The succeeding paragraphs then dealt with a hotel in Baltimore, a post office in Andover, Massachusetts, a church in St. Louis, an office building in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a onetime dentists’ college in Akron, Ohio, each of these buildings being architecturally or historically valuable for one reason or another, and each of them in current danger of demolition. Then, three paragraphs from the end, there came this:
“Right here in New York, yet another pair of landmarks is threatened by the trolls of mindless office-space expansion. According to Dwarfmann Investment Management Partners, this very active Manhattan-based realty firm is completing negotiations to purchase a parcel of land and structures on Park Avenue, in an area already saturated with available office space. The structures on the tract include the lovely old Alpenstock Hotel, with its interesting Teutonic tree-trunk sculptured columns in the lobby, and the unique Crispinite Monastery, with its echoes of Spanish and Greek religious motifs. A DIMP spokesman has announced that these two buildings, each distinctive and in its own way irreplaceable, will be torn down in favor of a sixty-seven-story office building. There’s still much that has to be done before the bulldozers start moving, and it’s far too early to tell if this particular battle will be won or lost, but on the basis of recent real estate history, and DIMP’s track record generally, the prognosis here is gloomy.”
I watched Brother Oliver as he read, and I saw his face change when he suddenly understood what was being said. When he looked up from the paper at last, his face was nearly as white as his hair. “Dear sweet Jesus,” he said, “they mean to tear us down.”
“That’s what it says. Are we really selling?”
“We?” He frowned at the newspaper again, then shook his head. “It’s not us,” he said. “It’s not up to us.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t own the land,” he explained. “We own the building, but not the land. We have a lease on the land.”
“When is the lease up?”
He was looking more and more pained, as though a toothache were coming on him. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I suppose I ought to go check.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, indeed.” The fact that Israel Zapatero had put up this building on leased land was mentioned in the small biography of our Founder given to each new entrant to the Order, but it had never occurred to me that we were still in a leasing arrangement. When I’d read that item about the sale, I’d assumed it was either an error or possibly some plan of Brother Oliver’s that he hadn’t yet decided to mention to the community at large. Now it was apparently something much worse; we didn’t own the land we stood on, and our lovely old monstrosity of a monastery — our home — was perhaps to be torn down around our ears.
Brother Oliver was, if possible, even more flustered and dismayed than I. “I’ll,” he said, and dithered, and finished the sentence, “look into it right away.” He started off, clutching the paper, then stopped and held the paper up, saying, “May I borrow this?”
“Of course,” I said, and as I did so my eye was caught by a streak of orange on Brother Oliver’s easel. That object in the tray, was it not an orange Flair?
Brother Oliver turned away again, hurrying toward the door. With sudden urgency, I called, “Brother Oliver?”
He stopped. “Yes? Yes?”
“Where did you get that pen?”
Bewildered, he frowned in the direction I was pointing. “Where did I what?”
“This pen.” I picked it up.
“Oh. I found it, in the library.”
“It belongs to Brother Valerian,” I said.
“I was using it for the infant’s cheeks. Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes. I, uh, I borrowed it from him, and then lost it.”
“Ah.”
“May I give it back?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Thank you,” I said, and we hurried off on our separate missions. I felt a great relief at having found the Flair after all — I would have been hard pressed to come up with the forty-nine cents to replace it — but my joy was tempered by my realization that at the very moment of discovering the Flair I had committed yet another sin; I had lied to the Abbot in saying I’d “borrowed” the pen.
Ah, well. Father Banzolini would be back to hear confessions again on Tuesday.
Two
“I’m getting sick of that orange Flair pen,” Father Banzolini told me.
So was I, but I said nothing. The confessional seemed the wrong place for chitchat.
Father Banzolini sighed. He was capable of the least realistic performance of long-suffering I’d ever witnessed. “Is there anything else, Brother?”
“Not this time,” I said.
“Very well. For your penance,” he said, and paused, and I thought, I’m going to get it now, and he said, “four Our Fathers and — twenty Hail Marys.”
Oo. “Yes, Father,” I said.
He trotted us through the Act of Contrition and the absolution, and out of the confessional I went, to go kneel awhile at the altar.
Two thoughts occupied my attention as I knelt there, plowing interminably through my penance: “Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” etc. Thought number one was my sense of relief that the incident of the orange Flair was at last behind me. Thought number two was curiosity as to whether the spiteful laying-on of excess penance was not itself a sin, which Father Banzolini would have to confess in his turn and then do his own penance for; and what penance would be considered excessive in his case?
“—pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, a-men.” Twenty. I stood at last, my knees cracking like old Brother Zebulon’s, and I found Brother Oliver waiting for me at the rear of the chapel. “That was a very long penance, Brother Benedict,” he said.
“I was meditating,” I said. And oh, dear — was that a lie? Would I have to confess it Saturday, receive another excessive penance, on and on, world without end, amen? But I had in fact been meditating, hadn’t I? It struck me as a gray area, and I suspected that, come Saturday, I’d be giving myself the benefit of the doubt.
In any event, the answer satisfied Brother Oliver. “Do come along now,” he said. “I want you at the meeting.”
“Meeting?” But he was already hurrying away, like Alice’s White Rabbit, so all I could do was hurry after him.
We went to his office, a low-ceilinged wood-lined irregular room like something built inside a tree trunk. The diamond-pattern leaded windows looking out on the unkempt grape arbor in our courtyard — our grapes were scanty, sour and useless — bolstered this elves’-forest image, and so did the brown-robed monks already there, seated at the refectory table in the middle of the room. Three of them: Brothers Clemence, Dexter and Hilarius.
Brother Oliver took his usual seat in the carved-oak chair at the head of the table, and gestured me to the seat at his left, saying to the others, “Brother Benedict told me something yesterday that I want him to repeat to you. Brother?”
“Oh,” I said. Public speaking is not my strong suit; I would never have done well in a preaching order. I looked around at the curious and expectant faces, cleared my throat two or three times, and said, “Well.”