Дональд Уэстлейк - Brothers Keepers

And on what had I dwelt? Christmas in the tropics, for one thing, beginning with the standard reaction of the northeasterner that a snowless Christmas amid warmth and palm trees was somehow “wrong,” followed by the sudden realization that palm trees were an almost inevitable part of all manger scenes, that there had been no snow in Bethlehem, and that the first Christmas of all had taken place in at least a semi-tropical setting.

I had also brooded on the choice I’d been given between saving the monastery and keeping Eileen, and on the general question of secular love, and on the Church’s ambiguous position in re fornication. (Married sex is sanctified and adulterous sex is condemned, but that leaves much of the world’s sex in Limbo. Eileen, for instance, had never been married in the Church and was not at this point married either in or out of it, so what we’d been doing was morally neutral, though most priests would have lowered their eyebrows at the idea of it.)

Meditation under the influence of rum tends to be more wide-ranging but less substantive than meditation taken straight. Aside from the above matters, I had brooded on several lesser topics from time to time, until finally I had staggered into the living room and onto this couch, not wanting to use the bed before having peacefully concluded the argument with Eileen.

Who had not come home before I’d faded out, my last remembered thoughts having been on the comparative textures of glass and wicker. Was she home now? Sitting up, which activated a sudden violent headache, I said, “Ow! Is Eileen back?”

“Not yet.”

What an incredible headache. “Ow!” I said again, and clutched my temples. “Do we have any aspirin?”

She held out the hand not holding the glass of foam, and two white pills were in the palm.

“Ah,” I said, and made the mistake of nodding. Then I made the mistake of squinting. “You’ve seen these symptoms before,” I suggested.

“It’s a regular epidemic. Here. Drink them down with this.”

I took the aspirin gladly, the glass of foam more dubiously. “What’s in it?”

“Drink.”

So I drank. Somewhere inside the foam was a sweet liquid with tastes that might have been milk, and egg, and sugar, and... rum? No. Impossible.

“Drink it all.”

I gasped for breath, then drained the glass. “Gaaaa,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” Taking the glass from me and getting to her feet as she said, “You still want the recipe?”

“Not even a little bit,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” Eileen said.

I was lying on the beach in front of the house, absorbing sun. Opening my eyes, shielding them with both hands, I saw Eileen seated beside me, looking troubled and contrite.

“Hello,” I said.

“I couldn’t handle it,” she said, “so I picked a fight.”

“That’s all right,” I said.

She gave me a hesitant smile. “Can we start over?”

“Sure. You couldn’t handle what?”

“The whole thing about you and my father.” She turned away and looked out at sea, letting sand run through her fingers. “I just can’t deal with that,” she said.

I sat up. It was late afternoon now, I had done much eating and much resting and I was quite recovered from last night, thank you. What I wasn’t recovered from was Eileen. Reaching out to touch her leg, I said, “What can’t you deal with? Tell me about it.”

She looked at me, upset and intense, then turned quickly away again. “You want me to choose between you and my father.”

“No, I don’t. I really don’t.”

“You really do.” When she faced me again, I could see from the skin around her eyes that she’d been doing a lot of crying. “You say he’s lying and he says you’re lying, and I have to choose which one of you I believe.”

Which was perfectly true, of course, so what could I say? Nothing. That’s what I said.

“How can I make a choice like that?”

“Maybe you can’t,” I said.

She turned away again, releasing me from her staring eyes, and said, “I don’t know who’s right or wrong about that monastery, I don’t know if they should be allowed to stay or forced to go or what should happen. All I know is—” And she looked at me again, and reached out to clutch my hand, “—it has to be without us. If we’re going to make anything of us , Charlie and Eileen, you and me, we have to stay away from it.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“It can’t be part of our lives,” she said.

“You’re right,” I said.

But now the monastery was filling my thoughts. If I were there at this instant, at this instant, at this instant, what would I be doing, what would the others be doing, what would be happening? The sound of Brother Eli whittling roused me on the beach, and when I turned my head it was Sheila buffing her nails. An airplane flew over, a black dart high in the blue sky, and I could almost see the bulky shape of Brother Leo, leaning backward to point his nose and chin toward Heaven. “Boeing,” he would say. “Seven-forty-seven.” One of ours.

Christmas Day. This was Christmas Day? Eating and drinking with a lot of pagan Irishmen on a tropic island that hadn’t even existed when Christ was born. “There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed,” Luke, chapter two, that’s why Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem, where there failed to be room in the inn; and Puerto Rico was no part of that world.

Neither was New York, of course, and neither was my monastery, but that didn’t seem to matter. Christmas was Christmas in New York; here it was an appendix.

I’m not even sure I mean that in a religious sense, though certainly in the monastery we did keep the holiday holy. Traditionally, we have had moderately good seats reserved for us at the midnight Mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a tradition that goes back, I believe, to the Cathedral’s beginning in 1879. Following Mass, it has been our custom to return to the monastery and to gather in the chapel for silent meditation until dawn, when we take a light snack of bread and tea and go to bed. At eleven we arise, have more bread and tea, and spend the daylight hours in our courtyard, regardless of the weather, in group prayers and hymns. (Occasionally in recent years Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer leaps our wall from a passing transistor radio to tangle with our Adeste Fideles , but so far we have beaten back all such incursions.) And then we have dinner.

Ah, dinner. It is purgatory for Brother Leo, hell for his assistants, and heaven for the rest of us. It is our only grand meal of the year, and its memory easily sustains us for the next three hundred sixty-four days. Brother Leo provides the suckling pig, the roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, the yams, the brussel sprouts, the broccoli au gratin, the asparagus with hollandaise sauce, the baked potatoes in their rough thick jackets streaming butter. Brother Thaddeus produces one or another of his seafood specialties for our first course: oysters Rockefeller, perhaps, or a shrimp bisque, or trout in white wine. And to finish, Brother Quillon puts out pie after pie like a compulsive stutterer: apple pie, mince pie, cherry pie, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, pear pie.

Then there’s the wine. Our undercroft has been well stocked now for centuries, and it isn’t often we really make use of it, but what is a more joyous time for celebration than the birth of our Lord and Savior? And so the wines come up for our table: German white with the first course, French red with the main course, Italian liqueurs with dessert, Spanish brandy and Portuguese port with Brother Valerian’s coffee.

We don’t exchange presents, of course. Individually we have nothing, and can give nothing, and can accept nothing. Besides, the fat red god is not our God, and it’s our God Whose birth we are celebrating.