Brothers Keepers Read online

  The train slowed. Brother Oliver, peering out the window, said, “Jamaica.”

  “What?”

  “We change here.”

  Into swine? Into stones?

  Into another train, across a concrete platform, where we found a more ordinary railroad car, with pairs of seats on both sides and no metal-walled cubicles. It was about half full, mainly with people smoking in violation of the posted sign, and it lurched forward almost before we’d found seats. More visions of Hell went by outside, but at least we were sitting in a space designed for human beings. That other car had affected me like an overly tight hat.

  Neither Brother Oliver nor I had done much talking so far, both of us intimidated by the enormity of our excursion, but now Brother Oliver said, “I might as well tell you what I know about the Flatterys before we get there, little as it is.”

  I looked attentive.

  “The one I knew best,” Brother Oliver went on, “was old Francis X. Flattery. He would visit once a year or so to demand a blessing and some whiskey. He firmly believed we were all alcoholics, and wanted to take part in our binges. Would you remember him?”

  “A skinny old man? With a mean mouth?”

  Brother Oliver looked slightly pained. “My own description,” he said, “might have been somewhat more charitable, but I believe you have the right man.”

  “I saw him twice, I think,” I said. “In the first year or so that I was there.”

  “The family is in the construction business,” Brother Oliver said, “and old Francis started coming around after his sons forced him to retire. Daniel’s the oldest son, so he inherited us when Francis died—that would have been five or six years ago.”

  “Do you know Daniel?”

  “We’ve met,” Brother Oliver said, though not with much enthusiasm. “Two or three times I had to telephone him to come take Francis away. Then he did visit the monastery after his father’s death, asking us to remember the old man in our prayers. He’s a very religious man, Daniel, in a gruff blaspheming sort of Gaelic way.”

  “What about the rest of the family?”

  “Daniel’s the only one that matters,” he said. “The rest don’t count.”

  As it turned out, he could not have been more wrong.

  * * *

  The cabdriver at the Sayville railroad station became much less effusive when he learned we merely wanted directions and not to hire his services. “Bayview Drive?” He shook his head, curling his lip like a meat inspector rejecting a bad roast. “It’s too far,” he said, “you can’t walk it.”

  “Oh, I’m sure we can,” Brother Oliver said.

  The driver gestured almost angrily at his ramshackle cab. “A buck and a half,” he said, “and you’re there in five minutes, in comfort and convenience.”

  “Then we can walk it in twenty,” Brother Oliver said gently. “If you could just point the way?”

  The driver looked around the empty station. Our train had departed, there were no other potential customers, and a cold wind was gusting across the blacktop parking lot. Yesterday’s rain had transformed to today’s clammy air and heavy clouds. The driver shook his head in disgust. “Okay, Father,” he said, and flung out one arm to point in a direction I took to be south. “You just walk that way till your ass gets wet,” he said, “and then you turn right.”

  “Thank you,” Brother Oliver said, and I had to admire his dignity.

  The driver grumbled and muttered and lunged himself into the cab, slamming the door. Brother Oliver and I started walking.

  The weather wasn’t particularly pleasant, but our surroundings had improved tremendously since first we had committed ourselves to the Long Island Railroad. We had Traveled fifty or sixty miles through a seamless quilt of small Long Island towns until eventually there came to be bits of green, actual lawns and parks and fields and at last even some pocket parcels of woodland. This quiet town of Sayville was such an utter contrast with the frenzy of Manhattan and the industrial grime of Queens that I felt almost giddy. Those who Travel more frequently become used to constant wrenching changes in their environment, but for me these swift changes—it was not yet noon—were like wine, too much of it drunk too quickly.

  Our route now took us to a neat but very busy main business thoroughfare where a polite overweight policeman gave us more comprehensive and less offensive directions. He also assured us it was too long a walk, but he was obviously mistaken. A grown man in reasonably good health can cover perhaps twenty-five miles in a day, and the directions we were given led me to believe the Flattery house was less than two miles from the railroad station.

  Which is a strange thing about Travel. People who do it all the time become enslaved to many false gods and absurd dogmas. The cabdriver and the policeman—and undoubtedly nearly anyone else in that town we might have asked—have grown so used to the idea of driving an automobile when engaged in the process of Travel that they have come to disbelieve in the very existence of other modes. Did that policeman live two miles from his place of duty? If he did, and if he walked to work every day rather than drive, he would be less overweight.

  We are not capricious, you see, in thinking Travel too serious to be undertaken lightly. Overindulgence in Travel, as in other questionable activities, leads to weaknesses that are moral, physical, mental and emotional. Imagine a healthy adult thinking two miles too far to walk! And yet he would laugh at someone who claimed, say, that the earth was flat.

  South of the business district we came on grander houses, set well back amid lawns and old trees and curving driveways. Occasional large loping dogs, dalmatians and Irish setters and suchlike, romped out to study us, and one German shepherd trotted along at our heels until Brother Oliver had to stop and tell him firmly that he should go home, that we were not prepared to accept responsibility for him. He smiled at us, and went back.

  Occasional cars rustled past us and we did meet one pedestrian, a tiny old woman who was talking to herself. She reminded me so much of old Brother Zebulon that I felt a sudden deep stab of homesickness. “Ahhh,” I said.

  Brother Oliver raised an eyebrow at me. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “We’re nearly there,” he assured me, demonstrating just how rapidly Travel can make even someone like Brother Oliver fall into error. I didn’t want to be nearly there; I wanted to be nearly home.

  Bayview Drive was aptly named. As we walked along it, we caught glimpses to our left of the Great South Bay which separates Long Island from Fire Island. The houses along here were estates, undoubtedly very expensive, and the ones on the bay side tended to have docking facilities at the farther end of the back lawn. Gleaming clapboard and weathered shingles combined here to create an aura of rustic wealth.

  The Flattery property was enclosed by a spike-tipped iron fence, but the driveway gate stood open and we walked up the gravel drive to the house. No dog came out to welcome us, which was something of a surprise, but Brother Oliver’s ringing of the doorbell produced almost at once a short stocky woman in orange pants and a woolly blue sweater who opened the door, took one look at us, and said, “Ah. Just one minute.” And then, before Brother Oliver could say a word, she shut the door again.

  Brother Oliver and I looked at one another. I said, “Maybe she went to get Daniel.”

  “It’s very strange,” Brother Oliver said, and the door snapped open again.

  She was back. This time she had a large black patent-leather purse in one hand and a five dollar bill in the other. Pressing the bill into Brother Oliver’s hand she said, “There you are, Father. Bless you.” And reclosed the door.

  Brother Oliver stared at the closed door. He stared at the bill in his hand. He stared at me, and a red flush began to creep up his cheeks from his neck, but whether it was a flush of embarrassment or annoyance I couldn’t entirely tell. Shaking his head, he firmly pushed the doorbell again.

  The woman, when she reopened the door, was very clearly annoyed. “Well
, now what?” she said.

  “First, madam,” Brother Oliver said, “you can have your money back. Mine has not been a mendicant order for at least a hundred years, and I doubt we ever begged from door to door.”

  The woman frowned as Brother Oliver forced the crumpling bill into her fist. “Well, what on earth—?”

  “We are here,” Brother Oliver said, with a dignity that was becoming just the slightest bit frosty, “to see Daniel Flattery. If we may.”

  “Dan?” The idea that anyone might want to see the man who lived in this house seemed to bewilder her utterly. “I’m Mrs. Flattery,” she said. “Can I be of help?”

  “I am Brother Oliver, Abbot of the Crispinite Order, and this is Brother Benedict. We would like to see your husband in connection with our monastery.”

  “Your monastery? Dan?” She gave a disbelieving laugh and said, “Put the thought right out of your mind. Dan in a monastery? I don’t know who gave you his name, but they were pulling your leg. Dan!” And she laughed again, in an earthy beery manner I found rather unattractive.

  “Daniel Flattery,” Brother Oliver said, his voice trembling somewhat, “owns our monastery. We are here to talk with him about its sale.”

  “What? Oh, that place! The place in New York!”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why, I haven’t thought about that place in years! Come in, come in!”

  So at last we crossed the threshold of the Flattery house. We had entered upon a rather bare front hallway, with a sweeping flight of white stairs leading away upward and a narrow wood-floored hall pointing straight ahead to a glass-paneled door with white curtains on its farther side. Two awkward paintings of weeping clowns hung on the side walls flanking the front door, with a nice antique writing desk under the one and a graceless grouping of brass hatrack, wooden chair and elephant-foot umbrella stand under the other. Past all this, archways on left and right led to rather dark and cluttered rooms, one of which appeared to be mostly living room and the other mostly library.

  It was toward the library that Mrs. Flattery gestured, saying, “Come in. Sit down. I am sorry I didn’t know who you were, but Dan never told me he was expecting you.”

  Brother Oliver said, “He hasn’t told you about the sale?”

  “Sale?”

  “Of the monastery.”

  “Oh, Dan never talks business with me.” Having ushered us into the library, she now shooed us into matching tan leatherette armchairs. “Sit down, sit down.”

  We sat. Brother Oliver said, “I’m hoping to convince him not to sell.”

  That struck me as a cleverly oblique opening—attract first her curiosity, then her sympathy—but I saw at once it just wasn’t to be. “Oh, I’m sure Dan will do the right thing,” she said comfortably. “He has a fine business head.”

  Brother Oliver did not easily give up the ship. “Sometimes,” he said, “a business head can make us lose sight of more important values.”

  “Well, I know you’ll keep Dan on the straight and narrow,” she said, smiling at the both of us. “I’ll just radio him that you’re here.”

  Brother Oliver, distracted from his doomed campaign, said, “Radio?”

  “He’s out on his boat, with some friends. I suppose he simply forgot you were coming.” She sounded as though being indulgent of her husband’s willfulness or waywardness was her sole occupation and greatest pleasure in life.

  “Well, in fact,” Brother Oliver said, treading delicately, “your husband doesn’t know we’re coming.”

  She looked surprised. “You didn’t call?”

  “I spoke with him on the phone, yes. But then I felt there was more to say and the phone wasn’t the best way to say it, so I took the chance on coming out.”

  Mrs. Flattery frowned and pondered; I could see the movement on the side of her face where she was gnawing her cheek. Then she raised her eyebrows and shook her head and skeptically said, “Well, I don’t know. If you think that’s the way to handle him…”

  “Handling” Daniel Flattery was obviously this woman’s career. She was speaking as a professional now, and she was dubious of our method. Still, there was nothing for us but to go through with it, and Brother Oliver said, “I’m just hoping that in a face-to-face meeting your husband and I will be better able to see one another’s point of view.”

  “You may be right,” she said, without conviction. “I’ll radio,” she said, and departed.

  “Brother Oliver,” I said, when we were alone, “I am losing faith in this journey.”

  “Never lose faith, Brother Benedict,” he told me. “We may lose battles, but we never lose faith and we never lose the war.”

  That sounded good but I doubted it meant anything, so rather than answer I spent the next few minutes looking at the Flatterys’ books. The far wall, which one saw most prominently on entering the room, was filled with Good Books obviously bought by the yard: a set of Dickens, a set of Twain, a set of Greek playwrights, another set of Dickens, a set of James Branch Cabell, a set of George Washington’s letters, another set of Dickens, and so on. The wall to the right was a veritable museum of recent trashy novels, all in book club edition but all with their dust jackets removed in the apparent hope that naked they would look older and more respectable. And the wall to the left was the no-nonsense bastion of a purposeful man: books on business accounting, on taxation, on real estate, books on inflation, on devaluation, on depression, books on politics, on economics, on sociology—and a biography of John Wayne.

  I was looking at the fourth wall—religion, auto repair, gardening and physical fitness—when Mrs. Flattery came back, looking disheveled but undaunted. “So you’ll stay for lunch,” she said, rather more forcefully than necessary, and I guessed her radio contact with her husband had been less than totally serene. He had more than likely objected to his wife’s having let us into his house, and she had more than likely informed him it was up to him to come back and do his own dirty work. At least, that was the little drama I invented for her current appearance and invitation.

  Brother Oliver bowed politely and gave her our warm thanks and told her we would be delighted to stay for lunch. She nodded briskly and said, “That’s settled, then. Dan won’t get back for an hour or so, you’ll have plenty of time. Come along now, I’m sure you’ll want to wash up.”

  * * *

  Her name was Eileen. She was Daniel Flattery’s daughter, she was at the most thirty years of age, and she had a black-haired delicate-boned cool-eyed slender beauty that would undoubtedly keep on improving until she was well into her forties.

  She was introduced to us at lunch. So were her brothers, two stick figures named Frank and Hugh, and Hugh’s stick-figure wife Peggy. And so was a callow, shifty-eyed, weak-chinned, silly-moustached fop named Alfred Broyle who was introduced as “Eileen’s young man.” I wasn’t surprised to note the girl’s lips tighten with annoyance at that description; of course he wasn’t her young man.

  These five, with Mrs. Flattery and Brother Oliver and myself, made up the luncheon party on the glass-enclosed slate-floored back porch. I had expected servants, but Mrs. Flattery and Eileen served the meal, while the unmarried son, Frank, was dispatched later for extra or forgotten items.

  Mrs. Flattery asked Brother Oliver to say grace, which he did; I rather liked the way Eileen’s full black hair lay across her cheekbone when she bowed her head. Brother Oliver prayed:

  “Almighty God, bless we pray this repast that has been prepared for the stranger as well as for family and friends. Bless the householder who has made it possible and keep him safe upon the bosom of Your ocean. Bless, we supplicate Thee, those who dwell in this house and safeguard them always, that they may never be forced naked from their shelter into the coldness of the outer world. Protect all Your children, we beseech Thee, and provide them with the food and shelter they must have. For this feast before us, we are grateful to Thee.”

  I thought all that a bit heavy-handed, but Brother Oliver had a
pparently decided to batter away at Mrs. Flattery’s indifference no matter how Herculean the task. As to the lunch being a feast, that was hardly any overstatement at all. There were cold roast beef, cold ham and cold chicken, potato salad, macaroni salad and coleslaw, white bread and pumpernickel, coffee, tea, milk and beer. We sat at a long glass-topped table with chrome legs—wasn’t Eileen’s skirt rather short for this time of year?—and spent the first five minutes or so in happy confusion, passing trays and condiments back and forth. The sons and Brother Oliver and Mrs. Flattery all constructed great tottering sandwiches while the rest of us eschewed bread—well, I did chew some pumpernickel—and ate mostly with knife and fork.

  I do drink wine and beer sometimes in the monastery, but I thought it better today, so far from home and so surrounded by new experiences—eating at a table with women for the first time in ten years, for instance—to limit myself to tea. Brother Oliver, however, drained his beer glass several times with obvious enjoyment.

  I was on the side of the table facing the windows and the short-cropped lawn with its few large old trees and the gray waters of the Bay beyond. That wind-ruffled water looked cold, and I found myself wondering what might happen if, despite Brother Oliver’s recently expressed wishes on the subject, something of a fatal nature were to happen out there to Daniel Flattery. Would his wife or these sons be easier to deal with?

  I was skating close to the precincts of sin all at once, coming very near to desiring the death of another human being. I averted my gaze from the Bay, trying to distract my thoughts. Glancing obliquely through the glass top of the table I spied again Eileen Flattery’s gleaming knees and the shadowed slopes curving away from them. I quickly looked at the remains of the cold ham.

  Conversations proceeded around me. Brother Oliver was giving the history and physical description of our monastery to Mrs. Flattery, who kept interrupting him to urge bread or mustard or coleslaw on this or that guest. The sons discussed professional football. I’m a fan of the Jets myself, and thanks to Brother Mallory I know more than I might have about professional football, but the sons seemed uninterested in expanding their discussion group and so I remained silent, as did Peggy, the wife of Hugh. And Eileen was having a bitter argument with Alfred Broyle.