Brothers Keepers

Five

Never had my little room looked so good to me. These patched and repatched plaster walls, white with paint that I had brushed on myself, this uneven wide-planked floor that I kept waxed and polished to the gleaming hue of honey, these two rough ax-hewn ceiling beams that gave me splinters every time I swept away the cobwebs, that heavy oak door with its filigreed iron hinges and handworn iron latch, the small diamond-paned window deeply inset in the exterior wall with its view — no, its glimpse — of the courtyard down below and the other arm of the monastery across the way, all enclosed me in the comfort and warmth of the familiar. There was not an inch of this room that I had not cleaned, touched, looked at, concerned myself with. It was mine in a way that Dwarfmann’s twin slabs would never be Dwarfmann’s.

Brother Oliver was right; Dimp had to be stopped. Should a wrecking ball be permitted to come crashing through that wall, by that window? Should a bulldozer be permitted to crumple and splinter and bury the planks of this floor?

And the furniture. It belonged to me, naturally, but it also belonged to this room. The bed, a four-inch foam rubber pad (four dollars and fifty cents, downtown) on a small plywood platform with legs made of stubby two-by-fours, had been constructed by me, with the help of Brother Jerome, and its dimensions had been planned with this room in mind. Along this wall, with a specific relationship to the window and a specific relationship to the door. And the box beneath the window, in which I kept my changes of clothing and my personal possessions, that I had built myself from pieces of packing crates, oiling the wood when I made the box and now waxing it every time I did the floor, that box had been designed for the dimensions of the window above it and for its second purpose of being a seat whenever I had anyone else in the room. (I sat, of course, on the bed.) The two pieces of furniture filled this room because they had been fitted to it and fulfilled all the room’s functions, but take them out of here and put them in some anonymous smooth-walled cube and you would make a room that could only be empty and barren and uncomfortable.

I sat for quite a while on my bed, once we returned from our journey to Dimp, watching the slowly changing trapezoid of afternoon sunlight on my floor and thinking about my recent experiences of Travel. How complex the world is, once one leaves the familiar and the known. It contains — and has for years contained, without my knowing it — both Eileen Flattery Bone and Elroy Snopes. If one were to Travel every day, would one go on meeting such richly intrusive personalities? How could the ordinary brain survive such an onslaught?

I was meditating on the possibility that perhaps ordinary brains did not survive such onslaughts, and that the coming of the Age of Travel produced by the end of feudalism and the social changes of the industrial revolution had in fact created mass psychosis (a theory that would explain much of the world’s history over the last few hundred years), when Brother Quillon, our resident homosexual, knocked on my open door and said, “Pardon my interrupting your meditation, Brother Benedict, but Brother Oliver would like to see you in his office.”

“Mm? Oh. Thank you, Brother Quillon, thank you.” I blinked and nodded and moved my limbs about in a disorganized fashion, readjusting myself to the world outside my head.

Brother Quillon gave me a shy smile and went away down the corridor. What a difficult life he had set for himself, poor man. We were all celibates in these walls, of course, but the rest of us had removed ourselves from the arena of temptation, while Brother Quillon was smack in the middle of it. If a girl on a television commercial — not to mention the physical presence of Eileen Bone — could strain the dam of my sexuality, think what Brother Quillon had to go through, every day of his life. His success was a continuing inspiration to us all.

Well. I left my room and hurried downstairs to see what Brother Oliver wanted.

It was another meeting, but this time there were six of us gathered around the refectory table. In addition to Brothers Clemence (attorney), Dexter (banker), Hilarius (historian), Oliver (Abbot) and myself (innocent bystander), there was also Brother Jerome. A stocky heavy-armed man with bushy eyebrows, Brother Jerome was our handyman and general fix-it master. He understood carpentry, plumbing, home wiring and the insides of small appliances. He it was who had helped me construct my bed, and he it also was who had become an accidental occasion of sin for me when he’d dropped a wet cloth on my head a few days ago, resulting in my taking the Lord’s name in vain.

He had been brought here by Brother Clemence, who explained that Brother Jerome “has something of interest to tell us. But it’s only a footnote, it can wait. We should hear the main text first.”

So we did. Brother Oliver began by giving a summary of his meeting with Daniel Flattery yesterday — a much less emotional summary than the one he had delivered to me in the railroad car on our way back from the Flattery house — and then he gave a rather detailed account of our meeting with Mr. Snopes, including a description of the structures Dimp intended to put in our place. “Although I intend to do my best with Mr. Dwarfmann when eventually I meet him,” Brother Oliver concluded, “I must say I don’t feel much optimism in that quarter. The sum of our efforts so far, I would say, Brother Benedict’s and mine, is that we have met the enemy. We know somewhat more than we did about the kind of people with which we must deal, but I wouldn’t say we know as yet very much about how to deal with them.”

“It sounds,” Brother Hilarius said, “as though aesthetic appeals would have very little effect on such people.”

“About as much effect,” Brother Oliver said, “as an appeal to conscience.”

Brother Hilarius said, “What about an appeal in terms of money? Wouldn’t that be the sort of thing they might understand?”

“In terms of money? What does that mean, Brother Hilarius?”

“What if we offered to buy the monastery ourselves?”

Brother Dexter entered the conversation, saying, “We couldn’t possibly afford it.”

“But couldn’t we,” Brother Hilarius asked him, “mount some sort of fund drive?”

Brother Dexter shrugged. “For the kind of money we’d need? An obscure order like ours? I really doubt it.”

“Well, how much money are we talking about?”

“I made some calls today,” Brother Dexter said, “to relatives down in Maryland. They talked to banking people they know in New York, and then they called me back. Now, they couldn’t find out exactly how much Dwarfmann’s paying Flattery for this land, but given the general range of current land prices in this area they came up with a ballpark figure of around two million dollars.”

“Oh,” said Brother Hilarius.

Brother Oliver said, “Ballpark figure? What’s a ballpark figure?”

“An approximation,” Brother Dexter explained. “It means we may not exactly be at home plate, but we’re inside the ballpark.”

“Everybody knows phrases that I don’t know,” Brother Oliver said. He sounded forlorn.

Brother Hilarius said, “Maybe we could interest a movie star. Someone to do a telethon for us or something.”

It seemed time for me to speak. I rarely had anything to say at these meetings, but occasionally it did fall to me to pass along some depressing fact, and one of those occasions was now upon me. “They wouldn’t sell to us,” I said.

They all looked at me. Brother Hilarius said, “Why not?”

“Because they want to put their building up,” I told them. “We’re not the only thing they’re buying. They’re taking everything on this whole block. If they don’t buy this monastery they won’t be able to put up their building.”

Brother Hilarius wouldn’t give up easily. He said, “What if we offered them a profit?”

“There’s still the other parcels,” I said. “They’re buying the hotel next door, and the buildings on the other side of us, and as I understand it they have options on those too. So they’ll have to pay the money for them. The only thing we could possibly try to buy from them would be the whole block.”

Brother Dexter said, “I wouldn’t even mention the dollar figure for something like that.”

Brother Oliver, with the hopeful expression of a man trying out a new bicycle, said, “It’s not in the ballpark?”

“It’s a different ballgame entirely,” Brother Dexter told him.

The new bicycle fell over.

Brother Hilarius said, “Well, what about these other buildings? Maybe they don’t want to be torn down either.”

“Now,” said Brother Clemence, “we get to Brother Jerome. Go ahead, Jerome, tell them what you told me.”

Brother Jerome had a habit of pushing his sleeves up to his elbows before speaking, as though speech were a difficult physical activity that required strength, determination and a lot of forethought. Because the sleeves of our robes are very loose, his usually flopped right down to his wrists again, as they did this time. “They want to sell,” he said. He had a gruff, under-utilized kind of voice, and he always crammed his eyebrows down hard over his eyes when using it.

Brother Oliver, still distressed at the failure of that bicycle, frowned back at him and said, “Who wants to sell?”

“All of them,” Brother Jerome said. He wasn’t one for wasting words.

Brother Clemence, urging him along as gently as a prospector with a favorite mule, said, “Give them the details, Jerome.” Then, before that could happen, Brother Clemence turned to the rest of us himself and explained, “Jerome knows the maintenance people around here, the janitors and superintendents and all that. They tell him what’s going on in the neighborhood.”

Brother Oliver said, “And what is going on?”

Brother Clemence said, “Well, let’s take the other buildings one at a time. On our left here, going down to the corner, we’ve got the Alpenstock Hotel. Tell them about that, Jerome.”

“They want to sell,” Brother Jerome said.

“Well, yes,” said Brother Clemence. “But tell them why.”

“On account of the Nazis.”

Brother Oliver was on the verge of incoherence. He said, “Nazis?”

“Maybe I’d better,” Brother Clemence decided. And none too soon, either. “You check me on this, Jerome,” he said, and then told the rest of us, “The history of that hotel is a little odd. Local German-American citizens built it before the turn of the century, planning to present it to the homeland for their New York Consulate. But Germany didn’t want it, and the builders couldn’t find a buyer for it, so finally they converted it to a hotel, just to pay it off. During the thirties the place got taken over by the German-American Bund, pro-Nazis, and they set it up to be Nazi Headquarters for after the invasion.”

Brother Oliver said, “What invasion?”

“The invasion of the United States. By Nazi Germany.” Brother Clemence reassuringly patted the air, saying, “It never happened.”

“I know that,” said Brother Oliver. “What has this got to do with tearing the building down?”

“We’re getting there,” Brother Clemence promised. “Now, there wasn’t an invasion, so the—”

“We all know that, Brother!”

“Yes, that’s right,” Brother Clemence said. “I’m just getting to the point.”

“Good,” said Brother Oliver.

“The point is,” Brother Clemence said, retaining his attorney’s calm in the face of the hysterical layman, “that the Bund was disbanded during the war, and the group that owned the Alpenstock Hotel simply disappeared. Eventually the bank took over, for nonpayment of mortgage. Two banks, actually, they’d had the building very heavily financed. The banks have operated the hotel themselves for the last thirty years, and they don’t like any part of it. It’s been continuously on the market for all that time, but this is not the city in which to sell a Nazi hotel. The place has generally earned out its expenses, the property taxes and staff and so on, but very little dent has been made in the principal of the indebtedness. So the banks are delighted to have a buyer after all these years.”

Brother Dexter said, “What banks are they, do you know?”

“One of them is Capitalists and Immigrants Trust.” Brother Clemence turned to Brother Jerome. “Do you remember the other one?”

Brother Jerome hiked up his sleeves and lowered his brows. “Um,” he said. “Douchery.”

Brother Oliver said, “What?”

“That’s it,” said Brother Clemence. “Fiduciary Federal Trust.”

“Ah,” said Brother Dexter. He nodded with fatalistic satisfaction. “Dimp does business with both of those banks,” he said. “According to the people I’ve talked to, they’re the principal paper holders on this very project.”

Brother Oliver closed his eyes. Faintly he said, “Paper holders?”

“They’re putting up the money,” Brother Dexter explained.

Brother Hilarius said, “They’re all entwined with one another, aren’t they? Dwarfmann buys the hotel from the two banks, and the two banks loan him the money to make the purchase.”

“There’s another tie-in,” Brother Clemence said. “At least potentially. For myself, I’ll be very surprised if the Flattery Construction Company doesn’t do some of the work on the new building.”

Brother Oliver opened his eyes. “I’ve said it before,” he said, “and I’ll say it again. If one is very patient, if one listens very carefully, if one just keeps asking questions, sooner or later everything begins to make sense.”

“I’m becoming interested in those buildings on the other side of us,” Brother Dexter said. “Just how do they tie in?”

“Not quite as neatly,” Brother Clemence said. “But there are still connections. For instance, Capitalists and Immigrants Trust also holds the mortgage on the building on our other side.”

“You mean the Boffin Club,” Brother Oliver said.

“Right.” Brother Clemence nodded. “The building is owned by the club. It’s a nonprofit corporation, like the Lambs Club or the Players Club.”

Brother Hilarius said, “Those are actors’ clubs, aren’t they?”

“Mostly,” said Brother Clemence. “But the Boffin Club is primarily for writers.”

“Nicodemus Boffin,” Brother Oliver said, rather unexpectedly, “was a character in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. He was so in love with books that he kept buying wagonloads of them, even though he didn’t know how to read.”

“Now, there’s a friend of writers,” said Brother Dexter. “I can see why they named their club after him.”

“But the founders of the Boffin Club,” Brother Clemence said, “were mostly radio writers. This was back in the twenties. They’ve had some playwrights and television writers over the years, but very few novelists. And in fact the membership has declined very badly in the last ten years or so.”

Brother Dexter said, “I believe that’s the case with all clubs of that sort. Society changed after the Second World War, something happened, people aren’t as interested in social clubs as they once were.”

Brother Clemence said, “I don’t know about any other clubs, but the Boffin Club is in very bad shape. Most of the founders are gone, the remaining members are generally older men who don’t do that much writing anymore and don’t have as much money as they used to. The club’s been on the brink of bankruptcy for years. Brother Jerome has a friend over there who’s told him the situation.”

Brother Jerome lifted his sleeves and lowered his eyebrows. “Tim,” he said.

“That’s right,” said Brother Clemence.

Sleeves up, eyebrows down. “Action writer.”

Brother Clemence nodded. “Yes. It seems this fellow Tim used to make a very good living as a writer. He wrote radio shows like The Shadow and a lot of short stories for the old pulp magazines. Had an estate out on Long Island.”

Sleeves, eyebrows. “Hindenburg.”

“That’s right,” Brother Clemence said. “He was a passenger on the zeppelin Hindenburg. Not the time it blew up, of course.”

Sleeves, eyebrows. “Himalayas.”

“I think,” Brother Oliver said firmly, “we’ve heard all we need to hear about the adventures of Brother Jerome’s friend Tim.”

“Well, you get the picture,” Brother Clemence said. “These days, Tim lives at the club. He’s sort of a janitor-watchman, in return for room and board, and he tells Jerome the membership is delighted at the thought of selling the place. They’ll make a nice profit on it, pay off their mortgages and other debts and still have some cash left over to distribute to the remaining members. They had a private meeting several months ago, and Tim was the only member to vote against making the sale.”

Sleeves and eyebrows. “Granddaughter.”

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

S & E. “Women’s Lib.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And of us,” Brother Oliver pointed out.

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

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

“Yes, it does,” Brother Clemence said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Prayer,” said Brother Jerome.

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

“Everybody,” said Brother Jerome.

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

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

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

“Sir?”

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

“I suppose so, yes.”

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