The Monk

by Hallahan, William H. ;

  On the way in a cab that night to Carnegie Hall, Trevor told her a story about his college days in Boston when he appropriated a truck loaded with junk and drove the members of his fraternity all over the Beacon Hill section. When the police finally caught them, the junkman complained in court that Trevor had taken some valuable jewels from under the driver’s seat. He was a marvelous story teller and, like Jackie, an uncanny mimic, but he was too gentle and self-effacing ever to succeed as an actor. Impulsively she told him that.

  “I know. I know. But I’m such a good loser.” Anne laughed but understood that he’d used a quip to turn the conversation away from his affairs. It was her trick too.

  Perlman’s playing was brilliant, breathtaking, and he received thundering applause. Trevor never took his eyes off the performer. He sat, leaning forward, his lips slightly parted, frowning with concentration. At the end of each piece in the din of the loud applause Trevor would turn to her and smile happily.

  Later, over thick pieces of German chocolate cake in the Palm Court of the Plaza, she asked him how he like his cake. “It looks very rich.”

  “Rich!” he said. “You could die from diabetes from it. Picture me dead in this chair, the last bite of cake on my fork, a beatific smile on my face.”

  Everything his eye fell on got a light dab of his mirth.

  Then he fooled her. He turned solemn when they were leaving the Plaza. She said, “I’ve just read Zelda Fitzgerald’s biography. Did you know that she and Scott danced in that fountain?” He looked at the great fountain beyond the line of waiting cabs. It was dry this time of the year and seemed forlorn without its spraying water and lights.

  He helped her into the cab and sat back. As they drove off he looked through the back window at the fountain. He seemed saddened by the dried leaves in it, blowing in the breeze.

  “You’re right, you know,” he said. He nodded emphatically at her.

  “What?”

  “About my career in acting. I’m never going to make it.”

  “Trevor. I could bite my tongue off.”

  “No, no. You did me a great service. These others, some of them have such tremendous talent. You have no idea how many marvelous actors all across America are sitting around, looking for parts or backers or trying to get a part in a film. Some of the most famous actors in the country are idle. And they’re all so amazingly resourceful. They work at their profession constantly, scaring up roles, chasing playwrights to write new plays, searching for backers, seeing people, making things happen. And the new ones coming along, I see them every day. They will literally kill to get a part. They never quit and they never say die.”

  “Then that’s what you have to do, Trevor.”

  “I suppose.” He looked away from her out of the cab window. She had him up to her apartment for a nightcap—he took coffee—and he read a poem to her by Cavafy. “Thermopylae.”

  “See?” he said. “Ephialtis does turn up in the end. And the Medes do break through.”

  “Isn’t that defeatist talk, Trevor?”

  “Oh, no. I’m not a defeatist. I just see too clearly.”

  “Attitude is more important than facts, Trevor.”

  “Oh, good. Excellent. Is that original?”

  “No. I read it somewhere. But it’s true.”

  He smiled at her. “Yes, it is true. It always comes down to faith—in yourself. And that’s my weak backhand—faith. I have none. Except in one area. Are you the wind-and-water type, Anne?”

  He invited her to enter a frostbite regatta on his sailboat off Newport, Rhode Island. Impulsively, when he left he kissed her cheek. “Thanks. You’re good for the soul. I wanted to cheer you up and you reversed the tables.” Then he waggled a finger at her with a sly smile. “God is watching.” He’d left her laughing again.

  The monks were up. Brendan heard them scuffling past his door in the dawn light, walking to the chapel. He opened the drapery and looked out on the compound. Then he opened the sliding door and in his bathrobe walked to the wall.

  The air was clear and dry and painfully sharp on his face and his breath came out like smoke. Underfoot, the snow cracked. In the east was the first red of sunrise. He wondered where the creature was. Maybe it had killed again. Maybe another group of men was standing in another barn, staring down at another dead horse or a dead prize bull.

  When would it kill its first human? He turned and went through his room, and down the hall after the monks to the chapel.

  Like the other segments of the monastery, the chapel too was a complete octagon. In six of the sides there was a stained glass window of geometric design. One contained a cross, another a Zen symbol, another a six-pointed star. There were a lectern and benches made of fruitwood but no altar. The monks sat in meditation with heads bowed. No one spoke. Brendan sat and watched them thoughtfully. This was his life from now on. He felt caged.

  Brother Luke led him to breakfast. It consisted of hot wheat cereal with honey and milk, an orange and a soft-boiled egg with herb tea.

  Later Luke led him on a tour of the facility. Brendan saw now that the monastery was one long, segmented, serpentine building, made of a series of octagonal units of different sizes, each with a Vermont slate roof and slate flooring. The structures were made of brick and fieldstone and glass.

  Brother Matthew and the other founders of the monastery had built the buildings twenty-seven years before with the aid of an architect, who later joined the order, and some skilled laborers. It took two years, during which time they lived in tents.

  Brendan could now see the dimensions of the garden that lay under the snow and beyond it the vineyard. The monks grew a fair amount of their own food and also made a passable wine. They all worked a half day, housekeeping, gardening in season and kitchen-keeping. Afternoons they pursued private labors. The rest of their hours were spent in study and discussion.

  Brother Luke also helped sort out the other monks for Brendan. Brother Paul had been a cardiologist in New York and Matthew’s heart doctor. For a number of years he had been a weekend monk; seven years ago he retired from his medical practice and joined the monastery full time. His wife still lived in the city, very comfortably on the doctor’s accumulated wealth. He spent his days studying philosophy, Wittgenstein in particular.

  Brother Benedict, like Matthew, had been a stockbroker and still practiced. Every afternoon he spent three or fours hours managing the monastery’s investment portfolio. “We’re rich, Brother Brendan,” Luke said.

  “So why don’t you hire people to cook and clean and have all your time free?”

  “Ah. It’s against the rules. Idleness leads to sloth, we are told.” He shook a finger at Brendan and smiled. “Besides, it would be distracting to have a bunch of strangers walking around making beds and cooking, wouldn’t it?”

  Vincent, Zen and Beaupré were the unlikeliest of friends. Vincent had been a drug head. He came from a wealthy family and woke up in a hospital one day, half dead from an overdose. That day he set foot on a path seeking the meaning of life. “He’s a cynic,” said Luke. “He doesn’t believe that one decent man ever lived.”

  “Has he found it?” Brendan asked. “A meaning to life?”

  “Well, for a long time he nearly drove us all crazy trying to find proof of God’s existence. He even hired a theological research firm to do a thesis assembling all the proofs of God from all the religions of the world. Took three years.”

  “And—”

  “Well, one man’s proof is another man’s mythology. It’s the old quarrel between faith and logic.”

  “What about the other two, Brother Zen and Brother Beaupré?”

  “Brother Zen was an electronics manufacturer. He’s half Chinese. He turned the business over to his children and came up here a couple of years ago. He’s the gardener—fantastic gardener. Brother Beaupré was a wheat farmer up in Canada and a lay preacher. He’s the cook. He knows the Bible by heart from cover to cover. The three of them didn’t seem to pay
much attention to one another for a long time. Then, a couple of months ago, they got as chummy as the pages in a book. And suddenly they’ve become convinced believers. They switched from the logic school to the faith school.” Luke smiled wryly at Brendan. “Funny thing is, and it really is funny, their newfound faith seems to have scared them half to death. You see them huddled all day long—buzz buzz buzz—wringing their hands and frowning.” He chuckled. “I think they were happier as atheists.”

  There were two other monks. Brother Xavier, the youngest, had been a Cistercian monk whose studies carried him far into the realm of Zen and yoga. He spent most of his time in solitude in trancelike meditation. “Hardly ever talks but he’s a really warm person.”

  Brother Thomas was a recent addition. He had been a weekend monk for several years. He had difficulty renouncing women—sex—and still wasn’t absolutely convinced he wanted to spend the rest of his life without it. He was a travel writer.

  “He’s probably the best educated of the lot of us. He has a PhD in philosophy. He likes to make sandals and leather things. His wife visits him twice a year.”

  They stood by the laundry room, where a huge commercial washing machine hummed. Next to it was the shower room and on open shelves were the community towels, underwear, long johns and socks and a rack of brown cassocks.

  “What about you, Luke?”

  “Oh. Nothing complicated. I was a football player. Professional. Pretty good, I guess, but I was a half step too slow, a half smile too nice to the opposition. I had to decide if I wanted to be a fill-in tagalong in the NFL or something else. So one day I asked myself what I wanted to do. And I decided.”

  “To be a monk?”

  “Well. Something like that. I’ll show you.” He led Brendan back past the laundry and the kitchen and the refectory to the library. In a small alcove of the library stood a lectern with a chair. He reached into a drawer and withdrew a soft paper folder and opened it. Inside was a sheet of vellum. It was a page from the Bible, hand-lettered and hand-illuminated.

  Brendan looked at it attentively. “I saw you working on this the other day. Are you doing the whole Bible?”

  “Yep. The whole thing. Old and New. Might take me the rest of my life.”

  “But where did you learn to do that?”

  “Oh, well, I had an interest in art all along. But when I talked to Brother Matthew about it, he sent me to a monastery in Ireland to learn how to do it. This is going to be a hand-illuminated Bible in English with purely African themes. That’s an eland, and that’s a—well, you see. And some are American black themes. Jazz and such.”

  The work was stunning. The range of colors covered the spectrum and the decorated letters contained dozens of illustrations of animals and birds and people, some so small he must have worked with a magnifying glass. Brendan wondered how those enormous hands could draw such delicate lines.

  Brother Luke smiled at Brendan. “It’s a race between blindness and the last page of the book.”

  “Think you’ll finish it?”

  Luke smiled and shrugged. “If I don’t someone else will.”

  Brendan left him there, his enormous torso bent over the page of vellum, doing a Zulu warrior’s mask. Brendan strolled up and down the corridors, then went and sat in his room. He thought about his office and the long line of burnt-out children on the stairs and the phones ringing and his desk untended. He wondered what Anne was doing. Her image pained him. What would he do here for the rest of his life? Knit? Paint? Bake bread?

  He thought about living with these nine men, day by day, year after year. A cardiologist, two stockbrokers, a football player, a wheat farmer, a travel writer, a Cistercian monk, an electronics manufacturer and an idle drug head.

  And which one, he wondered, was worshiping Satan?

  Later, Brendan had another conference with Brother Matthew in his bedroom. Matthew suggested that Brendan take his time deciding whether he wanted to become a monk. “You need a strong calling to survive the monastic life.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Yes. The Lord always gives man a choice.”

  Brendan frowned doubtfully. “Give me a list.”

  “Well. You can stay for safety’s sake. But we have no way of knowing just how safe you’ll be even here. You can live as a hermit in a cave. You can take your chances living in a city.”

  “I don’t see any choice in those three.”

  “Why don’t you make yourself useful around here for a while? Help with the housekeeping. Get to know the others.”

  Brother Zen put Brendan to work in the greenhouse, filling grass-molded planters with loam. “We start springtime in late January in here,” he said. “It’s magic.’ He left Brendan with a great pile of loam and trays of planters to be filled. “I must help Beaupré bake bread.”

  Bake bread: Brendan couldn’t picture himself doing that ever. He wanted to be back in his city, climbing the stairs to the Wandering Child offices, facing that unending stream of runaway adolescents. He wanted Anne O’Casey. He wanted his Aunt Maeve and his family and Jackie and—

  He was in exile. Brother Matthew was right. He did have a choice. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to stay here. Maybe there were some fates worse than death. Outside the greenhouse, nature was buried alive in a white sepulcher of snow. And he was also entombed alive in a monastery. Better a few months or weeks in New York than a few decades in a monastery.

  He worked at a steady pace, grateful to have something to take his mind off his personal affairs. He filled one pile of trays and began another. With a shovel and a barrow he got another load of loam from the head-high pile at the rear of the greenhouse. When the shovel slid across the concrete floor and into the pile of loam he began to uncover a series of lines drawn in chalk. Curious, he shoveled away some more. The damp loam had obliterated most of the lines but there was something very familiar about what was left. He shoveled still more until he was sure.

  There could be no doubt about it. He was looking at a Tipperary pentacle, a five-segmented circle, each piece of the pie a different color with a different occult symbol used by the witches in Ireland to summon demons. The last time he’d seen one was that summer down at the seashore when his cousin Bernadette had drawn one in the sand from her book on demonology. She was terrified when it began to split.

  Someone in the monastery had been summoning a demon. He sat back on the bench with the small hand trowel and looked at the monastery. Who in there would want to summon a demon? Then his eyes roved over the frozen lake, seeking the creature. Was there any connection?

  Lunch was the main meal of the day. And this day it was a Mexican-style paella, stewpots filled with fish, shrimp and lobster. Hardly an ascetic’s bowl of honey and water. Brendan watched them eating. They were all as individual as fingerprints, and he wondered anew which one would tamper with demonology. The doctor, the wheat farmer, the Cistercian monk? His eyes went from face to face. Brother Luke sat with a box of pens, discussing the relative merits of each on vellum with Thomas, the former travel writer. Paul, the doctor, discussed the condition of Brother Matthew’s heart with the three monks Brothers Vincent, Zen and Beaupré; he was not optimistic. Xavier sat separately and read a book. Tom Jones by Fielding. How improbable. Which one drew a pentacle in the greenhouse and said magic incantations to raise a demon? In due time he convinced himself they all could have.

  After the meal, when he went back to the potting shed, he noticed that someone had spilled water on the concrete floor by the pile of loam and scrubbed away the chalk marks.

  That night at supper, Brother Luke spoke to Brendan in a low voice. “You know that horse you told me about? The one with the twisted neck? Now there’s a herd of dairy cows that’s been killed on a farm on the other side of the mountain. Same thing. Their heads were nearly twisted off.” His eyes searched Brendan’s. “That’s pretty good, twisting a cow’s neck. I wouldn’t even try to twist her tail.” He pushed his hands into the sleeves of his gow
n and watched Brendan eat his soup. “You see that thing that followed you anymore?”

  Brendan nodded. “Yes. Sitting on the ice out there, watching the monastery.”

  Brother Luke regarded Brendan with skepticism. It was a strange war of emotions that roved across his face. “Next time you see him, call me, okay?”

  In the morning there was more news. When Brendan sat down to eat, a subdued tête-à-tête was going on. Luke told him another herd of six cattle had been killed, all with their necks broken.

  “They discovered some six-toed footprints,” he said. “Is that what you saw?”

  Brendan found all eyes regarding him. No one spoke.

  “That’s what I saw,” he said.

  “How come it didn’t twist your neck?” Brother Thomas asked.

  Brendan shrugged. “Maybe it’s afraid of sinners.”

  No one smiled.

  That afternoon, Brother Matthew’s life reached a crisis: The founder of the monastery was dying. And Brother Paul hurried into his room with his medical bag. Shortly later the door opened and all the monks were invited in. After looking at the grave expression on Paul’s face, no one spoke. Matthew lay gasping. After beating twenty-five years longer than it should have, the former stockbroker’s heart was exhausted. His eyes were bright and desperate as he looked at the nine faces ranged around him. “I want a vow from you all. No fighting. You’ll ruin this place if you do. A vow. Now.”

  They all looked around at one another and nodded. A vow.

  “Another thing. No demon worship. A vow. Hurry up.”

  Again they all nodded and looked at the other nodding heads, then nodded again at Brother Matthew. Another vow. Then they all knelt by his bed and prayed. Brother Benedict wept. When they raised their heads, Matthew was in a coma. Paul began to usher them out of the room, then paused. He listened with his stethoscope, then shook his head.

  “Dead? Is he dead?”

  He nodded.