It was strange all at once to have to think about my future. For ten years my future had merely been the present in finite repetition, and I had been happy and content. Now, without warning, I faced an unknown and unknowable future. Everything in my life was crumbling. Would this monastery be taken away, torn down to the ground? Would I be forced by the changes in my own mind to leave the monastery, no matter whether the building was saved or not? What was going to happen tomorrow? What did I want to happen tomorrow?
I had done little sleeping last night, and those questions had been ever-present in my mind, yet I still was nowhere near an answer. The habit of meditation, which had given me a brain (I like to think) as orderly as my room, had deserted me in my hour of need. My brain today was fudge. It was worse than fudge; it was last fall’s macaroni salad accidentally left behind in the summer cottage and not found until this spring.
The Mass was nearing its end. When I finished telling the whole truth to Brother Oliver, as I would of course have to do, would he tell me to leave? He might, I wouldn’t blame him. He might tell me to return to the outer world until I had become more secure again in my vocation. It was a possibility I’d already thought of for myself, without the slightest sense of pleasure or anticipation.
What did I want — what did I actually want for myself? I wanted the last week to cease to exist; I wanted it removed from history. I wanted to go directly from the Saturday night a week ago when I had in blissful ignorance brought that newspaper into these walls, directly from that Saturday to this Sunday, this morning, with nothing in between. No Travel, no Eileen, no threat to the monastery, none of it. That was what I wanted, and if I couldn’t get it I just didn’t have any alternate selection.
“Go, the Mass is finished.” But we stayed. The priest departed, and Brother Oliver stood up from his place in the front row and turned to face us. He looked heavier and older and more care-worn than his usual self, and when he spoke his voice was so low I could barely hear him.
In fact, I didn’t listen. I knew what he had to say, that stony center of fact that he would surround with cushioning layers of doubt and probability, and I spent the time instead looking about me at this place and the people in it.
Our chapel, like the rest of our building, was designed by Israel Zapatero and intended to be occupied by no more than twenty men. A long narrow shoebox of a room, its stone floor, stone walls, rough plank ceiling and narrow vertical windows were all part of the original plan, but other elements had been added in the two centuries since. The only one of Abbot Jacob’s stained-glass windows to remain out of the attic was here, centered above the plain table of an altar at the front of the room; a flowerlike abstract design in many colors, it had apparently been done shortly after some well-meaning relative had sent Abbot Jacob a compass and protractor.
More additions. The bas-relief Stations of the Cross lining both side walls were the work of some long-ago Abbot whose name I never knew, but who was also undoubtedly responsible for the bas-relief of St. Christopher carrying the Christ Child over the waters in our upstairs bathroom. Electrification had been delayed in this wing until the mid-twenties, when those brasslike helmet affairs had been attached to the corners of the ceiling, giving us a soft indirect lighting that almost perfectly duplicated the candlelight it had replaced. Due to the narrowness of the side windows, and the nonfunctional nature of Abbot Jacob’s stained-glass window — it had been affixed to a blank stone wall — the lights were needed as much in the daytime as at night.
The pews were a fairly recent addition; until about 1890 there had been no seating in here at all, and those attending Mass either stood or knelt on the stone floor. At that time, according to a story Brother Hilarius once told me, a church in Brooklyn underwent a severe fire, and the singed remnants of several pews had been given to our monastery. The Brother Jerome of that period had salvaged pew lengths each long enough for two people and had set ten of them in here, five on each side of a central aisle. Since there were only sixteen of us now, the last row was not in present use.
I was seated in the fourth row, against the right wall, from where I could see all my fellow brothers. In the front row, Brother Dexter was farthest to the left, his banker’s features less confident than usual as he watched and listened to Brother Oliver, who had been sitting next to him. Across the aisle on my side were Brothers Clemence and Hilarius, Clemence with his face toward Brother Oliver, Hilarius with his head bent and face hidden.
In the second row began those who were hearing the story for the first time. Brothers Valerian and Peregrine on the left, Mallory and Jerome on the right. Valerian, whose fleshy face I had often thought self-indulgent and whose orange Flair pen I had stolen out of pique, looked so stunned that I couldn’t help forgiving his having done that crossword puzzle. Peregrine, whose face was a bit too finely chiseled, too self-consciously actorish, but who had in fact been a set designer and summer theater operator rather than actor, seemed incapable of believing what he was hearing; as though he were being told the show would not after all go on. On this side of the aisle I could only see the broad backs and shoulders of Brothers Mallory and Jerome, the ex-boxer and the current handyman, like a pair of football players sitting on the bench.
In the third row, the faces were more expressive. Brothers Quillon and Leo were on the left, and Quillon looked crushed; Leo, on the other hand, looked enraged, as though he might lift that heavy fat forearm of his very soon and start pounding somebody into the ground. On the right, directly in front of me, were Brothers Silas and Flavian. Silas, onetime burglar and pickpocket, onetime author of his criminal autobiography, hunched lower and lower into himself as Brother Oliver talked, as though he’d just been picked up on a bum rap and was girding himself to tough it out without a word. Brother Flavian, the firebrand, started almost at once hopping up and down, coming very nearly to his feet, burning with the need to speak; the way he’d acted when he’d denounced my “censorship” and Brother Clemence had lawyered him to distraction.
Farthest to my left, across the aisle, were our two ancient Brothers, Thaddeus and Zebulon. Thaddeus, a large stocky man who had been a merchant seaman for years and years, had become sort of loose and shambling and disorganized in his old age, like an old car that hasn’t been cared for very well. Brother Zebulon had shrunk with age instead, becoming tinier and more brittle almost every day. Both of them watched and listened with frowning concentration, as though unable to really come to grips with what was being said.
On my side of the aisle, seated next to me, was Brother Eli, whose face had the impassivity of a spectator at an automobile accident, but beneath whose impassivity I thought I could detect the fatalism, the nihilism, he so much struggled against, that turn-off drop-out conviction of his generation that stupidity and destruction are inevitable, that there’s no point in struggle. Brother Eli’s faith, I saw, was just as necessary and yet tenuous as my own.
Brother Oliver finished by saying, as he had to, “And please give us your prayers.” And before he could sit down, or take another breath, Brother Flavian was on his feet, bursting up so precipitously he almost shot over the back of the pew and landed on Brother Jerome. “Prayers!” he shouted. “Of course we’ll pray! But we have to do more than that!”
“We are doing more than that, Brother,” Brother Oliver said. “I’ve just told you what we’ve done so far.”
“We need public opinion on our side!” Brother Flavian cried, waving his arms about.