Homebush Boy (6 page)

I did not read the pallor and the normal lines of stress and neurosis in the faces of brothers and priests, though I was aware they were there and wondered why. I saw only myself with my Fix-a-Flexed hair in a week of no pimples renouncing the girl in the virgin blue dress, and we were both incandescent and as lovely and unearthly as a tapestry.

I always knew I wouldn't be a Brother though. I didn't want to do the walk-away from the girl in the blue dress just to spend the rest of my life correcting kids' homework and acting outraged because they hadn't finished some essay. I looked to the bigger fights involving the priesthood – St Francis and nature, St Vincent and poverty, Pius XII and Communism. Sometimes in fantasy I was a monk of total silence, like Mangan would be. Sometimes I was a vocal pastor. Just once the girl in the blue dress saw me from a distance and was awed by something broader than our mutual splendour.

But all that was a fantasy. I didn't want to be a priest. I wanted to be a composer, a writer, an orator and possibly all three. But again, an occasional clerical fantasy. I was a priest, and women turned their eyes to me, sad for what I was and could not be for them.

What I was certain about was that I did not want to be a Christian Brother. You didn't get canonized, you didn't become a bishop, and as far as I knew, you didn't get your thoughts or your poetry widely published.

A priest named Father Byrne did the bigtime recruiting, the recruiting for the seminary of the archdiocese of Sydney, from which ordained priests, not humble Brothers, emerged. The minor seminary was located at Springwood in the Blue Mountains, and was the institution into which Dahdah had recently vanished.

Father Byrne the persuader was thin and ageless, though certainly not more than forty years. He was very pale but not with the paleness of disappointment. More the paleness of having prayed at night. He was not one of the surfing, tennis-playing, golfing curates Australians seemed to like for their human touch. There was something too challenging about him for that. He had come down from the mountain top where there weren't any tennis courts, where scalding divine light hid every detail of the landscape.

Even now I think he was wonder-struck with the doctrine of Transubstantiation, with what others mocked, the transformation of the substance of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ by the word of the priest.

‘This religion that makes cannibals of its members,'
The Rock
would thunder. ‘They actually believe they eat the flesh and drink the blood!'

But we all had niftier minds than that. We ate the
appearances
of bread, the
appearances
of wine. How could outsiders fail to understand that? Malice was, of course, the answer.

‘By your word,' Father Byrne would say to us. ‘By the word of an ordinary man. But are you an ordinary man? You've been transformed by ordination. You have given up the joy of the earthly generation of Christians so that Christ may make use of your words and thereby enter Christians under the guise of homely elements like bread and wine.'

It was generally early in the year, when the humidity was strong and the blowflies were active, and before our plans for university were too settled, that the priests came to raise this other possibility. Some of them, a little more worldly than Father Byrne, appealed to ambition.

‘Imagine the pride of this school, its Brothers and students on the day you are ordained to the priesthood in St Mary's Cathedral or even – in special cases – in St Peter's Basilica in Rome. Imagine then the joy of this school and of your parents if you should be consecrated a Bishop. Imagine then further what it would be for St Pat's if one of its sons was elevated to the College of Cardinals. For His Eminence Cardinal Gilroy attended an ordinary Brothers school and was an ordinary boy like you.'

We had seen Cardinal Gilroy distantly, proceeding in his scarlet cap and facings and accompanied by auxiliary bishops and monsignors in purple, and by clergy of lesser plumage, at the opening of new churches and new schools. It was the truth! He was native born. He had a slightly beaky but identifiably Irish face which you might have found on a parent, but he had gravity as well, and he would vent his resident Australian voice in a pulpit orator's delivery, which elevated its tones far above the utterance of ordinary people. Since his nomination as a Cardinal a year or two past, the newspapers ran occasional pieces about the likelihood of his being the next Pope.

Again, a daydream! ABC Radio returning to ask aged Brothers and grownup former students what they remembered of the new Pope. What sort of boy was he? Asking the girl in the blue dress, who in her grief had scarcely aged, but was fixed in her blue adolescent loss. Asking Bernadette Curran and the Frawley girls. ‘There
was
something about him,' Bernadette Curran would say. I saw her in this fantasy as barely aged too and wearing still her maroon Santa Sabina uniform.

After the priest had gone again, non-Celestials of the kind who hung on the Paragon milk bar in the Boulevarde in Strathfield, who sang the latest pop songs and had never heard of Mahler or GMH – fellows that is like genial Freddie Ford – would come up to Matt and pretend the priesthood was an option for him and say, ‘Gunna break all the sheilas' hearts, Mattie?'

And Matt would frame the answer with his handsome white lips. ‘Aw, don't think they'd want me, Freddie. I think I'd bring down the tone in the seminary.'

Freddie Ford was the sort of boy who went to the Stockade, the big combined toilets and changing rooms, at lunchtime with his mates. They would stand in turns in front of the one mirror and work frankly on their hair, slicking it lovingly back, as if it wasn't theirs but someone else's, as if they were barbers enjoying their work. Freddie was a boy of a different kind of honour and daydream, a boy kindly, mocking, sensual, deliberately neither a prefect nor a scholar, and happy with his age and surroundings. Mangan called Freddie and the others
narcissists
. But you couldn't call any of this public lunchtime hairdressing narcissistic, because they did it in front of their mates, communally, trying to look like Farley Granger or Montgomery Clift. Slyly and secretly at home, I tried to make mine look like Chatterton's, Viney managed to make his look like Beethoven's, and on top of that we felt morally superior. For we worked in guilty and exhaustive secrecy and wouldn't have confessed under torture to caring about these things.

At the start of the year, when Father Byrne came around to canvass us, the idea of the priesthood for me seemed preposterous. University would be the good thing. I would join the Newman Society and talk about scholastic philosophy, and perhaps Curran or the recurrent girl in blue would be there. Despite the splendour of the vestments and sacraments, I couldn't see much sense in being a plumply irascible, suburban priest like Monsignor Loane of St Martha's of Strathfield – Pop Loane the school kids called him – who played golf on Mondays and worried a lot about the Silver Circle, the numbers-like betting game on which St Martha's depended for a lot of its income. You wouldn't have ever heard Father Hopkins S.J. mention any Silver Circle! Father Byrne himself was quite a suitable model, but a threatening one, in that there seemed no flamboyance in his nature, no room for Hopkinsian poetry or broad gesture.

But although I didn't want to be a priest as far as I knew, and did not wish to occupy some Curran-less pulpit from which the Silver Circle results fell, I still queued up in the corridor with other people who wondered if they might be called. It was according to Father Byrne's advice, and all the advice I had heard since childhood, better to err on the side that you might be
called
, as the phrase went, and it got you out of Buster Clare's General Maths anyhow. And I was also within the guidelines: ‘Do you go to Mass more than once a week? Do you find yourself engaged in spiritual debates when some of your mates are more concerned about the things of the world? Do you spend most of your life in a state of Sanctifying Grace through regular Acts of Contrition and regular attendances at the confessional? Etc, etc.' All that applied to me.

‘I don't think my sense of vocation has crystallized yet,' I told Father Byrne when my turn to talk to him came.

That was a good verb, I knew. Brother Dinny McGahan would have liked that word.

‘Then be calm and pray to our Blessed Mother,' said Father Byrne. ‘The Mother of all of us. I don't know what would have happened to me without Her.'

We would all later find out that he was telling the truth about this. While he spoke, he looked to the ledge in the corner of the room on which the Madonna stood in blue and white robes. The Virgin Mother Saint Bernadette had seen at Lourdes. Even though I now know, in the smart-alec way all we former Brothers' boys now know, that Mary would not have been blue and white, would not have had Saxon or Celtic features, but would have been a small, brown and glittering-eyed, Bedouin-like woman, I did not doubt the force of what Father Byrne was saying then and I do not doubt it now. He was talking about an utterly literal kinship. He was talking about his Dreaming, if you like. The balance of his world depended on it. You looked into his pale face and did feel the appeal and temptation to be a young priest, rosary in hand, in a cold church after all the people had left, keeping the Virgin's real company at the altar rails.

‘I suppose if I'm not sure at the end of the year,' I told him blithely, covering my bets, ‘I could go to the seminary maybe after a year at uni.'

I wanted those poets and novelists, and the chance to argue with secular philosophers and to wrongfoot humanist professors with my Thomism.

‘I must counsel you very seriously,' said Father Byrne, leaning forward, ‘that is not the best way. There is a spirit of secularism and disbelief at the university. I know many a young man who followed that line: first my degree and then the priesthood. By the time they'd finished their degree, under the influence of atheistic philosophers from Marx to Nietzsche to Bertrand Russell, they'd lost their faith. The seminary is in any case a complete education – English, European Languages, History. But as well as that, of course, Philosophy, and Moral and Dogmatic Theology and Canon Law.'

‘Would I be allowed to try to write poetry or novels?' I wanted to know.

The novelist priest. A sort of G. K. Chesterton with a collar. Monsignor Ronald Knox wrote murder mysteries.

‘Subject to proper authority,' said Father Byrne. ‘I had a seminary friend who wrote poetry on a regular basis and had it published in the
Messenger of the Sacred Heart
.'

There was some confusion for me in this news of his friend's literary glories. I'd read the
Messenger of the Sacred Heart
, and a lot of its verse was obvious, rhyme-y stuff, full of clichés (ugh!) and none of the verbal and theological thunder of GMH.

‘I'll be back in May,' said Father Byrne, ‘and we may be able to speak then.'

Mangan didn't go to see Father Byrne. Mangan was beyond all that reassurance and urging stuff. He was shooting straight for the stars. He didn't want anyone trying to persuade him to go to the Sydney Diocesan Seminary. Rather than chat with Father Byrne, he would remain in class, doing penance within cuffing reach of Brother English.

Father Byrne was in any case not the only messenger from the spiritual world. There was still the free orchestral concert every Sunday afternoon in Sydney's massive, nineteenth-century Town Hall.

Sometimes the conductor was Sir Eugene Goossens, a bald, smooth-looking man. Quite famous, in a few years time he would be found with what Australian Customs said were pornographic items in his luggage and would be primly exiled for it. The awful thing was that some Australians would be oddly comforted that he was so found out. It just showed you! Artistic types.

An Oxbridge aesthete could not have folded himself more interestingly into his seat than Mangan did, or laid a finger more ponderingly over his lips, or become more lost. I wanted to be able to do that, but my bones weren't long enough. During the entire recital, Mangan would not once open his eyes. He was away on the plateau where Tchaikovsky, Bach and Debussy held discourse. The Frawley girls and Curran, with their nose for pretension, would nudge each other and point to him.

Afterwards we would descend to the train, and walk each other miles home from wherever we disembarked. One night we all walked Curran to her home on the hill behind St Pat's. The Currans lived in a standard brick cottage which was nonetheless rendered special by the cleverness and good looks of the Curran girls, Bernadette and her two younger sisters. Mr Curran, who worked for the State government, was as good-looking as a father in a film – a little like Fred MacMurray as a matter of fact. And there were plenty of older actresses that weren't as impressive as Mrs Curran. The same could have been said for my mother, on whose looks everyone commented, though for some reason that caused me to squirm.

As Mrs Curran gave us tea, I said to her, ‘I don't know about becoming a priest. Mrs Curran, I wonder if all your beautiful daughters would wait till I find out.'

Everyone laughed, Rose Frawley indulgently. ‘What a drongo,' she said softly to her tea.

Mrs Curran said, ‘I think you'd better stay at home with us, Mick.'

I felt secure, and knew I was staying home at least until recognized by the world. But just in case, what I'd said would make a good story for her to tell the ABC should I win the Nobel Prize at twenty-three or become Pope.

III

The upstairs flat in Loftus Crescent, which we had rented since the Second World Cataclysm, sat above a downstairs which had been rented for a similar length of time to a family called the Bankses. I did not realize it, since I took him for granted, that my father had startling ways of describing people. He was, in fact, a wordsmith comparable in his way to Gerard Manley Hopkins, a sort of bush poet who got not enough honour for it from his son.