Brothers Keepers Page 9

  Sleeves and eyebrows. “Granddaughter.”

  “Yes. If the club is torn down, Tim will have to go live with his granddaughter in Racine, Wisconsin.”

  S & E. “Women’s Lib.”

  “Thank you, Brothers,” Brother Oliver said, raising his hand to halt the flow of information. “I think that’s all we need to know about the Boffin Club.”

  Brother Dexter said, “You say Capitalists and Immigrants Trust holds the mortgage on the club?”

  Brother Clemence nodded. “That’s what Tim told Jerome, yes.”

  “So the bank,” said Brother Dexter, “has yet another reason to want this construction project to go forward. If the club is sold, the bank gets a full return on the mortgage. If it isn’t sold, but goes into bankruptcy, the bank gets only a percentage return on the dollar. Possibly only twenty or twenty-five percent.”

  Brother Oliver said, “I’m beginning to lose sight of the enemy here. At first I thought we were struggling against Dan Flattery. Then I thought it was Dwarfmann, or at least Dwarfmann’s company, or at least this man Snopes. Now you say the true villain in the piece is this bank.”

  “Not villain,” said Brother Dexter. “The bank isn’t doing anything illegal, or even morally wrong. The bank has investments, and is both legally and ethically required to safeguard those investments and bring in the best possible return for the shareholders. This is a perfectly ordinary business proposition, in which a new commercial building is put up. The bank’s interests are affected in several different ways, but there’s no conflict of interest.”

  “I wish I shared your objectivity, Brother,” Brother Oliver said. “But I keep feeling the weight of those slabs pressing down on the top of my head.”

  Brother Dexter offered us his thin cool smile. “I’ll grant you it’s unfortunate,” he said, “that we’re the toad beneath the harrow this time. But if we’re going to prevail in this situation, and I hope we are, I think it imperative we have the clearest possible picture of what’s going on.”

  I expected Brother Oliver to stumble on that toad-harrow thing, but apparently he knew his Kipling as well as his Dickens, because he simply nodded and said, “The clearest possible picture. How I’ve been looking forward to seeing it.” Turning back to Brother Clemence he said, “You and Brother Jerome have one building to go, don’t you? The one on the corner with the, uh, shop in it.”

  We all knew he meant the Buttock Boutique. There was a general clearing of throats, and then Brother Clemence said, “Well, yes. The tenant in there, the, uh, shop, they don’t want to be evicted any more than we do, but the landlord is once again very very happy to get out from under a financial headache.”

  Brother Jerome geared himself up toward speech in the usual way, and said, “Tell them about the rear end.”

  “Uhh, yes,” Brother Clemence said. “Jerome,” he quickly told us, “is referring to the back of the building. The situation is, once again, a little complex. The building was moved to that site in the eighteen-fifties.”

  “Moved there?” Brother Oliver expressed our general surprise. “That’s a very large building.”

  “That’s right. In fact, it was too large to move. As this place would be, for instance. Even if we were to find another site, the monastery wouldn’t survive being moved.”

  “Disassemble,” said Brother Jerome. His sleeve slid back down.

  Brother Clemence shook his head. “If this building were taken apart,” he said, “two-hundred-year-old stone walls, two-hundred-year-old beams, wooden floors, all the rest of it, there’d be so much crumbling and decay and destruction we’d never get it back together again.”

  “Please,” said Brother Oliver. “We were talking about the building with the, uh, shop in it.”

  “Yes.” Brother Clemence got back on the track, saying, “That building was originally northwest of here, in the area that became Central Park. It was one of the few buildings in that rectangle worth saving. A retired slave ship captain named Brinley Chansberger bought it from its original owner and had it moved on great log rollers over to its present location. But in the process, the rear wall was severely weakened, and several times in the latter half of the nineteenth century portions of floors collapsed, or windows abruptly fell out into the back garden, or half a dozen bricks would suddenly spurt out into the air for no reason. Chansberger spent much of his slave-trading fortune trying to repair the place, and when he died his heirs sold it to the city, who turned it into a firehouse.”

  Brother Oliver rested his elbow on the table and his forehead on his cupped hand. “I do believe,” he said, “these histories of yours are getting longer.”

  “There’s not much more to this one,” Brother Clemence promised. “The building was never very good as a firehouse. The city spent a lot of money trying to fix it up, adding their own municipal architecture gloss to Chansberger’s nautical alterations to a sort of basic townhouse original structure. Then, when in the late twenties a hook and ladder about to race out in response to a fire alarm suddenly fell through the floor into the basement instead, the city put the place up for auction. A combine consisting mostly of uncles and cousins of City Council members bought the place on the cheap, and there’ve been any number of tenants in the fifty years since. But the building still isn’t structurally sound, and hasn’t been for a hundred and twenty-five years. Inside it now, Jerome tells me, it’s a mishmash of styles and architectural monstrosities, with support walls all over the place and bricked-up doorways here and there, and the general feeling is that political influence is the only thing keeping the building from simply falling down and dying. Reputable tenants won’t go near the place, so it winds up renting to tenants like the, uh, shop. Which lowers the tone of the entire area, of course. So that not only do the owners want to sell, but many other owners in this neighborhood favor the Dwarfmann plan if only because it will rid the section of that eyesore.”

  “And of us,” Brother Oliver pointed out.

  Brother Clemence spread his hands, saying, “The people around here say, you can’t make omelets without breaking eggs.”

  “I believe I’ve heard that,” Brother Oliver said. “Does that finish Brother Jerome’s presentation?”

  “Yes, it does,” Brother Clemence said.

  “I have something,” Brother Hilarius said. “Nothing definite, just a sort of preliminary report.”

  We all looked at him. Brother Oliver said, “Yes?”

  “It’s about this question of getting ourselves designated a landmark,” Brother Hilarius said. “I’ve done some phoning, but there’s nothing conclusive yet.”

  Brother Oliver said, “Just what’s the advantage of becoming a landmark?”

  “If we can get the designation,” Brother Hilarius said, “that would effectively stop the bulldozer.”

  We all perked up at that. Brother Oliver said, “Is that what they mean by a landmark? We couldn’t be torn down?”

  “That’s right.”

  Brother Clemence made an impatient gesture, saying, “Well, what do you think? Is there a chance?”

  “I don’t really have that much to report yet,” Brother Hilarius said. “It takes time to find the right person in the city bureaucracy. But I think I have the right one now, and I’m supposed to call back on Monday.”

  Brother Oliver said, “Well, why shouldn’t we be a landmark? We’re two hundred years old, we’re certainly unique from an architectural point of view, and we’re a religious order.”

  “I’d love it to be that easy,” Brother Dexter said, “but somehow I don’t believe it.”

  Brother Hilarius nodded. “The people I’ve talked to so far haven’t been very encouraging,” he said. “A building’s use, for a monastery or a hospital or whatever, has nothing to do with whether or not it gets designated a landmark. And I’m told the Landmarks Commission shies away from designating any building that’s already scheduled to be demolished. Apparently there are legal problems involved.”


  “But you don’t know for sure yet,” Brother Oliver said. “You’ll find out on Monday.”

  “I’ll make more phone calls on Monday,” Brother Hilarius said. “And I’ll let you know what happens.”

  “Fine. I think that’s very encouraging.” Brother Oliver looked around. “Is there anything else?”

  There was silence. We all looked at one another, and then back at Brother Oliver, who said, “In that case. I’ll—”

  Brother Jerome cleared his throat, with window-rattling force. He hiked his sleeves up three or four times, he stamped his feet under the table to be absolutely certain they were flat on the floor, he lowered his eyebrows halfway down his cheeks, he gave himself a side-swiping punch across the nose, and he said, “I don’t want to move.”

  We had all become geared up for a rather more apocalyptic statement. As the rest of us gazed at Brother Jerome in astonishment, Brother Clemence patted his elbow—his sleeve had slid down over it again—and said, “I know you don’t, Jerome. This is our environment. We need this the way fish need water. We’ll do everything we can to save the monastery.”

  “Prayer,” said Brother Jerome.

  “We are praying,” Brother Clemence said. “Every one of us.”

  “Everybody,” said Brother Jerome.

  Brother Clemence turned to look at Brother Oliver, who had been listening with a pensive frown and who now said, “I agree, Brother Jerome. We’ve tried to keep this to ourselves, to not disturb the others, and we just can’t do it. We’ll have to tell them, if only so they can add their prayers to ours.”

  “I agree,” said Brother Clemence, and the rest of us nodded our approval.

  “Tomorrow morning,” Brother Oliver said. “After Mass.” He gave us all a somber look, and his gaze stopped at me. “Brother Benedict,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “You’ll be getting the Sunday paper tonight?”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Don’t find anything else,” he said. “If you can possibly help it.”

  Six

  But I did find something else. Or that is, she found me. But before that I went to confession, with Father Banzolini. I was far more flustered than usual when I entered the confessional, and got off at once on the wrong foot—or the wrong knee—by saying, “Bless me, Father, for I think I’ve fallen in love.”

  “What?” Never had I heard him so irritated, never, and Father Banzolini was an absolute opera of irritation.

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.” And I started again, doing it right this time: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been three days since my last confession.”

  “And in three days you’ve managed to fall in love?”

  “Ahhh.”

  “Sexually in love?”

  “Ohhhh.”

  “With that girl on television?”

  “What? Oh, her.”

  “Fickle in your affections, eh, Brother Benedict? Well, you might as well tell me about it.”

  So I told him about it. He already knew about the threatened destruction, so I started my story with the onset of my Traveling, the circumstances of my meeting with Eileen Flattery Bone, and the effect on my brain—waking and sleeping—ever since. His little breathing sounds of exasperation and impatience faded away as I went on, and at the end he was unusually soft-voiced and even-tempered. “Brother Benedict,” he said, “I believe you are suffering from what has been called culture shock. I did an article on it once for a missionary magazine.”

  “I didn’t know you were a writer, Father Banzolini.”

  “In a modest way,” he said modestly.

  “I’d like to read something of yours.”

  “I’ll bring around some tearsheets,” he said, in an offhand way. “But to get back to culture shock. It happens to some people when they are suddenly thrust out of the culture, the environment, that they know and in which they are comfortable. There were volunteers in the Peace Corps, for instance, who underwent culture shock when suddenly flown to some remote Central American village, where all at once everything was different. Right down to the basics, the attitudes about food and sex and dead bodies. Some people just cease to function, they become catatonic. Others lose touch with reality, they try to force reality to conform with their preconceptions about what society should be like. There are a thousand kinds of symptoms, but the cause is always the same. Culture shock.”

  I had the feeling I needn’t read Father Banzolini’s article on the subject, that I’d just heard his article on the subject. “That’s very interesting,” I said.

  “It’s a problem in the missionary field, as you can guess,” he said. “And I believe it’s what happened to you, Brother Benedict. You had become so settled in your way of life inside these walls in the last ten years that you couldn’t take a sudden transfer to a totally different environment. In the language of the street, it shook you up.”

  “Culture shock.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “These feelings you have toward this girl are certainly real, but they’re nowhere near as specific as you seem to think. It could have been any girl, any flesh-and-blood girl that you would meet and talk to in the middle of a brand-new environment. We already know from your television watching, Brother Benedict, that celibacy has not entirely quieted your sexual nature.”

  “Mm.”

  “In the grip of culture shock,” he went on, “you struggled for something familiar, toward which you could give a familiar reaction. The girl was it. You reacted to her as though she were something seen on a television set.”

  Hardly. But you don’t argue with your priest in confession. “That’s very interesting,” I said. Which wasn’t a lie. He might have been as wrong as Martin Luther, but he was interesting.

  “You asked, a moment ago,” he said, “whether your dreams could be considered sinful. Normally I would answer that the dream itself must be regarded as neutral, but that your reaction to the dream might constitute a sin. If, for instance, you dreamed of committing a murder, the dream would not be sinful, but if on awakening you relished the thought of having murdered that particular person, the reaction would be a definite sin.”

  “Well, it wasn’t murder,” I said, “but I guess it was a sin.”

  “You’re rushing ahead,” he cautioned me. “I said normally I would answer that way. But in truth, Brother Benedict, I believe in this case everything has been a dream to you, from the moment you started Traveling. A victim of culture shock is no more guilty of his thoughts and actions than is a victim of schizophrenia. In fact, I did an article once on moral culpability as it is affected by mental disorder. I could bring you the tear sheets, if you like.”

  “I’d like that very much,” I said. I was utterly astounded: the depths one finds in the unlikeliest people!

  “I’ll bring it next time,” he said. “As to your current problem, I think you should ask Brother Oliver not to take you along on any more expeditions he might make.”

  I surprised myself with my reaction to that. I should have been delighted; I should have been relieved to have at last a legitimate excuse to stop all this Traveling. But I wasn’t delighted, and I wasn’t relieved. Quite the reverse—a sinking feeling filled me, a sudden great sense of loss, as though something important, vital, had been taken away from me.

  So I really was suffering from culture shock. And it was being nipped just in the nick of time. “Yes, Father,” I said. “I definitely will.” One or two more excursions outside, and I might very well have lost my Call.

  Father Banzolini said, “And until the effects of your recent Traveling wear off, I don’t think you should worry too much about any stray thoughts that might meander through your head. At this point, you aren’t entirely responsible.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, Father,” I said.

  * * *

  One Our Father and one Hail Mary! I felt almost guilty as I scampered through my penance, as though I ha
d somehow sneakily put one over on Father Banzolini and were now wallowing in the rewards of that slyness.

  But I guess I’m too shallow to be depressed for long. By the time I’d rapidly recited my prayers and was heading up the aisle and out of the chapel I was no longer bowed down by either of my guilts. (I did have two to dwell on, had I the character to do so. First, there was my shameless toadying of Father Banzolini, resulting in the lightest penance of my penitential career. And second, there was the sense of loss I’d experienced and kept secret to myself when he’d told me I should Travel no more.) Not only was I unbowed by this double evidence of my own worthlessness, I actually gloried in them both. The penny-ante penance, it seemed to me, made up for a lot of heavyweight penances I hadn’t deserved. And there was a kind of exhilaration in the thought that Travel was not only philosophically wrong for me but was actually dangerous to my mental health. There was a titillation in the idea of Travel now that was probably very like the heroin addict’s view of his drug. Dangerous, but exciting, and finally exciting because it is dangerous.

  Ah, well; my fling with Travel was over. I was to be reduced again to a bearable level of addiction, being my weekly sojourn for the Sunday Times.

  Meaning now. Off I went to the office for the necessary sixty cents and permission to leave the monastery. Brother Eli was on duty at the desk, surrounded by the shavings from his whittling. Brother Eli, a brooding slender longnecked young man in his late twenties, had after an apparently normal California childhood deserted from the United States Army in Vietnam. He had Traveled extensively incognito through Asia, and along the way had picked up a skill in woodcarving with which he claimed to have supported himself for three years in southeast Asia. Returning unofficially to this country he had presented himself at our gates two years ago, saying he had heard of us in a lamasery and that his own experience of Travel agreed with our philosophical stance. He had asked us if we had any objection to a wanted fugitive joining our number. Brother Oliver had assured him the laws of Man, being transitory, contradictory and invariably in error, meant much less to us than the laws of God, and so this young man had given up the name under which his government thought of him as a felon and had become Brother Eli, a woodcarver.