The sidewalks were crowded with Saturday night revelers; couples strolling hand in hand, cheerful groups in loud happy conversation. I returned the occasional surprised look with a smile and a nod, and strode on. Some evenings I was treated to passing witticisms from people misunderstanding my garb and thinking me merely an isolated nut, but those were mostly out-of-towners who did that; New Yorkers are used to weirdos on their streets.
There were no remarks tonight, though a sidewalk Santa ringing a bell over a charity pot did give me a wave, as to a colleague. I was dubious, but I smiled back, and walked on to the newsstand, where the newsie said, as usual, “Evening, Father.”
“Evening,” I said. Years ago I gave up trying to explain to him that I was not a Father but a Brother, not a priest but a monk. I cannot say Mass or hear confessions or give extreme unction or perform marriages or do any of the other priestly duties. I am the male equivalent of a nun: a Brother, as she is a Sister. But it was too fine a distinction for the newsvendor, who from his accent I took to be Jewish, out of Russia via Brooklyn. After a year or so of gentle corrections, week in and week out, I had finally given up and now acknowledged the greeting for what it was — a friendly salutation between merchant and customer — and let it go at that.
The Sunday Times is never a particularly small newspaper, but in the two months before Christmas it becomes positively engorged, reaching at times to a thousand pages. It has been my practice for years to stop at the trash basket just north of the newsstand and lighten my load by depositing therein those sections of the paper we have no use for in the monastery. (There was some discussion several years ago, led mostly by Brother Flavian, a true firebrand, that this habit of mine was actually a form of censorship, but that storm long since abated, mostly because it simply wasn’t true.) The Classified sections go, of course, and all advertising supplements, and Real Estate. Travel And Resorts goes, since the Times’s philosophy in re Travel is so utterly at variance with our own. (Brother Flavian’s chief weapon of attack that was, till he admitted he himself wouldn’t read Travel And Resorts if I did bring it home.) At the request of various Brothers, however, I do keep News, Sports, Book Review, Magazine, Week In Review and Arts And Leisure. Which, prior to Christmas, is armload enough for anyone.
And so I headed home, slightly lightened. As I walked tonight I reflected on how totally this neighborhood had changed since Israel Zapatero and his tiny band had first put up our building on a leased bit of barren land surrounded by farms and woods and small — but growing — communities. Zapatero would hardly recognize the place now, nestled amid the hotels and office buildings of midtown Manhattan. We are on Park Avenue between 51st and 52nd Streets, and the city has rather grown up around us. The Waldorf-Astoria is two blocks to the south, the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Building is across the way, the House of Seagram is one block to the north, the Racquet and Tennis Club is diagonally opposite, and our other near neighbors include the International Telephone & Telegraph Building, the Colgate-Palmolive Building, and Lever House. We have been called an anachronism, our little monastery squatting amid all those high-priced high rises, and I suppose we are. But we don’t mind; we rather enjoy the bustle and scurry of the world around us. It gives more meaning to our own silences and meditations.
I must say, however, that I am yet to become reconciled to the PanAm Building, jutting up out of Grand Central Station like the hilt of a bayonet out of some beautiful creature that has been stabbed in the back. Much construction has been undertaken on Park Avenue in the past decade or so, and while beauty rarely has seemed to have been a part of the overall intention, most of the buildings are at least clean and neat and inoffensive, like a bleached bone in the desert. Only PanAm rouses me to an un-Christlike irritation; but then, they have the wrong idea about Travel, too.
I returned home tonight without looking directly at PanAm — it is less garish yet more sinister after dark — and carried the paper to the calefactory, where the usual cluster of Brothers awaited its arrival. Brother Mallory, a former boxer and onetime ranking welterweight, had first call on Sports. Brother Flavian, the firebrand, was as ever pacing by the doorway awaiting the editorial page in the Week In Review. Brother Oliver, our Abbot, has priority on the News section, and Brother Peregrine, whose checkered career in the theater included both set design Off Broadway and summer theater ownership somewhere in the Midwest, kept up with his former vocation through Arts And Leisure. The Book Review was for Brother Silas, who had once had published a nonfiction book describing his career as pickpocket-burglar (all prior to his joining our Order, of course), and I myself kept the Magazine, with its crossword puzzle; my one vice.
Which meant that I didn’t read Ada Louise Huxtable’s column on architecture in Arts And Leisure until the following afternoon. The instant I did, of course, I went direct to the Abbot.
“Brother Oliver,” I said.
He lowered his brush and looked at me reluctantly. “Is it important?” he asked.
“I’m afraid it is.” I nodded at his latest Madonna and Child — a bit darker in feeling than his usual mode, though Mary did have some sort of unfortunate smirk on her face that left the impression she’d just kidnapped the child in her arms — and said, “I wouldn’t disturb you otherwise.”
He sighed, and put down palette and brush. “Very well,” he said. Stocky and white-haired and as gentle as any dishwashing product on the market, Brother Oliver was now sixty-two and had been Abbot since he was fifty-six. He’d taken up painting only four years ago, and had already filled most of our corridors with his Madonnae and Children, done in a number of recognizable styles and with a great deal of meticulous craftsmanship, but not very much talent.
Still, it was better than all those lumpishly leaded stained glass windows the previous Abbot, Brother Jacob, had constructed during his tenure and had caused to be placed in all the bedroom windows, eliminating at one stroke light and air and the view. (Those windows were now stacked in the attic, along with Abbot Ardward’s matchstick mangers, Abbot Delfast’s photo albums of the changing seasons in our courtyard, and Abbot Wesley’s fourteen-volume novel on the life of St. Jude the Obscure. Space had been left up there for Madonnae and Children, though no one ever said so out loud.)
Even after putting down his palette and brush, Brother Oliver gazed wistfully at his painting a few seconds longer, studying it as though he would have liked to enter it, climb in and go for a stroll amid the broken stone columns in the murky background. But then he shook his head, turned to me, and said, “What is it, Brother Benedict?”
“This,” I said, and handed him the paper, folded to the right part of the right page.
He took the paper from me, frowning, and I watched his lips move as he read the headline: SOME DISASTERS WHICH MAY NOT HAPPEN. His frown intensified. “What is this?”
“Ada Louise Huxtable’s column,” I explained. “She writes on architecture for the Times.”
“Architecture?” He gave the paper a puzzled look, his painting a forlorn look, and me an almost annoyed look. “You want me to read a column about architecture?”
“Yes, please.”
He sighed again. Then, slowly and with much reluctance, he began to read.
I myself had only gone through the article twice, but the relevant paragraphs were already so fixed in my brain that I could almost quote them word for word. Paragraph one: “The struggle to retain the best of our heritage in the teeth of real estate interests motivated exclusively by short-term considerations of profit is an unending one. For each battle won or lost, three more battlegrounds appear, and the forces of tradition and good taste must hurriedly regroup themselves and hare off yet again. Today, we’ll mention a few of the most recent combat zones where the issue still remains in doubt, and some others looming just over the horizon.”