Brothers Keepers

Seven

Sunday Mass. We had no regular celebrant, different priests from St. Patrick’s taking turns at saying Mass in our little chapel. One of the newer young clerical clerics from the diocesan office officiated today, and after reading the gospel he asked us all, at Brother Oliver’s request, to stay at the end of Mass for an announcement.

Even through the fevered swamp my brain had become since last night’s occurrence with Eileen Flattery Bone, I could sense the unhappy atmosphere that filled the chapel while we all waited for the completion of Mass. Those of us who already knew what the announcement would be were of course saddened and disheartened at the necessity of making it, while those who did not yet know the details could certainly see, from the faces of Brother Oliver and we few others, that the announcement would be a gloomy one.

For me, it seemed doubly gloomy. I felt I was losing this home in two ways, both to the wrecker’s ball and to my own frailty. Neither Eileen nor I had spoken a word on the drive back last night, except that as I was hoisting myself from the car at the end she did say, in a small and toneless voice, “Thank you.” I had been unable to make any response at all, but had simply stumbled inside, where I’d pleaded fatigue and emotional upset with Brother Oliver, who of course had been waiting for me, anxious to know what Daniel Flattery’s daughter had come after. I still hadn’t told him, but would do so after Mass and his announcement. He would have to help me decide what to do.

It was strange all at once to have to think about my future. For ten years my future had merely been the present in finite repetition, and I had been happy and content. Now, without warning, I faced an unknown and unknowable future. Everything in my life was crumbling. Would this monastery be taken away, torn down to the ground? Would I be forced by the changes in my own mind to leave the monastery, no matter whether the building was saved or not? What was going to happen tomorrow? What did I want to happen tomorrow?

I had done little sleeping last night, and those questions had been ever-present in my mind, yet I still was nowhere near an answer. The habit of meditation, which had given me a brain (I like to think) as orderly as my room, had deserted me in my hour of need. My brain today was fudge. It was worse than fudge; it was last fall’s macaroni salad accidentally left behind in the summer cottage and not found until this spring.

The Mass was nearing its end. When I finished telling the whole truth to Brother Oliver, as I would of course have to do, would he tell me to leave? He might, I wouldn’t blame him. He might tell me to return to the outer world until I had become more secure again in my vocation. It was a possibility I’d already thought of for myself, without the slightest sense of pleasure or anticipation.

What did I want — what did I actually want for myself? I wanted the last week to cease to exist; I wanted it removed from history. I wanted to go directly from the Saturday night a week ago when I had in blissful ignorance brought that newspaper into these walls, directly from that Saturday to this Sunday, this morning, with nothing in between. No Travel, no Eileen, no threat to the monastery, none of it. That was what I wanted, and if I couldn’t get it I just didn’t have any alternate selection.

“Go, the Mass is finished.” But we stayed. The priest departed, and Brother Oliver stood up from his place in the front row and turned to face us. He looked heavier and older and more care-worn than his usual self, and when he spoke his voice was so low I could barely hear him.

In fact, I didn’t listen. I knew what he had to say, that stony center of fact that he would surround with cushioning layers of doubt and probability, and I spent the time instead looking about me at this place and the people in it.

Our chapel, like the rest of our building, was designed by Israel Zapatero and intended to be occupied by no more than twenty men. A long narrow shoebox of a room, its stone floor, stone walls, rough plank ceiling and narrow vertical windows were all part of the original plan, but other elements had been added in the two centuries since. The only one of Abbot Jacob’s stained-glass windows to remain out of the attic was here, centered above the plain table of an altar at the front of the room; a flowerlike abstract design in many colors, it had apparently been done shortly after some well-meaning relative had sent Abbot Jacob a compass and protractor.

More additions. The bas-relief Stations of the Cross lining both side walls were the work of some long-ago Abbot whose name I never knew, but who was also undoubtedly responsible for the bas-relief of St. Christopher carrying the Christ Child over the waters in our upstairs bathroom. Electrification had been delayed in this wing until the mid-twenties, when those brasslike helmet affairs had been attached to the corners of the ceiling, giving us a soft indirect lighting that almost perfectly duplicated the candlelight it had replaced. Due to the narrowness of the side windows, and the nonfunctional nature of Abbot Jacob’s stained-glass window — it had been affixed to a blank stone wall — the lights were needed as much in the daytime as at night.

The pews were a fairly recent addition; until about 1890 there had been no seating in here at all, and those attending Mass either stood or knelt on the stone floor. At that time, according to a story Brother Hilarius once told me, a church in Brooklyn underwent a severe fire, and the singed remnants of several pews had been given to our monastery. The Brother Jerome of that period had salvaged pew lengths each long enough for two people and had set ten of them in here, five on each side of a central aisle. Since there were only sixteen of us now, the last row was not in present use.

I was seated in the fourth row, against the right wall, from where I could see all my fellow brothers. In the front row, Brother Dexter was farthest to the left, his banker’s features less confident than usual as he watched and listened to Brother Oliver, who had been sitting next to him. Across the aisle on my side were Brothers Clemence and Hilarius, Clemence with his face toward Brother Oliver, Hilarius with his head bent and face hidden.

In the second row began those who were hearing the story for the first time. Brothers Valerian and Peregrine on the left, Mallory and Jerome on the right. Valerian, whose fleshy face I had often thought self-indulgent and whose orange Flair pen I had stolen out of pique, looked so stunned that I couldn’t help forgiving his having done that crossword puzzle. Peregrine, whose face was a bit too finely chiseled, too self-consciously actorish, but who had in fact been a set designer and summer theater operator rather than actor, seemed incapable of believing what he was hearing; as though he were being told the show would not after all go on. On this side of the aisle I could only see the broad backs and shoulders of Brothers Mallory and Jerome, the ex-boxer and the current handyman, like a pair of football players sitting on the bench.

In the third row, the faces were more expressive. Brothers Quillon and Leo were on the left, and Quillon looked crushed; Leo, on the other hand, looked enraged, as though he might lift that heavy fat forearm of his very soon and start pounding somebody into the ground. On the right, directly in front of me, were Brothers Silas and Flavian. Silas, onetime burglar and pickpocket, onetime author of his criminal autobiography, hunched lower and lower into himself as Brother Oliver talked, as though he’d just been picked up on a bum rap and was girding himself to tough it out without a word. Brother Flavian, the firebrand, started almost at once hopping up and down, coming very nearly to his feet, burning with the need to speak; the way he’d acted when he’d denounced my “censorship” and Brother Clemence had lawyered him to distraction.

Farthest to my left, across the aisle, were our two ancient Brothers, Thaddeus and Zebulon. Thaddeus, a large stocky man who had been a merchant seaman for years and years, had become sort of loose and shambling and disorganized in his old age, like an old car that hasn’t been cared for very well. Brother Zebulon had shrunk with age instead, becoming tinier and more brittle almost every day. Both of them watched and listened with frowning concentration, as though unable to really come to grips with what was being said.

On my side of the aisle, seated next to me, was Brother Eli, whose face had the impassivity of a spectator at an automobile accident, but beneath whose impassivity I thought I could detect the fatalism, the nihilism, he so much struggled against, that turn-off drop-out conviction of his generation that stupidity and destruction are inevitable, that there’s no point in struggle. Brother Eli’s faith, I saw, was just as necessary and yet tenuous as my own.

Brother Oliver finished by saying, as he had to, “And please give us your prayers.” And before he could sit down, or take another breath, Brother Flavian was on his feet, bursting up so precipitously he almost shot over the back of the pew and landed on Brother Jerome. “Prayers!” he shouted. “Of course we’ll pray! But we have to do more than that!”

“We are doing more than that, Brother,” Brother Oliver said. “I’ve just told you what we’ve done so far.”

“We need public opinion on our side!” Brother Flavian cried, waving his arms about.

“Shaking one’s fist in church is not quite the thing, Brother Flavian,” Brother Oliver told him mildly.

“We have to do something,” Brother Flavian insisted.

Brother Clemence got wearily to his feet, like Clarence Darrow in Tennessee. “If you’ll excuse me, Brother Oliver,” he said. “Brother Flavian, we are doing something, as Brother Oliver already outlined. Would you like me to repeat it, with another point-by-point summary?”

Brother Flavian waved that away with agitated — but unclenched — hands. “We have to do more. Why don’t we picket them? Contact the media, get out there on the sidewalk with signs, bring our message to the public. They wouldn’t dare make a move against us! Monks in a monastery?”

“I’m afraid they would,” Brother Oliver said. “Mr. Snopes told me he didn’t care about public opinion because he wasn’t running for office, and I’m afraid I believe him.”

Brother Peregrine jumped up. “Couldn’t we raise the money somehow, buy the place ourselves? Couldn’t we, oh, I don’t know, maybe put on a show?”

“There’s too much money involved,” Brother Oliver said, and turned to Brother Dexter for confirmation.

Brother Dexter didn’t stand, but he did half-turn in his pew to nod back at all of us and say, “Land value in this neighborhood is in the range of twenty thousand dollars a frontage foot. Just our own parcel would cost over two million dollars.”

That was a sobering number, and there was a brief unhappy silence, ended by Brother Leo, who demanded, “How did this happen anyway? If the lease ran out, why didn’t we know about it ahead of time?”

“I must take the blame,” Brother Oliver said, and spread his hands helplessly.

“No,” said Brother Hilarius. Rising, he spoke directly across the way to Brother Leo, saying, “A ninety-nine-year lease doesn’t call attention to itself like a three-minute egg.”

Brother Leo was not appeased. “Somebody should have known about it,” he said. “Where is this lease anyway? Who has it?”

“I should have it,” Brother Oliver admitted, “but it’s disappeared. I’ve searched high and low.”

“If any of you knows where it is,” Brother Clemence added, “I wish you’d tell us. I’ve been wanting to take a look at the wording.”

Brother Silas, betraying his background, said, “Maybe it was stolen.”

Brother Clemence frowned at him. “What for?”

“So you can’t take a look at the wording.”

Brother Valerian said, impatiently, “Now, Brothers, there’s no reason to get paranoid. From the sound of things, we have trouble enough as it is.”

Brother Thaddeus, whose years of Traveling with the Merchant Marine had perhaps inured him to the thought of abrupt transitions more than the rest of us, said, “Brother Oliver, what happens if we don’t save the place? Where do we go from here?”

Brother Quillon turned about to shake his head at Brother Thaddeus and say, disapprovingly, “That’s very defeatist, Brother. We should be positive in our thinking.”

“We have to consider the weather ahead,” Brother Thaddeus told him gruffly, “no matter what it is.”

Brother Oliver said, “That’s true. And Dimp has committed itself to finding a suitable replacement structure for us, and to assisting us in making the move. They first suggested a college campus upstate, and this morning, a messenger brought photographs and a proposal for a building in Pennsylvania which actually was at one time a monastery.”

Brother Flavian, angry and suspicious, said, “Where in Pennsylvania?”

“A small town called Higpen.”

Brother Silas said, “Higpen? You mean Lancaster Abbey?”

Brother Oliver said, “You know the place?”

“I was there for a while. It’s no good, believe me. After this place, it’s trash.”

Brother Quillon called, “Tell us about it, Brother.”

“Sure.” Brother Silas got to his feet and half-turned so we could all see him. He was somewhat shorter than average, a fact which had apparently been useful in his burglary-cum-pickpocket career, and his face was composed of small sharp features bunched together. He had the appearance I had always visualized for racetrack touts.

“This Lancaster Abbey,” Brother Silas told us, “was a part of the Dismal Order. You know, dedicated to St. Dismas, the Good Thief, the one hanging on the right of Christ.”

We all bowed our heads at the Name.

“I joined up with them,” Brother Silas went on, “when I first went straight. They sounded like my kind of people, they mostly used to be in the rackets themselves. But it turned out all they did, these guys, was sit around and tell each other what masterminds they used to be, tell each other the capers they pulled and how they got out of this thing and how they knocked off the other thing and all that. I began to think, these guys, they didn’t so much reform as retire, you know? So I split and I came here.”

Brother Oliver cleared his throat, “I believe our primary interest right now, Brother Silas,” he suggested, “is in the building.”

“Right, Brother.” He shook his head, telling us, “You don’t want it. See, these guys, they’d spent most of their adult lives doing time, you know what I mean? When they thought of home, they thought of something with cell doors and an exercise yard. So what they built themselves out there in Pennsy was like a baby Sing Sing. Gray walls, metal doors, brown dirt courtyard. You wouldn’t like it at all.”

“Thank you very much, Brother,” said Brother Oliver. The information seemed to have daunted him, but he turned bravely to the rest of us and said, “Of course, Dimp has promised to keep looking until they find something we can approve.”

Brother Quillon, his voice rather shrill, cried out, “But how can we approve anything, Brother? After this. Our home.”

“We all feel that way,” Brother Oliver assured him.

Brother Clemence said, “Excuse me. Let me just raise this question of the lease one more time. Has no one seen it, or have any idea where it might be?”

There was silence as we all looked at one another, everybody waiting for somebody else to speak.

Brother Clemence spread his hands. “Well, that’s it, then,” he said.

Then little Brother Zebulon piped up, saying, “Whyn’t you look at the copy?”

That got him more attention than he’d received in forty-five years. Brother Clemence actually stepped out into the aisle and took a pace in Brother Zebulon’s direction, saying, “Copy? What copy?”

“Brother Urban’s copy, of course,” said Brother Zebulon. “What other copy is there?”

“Brother Urban’s copy?” Brother Clemence looked around at us, his helpless expression saying as clearly as words that there was no Brother Urban among us.

Then Brother Hilarius spoke up. “A former Abbot,” he said. “The one before Wesley, I think.”

“That’s right!” cried Brother Valerian. “Now I remember! He did illuminated manuscripts. There’s a framed one of his hanging in the kitchen, near the sink, an illuminated version of I Corinthians V, 7: Every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that.”

Brother Clemence looked groggy. “Illuminated manuscripts?”

“He did illuminated manuscripts on everything,” Brother Zebulon crowed, suddenly breaking into laughter. “You should have seen his illuminated version of the front page of the Daily News the day Lucky Lindy landed in Paris!”

Brother Clemence shook his head. “Do you mean,” he asked, “this Brother Urban did an illuminated manuscript version of our lease?”

“Of course!” cried Brother Zebulon. He was slapping his knees and cackling as though he were on some front porch somewhere and not in our chapel at all. I suppose in the excitement he must have completely forgotten where he was. “That Brother Urban,” he cried, “was the looniest of them all, and they’ve all been loony! If he saw a piece of paper with writing on it, he’d do a copy, do it all up with pictures and big fancy capital letters and gold color all around the border and I don’t know what all.”

I noticed that none of us was looking at Brother Oliver. I too did not look at Brother Oliver, so I don’t exactly know how he took what he was hearing. But I know how Brother Clemence took it; with the stunned joy of a miser who’s been hit on the head by a gold bar. “Where is this copy?” he demanded. “The copy of the lease, where is it?”

Brother Zebulon spread his bony hands, shrugged his bony shoulders. “How should I know? With all his others, I suppose.”

“All right, where are they?”

“Don’t know that, either.”

But Brother Hilarius did. “Brother Clemence,” he said, and when Clemence turned to him he said, “Brother Clemence, you know where they are.”

Clemence frowned. We all frowned. Then Clemence’s frown cleared away. “Ah,” he said. “The attic.”

“Where else,” said Brother Hilarius.

The attic. Because the roof slanted down on both sides, the only place where one could stand up straight was in the very middle, directly beneath the ridgepole. And even then one could stand up straight only if one were less than five feet six inches tall. And barefoot.

That taller central area had been left clear as a passageway, but the triangular spaces on both sides were filled with the most incredible array of artifacts. Abbot Ardward’s matchstick mangers — and his three partly damaged matchstick cathedrals — made a sort of sprawling Lilliputian city all about, intermixed with ancient cracking leather suitcases, copses and groves of tarnished candelabra, tilting light-absorbing examples of Abbot Jacob’s art of the stained-glass window, curling blow-up sheafs of Abbot Delfast’s photographic studies of the changing of the seasons in our courtyard, piles of clothing, cartons of shoes, small hills of broken coffeepots and cracked dinnerware, and who knows what else. Over there leaned Abbot Wesley’s fourteen-volume novel based on the life of St. Jude the Obscure, now an apartment house for mice. Old chairs, small tables, a log-slab bench and what I took to be a hitching post. Kerosene lanterns hanging from nails in the old beams, bas-reliefs on religious subjects jammed in every which way, and a rolled-up carpet with no Cleopatra inside. The wanderings of the Jews were recorded in mosaics of tiny tile glued to broad planks; some of the glue had dried out and the tiles had fallen off, to be crunched distressingly underfoot. Old newspapers, old woodcuts of sailing vessels, old fedoras, old stereopticon sets and old school ties.

You can really fill an attic in a hundred and ninety-eight years.

We came boiling up to that attic now, all sixteen of us, like escaping prisoners of war. Up we came and out we spread and down we bent and on we searched. Tiles and mothballs and mouse droppings crunched distressingly underfoot. Heads thonked into beams, followed by cries of pain or indistinct mutterings. The forty-watt bulb at the head of the stairs, our only illumination, gave little enough light to begin with, and we made matters worse by constantly casting shadows either in our own way or somebody else’s. Brother Leo inadvertently knelt on a matchstick cathedral, Brother Thaddeus gashed his temple on a nail, Brother Jerome knocked over Abbot Wesley’s novel, and Brother Quillon tripped him while attempting to stand the volumes up again. Brother Valerian found a stub of candle, stuck it into a candelabra, lit it, and the candle fell out and rolled burning into a little suburb of newspapers and shirts. Pandemonium ensued, but the fire was put out before it caused much damage.

And the dust. One man up here, just having a casual look around, could raise enough dust in five minutes to drive himself back downstairs again. Sixteen of us, all more or less frantic, all rooting and scrounging through the deepest and furthest recesses of accumulated junk, created the closest thing to the atmosphere of the planet Mercury ever seen on the planet Earth. We coughed and sneezed, our perspiration turned to mud, our wool robes itched, our eyes burned, and half the things we picked up fell apart in our hands. Creating more dust.

When in tribulation, when in discomfort, the good Catholic can offer his sufferings to be credited to the account of the souls in Purgatory, to shorten their punishments and gain them earlier release to Heaven. If we sixteen didn’t empty Purgatory that day, I just don’t know.

“Here!”

The voice was Brother Mallory’s, and looking through the swirling gloom I saw his fighter’s body in a fighter’s crouch beneath the threatening beams. He was holding out and waving a large piece of stiff paper.

We all made our way in his direction, crushing anonymous crushables beneath our feet. Brother Clemence coughed and sputtered and called, “The lease? Is it the lease?”

“Not yet!” Brother Mallory shouted. “But it’s the right stuff. And there’s a lot of it here!” And he held that piece of paper out for our inspection.

Never had I seen No Smoking so beautifully rendered. The sinuousness of that S, suggesting smoke itself, was played off beautifully against the tendrils of green ivy encircling it, and the massive tree-trunk effect of that determined N was softened by the bank of daylilies in which it was embedded. The smaller letters were of a clear but soft black calligraphy, the whole surrounded by vines and leaves and floral arrangements. Small rectangular drawings of artisans in their rooms plying their crafts — writing, weaving, boot-making — were gracefully placed around the margins, and one noticed at once that not one of those artisans had a cigarette.

“There’s a whole stack of these,” Brother Mallory told us. “All different.” Turning to show us some more of them, he gave his head a whack on a beam and dropped the No Smoking sign. “Damn that beam,” he said, and looked toward Brother Oliver to say, “in a theological sense only.”

“The lease,” Brother Clemence said, leaning forward in impatience. “Never mind anything else, get that lease.” Like half a dozen of the others, he had put his cowl up to protect his head slightly from beam-thumps, and I suddenly realized that by now, in this smoky dusty yellow light, in these cramped wooden quarters surrounded by strange bric-a-brac, we sixteen robed figures, half of us with hidden hooded faces, must look like one of the more disturbed paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Monks in Hell, at the very least. I half expected some little imp-figure, half toad and half man, to come scampering out of that nearby matchstick cathedral.

But he didn’t; he stayed within. Brother Mallory, on the other hand, came up with a whole double armload of papers. “I don’t know what your lease looks like,” he complained. “Can’t see anyway, not in this light, with all this dust in my eyes.”

“We’ll bring them all downstairs,” Brother Clemence decided, “sort them out down there.”

“This isn’t all of them,” Brother Mallory said. “There’s hundreds back here.” Thrusting the present handful at Brother Leo, he said, “Here, take this. I’ll get the rest.” Brother Leo grasped the bundle of papers and hit his head on a beam. He grunted, and I waited for him to say something far worse than Brother Mallory’s theological comment. But he didn’t. For a few seconds he stood there biting his lips, and then he turned to say, “Brother Hilarius, was the Blessed Zapatero a tall man?”

“Short, I believe,” Brother Hilarius said. “Under five feet.”

“Pity,” said Brother Leo.

Brother Mallory had come up with another armload, which he passed to Brother Peregrine. Sheets fluttered this way and that. I spotted a beautifully rendered version of a poster for the Louis-Schmeling fight, the letters cleverly entwined with knotted ring ropes. An outsize copy of what appeared to be a doctor’s prescription featured stethoscopes, caducei, brass bedposts and cork-stoppered bottles in free-form style around the carefully reproduced illegible handwriting. Other sheets were too heavily encrusted with drawings, ivy-festooned capital letters, calligraphic curlicues and general grume to be comprehendible without a closer clearer look. But it was all very interesting.

And there was tons of it. When at last we all blundered back downstairs again armloads of the stuff were being toted by Brothers Mallory, Leo, Jerome, Silas, Eli and Clemence, while I stayed behind to gather up the half dozen sheets that had slipped and slithered out of the Brothers’ embrace. None of them proved to be the wanted lease, but I carried them along anyway, and followed everyone else all the way down to the first floor and Brother Oliver’s office, picking up other stray sheets along the way.

It’s truly wonderful how intense group activity can take one out of oneself. From the moment this great lease-hunt had gotten underway I had completely forgotten all about my own personal troubles, the doubts and perplexities about my future. It wasn’t until I was alone again, following the trail of paper left by the others, that reflection on my own situation returned to me. I felt the gloom descending, the unease and uncertainty, and I hurried to rejoin the safe anonymity of the crowd.

Brother Oliver’s office looked like Bureaucrat Heaven: papers everywhere, teetering and tottering on chairs and tables, collapsing on the floor, heaped atop the filing cabinet. Brothers Clemence, Oliver, Flavian, Mallory and Leo were all simultaneously trying to create order, which meant that together they created chaos. Brothers Valerian, Eli, Quillon and Thaddeus were all waving sheets of paper in Brother Clemence’s general direction and crying out, not at all in unison, “Is this it?” Brother Dexter looked across the mob scene at me, shook his head, and rolled his eyes. I could only agree with him.

It was Brother Peregrine who finally got everything channeled. Leaping up onto the refectory table as though about to break into a fast buck-and-wing — Brother Oliver gave him a startled and not pleased stare — Brother Peregrine clapped his hands together and shouted, exactly like the choreographer in every movie musical, “People! People!”

I think it was being called “People” rather than “Brothers” that did the trick. Silence fell, two or three syllables later, and everybody looked up at Brother Peregrine, who filled the silence at once by saying, very loudly, “Now, we need some organization here!” Two or three people would have restored chaos by simultaneously agreeing with him, but he out-shouted them and bore inexorably onward: “Now, Brother Clemence is the only one of us who knows exactly what we’re looking for.” Pointing at Brother Clemence, he said, “Brother, if you’ll come around on the other side of this table... Come along, come along.”

You don’t argue with the choreographer. I could see Brother Clemence begin dimly to understand that as, after a very brief pause, he pushed through the crush and went obediently around to the far side of the refectory table.

“That’s fine.” Brother Peregrine was suddenly so totally in command that he didn’t have to ask anybody for anything. Pointing as he called out the names, he said, “Now, Brother Oliver, Brother Hilarius, Brother Benedict and myself, we’ll go through those papers. It won’t take more than four of us. I know the rest of you are interested, but if we all try to help we just won’t get anything done. Now, if you want to watch, please just stand back there by the door. Brother Flavian? Over by the door, please.”

Magnificent. In no time at all Brother Peregrine had chosen his cast and created his audience. (I noticed he’d cast himself in a leading role, but since he’d done the same for me I wasn’t about to complain.)

Obedience was prompt and complete. Even Brother Flavian, though he hesitated, finally chose to keep his mouth shut and join the spectators. As those also-rans clustered themselves into the corner by the door, Brother Peregrine finished his staging. “Now,” he said, “we four will each take a stack of manuscripts and go through them one at a time. If you find something that looks as though it might be right, take it to Brother Clemence for inspection. All clear?”

I noticed that he didn’t ask us if we agreed; he asked us if we understood. You can’t answer a question you haven’t been asked, so we all nodded and mumbled our yesses. Brother Peregrine hopped gracefully down again from the refectory table, and the search got under way.

Brother Hilarius and I worked at stacks side by side, and very soon Brother Hilarius totally lost sight of the objective. The historian in him took over, and he thought we were here to admire the manuscripts. “Very nice,” he would say, holding out a representation of the front of a Kellogg’s Pep box. “Unusual commingling of Carolingian and Byzantine elements.” Or, in re a supermarket flyer offering steak at forty-nine cents a pound, “A perfect example of the Ottoman Renaissance.”

It made it difficult to concentrate on my own stack, but I did my best. And what a busy pen Abbot Urban had possessed! Anything in print, anything in print, that had passed before that man’s eyes had been copied in one or another style of illumination. Sheet after sheet after sheet I went through, finding nothing, pausing at a menu in which the capitals were constructed around the animals whose parts were being offered: fish, cattle, sheep.

“Look,” said Brother Hilarius. “Look at these drolleries.”

They didn’t look very droll to me. Hangings, crucifixions, electrocutions and other forms of violent institutional death were represented with small stylized figures in the margins of a wanted poster. I said, “Droll?”

“Drolleries,” he corrected me. “That’s the term for these, it’s a characteristic of the Gothic style, early sixteenth century.”

“Oh,” I said, and went back to my own array of drolleries.

“This Brother Urban,” Brother Hilarius said, “was quite a scholar as well as being quite an artist. He knew the different styles and stages of illumination, and he had the wit to combine them for his own statements.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said, and rejected a laundry list, all in gold and red.

“Is this it?” Brother Peregrine stood up, spraying sheets of paper off his lap, and rushed to Brother Clemence with his find. We all waited, tense, watching Brother Clemence’s face. He studied the wording which, like many of these things, was hard indeed to read, and abruptly shook his head. “Seven cents off on Crisco,” he announced.

Crushed, his star role reduced to a comic turn, Brother Peregrine turned away without a word and went back to his place. And my own humiliation followed almost immediately after.

I was positive I’d found it, positive, but Brother Clemence hardly gave it a look before dismissing it. “Birth certificate,” he announced. “Somebody named Joseph something-or-other.”

So we continued, more cautiously now, nobody wanting to be third in the chump sweepstakes, and then I got to something I couldn’t read at all. There was lettering there — I could see that much — but I couldn’t make out a word of it. Was that an L? Vines entwined themselves around the latticework of lettering, leaves fluttered, long-necked birds craned Heavenward, suns and moons were scattered with a liberal hand, and all in all I just got a headache trying to look at it.

Finally I had to ask for help. But not from Brother Clemence, not just yet. “Brother Hilarius,” I said. “What do you suppose this is?”

He looked at it, and burst out laughing. “Oh, that’s priceless!” he said.

“It is?”

“That’s very funny,” he informed me. “What a wonderful joke. Don’t you see what he’s done?”

“Not in the slightest particular.”

“He’s combined the Irish style,” Brother Hilarius told me, “right out of the Book of Durrow — look at that S right there—”

“Is that an S?”

“Of course it’s an S.” Brother Hilarius leaned over, chuckling, to study the joke in close-up. “He’s mixed the Irish style,” he said, “with Art Nouveau!”

“Oh really?”

“Art Nouveau! Don’t you see? Art Nouveau is less than a hundred years old, it comes much later than the age of illumination. Look at the curve of that tendril there.”

“Anachronism,” I suggested, trying to get a handle on this alleged joke.

“Wonderful juxtaposition.”

“Probably so,” I agreed. “The question is, is it the lease?”

Brother Hilarius frowned at me, distracted from his admiration of Abbot Urban’s humor. “What?”

“Is it the lease?”

“The lease?” He sounded astonished, as though he didn’t know there was supposed to be any lease around here at all. “Of course not.”

“Oh.”

“Look! Look! Read it for yourself.” His finger rippled across the leafy maze. “Lindy Lands,” he said.

“Lindy Lands?”

“Lindbergh. That’s the front page of the Daily News!”

Brother Zebulon, with that carelessness about rules characteristic of senior citizens, had wandered out of the audience and onto the stage. Now he was standing on Brother Hilarius’ other side, leaning over to look at the manuscript in my lap and to say, “Yes, that’s it. Lindy was all the way back here before Brother Urban ever got that one finished.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said.

Then Brother Zebulon looked around the room, squinting, obviously looking for something. “Where’s the rolls?” he said.

Brother Hilarius and I, in close harmony, both said, “Rolls?” Vision of hard rolls danced in my head.

Brother Zebulon placed all his fingertips together, then pulled his hands far apart, like someone pulling taffy. “Rolls,” he said. “Brother Urban did all the long things on rolls.”

Brother Hilarius said, “Papyrus rolls?”

“Paper rolls, that’s right,” said Brother Zebulon. “He taped pieces of paper together, and then rolled them up.”

Brother Clemence, who had been sitting at the refectory table twiddling his thumbs — literally physically twiddling his thumbs — now frowned in our direction, saying, “What’s that?”

“There should be rolls,” Brother Hilarius explained.

Brother Clemence spread out his arms to encompass the entire messy paper-strewn room. “You mean, there’s more?”

It was on one of the rolls. A select search party composed of Brothers Hilarius, Mallory, Jerome and Zebulon had found the rolls amid a lot of window shades and curtain rods, in behind the fourteen-volume novel based on the life of St. Jude the Obscure, and it didn’t take long to find the one headed by a magnificent Romanesque capital L in the form of an ivy-covered tower or turret, leading to delicately etched E, A, S and E, superimposed on small detailed two-dimensional representations of outbuildings.

“All right,” Brother Clemence said. “Let’s unroll it, and see what it has to say.”

More easily said than done. The roll wished to remain a roll, and not to become a tongue. When the end was released, it would immediately snap back to the main body. If just the end were held, the main body wished to barrel forward and enclose itself again. If both ends were held, the sides became determined to curl toward one another across the text.

Finally, four of us had to hold it down, like a sailor having his leg amputated in a pirate movie. I held part of the end and part of one side, with Brother Peregrine across from me and Brothers Mallory and Jerome down at the main body.

With the document thus spreadeagled, Brother Clemence could begin his inspection. Slowly he read, word by painful word, picking his way through two-hundred-year-old spelling, two-hundred-year-old legal phrasing, and nine-hundred-year-old calligraphy.

I grew tired, but I refused to let go, and in fact I saved the day when Brother Peregrine slipped and for just a second lost his grip on the other side. I held on, and Brother Peregrine quickly grabbed the curling corner again, but not before Brother Clemence gave him an annoyed look, saying, “Hold it steady, man.”

“Sorry.”

Brother Clemence read on. The audience crowded around, watching Brother Clemence’s face. There wasn’t a sound in the room.

Then Brother Clemence said, “Hm.” We all looked at him more closely. The audience stood up on tiptoe. Brother Clemence, one finger marking his route, read slowly again through the same passage, and by the end of it he was nodding. “Yes,” he said, and lifted his head to look around at all of us in grim satisfaction. “I got it,” he said.

It was Brother Oliver’s role to ask the questions now, and instinctively the rest of us deferred to him. And he asked: “What do you have, Brother?”

“Let me read this to you,” Brother Clemence said. Returning to the lease, having a little difficulty finding the place and then at last finding it again, he read aloud, “The option of renewal lies exclufively with the leffee.”

Brother Oliver turned his head a bit to one side, as though favoring a good ear. “It does what?”

“I’ll read it again,” Brother Clemence offered. And he did so: “The option of renewal lies exclufively with the leffee.” And now Brother Clemence smiled. Turing that smile on Brother Oliver, he said, “You see what that does?”

“No,” said Brother Oliver.

Brother Dexter said, “It says we can renew.”

“It says,” Brother Clemence said, “the option is ours to renew. Exclusively.”

Shaking his head, Brother Oliver said, “There’s that word option again.”

“Choice,” Brother Clemence told him. “In this case, Brother Oliver, it means choice. This lease says that we have the choice as to whether or not we want to renew.” Hope lit Brother Oliver’s eyes. “It does?”

“I thought there might be something like this,” Brother Clemence said. “When there was no paper filed at the time of the first renewal, back in 1876, I thought there just might be an automatic renewal option, and I wanted to see exactly what that option might say.” Patting the lease, which we four were still holding spread out like a patient etherized upon a table, he said, “And this is wording far beyond what I’d hoped for. At the best, I’d hoped it might say renewal was automatic unless one side or the other gave written notice of an intention not to renew at some specified interval before the due date. And that would have been enough, since we never were given any kind of notice. But this is even better. This lease says the lessor, the owner of the land, cannot refuse to renew the lease if we wish to stay on.”

“Then we’re saved!” Brother Oliver cried, and in the general hosannah that went up after that the lease got loose and snapped shut like a bear trap on Brother Clemence’s hand. Extricating himself, Brother Clemence shouted for our attention, and then said, “No, it doesn’t. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t.”

Brother Hilarius said, “It doesn’t what, Brother?”

“It doesn’t save us.” Holding up the lease, which was now a tight double roll, he said, “This is not the actual lease. It doesn’t contain the signatures of the participants. Nor is it, in any legal sense, a true copy. It isn’t notarized and there’s no original to compare it to for inaccuracies. It just wouldn’t carry sufficient weight in a court of law to decide the case conclusively for our side.”

Brother Flavian, ever the firebrand, cried out, “But it shows we’re in the right! Would we lie?”

“Men have been known to,” Brother Clemence told him drily. “Even clerics have on occasion dealt rashly with the truth.”

Brother Quillon said, “You mean, we went through all this for nothing? All we’ve done is find out we’re the victim of a miscarriage of justice?”

“Not exactly,” said Brother Clemence, and Brother Oliver sighed. Pushing ahead, Brother Clemence said, “We don’t have the original lease, but we do have this version, and it may be able to help us. The courts have established a precedent that could be very useful to us here. When a primary document is unavailable, the contents of that document can be reconstructed by assumption from secondary documents and the matter treated as though the primary document had been produced.”

“Oh, Brother Clemence,” Brother Oliver said wearily, and he sat down at the refectory table, shaking his head.

“This is a secondary document,” Brother Clemence said, waving the illuminated lease again. “In those messy filing cabinets over there, Brother Oliver, there must be other secondary documents that refer either directly or by inference to matters in the original lease. Letters, tax bills, account books, I don’t know what all. What I will do, now that I have this copy to tell me what to look for, is go through every document we possess and construct the strongest possible profile of the original lease. I will then ask a friend of mine, an attorney who volunteered the other day to help us for no fee, to get in touch with the Flatterys’ attorney, present our case, and suggest we settle out of court.”

Brother Oliver said, “And you really think there’s a chance?”

“It depends,” Brother Clemence told him, “on what secondary documents I can find.”

“And you’ll start searching right away?”

“As soon as I’ve cleaned up,” Brother Clemence said, “and broken my fast.”

“Oh,” said Brother Oliver. “Of course.”

Of course. We’d all been so caught up in this quest that all the more mundane things of life had become mislaid and forgotten. Breakfast; yes, indeed. We never eat until after morning Mass, of course, and today we hadn’t eaten at all. I was suddenly aware that I was starving, and I could see the same awareness in all the filthy faces around me.

Which was the other item Brother Clemence had mentioned; cleaning up. Scrounging around up there in that musty attic, smearing ourselves with dirt, cutting and bruising ourselves, getting ourselves severally muddied and bloodied, we looked now less like monks and more like the inhabitants of some medieval lunatic asylum.

As did our surroundings. This room, Brother Oliver’s office, was a knee-deep swirl of incomprehensible papers. Dust that had come downstairs with us hung in the air or had already settled on the room’s various surfaces. Brother Quillon now said, “Well, you won’t be able to find a thing in here the way it is. I’ll clean up.”

“I’ll help you,” Brother Valerian offered.

“Wonderful.”

The group was diffusing itself into separate conversations. Brother Leo, our cook, said, “I’d better get to the kitchen. Who’s on duty with me this morning?”

It turned out to be Brothers Thaddeus and Peregrine. “Well, come along, then,” Brother Leo said grumpily.

“Just a second,” Brother Clemence said, and when we all turned to give him our attention he said, “I hope everybody realizes the implication of this discovery.”

Brother Oliver said, “Implication? Besides the obvious?”

“This means,” Brother Clemence said, gesturing with the rolled-up lease, “that Brother Silas may have been right after all. The original lease really might have been stolen, to keep us from proving we have the right to stay here. So I think none of us should say anything to anybody about this copy we found.”

We all agreed, rather somberly, and then the kitchen trio went off to make breakfast while the rest of us headed upstairs to wash and change.

Brother Oliver stopped me briefly at the head of the stairs. “We’ll talk after breakfast,” he said.

“Yes, Brother,” I said.

And as I washed the attic grime from myself I wondered if Brother Clemence — or any of the others — had thought about the other implication of our find. If Brother Silas was right, if the lease had been stolen by somebody working either for the Flatterys or Dimp, who could have stolen it? Who, but one of us?