trickery up his sleeve.

  Brother Hilarius answered, “I wouldn’t know. Does it matter?”

  “In law,” Brother Clemence told him, “unchallenged occupancy for a period of fifteen years endows the tenant with title.”

  Brother Oliver, echoing again the word he didn’t understand, said, “Title?”

  “Ownership,” Brother Clemence explained.

  “Ownership?” Brother Oliver’s face lit with startled hope. “You mean we own our monastery?”

  “If we’ve paid no rent for fifteen years,” Brother Clemence said, “and if there has been no challenge in that time from whoever holds title, then it’s ours. The question is, do we pay rent?”

  “Not exactly,” said Brother Dexter, entering the conversation for the first time. A narrow-bodied narrow-headed man with a permanent air about him of scrubbed cleanliness, Brother Dexter was generally believed to be next in line for the abbotcy, once Brother Oliver had been taken to his reward. In the meantime he was Brother Oliver’s assistant, where his background—he came from a Maryland banking family—was a continual blessing in the balancing of our meager but messy books.

  Brother Clemence frowned at him. “What does ‘not exactly’ mean, Brother?”

  “We are required,” Brother Dexter told him, “to pay an annual rental, every February first, of an amount equal to one percent of the entire monastery income for the preceding year. The Blessed Zapatero invested his remaining capital when the monastery was founded, and other residents have also turned over income which has been invested in the general behalf. Also, for the first hundred years or so a certain amount of begging was undertaken, but the investment program was a sound one from the beginning and mendicancy has been unnecessary since well before the turn of the century.”

  Brother Clemence, disguising his impatience very well I thought, gently said, “Brother, have we been fulfilling our obligations vis-à-vis the rent?”

  “Yes, we have. We’ve been relieved of the necessity of actually paying over the rent, but in effect the rental situation remains intact.”

  Brother Oliver said, “I’m not understanding one word in ten. We don’t pay the rent but the rental situation remains intact? Is that even possible?”

  I was glad he’d asked that question, since I wasn’t understanding one word in twenty-five, but I hadn’t felt I should interrupt the flow of expertise. Now I squinted my eyes at Brother Dexter, the better to hear his answer.

  He began with a sentence I had no trouble comprehending. “The Flatterys are rich.” Then he went on, “They’ve never needed our rent money, so they used to return it as a contribution. But for the last sixty-odd years they haven’t taken it at all.”

  “That’s the part I don’t follow,” Brother Clemence said, and the rest of us all nodded; even Brother Hilarius.

  “I was trying to explain,” Brother Dexter said. Experts always get snappish when laymen are slow to understand. “Sometime before the First World War,” he said, “the Flatterys sent us a letter saying we should not send the rent money anymore, but should consider it a charitable contribution.”

  “Ah,” Brother Clemence said. “I see. They don’t forgive us the rent. We still have to determine the amount and collect it, but then instead of paying it to them we give it to ourselves.”

  Brother Dexter nodded. “That’s right. And we send them a memo telling them how much they gave. Last year, for instance, their contribution turned out to be four hundred eighty-two dollars and twenty-seven cents.”

  Even in grade school I had trouble with decimal points. But I’d lived in this monastery for ten years and this was the first hint I’d ever been given as to how we managed to make ends meet, so I was determined to work it out no matter what. Our communal property was in “investments,” and last year’s income from those investments had been four hundred eighty-two dollars and twenty-seven cents times one hundred. Add two zeros—move the decimal point to the left—no, the right—forty-eight million dollars?

  Thousand! Forty-eight thousand, two hundred twenty-seven dollars. Split among sixteen men, that gave us an average annual income of three thousand dollars. Not very much. Of course we did live here rent-free—sort of—and we were exempt from property taxes, and our mode of life didn’t encourage us toward very expensive tastes.

  Brother Dexter, ever the banker, now added, “Our income, by the way, represented nearly nine point four percent return on capital investment.”

  No. That one was beyond me. Some people—Albert Einstein, say—might be able to figure out from that clue how much money we had in these mysterious investments, but not me. Casting all numbers from my brain, I returned my attention to the conversation.

  Which Brother Hilarius had reentered, saying, “I’m no attorney, but if we aren’t in arrears in our rent they can’t throw us out, can they?”

  “Not until the lease is up,” Brother Clemence said, and looked around the table hopefully, saying, “Does anybody know when that
is?”

  “I can’t find it,” Brother Oliver said. He gestured helplessly toward our filing cabinet in the darkest corner, a cabinet I myself knew to be every bit as neat and organized as our attic and those grapevines out there. “I spent hours last night looking for it.”

  “Well, let’s work it out,” Brother Clemence said. Turning to Brother Hilarius he said, “You told us it was a ninety-nine-year lease. Starting when?”

  “It was signed with Colton Van deWitt in April of 1777,” Brother Hilarius told him, and through his normal stolid manner the pride of the historian briefly peeked.

  Sounding startled, Brother Oliver said, “Then it expired a hundred years ago!”

  “Ninety-nine,” Brother Clemence said, and something in his voice sounded ominous. “The lease would have been up in 1876, and would have been renewed as of then.”

  “With the Flatterys,” Brother Dexter said.

  “And would have run out again this year,” Brother Clemence said. “In April.”

  No one had anything to add. We sat there in a growing silence, looking around at one another’s pale faces as we absorbed what was happening. Our monastery. Our home.

  Brother Clemence at last broke the silence, if not the mood, by saying to Brother Oliver, “Well, I see now why you wanted a meeting.” He glanced around at the rest of us, and I thought a slight puzzlement clouded his expression when his eyes met mine.

  Brother Oliver must have seen that, too, because he said, “Brother Benedict was the first one to know about this. I wanted to keep this meeting small, just those who had to know or already knew. I don’t want to tell the other Brothers just yet. I don’t want to alarm them until we know for certain there’s no possible solution.”

  Brother Dexter turned to Brother Clemence, asking, “Who owns the building? The Flatterys own the land, but who owns the monastery?”

  “The owner of the land,” Brother Clemence said heavily, “owns any improvements thereon. So the Flatterys own the building.”

  “Not any more,” Brother Oliver said. “I called Dan Flattery today. It was very difficult to get through to him, but when I finally did he told me he’d sold the land to this fellow Dwarfmann.”

  Brother Clemence said, “Then Dwarfmann owns our monastery.”

  “Dwarfmann owns our monastery,” echoed Brother Hilarius. He said it with a kind of morose awe.

  Brother Clemence said, “I’d like to see that lease, see the exact wording.”

  “I just can’t find it,” Brother Oliver said. “I know I’ve seen it in the past, but last night and today I searched and searched, and it has just disappeared.”

  “Then, with your permission, Brother Oliver,” said Brother Clemence, “I should like to Travel downtown to the County Clerk’s office. There’ll be a copy recorded there.”

  “Certainly,” Brother Oliver said. “You could do that tomorrow. Brother Dexter will arrange subway fare for you. How much is the fare now, do you know, Brother Dexter?”

  “I’ll find out in the morning,” Brother Dexter said. “I could also call this man Dwarfmann and sound him out. He might be interested in selling the land back to us.”

  Now I had a contribution of my own to make, though not a very cheery one. “I doubt that,” I said. “Even if Dwarfmann was willing to sell, this is prime midtown office-space property here and I’m afraid the cost would be far more than we could afford. We must have at least a hundred feet of sidewalk frontage.”

  Brother Dexter looked grim. “You’re probably right, Brother Benedict,” he said, “but we might as well find out the worst.”

  “And I,” Brother Hilarius said, “will look through every scrap of history we have, to see if I can find anything at all that might be helpful.”

  “I knew I could count on you all,” Brother Oliver said. “With you at work, and with the Lord’s help, we might yet save our monastery.”

  I said, “And I? Is there anything I can do, Brother Oliver?”

  “Yes, there is,” he said.

  Startled, I said, “There is? What?”

  “You,” he told me, “can write to that architecture woman at the New York Times.”

  December 10, 1975

  Miss Ada Louise Huxtable

  The New York Times

  229 West 43rd St.

  New York, NY 10036

  Dear Miss Huxtable:

  I am writing to you in reference to the column of yours that you wrote in the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times last Sunday, December 7th, 1975, to tell you that I am a monk in the monastery about which you wrote in that column, and to ask you if there is anything

  December 10, 1975

  Miss Ada Louise Huxtable

  The New York Times

  229 West 43rd St.

  New York, NY 10036

  Dear Miss Huxtable:

  I am a monk. I am a resident in the unique Crispinite Monastery. You say that we are going to be torn down. We wonder if

  December 10, 1975

  Miss Ada Louise Huxtable

  The New York Times

  229 West

  December 10, 1975

  Miss Ada Louise Huxtable

  The New York Times

  229 West 43rd St.

  New York, NY 10036

  Dear Miss Huxtable:

  I am a monk in

  December 10, 1975

  Miss Ada Louise Huxtable

  The New York Times

  229 West 43rd St.

  New York, NY 10036

  Dear Miss Huxtable:

  I am a monk in the Crispinite Monastery on Park Avenue. We did not know we were going to be torn down until we read about it in your column. Is there anything you can suggest that would help us from being torn down? If you

  December 10, 1975

  Miss Ada Louise Huxtable

  The New York Times

  229 West 43rd St.

  New York, NY 10036

  Dear Miss Huxtable:

  I am a monk in the Crispinite Monastery on Park Avenue. We did not know our monastery was going to be torn down until we read about it in your column. Is there anything you can suggest that would help us to keep our monastery, which is also our home?

  We feel urgent about this because we just found out our ninety-nine-year lease is up.

  Yours in Christ,

  Brother Benedict, C.O.N.M.

  Our monastery:

  Wednesday’s meeting was grimmer than Tuesday’s. Outside the leaded windows, a gray December rain was raining. One of the other Brothers—I couldn’t tell which, because his cowl was up against the rain—puttered at our grapes. Within, I was still twitching and exhausted from my hours at the community typewriter, and none of the others had anything pleasant to report.

  Brother Clemence spoke first. “There’s no record of the lease with the County Clerk,” he told us. “I swear to you that when I expressed surprise at that, an ancient clerk there snapped at me, ‘Don’t you know there was a war on?’ Meaning the Revolution. Most of New York City was held by the British under martial law throughout the Revolution, and many deeds and leases and other legal papers just didn’t get properly recorded. A transfer of property would eventually have found its way into the records, but a simple rental doesn’t create as many legal necessities.”

  Brother Dexter said, “But the lease is still binding, isn’t it, even if it isn’t recorded?”

  “So long as one party retains a copy of it and wishes to enforce it,” Brother Clemence said, “it’s still binding. But I just wish I could get a look at the wording of the thing. Brother Oliver, still no luck with our copy?”

  “I spent all day searching for it,” Brother Oliver said mournfully, and the dust smudges on his cheeks and the tip of his nose bore silent witness. “I’ve searched everywhere, I was even in the attic. I went through every page of VEILED FOR THE LORD, just in case it had been put in there by mistake.”

  Brother Clemence squinted, “VEILED FOR THE LORD?”

 
“Brother Wesley’s fourteen-volume novel,” Brother Oliver explained, “based on the life of Saint Jude the Obscure.”

  “I’ve never actually read that,” Brother Hilarius commented. “Do you recommend it?”

  “Not wholeheartedly,” Brother Oliver told him.

  Brother Clemence, who was usually a jovial galumphing St. Bernard sort of man, could become a bulldog when his attention was caught, and this time his attention had been caught for fair. “I need that lease,” he said, his heavy white-haired head thrusting forward over the refectory table as though he would chomp the missing lease in his jaws. “I need to look at it, I need to see the wording.”

  “I can’t think where it is,” Brother Oliver said. He was looking the way I’d felt at that awful typewriter.

  Brother Hilarius said, “Wouldn’t the Flatterys have a copy? Why don’t we ask to look at theirs?”

  “I don’t think so,” Brother Clemence said. “I don’t think it would be a good idea to let the other side know we can’t find our own copy of the principal document.”

  Brother Hilarius said, “But the Flatterys don’t own us any more, so what difference does it make?”

  “That’s not exactly the case,” Brother Dexter said, raising a finger for our attention, and never in his life had he looked so neat and clean and controlled, though not particularly joyful.

  Brother Oliver, who seemed to be getting closer and closer to some sort of distractive fit, said, “Not exactly the case? Not exactly the case? Do they own the land or not? Dan Flattery told me they’d sold it. Did he lie to me?”

  “I’m sorry, Brother Oliver,” Brother Dexter said, “but the only short answer I can give you is, ‘Not exactly.’ ”

  “Then give me a long answer,” Brother Oliver said, and pressed both palms flat on the table as though our ship had entered heavy seas.

  “I spoke to a Dwarfmann assistant this afternoon,” Brother Dexter said. “Actually I spoke to several people in the Dwarfmann organization all day long, but finally this afternoon I got through to someone at an executive level. Snopes, his name is.”

  “This is a longer answer than I’d anticipated,” Brother Oliver said.

  “I am getting to it,” Brother Dexter told him, exhibiting just a touch of that expert’s peevishness again. “According to Snopes, they have taken an option on this land and on several other parcels of land around here.”