Motherless Brooklyn

A year or so later she visited a Zen retreat center on the coast of Maine. It was a place of striking beauty and, apart from the frantic summer months when the town became a resort for wealthy Bostonians and New Yorkers, splendid isolation. It reminded her of Nantucket, the things she missed there. She quickly arranged to study at the center full-time, and to support herself she took a job waitressing at the seafood restaurant next door, which at that time was a traditional Maine lobster pound.

It was there the girl met the two brothers.

The older brother first, during a series of short visits to the retreat with his friend. The friend had some experience with Buddhism, the older brother none, but they were both a disconcerting presence there in placid Maine-vibrant with impatience and a hostile sort of urban humor, yet humble and sincere in their fledgling approach to Zen practice. The older brother was solicitous and flattering to the girl when they were introduced. He was a talker like none she’d never met, except perhaps on the Alan Watts lecture tapes, which still shaped her yearnings so powerfully-but the older brother was no Watts. His stories were of ethnic Brooklyn, of petty mobsters and comic scams, and some of them had a violent finish. With his talk he made this world seem as near and real to her as it was actually distant. In some way Brooklyn, where she’d never been, became a romantic ideal, something truer and finer than the city life she’d glimpsed in Boston.

The girl and the older brother were lovers after a while.

The older brother’s visits grew both briefer and less frequent.

Then one day the older brother returned, in an Impala filled with paper shopping bags stuffed full of his clothes and with his younger brother in tow. After a sizable donation to the Zen center’s petty-cash fund the two men moved into rooms in the retreat center, rooms that were out of sight of the coastal highway. The next day the older brother drove the Impala off and returned with a pickup truck, with Maine plates.

Now whenever the girl tried to visit the older brother in his room, he turned her away. This persisted for a few weeks before she began to accept the change. The lovemaking and talk of Brooklyn were over between them. It was only then that the younger brother came into focus for the girl.

The younger brother wasn’t a student of Zen. He’d also never been out of New York City until his arrival in Maine, and it was a destination as mysterious and absurd to him as he was mysterious and absurd to her. To the girl the younger brother seemed an embodiment of the stories of Brooklyn the older brother had entranced her with. He was a talker, too, but rootless, chaotic in the stories he told. His talk entirely lacked the posture of distance and bemusement, the gloss of Zen perspective that characterized the older brother’s tales. Instead, though they sat together on the Maine beaches, huddling together in the wind, he seemed still to inhabit the streets he described.

The older brother read Krishnamurti and Watts and Trungpa, while the younger read Spillane and Chandler and Ross MacDonald, often aloud to the girl, and it was in the MacDonald especially that the girl heard something that taught her about a part of herself not covered by Nantucket or Zen or the bit she’d learned in college.

The younger brother and the girl became lovers after a while.

And the younger brother did what the older would never have done: He explained to the girl the situation that had driven the two brothers out of Brooklyn, to come and seek refuge in the Zen center. The brothers had been acting as liaisons between two aging Brooklyn mobsters and a group of suburban Westchester and New Jersey bandits who hijacked trucks on small highways into ork City. The aging mobsters were in the business of redistributing the goods seized by the truck pirates, and it was a business that was profitable for everyone associated with it. The brothers had made it more profitable for themselves than they should have, though. They found a place to warehouse a percentage of the goods, and a fence to take the goods off their hands. When the two mobsters discovered the betrayal, they decided to kill the brothers.

Hence, Maine.

The younger brother did another thing his older brother might never have done: He fell in love with the strange angry girl from Nantucket. And one day in the flush of this love he explained to her his great dream: He was going to open a detective agency.

The older brother in the meantime had grown distant from them both, and more deeply and sincerely involved in Zen practice. In the manner of so many spiritual practitioners past and present he seemed to draw away from the world of material concerns, to grow tolerant and wry but also a little chilly in his regard for the people and things he’d left behind.