Brothers Keepers

Fourteen

“And a very merry Christmas to you,” said a female voice, and I opened rum-bleary eyes to see Sheila Foney sitting on the coffee table next to me, holding a glass of creamy foam out in my direction.

I gestured several of my pudgy right hands toward the glass. “What’s that?”

“The cure,” she said. “Can you sit up and take nourishment?”

“I don’t know.”

Yesterday, after the fight with Eileen and the phone conversation with her father, I had done a certain amount of rum drinking. After Eileen suddenly burst out of the bedroom and out of the house and into the Pinto and away from here I did some more rum drinking. Then Sheila and Neal had come back from wherever they’d been, received a blurry headline from me about the fight — I’d offered no details, though they’d both encouraged me — and they’d taken me more or less under their combined wing. A Christmas Eve party was scheduled for the evening over at the Latterals’ place, and they’d urged me to attend it with them, but I hadn’t wanted to go anywhere without Eileen. Besides, what if I went out to a party and she came back here to make up? So I’d stayed home, with the rum bottle, and I’d done a lot of indiscriminate meditation, some of which had left tracks in my brain.

And on what had I dwelt? Christmas in the tropics, for one thing, beginning with the standard reaction of the northeasterner that a snowless Christmas amid warmth and palm trees was somehow “wrong,” followed by the sudden realization that palm trees were an almost inevitable part of all manger scenes, that there had been no snow in Bethlehem, and that the first Christmas of all had taken place in at least a semi-tropical setting.

I had also brooded on the choice I’d been given between saving the monastery and keeping Eileen, and on the general question of secular love, and on the Church’s ambiguous position in re fornication. (Married sex is sanctified and adulterous sex is condemned, but that leaves much of the world’s sex in Limbo. Eileen, for instance, had never been married in the Church and was not at this point married either in or out of it, so what we’d been doing was morally neutral, though most priests would have lowered their eyebrows at the idea of it.)

Meditation under the influence of rum tends to be more wide-ranging but less substantive than meditation taken straight. Aside from the above matters, I had brooded on several lesser topics from time to time, until finally I had staggered into the living room and onto this couch, not wanting to use the bed before having peacefully concluded the argument with Eileen.

Who had not come home before I’d faded out, my last remembered thoughts having been on the comparative textures of glass and wicker. Was she home now? Sitting up, which activated a sudden violent headache, I said, “Ow! Is Eileen back?”

“Not yet.”

What an incredible headache. “Ow!” I said again, and clutched my temples. “Do we have any aspirin?”

She held out the hand not holding the glass of foam, and two white pills were in the palm.

“Ah,” I said, and made the mistake of nodding. Then I made the mistake of squinting. “You’ve seen these symptoms before,” I suggested.

“It’s a regular epidemic. Here. Drink them down with this.”

I took the aspirin gladly, the glass of foam more dubiously. “What’s in it?”

“Drink.”

So I drank. Somewhere inside the foam was a sweet liquid with tastes that might have been milk, and egg, and sugar, and... rum? No. Impossible.

“Drink it all.”

I gasped for breath, then drained the glass. “Gaaaa,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” Taking the glass from me and getting to her feet as she said, “You still want the recipe?”

“Not even a little bit,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” Eileen said.

I was lying on the beach in front of the house, absorbing sun. Opening my eyes, shielding them with both hands, I saw Eileen seated beside me, looking troubled and contrite.

“Hello,” I said.

“I couldn’t handle it,” she said, “so I picked a fight.”

“That’s all right,” I said.

She gave me a hesitant smile. “Can we start over?”

“Sure. You couldn’t handle what?”

“The whole thing about you and my father.” She turned away and looked out at sea, letting sand run through her fingers. “I just can’t deal with that,” she said.

I sat up. It was late afternoon now, I had done much eating and much resting and I was quite recovered from last night, thank you. What I wasn’t recovered from was Eileen. Reaching out to touch her leg, I said, “What can’t you deal with? Tell me about it.”

She looked at me, upset and intense, then turned quickly away again. “You want me to choose between you and my father.”

“No, I don’t. I really don’t.”

“You really do.” When she faced me again, I could see from the skin around her eyes that she’d been doing a lot of crying. “You say he’s lying and he says you’re lying, and I have to choose which one of you I believe.”

Which was perfectly true, of course, so what could I say? Nothing. That’s what I said.

“How can I make a choice like that?”

“Maybe you can’t,” I said.

She turned away again, releasing me from her staring eyes, and said, “I don’t know who’s right or wrong about that monastery, I don’t know if they should be allowed to stay or forced to go or what should happen. All I know is—” And she looked at me again, and reached out to clutch my hand, “—it has to be without us. If we’re going to make anything of us, Charlie and Eileen, you and me, we have to stay away from it.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“It can’t be part of our lives,” she said.

“You’re right,” I said.

But now the monastery was filling my thoughts. If I were there at this instant, at this instant, at this instant, what would I be doing, what would the others be doing, what would be happening? The sound of Brother Eli whittling roused me on the beach, and when I turned my head it was Sheila buffing her nails. An airplane flew over, a black dart high in the blue sky, and I could almost see the bulky shape of Brother Leo, leaning backward to point his nose and chin toward Heaven. “Boeing,” he would say. “Seven-forty-seven.” One of ours.

Christmas Day. This was Christmas Day? Eating and drinking with a lot of pagan Irishmen on a tropic island that hadn’t even existed when Christ was born. “There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed,” Luke, chapter two, that’s why Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem, where there failed to be room in the inn; and Puerto Rico was no part of that world.

Neither was New York, of course, and neither was my monastery, but that didn’t seem to matter. Christmas was Christmas in New York; here it was an appendix.

I’m not even sure I mean that in a religious sense, though certainly in the monastery we did keep the holiday holy. Traditionally, we have had moderately good seats reserved for us at the midnight Mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a tradition that goes back, I believe, to the Cathedral’s beginning in 1879. Following Mass, it has been our custom to return to the monastery and to gather in the chapel for silent meditation until dawn, when we take a light snack of bread and tea and go to bed. At eleven we arise, have more bread and tea, and spend the daylight hours in our courtyard, regardless of the weather, in group prayers and hymns. (Occasionally in recent years Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer leaps our wall from a passing transistor radio to tangle with our Adeste Fideles, but so far we have beaten back all such incursions.) And then we have dinner.

Ah, dinner. It is purgatory for Brother Leo, hell for his assistants, and heaven for the rest of us. It is our only grand meal of the year, and its memory easily sustains us for the next three hundred sixty-four days. Brother Leo provides the suckling pig, the roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, the yams, the brussel sprouts, the broccoli au gratin, the asparagus with hollandaise sauce, the baked potatoes in their rough thick jackets streaming butter. Brother Thaddeus produces one or another of his seafood specialties for our first course: oysters Rockefeller, perhaps, or a shrimp bisque, or trout in white wine. And to finish, Brother Quillon puts out pie after pie like a compulsive stutterer: apple pie, mince pie, cherry pie, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, pear pie.

Then there’s the wine. Our undercroft has been well stocked now for centuries, and it isn’t often we really make use of it, but what is a more joyous time for celebration than the birth of our Lord and Savior? And so the wines come up for our table: German white with the first course, French red with the main course, Italian liqueurs with dessert, Spanish brandy and Portuguese port with Brother Valerian’s coffee.

We don’t exchange presents, of course. Individually we have nothing, and can give nothing, and can accept nothing. Besides, the fat red god is not our God, and it’s our God Whose birth we are celebrating.

It feels strange to talk about our community in a religious sense. We’re a religious brotherhood, but we don’t carry on about it. Similarly, we all of us dwell in a world ruled by the law of gravity, and every day of our lives we make one or more decisions based on the law of gravity, but how often do we talk about or think about gravity? It is simply a given, a basic postulate of our lives, and there’d be something foolish and self-conscious in an extended dissertation on the subject.

It isn’t that I believe that God requires me to be a Crispinite monk, though I do believe He requires all of us to keep our promises. I merely believe that God exists, that this world is His, and that He has provided a place in His world for each of us if we will but seek it out. For the last ten years, it has seemed to me that God’s place for me in His world was on Park Avenue between 51st and 52nd Streets. I have been happy there, and I have been delighted, once a year, to celebrate the birth of the One who made everything, to honor that birth with ritual and prayer and fasting, to welcome it with song, and to celebrate it with a communal feast.

But not this year. This year I was on a humid island in the dominion of North Pole Fats, in that great outer world where I don’t know what Christmas is supposed to mean.

Dinner in the rented house on the beach consisted of chicken parts on a bed of stewed tomatoes and rice, fried plantains, and a rather nice California white wine in a big glass jug. Eileen and I ate all this alone, Neal and Sheila having tactfully vacated the place so we could kiss and make up. It was a pleasant meal, but when after the coffee Eileen handed me three gift-wrapped packages I couldn’t think what they were for. “Your Christmas presents, dummy,” she had to tell me, and then I had to admit I hadn’t bought or made or invented anything at all for her. “You’re my Christmas present,” she said, unoriginally but passionately, and she kissed me again.

So I had to open the packages. I started with the smallest, and it unwrapped to display an alarm clock, a travel alarm clock that folded shut into a tan leatherette square clam. Open, it was a wind-up alarm clock with a neat squarish face and, when I tested it, a discreet but no doubt effective buzz. “That’s very nice,” I said. “Thank you.”

“You really like it?”

“Yes, I do, honestly.” I tried to put as much enthusiasm into my voice and face as possible.

“You were a real problem,” she told me. “It’s hard to know what to get someone who doesn’t have anything.”

I went on to open the second package, and this present was a razor, an electric razor with an infinity of settings. “Ah,” I said, constructing fervor again. “I’ll cut myself no more.”

“And you can use it without plugging it in,” she explained, her fingers intermixing with mine as she pointed out the razor’s features. “You can either plug it in like any razor, or you can take it with you when you travel, and it will run for days and days without recharging.”

“That’s great,” I said, and opened the largest package of all, and it was luggage, a tan vinyl overnight bag. “Ah hah,” I said. “Something to put everything else in.”

“Do you really like everything?” she asked me.

“I like everything,” I told her, and then I told her a truth: “And I’m madly in love with you.”

Now I lived from moment to moment, like a blind man coming down a mountain. I awoke each morning full of tension and uncertainty and the wisps of bad dreams, I soothed myself with rum drinks each afternoon, and I devoted myself to the truth of my love for Eileen each evening and night. My problems were critical but not urgent, severe but insoluble. There seemed nothing I could do to help either myself or the monastery, so I settled into fretful inactivity instead, trying not to think.

On Sunday we went to Mass, all four of us from the house. There was a small ancient vine-covered church in the nearby town of Loiza Aldea, but this Mass attendance was as much a tourist expedition as a religious requirement, so we drove past that church and on the twenty miles to San Juan and the Cathedral of San Juan Bautista, which features primarily the marble tomb of Ponce de Léon inside, and a statue of the same fellow out front, pointing rather languidly into the middle distance. (Aside from his famous search for the fountain of youth, instead of which he discovered Florida, Ponce de Léon was the first Spanish governor of Puerto Rico.)

The Mass we attended there seemed an older and richer rite than what I was used to in New York, somehow more properly Roman Catholic and yet much more remote. I had thought I might be embarrassed there, or alternatively that I might take the opportunity to seek guidance, but this version of God seemed unlikely to cast either an Eye or an Ear in the direction of some insignificant sex-struck erring monk; it would take fire and blood to attract the attention of this southern God.

Coming back from Mass, we stopped along the way for lunch and drinks, then continued on with Neal driving while Eileen and I were stowed together in the back seat. I touched her leg, which was my frequent habit, and she pushed my hand away. I said, “What’s the matter?”

“Not right after Mass,” she said. She wouldn’t look at me, but frowned out her window instead. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“Do you mean, never on Sunday?” The rum I’d taken on at lunch made me think things were funny.

“Not this Sunday,” she said, and the way she frowned made her look like a stranger.

We did, actually, late that evening, but there was a difference in it. My week of sex had awakened a hunger in me that had been dormant for a long long time, so that my hands seemed always now to be reaching out in Eileen’s direction and I wasn’t of a mind to be critical or analytical about individual encounters, but even I could tell this particular exercise lacked something. Eileen was more clinging and yet more removed, and I felt simultaneously sated and starved. We were like actors who had toured in a play together years ago and who now, on returning to the stage after a long absence, discovered that they remember all the lines and all the bits of stage business but have forgotten why they chose to do this play in the first place.

In the morning I called American Airlines. Eileen was not yet awake, and I spoke softly when I asked for a seat on the next plane leaving for New York. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the Spanish-accented voice, “we’re all booked for today.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

“Booked solid, sir,” she said. She managed to sound both cheerful and regretful at the same time. “I could put you on standby, if you like, but I don’t think there’s much hope, to be honest with you.”

This was absurd. Finally I wanted to Travel, and the gods of Travel wouldn’t permit it. I said, “Well, when can you book me?”

“Let me see, sir. Mm-hm, mm-hum. We could give you a seat on Wednesday morning’s flight.”

“Wednesday.” And this was barely into Monday: what would I do for the next two days?

“That’s right, sir. Do you wish to make a reservation?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That would be Wednesday, the three one of December,” she said.

The three one of December. New Year’s Eve, the last day of the deadline for the monastery. “That’s right,” I said.

So I was going; but where? Back to the monastery?

They’d take me back, I knew that, no matter what I had done during my time on the outside, but could I accept my presence there ever again? If the monastery, if its existence and its destruction (and my failure to stop that destruction), was a perpetual barrier between Eileen and me — and it was — wouldn’t it be just as much a barrier between the Order and me? When my brothers, some time this coming spring, were driven from their home to new quarters in some phased-out Job Corps campus or bankrupt soft-drink plant, how could I possibly include myself? How could I live among them there? I had been their last hope, and I had failed.

At first I’d thought my choice was between Eileen and the monastery, but in truth my range of options wasn’t even so broad as all that. I couldn’t possibly stay with Eileen if the loss of the monastery was a permanent fact between us, but neither could I save the monastery by giving up Eileen. I was giving her up, I was doing it now, but that was only because the very silly idea of our being together had run its course. I had to leave, but my reasons were private ones and I couldn’t use our separation to save the monastery. I couldn’t bring myself to fulfill Dan Flattery’s other demand. I just couldn’t tell her I had lied.

Of course, I should have done so. As Roger Dwarfmann had said, citing Scripture for his purpose, “Let us do evil, that good may come.” But I couldn’t do it, and that was my failure. I couldn’t go away leaving her to believe I was a liar and a con man, who had cheated her, who had not loved her.

She got up late that day, while I sat on the beach in front of the house — I’d carry quite a startling tan with me back to the cold dark northeast — rehearsing different ways to tell her that I couldn’t stay, that I was wrong for this world and any of her worlds. I was a monk again, whether I went back to the Crispinite Order or not. I would have to find some such place for myself; it was what I was fit for. Perhaps that Dismal Order of ex-thugs Brother Silas had told me about would take me in — I could join those felonious monks in whatever substitute San Quentin now housed them.

What on earth was I going to say to Eileen?

“I love you, but I can’t stay.”

“I was content and happy before all this started, and now I’m confused and miserable. Maybe I’m merely a coward, but I have to try to get back to where I was before.”

“The monastery, that simple stupid building, stands between us and always will, particularly once it’s been torn down.”

“You won’t want me forever. I’m merely a rest period between your struggles to find some way to live your own life.”

“You knew yesterday, you knew last night, that we’re finished, it’s only a matter of time.”

She came out at last from the house, wearing her lavender bathing suit under her blue terrycloth robe, and looking at her I knew the transition back to celibacy was going to be a difficult one. But it had been difficult the first time, ten years ago, until gradually the itch had faded, as it would do again; abstinence makes the heart grow colder.

She was carrying a glass in her hand, obviously one of our rum drinks, which was unusual this early in the day. She was also very pinched-looking around the mouth and eyes, as though she’d lost the ability to withstand the sun and now it was beginning to shrivel her. And the look in her eyes was both tender and hard. When she reached me, she knelt beside me in the sand and said, “I want to talk to you.”

“I have to tell you something,” I said.

“Me first. You have to go back.”

Suddenly it seemed too abrupt. My stomach fluttered, I needed things to slow down. “I do love you,” I said, and reached out for her hand.

She wouldn’t let me touch her. “I know that,” she said, “but you can’t stay. It isn’t any good for either of us.” Then she said, “All I’ve done is louse you up, make you confused and unhappy. You have to get back to where you were before I came along.”

Then she said, “That monastery building, that hateful place, it won’t let us get together.”

Then she said, “I’m not a forever person, and you are. I’m always either running to something or away from something. I’ll be that way all my life. If you stay with me, someday I’ll walk out on you and that’s a guilt I wouldn’t be able to stand.”

Then she said, “You know I’m right. You knew it yesterday, that we can’t go on.”

She had taken all my lines. I said, “I have a reservation on the morning plane Wednesday.”

Eileen drove me to the airport. I had slept the last two nights on that wicker sofa in the living room, I had avoided all rum since making my decision, and I was dressed again in my robe and sandals. I was also a physical wreck from lack of sleep, an emotional wreck on general principles, and a moral wreck in that I craved Eileen’s body just as much as ever. More. We had had a week together, and turning off that faucet was easier said than done. Her nearness in the Pinto made me quiver.

But I was strong — or weak, depending on your point of view — and I didn’t alter my decision. We arrived at the airport, Eileen walked me as far as the security checkpoint, and we said goodbye without touching. A handshake would have been ridiculous, and anything more would have been far too dangerous.

At the end, as I was about to leave her, she said, “I’m sorry. Char — I’m sorry, Brother Benedict. For everything the Flattery family has done to you.”

“The Flattery family gave me love and adventure,” I said. “What’s that to be sorry for? I’ll remember you the rest of my life, Eileen, and not just in my prayers.”

Then she kissed me, on the mouth, and ran. It’s a good thing she ran.