Brothers Keepers

Three

Travel. The world is insane, it really is. I’d forgotten, during my ten years inside our monastery walls, just how lunatic they all are out there, and my weekly stroll to the Lexington Avenue newsstand had not been exposure enough to remind me. I had come to think of the world as colorful, exciting, variegated and even dangerous, but I had forgotten about the craziness.

Brother Oliver and I, our cowls up protectively about our heads, left the monastery at eight-fifteen Thursday morning, after Mass and breakfast and morning prayer, and turned our faces south. And the city struck us head on, with noise and color and motion and confusion beyond description. Large ramshackle delivery trucks rounded corners continuously, always too fast, always jouncing a rear tire against the curb, always changing gears with terrifying clash-grind-snarls in the middle of the operation. Taxis, all of them as yellow and speedy as a school of demented fish, were incessantly either honking their horns or squealing their brakes, the meantime jockeying for position like children hoping for the largest piece of birthday cake. Pedestrians of all sizes and shapes and sexes (including the dubious), but of one uniform facial expression — scowling urgency — elbowed along the sidewalks and raced in front of speeding cabs and shook their fists at any driver who had the temerity to sound his horn.

Why was everybody Traveling so much? Where was the need? Was it even remotely possible that so very many people had just discovered they were in the wrong place? What if everyone in the world were to call up everyone else in the world some morning and say, “Look, instead of you coming here and me going there why don’t I stay here and you stay there,” wouldn’t that be saner? Not to speak of quieter.

Like babes in a boiler factory, Brother Oliver and I huddled close to one another as we set off, Traveling south along Park Avenue. Scrupulously we obeyed the intersection signs that alternately said WALK and DON’T WALK, though no one else did. Slowly we made progress.

Park Avenue stretched half a dozen blocks ahead of us, as far as Grand Central Station, with the hilt of the PanAm Building sticking out of its back. We would be taking a train eventually, but not from that terminal; the Long Island Railroad connects in Manhattan with Pennsylvania Station, quite some distance away. Eighteen blocks south and four blocks west, slightly over a mile from the monastery, the farthest I had been in ten years.

We crossed 51st Street, jostled by hurrying louts, and I gestured to an impressive church structure on our left, saying, “Well, that’s reassuring, anyway.”

Brother Oliver gave me the tiniest of headshakes, then leaned his cowl close to mine so I could hear him over the surrounding din. “That’s Saint Bartholomew,” he said. “Not one of ours.”

“Oh?” It looked like one of ours.

“Anglican,” he explained.

“Ah,” I said. The sanctum simulacrum; that explained it.

In the next block we passed the Waldorf-Astoria, a veritable cathedral of Travel; not one of ours at all. At 49th Street the WALK-DON’T WALK signs were so displaced that we chose to cross to the far side of Park Avenue, a very great distance in itself, the endless lanes of traffic separated in the middle by a grass-covered mall, as scruffy as but narrower than our courtyard. On the far side I looked back and could barely make out our monastery in the distance, huddled there like some ancient wood-and-stone flying saucer among the technological barbarians.

“Come, come,” Brother Oliver said to me. “It’ll be over soon.”

It wasn’t. The walk to Penn Station was both interminable and terrifying. Madison and Fifth Avenue were even more crowded and bustling than Park Avenue — and narrower as well — and west of Fifth Avenue we were in Babel. The citizens had become shorter and stouter and swarthier, and they spoke such a confusion of tongues we might as well have been in Baghdad or an evangelist’s tent. Spanish, Yiddish, Italian, Chinese, and God alone knows what else. Urdu and Kurd, I don’t doubt. Pashto and Persian.

Pennsylvania Station was a different sort of nightmare. The Penn Central and Long Island railroads both terminate there, and the resulting furor was too blurred with frenzy for me to see it clearly, much less describe it. One rode an escalator down to the floor of the main terminal building, and as I descended into it the whole panorama looked to me like nothing more nor less than a fistful of ants scrambling in the bottom of an amber bottle.

Then we couldn’t find the railroad. We found the other one with no difficulty, we found it over and over again: Penn Central to the left of us, Penn Central to the right of us, but where oh where was the blessed Long Island Railroad?

In the bowels of the earth. We commandeered a bustling maintenance man long enough to be given hurried grudging directions, and learned we had to descend more stairs to a different kind of station. The transition was very like that from the east side of Fifth Avenue to the west; we had descended not only physically but also in caste. It was very obvious.

“Now I understand,” I told Brother Oliver, “why Hell is always depicted as being beneath the surface of the earth.”

“Strength, Brother Benedict,” he advised me, and pressed onward to an Information booth, where we were given rapid-fire instructions in re ticket purchasing and train catching. There would be a train to be caught in the direction of Sayville in twenty-five minutes. “Change at Jamaica,” the Information man rattled off, “no change at Babylon.”

Brother Oliver leaned toward him, pushing his cowl back the better to hear what was being said. “I beg your pardon?”

“Change at Jamaica, no change at Babylon.” And the Information man pointedly looked at the inquirer next in line behind us.

“I’m not at all surprised to hear that,” Brother Oliver said, and I was pleased to see the Information man frown in bewilderment after us as we went away to buy our tickets. So it was possible to attract the attention of one of these dervishes after all.

“In 1971,” Brother Oliver told me as our train rolled through the industrial squalor of Queens, “Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of the State of New York, declared the Long Island Railroad to be the finest railroad anywhere in the world. As of the first of November that year.”

“Then I am all the more amazed,” I said, “that anyone ever Travels at all.”

The car in which we found ourselves was a sort of two-tiered slave quarters. One entered upon an incredibly narrow central corridor, lined with metal walls broken by open entrances to the cubicles on both sides. These cubicles were alternately two awkward steps up or two awkward steps down from the corridor, so that someone sitting in a lower cubicle was directly beneath the rump of the passenger in the next upper cubicle. We had chosen a lower, and huddled there like mice in an egg carton while the train rolled first through a tunnel and then through neighborhoods as grim as the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch. The knees and ankles occasionally passing in the corridor seemed calm enough, inured to this harsh environment, but I couldn’t have felt more dislocated if I’d awakened on the planet Jupiter.

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

“What?”

“We change here.”

Into swine? Into stones?

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

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

I looked attentive.

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you know Daniel?”

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

“What about the rest of the family?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nothing,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s right.”

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

So at last we crossed the threshold of the Flattery house.

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

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

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

“Sale?”

“Of the monastery.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I might have noticed it earlier, except that I was sedulously keeping my gaze away from that end of the table. None of the others noticed it, being involved respectively in monastery-depiction, hostessing and professional football, except Peggy, who had neither a conversation of her own nor any reason to avoid looking at anyone. It was her interest in the proceeding that attracted my attention, and when I glanced toward the two at the end of the table she was looking coldly furious and he was looking mulish and sullen.

How her eyes glistened when she was in a rage. Her heavy hair seemed more full, her sculptured face more slender, her expressive hands more long-fingered. And as for him, he was looking so loutish I half expected acne suddenly to begin popping out on his cheeks like bubbles on cooking fudge. They called him Alfred, so what sort of man could he be? If he had any gumption at all he’d be called Fred, or even better Al, and he would still not be good enough for her. And as an Alfred?

As I watched — I know I should have looked away, but I didn’t — the argument heated up. They had been exchanging tight angry remarks in low voices, inaudible to anyone else, but now he distinctly said, “You would say something like that.”

She became audible too, but still more controlled than he. “That’s exactly the way you were in Flynn’s,” she said.

“And whose fault was that?” His voice had risen sufficiently now to attract the attention of everyone else at the table with the exception of Brother Oliver, whose proselytizing for the monastery would brook no interruption. His narration, as though for an educational film, rolled on in the form of harmony while Eileen and Alfred provided the angry tune. “It was your fault, Alfred,” she told him, “and if you had the brains God gave a gnat you’d know it was your fault.”

“Well, I’m just not going to put up with it anymore,” he announced, and flung his napkin onto his plate. “I don’t know why you call me at all, you never like me when I’m here.”

“Indeed I don’t,” she said.

He leaped to his feet, and it seemed for a second as though he might raise a hand to her, but one of her brothers growled — it was exactly that, a low warning growl — and the gesture died. “I suppose,” he said nastily, “that was the way you talked to Kenny, and that’s why you’re here at all.”

Her face pinched in, as though he had indeed slapped her. Neither of them said anything for two or three seconds — even Brother Oliver had trailed away to silence by now — and then Alfred Broyle ran from the room, going not like someone in triumph following a smashing exit line but like someone who has shocked and embarrassed himself.

Frank Flattery got to his feet, his intention clear, and his mother said with quick loud cheeriness, “Oh, Frank, while you’re up, would you get the dessert? There’s ice cream, dear, and Eileen made that pound cake.”

It was a simple stratagem, but it deflected Frank. While he stood there, trying to make up his mind what to do, Eileen looked out the windows and said, with something very like sarcasm in her voice, “Well, just in time. Here comes Daddy.”

An enclosed motorboat, gleaming white and with green curtains on its small windows, had arrived at the small dock at the end of the lawn. It bobbed there in the churning water while a man came up out of the cabin, clambered onto the nose of the boat, picked up a coiled rope there, and jumped heavily ashore. He was stocky and meaty, with a big balding head and a heavy thrusting way of moving his body. He was wearing dark trousers and a black-and-white checked jacket, and as I watched he lashed the front of the boat to a metal projection on the dock.

So that was Daniel Flattery: he looked strong-minded. But even as I was thinking that another man appeared at the back of the boat, tossing another rope to the first man. This new one was dressed in a ratty green sweater and baggy khaki trousers, but physically he was identical with the first: heavy, powerful, fiftyish, truculent.

And after the second rope had also been made fast yet a third example of the type put in an appearance, this one wearing a sheepskin coat and dark green slacks. They all got out of the boat, with a lot of apparent hilarity and comradeship among them, and then the trio strode in this direction across the lawn. Tweedledee, Tweedledoh and Tweedledum — and which one was Daniel Flattery?

Number two, in the green sweater and khaki pants. The other two walked on around the outside of the house, with a great deal of hallooing and arm-waving as they went, and the real Daniel Flattery entered through a door somewhere away to our left. Banging doors marked his approach, as the sound of falling trees would indicate the approach of a bull elephant, and then he came into the room with the rest of us. Frank had seated himself again by now, both Broyle and dessert forgotten, and the family members greeted their patriarch with respectful if not overly warm hellos. Ignoring the lot of them, Flattery brooded first at me and then at Brother Oliver. “Well, here I am,” he told Brother Oliver at last. “Come along, we might as well get it over with.”

Brother Oliver and I both rose, but Flattery gave me a bloodshot glare — I suspected he’d been doing some drinking on that boat — and said, “Two against one?” Pointing at Brother Oliver, he said, “You’re the Abbot. I’ll talk to you. Come along.”

Flattery turned and stomped out of the room. Brother Oliver gestured to me to stay where I was, and off he went in Flattery’s wake. I stood at my place, feeling awkward, knowing that the family members were all feeling even more awkward than I, and then Eileen Flattery stood up and said, “Well, I’m finished anyway. Come on, Brother, I’ll give you the grand tour.”

“No, no and no!”

Eileen and I had done the house and were out on the side lawn now when we heard that bellow in Daniel Flattery’s voice. I said, “Brother Oliver doesn’t seem to be getting very far with your father.”

“No one gets very far with my father,” she said.

I hunted around for a response. “I guess not,” I said, and yet again the conversation died.

It had been dying with regularity for the last twenty minutes. This was a social situation so foreign to my experience of the last decade that I could barely walk, much less talk. Strolling through a strange house with a beautiful woman — if riding a train through Queens had been for me as alien as being dropped onto the planet Jupiter, this new experience was outside the known universe entirely.

But my own cumbersomeness wasn’t the only reason for our silences. Eileen was obviously still upset about the scene with Alfred Broyle at lunch, so much so that the tiny vertical frown lines in her forehead seemed almost permanent. All through the house, we would enter a room and she would tell me what room we had entered — “This is the kitchen,” in a room featuring sink, stove and refrigerator — and I would describe it as very nice, and the silence would fall again, and we would walk on to the next room. Now we were outside on the lawn and she was pointing to trees and I was saying they were very nice.

I had made a few faltering attempts at general conversation but they had all, like this last one concerning Brother Oliver and her father, barely survived one exchange. If I did get a response from her on my first statement I had no idea what to do next, how to follow through. Thud. Silence again.

We were moving around toward the rear of the house. She pointed at a clump of tall slender white birches. “We planted those when I was ten,” she said. “Those birches there.”

“You’ve both grown up to be very beautiful,” I said, and was so astounded and delighted by myself that I didn’t even care that I was immediately blushing.

Eileen didn’t notice the blush anyway; in fact, she hardly noticed the compliment. “Thank you,” she said, with the thinnest of smiles, and pointed at a weeping willow. “That’s a weeping willow. It was here when we bought the house.”

“It’s very nice.”

We moved on, and eventually were at the very end of the lawn, where the water lapped at a retaining wall of gray vertical wooden planks. “That’s my father’s boat.”

I took a deep breath. “You ought to stay away from Alfred Broyle,” I said.

She looked at me with amused astonishment. “I what?”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to say anything, and then I...” I waved my arms around and looked out at the Bay. “That’s the Bay, isn’t it?”

“What’s the matter with Alfred?”

Peripheral vision can be a cruel thing; even though I wasn’t looking directly at her I could see her condescending smile. “Should I call him Al?”

“Nobody can call him Al,” I said. “If they could, he’d be a different man.”

Did peripheral vision lie, or did her expression change to one of surprised recognition? No, peripheral vision did not lie. She said, “How right you are.”

“And I don’t like his moustache.”

“Neither do I.”

I looked fully at her, and she was smiling, but the smile was friendly now and not patronizing. “It’s a very weak moustache,” I said.

“It suits him,” she said.

“That’s the problem.”

“So it is.”

“Brother Behnnn-edict!”

I turned, and Brother Oliver was just outside the back door of the house, waving at me. “Oh,” I said. “I have to go.”

She touched my arm, a cool but friendly touch. “Thank you,” she said, “for taking an interest.”

“It was hard not to,” I said, returning her smile, “under the circumstances.”

“Brother Behnnn-edict!”

“You’ve made up my mind for me,” she said. “From this moment, Alfred is out of my life.”

“Good,” I said. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Flattery.”

“Mrs. Bone,” she said.

I stared at her. “What?”

She leaned close to me, deviltry in her eyes, and with unholy glee she whispered, “I’m divorced!”

“Oh.” And I was so astounded that I couldn’t think of another word to say. The “Kenny” mentioned by Alfred as his closing remark, that must have been the husband. Kenneth Bone. Another stupid name. I decided I didn’t like him. If this girl, a good and beautiful Irish Catholic girl from a good Catholic home, had found it necessary to divorce him, there had to be something really drastically wrong with him.

“Brother Benedict!”

“I have to go. Goodbye, Muh-Mi-Mi—”

“Eileen,” she suggested.

“Eileen. Goodbye, Eileen.”

“Goodbye, Brother Benedict.”

I could feel her smiling eyes on me as I hurried back across the lawn to Brother Oliver, who was in a foul mood. “That took long enough,” he said. “Ready to give up your vows, Brother?”

“Oh, Brother Oliver,” I said. “Flattery wouldn’t change his mind?”

Almost at once his manner thawed. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m upset at Flattery, not at you. But do come along now.”

We walked around the house, rather than through it. I said, “Is there no hope at all?”

“We’ll see,” he said, though without much confidence. “There’s always Dwarfmann.”