“Do you know Daniel?”
“We’ve met,” Brother Oliver said, though not with much enthusiasm. “Two or three times I had to telephone him to come take Francis away. Then he did visit the monastery after his father’s death, asking us to remember the old man in our prayers. He’s a very religious man, Daniel, in a gruff blaspheming sort of Gaelic way.”
“What about the rest of the family?”
“Daniel’s the only one that matters,” he said. “The rest don’t count.”
As it turned out, he could not have been more wrong.
The cabdriver at the Sayville railroad station became much less effusive when he learned we merely wanted directions and not to hire his services. “Bayview Drive?” He shook his head, curling his lip like a meat inspector rejecting a bad roast. “It’s too far,” he said, “you can’t walk it.”
“Oh, I’m sure we can,” Brother Oliver said.
The driver gestured almost angrily at his ramshackle cab. “A buck and a half,” he said, “and you’re there in five minutes, in comfort and convenience.”
“Then we can walk it in twenty,” Brother Oliver said gently. “If you could just point the way?”
The driver looked around the empty station. Our train had departed, there were no other potential customers, and a cold wind was gusting across the blacktop parking lot. Yesterday’s rain had transformed to today’s clammy air and heavy clouds. The driver shook his head in disgust. “Okay, Father,” he said, and flung out one arm to point in a direction I took to be south. “You just walk that way till your ass gets wet,” he said, “and then you turn right.”
“Thank you,” Brother Oliver said, and I had to admire his dignity.
The driver grumbled and muttered and lunged himself into the cab, slamming the door. Brother Oliver and I started walking.
The weather wasn’t particularly pleasant, but our surroundings had improved tremendously since first we had committed ourselves to the Long Island Railroad. We had Traveled fifty or sixty miles through a seamless quilt of small Long Island towns until eventually there came to be bits of green, actual lawns and parks and fields and at last even some pocket parcels of woodland. This quiet town of Sayville was such an utter contrast with the frenzy of Manhattan and the industrial grime of Queens that I felt almost giddy. Those who Travel more frequently become used to constant wrenching changes in their environment, but for me these swift changes — it was not yet noon — were like wine, too much of it drunk too quickly.
Our route now took us to a neat but very busy main business thoroughfare where a polite overweight policeman gave us more comprehensive and less offensive directions. He also assured us it was too long a walk, but he was obviously mistaken. A grown man in reasonably good health can cover perhaps twenty-five miles in a day, and the directions we were given led me to believe the Flattery house was less than two miles from the railroad station.
Which is a strange thing about Travel. People who do it all the time become enslaved to many false gods and absurd dogmas. The cabdriver and the policeman — and undoubtedly nearly anyone else in that town we might have asked — have grown so used to the idea of driving an automobile when engaged in the process of Travel that they have come to disbelieve in the very existence of other modes. Did that policeman live two miles from his place of duty? If he did, and if he walked to work every day rather than drive, he would be less overweight.
We are not capricious, you see, in thinking Travel too serious to be undertaken lightly. Overindulgence in Travel, as in other questionable activities, leads to weaknesses that are moral, physical, mental and emotional. Imagine a healthy adult thinking two miles too far to walk! And yet he would laugh at someone who claimed, say, that the earth was flat.
South of the business district we came on grander houses, set well back amid lawns and old trees and curving driveways. Occasional large loping dogs, dalmatians and Irish setters and suchlike, romped out to study us, and one German shepherd trotted along at our heels until Brother Oliver had to stop and tell him firmly that he should go home, that we were not prepared to accept responsibility for him. He smiled at us, and went back.
Occasional cars rustled past us and we did meet one pedestrian, a tiny old woman who was talking to herself. She reminded me so much of old Brother Zebulon that I felt a sudden deep stab of homesickness. “Ahhh,” I said.
Brother Oliver raised an eyebrow at me. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“We’re nearly there,” he assured me, demonstrating just how rapidly Travel can make even someone like Brother Oliver fall into error. I didn’t want to be nearly there; I wanted to be nearly home.
Bayview Drive was aptly named. As we walked along it, we caught glimpses to our left of the Great South Bay which separates Long Island from Fire Island. The houses along here were estates, undoubtedly very expensive, and the ones on the bay side tended to have docking facilities at the farther end of the back lawn. Gleaming clapboard and weathered shingles combined here to create an aura of rustic wealth.
The Flattery property was enclosed by a spike-tipped iron fence, but the driveway gate stood open and we walked up the gravel drive to the house. No dog came out to welcome us, which was something of a surprise, but Brother Oliver’s ringing of the doorbell produced almost at once a short stocky woman in orange pants and a woolly blue sweater who opened the door, took one look at us, and said, “Ah. Just one minute.” And then, before Brother Oliver could say a word, she shut the door again.
Brother Oliver and I looked at one another. I said, “Maybe she went to get Daniel.”
“It’s very strange,” Brother Oliver said, and the door snapped open again.
She was back. This time she had a large black patent-leather purse in one hand and a five dollar bill in the other. Pressing the bill into Brother Oliver’s hand she said, “There you are, Father. Bless you.” And reclosed the door.
Brother Oliver stared at the closed door. He stared at the bill in his hand. He stared at me, and a red flush began to creep up his cheeks from his neck, but whether it was a flush of embarrassment or annoyance I couldn’t entirely tell. Shaking his head, he firmly pushed the doorbell again.
The woman, when she reopened the door, was very clearly annoyed. “Well, now what?” she said.
“First, madam,” Brother Oliver said, “you can have your money back. Mine has not been a mendicant order for at least a hundred years, and I doubt we ever begged from door to door.”
The woman frowned as Brother Oliver forced the crumpling bill into her fist. “Well, what on earth—?”
“We are here,” Brother Oliver said, with a dignity that was becoming just the slightest bit frosty, “to see Daniel Flattery. If we may.”
“Dan?” The idea that anyone might want to see the man who lived in this house seemed to bewilder her utterly. “I’m Mrs. Flattery,” she said. “Can I be of help?”
“I am Brother Oliver, Abbot of the Crispinite Order, and this is Brother Benedict. We would like to see your husband in connection with our monastery.”
“Your monastery? Dan?” She gave a disbelieving laugh and said, “Put the thought right out of your mind. Dan in a monastery? I don’t know who gave you his name, but they were pulling your leg. Dan!” And she laughed again, in an earthy beery manner I found rather unattractive.
“Daniel Flattery,” Brother Oliver said, his voice trembling somewhat, “owns our monastery. We are here to talk with him about its sale.”