Three Cheers for the Paraclete

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘Please read it.’

  ‘My dear Maurie,’ it began, as if a diminutive could soothe, ‘I find it hard to believe that you fully intended the commission you have given me to do and which – I’m sure you’ll be willing to believe – I will perform at any personal cost if that is what you want. Just the same, I’m sure that if I tried to negotiate the difficult business which you have decided on, I’d be very glad of a chance to reconsider the course I was taking. I feel that the one to help you reconsider, Maurie, is your own archbishop …’

  ‘As this man himself would say,’ Maitland muttered, ‘that’s rich.’

  ‘… I feel that questions of confidence don’t enter into the relationship between a priest and his bishop, and I hear that yours is a very enlightened man, so that he’d be aware of what high-quality product one Maurie Egan is. I am writing him by the same mail as I am sending this …’

  ‘A good old chancellery fascist, this boy!’ said Maitland.

  ‘… and will be willing to perform anything that you and he work out in concert. Rest assured, Maurice, I shall remember you at the altar of sacrifice each morning …’

  ‘I’ve ruined you for nothing.’

  ‘No one ruins what isn’t.’ He found it hard to be disturbed that the crisis had come.

  ‘I was mad, James.’ That being preferable to a fall from grace. ‘I was mad. A good friend, a good friend …’

  Maitland forced him into the back seat of his little coupé and drove him back to the House of Studies. Later in the evening Nolan called in a discreet Catholic doctor to inject sedative into Egan. To Almighty God via the almighty knock-out drop, thought Maitland, although he was glad to see his friend sink to sleep, and only the super-righteous presence of Nolan and Costello moved him to irony.

  Later, Costello cornered him. ‘The president and I, we’ve been reviewing the time you’ve spent here. We find it hard to believe that you want to remain a priest.’

  Maitland was shaken. He said, ‘It’s essential that I stay.’

  ‘Essential? You mean, for your salvation?’

  Maitland agreed. ‘Yes, for that.’

  Costello sighed. ‘With your record, James, and taking that book into consideration … it becomes impossible for anyone to tell whether what you say is merely an exercise in sarcasm.’

  19

  NORA, WHO COYLY remembered her drunkenness of some months back, fluttered, but insisted that Maitland come in.

  ‘Maurice asked me to visit you,’ he explained, and his eyes wavered towards the bay-windowed prow of the living-room on his left. ‘Is your sister in?’

  ‘She is.’ But Nora foresaw no difficulty on that count. ‘Please come in, father. We’ve just made tea.’

  He followed her inside; where she kept remembering in a quavering way to perform little politenesses, such as to take his hat and point the way. He sensed, not altogether trusting the sense, that she was rushing him indoors; and found it beyond him to cut into her vein of ditheriness and force a conference in the hall. Full of complex dismay, they shuffled in the doorway of the living-room, both yielding the way, both beginning to move but yielding again. Within sat Celia, possessed by an acrid calm. She glanced over her shoulder at Maitland’s entry and sat forward almost politely, her raised left hand begging silence. Beside her, a race broadcast gurgled towards its upshot.

  ‘Sit here, father,’ Nora whispered. She was suddenly more expansive; even her shoulders were not as hunched.

  Maitland sat in what was obviously her chair, at the sunny end of the room near Celia. Now the horses were into the straight, and Celia swallowed. Living for the culmination, dressed in a long floral frock that made her seem proportionate or, better still, lovely, she woke large and cordial sensualities in Maitland’s belly. But the habit of celibacy asserted itself. He who rides a tiger, he thought …

  By which time the winners had been semaphored. Celia’s indolent hand turned the volume merely down, being satisfied when the ranting voice sounded like people arguing four or five gardens away.

  Immediately Maitland told them that Egan had gone to hospital. They heard him soberly. There was no yell of jubilee from Celia, no breast-beating from Nora, who looked unfathomably from Celia to Maitland to Celia again.

  Celia asked what the trouble was with Egan, and found a Dresden china teacup for Maitland while he told her of Egan’s nervous collapse. An acute anxiety state, he admitted.

  Nothing was said as tea was handed round; though Maitland could hear some harsh breathing from Nora. Yet, through silences that begged to be broken with tears, she did not weep. Rather, eyes down, Maitland began to feel that he was being stared at and, glancing at last, saw the two sisters, far from engrossed in him, totally distracted from him. Out of inert faces they peered at each other; raw, level, irrefragable communion. He wondered how Maurice Egan, with or without the Pope’s consent, would have dealt with this sister-hood deep as the womb.

  ‘What hospital?’ asked Nora, putting down her cup and straying towards the windows.

  Maitland told her. ‘He said he will write fully when he’s able. They have him drugged almost continuously.’

  ‘Poor, poor Maurice.’ Her voice gave. ‘Can he tell people apart?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s like a perpetual state of drunkenness, that’s all.’

  Though he bit his clumsy lip, neither woman saw need to impute spite to him.

  ‘We must go and see him as soon as possible, Celia. Are you using the car tomorrow?’

  Maitland tried to say, ‘There’s no chance –’

  ‘If you’d like the outing yourself,’ Nora suggested, ‘you could drive me up there.’

  ‘I might, too. It’s superb country. On a clear day you can get a view right to the sea.’

  Nora held her hands out for the afternoon sun to rinse. Saying ‘Poor, poor Maurice’ more resolutely this time. She stared at the moored yachts across the street, and the pottering yachtsmen.

  ‘We could take a picnic lunch,’ Celia proposed.

  ‘He’s probably not up to eating much. But we could take that chicken, in case. And then there are the giblets.’

  ‘Giblet broth.’

  ‘I was thinking the same thing. We might –’

  Maitland, close to panic-stricken, made a clatter with his cup, a brutal noise for Dresden. Picnic plans withered in the stem.

  He said. ‘Nora, you can’t see him.’

  With perhaps a sneer, Celia murmured, ‘My goodness, he must be ill …’

  Maitland persisted. ‘It isn’t that he’s too ill. Nora, I wonder could I speak to you in private?’

  The woman had gone sallow, but she said with a ferocity akin to Celia’s, ‘I want my sister to be here.’

  ‘Sit down, Nora,’ Celia prescribed and was obeyed.

  She made a good convenor. She said, ‘It seems you have something to tell us, father.’

  Just as he felt certain that these two women were sufficient to each other, he felt certain now that Nora would weep affectingly, temperately. In view of what he had to tell her, he hoped that these hastily founded certainties were valid. And it was not only the talk of giblet broth, nor their relish at the thought of nurse-maiding the broken priest that gave him hope. Rather that Nora had not convinced him, when he had come in a state that could largely be called willing to be convinced. His instincts hinted that, having suffered, she had become inured to living off the stored fat of her agonies, was growing, like her sister, into a professional wronged-woman.

  ‘He wanted me to let you know,’ Maitland began, ‘that he can’t see you again, not even once. He’ll write, as I said, but he isn’t capable of writing or telephoning yet, and the message couldn’t wait.’

  Nora wept affectingly, temperately, yet credibly enough to alarm Maitland.

  He thought, ‘So much for certainties! This may be the real McCoy, eternal widowhood for Nora Tully.’ Yet he could not manage to believe it.

  Celia could. She had risen, and stood chaf
ing Nora’s shoulders. Since to go on lolling and to intervene both seemed improper, Maitland sat tight, waiting to give details. But Celia began first. The tragedy, or whatever it was, had at least muted her.

  ‘He decides when to terminate the affair, eh? When he feels the bite? Ask him what about the girl he’s kept bloody enthralled for two years.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t his own decision.’

  ‘I suppose his spiritual director told him. Lop off the limb of Satan! She won’t feel it. It’ll only damn-well kill her, that’s all. Spiritual directors! Illiterate disrespecters of human decency –’

  ‘His archbishop told him to cut the connection.’

  ‘His archbishop?’

  ‘The archbishop. It was a command.’ He tried to speak directly to Nora. ‘He could never have given the system up. It would have killed him to do it. He would have been no use to you as an apostate, or whatever they call them.’

  ‘I suppose you think God is honoured by all this?’ said Celia.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m the type who could leave tomorrow without my old vows poisoning me, turning to gangrene, if you like. But Maurice isn’t.’

  ‘Well, Nora doesn’t happen to be interested in you.’

  ‘I know. It wasn’t a proposal.’

  Nora asked, her small voice caught in clenched fists, ‘The Pope didn’t grant him his petition?’

  ‘Some minor official returned the letter to His Grace. It was an impossible plan, Nora. If Maurice hadn’t been so wrought-up he would have seen how impossible it was.’

  ‘She’s just the type to take a lot of notice of archbishops,’ Celia judged of her sister.

  ‘So is Maurice,’ Maitland told her.

  ‘Oh, damn Maurice. Celibacy is only a high form of sex-titillation. An attack on women from a more exalted level. You read the psychologists!’ she recommended.

  ‘I don’t think Maurice is getting much fun out of it, Miss Tully.’

  ‘Mrs Crosley, however abandoned.’ She bent and made soothing noises close to Nora’s ear. Egan’s dark girl, bereaved by a prelate, laid her head on the arm of her lounge chair and locked it down with her slim tragic fingers. Bolstered by such grief, Celia glowered at the priest.

  ‘It must be convenient to be attached to God via an archbishop. You play about with a girl until the human toll begins to mount. Then you let your archbishop know that you have been ensnared by some unscrupulous woman. He commands, “Cut the connection!” You tell the girl, “I’m sorry, but I’m bound in conscience. It’s the will of God and I’ll always pray for you, etc.” Isn’t that the perfect male fiddle? No male with the normal endowment of brains in his backside could think of a better one.’

  Maitland sighed. ‘If you’re trying to tell me that churchmen are dishonest, I know that already. The question is smaller – Maurice and Nora. They believe in archbishops, they believe in canon law. There’s no hope for them.’

  He saw that the quivering Nora was listening. He whispered to Celia, ‘Arguments about the turpitude of churchmen and Church won’t have any bearing. You must help her –’

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ roared Celia, and pranced away into the window area. Maitland blushed for sounding like a stage parson, and swallowed as she swept back down on him, strutting, her glorious breasts bobbing visibly. ‘Will you perhaps send me roneo’d notes on how to do it? Arrogance in the best traditions of Holy Mother Church! Maitland’s balm for the sin-sick soul!’

  Solitary now, Nora mourned and skirted some of the milder borders of hysteria. Maitland felt bound to stay until the girl had been calmed; yet calm might take as long as a birth or a death. He was pleased to see that Celia was intent now on making it quick.

  ‘Come over here with me and sit in the sun.’

  Helped to hobble to the window-seat, Nora indomitably rasped, ‘You don’t want to miss Regal Fred’s race.’

  ‘No. No. We’ll listen together. We won’t miss it. No. Some more tea?’

  They seemed again to have forgotten Maitland. Celia stroked Nora’s dark hair for some minutes and held her watch up to the light once. It must have been some time after four. The bay was going slowly molten, and the windscreens of a luxury launch blazed miraculously. At length she turned to him, her hair and shoulders glowing in the prismatic light of advanced afternoon.

  Completely lacking in ardour: ‘You can get out,’ she told Maitland.

  20

  ON A NIGHT in early July, Maitland came – to sit before an inquiry – to the door marked Sapientia at the cathedral presbytery; and was taken without delay to the council room where he had dealt so unprofitably with His Grace and Des Boyle some months before. There the fire went well, the table glinted like port wine. Recognized now by Maitland as an old acquaintance, St Sebastian still exercised his terrible heroism in the window behind His Grace.

  On the archbishop’s right sat Costello, within a day or two to enter retreat and reduce his life to order for consecration as a bishop. Already he looked quaint in his black, caped priest’s cassock; his presence was a prelatial one, and that he should still be wearing simple black looked like a deliberate and poorly staged act of public humility.

  Monsignor Nolan sat on the left of the head of the table, and occasionally fuelled the fire. Before him lay a thin sheaf of typewritten notes, but the copious notepaper in front of Costello and His Grace had not been touched.

  For Maitland, a chair had been placed to Nolan’s side of the room. The table seemed even more suited to dramatizing the gulf between judges and judged than did the one at Sister Martin’s inquiry, and His Grace had wanted to avoid overtones of trial: he sensed that Maitland’s case was too important to be dressed up in formal ways. So Maitland, treated again to that upside-down consideration which was his right as a wrong’un, would sit at least as close to the fire as would his judges, and on the edge of a chair made for fireside dozing. He wondered whether, if he had murdered Nolan, they’d have given him a chaise-longue.

  Nevertheless, he would be throughout badly exposed to the tribunal behind their oak ramparts.

  ‘You still don’t have an overcoat, James?’ asked His Grace, mostly in accusation, partly in something that was indulgent.

  ‘He earns enough,’ Nolan asserted.

  As Maitland looked shamefaced and moved along the table to kneel before His Grace, the archbishop sat and warded him off with both hands.

  ‘Is this your idea of satire, James? I know you probably squirm and think it medieval, so I’d rather you didn’t.’

  Maitland said softly, ‘It’s a polite gesture, Your Grace. If I can’t be polite to my own bishop …’

  ‘Isn’t that by way of being the point?’ Costello asked.

  ‘Sit down, James.’

  But then the sight of this thin and ascetic troublemaker stooping to sit piqued His Grace.

  ‘You must know that I would be quite justified in suspending you without so much as speaking to you.’

  Maitland nodded.

  ‘You’ll notice, Dr Maitland,’ said Costello, ‘there is no clerk-of-court here. Conscience is, we hope, clerk-of-court and sanctioner. There is no notary. Conscience keeps the book. All right?’

  His Grace took up the thread. ‘Why I have chosen to consult you, James, is that I want explanations. And it’s not only a matter of this book. There are other failures – failures, note! – of yours which will work against you all your life unless you answer for them here. It will be necessary to impose a penalty on you. I want – I’d even say I plead with you – to accept it and remain my priest.’

  Maitland said indefinitely and with some embarrassment, ‘Yes, yes. Certainly.’

  His Grace nodded at Nolan, who scanned the details of the first complaint. ‘It seems, Dr Maitland, that within a month of your being appointed to the staff of the House of Studies, you gave a sermon at a most peculiar Mass, in which you applied to priests the dictum, “Because they love nobody they imagine that they love God.”’

  ‘Well, James?’r />
  ‘Of course I didn’t apply it to priests as such, Your Grace. It was used to outline a danger, nothing more. What I said that evening was a plea for tolerance for priests.’

  Costello smiled. ‘It’s kind of you to be concerned for us, Dr Maitland, but people seem to tolerate us to a quite satisfactory degree.’

  ‘It’s a nasty quotation, James,’ the prelate murmured. ‘You say you were outlining a danger. A danger for priests, I suppose you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t you think lay people have sufficient problems of their own without being let into ours.’

  Maitland took a risk. He said, ‘I don’t want to seem flippant, Your Grace. Least of all tonight. But the Mass in question was said for a society of graduates. To many of them, we are one of the major problems.’

  ‘My nephew, Mrs Lamotte’s son, who attended the Mass, found the dictum in bad taste,’ Nolan claimed.

  ‘If His Grace questioned priests about every sermon that individual Catholics found distasteful …’

  ‘I would find such a statement in bad taste whether in or out of context. I would find it so, not by the standards of some individual quirk, but by absolute standards.’

  ‘Oh, monsignor,’ James protested, ‘we’ve never been friends, let alone admirers. Isn’t it natural we’d find each other distasteful by absolute standards. That’s what resentment’s all about.’

  There was a silence. Then His Grace said, ‘Maitland, you’re not here to make proverbs.’

  Maitland admitted this. There was a further silence, broken, without a trace of gall, by Nolan.

  ‘Your Grace, the quotation came from a French poet called Charles Péguy.’

  His Grace, who harmlessly fancied his own French, went sorting names in his mind. ‘Péguy … Péguy …’

  ‘He was a nominal Catholic, a violent anti-clerical, and he didn’t attend Mass.’

  ‘Monsignor, that has no bearing on wisdom or its lack.’ Maitland longed to say something specious but ironic about Abraham and David, robust non-Massgoers. But His Grace intervened loudly.