A Little Love Story

by Roland Merullo

  My brother started to attend mass at the radical church near the State House that let homeless people sleep between its pews. He started to talk about “the Lord” all the time. He stopped driving cars onto golf courses. A year into this our father died, and my brother felt so guilty that he decided to leave his old life behind entirely and become a monk. After a decade or more of monkhood, he’d persuaded the abbot to let him live as a hermit in a one-room cottage on the monastery grounds (he told me there was some precedent for this in Church history), and he spent his days there praying and chopping wood, growing vegetables to give away to the local food pantry, and, three or four times a week, walking up to the main monastery buildings to teach and counsel novices. After the initial shock, my mother was not really unhappy about all this. If nothing else, it meant that Ellory would never again get his name in the paper under POLICE BLOTTER, and embarrass her at the hospital. It didn’t matter very much to me one way or the other, except that I saw him less. He was still my brother. He still smoked, still gave the abbot some trouble the way he’d given his parents trouble, and his teachers, his scoutmaster, his golf coach, and so on.

  In the first blush of monastic infatuation, Ellory had been in the habit of sending me letters that always ended with a kind of eager encouragement. “The Lord’s gifts come in strange wrapping,” he’d write. Or “Pain is a blessing.” Or “Pray every second.” Things like that. It got so bad that, whenever Gerard or I banged a finger with the hammer, or dropped a crowbar on a toe, or tripped over a sole plate and went crashing into a wall, the other person would immediately say, “Pain is a blessing.”

  But Ellory and I had always been close, in spite of the age difference, and his godly enthusiasms didn’t really put much distance between us. It seemed to me that he was at least as happy and well balanced as most of the non-monks I knew. On the four days a year when he was allowed visitors, I took my mother down there-it was less than three hours from Boston-and we had a meal with him and some of the other monks, his friends. Since a piece of her mind had been carted away, my mother had come up with the idea that my brother’s name was my name-John-and that he was, for some reason, an airline pilot, always in uniform, living in a mansion with all his pilot friends.

  With time, Ellory had evolved an individualistic interpretation of the monastery rules. He was still celibate, as far as I could tell, though he told me he missed the company of women more than anything else. He observed a strict fasting regimen during Lent, and said formal prayers either six or ten times a day, I could never remember. But every few months I went down and visited him, in an unofficial way, sneaking through the woods to his hermitage, and he always broke the rules a little bit then. He always wanted me to smuggle onto the monastery grounds exactly one pack of Marlboro cigarettes. If it wasn’t Lent, I might bring him a bottle of red wine and some Jarlsberg cheese and good bread. Or a few cigars. Or some copies of Sports Illustrated (not the swimsuit issue). Once, on his thirty-third birthday, we arranged to meet at the side of the nearest road and I brought a change of clothes and spirited him off to a golf course for nine holes.

  He was a good, devoted monk, and a good man. These were things he did, little things, ten times in a year maybe, to maintain some sort of interior balance. Even the pope, he pointed out to me, had sneaked away from Vatican City to go skiing once or twice when he was younger. “God doesn’t want machines, Jake,” he liked to say, after he’d been there awhile and had stopped ending his letters with “All the good Lord asks of us is that we think of Him.”

  I said I didn’t know what God wanted anymore.

  And he said, not in a preachy way, “You know right from wrong, Jake. God is just the part of you that knows right from wrong.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Stalin had that part, too. Hitler. Mussolini. Idi Amin. They were all sure they knew right from wrong. So were nineteen assholes with box cutters.”

  But by the time I took Janet there, Ellory and I had stopped having conversations like that. We just did what we did. He was a monk, I was a painter. I banged nails, I punched governors. His part of my father’s inheritance had gone to the monastery. My part had gone to buy the apartment I lived in. My sister’s part had gone into pharmaceuticals and roulette. We knew what was right and wrong and we wanted to serve our own little selfish demons, and balancing those things was called life.

  I didn’t usually sneak up to the hermitage at night, though, unannounced. And I had never taken a girlfriend there.

  For dinner, Janet and I stopped at a sub shop in Sturbridge-still a bit of bad air between us-and I had the pierced, beringed, and bespectacled young man make an Italian with everything on it, to go, for Ellory, and then bought the cigarettes at a convenience store in the same little strip mall, where another pierced and tattooed young fellow asked me to show my ID.

  3

  ON A QUIET, two-lane highway not far from the monastery there was an unmarked dirt parking area large enough for two cars, nothing but woods all around. Hunters used it in fall and spring. Teenagers probably used it as a lovers’ lane. I had used it a dozen times to make my clandestine visits to my brother. I pulled the truck off the road there and killed the lights. Janet and I locked the doors and walked up the highway to the spot where I had met Ellory on the day we’d gone golfing. From there we stepped off onto an old logging road that had almost been reclaimed by the forest, an old wound, mostly healed. I kept a cigar-sized flashlight in the glove compartment, and had remembered to bring it, so we had a little light to work by, and a three-quarters moon, and, for Janet, even in sneakers and a partly buttonless dress, the going wasn’t too bad.

  She’d been out of the hospital only a week and wasn’t coughing very much at all, but even so her lungs were functioning at only about thirty-five percent of capacity, so I went along at a slow pace. The visit was foolish in several ways, but I had mentioned Janet to Ellory in a letter, and he’d written back saying I should bring her to the next family day, which was scheduled for the start of January. But I knew that when Janet’s lung capacity dropped into the mid-twenties, which it would the next time she caught a cold, it would not be very easy to take her walking in the woods, or on a ride to the monastery, or much of anywhere else.

  It was about half a mile on the trail. We stopped twice to rest. Janet did not like me to see how out of breath she was, so when we stopped she stayed a couple of steps away from me and turned her back. I pretended I’d found some interesting mushroom or something to study in the beam of my little flashlight. From things that had happened in my own life during the previous year, I knew about pity and what it ruined. My promise to myself, from the night I’d first typed the words “cystic fibrosis” into Gerard’s computer, had been that, no matter what else I did, I was going to steer my feelings for her a hundred and fifty miles wide of pity.

  So I waited for her to say she couldn’t do something-couldn’t make love, couldn’t come into my studio because of the fumes, couldn’t walk a flat half-mile in the woods-but she never said that. I sometimes thought of her toughness as an iron bar running up her spine. Other times I thought of it as a fire in her chest. Once in a while, on my three-times-a-week morning runs, I’d find a long steep hill and sprint up it as hard as I could, just to feel the pain of wanting breath, and to realize she felt some version of that pain for most of her waking hours.

  Soon enough the woods ended and there were open, almost-flat hayfields coated in silvery light, and an old rail fence with signs every thirty feet: MONASTIC ENCLOSURE, PLEASE KEEP OUT.

  We ducked under the top rail. Crossing the hayfield, I took her hand. By then we had left the State House behind, it seemed to me, though my face hurt where the governor had scratched it, and my ribs and shoulder where he had practiced his judo on me. Janet’s hand felt hot against my palm and I had an urge to stop and lay her down in the sweet grass and make peace that way. I put the flashlight in my front pocket, then took it out and put it in my back pocket. We crossed a low rise and could see Ell
ory’s cabin ahead another eighty yards. The only window was an ocher rectangle, but as we got closer the light went out.

  “He’s just going to bed,” I told Janet quietly. “It’s good, he’ll be done with his prayers, he’ll be hungry.”

  We walked up to the cabin and I tapped on the door three times, two quick, soft knocks then a pause, then one sharp knock. In a minute the light came back on. Another minute and Ellory opened the door, any ordinary, nice-looking thirty-eight-year-old in a bathrobe, little spark of devil in the eyes.

  “Hi,” I said. “Sorry to bother you, but have you noticed lately how much trouble there is in the world? Have you ever wondered why?”

  4

  ELLORY TOOK A STEP out of his hermitage and squeezed me so hard I thought the rib the governor had bruised was going to snap. Before I could breathe well enough again to introduce Janet, he said, “Either you’ve brought a beautiful woman with you or Brother Theodorus is playing dress-up again.”

  “I’m Janet Rossi,” she said, holding out her hand.

  “Sorry. I’m not allowed to shake hands with women.” Ellory stepped farther out from the hermitage and embraced her, too, though not as hard. “Come in, before the night watchman sees us and they turn me back into a Protestant.”

  The hut was sixteen feet by sixteen feet with one chair, one table, one bed, one lamp, one three-shelf bookcase on the wall, a woodstove, a small sink with a hot plate to one side of it, a half-sized refrigerator, and a door that led to a closet with a flush toilet and a shower stall. I took the flashlight out of my pocket and Janet and I sat on the plain gray blanket on the bed. Ellory pulled his chair over. On his feet he was wearing a pair of no-heel leather slippers, color of a peanut shell, that my mother had given him when she was still, as we liked to say, “sharp.” They were in tatters, the tops and soles barely holding together, a toe showing through. Everything else in the room was perfectly neat-no cobwebs, no clutter, no excess-as if the monks had convinced my brother that the condition of his living space had some influence on the condition of his soul.

  “Would you guys like me to call out for a pizza?” my brother offered. He paused one beat for effect, then went to the door, opened it, and, in a not very loud voice, sang out, “Pizza! Pizza!” He came back in and sat down, smiling like a kid in a swimming pool.

  I could tell he was nervous.

  Janet was watching him. “You have your brother’s sense of humor,” she said after a few seconds.

  “It’s our dad’s, actually. He was an investment banker and then a financial counselor-did Jake tell you? White shirt and tie all week. Big serious meetings at which big serious men talked about large sums of money.”

  “Big serious money,” I said.

  “And at night, or on the weekends, or when we went someplace on vacation, he could be as foolish as a four-year-old.” He turned to me. His eyes were steady and clear. He was happy we’d come. “Remember Bastille Day?”

  “We were on vacation in Paris,” I said to Janet, “and we were all sitting at a sidewalk table getting ready to have dinner.”

  “Rue Mouffetard,” Ellory said. “No cars, you know. Little shops. Cobblestones.”

  “And some guy with an accordion started playing lively French tunes. So my father grabbed my mother by the arm and pulled her out into the street and started dancing with her there, spinning her around, bending her backwards like Fred with Ginger.

  “Which would have been fine, except he couldn’t dance to save his soul. He improvised. Mum improvised with him. It went on and on. The food was served, Mum came back to the table eventually, but Dad just kept going, solo. We started to eat and he just kept dancing, twirling around, flailing his arms up in the air. It really wasn’t that unusual a sight for us, him making a spectacle of himself. The people at the other tables loved it, though.”

  “Mum loved it, too,” I said.

  “Of course she did. She dealt with sick and dying kids all day, he was her relaxation… How is she anyway?”

  “Okay. The same. Last time you saw her she was asking for me.”

  Ellory almost smiled. “She’s not in any pain,” he said, and I could see the suit of guilt on him, too.

  “She mixes us up,” I explained to Janet.

  “You told me.”

  We didn’t talk for a moment. Janet fussed with the top of her dress and pushed herself back on the bed so she was against the wall. She let her eyes wander over the sparse furnishings. Those sparse furnishings, I noticed for the first time, included a framed picture of a young woman, which sat on the top of Ellory’s bookcase, above a row of lentil soup cans and next to framed pictures of my sister, me, and our parents. I looked at it once, and then just focused on a corner of the room where my brother had set up a little shrine-crucifix, votive candle, a vase with a few stalks of some kind of wild berry in it.

  I knew Janet well enough by then to see that she was at ease with Ellory and in his little house, the way she had been at ease in my apartment almost from the first minute. Families are like countries. They have their own language and jokes and secrets and assumptions about the right and wrong ways of doing things, and some of that always shows in the children, the way something of Germany or Australia always shows in a German or an Australian, no matter where they go. Outsiders like it or they don’t, they feel at home there or they don’t. It’s like the taste of cilantro. Giselle had never liked cilantro.

  I had been thinking about the photograph and holding the bag with the sub sandwich and cigarettes in it. I was somehow not paying attention. After she’d finished looking at the pictures and the soup cans and reading the titles on the spines of Ellory’s books, Janet touched my arm and pointed to the oil stain on my pants. I handed the bag to my brother and told him what it was. He insisted we share the sandwich with him. We said no. He insisted again and we said no again, we’d just eaten, we were fine. And then he said okay but he would save half of it for the next day’s lunch. And then he ate the first half of the sub from a plate on his lap, with his bathrobe on and his hairy shins showing, in about three seconds. My eyes wandered up to the bookcase again, and I could not keep myself from thinking about something he had told me: that the monks in his order weren’t supposed to talk and so they learned sign language and there was a certain sign they used for greeting each other and it meant memento mori, remember death. When he’d first told that to me and for years afterwards I thought it was one of the worst things I’d heard about the monastery, right there in line with Pain is a blessing. “Remember life,” I thought they should be saying to each other. “Remember fun.”

  But I’d gotten older and certain things had happened to me and to people close to me, and the monks’ little hand signal had started to make more sense. All of Ellory had started to make more sense.

  I took the pack of cigarettes out of my shirt pocket and handed it over. He placed it on his desk, just so.

  Janet pulled the top of her dress together again and asked him what it was like, living alone all the time.

  In his early monastic days, Ellory would have said, “I’m not alone, I have the Lord’s presence,” or some special thing like that. But he’d grown up, finally, after thirteen years of no sex and no carousing and no sleeping later than four a.m. He looked up at her and said, “Oh, shit. You’ve been here all this time and I haven’t asked about you at all.”

  “My life is an open book,” she said.

  He smiled. He was still holding the dripping oily sandwich in both hands an inch above his plate. “Mine, too, but… What kind of work do you do?”

  “I work for the governor of Massachusetts.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Reading and interpreting polls, deflecting and entertaining lobbyists, working on his travel itinerary in campaign years, advising on speeches, being a liaison with the press. Getting him reelected. My title is Special Assistant for Public Relations.”

  “He must be a good man, then, if you work for him.”

 
“He’s a jerkoff,” I said. My hand was hurting more now; there was about two percent of being sorry left in me.

  Janet had a particular way of pursing her lips when she was bothered by something I did or said. It made small ridges of skin at the outside edges of her mouth, and made the freckle almost disappear. When she pursed her lips like that in my direction, I knew everything was more or less alright between us. Ellory looked from me to her and she said, “No, he’s… flawed. I thought he might be someone special when I first went to work for him. He’s charismatic, in a politician’s way. He seems to care about children, really, and he’s good with his own daughters. When I first saw him-I went to work for him during his first campaign when I was right out of grad school-I thought he might turn into a great governor someday. I thought he might even run for president-he still wants to. But I’ve been there almost four years now and he’s squeezed three-quarters of the idealism out of me.” She coughed her deep wet cough and I watched my brother watching her. “I wanted to do something good for the world. Now I want to keep my health insurance and have someplace to go on rainy weekday mornings in February.”

  “I was more idealistic at first, too,” Ellory said when she was finished. “The routine here breaks it out of you. That’s good, I think, or natural. Every life does that. Marriage does it, work does it. The trick is to somehow keep the gates open in the fences at the edge of your mind and not get hard and bitter. You don’t strike me as hard and bitter. Jake doesn’t strike me that way either, in spite of everything that’s happened to him.”

  Janet looked at me when Ellory said that. It was as if I’d just taken off a pair of dark glasses and she was seeing my eyes for the first time. She looked back at Ellory, who was taking the opportunity to gulp down the second half of his sandwich, and whose eyes slipped once to the cigarettes on the desk.