The Monk

by Hallahan, William H. ;

  Acceptance, his mother had counseled him. Acceptance. He was trying. He felt like a leper. Maybe they would make him wear a leper’s warning bell as he read about in a story once. Acceptance, Brendan, acceptance.

  He sensed it before he saw it. It came sweeping with incredible speed from the deep darkness of the east, shooting right at him a foot above the water, over the breaking waves and curving in the air above him. It was a huge bird. He saw it only indistinctly, catching it in silhouette from the bonfires or by reflected light as it circled above his head.

  It shrieked at him as though he were an interloper of some sort.

  A woman cried out and crouched. “What is it?”

  “It’s a hawk,” a man said.

  “What’s it doing? What’s it want?”

  Brendan raised an arm to brush at it and felt razor-sharp talons on his forearm. His hat was snatched off, leaving another cut on his scalp. The bird’s wing struck Brendan on the back of the head and almost stunned him. It circled him once more, staring at his bared head, rose higher and flew in larger circles, still emitting its shrieks.

  A group from one of the bonfires came running.

  “What the hell is it?”

  “A bird.”

  “You okay, kid?”

  “It’s a hawk! It’s enormous. All black. See it?”

  “What the hell’s it doing here?”

  “Must be from the Brigantine Bird Preserve.”

  One of the men picked up Brendan’s hat. “The yellow must have attracted him. Maybe he thought you were a bird on the wing.” And he laughed. They all laughed.

  The hawk settled on a rooftop and watched Brendan a few moments more. Then it spread its wings, sailed off the roof and with three or four powerful pumps of its wings flew back into the darkness from which it had come.

  Brendan lay awake for hours, listening with growing dread. A three-quarter moon rose out of the sea above the balcony railing and was shining right at him while the night breeze surged through the attic. He lay with his hands behind his head, listening, knowing he could not stop it.

  He heard them again: hoofbeats, only this time there was something new—the sound of several horses, growing louder and louder, and now he heard with them the sound of a carriage, its steel-rimmed wheels clattering on cobblestones, coming closer, and the air was suddenly damp and there was a fog filling the attic, making everything indistinct. Even if he shut his eyes he could not block out the vision. The horses were running flat out and the carriage springs were protesting rhythmically but the clattering wheels were making the loudest noise, thundering frantically. He put his hands over his ears as the vision loomed out of the blackness and grew until the approaching carriage towered over him. Brendan threw an arm over his face, expecting to be run over. But the horses stopped right in front of him, the whole entourage in black in a black background.

  He raised his head and stared at the carriage. The horses stamped their metal shoes on cobblestones. Was it for him, the carriage? He sat up in his cot and looked. The driver was an indistinct lump up on top with a whip and a handful of reins. Then Brendan looked at the horses. Six of them. All black. All headless. And he saw now that the driver above his turned-up coat collar was also headless.

  Then the carriage door swung open. Brendan said the confiteor, “O my God, I’m heartily sorry for having offended Thee.” Then he heard voices.

  From the fog his mother stepped into view slowly in a very pretty old gown, and behind her came his father, and his father smiled at his mother to reassure her, and she took his hand and smiled at him. They were talking indistinctly and he heard his father say “Brendan.” He didn’t want to get into the carriage. “I must tell Brendan the secret,” he said quite clearly. His mother shook her head and pulled him toward the carriage. Then she stepped up and in, and his father stepped in behind her and pulled the door shut. He leaned out of the carriage window and seemed to look directly at Brendan. “Purple!” he cried.

  The driver cracked his whip and the horses leaped into a gallop and the carriage rushed off into the fog, steel rims ringing on cobbles, steel horseshoes striking sparks and thundering. The din was terrific and gradually receded in the fog, grew fainter and finally died away. A palpable silence flowed back into the attic. Brendan looked at the other four boys. They were all asleep. Some time had passed, for the moon was high over the house now and dawn couldn’t be far.

  He sat cross-legged on his cot, hearing the solemn pacing of the waves and the peaceful breathing of the others, knowing that they had not heard anything, that they could not have heard anything even if they had been awake. He never felt more alone and apart. He was convinced his mother and father had just died.

  The next morning was the longest of his life. His parents were due to arrive around 10 A.M., just as the puppet show was to start. He didn’t recall later much about the hours that intervened. He must have eaten breakfast. They all dined together at seven-thirty every morning in the high-ceilinged dining room and it was usually a noisy affair, and on that Saturday the sideshow must have had them all excited.

  He told himself over and over that it was a nightmare, that it had nothing to do with his parents, and he almost half-believed it. He sat by a dune fence down the beach, away from his uncle’s house, watching the main road that led from the bridge to the mainland, studying every car. And every time he saw one like his father’s, he would start to rise hopefully only to be disappointed.

  By nine o’clock the sideshow was in full swing. People gathered around the house and watched. Uncle Matty had put on his clown’s outfit—the same every year, an old pair of red-flannel long johns with sausage balloons pushed into the upper arms to make him look like the circus strong man. Brendan saw Jackie on stilts and some of the others but he didn’t take his eyes off the roadway for long.

  At ten he couldn’t sit still any longer and walked back to the house. His legs were trembling. Jackie came running up with a fist in the air.

  “I did it! I blew them all away. Did you see it? Where the hell were you? I walked on stilts in the surf!”

  Annie waited until quarter after ten to start the puppet show. “Never mind, Brendan,” she said. “I’ll put a special show on for your parents when they arrive.” Her theater was set up at the side of the house near the driveway.

  But just as the curtain opened and the angel began his quarrel with the devil, a car turned into the Larkin drive and Brendan’s heart gave a joyful leap, then flagged. It was the wrong car. And when it stopped, it was Aunt Maeve who got out—his father’s favorite sister—and with her was his father’s brother, Malachi. They walked directly toward the house without a glance at the sideshow, grave-faced. They weren’t supposed to be there.

  A few minutes later, Aunt Maeve came out on the porch. She looked up and down the beach, then studied the group around the puppet stage. When she saw Brendan, she raised her hand and silently pointed at him. Her beckoning finger told him everything.

  In his kitchen Matty Larkin hurriedly played the host while his mouth still hung open in shock. He took armsful of books from the table and chairs and dumped them in his den. Then he got out some cans of beer and as an afterthought put out a bottle of whiskey on the table.

  These were Jim Davitt’s people—sister and brother. Family. He seated the brother, Malachi, at the kitchen table. Then he looked out of his kitchen window to see the sister Maeve. There beyond the festive crowds strolling on the beach and milling around the World’s Worst Sideshow, beyond the fluttering bunting and packaged mirth, he could see Maeve talking to Brendan.

  “Don’t look! Don’t look!” Malachi Davitt pulled the curtain over the window. “Thank God I didn’t have to tell him. Thank God.”

  Matty Larkin pushed a glass of beer into his hand. “Wait,” Matty said, and he poured a stiff shot of whiskey into it.

  Malachi sat in silence, waiting for Maeve to come back.

  Matty’s wife, Gloria, was making tea. She turned from the stove t
earfully and asked in a trembling voice, “How—did—I—mean—” She held out two groping hands.

  “In a fog,” Malachi answered. “On the Connecticut Turnpike. It was a ten-car pileup.”

  Gloria Larkin bit her finger to stop the tears. “Were they—I mean, how long—”

  “They were both killed instantly. No suffering, thank God.”

  Matty Larkin watched Malachi bow his head, showing a half-bald crown. He had aged since Matty had last seen him, and now his stricken face looked dreadful. In that large Davitt family the only one who had ever given Malachi a run for his money was Jim.

  When Maeve returned to the house, she walked as if she were wounded. She stood in the kitchen doorway and stared at the faces that stared back at her mutely.

  “I feel like I just shot him,” she said. She looked through the huge multi-paned kitchen window at the beach. It was jammed with strollers in bathing suits, a perfect sun-filled day. Far down the beach she could just see Brendan staring at the waves. She dared not tell the others what Brendan had said to her. Malachi in particular would prance around the room like a hanging judge. When she had beckoned Brendan, the boy had stood at the bottom of the wooden porch steps and looked up at her and said, “I know. They were both killed this morning in a car in a fog somewhere.”

  That afternoon, Brendan went to live with his aunt Maeve.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Search

  Aunt Maeve had been married to a great tun of a man by the name of Hardy O’Grady and hardy he was. He had bushy black hair, great white teeth, a loud voice and a booming laugh that carried for miles, they said. He was impatient with small quantities of anything, especially beer. Wherever he went, he waved away the usual bar glass of beer and demanded pints, from which he would scoff off a half in one pull. He was the awe of the patrons in countless bars in New York—a man admirably suited to his occupation: beer salesman.

  Hardy O’Grady was a marvelous raconteur with an endless fund of stories, a master of timing with a gift for outrageous exaggeration. And he loved to hear a good story as much as tell one. He ate as he drank—in excess, with gusto and joy. Aunt Maeve was the very apple of his eye and they made an incongruous pair—he, enormous, as though he’d swallowed a barrel; and she, though not small, seeming petite beside his bulk. Imagine the great mirth in the Davitt family when from that union Aunt Maeve gave birth to Terry. Terrence Davitt O’Grady, at your service. In the crib he was long as a worm, his aunt Maggie said, with a whiny little cry and an unhappy expression on his face—born with it and never lost it. Terry never smiled except when he got something and then only until he realized it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. He had no friends. He disapproved of everyone and of everything. He was also a tattletale and was decidedly antisocial. Imagine. With a father like that. Worst of all, from Hardy’s standpoint, the boy had no sense of humor at all. The rest of the family often forgot to invite him to birthday parties. Behind his back they called him Ratface.

  When Terry was in his teens, he manifested, to everyone’s amazement, a gift for trade. He had a passion—just one—for postage stamps and bought and sold and traded them with a dedication that made him known to all the stamp dealers up and down the east coast from Washington to Boston. He had a real nose for the market, and by the time he was eighteen he had established his own stamp dealership in the basement of his home. He went through college at Columbia University, majoring in business. When he came out, he was already so well established as a stamp dealer, he never considered for a moment doing anything else. He opened a suite of offices in the old Marbridge Building near Penn Station on Thirty-fourth Street, which was populated mainly with shoe wholesalers’ showrooms. He was well-to-do before he was twenty-five.

  While Aunt Maeve and Uncle Hardy were watching this humorless, furtive, unhappy little old man grow affluent, he surprised them one day by bringing a woman to dinner. She was eight years his senior and had a figure as flat as an ironing board. She was one of those women who always seem to have a cold sore at the corner of their mouths and a dissatisfied set to their lips. She had the eyes of a bird that never showed any expression. She rarely spoke. But she was an excellent catalog editor, knew the stamp business from childhood (her father was the proprietor of a small stamp shop on Staten Island), and Terry had hired her to start a mail-order stamp catalog to be sent all over the world. It was to prove enormously successful. She made a perfect mate for Terry. The cash register was marrying the printing press. Hardy would laugh often at the bride’s name: Joy.

  The wedding was a hopelessly dull affair that didn’t get interesting until Terry and his bride left for their honeymoon—at Niagara Falls—by Greyhound bus. Hardy spread the story that they had actually hired two other people to go on their honeymoon for them while they went back to the office, and secretly, passionately, with the lights out, so no one might see, fingered the stamps.

  Two years later, Hardy died as he had lived, laughing. He was in his own home, in his kitchen in shirt sleeves and braces, pouring pints from a full keg of ale to the visiting Davitts, when he fell to laughing so hard at a joke Malachi told, he ruptured a blood vessel in his throat and suffocated and died.

  “To have died thus,” the priest told Aunt Maeve, “was a kiss from God.” Some of the family wished that God had kissed Terry and left the delightful man and his always-ready keg of ale on earth for a few more years.

  When Hardy died, Maeve was at sixes and sevens, restless, lonely and secretly grieving for the man who had filled her life “like a quart in a pint bottle.”

  Hardy had been dead little over a year when Maeve brought fifteen-year-old Brendan to her home. And the first thing she did after closing the door was to take him into the kitchen, brew him a cup of tea and say, “I’m not doing you a favor, taking you in. There will be no debts of gratitude. I’ve been fond of you since you were born and I’m delighted to have you fill up my home with life and vitality. I hope you’ll be happy here. It’s your home for the rest of your life. And we’re going to be the best of friends.”

  Aunt Maeve’s house was as clean and polished as a lighthouse lamp. The story was that it had belonged to a ship captain, some said a ferryboat captain, who’d had it built on the Brooklyn Heights so he could have a view of the entire harbor. It was made from beautiful rose-colored bricks taken from a famous brewery that was torn down at the time that the old Fulton Street ferry to lower Manhattan stopped. “And that was even before my time,” Aunt Maeve told him. The roof was slate and there were working fireplaces in every room.

  The house had nautical touches throughout. It was even built like a ship. The floors were thick ship’s planks, teak, taken in salvage from the Edna J., a celebrated clipper ship that had partially burned and sunk in the Erie Basin. The flooring was fitted by a ship’s adz and hand-pegged. Like a ship’s deck, it gleamed like glass. There were Delft tiles around each fireplace, and they all dealt with nautical scenes. The windows were all oversize and many-paned to fill the house with light even on the dullest winter day. In the brick-paved backyard garden there was a heavy brass stand for a ship’s telescope.

  Aunt Maeve told him one day, “I don’t care who gets what in the rest of the world. Let them have whole continents, give them enough money to fill an elevator shaft in the Empire State Building. All I want is this house.”

  Wherever Brendan went for the rest of his life, he could evoke that house simply by shutting his eyes. He could hear the old grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs, could see the cat cleaning her coat on the deep sill of a kitchen window and feel the contentment that filled the whole building.

  On the first night Aunt Maeve put Brendan in Terry’s old bedroom. She pulled up the window shade so that he could look out over the harbor from his bed, bade him good night and shut the door. He was alone for the first time since his parents had died.

  He lay there thinking of his lost home. He missed the excitement that his father always brought home and missed his mother’s s
ympathetic ear. There was no one else in the family he could discuss his second sight with. He wanted to talk about the black hawk that had attacked him and about his father’s last cry to him: purple. Purple what?

  Something distracted his thoughts. There was another presence in the room. He lay alert listening and watching. Where was it?

  A voice said with shrill clarity, “They were drinking beer behind Uncle Jim’s house.” Brendan raised his head from the pillow. “I saw them.” Brendan recognized the voice; it was his cousin Terry’s.

  Silence followed. Then Brendan heard deep, inconsolable weeping. A moment later he heard Terry’s angry voice speaking through clenched teeth. “I hate you all!” Brendan was astonished when he realized where the voice was coming from. Sullen, scheming, unloving and unlovable Terry had left emanations of his life—emotional debris—in this room, and here, years later, like a reluctant magnet, Brendan was drawing it all to him: He was absorbing all of Terry’s most intimate secrets. His second sight was growing stronger than ever.

  In this room Terry had cultivated a strange and perverse loneliness. Here he’d fed the bitter pleasure of feeling rejected. And here he’d done a lot of weeping. Brendan felt a great pity for him.

  Also, as he watched the Staten Island ferry cross the dark harbor, Brendan felt pity for himself. He was in the grip of strange forces, premonitions, sudden revelations of other people’s affairs. Worst of all, somewhere ahead of him in the frightening future, a terrible challenge was in store for him. A dark furious figure waited to pounce.

  He didn’t want to know about Terry, didn’t want to see the past or the future, especially his own. He yearned to be normal. In his fear he desperately wanted his parents, and knew he would never see either of them again. For the first time in his fifteen years, he discovered the unconsolableness of grief.

  “He was pickled in his own juices,” Aunt Maeve said of her son in the morning. “I tried to love him but I never found the way into his heart. It was like trying to handle a porcupine. He simply rejected me and everyone else. I knew there were many times when life hurt him and he was feeling very dejected but he never let me comfort him or get close. Even as a baby he didn’t like to be held. Most of all, Terry loved to feel sorry for himself.”