“That’s what I’ll phone you about, a meeting with Mr. Dwarfmann.”
“When?”
“I’ll be in touch no later than Monday afternoon.”
“Good. Come, Brother.”
“Right,” I said, and with one last backward glance at those slabs I followed Brother Oliver toward the door.
Which opened, just before we got to it, and Miss Flinter backed in with a tray containing three plastic coffee cups. “Oh,” she said, when she saw we were leaving, and she just stood there holding the cups.
“It’s the thought that counts,” Brother Oliver assured her, and he stopped in the doorway to look back at Snopes and say, “Mr. Dwarfmann is in Rome?”
“That’s right.”
“You people have no designs on St. Peter’s, do you, or the Vatican?”
Snopes laughed, as though it were all a friendly joke. “No, Brother Oliver, we don’t. And not on the Coliseum, either.”
“Well, you wouldn’t,” Brother Oliver said. “That’s already a ruin.”
Five
Never had my little room looked so good to me. These patched and repatched plaster walls, white with paint that I had brushed on myself, this uneven wide-planked floor that I kept waxed and polished to the gleaming hue of honey, these two rough ax-hewn ceiling beams that gave me splinters every time I swept away the cobwebs, that heavy oak door with its filigreed iron hinges and handworn iron latch, the small diamond-paned window deeply inset in the exterior wall with its view — no, its glimpse — of the courtyard down below and the other arm of the monastery across the way, all enclosed me in the comfort and warmth of the familiar. There was not an inch of this room that I had not cleaned, touched, looked at, concerned myself with. It was mine in a way that Dwarfmann’s twin slabs would never be Dwarfmann’s.
Brother Oliver was right; Dimp had to be stopped. Should a wrecking ball be permitted to come crashing through that wall, by that window? Should a bulldozer be permitted to crumple and splinter and bury the planks of this floor?
And the furniture. It belonged to me, naturally, but it also belonged to this room. The bed, a four-inch foam rubber pad (four dollars and fifty cents, downtown) on a small plywood platform with legs made of stubby two-by-fours, had been constructed by me, with the help of Brother Jerome, and its dimensions had been planned with this room in mind. Along this wall, with a specific relationship to the window and a specific relationship to the door. And the box beneath the window, in which I kept my changes of clothing and my personal possessions, that I had built myself from pieces of packing crates, oiling the wood when I made the box and now waxing it every time I did the floor, that box had been designed for the dimensions of the window above it and for its second purpose of being a seat whenever I had anyone else in the room. (I sat, of course, on the bed.) The two pieces of furniture filled this room because they had been fitted to it and fulfilled all the room’s functions, but take them out of here and put them in some anonymous smooth-walled cube and you would make a room that could only be empty and barren and uncomfortable.
I sat for quite a while on my bed, once we returned from our journey to Dimp, watching the slowly changing trapezoid of afternoon sunlight on my floor and thinking about my recent experiences of Travel. How complex the world is, once one leaves the familiar and the known. It contains — and has for years contained, without my knowing it — both Eileen Flattery Bone and Elroy Snopes. If one were to Travel every day, would one go on meeting such richly intrusive personalities? How could the ordinary brain survive such an onslaught?
I was meditating on the possibility that perhaps ordinary brains did not survive such onslaughts, and that the coming of the Age of Travel produced by the end of feudalism and the social changes of the industrial revolution had in fact created mass psychosis (a theory that would explain much of the world’s history over the last few hundred years), when Brother Quillon, our resident homosexual, knocked on my open door and said, “Pardon my interrupting your meditation, Brother Benedict, but Brother Oliver would like to see you in his office.”
“Mm? Oh. Thank you, Brother Quillon, thank you.” I blinked and nodded and moved my limbs about in a disorganized fashion, readjusting myself to the world outside my head.
Brother Quillon gave me a shy smile and went away down the corridor. What a difficult life he had set for himself, poor man. We were all celibates in these walls, of course, but the rest of us had removed ourselves from the arena of temptation, while Brother Quillon was smack in the middle of it. If a girl on a television commercial — not to mention the physical presence of Eileen Bone — could strain the dam of my sexuality, think what Brother Quillon had to go through, every day of his life. His success was a continuing inspiration to us all.
Well. I left my room and hurried downstairs to see what Brother Oliver wanted.
It was another meeting, but this time there were six of us gathered around the refectory table. In addition to Brothers Clemence (attorney), Dexter (banker), Hilarius (historian), Oliver (Abbot) and myself (innocent bystander), there was also Brother Jerome. A stocky heavy-armed man with bushy eyebrows, Brother Jerome was our handyman and general fix-it master. He understood carpentry, plumbing, home wiring and the insides of small appliances. He it was who had helped me construct my bed, and he it also was who had become an accidental occasion of sin for me when he’d dropped a wet cloth on my head a few days ago, resulting in my taking the Lord’s name in vain.
He had been brought here by Brother Clemence, who explained that Brother Jerome “has something of interest to tell us. But it’s only a footnote, it can wait. We should hear the main text first.”
So we did. Brother Oliver began by giving a summary of his meeting with Daniel Flattery yesterday — a much less emotional summary than the one he had delivered to me in the railroad car on our way back from the Flattery house — and then he gave a rather detailed account of our meeting with Mr. Snopes, including a description of the structures Dimp intended to put in our place. “Although I intend to do my best with Mr. Dwarfmann when eventually I meet him,” Brother Oliver concluded, “I must say I don’t feel much optimism in that quarter. The sum of our efforts so far, I would say, Brother Benedict’s and mine, is that we have met the enemy. We know somewhat more than we did about the kind of people with which we must deal, but I wouldn’t say we know as yet very much about how to deal with them.”
“It sounds,” Brother Hilarius said, “as though aesthetic appeals would have very little effect on such people.”
“About as much effect,” Brother Oliver said, “as an appeal to conscience.”
Brother Hilarius said, “What about an appeal in terms of money? Wouldn’t that be the sort of thing they might understand?”
“In terms of money? What does that mean, Brother Hilarius?”
“What if we offered to buy the monastery ourselves?”
Brother Dexter entered the conversation, saying, “We couldn’t possibly afford it.”
“But couldn’t we,” Brother Hilarius asked him, “mount some sort of fund drive?”
Brother Dexter shrugged. “For the kind of money we’d need? An obscure order like ours? I really doubt it.”
“Well, how much money are we talking about?”
“I made some calls today,” Brother Dexter said, “to relatives down in Maryland. They talked to banking people they know in New York, and then they called me back. Now, they couldn’t find out exactly how much Dwarfmann’s paying Flattery for this land, but given the general range of current land prices in this area they came up with a ballpark figure of around two million dollars.”