Brothers Keepers

by Donald E. Westlake

  By the time she came back I was a flustered wreck, unable to look her in the eye and certainly unable to look at any other part of her. But she didn’t notice, or at least gave no sign that she’d noticed. “You better not stay out here too long,” she said, handing me a folded-up towel. “It’s your first day in the sun.”

  “That it is,” I said. The towel, unfolded, showed a smiling couple with their arms around one another in a sailboat. I sat on them, and Eileen sat near me on her own towel, and for a while we remained like that in companionable silence.

  Then Eileen said, “I think you’ve had enough sun. We’ll take the car and go get you some clothes.”

  “I don’t see how,” I said.

  “What? I don’t follow.”

  “Well,” I said, “I spent the monastery’s money to get here. I can’t do that anymore, and I don’t have any money of my own.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said.

  “But I have to worry about it. You need money to live in this world.”

  “Look, Buh—” She shook her head, in mock annoyance at herself, and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get there. Charlie. Look, Charlie.”

  I smiled at her; she delighted me. “I’ll answer to any name you want to use,” I said.

  She gave me an ironic look. “You’ve been saving up those zingers for years, huh? Just waiting to hit some poor girl with the whole bunch of them at once.”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “But the subject,” she said, “is money.”

  “And that I don’t have any.”

  “You don’t need any.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Look, Charlie,” she said, and nodded in satisfaction. “Got it right that time.” Then she went on: “I live off my father, Neal lives off his mother, and Sheila lives off her ex-husband. You might as well live off us for a while, if only to even the score a bit.”

  I said, “I can’t take money from a—”

  She stopped me with a sternly pointing finger. “I’ll have you know I’m a Ms.,” she said (pronounced Mizz), “and you’d better be very careful how you finish that sentence.”

  I closed my mouth.

  “I thought so,” she said, got to her feet and gathered up her towel. “Come on, pig,” she said.

  “Come on where?”

  “First we get you out of the sun while I throw on my city clothes, then we drive to San Juan and get you decently dressed.”

  I felt as though there were arguments I should be presenting, but I couldn’t think what they were. Besides, Eileen was already heading for the house, and the sun was in fact feeling very hot on my shoulders. So off I went.

  * * *

  After the shopping expedition, we went to one of the beach-front hotels for a drink. I was dressed now in white slacks, a pale blue shirt and sandals which were much lighter and flimsier than the ones I’d always worn in the monastery. But those of course had been handmade by Brother Flavian, who made all our shoes.

  As to Eileen, she was also in white slacks and sandals now, plus an orange halter. The attention she got from other men confirmed my own feeling that she was something special, out of the ordinary.

  We sat in a shaded air-conditioned lounge, in a corner with windows on two sides. In one direction we could see the crowded swimming pool and in the other direction the big empty beach. We were both drinking some sort of rum concoction, pink and sweet and full of fruit juice. I was already light-headed, from the sun and the events of the day, and I doubted this drink would have much effect on me.

  We seemed to have no small talk, Eileen and I, though that didn’t mean our silences were comfortable. We were both twitchy and nervous, glancing quickly at one another and then away, and abruptly dropping into speech. For instance, after our second drink arrived I said, “What was Kenny Bone like?”

  She looked at me. “Was? I’m not a widow, I’m divorced.”

  “I meant, what was he like during the marriage?”

  “Like you,” she said.

  I stared. “What?”

  “Don’t take it as a compliment,” she said. “He was an unexpected lunatic, a turn for the worse, a complicated crazy man.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  She made wet circles on the table with her drink, watching them with great concentration. “I thought I could take care of him,” she said. “Protect him from the world.” Her lips curled in what might have been a smile, and she said, “Be his monastery.”

  “What was he?”

  “A loony.”

  “I mean, what did he do?”

  “I know what you meant,” she said, and drank down half of her drink. “Sometimes,” she said, “he claimed he was a poet, sometimes a playwright, sometimes a songwriter. And he could do it all just as well as the real thing, so long as the fit was on him.”

  “And in between?”

  “Fifty percent mush and fifty percent paint remover.”

  “And you think I’m like that?”

  “No.” She shook her head, but not very enthusiastically. “I don’t know what kind of hell you are,” she said, “but I have my suspicions.”

  “Where is he now?”

  She shrugged. “Probably London. But it doesn’t matter, he wouldn’t give me a reference.”

  “Did you divorce him or did he divorce you?”

  “I divorced him,” she said, “partly because I didn’t want to talk about him anymore.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  She reached over to place her non-drinking hand on my non-drinking hand. “I don’t mean to be bad-tempered,” she told me. “It just seems to come natural, under the circumstances.”

  I said, “What are the circumstances? Would you mind telling me what we’re doing?”

  “You ask too many questions, copper,” she snarled, and finished her drink. “Come on, let’s drive back to the house.”

  * * *

  It was strange to whiz back and forth in sunlight over the road I had walked in darkness. Strange, but not informative. The light showed me land and swamp and stunted trees and occasional sagging buildings, but it didn’t show me anything I needed to know.

  The car we were in, a rental shared by everyone in the house, was called a Pinto, even though it was only one color; yellow. At one point in the drive back I said, “Shouldn’t a Pinto be two colors? This is more a Saffron, isn’t it?” But Eileen didn’t know what I was talking about, so I let it go. Also, I wasn’t feeling very good.

  Shortly after we turned off the main road onto the road to Loiza Aldea I said, “Eileen.”

  “Yes?” She half-turned her face toward me, but kept her eyes on the bumps ahead.

  I said, “Can a grown-up be carsick?”

  She gave me a startled look, then braked at once to a stop. “You look terrible!”

  “Good. I wouldn’t want to feel this way and look wonderful.”

  She touched my wet forehead and said, “You’re all clammy. You’re coming down with something.”

  “I’m also coming up with something,” I said, and struggled out of the Saffron and did it.

  * * *

  Maybe there’s something to be said for this business of psychosomatics. If there is, Sheila Foney said it. She told me the whole story, in her brisk argumentative way, when I was once again healthy—that the body’s illnesses reflect the mind’s disturbances. “A runny nose is a way to deal with unexpressed weeping,” she said, with her self-confident face that seemed never to have known either snot or tears.

  But maybe so. I’d almost never been sick during my ten years in the monastery, and here I was barely into secular clothing when I got the flu, complete with vomiting and diarrhea and sweating and incredible weakness. Maybe I was, as Sheila bluntly explained, punishing myself with all that, and getting out my grief and confusion as well.

  On the other hand, there’d been the night without sleep on the plane, the sudden transfer from the cold of December in New York to the heat and mugginess of
Puerto Rico, the twenty-mile walk in the humid night air, the alternations between heat and air-conditioning, my damp robe freezing on me during breakfast, the unfamiliar dip in the ocean…

  Well. Whatever the cause, I spent the rest of Saturday, all day Sunday and part of Monday in bed, mostly asleep except for occasional staggering runs to the toilet, and generally feeling like something that had been eaten by a dog. (It neatly, by the way, solved the problem of what I would have done about Sunday Mass, which is another one up for the psychosomatic theory.)

  Toward the end I had a dream, in which I was twins, one of me hot and one cold, and when I awoke I was very hot because Eileen was asleep next to me with one arm and one leg thrown over me, weighing me down, and she was shivering with cold because the air-conditioning was (inevitably) on and she was on top of the covers. “Hey,” I said, and she snarfled and moved somewhat, but didn’t wake up, and for a while I didn’t know what to do about it.

  Then I took time out to realize I didn’t feel as rotten as usual. I was generally so weak my ears were hanging down, but the clammy perspiration no longer sheathed me, my stomach no longer felt like a sailor knot, and there was no urgent need for me to run to the bathroom. The flu had gone, leaving the local population with the task of reconstruction.

  And Eileen was shivering in her sleep. It would be really stupid if she caught the flu just as I finally got rid of it, so I dragged one arm out from under the covers and spent a while shaking her shoulder, trying to wake her up. She groaned, she thrashed about, and she exhaled a lot of sweetish rum aroma, but she absolutely refused to become conscious, so I paused and looked around the room, trying to decide what to do next.

  This was Eileen’s bedroom, and very dark. There was no sound from anywhere in the house, so McGadgett and Sheila were probably also asleep. They’d probably all been drinking together, and Eileen had forgotten about me being here until she’d come in to go to bed, and then she’d been either too sleepy or too drunk to make other arrangements. (I learned later that she’d spent Saturday night on a wicker sofa in the living room.) So she’d gone to sleep on top of the covers, wearing shorts and a halter, and now her skin was very cold.

  Well, I couldn’t just leave her there. I managed to shove her limbs off me, and then I climbed wearily out of bed and stood leaning against the wall until the likelihood of fainting passed. Then I pushed the covers from my side over to the middle of the bed, exposing the bottom sheet, and yanked on Eileen until she rolled complaining over the bunched-up covers and onto the sheet, her head thumping onto my pillow. I stopped her before she could roll completely off the bed, and pulled the covers back again, bringing them over her and tucking them in along the side. Then I stumbled around the bed, got in on the other side, and fell almost immediately asleep again.

  * * *

  Our arms and legs and noses were tangled. Early morning daylight squinted through the slats of the bamboo shades, and Eileen’s open right eye was so huge and so close that I couldn’t clearly focus on it.

  We were both moving a bit fretfully, trying to become comfortable. Then we were just moving, and discomfort didn’t seem to matter much anymore. “I think we’re going to do something,” I said.

  “You’d better,” she said.

  Thirteen

  By Monday afternoon I was out of bed, though very weak what with one thing and another, and I spent the next few hours on the beach, soaking up sun through a thick smear of suntan lotion, applied by Eileen. That, plus a great quantity of food, made me feel almost my old self by evening, when the four of us got into the Pinto—Eileen and I crowding snugly together into the back, while Neal drove and Sheila gave expert criticism—and we traveled fifteen miles to another beach house currently occupied by well-off Long Island Irish: Dennis Paddock, Kathleen Cadaver, Xavier and Peg Latteral, plus some others who came later and whose names I didn’t catch.

  These people had all gone to the same parochial schools together along Long Island’s south shore, the same Catholic high schools, even the same Catholic colleges: Fordham and Catholic University. Their parents had also grown up together in the same settings, and for some of them the linkages extended back to grandparents. The fathers were in construction or real estate or banking, and the sons were in advertising or law or the communications media. This was the generation which had severed the last of its ties with its heritage—they were only sentimentally Irish and only nominally religious—and I had been cautioned on the way over not to mention the fact that I was, or had been (the confusion on that score wasn’t as yet settled), a monk. I had promised to say nothing about it.

  In fact I said very little at all. Like most groups of people whose relationships extend back nearly to the cradle, this bunch spent most of the evening talking about those of their friends who had been so incautious as not to be present. There must have been some ears burning in Patchogue and Islip that night. I sat quietly in the corner amid the talk, sipping rum-and-something-sweet while rebuilding my strength and meditating on the similarities and differences between a secular social grouping like this and the more cohesive and purposeful grouping at the monastery. We monks did our own backbiting, of course, but it seemed to me a less important part of our relationship there than it was of the social structure here. If this entire group was ever gathered together into one spot, for instance, with no absent friends to discuss, what on earth would they find to talk about?

  (I asked Eileen that question eventually—not that night—and she answered, “Dead people.”)

  I was not the first monk to leave in the Crispinite Order’s two-hundred-year history, but I was the only one in my experience and I had no idea how to think about it from the group’s point of view. I tried to visualize one of the others leaving—Flavian, say, or Silas—and guess what my reaction would be, but it was impossible. Even if I surmounted the difficulty that I couldn’t visualize either of those two, nor any of the others, leaving the monastery, I was still left with the problem that my reaction would be different depending which brother it was who had chosen to depart.

  Well, I was the one who had departed, so what would the others think and say about me? Fifteen bewildered faces passed across my imagination, but no words issued from any of those open mouths, nor could I guess at any emotions deeper than or subsequent to the initial surprise.

  Perhaps that was partly because my own reaction hadn’t yet moved beyond bewilderment. In fact, it seemed to me as though no moment of decision had ever actually been reached, and yet somehow here I was on the other side of it. When had I decided I no longer had a religious vocation? When had I come to the conclusion that I could make my peace with God outside the monastery walls? When had I chosen to fling myself back into the river of the world?

  I didn’t know. But here I was, in over my head.

  My only other reaction to myself, beyond bewilderment, was a great fluttery nervousness. Whenever I tried to see more than five minutes into the future—what I would do, where I would live, how I would earn my daily bread, what would eventually happen between me and Eileen—I began at once to twitch and itch, fidget and scratch, gulp a lot and feel very queasy in the stomach. My solution to that was to avoid thought of the future as much as possible, and I quickly learned that the ever-present rum drinks were a considerable help in that direction. And if a thought of the morrow did from time to time infiltrate through my rum defenses, the rum at least helped to lessen the resultant jitters.

  It also helped me to think more calmly about Eileen. The ice had been broken between us, so to speak, and I had learned that swimming was not the only facility that remained undimmed in its details over a decade, but when I was utterly sober and in my right mind—or my usual mind—I still felt embarrassed at the lechery of my thoughts when I looked at her. A little rum helped me to relax and accept the fact that, for instance, in the back seat of the Pinto I really did want to stroke her leg. And other things of that sort.

  * * *

  What a nervous time the mo
rning was! But it wasn’t considered acceptable to start drinking rum until lunchtime, so I distracted myself with as much activity as possible: swimming, talking, shopping, going for drives. And my tendency was to avoid Eileen until I’d had a little something to calm me down.

  I was beginning to answer now when people said, “Charlie.” Mostly I said, “Huh?” And there were always, it seemed, plenty of people around. The group I’d met Monday night continued to be a part of our landscape, a fluctuating informal grouping that tended to get together after lunch and more or less stay together until late at night. Joining them on Eileen’s visa, I accompanied them swimming at Luquillo Beach, gambling in San Juan and drinking at one or another of their rented houses. The days were far more full—and yet emptier—than in my previous life in the monastery, and I was a neophyte, learning this vocation. I kept quiet, watched and listened, and allowed the group consensus to determine my course.

  * * *

  Tuesday night I spent three hours at the crap table, betting against the shooter, and won two hundred seventy dollars. Eileen wouldn’t take the money.

  * * *

  Wednesday morning Sheila Foney spent an hour on the beach telling me why a Cancer like me was just perfect with a Scorpio like Eileen. Then she told me more about Kenny Bone than I could possibly have wanted to know, including sexual things that were certainly none of my business and even less any of hers. In her version, Kenny Bone emerged as something of a cross between Brendan Behan and Reinhard Heydrich, but with neither Behan’s talent nor Heydrich’s efficiency.

  One interesting fact did emerge from that talk: Kenny Bone had not been a member of this social grouping. “You’re certainly better than the first guy she came back with,” was the remark by Sheila that gave me the hint. When I questioned her further, it developed that Eileen had always been slightly out of phase with the rest of the group, “even in grammar school.” She had tended throughout childhood to find her friends elsewhere, in the local public schools, and she’d confirmed this habit later by not going to any of the usual colleges but to Antioch, which Sheila for some reason apparently thought of as Jewish.