Brothers Keepers

Eight

We had our talk after breakfast, strolling in the cloister, past the refectory and the kitchen, with the courtyard on our other side. The high wall separating us from the street marked one boundary of our walk, and the chapel and cemetery marked the other, a symbolism that struck me as simultaneously pat and obscure.

We walked together one circuit in silence. I could feel Brother Oliver glancing sidelong at me from time to time, but he remained very patient, not speaking until we had passed our original starting point, and then saying, “Yes, Brother Benedict?”

“I don’t know where to begin,” I said.

“Why not at the traditional place?”

“Yes, of course.” I frowned, scrinching my face up tight. I held my breath for several seconds, and at last I burst out with it: “Brother Oliver, I’m emotionally involved with that woman!”

“Woman?”

“Eileen Flattery.”

“I know which woman, Brother Benedict,” he informed me. “But what do you mean by the phrase ‘emotionally involved’?”

What did I mean by it? Wasn’t that the question I’d been asking myself? We walked as far as the front wall, then reversed. “I mean,” I said at last, “that my mind is confused. She’s in my thoughts waking and sleeping. I hardly know who I am any more.”

Brother Oliver listened to this definition in silence, his somber gaze on the alternating toes of his sandaled feet licking out from under his robe as he walked. When I finished, he nodded slowly and said, “In other words, she has attracted your attention.”

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded again, continuing to watch his feet, and we walked the length of the cloister as far as the archway leading to the chapel and cemetery. Again we reversed, and he said, “Is this a sexual feeling?”

“I suppose it must be,” I said. “I want to touch her the way an infant wants to touch a gold watch.”

I must have spoken somewhat forcefully. Brother Oliver flashed me a quick startled look, but said nothing.

I went on. “Last night,” I said, “I did touch her.”

He stopped in his tracks, and looked at me.

“Not very much,” I said.

“Perhaps you should tell me about it,” he suggested. He didn’t walk on, so neither did I.

“Last night,” I said, “she took me for a ride in Central Park. She stopped the car and two young men tried to rob us. After I chased them off she was—”

“You chased them off?”

“It worked out that way. And afterwards she was trembling, and I put my arms around her.”

“I see,” he said.

“I hadn’t done that with anybody for a long time,” I said.

“No,” he agreed. “And that was as far as it went?”

“Yes, Brother.”

“I see.” He turned and walked again, and I fell in beside him, and we walked in silence together as far as the front wall, and reversed.

I said, “I think she’s emotionally involved with me, too.” Then I frowned and moved my arms around and stared out at the courtyard on our left, and said, “At least I think so. I’m not sure of it, but that’s what I think.”

Brother Oliver shook his head, saying, “I wish you knew a shorter phrase than ‘emotionally involved,’ Brother Benedict. It’s like talking with some giddy version of Brother Clemence.”

“I do know a shorter phrase, Brother Oliver,” I told him, “but I’m afraid to use it.”

“Oh.” He gave me a quick speculative look, then studied his feet once more. “All right, then,” he said. “Whatever you think best.” His voice sounded muffled all at once, as though he were talking into a turtleneck sweater.

“Thank you, Brother Oliver,” I said.

We walked together. We reached the cemetery arch and reversed. Brother Oliver said, “So you think she is also emotionally involved.”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Maybe she’s just confused, the way I am.”

“And is that what she wanted to talk with you about last night?”

“Oh, no, not at all. She wanted to talk about the monastery.”

“And to say what about it, Brother Benedict?”

I said, “She told me the arguments her father used to justify the sale.”

“His arguments?” Brother Oliver sounded more intrigued than surprised. He said, “I hadn’t realized he’d done any arguing on the subject.”

“Apparently so, Brother. At least with his family.”

“Ah.” That seemed to explain things.

I said, “His argument is mostly function, by the way.”

“Eh?”

“Function,” I repeated. “The claim that usefulness is the primary virtue, that all other considerations are secondary, and that this particular space would be most usefully employed as an office building.”

“A barbaric set of values,” he said.

“Yes, Brother.”

He mused, then said, “Was Miss Flattery reporting this argument favorably?”

“No. She wanted me to counteract it.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Really? Why was that?”

“She said she could help us,” I explained, “but she wouldn’t do it unless she was convinced it was right to go against her father.”

“Help us? In what way?”

“I don’t know, Brother. She wouldn’t be more specific, she only said she could definitely help us if she chose. But first I had to defeat her father’s argument.”

He nodded. “And did you?”

“No, Brother.”

We had reached the front wall again. We reversed, and Brother Oliver said, “Because of your emotional involvement, Brother Benedict?”

“Probably,” I admitted. “And then we were mugged,” I added, as though that felony had cut me down in brilliant mid-debate.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “And did you suggest to her that she talk to one of the other residents instead?”

“Yes, Brother.”

That answer surprised him. “You did?”

“I really didn’t want any of this to happen, Brother Oliver,” I said.

“I know you didn’t,” he said, his sympathy showing again. “This all came on you too suddenly and too forcefully. You weren’t ready for it.”

“Father Banzolini calls it culture shock,” I told him.

“You’ve discussed this with Father Banzolini?”

“Only certain aspects of it,” I said. “In confession.”

“Oh.”

“Father Banzolini thinks I’m temporarily insane.”

Brother Oliver gave me a look of utter astonishment. “He what?”

“Well, he didn’t phrase it that way,” I said. “He just said I wasn’t responsible for my actions at the moment.”

Brother Oliver shook his head. “I’m not entirely convinced a Freudian priest is a viable hybrid.”

“I may not actually be insane,” I conceded, “but I’m certainly confused. I don’t have any idea what I should do.”

“Do? About what?”

I spread my hands. “About my future.”

He stopped. Frowning at me he said, “Are you seriously considering an involvement with this woman? And I don’t mean an emotional involvement, I mean an involvement.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I want to stay here, I want things to be the way they used to be, but I just don’t know what to do about it. I need you to tell me, Brother Oliver.”

“Tell you? What to do with your life?”

“Yes, please.”

We came to the arch. Brother Oliver stopped, but did not reverse. Instead, he stood there for half a minute or so, gazing at the stones over long-departed residents. There were about thirty graves in our small cemetery, all from the nineteenth century. These days, we bury our deceased residents in a Catholic cemetery in Queens, next to the Long Island Expressway. The linkages with Travel are distressing, but unavoidable.

Brother Oliver sighed. He turned to me and said, “I can’t tell you what to do, Brother Benedict.”

“You can’t?”

“No one can. Your own mind has to tell you what to do.”

“My mind can’t tell me anything,” I said. “Not the way I am now.”

“But how could anyone else decide whether or not you’ve lost your vocation? This woman is testing the strength of your commitment to God and to this life. The answer has to come from within, it has to.”

“There’s nothing within me but mush,” I said.

“Brother Benedict,” he said, “you are not tied by vows the way a priest is. That gives you more freedom, but also more responsibility. You have to make your own decisions.”

“I’ve given a vow of obedience,” I pointed out.

“But that’s the only one,” he said. “You’ve made no vows of chastity or poverty. You have vowed only to remain obedient to the laws of God and of this Order and of the Abbot.”

“That’s you,” I said.

“And my commandment to you,” he said, “is to search your mind and your heart, and do what is best for yourself. If that involves either temporary or permanent separation from this Order, you should do so. The decision is yours.”

The buck stops here. “Yes, Brother,” I said.

There’s a flow, a cyclical movement to the life of the monastery, and the points of the cycle primarily involve religion and work. Our religious activities, Mass and prayer and times of meditation, are mostly recurrent on a daily basis, but our work assignments tend to cycle at a more stately pace. While some tasks are in the permanent care of residents peculiarly suited to them — Brother Leo being our cook, for example, Brother Jerome being our superintendent-handyman, Brother Dexter handling our paperwork — most job assignments rotate among us all. I had been free of work assignments for nearly two weeks when suddenly my turn came around for two in a row. At the evening meal on that Sunday, a few hours after my talk with Brother Oliver, I was on kitchen duty with Brothers Leo and Eli, and on Tuesday I had a stint in the office.

The kitchen job was simple but unappealing; one obeyed all of Brother Leo’s barked commands about batter beating and water boiling and so on, and at the end of the meal one washed all the dishes. Such tasks left plenty of time for meditation, and all at once I had more than enough to meditate about. Washing spinach for the salad should certainly be conducive, if anything is, to dispassionate thought.

The outside world eats three meals a day, of course, but we feel content with two. We never have breakfast till we’ve been up and about for at least three hours, and then that first meal is hearty enough to carry us till the evening, when we have a second meal just as hearty. It’s a healthy regimen, and it assures we’ll have a good appetite every time we enter the refectory.

Brother Leo cooks all the meals, not because the rest of us aren’t willing to do our share of the work but because he isn’t willing to eat anything that any of us might prepare. He made that point clear in several unforgettable conversations shortly after joining the Order (unforgettable to those present at the time, who have repeated the good Brother’s remarks almost verbatim to later-comers like myself), but he’s always been willing to take on assistants and bully them. Thaddeus and Peregrine today at breakfast, for instance, and Eli and myself at dinner.

I got myself in trouble with Brother Leo right away, for what he grumbled was “wool gathering.” And by golly, he was right. I hadn’t even been brooding on my troubles; far from it. In fact, I had been standing there oblivious, watching Brother Eli peel carrots. He did it as though he were whittling, the little curls of carrot spreading around him exactly like wood shavings, and I began to be convinced the twelve Apostles would soon be emerging from that bunch of carrots; twelve little orange Apostles, edible and crunchy.

“Brother Benedict! You’re wool gathering!”

“Ak!” And back to the spinach I went, salad gathering.

The Apostles did not after all appear, nor did the solution to my problem. The meal got itself made, and it got itself eaten, and the dishes got themselves washed, but my head remained a mess. Every time I tried to think about Eileen Flattery Bone my brain began to jiggle and fuzz like the television set when a plane goes over. And every time I tried to think about myself in a future outside these monastery walls my brain simply turned to snow, and then the snow melted. So much for meditation, and so much for Sunday.

Monday was a free day for me, meaning a day in which I could walk in circles in the courtyard and fail to think. I could also enter the chapel to ask God for assistance, and then realize I didn’t know what assistance I wanted. The strength to stay? Or the strength to go?

For the others in our community, Monday was the day we learned we could hope for nothing from the Landmarks Commission. Brother Hilarius apparently spent much of the day on the telephone, and he reported the result to us all at dinner. Brother Leo and today’s slaveys — Clemence and Quillon — came soapy-armed from the kitchen to listen, and Brother Hilarius began by telling us we couldn’t hope for the Landmarks Commission to designate us a landmark because they’d already rejected us seven years ago.

A lot of people said, “That’s impossible.” Brother Oliver said, “We would have known about it. Why wouldn’t we have known about it?”

“We’re not the owners,” Brother Hilarius pointed out. “The Flatterys were informed, and they attended the hearing to oppose the designation. I suppose they should have informed us themselves, but we won’t get very far with that argument seven years later.”

Brother Clemence, wiping his soapy hands and arms on everybody’s napkins, said, “What was the reason for the refusal?”

Brother Flavian thought he already knew. “So the Flatterys have friends in high places, eh?”

“That wasn’t the reason,” Brother Hilarius told him.

“Then what was it?”

“We have a dull facade.”

Everybody looked at him. Brother Peregrine said, “We’re a monastery, not a burlesque house.”

“But that was the reason,” Brother Hilarius said. “And if you think about it, it’s true. We do have a dull facade.”

What a thing to be accused of; a dull facade. Brother Quillon, who in fact did not have a dull facade, said, “What does that mean? Facade? I just don’t understand it.”

“The Landmarks law at that time,” Brother Hilarius explained, “limited the commission to consideration of a building’s facade, the outer walls facing the street. Inside, you could turn a place into a roller skating rink, but if you kept that nice Federal facade then everything was fine.”

Brother Oliver said, “Wait, let me understand this. Does the Landmarks Commission preserve buildings or front walls?”

“Front walls.” Brother Hilarius spread his hands. “The Commission itself wants to do more, but the real estate people get in and lobby against the laws, so they come up with compromises. And that one said the Landmarks Commission could not designate a building on any basis other than its street facade. Not an architecturally interesting interior, not a useful function, not anything at all except facade. And our facade is dull.”

Now that he’d explained it, nobody wanted to argue the point. In truth, our facade was dull. Since the Blessed Zapatero had been constructing a retreat from the world, he and his fellow builders had devoted their attentions mainly to the interior of our building. Facing Park Avenue was a blank gray stone wall one hundred feet long and twenty-five feet high. It contained two doors on the first floor and three smallish windows on the second floor, and that was it. From the street one couldn’t see, one couldn’t even guess at the existence of, our courtyard, our cloisters, our chapel, our cemetery or anything else.

Brother Clemence, having made a sopping pest of himself with everybody’s napkins, now broke our grim silence by saying, “Wait a minute. Hilarius, didn’t you say that was the law at that time?”

“Yes.”

“Meaning it’s been changed?”

“Not in any way that can help us.”

“What’s the change?”

Brother Hilarius said, “In 1973, the law was changed to permit the consideration of some interiors.”

Brother Clemence brightened, saying, “Oh, really? I’d love to hear a law that could open up consideration to some interiors and not include this interior.” His spreading (dry) arms suggested a magnificence in our surroundings that was perhaps slightly overdone.

Many of us felt the same way, and I could see hope entering the faces around me. But Brother Hilarius was already shaking his head. “The interiors to be considered,” he said, “in the direct language of the law, are those ‘customarily open or accessible to the public.’ If there’s one thing we’re not, Brother Clemence, it’s open or accessible to the public.”

“Then it looks as though,” Brother Clemence said, “I’ll just have to save us myself, with my secondary documents.”

Several of us turned to ask him how he was doing, and he gave us strong assurances. “Coming right along,” he told us. “It’s merely a matter of constructing the strongest possible profile.” But somehow his air of self-confidence wasn’t totally convincing.

Tuesday I was on assignment in the office, another task which left the mind free to meditate. Though in my case the word wasn’t meditate. In my case the word was stew.

There are actually two offices in the monastery, being the Abbot’s Office and the Abbey Office. The Abbot’s Office was where we’d been having our meetings and where Brother Clemence was now going through the chaos of our filing system. The Abbey Office, also called the scriptorium (inaccurately, I might say; a scriptorium in the old days was a room where monks hand-copied manuscripts), was at the front of the building, containing a desk and a telephone and a visitor’s bench. Our rare incoming phone calls and in-person visitors were dealt with in this room. Our petty cash (all of our cash was petty) was also kept here, to be tapped by me on Saturday evenings for the price of a Sunday Times. One of us was usually on duty here afternoons and evenings, and Tuesday was my turn.

I spent the first hour or so sitting at the desk, leafing through the airplane magazines Brother Leo keeps in the bottom drawer there, and from time to time mooning into the middle distance, my brain turning in fretful circles like a dog trying to figure out how to lie down.

All of this cogitation was entirely self-centered, concerned only with my own future. I had virtually abandoned all thought about Dimp and the demolition deadline fast approaching. We had only sixteen days left to save ourselves, but I spared that fact hardly a thought.

Nor had I done anything about my suspicion that one of the residents must have stolen the original lease. I’d mentioned the idea to nobody, and in fact I didn’t even think about it myself. It was too grim to contemplate.

Whom would I suspect, out of my fifteen fellow monks? Brother Oliver? Brothers Clemence or Dexter or Hilarius? Brother Zebulon? Brothers Mallory or Jerome? Brothers Valerian or Quillon or Peregrine? Brothers Leo or Flavian? Brothers Silas or Eli or Thaddeus? There wasn’t one of them I could suspect. How could I think about such a thing?

And my own problems did seem so much more acute. Brooding about them, it occurred to me at one point that I hadn’t been considering Eileen Flattery’s mental state in all this. Shouldn’t I care what she was thinking? Didn’t it matter that I might leave this monastery and then discover she didn’t want me after all?

Well, no. In some strange way, she wasn’t what really mattered. Brother Oliver had been right about that; her existence was the form of the test I was undergoing, but my vocation was the subject. Whether Eileen Flattery wanted me or not had finally nothing to do with my staying or going. The question was, would I remain Brother Benedict, or would I go back to being Charles Rowbottom? Everything else was confusion and irrelevancy.

It was nice to have the question defined, of course, but it would have been even nicer if it had come equipped with its own answer. I was continuing to ponder that little black spot in my thinking when all at once the street door opened and in came a lot of loud traffic noise and a tiny forceful man who slammed the door on the noise and then said, “All right, I’m here. I’m a busy man, let’s get this over with.”

I’ve been snapped back from meditation by the exterior world before, but never quite like this. In the first place, that street door was almost never opened, most of us preferring to use the courtyard door instead in our rare expeditions outside. In the second place, I’d assumed the street door was locked, since it usually was. And in the third place, who was this forceful little man?

I must have been gaping. The little man frowned at me and snapped, “You an unfortunate?” He darted quick impatient glances around the room, apparently looking for somebody swifter to talk to. “Where’s the head man? Oliver.”

“Brother Oliver? Who are you?”

His look grew even more impatient. “Dwarfmann,” he said. “This Abbot wants a face-to-face. I’m here.” He tapped a watch which was nervously displaying skinny red numbers on a black background: 2:27, it trembled, and the tiny brisk fingers tapped it, and it changed its mind. 2:28. “Time flies,” Dwarfmann commented.

Dwarfmann?

Dwarfmann! I jumped to my feet, displacing airplane magazines. “Roger Dwarfmann?”

He couldn’t believe how I was wasting his flying time. “How many Dwarfmanns you expecting today?”

“None,” I said. Then, “Wait. Yes, yes of course. Mr. Dwarfmann. Why don’t you, uh, sit down.” I looked around, my brain ascramble, trying to work out what piece of furniture people used when sitting down. “On that,” I said, pointing, spying the bench. Then I remembered its name. “That bench,” I said. “I’ll go tell uh, I’ll find Brother — I’ll be right back.”

He frowned after me as I fled the room. I couldn’t help it if he thought I was an unfortunate; I’d been startled, that’s all. I’m not very good at being startled. In the last ten years, before all this current craziness began to happen, I lost all of my training at being startled. There isn’t all that much of a sudden nature that takes place in a monastery. Once, about six years ago, Brother Quillon tripped on the door jamb coming into the refectory and dumped a tray containing twelve dishes of ice cream on me, and of course the other week Brother Jerome had dropped that wet washcloth on my head, but other than that my life had been fairly placid for a long long time. It wasn’t as though I were a cabdriver or something.

Brother Oliver was not in his office, though Brothers Clemence and Dexter were, both of them elbow deep in paper and looking mildly hysterical. I asked them if they knew where Brother Oliver was, and Brother Clemence said, “Try the library.”

“Fine.”

“Or the calefactory,” said Brother Dexter.

Brother Clemence looked at him. “The calefactory? What would he be doing in there?”

“I saw him in there just the other day,” Brother Dexter said.

Brother Clemence said, “But what would he be doing in there now?”

“Thank you,” I told them both.

They ignored me. Brother Dexter said to Brother Clemence. “I just said he could be in there.”

I hurried on, hearing their voices rising somewhat behind me.

Brother Oliver was not in the library. Brother Silas was sitting there, reading his book — when joining this Order, he had donated to our library fifteen remaindered copies of I’m No Saint, the memoir of his life as a professional criminal, and he frequently came here to glance through one or another copy — and when I asked him about Brother Oliver he said, “He was here. I think he went upstairs.”

“Upstairs. Right.” I turned back down the hall, and then I realized I’d have to go back through the office — the one containing Roger Dwarfmann — to get to the stairs. Well, there was nothing for it.

The sounds of Brothers Clemence and Dexter in contention rippled from their doorway as I retraced my steps. I trotted back to the front office and found Roger Dwarfmann not sitting. He was standing, and he was pacing, and he was looking at his watch with the trembly red numbers. He paused to lower his eyebrows at me, but I didn’t pause at all. “Upstairs,” I said, en passant. “I’ll just be—” And up the stairs I went.

Brother Oliver’s room was second on the left. I could see it was empty through the open doorway, but I knocked anyway, and Brother Quillon came out of his own room diagonally across the hall to say, “Did you want somebody?”

“Brother Oliver.”

“I think he’s in the calefactory.”

Two votes for that suggestion. “Ah,” I said.

Brother Quillon went back into his room, leaving the door open. Starting for the stairs, I paused to look in at him and say, “What’s he doing in there?”

Brother Quillon was puzzled. “I beg your pardon?”

“Brother Oliver. In the calefactory.”

“Oh. Calisthenics,” he said.

“Calisthenics? In the calefactory?”

“Brother Mallory thought it was getting too cold in the courtyard.”

“Ah. Thank you.” And I hurried back down the stairs, wondering fretfully what little red numbers were showing by now on Roger Dwarfmann’s watch. But I really didn’t want to know.

He was pacing again. He stopped to glare at me, frowning like a rock fault, and I said, “Calefactory. I’ll go, um—” And down the hall I went again.

Brothers Clemence and Dexter were very angry at one another. I paused on the way by to close that door, not wanting Roger Dwarfmann to hear monks shouting at one another that way, and then hurried on down the hall to the calefactory.

The original idea of a calefactory was that it was a room that was kept warm in winter. Until this century, most rooms of most buildings were left unheated, and the calefactory in a monastery was where one could find heat if it was needed. The great fireplace in one wall demonstrates that this room was originally employed as its name suggests, but in more recent years it has become a general sitting room, our communal parlor. We most particularly like it in summer, perhaps, when it is one of the coolest spots in the building.

And Brother Mallory seemed to be taking it over for himself, gradually turning it into a gymnasium. Last Saturday he’d held his boxing matches here, and now his calisthenics class was spread out on the floor, raising one leg after the other with a great whiffling of robes. Brothers Valerian, Peregrine and Hilarius, looking like tipped-over wind-up dolls, with Brother Mallory marching around them and counting out the cadence.

But no Brother Oliver. I shouted out my question, breaking into Brother Mallory’s count, and while the three on the floor permitted their legs to flop and did a lot of gasping for breath. Brother Mallory mused a moment and said, “I think I saw him going into the chapel.”

Would this never end? “Thank you, Brother,” I said, and trotted out the calefactory’s side door, through the cloakroom past the sacristy, and into the chapel by the door behind the altar, where the reports of exploding knees told me Brother Zebulon was present long before I actually saw him.

Yes, there he was, sweeping the floor, and genuflecting every time he passed the center aisle. Crack! Bang! Kapow! He sounded like a Civil War battle.

Brother Oliver wasn’t here, of course. I hurried over to Brother Zebulon — adding my own rattle of gunfire when genuflecting along the way — and whispered, “Where’s Brother Oliver?”

He ignored me. I don’t think he even knew I was there.

Well. One should whisper in church, but whispering to a deaf old man is self-defeating, so I raised my voice: “Brother Zebulon!”

He dropped his broom and jumped a foot. Turning, he said, “What? What?”

“Brother Oliver,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”

He was annoyed with me, and so didn’t answer till he’d picked up his broom. Then he said, “Try the kitchen,” and turned his back on me.

I went out the far door of the chapel, intending to go through the cemetery to the cloister and thus into the kitchen, but turning out the cemetery arch I stopped and frowned and decided no. The way things were going Brother Oliver would not be in the kitchen but Brother Leo would, and he’d tell me to try the refectory, where some other Brother would tell me to try the second floor on this side — there are two separate second floors, which don’t connect — where yet another Brother would tell me to try the tower, where a passing pigeon would suggest I try the undercroft, which is the basement, back over on the other side. Directly beneath, in fact, the pacing feet of Roger Dwarfmann.

No. Enough. Leaving the cemetery, I went instead directly out to the courtyard, a big grassy area crisscrossed by stone walks and dotted with plane trees, a few struggling evergreens, a couple of birdbaths, a flower garden which was not at its best this time of year, and along the chapel wall our grape arbor. I strode now out to the middle of this space, lifted my head, and said, “BROTHER OLIVER!”

“Yes, Brother Benedict?”

He was right next to me. He came mildly around the nearest evergreen, his paintbrush and palette in his hands, and blinked gently at me, wondering what it was I wanted.

“At last,” I said. “It must be 2:43 by now, maybe even 2:44.”

“Brother Benedict? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I lied. “Roger Dwarfmann is in there.”

Brother Oliver looked pleasantly surprised, but no more. “He called?”

“He came! He’s here, right now, he’s walking up and down in the office!”

“He’s here now?” Brother Oliver fussed with his paintbrush and palette, not knowing where to put them. “In my office?”

“No, the other one. The scriptorium. Brothers Clemence and Dexter are in your office, I didn’t think I should—”

I stopped talking, because Brother Oliver had disappeared around the tree again. Following him, I saw him place his brush and palette at the feet of his latest murky Madonna, who oddly enough seemed to have been influenced by Picasso — I assume that treatment of the eyes was deliberate — and then he gathered up his skirts and trotted toward the side door, which led via a short hall to the scriptorium. I jogged after.

Dwarfmann had continued to pace. He stopped at our arrival and I tried to read those transient red numbers on his wrist, but his hands and arms were constantly involved in expansive gestures. “Well?” he said, glaring past Brother Oliver’s shoulder at me. “Well?”

Apparently I was to make introductions. “Brother Oliver,” I said. “This is Roger Dwarfmann.”

“So here you are,” Dwarfmann said. He bobbed on the balls of his feet, as though to make himself taller, and frowned severely upward at Brother Oliver’s bulk.

“Have I kept you waiting? I’m so sorry,” Brother Oliver said. “I was painting, in the courtyard. This winter light is so perfect for—”

Dwarfmann gestured that away with an impatient flick of his numerical wrist; I couldn’t see the numbers. “My days,” he said, “are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle. Let’s get down to business.”

I’m sure Brother Oliver was as taken aback as I was. The imagery, in Dwarfmann’s rattly style of speech, seemed wildly inappropriate. Then Brother Oliver said, in distinct astonishment, “Was that from Job?”

“Chapter seven, verse six,” Dwarfmann snapped. “Come, come, if you have something to say to me, say it. Our time is a very shadow that passeth away.”

“I don’t know the Apocrypha,” Brother Oliver said.

Dwarfmann gave him a thin smile. “You know it well enough to recognize it. Wisdom of Solomon, chapter two, verse five.”

“Then I can only cite One Thessalonians,” Brother Oliver said. “Chapter five, verse fourteen. Be patient toward all men.”

“Let us run with patience,” Dwarfmann or somebody said, “the race that is set before us.”

“I don’t believe,” Brother Oliver told him, “that was quite the implication of that verse in its original context.”

“Hebrews, twelve, one.” Dwarfmann shrugged. “Then how about Paul to Timothy, with its meaning intact? Be instant in season, out of season.” Again he tapped those little red numbers, and now I saw them: 2:51. I don’t know why I felt so relieved to know the exact time — something about Dwarfmann’s presence, I suppose. And he was saying, “I’m a busy man.” That couldn’t be Biblical. “My man Snopes told you all you needed to know, we’ll give you every assistance in relocation, given the circumstances we’ll go farther than the law requires. Much farther. But that wasn’t enough for you, you have to hear it from me direct. All right, you’re hearing it from me direct. We’re building on this site.”

“There is a building on this site,” Brother Oliver said.

“Not for long.”

“Why not look at it?” Brother Oliver made hospitable gestures, urging our guest to come look the place over. “Now that you’re here, why not see the place you intend to destroy?”

“Beauty is vain,” Dwarfmann said. “Proverbs, thirty-one, thirty.”

Brother Oliver began to look somewhat put out. He said, “Wot ye not what the Scripture saith? Romans, eleven.”

With that sudden thin smile again, Dwarfmann answered, “What saith the Scripture? Galatians, four.”

“Pride goeth before destruction,” Brother Oliver told him, “and an haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs, sixteen.”

Dwarfmann shrugged, saying, “Let us do evil, that good may come. Romans, three.”

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil. Isaiah, five.”

“Sin is not imputed when there is no law,” Dwarfmann insisted. “Romans, five.”

Brother Oliver shook his head. “He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent.”

“Money answereth all things,” Dwarfmann said, with a great deal of assurance.

“He heapeth up riches,” Brother Oliver said scornfully, “and knoweth not who shall gather them.”

“Unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.” Dwarfmann permitted his own scornful expression to roam around our room, then finished, “But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Another quick look at his watch. “I think we’ve played enough,” he said, and turned toward the door.

Brother Oliver had two pink circles on his cheeks, and his pudgy hands were more or less closed into ineffective fists. “The devil is come down unto you,” he announced, “having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”

Dwarfmann’s hand was on our doorknob. He looked back at Brother Oliver, flashed that thin smile again as though to say he was glad we all understood one another now, and with another quick glance around the room said, “He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more. Job, chapter seven, verse ten.” And he left.

Brother Oliver expelled held-in breath with a sudden long whoosh. Shaking my head, I said, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”

Brother Oliver gave me a puzzled look. “Is that New Testament? I don’t recognize that.”

“Uhh, no,” I said. “It’s Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice.” I cleared my throat. “Sorry,” I said.