The Black Dress (19 page)

‘Why did you not speak out, Mary?’ Papa asked me. I gave him my reasons, tension building up below my breastbone. I knew that look of Papa’s. The stop-at-nothing anger starting up in his eyes, the righteous anger that he seemed almost to enjoy. God only knew what he would do. I tried to calm him down.

‘It’s over, Papa. Next year the inspector will realise who has been teaching well, and—’

Donald broke in. He was hopping from foot to foot with eagerness. He was very young; he didn’t understand the possible consequences to us of setting Papa off on a crusade. He just liked the excitement and the feeling that Papa would fight injustice. Oh, you could depend on Papa for that, if for nothing else.

‘That’s not all, Papa!’

Donald told Papa of the rearrangement of the classes. Papa looked at Annie and me.

‘Is this true, Maria Ellen?’

‘Mr Cusack has the right to order the classes as he sees fit, Papa,’ I said quietly.

Then he exploded. I’ve heard a lot of Papa’s rants and that was a good one. It went on for a full ten minutes, covering Mr Cusack’s morals, background, lack of integrity, unsuitability for having the moral care of young souls, and ending with a prohibition against Annie going back to teach under him.

‘You shall not return to that false authority, Anne,’ he said. ‘I forbid it.’

Then he turned to me. I knew he wanted to forbid my going back, too, but wasn’t sure of my reaction. He didn’t even think for a moment about how we would manage if neither Annie nor I were bringing money home.

‘
I
am over 21, Papa,’ I said. That was all, but it was enough. He had no legal authority to control me, and he was afraid, I think, that if he pushed me to defy him he would lose all our respect. What we had left, anyway.

‘You must make your own decisions, Maria,’ he said grandly. ‘Pray for guidance.’

‘Och, Mary, you won’t leave your position?’ Mamma cried. I reassured her.

‘Mary must follow her conscience,’ Papa said. He went over to the hatstand and took down his hat.

‘Please, Papa, please leave things as they are!’ I begged. ‘I need that job. The family needs the money! It will do no good to—’

‘We cannot consider our own needs when the moral guidance of children is in the hands of a liar and a cheat!’ he said, in his grand oratory manner. ‘That man must be removed from his position!’

I lost my temper. I was upset myself, but that is no excuse. Papa, once again, was going off to set the world right without the slightest concern for others—for you know, he did not care individually for the students in the school, only for the abstract ideas of probity and moral guidance.

‘Papa, you should not! You are acting selfishly! Consider Mamma!’ I cried.

‘Well, Flora?’ he said, turning to her. Mamma looked up at him. I don’t know what she saw. Perhaps the young man she had fallen in love with? The man who had ridden through storm and rain to bring her the midwife when John was born? But her face softened and her eyes filled with tears.

‘You must do as your conscience directs you, Alex,’ she said. ‘God will provide.’

Papa kissed her on the cheek.

‘Thank you, Flora,’ he said.

Then he went off to see the priest and demand that Mr Cusack be sacked. Which he was. Which started a war of words like Portland had never seen. It was my first experience of having an enemy, for Mr Cusack decided his dismissal was my fault, as I had the most to gain by his absence. He blackened my name in every way he could think of, with lies and slander and calumny. The town was split in its allegiance and the falling outs were bitter.

I was astonished that so many of my ‘friends’ in Portland believed him. It taught me how shallow popularity is, how easily others will listen to lies, and how valueless is anything other than the truth that is known only to the soul and its Maker.

It prepared me, as so much in my early life prepared me, for later calumny and slander and lies. Oh, the lies! Let’s see ... people have reported that I was a drunkard, have tried to get me arrested for the non-payment of debts (for a pair of boots!), and of course I was a defiant, wild, disobedient woman who, according to poor dear old Bishop Sheil, brought the wicked ways of the world into my convent. Oh, my, it’s hard not to laugh but laughing hurts so much.

I was calm through all the kerfuffle in Portland, so calm that Annie and Maggie and my mother could not understand me. I said nothing. Replied to no taunts, no accusations. What good would it do? I had learnt, long ago, from Papa’s disputations in the newspapers, that replying to calumny only increased the slanders, only entrenched the two sides in their opposition, and merely fogged the truth even further. Besides, this was meant to happen.

My family hadn’t known the purpose of my
novena,
you see, but I saw, as the scandal and bother increased, the hand of God detaching me from Portland, just as I had prayed. No-one was trying to keep me there now!

If Papa hadn’t acted so, I am sure God would have found another way of setting me free. I feel badly now that, even though I saw clearly the Lord’s hand in action, I blamed my father so much. That was mostly habit, I think, the habit of being exasperated and annoyed with him when he disrupted our lives. It’s an easy thing to get into, a habit like that, particularly with a man like Papa! Even Mamma, eventually, after so many, many years of unflagging support for him, was angry over Portland. She had been so happy there. Maggie was furious, all her lovely family peace up in smoke. We had to take in ‘gentlemen lodgers’ to make ends meet, so Annie and Lexie and Maggie moved back to Fitzroy Cottage, where we had first lived when we moved to Portland.

Then some boys, taking Mr Cusack’s side, shouted at Papa in the street and threw stones at him and he took them to court, God help us all. The students’ parents took them away, the parish priest wouldn’t take Annie back and I was coping with three classes at once until he could find replacement teachers.

Into all of this came a letter from Father Woods, telling me that Miss Johnson, who had run the Catholic school in Penola (a fee-paying school, like Portland) had married and was retiring, and it was time for me to come and start the free school as we had discussed. ‘Come and begin our great work,’ he wrote. He knew, for we had had many discussions about our family circumstances, that I could not leave Mamma to cope with all the family and Papa. But he did not want the whole family to come to Penola, especially Papa. ‘You cannot deny that your father is an unfortunate manager and might embarrass your position very much’.

An understatement, considering what had just happened in Portland.

Father Woods proposed that Mamma should remain in Portland, taking in boarders, with Donald and Peter and John, who would find work. Papa should go to Uncle Peter’s place at Hamilton, north of Portland, while Maggie, whose health was not improving, went to live with Uncle Peter and Aunt Julia at their other property at Duck Ponds. Annie, Lexie and I would go to Penola and start the school.

The plan did not address our debts, but Father Woods declared that he would take these on himself and leave us free to begin teaching the poor. Oh, I wish he had. It would have made the next few years much easier for all of us. Father Woods was prone to enthusiasms like that, promising things, especially about money, which he was not able to give.

It wasn’t dishonesty—at the time, fired by his belief in God’s will, he truly believed he would be able to provide what was necessary—but he never
planned
for it as he needed to. A man of great vision, to whom I shall always be thankful, but, God bless him, he had no real idea of how to work in the world, or the trials and malice and straightforward lies he would receive from others.

He didn’t know what to do when he encountered dislike or malice. Where Papa would jump into the fray, tongue spitting out invective with real satisfaction, Father Woods retreated into hurt dismay, or used his personal charm (oh, that was very real!) to persuade others into being his supporters. He was much more successful with women than with men. I think many men distrusted his charm and his eloquence. Poor Father! He meant so well, and was so easily deceived and led into error, often by his own obsessions with the, the ... the more
obscure
branches of religion, like visions and angelic visitations and stigmata.

The trouble we had in the early days with visions! One of the nuns involved at least admitted her deception. She, I think, was stimulated and excited by the lies and attention she received, her mind too easily influenced, but the other nun was a simple mischief-maker who was out to control the convent in my absence, though she was the last person I would have left in charge!

Oh, she was dangerous, Ignatius, no doubt about it, as she proved more than once.

But I must ask, what kind of unhappiness led her to such malice and deception—creating a poltergeist, pretending to see visions,
blaspheming
by claiming direct contact with Our Blessed Lord through the stigmata? How could anyone who had
truly
experienced the feeling of God in her heart ever
pretend
about it? Impossible. She was not suited to life in a convent, but Father Woods would not hear a word against her, even after Sister Angela confessed their deception.

Oh, so many times I’ve heard him criticised by others. So many times others have invited me to criticise too. But no matter what happened later, I could not. Without Father Woods the Institute would never have come into being. That’s why I wrote a book about his life, to make sure that people remembered that.

People often complained about Father. ‘The man’s mad, Mother Mary, surely you can see that?’ they would say. ‘He’s leaving a trail of debts a mile long, and no way to pay for it!’ Or even, ‘He should be locked up in an asylum where he can’t do anyone any harm!’ But how could I criticise him when I could remember his kindness and his real vision for the work of the Institute? His letter to me in Portland said, ‘Come and begin our great work, Mary.’

I knew when I received it that the time had come for me to start my real work, and yet my heart bled—Father Woods’ plan meant the break-up of my family and we all knew that Mamma and Papa would never live together again.

It was not a step that Mamma would ever have taken on her own, no matter how much, in later years, she wished for peace from Papa’s tirades and poor decisions and public humiliations. But with Father Woods’ express command, she could believe that she was following the Will of God. After the troubles in Portland, I think all she wanted was a little quiet, time to mother her boys and speak to her neighbours without worrying about what Papa had last said or done.

I have seen Papa described as a drunk more than once, but I think that is because drunkenness is a thing people understand, while Papa’s over-zealous regard for truth and probity is strange to them. Though it’s true he liked a dram or two, and liked it more as he got older and felt more useless.

After we left Portland, I never saw my father again. He died three years later, at Hamilton, with Mamma by his side.

How sad it is to think that even Mamma saw his death as freeing her from a trial, for she had continued to send him whatever monies she could; particularly when he had fallen out (inevitably!) with the overseer of the property and had to move to another part of Uncle Peter’s domain in Geelong for a time.

It was a sad death because there was so little to celebrate about his life, but we were relieved as well as saddened. What a contrast to Mamma’s death, where we all genuinely grieved for such a long time, although we were sure she was safe in Heaven with Papa, John, Maggie and Alick.

So little to celebrate ... but now I wonder. Three of his children chose the religious life—me in the Josephites, Lexie as a Good Shepherd nun, and Donald as a Jesuit. Mamma taught us loving faith but Papa encouraged our vocations, as she never did.

It was a mystery to me at the time as to why I was called. I have wondered, over and over, at the flood of memories these last days have brought back. The Holy Spirit has finally made it clear to me. I have always said that my early life prepared me to be a nun, but now I realise my childhood gave me more than an acceptance of living on charity!

It needed an educated woman to start an order of teaching nuns, and I was as educated as women were allowed to be at that time. It needed someone with an
intimate
acquaintance with poverty, a working woman, to start the kind of schools that the poor really needed—schools that taught them practical subjects like bookkeeping and letter-writing, instead of rhetoric and Latin. It needed someone who was committed to her Catholic faith, as it was both the material and spiritual needs of the children that had to be filled. It needed someone who had been poor herself to ensure that poor children were treated equally, loved equally, praised equally—someone who did not believe that the poor deserved their lot. Apart from that, she needed to have the faith that God would provide! There were not many women in Australia at that time, I think, who met those criteria. Perhaps there was only one who was Catholic.

Thinking about that list, it’s clear that without both my parents, I would not have been fit for the job.

Without the experience of poverty that Papa so liberally gave me, I might never have learnt compassion for the poor, never have understood that the poor were not a different, lesser form of humanity, as so many of our class believed—never have learnt to beg for my daily bread! Oh, it hurts to laugh. Poor Papa. Without his fights with Dunmore Lang, would I have learnt to keep silent and let controversy die down around me, as it so often has, or would I have stirred it up and made it worse? Without his carelessness with money, would I have learnt to scrimp and save and plan? Without his impulsiveness and tendency to vitriol, would I have learnt to keep the peace between my Sisters as I had to? To think twice, to search for a charitable answer, to offer my opinion humbly and to make corrections gently, without heat?

Most important of all, without his absolute commitment to doing what God required of him, would I have heard God’s Call to me? Would I have recognised it when it came? Would I have stood up to the bishops when they tried to take over the Institute? Would I have fought so hard for the establishment of the Rule?