Brothers Keepers by Donald E. Westlake

Author:Donald E. Westlake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

Nine

Father Banzolini’s tear sheets were perhaps the most difficult penance he’d yet given me. What an earnest writer he was! His articles were clearly the work of a slow but serious man who very sincerely wanted to explain every last detail of whatever subject he had chosen to gnaw. Unfortunately, he knew only one kind of sentence—the kind that has a subject and a verb and a comma and another subject and another verb and a period—and he used that sentence to tell us everything. A straightforward compound sentence is perfectly all right, of course, but seven thousand of them in a row can get wearing. After a while, the only question left was whether the word after the comma would be “and” or “but” or “or.”

But I did have to read them. Father Banzolini had given me these tear sheets at confession with a kind of shy pride, and I knew I was not only going to have to read them, I was going to have to like them. Or at least find something in each of them that I could think of as likable for the next time I met with their author.

Because I was on the horns of a dilemma, a true dilemma. If I lied to Father Banzolini, I would then have to admit to him in confession that I had told the lie. In the abstract that might make for what mathematicians call a pretty problem, but in real life it made for a very ugly problem indeed.

And so I read. I learned more than I cared to know about missionary obstacles in newly independent African states, the attitude of the Church toward the “Protestant Ethic,” Women’s Lib for Catholics, feudalism versus mass transit, translation difficulties with the Bible, and several other topics both sacred and profane. By the time I finished I was feeling both sacred and profane myself.

Well, at least I was distracted for a while from my own more personal dilemma, which could very neatly be defined in the Father Banzolini Format: “I will stay in the monastery, or I will leave the monastery.” Meditation was getting me nowhere on that topic, so perhaps distraction would help. As Father Banzolini himself had pointed out in The Subconscious and the Holy Ghost, “We think we are thinking about something else, but we are still thinking about Topic A.”

So I read all the articles, starting them Tuesday night and finishing early Wednesday afternoon. Then I took a walk in the cloisters, trying to think of something both truthful and flattering to say about them. I could call them “interesting,” which was true of at least a few—The Great Catholic Boxers, for instance, and Why Animals Don’t Have Souls. I could say of all of them that they were “fact-filled,” and I could hear myself saying enthusiastically to Father Banzolini, “I hadn’t known about ———.” (I’d fill in the blank as seemed appropriate at the time.)

But it was going to take more; I could feel it in my bones.

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