Дональд Уэстлейк - Brothers Keepers

Conversations proceeded around me. Brother Oliver was giving the history and physical description of our monastery to Mrs. Flattery, who kept interrupting him to urge bread or mustard or coleslaw on this or that guest. The sons discussed professional football. I’m a fan of the Jets myself, and thanks to Brother Mallory I know more than I might have about professional football, but the sons seemed uninterested in expanding their discussion group and so I remained silent, as did Peggy, the wife of Hugh. And Eileen was having a bitter argument with Alfred Broyle.

I might have noticed it earlier, except that I was sedulously keeping my gaze away from that end of the table. None of the others noticed it, being involved respectively in monastery-depiction, hostessing and professional football, except Peggy, who had neither a conversation of her own nor any reason to avoid looking at anyone. It was her interest in the proceeding that attracted my attention, and when I glanced toward the two at the end of the table she was looking coldly furious and he was looking mulish and sullen.

How her eyes glistened when she was in a rage. Her heavy hair seemed more full, her sculptured face more slender, her expressive hands more long-fingered. And as for him, he was looking so loutish I half expected acne suddenly to begin popping out on his cheeks like bubbles on cooking fudge. They called him Alfred, so what sort of man could he be? If he had any gumption at all he’d be called Fred, or even better Al, and he would still not be good enough for her. And as an Alfred?

As I watched — I know I should have looked away, but I didn’t — the argument heated up. They had been exchanging tight angry remarks in low voices, inaudible to anyone else, but now he distinctly said, “You would say something like that.”

She became audible too, but still more controlled than he. “That’s exactly the way you were in Flynn’s,” she said.

“And whose fault was that ?” His voice had risen sufficiently now to attract the attention of everyone else at the table with the exception of Brother Oliver, whose proselytizing for the monastery would brook no interruption. His narration, as though for an educational film, rolled on in the form of harmony while Eileen and Alfred provided the angry tune. “It was your fault, Alfred,” she told him, “and if you had the brains God gave a gnat you’d know it was your fault.”

“Well, I’m just not going to put up with it anymore,” he announced, and flung his napkin onto his plate. “I don’t know why you call me at all, you never like me when I’m here.”

“Indeed I don’t,” she said.

He leaped to his feet, and it seemed for a second as though he might raise a hand to her, but one of her brothers growled — it was exactly that, a low warning growl — and the gesture died. “I suppose,” he said nastily, “that was the way you talked to Kenny, and that’s why you’re here at all.”

Her face pinched in, as though he had indeed slapped her. Neither of them said anything for two or three seconds — even Brother Oliver had trailed away to silence by now — and then Alfred Broyle ran from the room, going not like someone in triumph following a smashing exit line but like someone who has shocked and embarrassed himself.

Frank Flattery got to his feet, his intention clear, and his mother said with quick loud cheeriness, “Oh, Frank, while you’re up, would you get the dessert? There’s ice cream, dear, and Eileen made that pound cake.”

It was a simple stratagem, but it deflected Frank. While he stood there, trying to make up his mind what to do, Eileen looked out the windows and said, with something very like sarcasm in her voice, “Well, just in time. Here comes Daddy.”

An enclosed motorboat, gleaming white and with green curtains on its small windows, had arrived at the small dock at the end of the lawn. It bobbed there in the churning water while a man came up out of the cabin, clambered onto the nose of the boat, picked up a coiled rope there, and jumped heavily ashore. He was stocky and meaty, with a big balding head and a heavy thrusting way of moving his body. He was wearing dark trousers and a black-and-white checked jacket, and as I watched he lashed the front of the boat to a metal projection on the dock.

So that was Daniel Flattery: he looked strong-minded. But even as I was thinking that another man appeared at the back of the boat, tossing another rope to the first man. This new one was dressed in a ratty green sweater and baggy khaki trousers, but physically he was identical with the first: heavy, powerful, fiftyish, truculent.

And after the second rope had also been made fast yet a third example of the type put in an appearance, this one wearing a sheepskin coat and dark green slacks. They all got out of the boat, with a lot of apparent hilarity and comradeship among them, and then the trio strode in this direction across the lawn. Tweedledee, Tweedledoh and Tweedledum — and which one was Daniel Flattery?

Number two, in the green sweater and khaki pants. The other two walked on around the outside of the house, with a great deal of hallooing and arm-waving as they went, and the real Daniel Flattery entered through a door somewhere away to our left. Banging doors marked his approach, as the sound of falling trees would indicate the approach of a bull elephant, and then he came into the room with the rest of us. Frank had seated himself again by now, both Broyle and dessert forgotten, and the family members greeted their patriarch with respectful if not overly warm hellos. Ignoring the lot of them, Flattery brooded first at me and then at Brother Oliver. “Well, here I am,” he told Brother Oliver at last. “Come along, we might as well get it over with.”

Brother Oliver and I both rose, but Flattery gave me a bloodshot glare — I suspected he’d been doing some drinking on that boat — and said, “Two against one?” Pointing at Brother Oliver, he said, “You’re the Abbot. I’ll talk to you. Come along.”

Flattery turned and stomped out of the room. Brother Oliver gestured to me to stay where I was, and off he went in Flattery’s wake. I stood at my place, feeling awkward, knowing that the family members were all feeling even more awkward than I, and then Eileen Flattery stood up and said, “Well, I’m finished anyway. Come on, Brother, I’ll give you the grand tour.”

“No, no and no!”

Eileen and I had done the house and were out on the side lawn now when we heard that bellow in Daniel Flattery’s voice. I said, “Brother Oliver doesn’t seem to be getting very far with your father.”

“No one gets very far with my father,” she said.

I hunted around for a response. “I guess not,” I said, and yet again the conversation died.

It had been dying with regularity for the last twenty minutes. This was a social situation so foreign to my experience of the last decade that I could barely walk, much less talk. Strolling through a strange house with a beautiful woman — if riding a train through Queens had been for me as alien as being dropped onto the planet Jupiter, this new experience was outside the known universe entirely.

But my own cumbersomeness wasn’t the only reason for our silences. Eileen was obviously still upset about the scene with Alfred Broyle at lunch, so much so that the tiny vertical frown lines in her forehead seemed almost permanent. All through the house, we would enter a room and she would tell me what room we had entered — “This is the kitchen,” in a room featuring sink, stove and refrigerator — and I would describe it as very nice, and the silence would fall again, and we would walk on to the next room. Now we were outside on the lawn and she was pointing to trees and I was saying they were very nice.