Finally I had to ask for help. But not from Brother Clemence, not just yet. “Brother Hilarius,” I said. “What do you suppose this is?”
He looked at it, and burst out laughing. “Oh, that’s priceless!” he said.
“It is?”
“That’s very funny,” he informed me. “What a wonderful joke. Don’t you see what he’s done?”
“Not in the slightest particular.”
“He’s combined the Irish style,” Brother Hilarius told me, “right out of the Book of Durrow — look at that S right there—”
“Is that an S?”
“Of course it’s an S.” Brother Hilarius leaned over, chuckling, to study the joke in close-up. “He’s mixed the Irish style,” he said, “with Art Nouveau!”
“Oh really?”
“Art Nouveau! Don’t you see? Art Nouveau is less than a hundred years old, it comes much later than the age of illumination. Look at the curve of that tendril there.”
“Anachronism,” I suggested, trying to get a handle on this alleged joke.
“Wonderful juxtaposition.”
“Probably so,” I agreed. “The question is, is it the lease?”
Brother Hilarius frowned at me, distracted from his admiration of Abbot Urban’s humor. “What?”
“Is it the lease?”
“The lease?” He sounded astonished, as though he didn’t know there was supposed to be any lease around here at all. “Of course not.”
“Oh.”
“Look! Look! Read it for yourself.” His finger rippled across the leafy maze. “Lindy Lands,” he said.
“Lindy Lands?”
“Lindbergh. That’s the front page of the Daily News!”
Brother Zebulon, with that carelessness about rules characteristic of senior citizens, had wandered out of the audience and onto the stage. Now he was standing on Brother Hilarius’ other side, leaning over to look at the manuscript in my lap and to say, “Yes, that’s it. Lindy was all the way back here before Brother Urban ever got that one finished.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said.
Then Brother Zebulon looked around the room, squinting, obviously looking for something. “Where’s the rolls?” he said.
Brother Hilarius and I, in close harmony, both said, “Rolls?” Vision of hard rolls danced in my head.
Brother Zebulon placed all his fingertips together, then pulled his hands far apart, like someone pulling taffy. “Rolls,” he said. “Brother Urban did all the long things on rolls.”
Brother Hilarius said, “Papyrus rolls?”
“Paper rolls, that’s right,” said Brother Zebulon. “He taped pieces of paper together, and then rolled them up.”
Brother Clemence, who had been sitting at the refectory table twiddling his thumbs — literally physically twiddling his thumbs — now frowned in our direction, saying, “What’s that?”
“There should be rolls,” Brother Hilarius explained.
Brother Clemence spread out his arms to encompass the entire messy paper-strewn room. “You mean, there’s more?”
It was on one of the rolls. A select search party composed of Brothers Hilarius, Mallory, Jerome and Zebulon had found the rolls amid a lot of window shades and curtain rods, in behind the fourteen-volume novel based on the life of St. Jude the Obscure, and it didn’t take long to find the one headed by a magnificent Romanesque capital L in the form of an ivy-covered tower or turret, leading to delicately etched E, A, S and E, superimposed on small detailed two-dimensional representations of outbuildings.
“All right,” Brother Clemence said. “Let’s unroll it, and see what it has to say.”
More easily said than done. The roll wished to remain a roll, and not to become a tongue. When the end was released, it would immediately snap back to the main body. If just the end were held, the main body wished to barrel forward and enclose itself again. If both ends were held, the sides became determined to curl toward one another across the text.
Finally, four of us had to hold it down, like a sailor having his leg amputated in a pirate movie. I held part of the end and part of one side, with Brother Peregrine across from me and Brothers Mallory and Jerome down at the main body.
With the document thus spreadeagled, Brother Clemence could begin his inspection. Slowly he read, word by painful word, picking his way through two-hundred-year-old spelling, two-hundred-year-old legal phrasing, and nine-hundred-year-old calligraphy.
I grew tired, but I refused to let go, and in fact I saved the day when Brother Peregrine slipped and for just a second lost his grip on the other side. I held on, and Brother Peregrine quickly grabbed the curling corner again, but not before Brother Clemence gave him an annoyed look, saying, “Hold it steady, man.”
“Sorry.”
Brother Clemence read on. The audience crowded around, watching Brother Clemence’s face. There wasn’t a sound in the room.
Then Brother Clemence said, “Hm.” We all looked at him more closely. The audience stood up on tiptoe. Brother Clemence, one finger marking his route, read slowly again through the same passage, and by the end of it he was nodding. “Yes,” he said, and lifted his head to look around at all of us in grim satisfaction. “I got it,” he said.
It was Brother Oliver’s role to ask the questions now, and instinctively the rest of us deferred to him. And he asked: “What do you have, Brother?”
“Let me read this to you,” Brother Clemence said. Returning to the lease, having a little difficulty finding the place and then at last finding it again, he read aloud, “The option of renewal lies exclufively with the leffee.”
Brother Oliver turned his head a bit to one side, as though favoring a good ear. “It does what?”
“I’ll read it again,” Brother Clemence offered. And he did so: “The option of renewal lies exclufively with the leffee.” And now Brother Clemence smiled. Turing that smile on Brother Oliver, he said, “You see what that does?”
“No,” said Brother Oliver.
Brother Dexter said, “It says we can renew.”
“It says,” Brother Clemence said, “the option is ours to renew. Exclusively.”
Shaking his head, Brother Oliver said, “There’s that word option again.”
“Choice,” Brother Clemence told him. “In this case, Brother Oliver, it means choice. This lease says that we have the choice as to whether or not we want to renew.” Hope lit Brother Oliver’s eyes. “It does?”
“I thought there might be something like this,” Brother Clemence said. “When there was no paper filed at the time of the first renewal, back in 1876, I thought there just might be an automatic renewal option, and I wanted to see exactly what that option might say.” Patting the lease, which we four were still holding spread out like a patient etherized upon a table, he said, “And this is wording far beyond what I’d hoped for. At the best, I’d hoped it might say renewal was automatic unless one side or the other gave written notice of an intention not to renew at some specified interval before the due date. And that would have been enough, since we never were given any kind of notice. But this is even better. This lease says the lessor, the owner of the land, cannot refuse to renew the lease if we wish to stay on.”
“Then we’re saved!” Brother Oliver cried, and in the general hosannah that went up after that the lease got loose and snapped shut like a bear trap on Brother Clemence’s hand. Extricating himself, Brother Clemence shouted for our attention, and then said, “No, it doesn’t. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t.”