Why was everybody Traveling so much? Where was the need? Was it even remotely possible that so very many people had just discovered they were in the wrong place? What if everyone in the world were to call up everyone else in the world some morning and say, “Look, instead of you coming here and me going there why don’t I stay here and you stay there,” wouldn’t that be saner? Not to speak of quieter.
Like babes in a boiler factory, Brother Oliver and I huddled close to one another as we set off, Traveling south along Park Avenue. Scrupulously we obeyed the intersection signs that alternately said WALK and DON’T WALK, though no one else did. Slowly we made progress.
Park Avenue stretched half a dozen blocks ahead of us, as far as Grand Central Station, with the hilt of the PanAm Building sticking out of its back. We would be taking a train eventually, but not from that terminal; the Long Island Railroad connects in Manhattan with Pennsylvania Station, quite some distance away. Eighteen blocks south and four blocks west, slightly over a mile from the monastery, the farthest I had been in ten years.
We crossed 51st Street, jostled by hurrying louts, and I gestured to an impressive church structure on our left, saying, “Well, that’s reassuring, anyway.”
Brother Oliver gave me the tiniest of headshakes, then leaned his cowl close to mine so I could hear him over the surrounding din. “That’s Saint Bartholomew,” he said. “Not one of ours.”
“Oh?” It looked like one of ours.
“Anglican,” he explained.
“Ah,” I said. The sanctum simulacrum; that explained it.
In the next block we passed the Waldorf-Astoria, a veritable cathedral of Travel; not one of ours at all. At 49th Street the WALK-DON’T WALK signs were so displaced that we chose to cross to the far side of Park Avenue, a very great distance in itself, the endless lanes of traffic separated in the middle by a grass-covered mall, as scruffy as but narrower than our courtyard. On the far side I looked back and could barely make out our monastery in the distance, huddled there like some ancient wood-and-stone flying saucer among the technological barbarians.
“Come, come,” Brother Oliver said to me. “It’ll be over soon.”
It wasn’t. The walk to Penn Station was both interminable and terrifying. Madison and Fifth Avenue were even more crowded and bustling than Park Avenue — and narrower as well — and west of Fifth Avenue we were in Babel. The citizens had become shorter and stouter and swarthier, and they spoke such a confusion of tongues we might as well have been in Baghdad or an evangelist’s tent. Spanish, Yiddish, Italian, Chinese, and God alone knows what else. Urdu and Kurd, I don’t doubt. Pashto and Persian.
Pennsylvania Station was a different sort of nightmare. The Penn Central and Long Island railroads both terminate there, and the resulting furor was too blurred with frenzy for me to see it clearly, much less describe it. One rode an escalator down to the floor of the main terminal building, and as I descended into it the whole panorama looked to me like nothing more nor less than a fistful of ants scrambling in the bottom of an amber bottle.
Then we couldn’t find the railroad. We found the other one with no difficulty, we found it over and over again: Penn Central to the left of us, Penn Central to the right of us, but where oh where was the blessed Long Island Railroad?
In the bowels of the earth. We commandeered a bustling maintenance man long enough to be given hurried grudging directions, and learned we had to descend more stairs to a different kind of station. The transition was very like that from the east side of Fifth Avenue to the west; we had descended not only physically but also in caste. It was very obvious.
“Now I understand,” I told Brother Oliver, “why Hell is always depicted as being beneath the surface of the earth.”
“Strength, Brother Benedict,” he advised me, and pressed onward to an Information booth, where we were given rapid-fire instructions in re ticket purchasing and train catching. There would be a train to be caught in the direction of Sayville in twenty-five minutes. “Change at Jamaica,” the Information man rattled off, “no change at Babylon.”
Brother Oliver leaned toward him, pushing his cowl back the better to hear what was being said. “I beg your pardon?”
“Change at Jamaica, no change at Babylon.” And the Information man pointedly looked at the inquirer next in line behind us.
“I’m not at all surprised to hear that,” Brother Oliver said, and I was pleased to see the Information man frown in bewilderment after us as we went away to buy our tickets. So it was possible to attract the attention of one of these dervishes after all.
“In 1971,” Brother Oliver told me as our train rolled through the industrial squalor of Queens, “Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of the State of New York, declared the Long Island Railroad to be the finest railroad anywhere in the world. As of the first of November that year.”
“Then I am all the more amazed,” I said, “that anyone ever Travels at all.”
The car in which we found ourselves was a sort of two-tiered slave quarters. One entered upon an incredibly narrow central corridor, lined with metal walls broken by open entrances to the cubicles on both sides. These cubicles were alternately two awkward steps up or two awkward steps down from the corridor, so that someone sitting in a lower cubicle was directly beneath the rump of the passenger in the next upper cubicle. We had chosen a lower, and huddled there like mice in an egg carton while the train rolled first through a tunnel and then through neighborhoods as grim as the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch. The knees and ankles occasionally passing in the corridor seemed calm enough, inured to this harsh environment, but I couldn’t have felt more dislocated if I’d awakened on the planet Jupiter.
The train slowed. Brother Oliver, peering out the window, said, “Jamaica.”
“What?”
“We change here.”
Into swine? Into stones?
Into another train, across a concrete platform, where we found a more ordinary railroad car, with pairs of seats on both sides and no metal-walled cubicles. It was about half full, mainly with people smoking in violation of the posted sign, and it lurched forward almost before we’d found seats. More visions of Hell went by outside, but at least we were sitting in a space designed for human beings. That other car had affected me like an overly tight hat.
Neither Brother Oliver nor I had done much talking so far, both of us intimidated by the enormity of our excursion, but now Brother Oliver said, “I might as well tell you what I know about the Flatterys before we get there, little as it is.”
I looked attentive.
“The one I knew best,” Brother Oliver went on, “was old Francis X. Flattery. He would visit once a year or so to demand a blessing and some whiskey. He firmly believed we were all alcoholics, and wanted to take part in our binges. Would you remember him?”
“A skinny old man? With a mean mouth?”
Brother Oliver looked slightly pained. “My own description,” he said, “might have been somewhat more charitable, but I believe you have the right man.”
“I saw him twice, I think,” I said. “In the first year or so that I was there.”
“The family is in the construction business,” Brother Oliver said, “and old Francis started coming around after his sons forced him to retire. Daniel’s the oldest son, so he inherited us when Francis died — that would have been five or six years ago.”