The Abbey

by James Martin

  “And if Brad jumped off the Walt Whitman Bridge, would you do that too?” She asked that question so often that Jeremiah used to tease her about it.

  “Yes!” he said, grinning. Jeremiah’s quicksilver mood changes always amazed her.

  “I would jump off the Walt Whitman Bridge! Like this,” he said, clasping his hands together and forming his slender body into a mock diving position. “And I’d be wearing that Phillies shirt while I did it! And on the way down I’d say, ‘Go Phillieeeeeees!’” He almost collapsed in laughter. The person who could make Jeremiah laugh hardest was always Jeremiah.

  Anne could almost hear his laugh, which was what she missed most about him. Her chest tightened, and tears sprang to her eyes. She thought it not only unfair, but cruel, that she would never hear her son laugh again.

  “God damn it,” she said aloud, and she felt the familiar hollow in her stomach open up.

  Anne inhaled and exhaled deeply as she turned away from her son’s photo, willing herself to continue her day.

  4

  By Monday the window was repaired, to Mark’s relief. The glazier (how could he have been so dumb to insinuate that Anne didn’t know what that was?) carried a pristine square of glass from his truck and expertly fit it to the window frame. Although Mark was glad to see it fixed, he had also enjoyed the brief novelty of the broken glass, which allowed the humid air to creep into the room as he watched the ball game on Sunday night, enjoying a beer.

  The weather remained sticky, even though the sun hadn’t shown its face since Sunday afternoon. How could Philly be so humid? Sometimes he felt as if he had moved to Atlanta. Everything south of New England was too hot for him. He pulled out of his driveway, checking to make sure that no boys were screaming down the road on their boards or that Brad wasn’t driving his father’s car.

  The drive to the monastery was an easy one and enjoyable on most days. Out of his neighborhood, up the Blue Route, and past the towns he always wanted to visit, though he never seemed to find the time to do so.

  “St. Davids,” he once said to John, Brad’s father. “What’s St. Davids like? Sounds picturesque, like some Welsh mining town.”

  “Uh-huh,” said John. “Try buying a house around there, and you’ll see how much the miners’ cottages are going for.”

  Mark turned on the radio and fiddled with the dials, unsuccessfully trying to find a song he liked. He turned off at the exit onto a smaller road. After a year, he knew the route cold. Forty-five minutes door-to-door wasn’t so bad; and even if traffic delayed him, the monks didn’t care if he was a little late, unless he was scheduled to meet with a contractor. For men whose lives revolved around the clock, they were surprisingly tolerant of his tardiness. Mark had said as much to the abbot, meaning it as a compliment.

  “Our lives revolve around God, not the clock,” the abbot said.

  He liked Father Paul. As head of the abbey, he could have insisted on being called Abbot Paul, but on the first day he told Mark, “I’ve been Father Paul for so long that it fits.”

  Abbot came from a word meaning “Father,” Mark had discovered in his online research after his first day of work, during which he’d been introduced to a raft of unfamiliar words. When he asked Dave, a college friend who recommended him for the job, if the monks spoke Latin, Dave howled.

  “Oh yeah!” said Dave. “That’s how I communicate with them when I’m doing their books—in Latin. We all speak Latin to one another. Of course they don’t speak Latin, you nimrod.”

  But on that first day they might as well have been. The English words the monks used were ones Mark remembered only dimly from his architectural studies. “Refectory,” “cloister,” “chapter house” he heard on the first day, as Father Paul showed him around the abbey.

  Mark never did, and never would, get the hang of the names of the times that the monks prayed in chapel, which occurred every few hours. With the exception of “Vigils,” which made some sense, the terms identifying the other times of prayer—“Lauds,” “Compline,” “Sext,” and “None”—seemed like nonsense words. He had been corrected enough times on the pronunciation of “Compline” (“Com-plin, not com-pline,” said one older monk sourly) that he now simply said, “Your prayers.” Why couldn’t they just say “morning prayer” or “evening prayer”? Or maybe they intentionally made their way of life inscrutable to outsiders.

  After being laid off from his entry-level job at an architectural firm in Cambridge, Mark had spent a few months scrounging around for carpentry jobs in Boston. As a college student he had worked as an apprentice to a local carpenter to help pay for tuition, and he enjoyed the work. During the first few months after the layoff, Mark figured he could make a go of it; he remembered how much he enjoyed the manual labor. But the carpentry work was sporadic at best, and if he wasn’t going to default on his massive student loans, he would have to find something more permanent.

  So when Dave, who helped the monks with their taxes, told Mark about a full-time job at the monastery, he jumped, even though he would miss Boston. It would be steady work and some carpentry in the suburbs of Philly, which he had heard was a more affordable place to live. He had lived in Cambridge so long that he thought Anne was joking when she quoted the monthly rent on the house.

  “You want me to raise it?” she asked when she saw his face.

  The first day at the abbey, though, was profoundly weird. He remembered that now as he made a left at the sign that had the word “Monastery” floating above a fat red arrow pointing to a long snaking driveway lined with massive pine trees.

  The monastery was built in the 1950s, when suburban towns and villages were blossoming around Philadelphia, as World War II veterans searched for quiet places to settle down with their wives and families. The archbishop of Philadelphia invited the monks to start an abbey here, to “support our growing church with your constant prayers” read the yellowing letter, framed and still hanging in the sacristy.

  Mark once remarked to one of the monks that the archbishop of Philadelphia had beautiful handwriting. That kind of round, flowing script was a lost art. “I’ll bet he went to Catholic school, and the nuns taught him that!”

  “Yes,” said Brother Benjamin, irritated, “they did.”

  Mark’s jokes sometimes fell flat with the monks.

  The monastery was named after Saints Philip and James not because of any special devotion the monks had for the two, but because they were the favorite saints of the archbishop who invited them to Philadelphia. When Mark learned that James was one of the apostles and called “the Lesser” (instead of another apostle named James, called “the Greater”) and that Philip had once doubted that Jesus could perform a miracle, he judged the monastery’s name pretty lame, considering there were other, more famous apostles to choose from.

  Nearly everyone in the area, even those who weren’t Catholic, knew the place—if only for the jam that the monks made to support themselves and that held pride of place in local supermarkets. They called it the Abbey of P&J, or the abbey, or the monastery, or sometimes just P&J. Sometimes, when Mark told women he dated where he worked, they seemed impressed, as if they were meeting a saint. “I’m just the handyman, for God’s sake,” he would say. One woman, however, seemed turned on by it, which creeped him out.

  But his architectural soul felt a thrill when he saw the place for the first time. Built in the local stone called Wissahickon schist, a rough gray shale that glittered in the sun, the abbey church was a long rectangular building with a peaked wooden roof and a tall stone bell tower that stood beside it. That was the first thing you saw as you approached the abbey, and he never tired of watching the bell tower rise slowly over the driveway as he drove up the hill. Until his first day there, he had never been inside a monastery, though he had studied them in his class “The Medieval World” in architecture school. If you were paying attention as you drove past on the Blue Route, you could see the tall gray steeple poke above the hilly landscape.

&
nbsp; A few minutes before his interview on that fall morning last year, he had opened the heavy wooden door to the church and was almost floored by the sound of chanting, something he had heard only on the radio. People still sing like this? His next thought was: This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.

  He found a place in a pew and listened to the rising and falling men’s voices, unaccompanied but for a single organ note at the beginning of each stanza. Listening more carefully, he realized that they were singing in English. He didn’t know much about Catholicism (neither of his parents went to a church of any kind) and even less about monks and monasteries, but he could tell they were singing psalms.

  “Blessed be the name of the Lord,” sang one voice. Then the rest answered with other verses. At the end of their prayers, they sang a hymn with an organ accompanying them.

  There were only two other visitors in the church on that day—an old woman and a young man—both seated a few pews ahead of Mark. After the chanting stopped, they stood, knelt down and crossed themselves as Catholics do, and exited the church. Both smiled at him on the way out. Before the door closed, he could hear them talking to each other outside, under the portico. Even from the few words he caught, Mark sensed that they were acquainted through their visits here. The old woman’s presence he could understand, but what was a college-age kid doing at a monastery at seven in the morning?

  Connected to the church was the dormitory, where the monks slept. That part of the abbey included the chapter house, where they gathered for meetings; the infirmary, for the sick monks; and the refectory, where they ate. A few hundred feet away, in a separate building, was the jam factory, where they produced “Monastery Jam,” sold locally and through mail-order catalogues and a website. “Jam puts the rest of the food on the table,” said Father Paul with a smile.

  On that first day Mark wasn’t sure where he was supposed to meet the abbot. But Paul found him. Mark stood outside the church lighting up a cigarette when the abbot emerged from a side door.

  “I’m Father Paul,” he said, offering his hand. “Welcome to the Abbey of Saints Philip and James. You’re Mark, I guess?”

  Paul had a pale, thoughtful face, large blue eyes, thinning gray hair, and enormous glasses. His handshake was firm, his hand soft—not the hand of someone who did much manual labor. On the plus side, he looked like what Mark’s mother used to call a “kind soul.”

  Mark snubbed out a cigarette on the flagstone pavement under the portico and noticed Paul’s face register mild disapproval. Only then did he notice Paul’s getup.

  “Wow,” said Mark, surveying the abbot’s long white robe and the heavy black cloth that covered his shoulders and hung down to his knees. (A few months later, Mark found out that the black cloth was called a “scapular.”) A thick brown leather belt cinched around his waist completed the monk’s outfit.

  “Ah, yes,” said the abbot. “Welcome to the eleventh century. Our habit is pretty strange, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s pretty cool,” said Mark, meaning it. “Does it have pockets?”

  Paul reached into a pocket and pulled out a set of keys that jangled and sparkled in the autumn light. “The keys to the kingdom,” he said triumphantly.

  “The what?”

  “Sorry,” said Paul. “An attempt at a joke. Why don’t you follow me, I’ll show you around, and we can talk about the job. Dave gave you an excellent recommendation.” Mark made a mental note to take Dave out for a beer in Philly.

  Mark followed the abbot into his office and noticed he was wearing sandals—Birkenstocks—with socks, which gave him a vaguely hippielike air.

  The job was not what Mark expected he would be doing at this moment in his life. Back in school he had listed his career goals on a small square of quadrille-ruled paper that he kept tucked in his wallet for a few years. By this point, he was supposed to have founded his own small architectural firm with friends. As Mark found himself farther and farther behind in his ambitions, he finally threw the paper away.

  Still, he found that he liked working at the abbey more than toiling behind his desk at the firm, where he had spent most of his time designing bathrooms for office buildings in downtown Boston.

  “Director of the Physical Plant” was his title, something the abbot insisted on calling him, even though he felt he was just a handyman. “Don’t forget that Jesus was a carpenter,” Father Paul said several times during the first month. Mark was busy with many things: painting endless hallways, fixing leaky pipes and toilets that probably had never flushed right, plastering water-damaged walls, raking leaves in the cloister garden, and mowing the largest lawn he had ever seen or ever hoped to see.

  Often Mark spent hours supervising contractors the abbot had called to fix something beyond Mark’s expertise. A huge complex of buildings built so long ago needed an enormous amount of care. And with only twenty-seven monks, several of them busy in the jam factory and many of them elderly, Mark had plenty to do. Occasionally he even got to do some carpentry. He was particularly proud of a new pine shelf he installed in a side chapel in the abbey church, dedicated to Mary, or “Our Lady,” as Father Paul said.

  That was almost a year ago. By now Mark felt at home. He liked the monks, most of them at least, and a few days into the job he realized that his initial impression had been wrong. They didn’t have such an easy life: rising at insanely early hours, praying all the time, working both inside the house and in the jam factory, and eating extremely simple meals. They took vows of poverty, so none of them owned anything, not even their habits. Lots of fasting during Lent too, he gathered.

  Plus, no sex. That part made their lives seem impossible. When one monk asked him in a friendly way if he ever thought of joining them, Mark laughed out loud. The monk was not pleased with this response.

  Father Paul had also become a kind of confidant for Mark. He still didn’t know many people in Philly other than Dave, whom he saw only occasionally, and whatever women he met in bars in Center City or online. Last summer, Dave invited him to join a local softball league, which turned out to be fun, but most of the guys on the team were either married or on their way to marriage, so invitations to a drink or a ball game meant that either their wives or their girlfriends came along. That ended up making Mark feel even lonelier.

  One day, driving home from work, it dawned on him that the person he spent the most time with was Father Paul. He smiled to himself, finding it funny (or bizarre or pathetic, he wasn’t sure) that his best friend in Philly, next to Dave, was a monk.

  But Paul was a good listener, patient, with a lively sense of humor. Something else Mark appreciated about the abbot: he always seemed calm. Unflappable even when a portion of the ceiling in the jam factory collapsed after a huge snowstorm in December. Paul simply peered up at the gaping hole in the ceiling and down at the sodden acoustical tiles on the factory floor and the plastic yellow bucket that caught the dripping water and said, “Well, that’s something, isn’t it?”

  And no matter what you told Paul, he seldom seemed surprised, much less disturbed. Sometimes Mark wondered how you got to be a person like the abbot—patient, listening, not judging. Open. Mark would complain about a date that had gone bad, a woman who dumped him, or a heated argument he’d had with a contractor, and Paul took it in stride. At times he could even make Mark laugh about some of his problems. Once Mark angrily told him how a woman had thrown a drink in his face the night before, and Paul’s first response was, “Did you deserve it?”

  Today’s work shouldn’t be too tough. Finish painting the wall in the refectory that he replastered after last week’s storm, install a new shower stall in a bathroom on the second floor of the dormitory, and help Brother Robert unload a shipment of jars for the jam factory.

  Brother Robert was another favorite—friendly, quiet, practical, and with a head for business. The monks Mark appreciated most were those who had worked, as they said, “in the world” before entering the monastery. Brother Robert always smi
led when Mark called it the “Abbey of PB&J.” A few weeks after he started the job, Mark handed him a case of gourmet peanut butter for the community on All Saints Day, which he knew was a big day for them, as a gag gift.

  “First time anyone’s ever given us a case of peanut butter,” said the monk.

  “First time I ever knew when All Saints Day was,” said Mark.

  At the end of the workday, around five, Brother Robert waved at him as he entered the noisy jam factory. Mark assumed it was to check if the jars arrived; they hadn’t. Instead, Brother Robert told him he had a phone call.

  Who would call me here? he wondered.

  Maddy, who worked in the guest house and was visiting Brother Robert, handed him a small pink slip of paper. When Mark first came to the abbey, he was surprised to discover so many of what he called “nonmonks” working in the factory. “There are only twenty or so in the community who are able-bodied,” said Brother Robert. “And you don’t have to be a monk to make jam.”

  At first he found Maddy, a seventyish woman with a long, mournful face and a slow gait, which he ascribed to arthritis, distant. She was also overly deferential to the monks. “The holy fathers and brothers” she often called them. Mark knew she was trying to be funny, but he suspected that Maddy did think they were all holy. He didn’t—he’d seen enough of the monks grow testy when a toilet wasn’t fixed on time or irritated when Mark was hammering too loudly. (“It’s a hammer,” he said to a monk who screwed up his face when he passed Mark fixing a table in the refectory. “It’s loud.”) The monks could get angry, and even petulant, like anyone else. In time, though, he grew to appreciate Maddy for her work ethic. She was loyal to the monks and the monastery, never late, and always efficient.

  “Anne called,” said the note. At first he was happy to see the name: a lawyer he met at a crowded bar in Center City last week. But then he saw the phone number: his landlady. Now what? Had the window not been fixed to her exacting specifications?