Brothers Keepers

Thirteen

By Monday afternoon I was out of bed, though very weak what with one thing and another, and I spent the next few hours on the beach, soaking up sun through a thick smear of suntan lotion, applied by Eileen. That, plus a great quantity of food, made me feel almost my old self by evening, when the four of us got into the Pinto — Eileen and I crowding snugly together into the back, while Neal drove and Sheila gave expert criticism — and we traveled fifteen miles to another beach house currently occupied by well-off Long Island Irish: Dennis Paddock, Kathleen Cadaver, Xavier and Peg Latteral, plus some others who came later and whose names I didn’t catch.

These people had all gone to the same parochial schools together along Long Island’s south shore, the same Catholic high schools, even the same Catholic colleges: Fordham and Catholic University. Their parents had also grown up together in the same settings, and for some of them the linkages extended back to grandparents. The fathers were in construction or real estate or banking, and the sons were in advertising or law or the communications media. This was the generation which had severed the last of its ties with its heritage — they were only sentimentally Irish and only nominally religious — and I had been cautioned on the way over not to mention the fact that I was, or had been (the confusion on that score wasn’t as yet settled), a monk. I had promised to say nothing about it.

In fact I said very little at all. Like most groups of people whose relationships extend back nearly to the cradle, this bunch spent most of the evening talking about those of their friends who had been so incautious as not to be present. There must have been some ears burning in Patchogue and Islip that night. I sat quietly in the corner amid the talk, sipping rum-and-something-sweet while rebuilding my strength and meditating on the similarities and differences between a secular social grouping like this and the more cohesive and purposeful grouping at the monastery. We monks did our own backbiting, of course, but it seemed to me a less important part of our relationship there than it was of the social structure here. If this entire group was ever gathered together into one spot, for instance, with no absent friends to discuss, what on earth would they find to talk about?

(I asked Eileen that question eventually — not that night — and she answered, “Dead people.”)

I was not the first monk to leave in the Crispinite Order’s two-hundred-year history, but I was the only one in my experience and I had no idea how to think about it from the group’s point of view. I tried to visualize one of the others leaving — Flavian, say, or Silas — and guess what my reaction would be, but it was impossible. Even if I surmounted the difficulty that I couldn’t visualize either of those two, nor any of the others, leaving the monastery, I was still left with the problem that my reaction would be different depending which brother it was who had chosen to depart.

Well, I was the one who had departed, so what would the others think and say about me? Fifteen bewildered faces passed across my imagination, but no words issued from any of those open mouths, nor could I guess at any emotions deeper than or subsequent to the initial surprise.

Perhaps that was partly because my own reaction hadn’t yet moved beyond bewilderment. In fact, it seemed to me as though no moment of decision had ever actually been reached, and yet somehow here I was on the other side of it. When had I decided I no longer had a religious vocation? When had I come to the conclusion that I could make my peace with God outside the monastery walls? When had I chosen to fling myself back into the river of the world?

I didn’t know. But here I was, in over my head.

My only other reaction to myself, beyond bewilderment, was a great fluttery nervousness. Whenever I tried to see more than five minutes into the future — what I would do, where I would live, how I would earn my daily bread, what would eventually happen between me and Eileen — I began at once to twitch and itch, fidget and scratch, gulp a lot and feel very queasy in the stomach. My solution to that was to avoid thought of the future as much as possible, and I quickly learned that the ever-present rum drinks were a considerable help in that direction. And if a thought of the morrow did from time to time infiltrate through my rum defenses, the rum at least helped to lessen the resultant jitters.

It also helped me to think more calmly about Eileen. The ice had been broken between us, so to speak, and I had learned that swimming was not the only facility that remained undimmed in its details over a decade, but when I was utterly sober and in my right mind — or my usual mind — I still felt embarrassed at the lechery of my thoughts when I looked at her. A little rum helped me to relax and accept the fact that, for instance, in the back seat of the Pinto I really did want to stroke her leg. And other things of that sort.

What a nervous time the morning was! But it wasn’t considered acceptable to start drinking rum until lunchtime, so I distracted myself with as much activity as possible: swimming, talking, shopping, going for drives. And my tendency was to avoid Eileen until I’d had a little something to calm me down.

I was beginning to answer now when people said, “Charlie.” Mostly I said, “Huh?” And there were always, it seemed, plenty of people around. The group I’d met Monday night continued to be a part of our landscape, a fluctuating informal grouping that tended to get together after lunch and more or less stay together until late at night. Joining them on Eileen’s visa, I accompanied them swimming at Luquillo Beach, gambling in San Juan and drinking at one or another of their rented houses. The days were far more full — and yet emptier — than in my previous life in the monastery, and I was a neophyte, learning this vocation. I kept quiet, watched and listened, and allowed the group consensus to determine my course.

Tuesday night I spent three hours at the crap table, betting against the shooter, and won two hundred seventy dollars. Eileen wouldn’t take the money.

Wednesday morning Sheila Foney spent an hour on the beach telling me why a Cancer like me was just perfect with a Scorpio like Eileen. Then she told me more about Kenny Bone than I could possibly have wanted to know, including sexual things that were certainly none of my business and even less any of hers. In her version, Kenny Bone emerged as something of a cross between Brendan Behan and Reinhard Heydrich, but with neither Behan’s talent nor Heydrich’s efficiency.

One interesting fact did emerge from that talk: Kenny Bone had not been a member of this social grouping. “You’re certainly better than the first guy she came back with,” was the remark by Sheila that gave me the hint. When I questioned her further, it developed that Eileen had always been slightly out of phase with the rest of the group, “even in grammar school.” She had tended throughout childhood to find her friends elsewhere, in the local public schools, and she’d confirmed this habit later by not going to any of the usual colleges but to Antioch, which Sheila for some reason apparently thought of as Jewish.

Kenny Bone had been one of the results of Antioch. As with her public high school sweethearts, it had been obvious to her in-group friends at once that the relationship could only end badly. “From the time she was twelve,” Sheila said, with strict satisfaction in her voice, “she’s been going away and going away, and she always comes back. Usually with her tail between her legs.”

I doubted that last part; it seemed to me Eileen’s pride would keep her from showing any emotional reaction to failure. But I had to consider Sheila’s own emotional reactions in judging her choice of words. Her own well-guarded pain at these perpetual snubs from Eileen was combined with and shielded by her no doubt sincere belief that the in-group was the best place to be, with the best possible friends, the best possible values, enjoying the best possible times together. Eileen was both an affront and an enigma to Sheila, and no doubt to all the others as well.

Sheila didn’t say so, but the impression I had of her opinion of me — and by extension the group’s opinion, presumably — was that I was not to be taken seriously, since no one outside the group was ever taken seriously, but that I was certainly a step up from Kenny Bone and undoubtedly a therapeutic interval for Eileen until she was ready to settle down at long last with one of the currently available group males. (These people were far enough from their heritage for divorce to be as common among them as in the external society.)

I also learned from this talk that Eileen had not been exclusively alone during her stay down here. In fact, she’d been accompanied by a man until just the day before I’d arrived — not the infamous Alfred Broyle, but somebody named Malcolm Callaban, “a swell guy in television news in the city.” Some sort of raging argument had taken place, lasting the final three days of Callaban’s stay on the island, until he had at last departed in a fury, flying back to New York the afternoon before I showed up. Eileen’s temper was apparently as famous with the group as her failed attempts to live away from them, though I had to say I hadn’t as yet seen it. I would have asked for more detail — was she a screamer, a thrower, a silent seether, an insidious revenger — but Eileen herself joined us at that point, followed by lunch, and the subject was dropped.

“Hey, Charlie, you want a drink?”

“Soon as I finish this one.”

We were alone in El Yunque, Eileen and I, looking at the greenery from the tower there, when next I brought up the subject of the monastery and the sale to Dimp. I hadn’t really thought much about that since coming to this island, though it was certainly urgent enough, with barely a week to go before the sale would be final and all hope gone. But my own chaotic emotional life had driven the question from my mind, and when it had strayed across my consciousness from time to time I’d determinedly avoided it, feeling helpless. The El Yunque tower, though, brought it all back, in a manner too insistent to ignore.

El Yunque is a rain forest in the mountains of Puerto Rico, part of which has been semicivilized by the National Park Service into the Caribbean National Forest (Luquillo Division). One drives south from the main road, and after a mile of ordinary flat scenery the road begins to climb and curve and zigzag and corkscrew up the steep mountain sides into the rain forest. Much of the road is kept in permanent damp twilight by huge overhanging ferns, and eerie trees crowd the blacktop from both sides, their roots coiled above the ground like gray snakes. Everywhere the trees and vines and shrubs are all snarled together like one of Brother Urban’s illuminated manuscripts — twice on the drive up I thought I read “LINDY LANDS” in the vegetation — and from time to time we’d passed narrow, tiny, furious waterfalls rushing down over slick dark boulders.

And five miles in, rounding yet another climbing V-turn, one comes abruptly on the tower. Playful, silent, silly, unnamed, virtually useless, it stands on a rare flat spot in the forest, a round blue-gray tower about forty feet high, topped by a crenellated Camelot fortress wall. There’s nothing around it but the jungle and a smallish parking area, and nothing inside it but a circular staircase to the top, from which it is possible on a clear day to see as far as the Virgin Islands.

Though not today. A notice near the tower entrance had told us that when the tree leaves on the mountainside rising up across the road were all turned over, revealing their pale gray-green undersides, there would soon be rain, and when we reached the top of the tower the leaves were indeed all doing their mysterious flip-flop, looking as though that one mountain out of all the mountains here had been faded by the sun. Southward, thick black clouds like great pillows were humped around the mountaintops, and a damp mildew smell was in the air. To the north and east, the tangled valleys tumbled away, stopping at a narrow tan border of beach before the flat blue ocean.

But it was the tower that held my attention; reminiscent of so many other towers and turrets and castles and yet uniquely and ridiculously itself, in the wrong place and inexplicable and yet calm about its role in the scheme of things. Insistent and rather friendly and faintly comical, how could it not have reminded me of my monastery?

“This reminds me of the monastery,” I said.

“Then let’s leave,” Eileen said. She took my hand and started for the steps.

“No, wait.” I tugged back, keeping her from descending, and the look she gave me was worried and impatient and annoyed. I said, “I want to talk about it.”

Annoyance became dominant. “That’s the past, Charlie. Do I talk about Kenny Bone?”

“But they’re still in trouble, and there isn’t much—”

“All right,” she interrupted. Withdrawing her hand from mine, she leaned her back against a merlon — a crenellated parapet consists of alternating crenels and merlons — and said, “You want to talk about that place, we’ll talk.”

Her face was closing against me; was this the beginning of the famous temper? Nevertheless, I had no choice but to push ahead, and so I did. “They’re in trouble,” I said.

“Uh huh.” The very neutrality of it was hostile.

“If something doesn’t happen by the first of the year,” I said, “there won’t be any hope left at all. The sale will go through, the building will be torn down, and we’ll — they’ll have to move.”

“Where to?”

It seemed a strange question, under the circumstances, and even stranger in its delivery, flung out at me like a challenge. I said, “I don’t know. The Dimp people are trying to find a place, but all they’re thinking of is storage, not living. Some defunct college upstate, places like that.”

“Did you go look at it?”

“At what? The college? No, we just heard about it, that’s all. That was enough.”

“It doesn’t matter, though, does it,” she said. “Dimp could find the greatest place in the world, but that isn’t the point.”

“That’s right,” I said, eager to find her so unexpectedly on my side.

“They could offer you the Waldorf-Astoria, you still wouldn’t want it.”

I didn’t correct her use of pronouns. “They’re happy where they are,” I said. “And the building itself—”

“Fuck the building, Charlie,” she said.

“Ah,” I said. “People sure do talk different to you when you wear shirt and trousers, don’t they?”

“The point is,” she said, sounding like a hanging judge instructing the jury, “and the only point is, those precious monks of yours don’t want to move.”

“Well, there’s this philosophical viewpoint they have about Travel, the whole question of—”

“They don’t want to move.”

I hesitated. Explain at length? No, the moment seemed wrong for that. “Yes,” I said.

“Big deal,” she said.

“What?”

“Why not move?” she said. “A change of pace every once in a while is good for everybody. Get up and get out, blow the cobwebs out of your brain, get a new perspective on life. What’s such a big deal about this bunch of monks, that they can’t be moved? What are they, breakable?”

“They’re a community,” I said, “with their own view of life, and they ought to be permitted their own destiny. Surely the world can make a place for alternate points of view.”

“Upstate,” she said. “In that defunct college.”

“Where they are,” I insisted. “It’s their setting, it’s been their setting for two hundred years, they belong—”

“It’s time they moved,” she announced. “It’s the wrong place for them, midtown Manhattan. It’s a ridiculous idea to begin with.”

“It’s their right to be there.”

“But it isn’t. My father has property rights, they’re perfectly legal and honorable—”

“They are not.”

She lowered her brows at me. “Don’t you play holier-than-thou with me, Brother Benedict.”

“I’m not. I’m just telling you your father does not have legal and honorable property rights. There’s nothing legal or honorable about it at all.”

“Of course there is. The lease is up and—”

“The lease was stolen from us,” I said. I hadn’t intended to get into this — one doesn’t like to accuse one’s girl’s relatives of being thieves and arsonists — but this callous point of view she was putting forth was becoming annoying. “And when we found a copy of it,” I went on, “your brother Frank set fire to it.”

She looked at me as though I’d just announced I could leap from this tower and fly. “Are you crazy? Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?”

“I certainly do,” I said. “There’s a clause in the lease that gives the monastery the exclusive right to renew, and we’ve been cheated of that right because our copy of the lease disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and there’s no copy of it on file with the County Clerk, and when we found an unofficial copy that one of the other Abbots had made your brother came in dressed up like a monk and burned it. I saw him.”

“My brother?” She was still staring at me as though I’d just grown a second nose.

“Your brother Frank,” I said.

“That’s such a silly thing to say, I can’t even think about it.” She shook her head to show me how bewildered she was, and spread her hands out. “Why would you even say such a thing?”

“Because it’s true.”

“My brother Frank would never do — How would he even know you had a copy?”

“They bugged the monastery.”

She gave me a flat look. “You are crazy,” she said.

I said, “They put a microphone in Brother Oliver’s office, and they had their equipment in a florist’s truck parked out front. When I found the microphone I went out there and opened the back of the truck and your friend Alfred Broyle was in there. He punched me in the nose.”

She had been shaking her head all the way through that recital, and now she said, “I don’t see what you expect to gain. Do you think the story’s so wild I won’t believe you could make it up? My brother Frank, now Alfred, there’s—” Then she stopped, and frowned, and looked away toward the upside-down leaves.

“Everything I’ve told you—”

“Shut up a minute.” She was thinking hard. “Florist truck,” she said, and looked at me again. “What was the name of the florist?”

“How would I know? It was just a florist truck, it was parked outside all the time, it finally occurred to me—”

“You must have looked at it,” she said. “You saw the word florist. What else did it say?”

“What else?” I did some looking away myself, and some frowning, trying to picture that truck in my memory. Light blue, a badly done painting of flowers in a white vase, and a name followed by the word florist. “I think it started with a C,” I said. “What difference does it make?”

“A C? You’re sure?”

“No, I’m not, I — Wait a minute. Grynn! That was it, Grynn’s Florists!”

She was giving me calculated looks. “If only I could be sure of you,” she said.

“Sure of me about what?”

“About whether or not you knew that Alfred worked for Grynn’s. Come on,” she said, and turned away.

The first raindrops, huge and cool, splashed about us. “Come where,” I said.

“Back to the house. I’m going to call my dear father.”

When I’d changed from my wet clothing into a dry bathing suit and returned to the living room Eileen was already on the phone. Back at the tower the promised rain had suddenly descended as though someone had slit open the black bellies of the clouds with a sword, so that by the time we’d hurried down the circular staircase to ground level the world was made entirely of water. It was like being in a play tower in a fish tank. Running from there to the car, whose windows we’d left open, drenched us to the skin and possibly to the bone, and how Eileen managed to see well enough to drive us away from there I still don’t know. Though the rain stopped two miles later — or perhaps we’d merely traveled beyond its edge — the air remained humid and we remained sodden, and I changed at once upon reaching the house.

But not Eileen. Urgency had driven her to the telephone, and she was sitting there now with her wet hair lank around her head and her wet clothing plastered to her slender body as she repeated my story to somebody at the other end of the line, presumably her father.

Most of it had already been told, and she was down to the part about the florist’s truck and the Alfred Broyle nose-punch. She seemed to be giving a mostly fair and neutral account, but I didn’t like the way she kept inserting remarks such as “He says,” and “According to him.” I wished I’d been here to listen to it all from the beginning.

At the end of her recital she said one word — “Well?” — and then sat back to listen, flashing me a sharp but enigmatic look and gesturing at me crossly to seat myself. I did, and watched her listening. With her wet hair molding her skull she looked younger, quicker, harder, more intelligent, less receptive. “No, it doesn’t,” she said, and went on listening. (Her father had most likely pointed out that the activities described didn’t “sound like” normal doings of the Flattery family.)

I could faintly hear the crackle of the voice speaking into Eileen’s ear. What was he saying? Would he deny everything? Would she believe him?

“That isn’t the point,” she said. I frowned, watching her, unable to guess what had been said to cause that response. Then she said, “I know I am. Nobody ever said I shouldn’t be.” The crackle went on, impassioned and impatient, and she interrupted it, saying, “You want me to come home right now? I’ll get a job.” Crackle, crackle crackle. She glanced at me, shook her head, looked away, and when next she spoke I felt she was as much describing the situation for my benefit as to continue the dialogue with her father. “Look, Daddy,” she said. “Maybe we are broke, I don’t know. This is the first I’ve heard of it.” Crackle. “No, let me talk for a minute.” Crackle. “I don’t care, I want to say this. If we’re broke somebody should have told me. And maybe it is a legitimate excuse, and I don’t know what right those damn monks have to be smack in the middle of mid-town either, and if we have to set fire to their papers and punch them in the nose then maybe we have to do it. What I want to know is, did we do it?”

There was silence now for quite a long time, and when the crackle started again it was lower and slower. And Eileen interrupted it: “You already said that, and I already agreed with you.” More crackling. “That’s a good point, I’ll ask him.” Crackle? “Of course he’s here,” she said calmly. “Hold on.” And without covering the mouthpiece she said, “My father says, if there was arson and assault and illegal bugging and all that, why didn’t anybody call the police?”

“Because we couldn’t prove it,” I said.

“Why not? You could identify Alfred, couldn’t you?”

“Yes, but I’m the only one who could. Nobody else saw him.”

“What about my brother? Didn’t somebody else see him?”

“Not his face,” I said.

She gave me a long calculating state. “Next,” she said, “you’ll tell me you were the one who found the microphone.”

Was I blushing guiltily? Why did I feel guilty, when I knew I was innocent? “Yes,” I said, and had trouble meeting her eye.

Into the phone she said, “Just a minute, Daddy,” and this time she did put her palm over the mouthpiece, to make our conversation private. She studied me, and she’d never looked more beautiful, but it was a very unhuman beauty. Her skin was thin and taut and almost blue over her cheekbones, and her eyes were so deep-set they seemed to be studying me separately from somewhere deep in the center of her head. I met her gaze — with difficulty — trying to look innocent and finally she said, “Is this whole thing a con job, Charlie?”

“No! Of course not, why would I — what would I gain, what’s in it — what—?”

“I can’t figure that out either,” she said. “What do you hope to get out of it?”

“Look,” I said. “I can’t prove anything, I wasn’t even going to talk about that part with you, I just wanted to know what you meant when you said you could help us and I got caught up in, in, in everything, and I don’t know where I am anymore.”

“My father says we need the money,” she told me. “When I said I could help, I meant I knew he was embarrassed about selling the monastery, he blustered with us and tried to justify himself, and I know how to handle him when he gets that way. But not if the family’s broke. I wouldn’t be able to talk him into changing his mind even if I wanted to, and why should I want to? If the family’s broke I’m broke. I don’t get any alimony from Kenny Bone, believe me.”

“But what if it’s dishonest?” I said. “What if the, the monks have the right to stay there, it’s in the lease, and they’re being cheated just so you can afford to go on hanging around with these, these, these people you’re hanging around with?”

“What’s the matter with these people?” She was really bridling at that.

“Nothing,” I said forcefully. “I think they’re all terrific.”

The phone had been crackling petulantly for a while now, like a mosquito locked in a medicine cabinet, and Eileen spoke abruptly and severely at it, saying, “Will you wait just one minute?”

I said, “Does he deny about that clause? Did you ask him about the clause?”

She ignored that. Palming the phone again, she said to me, “Now, what’s this about the people around here? They’ve treated you all right, haven’t they?”

“They’re fine people,” I said. Me and my big mouth. “And they don’t have anything to do with any of this. The point is—”

“The point is,” she said, “this doesn’t have anything to do with people punching one another and all this mystery movie nonsense about microphones and arson and all that silliness. You just think you’re better than we are.”

“No, I don’t, I—”

“You think we’re silly useless people who don’t have any reason to be alive, and you’re some sort of saint. A whole bunch of saints there on Park Avenue.”

Knowing that she was accusing me of attitudes toward her friends that she herself held — or why else was she constantly trying to get away from them? — didn’t help me a bit. “I never said I was a saint, or any of us was—”

She slammed the phone into its cradle, ending the call, and jumped to her feet. “You think you can shame me into helping you?”

“The clause!” I wailed, pointing at the phone. “You didn’t ask him about the clause!”

“Just look at yourself!” she challenged me. “Just how holy are you? You come down here like any con man, you jump into the sack with me, you try to turn me against my own family, turn me against my friends, and you’re the biggest fake of all!”

“I never tried to—”

But I was wasting my breath. Turning on her heel, she marched away into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her, shaking the house. And the click I heard an instant later was the lock.

I was still standing there, trying to figure out what words exactly I wanted to try speaking through that locked door, when the phone rang. I looked at it, looked at the door, and it rang again.

No, she wasn’t coming out. Not for me, not for a ringing phone, not for anything.

On the third ring I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Is my daughter there? Eileen, let me speak to Eileen.” It was a heavy and angry and yet hesitant voice.

I said, “I’m not sure, uh... Hold on. I’ll just—”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Is that the monk?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Just what the hell are you up to? You’re pretty goddam cute, aren’t you, attacking a man through his family.”

“I what?” I was so flabbergasted I couldn’t think of any answer at all.

“Do you call that Christian behavior?”

“Me!”

“Listen,” he said, “I never said I was a saint. I’m just a fella trying to make it in one world at a time. This Dwarfmann deal here, this could pull me out of a real hole.”

“The lease says—”

“Yeah, the lease,” he said. “Does the lease tell you where I get my interest payments? I got loans outstanding, I got earth-moving equipment, I got heavy construction equipment, all of that stuff has to get paid for. You think I go to Mack Truck, I go to Caterpillar, I pull seventy-two grand out of my pocket and I say, ‘Give me one of the big yellow things with the tires?’ You think that’s the way it works?”

“I have no idea how it—”

“No, you don’t, I know damn well you don’t. You hang around, you burn candles, you pray a lot, you got it made. Me, I’m financed up to my earlobes. I got major equipment, the interest alone costs me forty-one hundred dollars a month, I got no job to put them on. I default on the payments, they come take the stuff back, I lose the entire investment. And when another major job comes along, can I bid? Without equipment? Don’t make me laugh.”

“I’m not trying to make you—”

“Inflation’s wiping me out,” he said. “It isn’t enough I backed the wrong candidates all over Nassau County, there’s no mortgage money anywhere. Nobody’s building. You want me to tell you about trade unions?”

“No, I don’t think I—”

“No, that’s right. You don’t want to hear any of that shit. My red corpuscles are blowing up like firecrackers, I got a life expectancy of fifteen minutes, all you want is you should go sing Gregorian chants on Park Avenue. Why on Park Avenue?”

“We don’t sing Gregor—”

“WHY ON PARK AVENUE? WHAT IN THE NAME OF CHRIST ARE YOU DOING ON PARK AVENUE?”

“We were there first,” I said.

“Oh, my bleeding ass,” he said.

“I’m sorry about your financial problems,” I said. “I know you wouldn’t go to these extreme measures if it wasn’t—”

“Shut up,” he said, but he said it quietly, almost calmly.

“What?”

“You talk about extreme measures,” he said. “You’re turning my daughter against me.”

“No, I’m not. I—”

“Don’t tell me what you’re doing, you pasty-faced twit, you’re turning my goddam daughter against me!”

“You mean by telling her the truth?”

“Self-righteous son of a bitch.”

“I’ll tell Eileen you’re on the phone.”

“No,” he said, even more quietly and calmly than before. “Wait a minute. I want to make you a deal.”

“A deal?”

“What’s a construction business, right? It’s only been in the family three generations, so it goes under, so what? I got a piece of a wholesale liquor business, I’m not gonna starve, right?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “If you say so,” I said.

“So here’s the deal,” he said. “You tell my daughter you were lying.”

“I couldn’t possibly—”

“Hear me out,” he said. “My little girl is very important to me, and what I would most like to do is come break your arms and your legs. But that wouldn’t do me any good.”

“Me either.”

“I don’t care about you. Now, listen. You tell her you were lying, and you make damn sure she believes it. And then you go back to your goddam monastery, and you stay away from my daughter the rest of your life.”

“Mr. Flattery, I can’t—”

“You can listen. What you get in return is a copy of the lease.”

I was silent. There wasn’t a thing I could think of to say.

“With the option clause,” he said. “Before the first of the year.”

I went on being silent. There went on being nothing for me to say.

“Well? Is it a deal?”

The lady or the monastery. “Um,” I said.

“What?”

“I... I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know? You think you’re in love with her? You’re a monk!”

“I know what I am,” I said, although it wasn’t the strict truth.

“How long you think you’d stay with her? Or her with you?”

I looked at the closed bedroom door. “I don’t know,” I said. Particularly if the price for keeping her was the loss of the monastery.

(And the monastery? If the price of keeping that was the loss of Eileen?)

“It’s a good deal,” Flattery was saying, “better than you deserve. You gonna take it?”

“I’ll, uh, I’ll call you back,” I said, and hung up on his squawking voice. “Rum,” I said, in distraction, and went away to the kitchen.