Office of Innocence (26 page)

“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 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.

Fratelli could not be dissuaded from further unnecessary explanations. “I don't court women like a barbarian. I'm slow. I'm kind. I take care. I say gentle and tender things you would not expect of a rough soldier. I don't parade my uniform, never have. I dress like an ordinary Joe in an ordinary job. I am thoughtful of her children—though I want the woman, I know that this can be a hard thing for the child. For the way the child sees the mother, that's what I mean. I'm as scared as the woman that the child might see us doing something wrong. The woman is frightened of that too, but not as frightened as I am. I'm the one that's got good reason to be frightened. The woman meets me—I met Kate when I helped her with a suitcase at Strathfield Station—and I'm as edgy as she is about what might happen. I'm as careful. Women aren't used to this. They're used to oafs blundering up, wanting them straight off.”

“All you tell me,” said Darragh, further and further out of his depth, “confirms you have a good heart.”

“You don't know yet where I'm taking you. Anyhow, I don't visit often, I visit at discreet times. And as I said, dressed like a guy who works in a store somewhere. A guy in a cheap suit. Kind of threadbare and respectable. Gray or blue with little pinstripes. No two-tone shoes. Some dead guy's tie, bought in a secondhand shop. The dust of years in it. I'm so sincere, I'm pretty much invisible. I look like some Polack factory hand. I do this not so that people won't remember me, though that's often the case. I do it for her, too. I don't preen. I say, this is all I am, a poor motherless child. So I kind of fall in love the normal way. I think it's the normal way. She's married, but her husband is away, working on a dam somewhere, or drilling for oil, or in the navy.”

With a tremor in his throat, Darragh said, “Or serving in New Guinea or Africa. . . .”

“I'm talking about my old life, in the States. Fort Ord, Camp Bullis, Fort Bragg. I've been ten years in the service.” Fear of what was imminent prevented Darragh from commending the earnestness, the care for avoiding scandal, in Fratelli's courtship methods. At the heart of lust there was meant to be no redeeming courtliness. “I tell myself this is genuine love that I feel, and that, like they say, love conquers all. I'm behaving well. I even feel noble. I'm able to imagine what it'll be like when she and I say at last yes, and I get excited like a normal man, and want no other woman on earth. I even want her to leave her husband. I begin to talk to her about it before we've even done a thing.”

He considerately paused, in case Darragh wanted to annotate the issues raised to this stage. But Darragh had nothing to say, for Fratelli evaded all the skills of the confessor.

So the sergeant continued. “Some night—or some daytime if the kid's at school—it comes. And this is perfect. This is a perfect union. No unwillingness in the woman—we're both past unwilling. She gives herself up. The one problem is, I can't give myself up. My aunt reaches out from the pickers' quarters, and I smell the smell of the place, and I'm done for. I'm part of a terrible grayness. I've died, I'm gone. This good woman lies there with a corpse, a rotting thing. Me. She knows it, and I can't begin to tolerate that she knows all this about me, that she sees me rotting like this. She's full of fear. She's sacrificed honor. For this? To lie with the dead?”

“You
must
see a doctor,” Darragh told him. A doctor might be the least of it.

“I
must
see a doctor,” Fratelli agreed. “But at the time I'm not within reach of a doctor. Before I know, I've reached out and crushed her breath out of her. I save myself. I save her as fast and furious as I can. I manage, dear God, to crank off like a schoolboy. I put my suit back on, and I close the door and leave my saved love behind.”

Darragh, who had had rage for the imagined murderer, felt mere exhaustion now. “You are in the greatest danger,” he said. Which was absurd.

“It happened three times in the States. Three angels I made and released from their own disgust. Only three. I don't go around talking to every woman I meet.”

“And one in Australia,” said Darragh with his dreadful certainty.

“An angel in Australia,” Fratelli assented.

“Don't you dare say ‘angel'!” Darragh, overtaken now by the appropriate fury, told him. “I forbid you.”

“It's the way I think,” Fratelli murmured.

“No. You say ‘angel' to excuse yourself. You've done nothing but excuse yourself throughout.”

Darragh was aware his voice was growing somewhat heightened for the confessional. But the confessional lightning had struck him. The very woman whose salvation he so actively desired was connected to this wretch whose salvation he needed now to countenance. This case always advanced in Moral Theology classes, in the
De sacramentis
section. The murderer comes to the confessional grille, to the curtain where God's omniscience begins, and the priest is left with the human knowledge of what has been savagely done. The confessor orders the killer to surrender himself—it is a condition of absolution that he should firmly intend to do so. The killer says he will, and the priest absolves him in the hope that the grace of the sacrament will fortify him for self-surrender to the state. But then the killer does not do so, reneges on the conditions of his absolution. When Dr. Cleary, professor of moral theology, raised this issue, for some reason Darragh the student imagined an enclosed European village, sealed in by mountains, with the priest walking amongst gothic villagers, knowing they were endangered by the killer yet unable to tell them. As Darragh the student had imagined the scene, it had little to do with the suburbs of Sydney.

But it had happened to him and to those with whom he had broken the bread of heaven. It was not some Alpine village of the kind he knew only from films set in Europe. It was a matter of
these
plain streets. A priest, whether in Homebush or in a mountain-girt Catholic village, could not break the seal of the confessional to save his life, to protect his good name, to refute a false accusation, to save the life of others, to aid the course of justice, or to avert a public calamity. He was not bound by any oath in court when asked to reveal what was said in the confessional. A confessor who directly violated the seal of confession incurred an automatic excommunication, which only the Vatican could lift. The Fourth Lateran Council seven hundred years past had stated a sentiment Darragh was familiar with: “Let the confessor take absolute care not to betray the sinner through word or sign, or in any other way whatsoever. . . .” The Czech saint St. John Nepomucene, confessor to King Wenceslaus IV and to his queen, knew that the king was perverse in his sexual practice, and that the queen was utterly faithful to him. Wenceslaus tortured St. John so that he might reveal the queen's sins, and when he would not, he was thrown into the river Moldava and drowned, dying to preserve the seal.

The other law which Darragh knew from his student days and now could recount to himself instinctively was that he could not even raise the matter with Fratelli outside the confessional, unless by some miracle, some quirk of his madness or guilt, Fratelli himself raised it.

Darragh heard himself tell Fratelli flatly that he must now turn himself over to the authorities, and heard Fratelli answering in a reasonable, doleful voice.

Darragh shook his head. “What? What are you telling me?”

“I said, I am the authorities,” said Fratelli moderately, with the mildest sadness.

“You are not an authority. You are the authority for nothing.”

“Just now,” Fratelli said reasonably, “you told me the grace of confession will help me not do any of this again. I wish never to do it again. But if I turn myself in, Father, I'll be hanged.”

“Don't you think that just?”

“Kind of just,” Fratelli conceded.

“You'll do this dreadful thing again.”

“Not if I pray.”

“This is hopeless,” said Darragh. “Will you release me from the seal of the confessional, so that I can talk to you about this, face to face?”

“You can't tell anybody else?”

“No, I can talk only to you. In fact, if anyone else overheard us, they'd be bound to secrecy too. But nobody will overhear us.”

“Father, I have a purpose to amend myself.”

Darragh shook his head. “When will we meet then?”

“Why not outside?” suggested Fratelli. “Now.”

For some reason this made Darragh furious. “Haven't you got any shame at all?”

“I have shame. And if you don't speak to me gentle, Father, who will?”

“I don't know if I can do that yet. Speak gently, I mean.”

Fratelli said, “Maybe you'll be given the grace to do it. If I can be, you sure can too.”

“Stop this sophistry, for God's own sake.”

“I don't understand,” said Fratelli. “All I understand is that I'm contrite.”

“God forgive you,” said Darragh, and then he absolved Fratelli of the crime of destroying Kate Heggarty. He imposed a penance of one whole rosary, the Joyful, Glorious, and Sorrowful Mysteries, to be recited within the next twenty-four hours. It was such a fatuous penalty, Darragh thought, for the deaths by omission of Negroes, the deaths by commission of wives. He suspected that, after all, the sacrament of penance was not designed for such sins and Fratelli should have stayed, without approaching the confessional, in the habitation of the damned, some outer dark, awaiting capture.

By the time the stunned Darragh emerged, thinking, Surely he has gone, it was full night. He looked automatically at his watch—it was only three-quarters of an hour before Saturday-night Benediction, which meant a full church of people these anxious days. All attending to their contract with God—I will attend Benediction and Mass if you will let him live . . . if you make sure I die before him . . . if you give me a sign that he has gone to heaven . . . if you will turn the alien hosts away. God made no contracts, however. Except perhaps the long-term contract of redemption, longer-running than the term set by the severest bank, the most avid insurance company.

He found Fratelli smoking calmly on the side steps of the church. The light in Mrs. Flannery's presbytery kitchen thinly blinked between blackout curtains. Darragh snatched the cigarette from his hand and ground it out against the pavement. He was aware, from this sudden contact, of the meatiness of Fratelli's hand and thus, by implication, of the arm in which it ended. He took a step back in disgust.

“Father,” said Fratelli without sarcasm, “I think you might hang me yourself.” And he held his hands up palm first. “We can talk more about it. Tomorrow night. Are you free tomorrow night?”

Darragh tried to perceive some notional calendar of his coming activities. He saw only vacancy. He said, “Yes, tomorrow night.”

Here, in the broader night, Fratelli was in command. “Okay. I want you to dress like a normal Joe. My style. You got any civvies, Father? There's a pub in the Cross, Greenknowe Street. Open all hours to us and our friends. We'll find a quiet corner. A corner with walls behind us. Will you come, really?”

“I tell you to surrender yourself tonight. I don't want a drinking session with you.”

“It takes time and a bit of moral support before a guy can do that, Father. And I'm on duty tonight. So will you come tomorrow?”

“You're not in a position to order a priest around.”

“No, but you'll come. We'll settle everything that needs to be settled then.”

Darragh thought himself further into the meeting Fratelli proposed. There was something about those “walls behind us” Fratelli had mentioned that alarmed Darragh, who harbored a primal desire to live longer than Fratelli. No Moldava River for me, he pledged.

“I'll bring someone with me, though,” he said. He could not imagine who it would be. “Just someone to keep an eye on me. He can drink in another part of the bar. He won't know what we're saying.”

“Who will you bring?” asked Fratelli, sniffing the air, suddenly irritable. “I don't want another guy. Another guy mightn't know that what I told you is sacred. I don't want eavesdroppers.”

“I can assure you, this fellow won't eavesdrop.”

“But he'll know you don't trust me.”

“I don't.”

“Says very little for the absolution you just gave. And all that grace you talk about.”

“I'm a human being, and I'm scared. I'll tell this—” Darragh was going to say “friend”—“parishioner that I'm afraid you're such a sociable man I might get drunk, that he's there to get me home safe. I'll tell him we're talking, privately, about Private Aspillon.”