by Jon Cleary
In 1976 he was made a monsignor and in 1980 became a bishop. It was then that Fingal, coming to Rome to celebrate the occasion, for the first time raised the subject of Kerry’s becoming Pope.
“Now don’t say it’s a crazy dream—”
“I wasn’t going to, Dad. Don’t you think I’ve dreamed of it myself?”
“Is it possible?”
“It’s a lottery. All you can do is buy as many tickets as you can.”
“You mean the cardinals can be bought, just like the pollies back home?” Even Fingal was surprised at the thought.
“No, not like that. You just make opportunities to be noticed. But I have a long way to go yet, two more steps. I have to make cardinal first.”
“How long will that take?” He was impatient now, he was seventy-five years old and occasionally he caught a whiff of the grave on the wind.
Kerry shrugged. “Who knows? There are eighty-year-old cardinals over there in the Curia still hoping they’ll get the vote.”
“Then we’ll have to see you get noticed. Do they vote for saints as Pope these days?”
“I wouldn’t fit the image, Dad.” He knew his limitations. “No, I know my road. Communism is the enemy—if I can beat that wherever it’s making inroads, then I’ll be noticed. We’ll just have to be patient.”
In 1983, by which time he had engineered his own small congregation, the Department for the Defence Against Subversive Religions, he was made an archbishop, one of the youngest in the Church. Fingal once more came to Rome to celebrate the elevation and to buy the apartment in the palazzo on the Tiber.
“It won’t be out of character for an archbishop, you living there. You can get a better car, too. What’s the going model for an archbishop?”
“A Mercedes.”
Fingal shook his now white head. “You haven’t changed.”
“Have you?” said Kerry.
“What does that mean?”
“Isn’t it time, Dad, you told me who you really are? You’re—what?—seventy-eight this year. I think it’s time you told me—and Brigid—who you were before we were born. The newspapers have already been on to me, they’re already writing your obituary.”
“Who cares about the newspapers?”
“All right, forget the newspapers. What about Brigid and me? We have a right to know who you were. What have you got to hide?”
“Are you wanting to hear my confession?”
“In a way, yes.”
Fingal sat in a chair which had once seated a pope. This room, the main salon of the palazzo, held more secrets than he could ever divulge. He had at last begun to feel old: every road from here on was downhill, even though he sometimes felt he was climbing them. Winter (memories of Chicago) had begun to assail him once more. He spent his year now in perpetual summer, coming to Europe for it, going home for it. Like most old men he was beyond surprise but not beyond feeling. It both pleased and hurt him to learn that Kerry (and Brigid: it was always an effort to think of her these days) wanted to know who he really was. He had forgotten, if he had ever known, that a father owed more to his children than just their well-being.
Chicago and its ghosts were safely behind him now, though he had never been back there. O’Banion, Drucci and Moran were almost forgotten names; minor ghosts are kept alive only by discussing them and there had been no one with whom to discuss them. He still remembered Capone. He could close his eyes and see the Big Fella as clearly as on those days when he had faced him in the suite of the Metropolitan Hotel or in the back room of 2145 South Michigan, in Dr. Alphonse Brown’s surgery. But Capone was long dead and so was everyone who might have sought revenge for him; no dynasties die out so quickly as gangland ones. It was safe to kneel in the confessional:
“This is just between you and me. Brigid isn’t to be told—I don’t know she can be trusted to keep her mouth shut. You know what artists can be like.”
Kerry nodded, wondering what sort of sins he was about to hear. “I shan’t tell her, at least not till you’re dead.”
Fingal hesitated, then accepted that. It might be a joke, if there were any jokes in the grave, to know how shocked some people would be to learn that Australia’s richest man had begun life as a con man. Or maybe they would not be: Ned Kelly, the bushranger, was still a national hero.
“I was born in Ireland, in a village called Ballyseanduff, but I was taken to Chicago when I was six months old and I grew up there. I worked for Dion O’Banion and Al Capone—”
“You were a gangster?” It was Kerry who was shocked. He knew all about venality and skulduggery, but he was an innocent, though an archbishop, to real sin.
“No, I was not.” Fingal had his pride. “I dealt in bootleg liquor, but I never belonged to any gang.”
“You said you worked for Al Capone—” His father had worked for one of history’s worst villains, a latterday, low-class Borgia. He could see his whole career going up in smoke, but not the white smoke that signalled the election of a new Pope.
“Only as a consultant.” Fingal smiled: it was a joke that had lasted almost sixty years. “I never carried a gun. Nor ordered anyone killed.” Not till I came to Australia. And that, now, was forty years behind him. “I lived by my wits, the same as I’ve done in Australia. Only in Chicago I had to deal with gangsters.”
“Why?”
“Because in Chicago in those days a poor boy from a poor family got nowhere unless he worked for those with influence. And the gangsters had the influence. They ran the city. You’ve never seen corruption like it, not even here in Italy. If I wanted to get uptown, I had to forget everything my mother tried to tell me—she was a good Catholic woman, always praying for me, even took her rosary beads into the bath with her in case she had a seizure and drowned. I had to stop listening to her and listen to my father, who knew what the score was.” He sounded sincerely regretful, an honest moral boy who had had to bend his standards to survive. Old men have a tendency to colour not only their youth but their intentions. “It wasn’t easy.”
“Why did you leave Chicago?” Kerry was not taken in by his father’s penitent tone.
Honesty, even towards one’s son, could be taken too far: “I could see myself getting too involved with Capone and the others.”
“Why did you choose Sydney, of all places?”
“I read it was warm.” That, at least, was the truth. He sat waiting for absolution; but none seemed forthcoming. At last he said, “Well?”
“I don’t know what to say,” said Kerry, never lost for a word. “I always suspected you must have had something to hide. I thought you might have had another wife before Mother, that you’d run away from her . . . But Chicago in the Nineteen-Twenties! With Al Capone! God, if it should ever get out . . . !”
“It won’t. That’s why I don’t think you should say anything to Brigid—you know what women are like.” Women and artists, the blabbermouths of the world. “Well, maybe you don’t know . . .” He sometimes forgot that his son was celibate. “You’ve come this far. Nothing must spoil it now.”
Kerry nodded, still absorbed in what his father had told him; and what he had not told him. For he knew that only half the truth had been told. He had lived too long with his father not to recognize that he was a consummate liar. He didn’t feel disappointed that he had been lied to: perhaps it was better not to know the whole truth.
Later, over dinner in the apartment’s big dining-room, with the newly acquired staff hovering over them in black-and-white livery, like trained magpies, Kerry said, “Are you thinking of retiring?”
“What would I do? I’ll retire when you become Pope. I’ll come here and live, maybe I’ll become a born-again Catholic. Just for appearance’s sake.” He knew The Lord would never accept him.
“You may be ninety years old before that happens.”
“I’ll live that long, if it’s necessary.” He would do his best, would get up-wind from the grave.
“You’re not going to keep on with th
e day-to-day running of Ballyduff?”
“Why not? I’m still two streets ahead of anyone who works for me.”
“Give it away, Dad. Ease up. Let Jonathan take over.”
“Not a chance.”
He chewed carefully on scaloppina al marsala. He still had most of his own teeth, preserved at great expense by Sydney’s best dentist, but he had a small bridge that occasionally caused him trouble. He usually solved the problem by taking out the bridge and wrapping it in his handkerchief, no matter what company he was in; the very rich and the very old have their own rules of etiquette. He took out the bridge now and a manservant, accustomed to either the habits of the rich or just ordinary sensible Italians, appeared at his elbow with a fresh napkin. Fingal, impressed, took it and wrapped his bridge in it and put it on the table beside his plate. He had always thought the Italians had plenty of imagination but no common sense; maybe he had been wrong. Al Capone had had both, but then he had gone to America.
“You don’t mean it.” Kerry was surprised. He had never interfered in the affairs of Ballyduff, never ventured an opinion. He had, however, never missed a line of the annual reports, never failed to check the stock prices of the holding company and its myriad subsidiaries. “I thought it was taken for granted that he’d . . .”
“No. It’s never been in my mind that he would.”
“Who, then?”
“Bob Borsolino.”
“Does Jonathan know that?”
“No. Neither does Borsolino. They work better together if they’re kept guessing.”
“Jonathan is the better of the two of them, I think that’s generally recognized. When he got his knighthood, I thought you’d arranged that.”
Fingal shook his head. “Not me. He arranged it himself.”
“I’ve often wondered why you didn’t get one yourself.”
“What would Sir Fingal be beside Pope Kerry? People would always say you’d upstaged me.”
“But what about Jonathan? Why are you so against him? The board and the shareholders won’t agree with you.”
“I have my reasons for not wanting him to take over.” It was difficult to explain enmity born out of plain hatred, so he didn’t bother. Wars have been started for simpler reasons. “That’s where you and Brigid will come in. She has no time for him, no more than I have. When I go, you two and your trusts will have 51 per cent of the holding company—and the holding company has the preferential voting shares in the subsidiaries. I’ve seen to all that in my will. All you have to do is vote against him.” He looked up and across the table at the son to whom he had given so much. “That’s all you owe me.”
II
Four years passed before Jonathan Tewsday learned that he was never going to have the top job at Ballyduff.
He was within touching distance of his target in the business and social firmament. He was equal No. 2 in what was now the nation’s largest and richest corporation, above even BHP and the other, more recently arrived high-flyers. He had a wife who was one of Sydney’s leading hostesses, a charity Queen Bee, and three bright daughters who, he suspected, didn’t think as much of him as he did himself. He had a sixty-foot cruiser, the Rolls-Royce and a BMW for Fiona, his knighthood, a country property outside Bowral and a mansion at Pymble on the North Shore. Pymble reeked of respectability, like the smell of old mouldering money; he had arrived in the land he had promised himself. It was not Israel; for some reason, there were few Jews in Pymble. He and Fiona were both anti-Semitic, though they would never admit it. Some of their best friends were Jews, but they didn’t want to live amongst them. To do him justice, Tewsday didn’t dislike Jews as much as he did the Irish. Or anyway the Hourigans.
In the Pymble house he now had a library: Fiona had introduced him to books. He was now known as a collector of antique books, though he had to rely on an antiquarian bookseller to guide him; it did, however, give him a certain cachet, it set him apart from other newly rich men who collected paintings. He did not read the antique books; they were for show. His reading consisted of what he called “solid” books: biographies, English sagas by long-dead authors and books about business chicanery, which he enjoyed the most. He never read “modern” authors, certainly not women authors, and still had never ventured into poetry.
When they moved into the big home in Pymble, Fiona decided she wanted live-in staff. Up till then she had got by with a cleaning woman coming in every day and a cook coming in late on the afternoons when they were having dinner parties. Tewsday had had a company chauffeur for several years, but he had been available only during business hours; Fingal had insisted that he and Bob Borsolino had to drive themselves in their own time. Now, Fiona said, it was time they engaged other people to look after them.
They advertised for a couple. They chose Gary Gawler and his wife Sally, the only couple to apply whose native tongue was English. No Australians applied: to be “in service” was against the native grain. Gawler, however, was an American and his wife English, each from a country where helots could still be found if the price was right.
They were a couple obviously in love, a pair who looked as if they might have arrived at true love rather late and for the first time. He was in his early forties and she in her late thirties, he quiet and controlled, she jovial and outgoing. Each was good at his or her job and the Tewsdays were glad to have them.
Yet Tewsday never felt entirely at ease with Gawler. It was not because he lacked the confidence, so endemic amongst the newly rich, to handle personal staff. It was just that Gawler was always slightly distant, a superior slave; it was as if he carried with him an invisible screen to match the one that had been specially fitted between the driver’s seat and that of the passengers in the Rolls-Royce. He never ventured any information about himself other than what had been in his references: that he was Chicago-born, had served in the US Army in Vietnam, had worked as chauffeur for retired widows in Missouri and Kansas. He was polite, a hard worker, never complained; but as enigmatic as one of the Chinese jade statuettes that Fiona was always buying. Nothing, it seemed, could disturb his cold equanimity except the sight of the cheerful Sally waiting for him when he drove Tewsday home each evening.
On one occasion the Rolls-Royce ran over a dog. The fox terrier sprinted out into the middle of the road; Tewsday, later, thought there would have been time for Gawler to brake. He didn’t: he just went straight over the dog. He did draw in then to the side of the road and went back to see if the dog was dead.
When he came back Tewsday said, “You could have avoided that, Garry.”
“Yes, sir.” Gawler was unperturbed; he might just have run over a road marker. “But the car behind me would have run into us. I think humans are worth more than a dog, sir.”
There was no answer to that, unless you were an animal welfare enthusiast; which Tewsday was not. “Is the dog dead?”
“Yes, sir. There doesn’t seem to be anyone coming to claim it. Shall we drive on?”
Tewsday, feeling a little sick, nodded. He was upset more by Gawler’s apparent callousness than by the death of the dog. The screen between them had thickened.
He tried to sound out Sally Gawler on her husband, but Sally, though loquacious, told him nothing. “That’s just him, Sir Jonathan. He’s kindness itself to me, the best thing that’s ever happened to me. He doesn’t say much, unlike me, but that’s the way some people are. It’d be a pretty noisy world, wouldn’t it, if everyone was like me.”
Then, one night, Tewsday worked back in his office. His secretary had gone home and when he finally left the office there was no one in the building but the cleaners, the security men and the two caretakers. He went down in the lift on his own, from the sixty-eighth floor to the basement garage.
He stepped out of the lift into the half-lit garage. Most of the cars had gone; there were no more than half a dozen parked in the vast cave. His mind was still occupied by the desk work he had just left; Ballyduff had made a raid on one of its smaller competitors. H
is wits were not about him as he got out of the lift and turned towards where the Rolls-Royce was always parked. The youth, long-haired, unshaven and grubby, wielding a long-bladed knife, seemed to materialize out of nowhere.
“Okay, shit-head, gimme everything you got on you!”
Tewsday was pushed hard against the wall; the long-bladed knife was pricking the skin between his first and second chin. He was paralysed by fear; physical courage had never been one of his attributes. He was on the verge of fainting; he knew his legs were going to fold under him at any moment. He could do nothing with his hands to give the mugger what he wanted; he just stood with his mouth and eyes wide open, an animal whimpering coming from him. The youth, with his free hand, began to rip at Tewsday’s pockets.
Then Tewsday saw Gawler come out from behind the Rolls-Royce. He moved so silently, on the balls of his feet, that he was on the mugger before the latter saw him. Tewsday, closer to a killing, his own or anyone else’s, than he would ever again be in his life, saw everything in frightening close-up. He saw Gawler take the youth from behind, wrapping a muscular arm round the scrawny neck. The knife flicked away from Tewsday’s chins, cutting the top one; it went backwards to swipe at Gawler, but the American grabbed the wrist of the hand that held the knife, twisted, and the wrist was broken. The youth tried to scream with the pain, but the arm round his neck was pressing too tightly. Only a foot from him, watching the agony and the fear in the wide, drug-crazed eyes, Tewsday saw the youth die. Gawler gave a last savage jerk that broke the youth’s neck, then let him drop to the floor.