Well, I didn’t. I continued the twelve paces forward, holding tightly to my newspaper and looking directly at her. She was wearing pants, and a dark-colored sweater, and some sort of hip-length jacket. She looked tall and slender and darkly beautiful. She was the refined essence of every electric peril I had sensed in the world tonight.
I stopped when I reached her. It didn’t seem possible merely to nod and say hello and walk on by, so I stopped. But I didn’t speak.
She did. “Hello, Brother Benedict,” she said, and both her smile and her tone of voice were far too complex for me to unravel. Several kinds of humor and several kinds of somberness were so entwined in her voice, her eyes, the set of her head, the lines of her lips, that I merely let it all wash over me like a Russian symphony and didn’t even seek for meaning. “I’ll drive you home,” she said.
“It isn’t far,” I said.
“We’ll make it far,” she said. Then she looked slightly more somber, slightly less humorous. “I want to talk to you, Brother Benedict.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I have strict orders to return to—”
“About your monastery,” she said. “About the sale. I might be able to help.”
That stopped me. Frowning at her, trying to read her despite the complexity, I said, “Why?”
“You mean how,” she said.
“No, I mean why. It’s your father that’s selling the place.”
“That might be a good reason right there,” she said. “And there might be others. I’m hoping you’ll tell me.”
“Brother Oliver is the one who—”
“You, Brother Benedict.” Humor was returning, glinting in her eyes and creating soft pale shadings on her cheekbones. “I have a sense of trust in you,” she said. “If anyone can tell me the monastery’s side of all this, you’re that one.”
“Tomorrow,” I said. “If you were to come tomorrow, possibly I—”
“I’m here now. I might change my mind by tomorrow.”
“Come into the monastery, then, I’ll show you ar—”
“No, Brother Benedict,” she said. “My turf, not yours.” And she gestured at her car. It was as long and sleek and graceful and competent and gleaming as she herself, and she was right about it. It matched her, as my monastery matched me.
I said, “I don’t think I could get permission to—”
“Why get permission? We’ll talk for ten minutes, and I’ll drop you off at your door.”
I shook my head. “No. We have rules.”
She was becoming impatient with me. “I’m beginning to be sorry I came here, Brother Benedict. Maybe my brother’s right about you people, it doesn’t matter what happens to you one way or the other.”
“I’ll ask,” I said. I gestured with the newspaper, displaying it, saying, “I’ll bring this in, and I’ll ask Brother Oliver.”
She studied me, frowning, as though trying to decide whether my insistence was weakness or strength. Then abruptly she nodded and said, “All right. I’ll be waiting out front.”
I found Brother Oliver in the calefactory, watching Brothers Peregrine and Quillon in a boxing match. The purpose was salubrity rather than belligerence, this being an exercise campaign initiated by Brother Mallory, the former welterweight, who was quadrupling now as referee, trainer and both seconds. Brother Peregrine, our onetime summer theater operator, merely looked absurd in his long brown robe and huge sixteen-ounce boxing gloves, floundering around like a marionette with tangled strings, but Brother Quillon looked bizarre. They were circling one another like a binary star, with Brother Mallory bobbing and weaving intently around them as though an incredible display of fisticuffs were taking place somewhere or other. In truth, Brother Quillon backed in great eccentric circles, his eyes very round and his mouth very open and both boxing gloves held out in midair in front of himself, while Brother Peregrine stalked along in his wake, delivering confused flurries of punches at Brother Quillon’s gloves.
I waited till a round had completed itself before attracting Brother Oliver’s attention. While Brother Mallory bounded from corner to corner, giving his pugilists good advice and firm reassurance, I told Brother Oliver what I had found outside. “Hmm,” he said, and frowned. “What did she want?”
I repeated the conversation, and her invitation, and the threat that she might change her mind by tomorrow. “The question is,” I finished, “should I go?”
Brother Oliver thought it over. The next round had begun, and he watched as he pondered. Out in the middle of the floor Brother Peregrine’s face was becoming very red, while Brother Quillon’s was dead white.
“I think,” Brother Oliver said at last, “you should go.”
“You do?”
“I see no harm in it,” he said.
I did. I wasn’t exactly sure what the harm was, but I saw it or felt it or tasted it; I sensed it with some sense or another, and I was torn about what to do. I’d been hoping Brother Oliver would refuse to let me out, thereby taking the decision out of my hands. But he was giving me permission, and now what was I going to do?
“All right, Brother Oliver,” I said, not happily, and left the scene of battle.
So I would Travel. That was clearly where my duty lay, if by means of my Traveling I could at all help to save the monastery. And, I must admit, it was also what I really wanted to do, despite our Order’s thoughts on the subject, despite Father Banzolini’s warnings, and despite my own awareness that I was becoming very badly addicted. Very badly addicted. “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist,” Saint Augustine wrote in Enchiridion. Or, putting it another way, “I can resist anything,” said Oscar Wilde, “except temptation.”
It was awkward getting into the car. Through some miracle of design the seat managed to be several inches below street level, and the door opening was a weirdly shaped parallelogram through which it would have been difficult to pass anything larger than a doughnut. However, I did effect entry, though without much grace; at the last I had to release all my hand-holds and simply drop backwards the last few inches onto the white upholstery. Then I tucked my knees up under my chin, tucked my robe under my legs, and practically had to leave the car again in order to reach the handle so I could close the door.
Mrs. Bone — I thought it safest to think of her under that heading — watched my progress with amusement. “I guess you’re not used to this kind of car,” she said, when I finally completed my labors.
“I’m not used to any kind of car,” I told her. “This is my first automobile ride in over ten years.”
She raised a surprised eyebrow. “Is that right? How do you like it so far?”
Shifting position, I said, “I didn’t remember the seats as being so uncomfortable.”
More surprise, plus amusement, “Un-comfortable? The people at General Motors will be sorry to hear that.”
“I suppose one gets used to it,” I said.
“That must be it,” she agreed, and shifted the gear, and away from the curb we moved.
The sensation was pleasant, if more startling than Travel by train. The outer world was very close, almost as close as if one were on foot, but it was approaching and receding much more rapidly. Mrs. Bone’s delicate hands made small adjustments of the steering wheel and we crashed into none of the obstacles that leaped into our path.
Neither of us spoke at first. Mrs. Bone was concentrating on her driving, and so was I. We Traveled north to 55th Street, where we turned left under a traffic light that I thought of as having already switched from amber to red, we made a green light at Madison Avenue, and we came to a stop rather reluctantly before a red light at Fifth. During this time I studied her profile in those instants when I could spare some attention from our driving, and I realized that in my dreams I had altered her somewhat. I had made her more ethereal somehow, more liquid, softer and slower and less totally present.