“Where to?”
It seemed a strange question, under the circumstances, and even stranger in its delivery, flung out at me like a challenge. I said, “I don’t know. The Dimp people are trying to find a place, but all they’re thinking of is storage, not living. Some defunct college upstate, places like that.”
“Did you go look at it?”
“At what? The college? No, we just heard about it, that’s all. That was enough.”
“It doesn’t matter, though, does it,” she said. “Dimp could find the greatest place in the world, but that isn’t the point.”
“That’s right,” I said, eager to find her so unexpectedly on my side.
“They could offer you the Waldorf-Astoria, you still wouldn’t want it.”
I didn’t correct her use of pronouns. “They’re happy where they are,” I said. “And the building itself—”
“Fuck the building, Charlie,” she said.
“Ah,” I said. “People sure do talk different to you when you wear shirt and trousers, don’t they?”
“The point is,” she said, sounding like a hanging judge instructing the jury, “and the only point is, those precious monks of yours don’t want to move.”
“Well, there’s this philosophical viewpoint they have about Travel, the whole question of—”
“They don’t want to move.”
I hesitated. Explain at length? No, the moment seemed wrong for that. “Yes,” I said.
“Big deal,” she said.
“What?”
“Why not move?” she said. “A change of pace every once in a while is good for everybody. Get up and get out, blow the cobwebs out of your brain, get a new perspective on life. What’s such a big deal about this bunch of monks, that they can’t be moved? What are they, breakable?”
“They’re a community,” I said, “with their own view of life, and they ought to be permitted their own destiny. Surely the world can make a place for alternate points of view.”
“Upstate,” she said. “In that defunct college.”
“Where they are,” I insisted. “It’s their setting, it’s been their setting for two hundred years, they belong—”
“It’s time they moved,” she announced. “It’s the wrong place for them, midtown Manhattan. It’s a ridiculous idea to begin with.”
“It’s their right to be there.”
“But it isn’t. My father has property rights, they’re perfectly legal and honorable—”
“They are not.”
She lowered her brows at me. “Don’t you play holier-than-thou with me, Brother Benedict.”
“I’m not. I’m just telling you your father does not have legal and honorable property rights. There’s nothing legal or honorable about it at all.”
“Of course there is. The lease is up and—”
“The lease was stolen from us,” I said. I hadn’t intended to get into this — one doesn’t like to accuse one’s girl’s relatives of being thieves and arsonists — but this callous point of view she was putting forth was becoming annoying. “And when we found a copy of it,” I went on, “your brother Frank set fire to it.”
She looked at me as though I’d just announced I could leap from this tower and fly. “Are you crazy? Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?”
“I certainly do,” I said. “There’s a clause in the lease that gives the monastery the exclusive right to renew, and we’ve been cheated of that right because our copy of the lease disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and there’s no copy of it on file with the County Clerk, and when we found an unofficial copy that one of the other Abbots had made your brother came in dressed up like a monk and burned it. I saw him.”
“My brother?” She was still staring at me as though I’d just grown a second nose.
“Your brother Frank,” I said.
“That’s such a silly thing to say, I can’t even think about it.” She shook her head to show me how bewildered she was, and spread her hands out. “Why would you even say such a thing?”
“Because it’s true.”
“My brother Frank would never do — How would he even know you had a copy?”
“They bugged the monastery.”
She gave me a flat look. “You are crazy,” she said.
I said, “They put a microphone in Brother Oliver’s office, and they had their equipment in a florist’s truck parked out front. When I found the microphone I went out there and opened the back of the truck and your friend Alfred Broyle was in there. He punched me in the nose.”
She had been shaking her head all the way through that recital, and now she said, “I don’t see what you expect to gain. Do you think the story’s so wild I won’t believe you could make it up? My brother Frank, now Alfred, there’s—” Then she stopped, and frowned, and looked away toward the upside-down leaves.
“Everything I’ve told you—”
“Shut up a minute.” She was thinking hard. “Florist truck,” she said, and looked at me again. “What was the name of the florist?”
“How would I know? It was just a florist truck, it was parked outside all the time, it finally occurred to me—”
“You must have looked at it,” she said. “You saw the word florist. What else did it say?”
“What else?” I did some looking away myself, and some frowning, trying to picture that truck in my memory. Light blue, a badly done painting of flowers in a white vase, and a name followed by the word florist. “I think it started with a C,” I said. “What difference does it make?”
“A C? You’re sure?”
“No, I’m not, I — Wait a minute. Grynn! That was it, Grynn’s Florists!”
She was giving me calculated looks. “If only I could be sure of you,” she said.
“Sure of me about what?”
“About whether or not you knew that Alfred worked for Grynn’s. Come on,” she said, and turned away.
The first raindrops, huge and cool, splashed about us. “Come where,” I said.
“Back to the house. I’m going to call my dear father.”
When I’d changed from my wet clothing into a dry bathing suit and returned to the living room Eileen was already on the phone. Back at the tower the promised rain had suddenly descended as though someone had slit open the black bellies of the clouds with a sword, so that by the time we’d hurried down the circular staircase to ground level the world was made entirely of water. It was like being in a play tower in a fish tank. Running from there to the car, whose windows we’d left open, drenched us to the skin and possibly to the bone, and how Eileen managed to see well enough to drive us away from there I still don’t know. Though the rain stopped two miles later — or perhaps we’d merely traveled beyond its edge — the air remained humid and we remained sodden, and I changed at once upon reaching the house.
But not Eileen. Urgency had driven her to the telephone, and she was sitting there now with her wet hair lank around her head and her wet clothing plastered to her slender body as she repeated my story to somebody at the other end of the line, presumably her father.
Most of it had already been told, and she was down to the part about the florist’s truck and the Alfred Broyle nose-punch. She seemed to be giving a mostly fair and neutral account, but I didn’t like the way she kept inserting remarks such as “He says,” and “According to him.” I wished I’d been here to listen to it all from the beginning.
At the end of her recital she said one word — “Well?” — and then sat back to listen, flashing me a sharp but enigmatic look and gesturing at me crossly to seat myself. I did, and watched her listening. With her wet hair molding her skull she looked younger, quicker, harder, more intelligent, less receptive. “No, it doesn’t,” she said, and went on listening. (Her father had most likely pointed out that the activities described didn’t “sound like” normal doings of the Flattery family.)