She frowned, but didn’t look at me. “Meaning what?”
“A cheaper, less attractive car would perform the same function.”
Now she did look at me, and her smile was almost savage. “So. You admit it. You are a luxury.”
“Am I?”
“We all like luxuries,” she said, “as you just pointed out. But wouldn’t you have to agree yourself that where luxury and function clash, it must be luxury that gives way?”
“Mrs. Bone, I don’t—”
“Call me Eileen,” she said.
I took a breath. “I think I’d rather call you Mrs. Bone,” I told her.
Again she turned her eyes from the traffic, this time giving me a searching look. In a softer voice she said, “Am I an occasion of sin for you, Brother Benedict?”
I didn’t answer immediately. She watched the road again. I said, “I never really knew what the phrase ‘occasion of sin’ meant.”
She laughed, but in a friendly way, and said, “I’m not sure, but I think that may be the nicest thing anybody ever said to me.” Then she suddenly leaned over the wheel, determination clenching her features, and the car surged forward. We rocked around a clopping hansom cab, threaded through a minefield of moving cars, and suddenly turned off, coming to a stop in an otherwise empty parking lot. Darkness surrounded us, but I could see her face when she turned to me, saying, “You’ve got to help me, Brother Benedict. I want to help you, I really do, but first you have to help me.”
“How? In what way?” I responded to her intensity with a helpless intensity of my own. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Don’t you realize,” she said, “that those are my father’s arguments? I want you to beat them down, Brother Benedict, I want you to win the battle for my allegiance. I am the sincerest of Flatterys, I want to help you, but I can’t do it unless I can believe it’s right to go against my father.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not very good at argument. Now I wish I were.”
“I’m not asking to be conned,” she said. “I don’t want you to bring out some clever Jesuit to sell me a bill of goods. I want honesty. I can help your monastery, Brother Benedict, believe me I can, but you’ll have to convince me I ought to.”
“How can you help? What could you possibly do?”
“Never mind. Just take my word for it. And convince me, Brother Benedict.” And she sat there, leaning sideways toward me, her burning eyes staring at me in the darkness.
Never had my mind been such a blank. Convince her? Beat down her father’s arguments about the usefulness of usefulness, and the luxury of everything else? There were no words in my mind, no words at all, and certainly no words in my mouth. Staring at her, into those unblinking eyes, all I could do was pray for a distraction.
God answered my prayer almost at once. We were mugged.
They yanked both doors open at the same instant, two tall skinny black boys with flashing knives in their hands. “Okay, Jack, get outa there,” one of them said, and the other one said, “Come on out, honey, and meet the man.”
Only Eileen was the one they called Jack, and I was the one they called honey.
It was an easy mistake. Eileen was driving, she was wearing pants, and my robe undoubtedly looked like a dress in the uncertain light.
But that realization came to me later, when I had more leisure to reflect on the situation. At that moment, all I could think was, They’re not going to hurt Eileen!
The car was just as difficult to leave as it had been to enter. I squirmed out, clutching parts of it here and there to hoist myself up to ground level, and when I finally did get out and upright I stomped my attacker on the foot. The sneakered foot.
He wouldn’t have been so careless if he hadn’t thought I was a girl. He would have stayed farther away from me. But probably having some unseemly ideas about actions he would take toward me, he had stood very close while I was getting out of the car, and that was why he was now hopping around on one foot, clutching the other with both hands and yipping like a dog that’s been hit with a stone.
Now the other one, menacing Eileen. There was one advantage in a car as low as this; when in a hurry, you didn’t have to go around it. Hiking up my skirts, I ran over the hood and fell on the other mugger like the Red Sea on the armies of Egypt.
Why, the nasty little creature, he tried to stick me with that knife of his. And me a man of the cloth. I whomped him two or three times, wishing I had Brother Mallory’s expertise in punching people, and then he wriggled out from underneath me, got to his feet and took to his heels, disappearing almost at once into the surrounding darkness.
I struggled up, tripping over my own robe and running forward into the rear fender of the car. The second time, climbing up the automobile, I made it to my feet and looked across the auto roof to see the other one hobbling away as well. He gave one dirty look over his shoulder — aggrieved, that’s what he was — and then he too was gone.
Panting, bewildered, I looked around and saw Eileen sagging against the side of the car. Her eyes seemed to be closed. I took two sudden strides to her, grabbed her by both shoulders, and cried out, “Eileen! Eileen!”
Her eyes opened. Beneath my hands her body was trembling. “My goodness,” she said, in a much smaller and younger voice than I’d ever heard from her before.
“Are you all right?”
“—I—” She was more bewildered than I was, more thunder-struck. “I’m not... cut or anything, I’m... Oh!” And she squeezed her eyes shut again, the trembling becoming much worse.
“Eileen,” I said, and pulled her in close, putting my arms tight around her to contain the trembling. My face was in her hair.
We both sensed the change. This slender body in my arms... the fragrance of this hair... There is nothing else like it on earth, and I’d been celibate a long long time.
We drew back from one another. She wouldn’t look at me, and I was just as glad not to have to meet her eyes. She cleared her throat and said, “I’ll, uh, drive you home. I mean, to the monastery.”
“Yes,” I said.
“To the monastery,” she repeated, and fumbled herself back into the car.
Seven
Sunday Mass. We had no regular celebrant, different priests from St. Patrick’s taking turns at saying Mass in our little chapel. One of the newer young clerical clerics from the diocesan office officiated today, and after reading the gospel he asked us all, at Brother Oliver’s request, to stay at the end of Mass for an announcement.
Even through the fevered swamp my brain had become since last night’s occurrence with Eileen Flattery Bone, I could sense the unhappy atmosphere that filled the chapel while we all waited for the completion of Mass. Those of us who already knew what the announcement would be were of course saddened and disheartened at the necessity of making it, while those who did not yet know the details could certainly see, from the faces of Brother Oliver and we few others, that the announcement would be a gloomy one.
For me, it seemed doubly gloomy. I felt I was losing this home in two ways, both to the wrecker’s ball and to my own frailty. Neither Eileen nor I had spoken a word on the drive back last night, except that as I was hoisting myself from the car at the end she did say, in a small and toneless voice, “Thank you.” I had been unable to make any response at all, but had simply stumbled inside, where I’d pleaded fatigue and emotional upset with Brother Oliver, who of course had been waiting for me, anxious to know what Daniel Flattery’s daughter had come after. I still hadn’t told him, but would do so after Mass and his announcement. He would have to help me decide what to do.