Brothers Keepers

Two

“I’m getting sick of that orange Flair pen,” Father Banzolini told me.

So was I, but I said nothing. The confessional seemed the wrong place for chitchat.

Father Banzolini sighed. He was capable of the least realistic performance of long-suffering I’d ever witnessed. “Is there anything else, Brother?”

“Not this time,” I said.

“Very well. For your penance,” he said, and paused, and I thought, I’m going to get it now, and he said, “four Our Fathers and — twenty Hail Marys.”

Oo. “Yes, Father,” I said.

He trotted us through the Act of Contrition and the absolution, and out of the confessional I went, to go kneel awhile at the altar.

Two thoughts occupied my attention as I knelt there, plowing interminably through my penance: “Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” etc. Thought number one was my sense of relief that the incident of the orange Flair was at last behind me. Thought number two was curiosity as to whether the spiteful laying-on of excess penance was not itself a sin, which Father Banzolini would have to confess in his turn and then do his own penance for; and what penance would be considered excessive in his case?

“—pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, a-men.” Twenty. I stood at last, my knees cracking like old Brother Zebulon’s, and I found Brother Oliver waiting for me at the rear of the chapel. “That was a very long penance, Brother Benedict,” he said.

“I was meditating,” I said. And oh, dear — was that a lie? Would I have to confess it Saturday, receive another excessive penance, on and on, world without end, amen? But I had in fact been meditating, hadn’t I? It struck me as a gray area, and I suspected that, come Saturday, I’d be giving myself the benefit of the doubt.

In any event, the answer satisfied Brother Oliver. “Do come along now,” he said. “I want you at the meeting.”

“Meeting?” But he was already hurrying away, like Alice’s White Rabbit, so all I could do was hurry after him.

We went to his office, a low-ceilinged wood-lined irregular room like something built inside a tree trunk. The diamond-pattern leaded windows looking out on the unkempt grape arbor in our courtyard — our grapes were scanty, sour and useless — bolstered this elves’-forest image, and so did the brown-robed monks already there, seated at the refectory table in the middle of the room. Three of them: Brothers Clemence, Dexter and Hilarius.

Brother Oliver took his usual seat in the carved-oak chair at the head of the table, and gestured me to the seat at his left, saying to the others, “Brother Benedict told me something yesterday that I want him to repeat to you. Brother?”

“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.”

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.”

“Option,” said Brother Oliver. “Option means choice. You mean they’re going to choose one bit of land and let the rest go?”

Brother Clemence said to Brother Dexter, “May I?”

“By all means,” Brother Dexter said to Brother Clemence.

Brother Clemence said to Brother Oliver, “In law, an option is a binding agreement to make a purchase. For instance, I might say to you that I want to buy your, um...” Frowning massively, Brother Clemence ground to a halt. “You don’t own anything,” he said. He looked around at the rest of us. “None of us own anything.”

“Perhaps I ought to try it,” Brother Dexter said.

“You’re welcome to,” Brother Clemence told him.

Brother Dexter said to Brother Oliver, “Suppose you owned the chair you’re sitting in.”

Brother Oliver looked doubtful but willing. “Very well,” he said.

“Suppose,” Brother Dexter went on, elaborating his fantasy, “suppose we all owned the chairs we were sitting in.”

Brother Oliver looked at us. I looked steadfastly back, trying to fix about my face the gaze of a man who owns the chair he’s sitting in. Even more doubtfully, but just as willing, Brother Oliver said again, “Very well.”

“Now suppose further,” Brother Dexter said, risking all at every step, “that I wish to own all the chairs.”

Brother Oliver gave him an astounded look. “What for?” Brother Dexter was patently stymied for just a second, but then he leaned forward and said, clearly and distinctly, “For purposes of my own.”

“Yes!” cried Brother Clemence. He had obviously caught Brother Dexter’s drift and was pleased with the structure under formation. Leaning forward to stare intently at Brother Oliver while waggling a finger at Brother Dexter, Brother Clemence cried out, “For reasons of his own! Personal private reasons! He has to own all the chairs!”

“That’s the point,” Brother Dexter said.

Brother Oliver, apparently at the point of despair, looked at him and said. “It is?”

“I have to have all the chairs,” Brother Dexter said. “Just some of them won’t do, not for, uhh, those purposes of mine. I need them all. So I come to you,” he rushed forward, “and I tell you I’ll pay you, oh, fifty dollars for your chair.”

Brother Oliver twisted about to look at his chair, which was in fact a very handsome carved-oak antique. “You will?”

Brother Dexter was not about to get sidetracked into a discussion of furniture. Racing along, he said, “However, I explain to you that I can’t use your chair unless I can also buy all the other chairs. So we sign an agreement.”

“An option agreement,” put in Brother Clemence.

“Yes,” said Brother Dexter. “An option agreement. The agreement says that I will buy your chair for fifty dollars next Monday, if I have managed to conclude similar agreements with the owners of all the other chairs. And I will pay you five dollars now as an earnest of my intentions. With that agreement, and once you accept the five dollars, you can no longer sell your chair to anyone else, even if someone were to make you a better offer. If Brother Benedict, for instance, were to come along tomorrow and offer you a thousand dollars for that chair, you couldn’t sell it to him.”

Brother Oliver studied me in bemused astonishment. “A thousand dollars?”

For some reason I remembered yesterday’s very long penance, which Brother Oliver had noticed, and I became very very guilty. I think, in fact, I blushed, and I know I averted my gaze.

But Brother Dexter wasn’t going to permit that digression either. “The point is,” he said, “once we sign that option agreement we are committed to the sale of the chair if the other conditions are met by the deadline. Being next Monday.”

“I think,” said Brother Oliver cautiously, “that some parts of this are beginning to make sense.”

“Good,” said Brother Dexter.

“Peripheral parts,” Brother Oliver added. “But now, if you would expand your parable from chairs to monasteries, I just might be able to follow you.”

“I’m sure you will,” Brother Dexter said. “The Dwarfmann people — by the way, they seem to refer to themselves as Dimp, which would stand for Dwarfmann Investment Management Partners — so the Dimp people—”

Brother Hilarius, incredulity ringing in his voice, said, “The Dimp people?”

“That is what they call themselves,” Brother Dexter said.

“Quickly,” Brother Oliver said. “I feel it all slipping away.”

“Certainly,” Brother Dexter said. “The Dimp people have acquired options on several pieces of land in this area. The Alpenstock Hotel, for instance, and this monastery, and that building on the corner with the silver-fronted store. You know the one.”

“I’m afraid I do,” Brother Oliver said. The store in question, very Bauhaus in its facade, was called the Buttock Boutique and it featured ladies’ slacks. When a member of our community did find it necessary to Travel, he almost always set off in the opposite direction from that shop, no matter what the destination.

“Well, these options,” Brother Dexter said, “come due on January first. At that time, if all the necessary parcels of land have been acquired, the sales will go through.”

“I don’t understand about necessary parcels,” Brother Oliver said. “If they buy one piece of land — or one chair, come to that — why do they have to have another one as well?”

“Because of the building they intend to put up.” Brother Dexter did some crisp but unintelligible things with his hands on the tabletop, the while saying, “If they were to buy the land on either side of this monastery, for instance, but then didn’t buy the monastery, they wouldn’t be able to put up one large office building spreading over all their land.”

“I don’t like large office buildings anyway,” Brother Oliver said.

“Nobody likes them,” Brother Dexter said, “but they do intend to build one, and unfortunately we are on part of the land they intend to use.”

Usually I preferred to keep my own two cents’ worth out of these discussions, but an issue had been raised a minute ago and I wanted to explore it a little further, so I said, “Brother Dexter, are you saying that if they don’t get options on every piece of land the deal is off? They won’t buy the monastery after all, and they won’t put up their office building?”

The light of hope shone in several faces around the table, but not for long. Smiling sadly at me and shaking his head, Brother Dexter said, “I’m afraid it’s too late, Brother Benedict. They already have all the options they need. They don’t intend to close before January, but unless something unforeseen happens there’s no chance that the deal won’t go through.” Turning back to Brother Oliver, he said, “Now you see why I said not exactly when you asked me if the Flatterys still owned the land. In a sense, they do, but the Dimp people have taken an option and will complete the purchase in January.”

“I understand enough of it now,” Brother Oliver said, “to know there’s little comfort in it. The more I understand, in fact, the more depressing it becomes. It might be best not to explain anything to me from now on.”

“There are a few thin rays of sunshine,” Brother Dexter said. “When I told the Dimp man, Snopes, that Brother Benedict here was in communication with Ada Louise Huxtable, he assured—”

“Brother Dexter!” I said. I was truly shocked.

Brother Dexter gave me the crystal-clear glance of the true sophist and said, “You do read her column, don’t you? You’ve written to her, haven’t you? If that isn’t being in communication I’d like to know what is.”

Patting the table impatiently, Brother Clemence said, “We’ll leave that to you and Father Banzolini to work out, Brother Dexter. What did this Dimp person assure you, after you’d name-dropped at him?”

“That the Dwarfmann organization,” Brother Dexter said, “would make every effort to help us find satisfactory new quarters, and would also help to allay the expense of our moving.”

“Sunshine?” Brother Oliver’s voice was nearly a squeak. “You call that a ray of sunshine? How can there be satisfactory new quarters? If the quarters are new, they won’t be satisfactory! Look around you, look around just simply this one room — where on the face of God’s Earth would we find its counterpart?”

“Nowhere,” Brother Dexter said promptly.

Brother Hilarius said, “And you forget the question of Travel. The process of Moving, the permanent relocation of not only one’s self but also all of one’s possessions from point A to point B, is the profoundest form of Travel.”

“It’s just impossible,” Brother Oliver said. “The more one thinks about it, the more one sees we simply can’t leave this monastery.”

Brother Hilarius said, “But if they tear it down?”

“They must not, that’s all there is to it.” Brother Oliver had clearly brought himself back from the edge of despair and helplessness, and had determined to fight back. “Through the forest of your not exactlys,” he said to Brother Dexter, “I seem to discern one tree. The land is promised to Dwarfmann or Dimp or whatever those tools of Satan call themselves, but until January first the owner of the land is Daniel Flattery.”

“Technically,” Brother Dexter said, “yes.”

“Technically is good enough for me,” Brother Oliver said. “Tonight I will continue to look for that missing lease, though I can’t think what corners there are left to search in, and tomorrow I shall Travel.”

We all looked at him. Brother Hilarius said, “Travel? You, Brother?”

“To Long Island,” Brother Oliver said. “To the Flattery estate. Daniel Flattery was embarrassed to tell me the truth on the telephone. In person, perhaps I can turn that embarrassment to honest shame and put an end to this sale.”

Brother Clemence said, “If there’s already a signed option agreement, I don’t see what we can do.”

“I know very little about rich men,” Brother Oliver said, “but one of the few things I believe about them is that they became rich by knowing how to renege on their promises. If Daniel Flattery wants to void that option agreement, he’ll void it.”

Smiling slightly, Brother Clemence said, “Remembering my days on the Street, Brother Oliver, I must say I think you have something there.”

Brother Dexter said, “Would you want us to go with you? You wouldn’t want to Travel alone.”

“I would prefer a companion,” Brother Oliver admitted, but then he looked around doubtfully and said, “But if I were to arrive with an ex-banker or an ex-lawyer we might very well degrade ourselves to a business level, when the effect I intend to strive for is one of good strong Catholic guilt.” He mused aloud, saying, “On the other hand, we five are the only ones in the monastery who know about this, and I still don’t want to alarm the others.” His eye lit on me. “Ah,” he said.