The Abbey

by James Martin

  Stepping outside, he took out his cell phone and punched in her number. The day was getting even warmer, with full, darkening clouds foretelling a thunderstorm.

  “Is this Mark Matthews?” she asked before he could say anything. “I’m sorry to call you at work, but I didn’t have your cell and I know you work at the monastery.” She sounded agitated.

  “No problem,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “This is kind of embarrassing, but I was on my way home from work and I’m stranded. My car broke down in the parking lot, and everyone I work with already left, so I was wondering if you could pick me up on your way home. Is that doable? I’m at the garage where they towed the car, not too far from St. Davids.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Let me get a pencil, and you can tell me how to get there.”

  “Oh, I have no clue where I am. Let me give the phone to one of the mechanics.”

  Mark copied down the directions and hung up. “I have to pick up a woman in St. Davids,” he said to Brother Robert.

  “Well, congratulations,” he said.

  “No, it’s my landlady.”

  “Oh, condolences then.”

  5

  Anne was standing outside the gas station, waving and smiling. She looks good, he thought, with her hair pulled back, wearing a tailored white shirt that showed off her slender figure. He wondered if he should ask her out, and then reminded himself of their age difference. Still . . .

  “Thank you so much,” she said, climbing into the truck. “I feel like an idiot.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Happy to help.”

  “How’s life at Peanut Butter Abbey?” she said. “Isn’t that what you call it?”

  “PB&J.”

  “Right,” she said flatly. “How was work?”

  “Great! I got tons of stuff done today. It’s a good feeling to do work and just get stuff done. Cross it off the to-do list, you know?”

  “Uh-huh.” She sounded distracted.

  “How’s the car?” he asked.

  She exhaled. “Lousy. I freaking hate that car. My ex-husband bought it, and I’ve never liked it.”

  Mark knew not to ask about her husband. One evening in the early fall, Brad’s father, John, recounted the story, a week after Mark moved into the neighborhood. John was watering his rosebushes as he did so. They were talking about Mark’s dating life.

  “How are things with Susie?” asked John. “Is that her name?”

  “You mean Nancy? Or Stacy?”

  “Who can keep track?” John guffawed. The conversation turned to Mark’s hopes for marriage, then to news about other families on the street, and then to Anne.

  Anne had grown up not far from the neighborhood and moved into her current house at a young age, along with her husband, who had been her high-school sweetheart. “He was quite the jock,” said John. “Played minor league ball at some point, I think.” Anne’s parents owned her house, and another one on the same street. After they died, she inherited both houses. The extra one, where Mark now lived, had provided her and her husband with some additional income.

  A few months after moving in, Anne became pregnant, something that obviously made her happy. After Jeremiah was born, Anne loved pushing him around in his stroller through the neighborhood and waving to all of her neighbors. Sometimes she’d sit on the front step of her house reading a paperback as the baby snoozed on a blue blanket spread out on the lawn under the big maple tree. “She was a great mom,” said John, turning his hose toward the rosebushes.

  But her husband couldn’t handle being a father and moved out when Jeremiah was two or three, John couldn’t remember. He did remember watching her struggle to balance a full-time job with single parenthood. But she did it, thanks to her own grit, and also to an elderly woman in the neighborhood who ran a small day-care center in her house.

  As a boy, Jeremiah seemed close to his mom. Anne went to all his Little League games in the spring and summer, drove Jeremiah and his friends to the movies, and even served as a den mother for the local Cub Scout pack. John described Jeremiah as a “sweet kid,” a phrase that Mark suspected he didn’t use much.

  When he was thirteen, Jeremiah was struck and killed by a car. Three years ago, he, Brad, and two other friends were crossing a busy highway on the way home from a movie they didn’t have permission to see and to which Anne had refused to drive them. He survived only a few hours in a local hospital before dying.

  When John reached that part of the story, he turned his face toward the rosebushes and said, “It was a tough time for my son.” He bit his lip and continued with the rest of the story: the crying they heard from Anne’s house that night and the next day, the funeral on a humid Memorial Day weekend with Jeremiah’s friends serving as honorary pallbearers, the flower baskets that crowded her front step for days until they wilted under the sun. Anne shut herself inside the house for the next few weeks.

  John swept the rosebushes with a bath of water. Mark felt a faint cool mist on his face.

  It was difficult for Mark to take it all in. All he had asked was, “So what’s my landlady’s story?”

  Such a strange thing to hear on a warm evening just before sunset with the fireflies winking on and off. So much sadness unearthed in a few minutes. Mark remembered the conversation with Brad’s father now, as Anne sat beside him in his truck.

  Anne looked out the window as Mark drove on. “I hate that car.”

  “You know,” Mark said to change the topic and to cheer himself up, “I don’t even know what you do. I’ve known you for a year, and I’m not sure what you do.”

  “That’s funny.” She turned and faced him with a sly smile. “What do you think I do?”

  Mark grimaced. In college one of his girlfriends asked with depressing regularity, “Guess what I’d like to do tonight?” and he always seemed to give the wrong answer. Usually his girlfriend wanted to either go out to dinner or see a movie; he wanted to stay home and have sex. Once, despairing of answering correctly, he opted to say what he really wanted: “Polish off a six-pack, watch the Celtics, make love, and go to sleep.” She sulked for the rest of the night.

  He tried to imagine what Anne did. All he could think of was the sight of her in those gray yoga pants. “A yoga instructor?”

  Anne laughed loudly, the first genuine laughter he’d ever heard from her. She had a sexy laugh, deeper than he expected.

  “Thanks,” she said, shaking her head and looking out the window. “I’ll have to tell everyone in my yoga class that. No, nothing that interesting. I’m just an accountant.”

  “Really?”

  “Why?” she said turning toward him again. “You don’t think I’m smart enough? That I’m some sort of soccer . . .” She paused before she got to the word “mom.”

  “No, no,” Mark said, trying to fend off any mention of her son. “It’s just that I always see you in the yoga outfit and you seem too, um, mellow to be an accountant.”

  She smiled, pleased by the small compliment, and tapped the dashboard absentmindedly. “Yeah, that’s me—mellow CPA. You should talk to people in the office. I think they wish I were mellow.”

  They drove together in silence, windows down, enjoying the evening air, which suddenly had grown cooler. He looked through his windshield at the heavy clouds. It was definitely going to rain.

  “Shit!” he shouted, just as they were turning onto the Blue Route.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I left my cell phone at the abbey.”

  She sighed and pursed her lips, anxious to get home and uninterested in going to the abbey.

  “Do you mind if we stop by there?” he said. “I can’t live without my phone.”

  “You’re doing me the favor, remember?” she said. “Stop by, and I’ll wait in the car.”

  6

  By the time they reached the Abbey of Saints Philip and James, rain was drumming loudly on the roof of the truck. Anne hadn’t set foot on the monastery grounds since she
was a girl, but when Mark pulled onto the driveway, she remembered it all: the vast green lawns and endless meadows where she used to hunt for grasshoppers and crickets, the tall pine trees that lined the driveway like sentinels, and the way the church steeple slowly rose over the driveway as you approached it. “Like a ship’s mast coming over the horizon,” she suddenly remembered her dad saying. She was amazed that she recalled that phrase. Where did that come from?

  Both her parents were religious—her father extremely, her mother fairly. An accountant like Anne, her father helped the monks with their books, mainly during tax season. As far as she could recall, he was on a parish retreat when he met Father Edward, the monk with the bad breath, and they had remained friends. But she was vague about that. Once or twice he brought Anne to the monastery, and she remembered it as a not unpleasant place, but not pleasant either. Sometimes she’d sit on a bench in some hallway outside the chapel when the monks were singing, but most of the time she sat in an office, doodling with colored pencils on plain sheets of typing paper while her father worked on the books and monks dropped by to chat. For a silent monastery, they certainly talked a lot. She recalled being inside the chapel once.

  Or maybe not. Maybe that was some other church. She had long ago given up on going to church, except for weddings and funerals.

  What she remembered most about the abbey was its smell. It was incense of course, but a special kind she hadn’t smelled before or since. It was quite unlike the incense she smelled whenever she passed that Zen bookstore she liked in Philly, where the slender sticks of sandalwood burning outside the entrance produced an acrid smell. The monastery’s scent was different. Sweeter somehow. At least in her memory.

  “We’ll go in the back way,” said Mark. He drove up the driveway, turned left onto a blacktopped road, splashed loudly through a shallow puddle, and passed a sign that said, “Enclosure. No Entrance Please.”

  Not only do the monks live on a huge piece of property in a wealthy suburb, thought Anne, but they put up signs to make people feel unwelcome. Seems unchristian.

  Mark pulled into a parking lot outside a modest wooden building with a red-and-white plaque over the door that read, “Monastery Jams.”

  “That’s where they make the jam?” she said. “It looks tiny.”

  “Things look different from the inside. It’s bigger than it seems. Why don’t you come in for a bit?” he said over the rain, which was letting up. “I can get you a cup of coffee. And they have some amazing coffee in the retreat wing.”

  “No, thanks. I’m fine here.”

  “Oh come on. They’re not going to bite.”

  She exhaled. “Okay.”

  They emerged from the car, tried unsuccessfully to dodge the raindrops, sprinted around the side of the jam building, and walked quickly up a flagstone path. She didn’t remember this part of the monastery. It was lovely. Even in the light rain, with her head down, Anne was aware of the lush grass, the carefully pruned pine trees, the well-tended azaleas, the full rhododendron bushes.

  “Oh God,” she said sharply. “What’s this?”

  “Oh,” he said, suddenly flustered. “The cemetery.”

  She could see that the monks were buried here with a minimum of fuss, laid to rest in a small plot that held perhaps fifty of them, with white metal crosses, only a foot or so tall, marking the spots. She glanced at Mark and noticed his discomfort at having brought her this way.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “Let’s just go out another way when we leave, okay?”

  The flagstone path led to an archway with a door. Mark opened it for her.

  7

  Central air for this big building? Anne thought as she stepped inside the cool of the monastery. No wonder they have to sell so much jam.

  Then the aroma hit her. She hadn’t experienced it for years, and instantly it called up a precise memory from childhood: her reaching up to hold her father’s hand as she walked through the monastery. Something like flowers but not flowers, something like perfume but not perfume, something like a fire in a fireplace, but not that either. The overpowering scent made her want to pause and think about her father.

  Anne remembered her Psych 101 professor at Haverford saying that smell was the most primal of senses, tapping directly into our brains. This, she knew, was what was happening. But it moved her nonetheless. She wanted to tell someone how much she missed her father and how much she wished she could talk with him about Jeremiah. But she didn’t know Mark well at all. So she just inhaled. If I could smell this every day, I might be happier.

  Mark led her down a long hallway whose plain brick walls were lined with silky white robes hanging on wooden pegs.

  “What are those?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” he whispered. “We can’t talk that loudly. They like to keep things quiet here.”

  That was something she disliked about church: people were always telling you what not to do.

  “Fine,” she said in a loud whisper. “What are those?” She pointed to the robes.

  “Cowls. The monks use them during their prayers, which are going to start soon. It’s almost time for Vespers. Wanna go to Vespers while I’m looking for my phone?”

  “No thanks.”

  “It’s pretty impressive,” he said enthusiastically. “You might enjoy it.”

  “No,” she said firmly, “that’s okay.”

  “Okeydoke.” He invited her to sit on a long wooden bench in the hall, while he began his search for his cell phone.

  “I think I know where to find it,” he said, walking off into the darkness.

  It was certainly dark. Maybe they should spend less money on air conditioning and more on lightbulbs, she thought. The hallways were dim, at least the one in which she now sat. An ornate wooden cabinet, made of the darkest pine, stood against an opposite wall. Its drawers, which bore carvings of flowers and leaves and the heads of chubby little angels, were tightly shut, and its gleaming polished top was bare. If that were in my home, it would be piled high with letters and books and magazines.

  With her back resting comfortably against cool brown bricks, Anne was suddenly aware of her fatigue.

  She sat in one end of a series of four hallways that formed a perfect square and enclosed a large glassed-in garden. In the center of the garden was a white marble fountain, the size of a birdbath, surrounded by four large ornamental cherry trees in full bloom. In the rain their wrinkled trunks were a shiny black and their blossoms glossy pink. Azaleas glowed in red profusion. Either the monks were talented gardeners, or they had hired some good landscapers, because she had never seen such a well-tended plot, lush with grass and carefully nurtured trees and bushes.

  Something about the view seemed familiar, but she couldn’t remember if she had seen the garden when she was little or even if she had been to this part of the abbey. It didn’t register the way the steeple and the incense had. Anne stared at the garden as if she were seeing something she knew in a deep way while not being sure. As if she both remembered it and was seeing it for the first time. The feeling unsettled her.

  A tall, thin monk appeared, wearing long white-and-black robes. She remembered their outfits well enough: Father Edward dressed like that. Sometimes he had food on his robes too. As the monk silently glided past her, he nodded and smiled, pulled a cowl from one of the pegs on the wall, swiftly tossed it over his habit, expertly arranged the hood so that it fell back neatly over his shoulders, and slipped into a doorway to her right.

  A loud bell tolled, startling her. She instinctively looked up and realized that the bell must be in the steeple outside. It rang out single notes, then more insistently, with the tones coming every few seconds.

  Within moments, several monks materialized, emerging from doorways she hadn’t noticed. Single file, they walked down opposite sides of the hallway, some looking at the glassed-in garden, some with eyes fixed on the dark red tile floor, nearly all with hands hidden within the folds of their habits. Some were ancient and use
d wooden canes and metal walkers, moving deliberately. Two were surprisingly young, perhaps in their late twenties, though it was hard to tell with their downturned faces and close-cropped hair. Most were late-middle-aged men who gave the impression of having made this walk many times. Only a few glanced at her as they passed. She figured there were about twenty-five monks in all.

  One man, pale, tall, with thinning hair, a receding chin, and Buddy Holly glasses, smiled as he approached, slowed his pace, and bent over to address her. He had watery blue eyes. Anne was surprised to feel a desire to know him.

  “Welcome,” he whispered. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m with Mark Matthews,” she said. “He’s lost . . . I mean, he lost his cell phone, and I’m waiting for him. Am I in the wrong place?”

  Another tall monk, with close-cropped sandy hair, stopped and paused before her bench. “Are you Anne?”

  How the hell does he know my name? she wondered.

  Seeing her confusion, he whispered, “I’m Brother Robert. Mark told me he was going to pick you up tonight.”

  Mark talks about me here?

  The monk with the big glasses asked, “Would you like to join us for Vespers? I can take you to the visitors’ section, if you’d like.”

  “No, thank you,” she said politely. “I’m fine here.”

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll pray for you.”

  Anne never knew how to respond to that. Well-meaning friends often said it after Jeremiah’s death. She wasn’t sure if she still believed in God, so she thought it was hypocritical to say thanks, as if she wanted them to pray to God. And what would she tell them if nothing happened? If she didn’t feel any better? They’d probably be disappointed that their prayers hadn’t worked, and the last thing she needed was more disappointment in the air. So usually she just said, “Okay.” Which was what she said now to the monk with the Buddy Holly glasses.

  He smiled at her again and walked into the chapel behind the other monk.