Dwarfmann shrugged, saying, “Let us do evil, that good may come. Romans, three.”
“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil. Isaiah, five.”
“Sin is not imputed when there is no law,” Dwarfmann insisted. “Romans, five.”
Brother Oliver shook his head. “He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent.”
“Money answereth all things,” Dwarfmann said, with a great deal of assurance.
“He heapeth up riches,” Brother Oliver said scornfully, “and knoweth not who shall gather them.”
“Unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.” Dwarfmann permitted his own scornful expression to roam around our room, then finished, “But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Another quick look at his watch. “I think we’ve played enough,” he said, and turned toward the door.
Brother Oliver had two pink circles on his cheeks, and his pudgy hands were more or less closed into ineffective fists. “The devil is come down unto you,” he announced, “having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”
Dwarfmann’s hand was on our doorknob. He looked back at Brother Oliver, flashed that thin smile again as though to say he was glad we all understood one another now, and with another quick glance around the room said, “He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more. Job, chapter seven, verse ten.” And he left.
Brother Oliver expelled held-in breath with a sudden long whoosh. Shaking my head, I said, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”
Brother Oliver gave me a puzzled look. “Is that New Testament? I don’t recognize that.”
“Uhh, no,” I said. “It’s Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice.” I cleared my throat. “Sorry,” I said.
Nine
Father Banzolini’s tear sheets were perhaps the most difficult penance he’d yet given me. What an earnest writer he was! His articles were clearly the work of a slow but serious man who very sincerely wanted to explain every last detail of whatever subject he had chosen to gnaw. Unfortunately, he knew only one kind of sentence — the kind that has a subject and a verb and a comma and another subject and another verb and a period — and he used that sentence to tell us everything. A straightforward compound sentence is perfectly all right, of course, but seven thousand of them in a row can get wearing. After a while, the only question left was whether the word after the comma would be “and” or “but” or “or.”
But I did have to read them. Father Banzolini had given me these tear sheets at confession with a kind of shy pride, and I knew I was not only going to have to read them, I was going to have to like them. Or at least find something in each of them that I could think of as likable for the next time I met with their author.
Because I was on the horns of a dilemma, a true dilemma. If I lied to Father Banzolini, I would then have to admit to him in confession that I had told the lie. In the abstract that might make for what mathematicians call a pretty problem, but in real life it made for a very ugly problem indeed.
And so I read. I learned more than I cared to know about missionary obstacles in newly independent African states, the attitude of the Church toward the “Protestant Ethic,” Women’s Lib for Catholics, feudalism versus mass transit, translation difficulties with the Bible, and several other topics both sacred and profane. By the time I finished I was feeling both sacred and profane myself.
Well, at least I was distracted for a while from my own more personal dilemma, which could very neatly be defined in the Father Banzolini Format: “I will stay in the monastery, or I will leave the monastery.” Meditation was getting me nowhere on that topic, so perhaps distraction would help. As Father Banzolini himself had pointed out in The Subconscious and the Holy Ghost, “We think we are thinking about something else, but we are still thinking about Topic A.”
So I read all the articles, starting them Tuesday night and finishing early Wednesday afternoon. Then I took a walk in the cloisters, trying to think of something both truthful and flattering to say about them. I could call them “interesting,” which was true of at least a few — The Great Catholic Boxers, for instance, and Why Animals Don’t Have Souls. I could say of all of them that they were “fact-filled,” and I could hear myself saying enthusiastically to Father Banzolini, “I hadn’t known about—.” (I’d fill in the blank as seemed appropriate at the time.)
But it was going to take more; I could feel it in my bones. I doubted that Father Banzolini, in the ordinary course of his days, had been so inundated with praise for his writing efforts as to become jaded or blasé on the subject. It was my very strong suspicion, in fact, that he was hungry for shoptalk and “positive feedback,” as he’d phrased it in the The Confessionaclass="underline" A Two-Way Street. It was going to take more than a couple of carefully phrased ambivalent sentences to satisfy that hunger.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was going to need professional — or at least semiprofessional — help. Brother Silas did a lot of reading in the Sunday Times Book Review, and I suspected there was still something criminous buried deep within him. Could he be of assistance? Not so much with specific phrases as with a general wishy-washy attitude. I firmly intended to waffle, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about doing it.
Come to think of it, though, Brother Silas just didn’t strike me as the waffling type. Criminal and literary though he might be, there was still something very direct about his approach to life. I would certainly talk to him, but I doubted he was the expert I needed.
Who else, then? Pacing back and forth in the cloister, trying to think of someone who could help, I looked out over the courtyard where several of my fellow residents happened at the moment to be in view. Brother Oliver, for instance, seated on a three-legged stool, was hard at work on his latest Madonna and Child; but no, he didn’t have the devious cast of mind I was seeking. Brothers Mallory and Jerome were packing mulch around some shrubbery near the front wall, but they were even more remote from the necessary subtlety of approach. And who else was there?
Someone came out of Brother Oliver’s office across the way, turning to walk along the cloister on that side. His cowl was up, making identification difficult, but in his build and movements he reminded me of Brother Peregrine.
Of course! Brother Peregrine had operated summer theaters! Would anyone be more experienced at the ambivalent compliment, the tender treatment of tremulous talents? “Brother Peregrine!” I cried, waving one hand over my head, and dashed out across the courtyard in his direction.
He didn’t seem to hear me. He was striding quite purposefully toward the front wall, more or less in the direction of Brothers Mallory and Jerome, angling out now away from the cloister and across the courtyard toward the front doors.
“Brother Peregrine! Brother Peregrine!” I altered my own course to intersect his, trotting around birdbaths and plane trees, and he just kept moving. Such concentration I would normally respect, but this time I could think of nothing but my own problems, so when I reached him I put out my hand to grab his forearm, his head turned in my direction, and inside the cowl he was not Brother Peregrine.
A familiar face, but not—
“Frank Flattery!” I shouted his name out loud, more from astonishment than anything else. Dan Flattery’s unmarried son, Eileen’s brother.
Eileen’s brother, but not ours.