An Angel In Australia (23 page)

It was Aunt Madge on the other end. ‘Frank, you sound like you're in the other room,' she said, as if the entire point of this trunk call was to demonstrate the miracle of the telephone. She was breathless, as most people were, with the seriousness of trunk calls, with their expense, and the inroads they were said to make upon vital military communications. ‘I hope you are well, dear Frank. Look, we read the paper. Believe me when I say it means nothing. It's always been an anti-Catholic rag, and like all rags it'll be tomorrow's steak wrapping, or cut up into strips to be used on backsides in country shouses. Don't let them make you feel shame, Frank. Do you hear? Now I'll get your mother. She's standing right here.'

Darragh's mother said, ‘Darling. Are you well?'

‘I'm well. I'm only worried about you.'

‘I'm in first-class form,' asserted Mrs Darragh. ‘It's always
been an anti-Catholic rag, that
Telegraph
.' This was the antiphon Catholics were used to uttering when newspapers printed tales of scandal within the Church.

He said, ‘It's a poor return for you, Mama, after all the years of expense in the seminary. I keep on thinking of the chalice you and Aunt Madge bought for my ordination.' Gilt and gold plate with enamelled medallions on sconces of the handle—the Lamb of God, the IHS (
Iesos Hristos Soter
, Jesus Christ Saviour). A miraculous vessel. A grail. And it must have cost his mother and Madge at least £50. Now it spent most of its year in a cupboard at St Margaret's sacristy. He sometimes remembered to bring it forth and use it at Mass at Easter or Christmas.

‘It's the insinuation of it all,' said his mother. ‘You can't help that the woman went to confession to you, can you? They just like to insinuate. You wonder if anything they say is the truth, even about the war.'

‘Oh, I think a lot of that is reliable,' Darragh sadly assured her.

‘They talk about a scuffle. Did anyone hit you, Frank?'

‘I'm not hurt, Ma. It was just a local eccentric.'

‘Now, don't you worry,' she said, a true warrior woman. ‘No one is going to take any notice of this. Mr Regan was just in here and he said that everyone he's spoken to thinks it's ridiculous. They all know you, darling.'

Then they're doing well, Darragh thought. But it would be too cruel to say so to his mother. So they continued, for the remaining permitted minute of their trunk call, to play what Darragh thought of as a form of tennis of consolation—‘I'm concerned for you,', ‘But I'm only concerned for you.' The kindly myth that no damage had been done was piled up, house-of-cards-wise, in the ether between the Kangaroo Valley monastery and the Darragh bungalow in Rose Bay. Then the line was cut.

When Darragh went into Father Anselm's study that night, the old man looked at him with an acute and, for the first time, knowing kindliness in his eyes. ‘I believe, young Darragh, you are in a hard position. A priest who falls, even for the moment, into the hands of the weekend press …'

What Darragh was most certain of, now that his follies had been published and there was no further need to keep him hidden, was that he would be released from his retreat after eleven days, on the coming Friday, to enable him to do the Saturday confessions and Benediction, and the early Sunday Masses. And so it happened. On Friday afternoon, the vicar-general called and said that the retreat was considered concluded, and that Darragh was to take the Saturday morning train back to Sydney. The cheering aspect of this recall was that it meant the cathedral did not expect him to appear in this coming Sunday's papers.

His last session with Father Anselm was five o'clock on Friday evening.

‘It's possible,' the old monk told him in conclusion, ‘for a man to be involved in scandal through very little fault of his own. His strongest impulse, his simplicity of heart, betrays him. But the world does not know how to use a simple heart.'

Father Anselm seemed for a time to think about unnamed instances, perhaps on battlefields, where the world had tried to violate with steel his own simple heart. ‘It's the reason priests get hardened as they age. They were taken as fools in youth, and don't want it to happen again.' He thought about this phenomenon awhile, too. ‘You bear for Christ this cross of notoriety. With any good fortune, it'll be a temporary affliction. I have in a long life, Father Frank, seen men bear themselves with dignity even when there are no grounds for dignity left. You must bear yourself with
dignity now, administering the sacraments, giving good sermons, visiting the sick, living simply. And show your parishioners that you are conscious of no deliberate shame, or if you are, that you have taken account of it.'

That evening, after dinner, Father Matthew stopped him outside the refectory and took him to his office and poured him a whisky. ‘I've got to say I wouldn't want to be in your position, mate,' said Matthew, and Darragh felt a vague and yet enjoyable vanity at being seen as a man on a frontline. ‘I'm sure you've got the heart for it, but it's hard to face people, and you'll be facing a lot of them at Mass on Sunday. What'll you say to them?'

‘I haven't thought of that,' said Frank, putting down his glass. It was a daunting idea. ‘What do you reckon, Matthew? Do I address the subject? Or do I just give a regular Sunday sermon? Faith, hope and charity. The sacraments. The Blessed Virgin … Say this had happened to you—would you mention the
Telegraph
?'

‘Some of your parishioners would want you to stand up for yourself. Some will have morbid interest. It's a hard one. But, bloody hell, I think I'd tell the truth and mention anti-Catholic newspaper talk—that sort of thing. I'd reckon you're entitled to say that.'

‘Do I speak of the woman?' asked Darragh.

‘That'd be brave. But look, even down this way, even in a country town, there's a new and dangerous air about. We used to visit the big world in the picture shows, but now the pictures have come to us. In the form of the Yanks. In the form of the Japs as well. I tell you, Frank, I'm glad I've got the dairy farm to concentrate my mind.'

H
OME AFTER LUNCH
on Saturday, Darragh found himself treated with a sort of edgy awe by Mrs Flannery, who gave him a canned salmon sandwich to compensate for his missed meal. Captain O'Rourke had called, and had reported that ‘the person in question', who had been ‘sentenced at court-martial', had been ‘shipped north with a penal battalion'. These were words she read from notes she had taken, raising her eyes wonder-struck at ‘court-martial', as if it were the measure of how utterly transformed Darragh now was.

Invigorated to know that Private Aspillon still breathed, Darragh washed his face and hands, put on his cassock, and went across to the church to hear confessions. As he approached his confessional, he was aware of the normal three or four pews of queued penitents. Some looked at him sideways; there was a shining fixity in the faces of the older women there. Yes, he had been in the papers. But they were sure the papers were wrong! Their loyalty abashed him. But there must have been some drawn into the ambit of his confessional by his notoriety, or even the
possibility that being under question himself, he would not be too severe with them. Carrying his stole, he paused at the middle door of the confessional, kissed the cross embroidered on the purple, entered, closed the door on himself in this small, shadowy space, and took his position on the chair which enabled him to hear with equal ease confessions on the right and the left.

A shiver possessed him as his mind, his sacramental intent, settled itself to hear the whispered shame of his congregation. Whispers of desire and meannesses of love and of spirit entered the space where he sat. He told the masturbating boys that when they met their wives in ten years time, they would be ashamed of having yielded to their weaknesses now. Virtuous women who confessed to pride—the most suspicious confessions of all, since sometimes when women mentioned pride they also implied they had much reason for it—plagued his ears and eroded his spirit. He was aware of an impatience in his voice, and a slight astonishment in response from the other side of the wire grille, of the kind a child shows when a favourite and indulgent uncle becomes severe. He imposed the penalties appropriate to these small sins, but again he confused certain matrons of the parish by asking them to say entire decades of the rosary to expiate the pride they had so proudly confessed.

The radiance of afternoon faded in the small slit of beaded-glass window behind his head. He sat in an even more sombre half-dark, in which his folded hands shone dimly but luminously. Winter afternoon sun came down aslant the council chambers, leaving Darragh's confessional weakly lit. Yet, he knew, he spent twice, three times as long in the confessional as the monsignor. This small geographic injustice once more nagged away at him for half an hour, as he automatically bound and loosened his penitents, absolved the petty crimes of his parishioners, handed
out penances and thought of tasks to be attended to among the living—the two chief issues being the tracking down of Gervaise, and a trunk call, if it could be arranged, to the orphanage in Killcare.

Nearly all the light was gone. Having concluded with a penitent in the box to the right, he slid the shutter on that side's grille closed, and opened the one to the left to find nobody there.

His mind took now to nudging round the rough tablets of his Sunday sermon, as yet unwritten. The story of the woman taken in adultery, whom Christ saved. There had been no merciful intervention in Kate Heggarty's case. Darragh knew he should not explicitly mention her name. It would only titillate people to do so—boys who had seen her in the pews on Sunday and thought she was a good sort. He also knew that to mention the murdered woman by her name would play into the monsignor's rampant idea of his, Darragh's, own folly, and it was best to satisfy that appetite only when conscience or instinct made it unavoidable.

He flinched as a penitent entered the left-hand confessional box, and he heard the whisper of cloth as whoever it was lowered himself to the kneeler there. He knew it was a man in a suit. In taking up the kneeling position, men's serge made a different noise from women's satin or cotton or wool. Though he did not even know he knew this, Darragh's mind accepted the newcomer as a male.

He made sure that the right-hand grille was definitely closed, lest a late-entering penitent in that box hear what this newcomer said.

‘Bless me Father for I have sinned,' the penitent began, proving the universality of the rites of the Catholic Church by speaking in Fratelli's voice. Looking through the confusing window of the
fine-mesh grille, Darragh saw a Fratelli-like bulk. This meant, he decided, with reasoning rendered leaden by the hour, that the penitent
was
Fratelli.

‘It is a year and a half since my last confession.'

‘So you missed your last Easter duty?' asked Darragh.

‘That's a fact, Father. But a good angel is on me, and so I came now.'

‘A good angel? What exactly does that mean?'

‘It means that for the moment I'm not the Devil's property.' It sounded such a humble and gothically minded Fratelli, a Fratelli drawing on the robust Italian Catholicism of his parents, a Fratelli who for the moment renounced the shining nimbus of his helmet and the authority of his side-armed waist.

‘Here,' said Darragh, coughing and regaining his breath, ‘here you are within the reach of influence far greater than that of angels. That of Christ and His Blessed Mother.' Where did these sure assertions come from? Darragh wondered.

‘I need to be under a better influence by far. You know that …'

‘How do I know it? I'm not aware of that. Not yet.'

‘Well, I always thought you saw through me.'

So, either I'm a fool or a seer! thought Darragh, his head spinning. What little ration of wisdom might be in him was underestimated by vicar-generals, and overstated by penitents.

‘No,' said Darragh, wanting to clear away the idea that he had any special insight. ‘Do you know what? I thought you looked like a courtier in a Renaissance painting. A handsome creature, virtuous and dangerous at the same time. That's all I thought. So don't make things up about me.'

‘Okay,' Fratelli agreed, but he was not convinced. ‘Now, no question I do my own sinning, but when I was a boy, I was misused by an older woman, and terrible things were let loose.
In an army in peacetime, you find plenty of guys with demons. The Corps of Military Police meets up with them in the stockade. Broken souls. At nineteen years, it's already too late to go back and untangle their lines. I feel a lot of anger when I see how like me they are. And how like I am to them.'

Darragh's instincts were against such an over-elaborated confession as Fratelli was making. He tried to get the man to the point. ‘So you're confessing rage?'

‘That's right. Rage.'

‘Against prisoners? Or others?'

‘Prisoners figure in it.'

‘Do you inflict blows?'

‘Yes. Them too.'

In silence, Darragh waited. He imagined bruised and contused jaws. ‘I have sat at desks while men hanged themselves,' Fratelli continued at last. ‘Sometimes it seemed to me a wise thing they did. I have given niggers in the stockade what they need to end things.'

Here, to Darragh's sudden outrage, was evidence for Gervaise's view of the world. ‘How do you mean?' Darragh asked nonetheless.

‘A man who wants can hang himself with a cut-up handtowel. If he's ambitious for it, he can do it with shoelaces or rosaries.'

So the foundations had shifted. Captain O'Rourke, as officer and priest, declared such tales apocryphal. Had O'Rourke never heard the confession of a prison guard?

‘How often did this happen?' asked Darragh, fearing the answer, pleased that Gervaise was out of
these
hands, but alarmed he might be in ones of similar intentions.

Fratelli seemed, beneath the aegis of the angel he had invoked, to be counting. ‘Five, maybe six times. You can't have too many
prisoners die on your watch. But niggers—the army goes along easy with the idea coloureds hang themselves in prison. And the more who do it, the more the figures prove it.'

This was not the normal mumbling of a sheltered young man of scruples. Did all Americans make their confessions as fulsomely as this? Maybe they were told in childhood not to shilly-shally in front of the confessional grille. It had to be counted, too, that the parishioners he absolved were chiefly of Irish, Scottish or English descent, and had a more reticent, more stuttering nicety of guilt than Fratelli.

‘This is a very serious matter. For you. For your superiors.' It was serious for Gervaise too.

‘I did mention demons,' Fratelli pleaded.

‘But it can't all be blamed on demons, can it? Your free will was involved.'

The penitent seemed to contemplate this and then concede the point. ‘My free will runs to ruin. It chooses the bad from the bad.'

‘But if you think that way all the time, then you expect to sin. You shouldn't expect to sin. You shouldn't think it can't be avoided.'

‘But there are people round me who know too much about me. What people know of you is what you become.'

Is that true? Darragh was tempted to consider. It sounded true.

‘Other MPs?' he asked.

‘Other MPs,' Fratelli agreed. ‘And other dangerous people in general.'

‘You might have to stand up to them,' said Darragh. ‘Defy their power over you. I'm not asking the impossible. But history is full of people who have stood up. They get mocked … It's a small price.'

Fratelli laughed, without any viciousness, but in a way that showed he thought mockery would be the least that would befall him should he desist from helping black men hang themselves.

‘You're not talking about Private Aspillon?'

‘Not that one. All the coloureds got shipped to North Queensland. He's not the question, that particular nigger of yours.'

‘When Gervaise and I were together in that shed … did you want us both killed?'

Fratelli answered with some passion. ‘I wanted you to learn a lesson. I wanted you to see the size of things. You'll see there were reasons I wanted to bring you to size. You were already in my sights.' Fratelli seemed to writhe within his suit. Body and fabric could be heard shifting. ‘Be patient. You'll see.'

What would Father Anselm think of this, with his moment-by-moment theory? Darragh did not know what to make of it but horror.

He said, ‘If you're really willing to amend, then I can absolve you of these sins. Even if you don't think you've got the strength, the desire to behave well is reinforced by what happens here, by the sacrament. The grace you need is not fully in your possession yet. You'll receive it with absolution, the grace to be a genuinely brave man. And you can stand up to them. If you can stand up to me … I can't complain that your confession hasn't been full and frank … then you can stand up to them.'

‘But I'm not finished yet,' Fratelli assured him. ‘I had you say a Mass for my aunt. Speak no ill of the dead, but she needed one. A married woman, and me thirteen or fourteen, getting at me in the empty pickers' huts at the back of the orchard. Making a man of me.'

Darragh wanted this torrent of confessed misuse to end. His
vanity as a confessor had kept him in place late enough for Fratelli to arrive and begin pouring these poisons in his ear.

‘Are you saying you and your aunt …?'

‘I didn't think I was used badly at the time. She was proud of me, I was proud of myself. She said, “I'd never find a boy like you among the skinny Protestants. Beside them, an Italian boy is a man.” So you see, I had my full issue of pride before a fall. I didn't know anything. I was a straitlaced boy and I didn't know. And I was glad she was not a whore, and proud that she was older and saw me as a man, better than my uncle. “You're a better man than your uncle,” she told me, and I was as proud as Satan. And for her I was a better man. In the sense she wanted.'

‘You've surely confessed this in the past,' Darragh suggested hopefully.

Fratelli said, ‘That's right. It's old stuff in a way.'

‘And so it's forgiven. Unless there's something in it you go back to, or let influence you now.'

‘There's an influence,' Fratelli admitted. ‘She messed me for normal women. I was a man only for her. I was her man and never became anyone else's. I don't like whores. Whores are an abomination. I always thought so. I always wanted a decent woman. But I had no interest in kids my age. I wasn't interested in courting a Catholic girl, some lettuce-grower's daughter. When my aunt was praising me, I thought, watch out, you girls! Proud, you know. I thought I'd find a peach, a pearl. Easy work. But girls were nothing to me. It was married women, and women who looked married, like my aunt. I liked women with husbands and kids, women who'd been used and were kind of sad. Those who weren't left me ice-cold. But even now when I meet the sort of women I like, I've got the full intention to do the adultery. But
I can't make it work. Punishment, you see, for my old pride as a kid.'

Darragh shook his head. ‘So, you have tried to have indecent relations with married women, but have been unable to?' he asked, wanting to move things along.

‘That's true for the large part,' said Fratelli.
True for the large part …
Nothing was straightforward true for this man. He could keep me here for hours, Darragh thought in panic. He asked, ‘Have you seen a doctor?'

Fratelli was a little amused in a brotherly way. ‘Do you want a doctor to help me become the perfect fornicator?'

‘I'd want you to marry, normally.'

‘Normally,' conceded Fratelli. ‘I wouldn't mind that myself.'

To reach a conclusion, Darragh found himself speaking of the Blessed Virgin, the image of womanhood. She wanted his happiness, Darragh assured Fratelli. Many men of perverse tendency had been helped to a normal life by faith in her powers of intercession with her son. Darragh, of course, did not know this from any experience, but he believed it absolutely, even in his present numb state.