An Angel In Australia (10 page)

Five minutes of protected eardrum practice passed. Via his sighting of Anthony Heggarty, the worrying images of Mrs Heggarty and the stranger, generous for a purpose, replaced the idea of Japanese bombardment and of the dimensions and appearance of the Holy Family in Darragh's mind. The urgency had re-arisen in him to write to Mrs Heggarty, to send a note home with Anthony. After this air-raid practice he would examine his conscience perhaps, and if there were to be a letter, it would be based on an honest exercise of piety, not on the basis of pride, or of any other desire his instincts told him it was better not to name.

Sister Felicitas called on him, now that the tennis ball halves were back in the linen bags and the children had had as much practice as their years could stand, to bless the entire group. ‘
Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus
…' The littlest ones were allowed into the open air first, and crouching under the low roof still, Darragh heard how the sunlight outside gave them back their voices and called out all the laughter which, in the bomb shelter, had lain buried.

Back in his room and at his prie-dieu, its kneeler buffed by the knees of a number of former St Margaret's curates, Darragh attempted his examination of conscience. He began with formal
prayers—the ‘Our Father' the ‘
Ave
', the ‘
Confiteor
'. Then he tried in their residual light to organise his motives, to place them in line with absolute principles rather than with thoughts about how eminently, touchingly, beautifully ripe for salvation Mrs Heggarty was. Her honesty, for one thing. It seemed to give her a special strength of claim. He put in a quarter of an hour, recited some more prayers in conclusion, rose with the matter unresolved, and went straight to his desk and wrote the note to her, as he had really known from the start he would. He had been concerned, he said, by their conference. If she would like to speak again, she must feel free …

He waited in the playground, intercepted Anthony Heggarty, placed the letter in his satchel and told him to be sure to give it to his mother. He did not care, nor should he have, if Sister Felicitas saw this transaction from her dominant place on the school steps.

I
T WAS THE
kind of late summer day in which, if possible, people stayed indoors. The air blazed beyond the windows, and was rendered dense with smoke from a bushfire in the Blue Mountains. Saying his office in the corner of the living room, Darragh was interrupted by Mrs Flannery, tentative because she knew the importance of the hours. There was an American soldier at the door.

‘Oh,' Darragh commented. ‘I didn't hear the bell.'

‘No,' said Mrs Flannery. ‘He sort of appeared. He looks very impressive.'

Mrs Flannery might have made an Australian soldier wait until Darragh had finished the office. But the Americans had the authority of their strangeness and their air of confidence.

The soldier in the hall, Darragh noticed in the small time before the conversation began, was a large, well-made man, but did not stand with the typical jauntiness Sydneysiders associated with his type of particularly well-cut uniform. He held his cap at his side, and his smoothly combed brown hair did not seem much
brilliantined. The stripes on his sleeve were worn, as Americans wore them, the reverse way to Australian chevrons—pointing to the shoulder, ascendant. Beneath this man's three stripes were further semi-rondels. The man stood peering up at a painting of St Jerome, translator of the Bible into vulgate Latin, who knelt in umber oils amidst the scrolls of his own and others' scholarship, bare-breasted, a stone nearby for penitential beating of his breast. He withdrew his gaze from it dazedly as Darragh appeared before him, and blinked. He had extraordinary almond eyes, as fascinating, Darragh thought at once, as those of a knight or courtier or angel in a Renaissance altar piece.

‘Father,' the soldier said, ‘am I disturbing you?' He was perhaps a year older than Darragh, and his particular mixture of forwardness and courtesy was refreshing on a dull morning in Lent. Darragh said not at all, and marked his place in Vespers with one of the coloured in-sewn tassels of his breviary.

‘My aunt's died back home,' said the soldier, fixing him with the almond eyes.

‘Ant?' asked Darragh, thinking this an insect joke.

‘No,' said the soldier, shaking his head, self-reproving. ‘I forgot you guys pronounce it different. My A–U–N–T. She's a widow. And not so old. I was wondering if you could say a Mass for her.' He pulled from his trouser pocket a folded envelope. He knew the protocol for offering a priest a stipend for saying a Mass for the dead.

‘My father's sister-in-law, see. Louisa Fratelli. More or less raised me, with my parents being so busy with the market garden. I've written her name on the envelope.'

Darragh accepted the envelope and considered it. He looked inside. There was, as the last time an American had asked him to say Mass, a full pound note. But this was to be a Mass for the
dead. To be asked to say Mass for a person who had died so far-off—that was a new experience.

Darragh said, ‘I should tell you … the normal stipend for a Mass is as little as five shillings and never more than ten.'

‘Please, Father. Take it. Put the rest in the poor box.'

Darragh said, ‘Thank you. I will. We have a very active St Vincent de Paul branch here, and soldiers' families to look after, Sergeant …'

‘Sorry. I'm Master Sergeant Gene Fratelli. G–E–N–E, as in Gene Kelly. Eugenio, I was baptised. I'm an MP, but I take my armband off in places like this.'

Darragh introduced himself and asked, ‘Where did your aunt die?'

‘Next door my parents. Place called Stratford. In California. The Central Valley. Lots of Italians. Some Portuguese. You know. The Portuguese and Mexicans do the picking.'

‘Why did you come to St Margaret's, Sergeant?' Darragh wanted to know. ‘Not that you aren't entirely welcome.'

‘I've been to Mass here once or twice.' Darragh was surprised. He would surely have noticed such a striking face from the pulpit.

Darragh suggested, ‘There's a dance club at Flemington—a lot of American soldiers go there.'

‘I don't hang round those places, Father. I like quieter people. Someone to take a poor GI in and give him dinner.'

So, someone in the area had kindly fed Sergeant Fratelli, Darragh concluded. He could not quite defeat in himself the idea that there was something odd about a man wanting a Mass said in Australia for a woman who had died in California. But there was no reason why such an arrangement was not entirely proper. The Communion of Saints transcended all borders and traversed an ocean with ease.

‘I'll announce your aunt's name at the Masses on Sunday,' said Darragh.

‘Louisa Fratelli,' insisted Darragh, for verification.

‘You know, that would have tickled her,' Sergeant Fratelli told him with a sudden smile which reached up and nicely kindled the almond eyes. ‘I'll try to be here for it, unless I'm on duty of course. I'm running Suspects Squad at the moment.' Darragh did not know what that meant, and did not ask.

‘Who's this guy again?' asked Fratelli, nodding towards the painting.

‘St Jerome. Fourth or fifth century. I don't know the exact dates, Sergeant. He came from North Africa and translated the Bible into Latin. He's the patron saint of librarians, and he was secretary to a Pope, but he often lived in desert caves.'

‘He was an Arab?'

‘Egyptian, I believe.' Darragh was not utterly sure.

‘And the stone in his hand, Father?'

‘He was penitential. He beat his breast with desert rocks.'

‘Wow,' said Fratelli. ‘That's what I like. I like saints' stories. Because I'm not one myself.'

He smiled, his lips folding gently. ‘Are you and the head priest fixed for groceries, Father?'

‘Yes, thanks, we're well off.'

‘You'd say that,' Fratelli asserted, as if he knew Darragh well. ‘I can get stuff easy. The PX at the Showgrounds.'

‘Please, don't go to the trouble …'

‘Okay. But you guys have rationing and all …'

‘You're a generous man. But we're well looked after, thank you.'

The man saluted casually, without that British snappiness the Australians were taught to affect but rarely managed. With a last
look at St Jerome, he let himself out of the door. He had fascinated Darragh with his casual courtesies, which were stylistically different from those of young Australian men. Darragh had noticed that in addition to his stripes, he wore three white service bars on his lower sleeve, which meant he had served in the army for some years, probably since he was eighteen, and thus—as Kearney had in Sydney—had beheld mayhem. That reality made it harder for Darragh to define the man Fratelli was. But that was merely one small mystery cast up by the new order of the world, when to defeat the risk of terrible Japanese strangeness, one needed to invite some relative strangeness within the walls.

T
HIS BLAZING DAY
proved itself to be one ripe with incident when, having returned to the recitation of his office, he heard the telephone ring.

‘I'm so sorry, Father,' said Mrs Flannery. ‘There's a Mr Flood on the telephone for you.' He closed his breviary again, his heart pumping at the unexpectedness of this summons.

It was indeed Mr Bert Flood, speaking loudly but in his normal neutral tone. ‘Father Darragh. Ross is off to a trade union meeting in Lithgow. The missus wondered could you call in today?'

Darragh said that of course he could.

‘She's not up to much anymore. The smoke's bad for her. The doc gives her a month or two.' In his way Bert was saying, she's not capable of sinning now—only of suffering. ‘This is a chance for those last rites, you know, if you want …'

Ross Trumble was away, and so Mrs Flood was willing to die as a secret penitent. It seemed she did not intend to tell her lover. This was a very pragmatic use of Christ's sacraments. The
absolutism of Darragh's nature until recently would have frowned on such a dodge. But now that the world had grown complicated, he was willing to be of service to Mrs Flood on any terms. He felt a light-heartedness at last descend on him as he put on his clerical stock and collar, and crossed through the particled air to the sacristy, which the thick bricks of the church had kept cool. He put on his stole and white thigh-length surplice, fetched the small black bag in which he would carry all that Mrs Flood needed, retrieved the keys to both the tabernacle and the locked box on the sanctuary wall where the holy oils were kept, and walked out onto the altar steps, feeling once more the excitement of the complex duties ahead of him. The altar had been clothed by the women of the altar society in the violet altar facings of Lent. He ascended the steps after genuflecting, moved aside the altar card in front of the tabernacle, the one with the prayers for the Offertory and Canon of the Mass, which he knew by heart. He pushed aside the violet tabernacle cloth, feeling again gratefully fed by these ritual movements, and with the key opened the bronze tabernacle, the strongbox of the Divine. Here, along with a large, full-bodied and lidded silver cup named the
ciborium
, the feeder, containing altar breads which would be transmuted into the body and blood of Christ at Mass tomorrow morning, was a further such vessel, veiled in violet, containing some communion hosts consecrated by himself at that morning's Mass and left there for emergencies such as a call from Bert Flood. He removed the veil and lid of this one and placed two hosts in the disc-like metal container, the pyx, from the silk-lined bag he had brought from the sacristy. He made sure the clasp on this disc clicked tight shut, preserving the body of Christ from contamination until it deigned to rest on Mrs Flood's capricious tongue.

Having locked the tabernacle and adjusted its veil and again
genuflected, he moved down the steps to the left side of the altar. Here another but less ornate metal box was attached to the wall. He unlocked it and saw before him three metal canisters, tubular urns, on a shelf. The holy oils. The oil, consecrated by the archbishop at the cathedral in Sydney each Easter Thursday morning, was fetched out to every suburb by the parish priest or the curate. Again, Monsignor Carolan always sent him, Darragh, to attend the ceremony in an alb and stole to bring back a year's supply of the three species of oil. Yet it was the allure of these mysteries which had brought him to the priesthood. Although he was attached to his parents by an intense love of the kind which preempted any questioning, he had seen nothing in their marriage to attract him to the state. Marriage—both their faces said it at different times—was hard, and uncertain. Fred Astaire might dance in tails with Ginger Rogers, but real life, and dogged love, seemed noble yet squalid. The memory of physical love, of what people called sex, seemed to tease people with wistful memory rather than make them happy. The priesthood, with its arcane knowledge, the drama of the rites, rose above the doubt and the ordinariness of the moment. It had a vestment, an incantation and a soothing code only its priests understood. Who would not want to become a priest, and consider it an honour?

Each canister before Darragh carried engraved letters to identify its separate use. O. C. for baptisms; O. S. for confirmations; O.I.,
oleum infirmorum
, for the anointing of the ill. He added this latter canister to a metal bracket fitted into his black bag. Vanity again arose—the idea that Mrs Heggarty might respect him better if she saw his competence among these symbols and substances. But he shook it away. The memory of cautionary tales about fallen priests recurred. The alcoholic priest who had left the priesthood, mixed with prostitutes, and one night, crazy
for drink and in pure malice, consecrated the entire contents of a bread shop window. Once a priest and always a priest, he had transformed the bread into Christ's body, making his Saviour hostage to whatever customer, pure or impure, Catholic or Protestant, ate of the contents of the shop. And a companion tale: the same kind of priest, lying with a fallen woman who suddenly goes into the throes of death. She pleads for the last rites, the
oleum infirmorum
, and he goes to the kitchen and, purely to appease this dying woman, fetches butter and anoints her. These tales indicated that a fallen priest was a dangerous man, an assassin, a mocker. He was not yet such a man, but to think of Mrs Heggarty so compulsively was to reach the first station on a very long line which led to a version of the priesthood which exploded inwards on itself.

There were some four or five hours of sunlight left as he took to Homebush Road and its bubbling tar, now carrying his surplice and stole and two candlesticks in a bag somewhat like a workman's, and also within it the small black box containing not only the pyx and hosts and oil, but wads of cotton to apply the unguent to Mrs Flood's organs of sense. A professional pride helped him deal with the bullying heat and the stained air. Extreme unction. An anointment at the last. A smearing of those human extremities which had walked into, sniffed, eyed or tasted wrong. In the Eastern Orthodox Church priests anointed the loins, the region of so much lethal peril, but fortunately that was not the custom with the Roman Church.

Bert Flood, opening the door of the little house with a greater speed than last time, wore what looked like the same vest and pants and collarless shirt as before. ‘Oh yairs,' he said, as if he had forgotten he had called Darragh. ‘The missus is in the bedroom.'

He was one of those Australians who confused Darragh. Bert Flood's demeanour bore out the description given by one of the bush poets: ‘Hadn't any opinions, hadn't any ideas.' He appeared as if he had leached all anger, enthusiasm and purpose out of his soul, to the extent Darragh wondered how he ever got himself to the intense point of proposing marriage to Mrs Flood, and what she thought of him when she agreed. But in his way, he had achieved a dramatic point now by opening the door to Darragh.

Bert led him to the first room off the corridor. Darragh noticed a pleasant smell of menthol and camphor in Mrs Flood's bedroom. The woman herself lay diminished in the middle of the bed, buttressed with pillows, and there was a hectic redness to her cheeks. Beside her on a wicker table lay various brown bottles, and a glass with the dregs of some fluid still in it. A picture of a sylvan arbour, bearing no resemblance at all to the landscapes in which Mr and Mrs Flood had conducted their marriage, sat over the bed, in its way like a prayer for Eden, or for a cleansed earth in which all growth and all manners were orderly. Both partners had failed the idyll.

It seemed to Darragh that in aging by ten years since he had last seen her, Mrs Flood had managed to become more ageless. Wastage was visible, however, in the way her facial bones made claim upon the rosy filament of flesh laid over them. The death's head was threatening to emerge. The humming rattle of her breath was a permanent sound. There was no tubercular charm to it today. It sounded frankly like the clatter of some failed mechanism.

‘She's not too flash at talking for long,' said Bert. But her eyes were alight as they picked up Darragh's arrival. In the context of her decline, her smile seemed more childlike than girlish. But at least she was not one of those of whom Christ said, ‘I wish you
were either hot or cold, but since you are neither, I shall spit you out of my mouth.'

Darragh asked, ‘Could I put the pyx and the oil on the table here?' Bert nodded, bustled past, and rearranged the bottles of medicine and tonic to make room for Darragh. Then he touched Darragh on the elbow and gave him a solemn wink. ‘I'll leave you to it, Father. I'll get the kettle on.'

‘You're welcome to stay, Bert. It's your house.'

The idea seemed to panic Bert.

‘No. I'll get the kettle on.'

For that was the great secular sacrament—tea. Before Bert had even left, Mrs Flood reached out and grasped the hem of Darragh's coat, dragging him closer. ‘Don't make Ross clear out. We met in the sanitarium. He had this curse too. He's a good fellow. And I'm past it all now. Past every crime, eh? If you come on heavy, it'll only make trouble for poor old Bert. All right?'

It was apparent from the effort this took that she could not make a detailed confession.

‘Don't talk,' he said, in command with the dying. ‘You can nod, Mrs Flood.'

She nodded to show she could. A new submission had entered her.

He unpacked his bag, placed the two candlesticks from his small black case on the table, lit them, put on his surplice and stole, while Mrs Flood's eyes glittered with a kind of hunger at all these activities. He instructed her to pray mentally with him while he recited the Act of Contrition.

‘Oh my God,' he intoned, ‘I am heartily sorry and beg pardon for all my sins …'

She said arduously, ‘There's one thing, Father. You know why I married Bert. He didn't make a fuss of me. I was impressed. We
worked for this store in Cobar, and Bert was a warehouseman, and I sold frocks. The boss was always grabbing for me. But Bert didn't make a fuss. It turned out he couldn't make a fuss of anything, poor old dear.'

‘Don't talk, Mrs Flood. You don't need to.'

‘These … what you call, sins of the flesh.'

‘It's all right.'

‘They're not so bad. They're just silly little things half full of dark. But there's light and heat too …'

‘Yes, but you repent of them?'

‘Look at what the Japs did in Hong Kong … and the Black and Tans in Ireland … They
were
sins!'

‘But the people who committed them don't have the benefit of our beliefs,' he said, entering into the debate despite himself. ‘Leave it all to God and repent.'

‘All right,' she gasped. ‘I do.'

‘Please, you don't have to talk. Just nod.'

Indeed she nodded with a poignant urgency. Confession was easy for the sinner of limited breath. Mrs Flood continued to nod her affirmation of repentance as Darragh recited. Her lips throughout worked dryly on the sentiments she lacked the breath to state. She said ambiguously, ‘I'm sorry for Bert,' as he absolved her.

Then he took the small white host out of the pyx, and she opened her mouth as taught in childhood, and he placed it on her tongue. ‘Now, Mrs Flood, you'll understand I must wash my hands before I open the holy oil. Is that all right?'

‘Don't be delicate on my account,' she instructed him, pointing with her right hand in the bathroom's direction.

He went and found it, scrubbing himself at the basin from which hung an old razor strop, possibly Bert's. Bert had laid out
a clean towel. In his way the fellow was astonishing. Darragh went to find him to ask him would he help with the bedclothes, since they would need to be moved back for the anointing. But Bert was not in the kitchen, or on the awninged verandah which was his isolation ward from both marriage and the disease.

Returned to Mrs Flood's room, Darragh took up the container of oil from its bracket in the black case and, with the appropriate words, absolved with this holy chrism her eyes for all the wrong they had seen, her ears for the burden of what they had heard, her nostrils for having drawn the breath of sin, her hands for their ill-considered caresses, her mouth for its mortal appetites, and finally, the sheets drawn back, her feet, pink and delicate and not like normal suburban feet, for walking in dangerous paths. ‘
Per istam Sanctam Unctionem indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid deliquisti
—Through this blessed oil may the Lord forgive whatever ill you did.'

The passive effort involved in having the sheets pulled up to her chest again by Darragh seemed to exhaust her. Darragh ate the second host himself, and stood in prayer a moment.

‘I'll try to find Bert,' he said.

This time Bert was in the kitchen, unpacking a brown bag. ‘I ducked round to Moran and Cato's for some biscuits,' he said in his voice of flat melancholy, yet it was touching to find that he considered Darragh's being there an event, a significant passage, worthy of the good cups and a few Arnott's shortbreads.

‘Mrs Flood is finished,' said Darragh. ‘I mean, she's been anointed, and the rest.'

‘Righto,' said Bert. ‘She'll be happy. And Ross will be sweet. His bark's worse than his bite. He feels he has to be rude to you. Union rules.'

The
Daily Mirror
was on the table with its predictable stories
of Allied progress in Africa and Allied devastation in Asia. All the military success was in the wrong place for Bert and Darragh, and came at the cost of Lance Bombardier Heggarty's capture and Mrs Heggarty's endangered soul.

Darragh said, ‘Mrs Flood will be safe now from all this.' He waved his hand at the headlines. As soon as he said it, he thought he might have uttered the wrong sentiment.

‘She'll be missed,' said Bert. ‘She was a lovely girl. She was an usherette at the State when we came down to Sydney, believe it or not. Don't know what she was doing with an ugly bugger like me. Pardon the French, Father.'