Three Cheers for the Paraclete

by Thomas Keneally

‘No, I don’t think it could.’

  He peered violently at Maitland, then back at the cutlery. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘What have I been doing?’

  ‘Never mind. Do you want me to help you? Getting them back to the kitchen, I mean.’

  The young man held his breath to convulsive lengths and let it go in sobs.

  ‘I’m not mad. These things were a direct occasion of sin to me. You know. It sounds mad, but …’

  Maitland slid into the hole, thinking, Another triumph for Western Christianity. He asked Hurst, ‘Did you get much dirt in them?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not much.’

  ‘Well, we can just slip them back into the kitchen.’

  He scrabbled his hand in under the corner of the thing. Hurst watched, jabbing at tears, warning, ‘It’s very heavy.’

  It was, in fact, as heavy as a strong-box and, when first edged from its bed, growled like an animal. Maitland laughed and told Hurst, ‘When I heard that noise a moment ago, I thought it was an Alsatian. Come on.’

  They made a coffin-bearing silhouette against the clear heaven, but there was no one to see them, and the nuns had gone from the kitchen to their early night-prayers. As his arms began to feel the strain, Maitland grew improperly angry. He could remember leaving his room at night, a God-struck eighteen-year-old, to roll drums of tar, used for path-mending, off this very platform, lest his brethren stumble over them on their evening walks. Now as the memory of himself at eighteen, performing moral idiocies in the moonlight, nettled him, so did Hurst. There was something particularly insufferable about grunting indoors to find that someone, as if to underline Hurst’s fatuity, had left a honed kitchen-knife on the chopping board.

  ‘I’m supposed to be at study,’ Hurst said, rapidly espousing the sanity of timetables.

  ‘No, I think you need a bit of supper. Come upstairs.’

  ‘I’m not mad, doctor. I simply don’t want you to jump to conclusions.’

  But he followed Maitland. It was not yet time to ask what grudge he bore cutlery. He was still in a state where he took it for granted that many a good life and mind had been ruined by an improper attachment to table-knives. Within twenty minutes, though, breathing into a cup of coffee in Maitland’s room, he was able to speak about his strange anguish as about a symptom. So Maitland, eleven years past, having rolled drums half the night, strode into the lecture hall at nine the next morning and explained Leibniz’s theory of monads with utter lucidity.

  ‘Used you confess this sort of thing?’ Maitland asked him.

  He used. Usually once every two or three days.

  ‘What used your confessor say?’

  Hurst gave an outline.

  ‘My God!’ Maitland called out. ‘Why did you keep on patronizing him?’

  ‘He seemed so – self-contained.’

  Maitland said, ‘Believe me, for your sanity’s sake, he gave you some benighted advice.’

  ‘Did he?’ begged Hurst, grimacing with an effort of hope. ‘I thought I was the benighted one.’ And, within a few seconds, thought it again. ‘It’s impossible, Dr Maitland. You heard the brilliant sort of thing he said tonight. Look, his – composure stood out so clearly I felt I had to get out of the refectory.’

  ‘I saw you go.’ Maitland squinted in a futile effort not to ask, ‘You’re not speaking of Dr Costello?’

  ‘Yes. He’s my confessor.’

  Despite layers of insouciance and a passable acquaintance with the history of the Church, Maitland was still appalled to find that Rome had chosen badly. He decided to be rash.

  ‘You’ve got only your own and my word for it, and you’ll probably find out that Costello resents me perhaps more than I resent him. But believe me, you have been perilously advised.’

  Hurst stared into his tranquil coffee again, and addressed it as if reading Costello’s features there.

  ‘His motives were good. He didn’t want me to seek treatment because he thought the whole business would pass. And he thought it might endanger my chances of ever becoming a priest. As you know, a person needs Monsignor Nolan’s vote to be ordained priest. And you can’t go to a psychiatrist without his permission, and he never seems to forgive anyone who does so. So,’ Hurst ended hopelessly, ‘there you are.’

  ‘And it’s bloody infantile.’

  ‘Just the same, I want to be ordained a priest.’

  ‘As if it were your fault and not theirs!’

  ‘Perhaps it is mine, doctor. It was impossible, listening to Costello tonight, to think of him as a man at fault.’

  ‘Even if he threatened to put his episcopal boot up your …? Pardon me, Hurst, I was already angry with the man when I met you this evening.’

  ‘It’s strange,’ Hurst admitted, ‘but I’ve always found him oddly disgruntling.’ He raised his eyes tentatively and smiled. ‘Isn’t it strange how often you want to be like people you don’t even like?’

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  Since Costello’s spirit filled the house to splitting, these two men who had scores against him were bound to brotherhood of a kind; two members of an underground. In celebration of their freemasonry, Hurst’s sight kept taking small excursions along Maitland’s bookshelves. He seemed expectant, this young man of twenty-two who had felt called by the devil to gut clerics and by God to bury the cutlery. He was twenty-two and innocent, a believer in books, a believer in the Incarnation, Christ’s light yoke, moral theology, and his own fundamental depravity. Now he rested in the certainties and in the false peace that follows excess or exposure.

  Considering whether he should turn the matter over to Costello’s discretion, for the man could not be a thorough fool and had never had for guidance the potent sight of Hurst actually interring the knife drawer, Maitland rose and plugged in the hot-water jug once more. This stood on two volumes of Migne’s Patrology, probably the two most valuable books he owned. He thought, ‘If I brew up coffee on Migne, can I pretend to outraged sanity when faced with Hurst’s exploit?’

  Hurst said, ‘I want to see a doctor. And I want to be ordained a priest.’

  Maitland nodded. ‘Let me tell you this. In a camp for suicide pilots, the prime goal in life for all personnel would be to successfully and at all costs kill oneself. Here it is to manage at all costs to be ordained priest. So that you may think that a mad priest – we’ll let the word stand – is less mad because of his priesthood than the mad gas-fitter or clerk or short-order cook. You may think too that the torment of a sick priest is more desirable and consecrated than the torment of a sick anybody. As they say in the films, “Forget it, Buster!”’

  ‘I know,’ Hurst said, sounding hurt.

  ‘I’m sorry. No doubt you’re full up of being advised floridly by your elders. But being a priest isn’t everything.’

  ‘Did you think so, at my age?’

  ‘It doesn’t make you of a different race. The basic duties are human ones, surely. To get back your –’

  ‘Sanity?’ Hurst suggested.

  ‘Equilibrium,’ said Maitland with relief, after thumbing through the poor Roget’s of his mind. ‘Which is a different thing altogether from merely avoiding going mad. Am I being too dogmatic …?’

  ‘You make my prospects sound remote,’ Hurst accused him, and Maitland was overcome with peevishness at this boy so willing to swallow all Costello’s pietistic guff, so resistant to basics.

  ‘The trouble is, you want to be comforted, but comfort won’t take you any distance. You want the same old ineffectual elixir. To be told that you must immerse yourself in God, submit yourself with an utter submission on all levels of your being. To be told, too, to stop worrying about the compulsion to cut peoples’ balls out –’ Hurst quickly shut his eyes – ‘and leave the onus of the matter on God.’

  The boy, who had gone grey with quiet anger, asked, ‘Isn’t it all the truth?’

  ‘Of course it’s all true. But you can’t do any of it. Neither can I. And when we can do it, we’ll be more or less perfe
ct. We’ll taste God face-to-face and dive into death like a trout.’

  ‘That’ll never happen. And whose fault is it?’

  ‘Without being maudlin, I think we’re two good lads ruined by the poisonous old idea that will-power will get you anything.’ Maitland raised his hand and outlined the words he spoke, as if they were bannered in carnivalsized letters across the room. ‘You can be a saint this month if you want to be! Suppress the wild provinces of the spirit! Put a lid on the stew!’

  The jug began to shudder, and Maitland spooned into Hurst’s cup the cheap coffee powder he bought each week. Every time he intended to ask for something that tasted less like granulated cardboard, but always concluded, once he breasted the grocer’s counter, that a brain-clot might finish him any old night and make inane the quest for a better coffee.

  He said, ‘Yes, you can be a saint if you want. But then, what’s the use of the idea of the divine, what’s the use of mystery, rite, myth, the whole caboose, if you can be the man you want to be?’ He poured the hot water. ‘In another sense, Hurst, we are the men we wanted to be. Except that we’ve gone off on ourselves, like time-bombs or something. The old explosive idea of God went off in our faces. You, Hurst, are the maimed laboratory worker, and the management won’t be happy. God damn them!’

  Hurst was still angry. ‘God,’ he said, ‘provides the grace that vivifies the will.’

  ‘Don’t make me sick! Here, drink this. I’m not very kind, am I?’

  ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, there’s all the hope in the world for you.’

  ‘Is there all the hope in the world of becoming a priest?’

  Hurst’s mouth, which seemed never to have emerged from adolescence, quivered with yearnings bred on ordination speeches, treatises on the priesthood, Lacordaire’s sermon. There was an almost feminine, and therefore – to Maitland – alarming quality of sorrow in that mouth ringed with scars of boyhood pimples not yet quite outgrown.

  Maitland lied to a face that begged lies. ‘Why not?’ he said.

  In that case, said Hurst, binding him, would Dr Maitland consider arranging a visit for him to a doctor. If they had expert opinion, they’d know better how to approach Dr Nolan without damaging the good chances Dr Maitland had just assured Hurst he had.

  ‘I could slip out one afternoon.’

  ‘“One” is the word,’ Maitland said. Nervously. A person got inured to the tone of the house and thought of his standing. And found it not too grotesque that adults should be required to abstain from psychiatrists; psychiatrists being usurpers of Nolan’s overlordship of spirits. ‘After one visit I do the Herod and soap act. Then it’s up to you, God, and Nolan.’

  He would have thought that breakfast was to be a trial, to sit and suffer that frigid attentiveness by which the outrageous are passed the sugar and salt without delay. So it was that the bacon dish came to him from Nolan like a symbol of isolation. Yet one of the younger priests leant and whispered to him, ‘I enjoyed that. If Cos has one fault it’s that he’s a little bit lordly. It isn’t good for bishops to be lordly.’

  So Maitland forgot himself and had a good breakfast.

  After morning thanksgiving in chapel, Egan, who could have strolled down the hall with the president and the bishop-elect, chose to talk to Maitland, chose to be openly companionable.

  ‘What do the staff think?’ Maitland asked him.

  ‘I’ll be frank, James. They thought you could have been a whit less pungent.’

  Maitland laughed gently and without malice at the small priest’s courtly choice of words.

  ‘However,’ Egan pursued, ‘if our honoured friend has any fault …’

  ‘Oh, I think that’s established,’ said Maitland. ‘I’ve seen him exercising a fault or two.’

  ‘Indeed. And his faults all stem from a certain pomposity of temperament.’

  ‘I couldn’t have said it better.’

  ‘I think it will do him nothing but good.’

  Maitland saw that the certainty with which a defensor vinculi should lay down his judgments shone in Egan this morning.

  Maitland whispered, ‘You seem very much at one with the world this morning.’

  Egan rolled his eyes, meaning, ‘There are reasons.’ Taking Maitland’s elbow, he guided him through the traffic of breakfasted students and cornered him against one of the appalling fluted pilasters. It was, besides decisive, an extravagant gesture for Egan, and James saw now a hard excitement, not completely joyous, in the man’s eyes.

  ‘Nora is flying to London in two weeks’ time. Thank God she has the money.’

  ‘It will be better for you then, won’t it?’ Maitland said.

  Egan hissed, ‘Yes. Yes. It’s our salvation. Nothing less.’

  ‘I suppose there are ways in which it causes you –’ he shrugged; he was ill-acquainted with lovers’ terms – ‘heartburn.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Maurice swallowing. ‘Well, yes, I suppose. But heartburn doesn’t count. She has the money to do it and she’s doing it.’ He laughed in brittle joviality. ‘The rich certainly have the advantage on the poor when it comes to avoiding the occasions of – of sin. The rich can do it by international jet.’

  Suddenly he was so proud of Nora’s background that he let James out of the corner and they walked on. ‘Did you know that Nora and Celia and their brother own between them thirty-five thousand acres of grazing, the very best hotel in half a dozen country towns, and three or four racehorses? The brother manages the property and Celia manages the racehorses. He has told me stories of things Celia has done to jockeys that would fill you with pity for the poor fellows.’

  ‘That’s not hard to believe,’ Maitland told him.

  ‘No. Whereas Nora has a talent for – what do they call it? They have professorships in it these days. Yes, hotel administration. She managed the premier hotel in W———.’

  Once more the native name that Nora had spoken while drunk evoked red peppercorns, red earth, and jagged atoms of light; and the desire to catch a train to these things.

  ‘That was before her sickness. It serves to show you that before her sickness she was very capable, very even in temperament.’

  ‘Speaking of sickness, Maurice, do you know the name of a good psychiatrist? I think he’d need to be a Catholic, but not party-line. Someone who has a jovial contempt for that cockeyed organ known as the Catholic conscience.’

  Egan laughed. ‘You’re very unorthodox, James.’ He looked sly. ‘I have just the man,’ he said.

  13

  MAITLAND HAD NOT yet finished having adventures with newspapers.

  It was an opulent winter afternoon. Light lay on the eye like a veneer of the best quality, and the indoor dimness of the house seemed enriched to mahogony. Maitland was seated at his desk, stifling the urge to sleep or go out strolling, when Nolan came in without knocking.

  The president was a known after-lunch napper. He was, at that moment, stripped to black trousers, slippers and flannel shirt. The shirt, like everything else about Nolan, spoke to Maitland of a lost and naïve age, of sombre flannel-shirted fathers standing before a basin of water set down on a black-butt stump, ritually washing red grime and sawdust from their arms. Nolan’s paternity within the house was of this flannel-shirt era – strong and remote, and so piquantly old-fashioned that it could not fail to convince those who survived it that it had been what every young cleric needs.

  The monsignor’s Adam’s-apple, chicken-fleshed from the work of cut-throat razor and anno Domini, jiggled as he swallowed back the bitter juices of his late lunch.

  ‘I knew you shouldn’t have touched that land business,’ he told Maitland.

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘That land business. It’s not our sphere. As I warned you.’

  Nolan’s anger seemed to Maitland to have emerged unexpectedly from the president’s pre-nap musings, to have moved so powerfully in him as to make him rise and tramp down the hall to cha
stise the difficult young man.

  Maitland shrugged, ‘I simply thought it was my sphere.’

  ‘You have a cousin involved in all this? Some post-office employee?’

  ‘Some post-office employee.’ Maitland nodded.

  ‘Yes. Water’s thicker than blood with him.’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘He’s not backing you up in this matter. There are some people downstairs to see you. From the press. I think you should speak to them. Your cousin has.’

  Maitland could have kicked a chair or pounded the wall or even Nolan. The way in which his petty adventures in benevolence returned to their dead-letter office in this stale old man was, for the moment, intolerable.

  ‘There’s no need to dress,’ said the stale old man.

  Which prompted Maitland to put on his soutane; to show that he was not racked by curiosity and that the pleasure of being effectively mum and augurial all the way downstairs would not be Nolan’s. Similarly, he took the time to fit his collar on.

  ‘Hurry,’ Nolan said.

  In the vestibule, Maurice Egan seemed to be holding back a tide. One of the leaves of the double door was held open with a firm pink fist, the other pushed shut with the shoulder. He stood so heroically that it might have been the Goths or Charles V’s German mercenaries or some other raucous body of anti-clericals that he opposed there. In fact the only raised voice was Egan’s own.

  ‘No, no,’ he was saying. ‘It isn’t my place to ask you in, I’m sorry. It’s Dr Maitland’s affair.’

  ‘Do you know they’ve gone to the trouble of sending a photographer?’ Nolan was provoked into asking as they traversed the arms of the marble cross inlaid in the vestibule floor.

  Beyond the door a polite blonde showed no desire to force an entry. A photographer stood by her, frowning over his flash.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Maitland called to them over the pudgy stanchion that was Egan’s left arm.

  The girl said quietly, ‘Dr Maitland, I’m sorry to worry you. But the editor thought it only fair that you be given a chance to comment.’

  ‘Comment? Excuse me, Maurice.’ He edged around Egan’s shepherding form and onto the porch. ‘Comment?’