But my own cumbersomeness wasn’t the only reason for our silences. Eileen was obviously still upset about the scene with Alfred Broyle at lunch, so much so that the tiny vertical frown lines in her forehead seemed almost permanent. All through the house, we would enter a room and she would tell me what room we had entered — “This is the kitchen,” in a room featuring sink, stove and refrigerator — and I would describe it as very nice, and the silence would fall again, and we would walk on to the next room. Now we were outside on the lawn and she was pointing to trees and I was saying they were very nice.
I had made a few faltering attempts at general conversation but they had all, like this last one concerning Brother Oliver and her father, barely survived one exchange. If I did get a response from her on my first statement I had no idea what to do next, how to follow through. Thud. Silence again.
We were moving around toward the rear of the house. She pointed at a clump of tall slender white birches. “We planted those when I was ten,” she said. “Those birches there.”
“You’ve both grown up to be very beautiful,” I said, and was so astounded and delighted by myself that I didn’t even care that I was immediately blushing.
Eileen didn’t notice the blush anyway; in fact, she hardly noticed the compliment. “Thank you,” she said, with the thinnest of smiles, and pointed at a weeping willow. “That’s a weeping willow. It was here when we bought the house.”
“It’s very nice.”
We moved on, and eventually were at the very end of the lawn, where the water lapped at a retaining wall of gray vertical wooden planks. “That’s my father’s boat.”
I took a deep breath. “You ought to stay away from Alfred Broyle,” I said.
She looked at me with amused astonishment. “I what?”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to say anything, and then I...” I waved my arms around and looked out at the Bay. “That’s the Bay, isn’t it?”
“What’s the matter with Alfred?”
Peripheral vision can be a cruel thing; even though I wasn’t looking directly at her I could see her condescending smile. “Should I call him Al?”
“Nobody can call him Al,” I said. “If they could, he’d be a different man.”
Did peripheral vision lie, or did her expression change to one of surprised recognition? No, peripheral vision did not lie. She said, “How right you are.”
“And I don’t like his moustache.”
“Neither do I.”
I looked fully at her, and she was smiling, but the smile was friendly now and not patronizing. “It’s a very weak moustache,” I said.
“It suits him,” she said.
“That’s the problem.”
“So it is.”
“Brother Behnnn-edict!”
I turned, and Brother Oliver was just outside the back door of the house, waving at me. “Oh,” I said. “I have to go.”
She touched my arm, a cool but friendly touch. “Thank you,” she said, “for taking an interest.”
“It was hard not to,” I said, returning her smile, “under the circumstances.”
“Brother Behnnn-edict!”
“You’ve made up my mind for me,” she said. “From this moment, Alfred is out of my life.”
“Good,” I said. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Flattery.”
“Mrs. Bone,” she said.
I stared at her. “What?”
She leaned close to me, deviltry in her eyes, and with unholy glee she whispered, “I’m divorced!”
“Oh.” And I was so astounded that I couldn’t think of another word to say. The “Kenny” mentioned by Alfred as his closing remark, that must have been the husband. Kenneth Bone. Another stupid name. I decided I didn’t like him. If this girl, a good and beautiful Irish Catholic girl from a good Catholic home, had found it necessary to divorce him, there had to be something really drastically wrong with him.
“Brother Benedict!”
“I have to go. Goodbye, Muh-Mi-Mi—”
“Eileen,” she suggested.
“Eileen. Goodbye, Eileen.”
“Goodbye, Brother Benedict.”
I could feel her smiling eyes on me as I hurried back across the lawn to Brother Oliver, who was in a foul mood. “That took long enough,” he said. “Ready to give up your vows, Brother?”
“Oh, Brother Oliver,” I said. “Flattery wouldn’t change his mind?”
Almost at once his manner thawed. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m upset at Flattery, not at you. But do come along now.”
We walked around the house, rather than through it. I said, “Is there no hope at all?”
“We’ll see,” he said, though without much confidence. “There’s always Dwarfmann.”
Four
“Brother Oliver,” I asked the next day, as we were preparing to leave the monastery, “can a dream be a sin?”
He was brooding deeply on problems of his own — mostly, I suppose, his failure yesterday with Daniel Flattery and the anticipated meeting this afternoon at the Dwarfmann offices — and he frowned at me for some time in complete incomprehension before saying, “What? What?”
“What I mean is,” I explained, “say there’s an action that’s a sin if you were to do it in real life. And it would be a sin of intent if you did it in a purposeful fantasy. But if it happens in a dream? Is that a sin? And if it is, what kind of sin is it?”
“Brother Benedict,” he said, “I haven’t the vaguest idea what you think you’re talking about.”
“I do have the vaguest idea,” I said. “That’s all I have, the vaguest idea.”
“I think you ought to ask that question, whatever it was, of Father Banzolini when he comes to hear confessions tomorrow night.”
“I suppose so,” I said. And what a sigh Father Banzolini would produce when I asked him — I could hear it already. Or was that me sighing?
“Are you ready to go, Brother Benedict?”
“Not really,” I said. “But as much as I’ll ever be.”
“Brother Benedict,” he said, with a kind of paternal impatience, “don’t you think I know how you feel? Don’t you think I myself would rather be back to my painting, and not have to Travel Travel Travel all the time?”
No, I did not. My own personal feeling was that Brother Oliver was getting a secret thrill out of all this Travel, that he had adjusted very quickly yesterday to the outside world, that he had enjoyed the journey back from Long Island even more than the journey out — despite the failure of our mission — and that he was positively looking forward to the Travel aspect of today’s expedition. I had seen him yesterday slip that Long Island Railroad timetable inside his robe. The retaining of souvenirs is the surest sign of a luxuriating relationship with Travel. In my opinion, that incomplete Madonna and Child figured in Brother Oliver’s current thoughts not at all.
None of which I said aloud, just as I had not made any mention yesterday of my having noticed the timetable disappear. I contented myself with an ambiguous but not actually rebellious shrug, and I said, “Well, I suppose we might as well get going.”
And so we went. Out to the courtyard, where Brother Leo was frowning upward at a passing airplane as though uncertain whether or not it was one of ours, and then through the great oak door and once again into the rapids of the teeming world.
But though I went quietly, inside I was mutinous. It was bad enough that Brother Oliver was secretly enjoying all this Travel, and it was certainly bad enough that my first experience with Travel since joining the Order should have presented my mind with so many utterly indigestible experiences. What made it all so much worse was the knowledge that I shouldn’t be going through all this in the first place. I wasn’t one of Brother Oliver’s close associates, one of that small group who actually ran things here — Brothers Dexter and Clement and Hilarius filled those roles — and the only reason I was involved in this at all was that I’d been the one to notice our monastery’s name in the newspaper. That was the only reason.