One day Father Lacey said to the class, ‘The other day I happened to read an Australian Catholic Truth Society pamphlet. It was written by a famous American Jesuit for young people in America, and I couldn’t help thinking how much better off we are in Australia than the Americans—morally, I mean. No doubt there are many fine Catholics in America. There are wonderful men among the American clergy. Monsignor Fulton Sheen, Cardinal Cushing, Father Peyton the Rosary Priest—they’re not afraid to denounce immorality or Communism. But decent Americans must be nearly swamped sometimes with temptations against purity.
‘One of the things the pamphlet was discussing was what the Americans call petting. Now, this word “petting” was something I’d never come across before. I still think it sounds more like something you do to your dog or cat. Anyway, from what this priest was saying it seems that one of the gravest problems in America today is the petting that goes on amongst young people.
‘It’s hard to believe, but apparently American fathers and mothers allow their children to stay out half the night in cars and parks and on street corners. And these young flappers and hobbledehoys (because that’s all they are at their age—they’re still wet behind the ears, so to speak), well, naturally they face enormous temptations when they’re alone in these places together. And boys, it’s all so wrong. You know as well as I do that these things are for married people exclusively.
‘Go back for a moment to the Middle Ages, to the great days of the church. In those days the whole of the civilised world observed the commandments of God and his church. There were no problems of courtship and company-keeping then. This petting that’s worrying the people of America hadn’t been heard of. Of course the young people of both sexes had the chance to meet each other and look each other over before marriage. They had their dances and balls in those days too. But it was all good wholesome fun. The young ladies were all chaperoned and watched over by their God-fearing parents. And the parents in their wisdom saw to it that no two young people had the opportunity to be alone together where they might face temptations that were too strong for them.
‘Those were the days when knights sang about pure love. And it was pure. If a young man fell in love with a young woman he might wear her colours into battle or write a poem to her, but he certainly didn’t hang around with her in dark doorways on the way home from the pictures.
‘Young fellows of your age would probably be off to fight the Turks under the banner of Our Lady. That’s who your lady would be. It was the Age of Our Blessed Lady. It’s no coincidence that the period of history when men were bravest and most chivalrous and most honourable in the way they behaved towards the fair sex—that age was also the greatest age in history for devotion to Our Lady.
‘But to get back to America again. There’s another expression I’ve heard and I suppose some of you must have too. It’s a cheap, vulgar expression if ever there was one—sex appeal. The way some Americans behave, you’d think it was all that mattered when a man was thinking of marriage. As long as the woman has sex appeal, she’s sure to make a good wife.
‘Well, we can see the result of all this in the divorce courts. I suppose even at your age you’ve read about some of these Hollywood stars getting married—he for the fifth time and she for the third. Think of it. America has gone mad over this thing called sex appeal. But I shouldn’t say that. We know there are thousands of good Catholics in America—people in the fine old Catholic cities like Boston and Chicago struggling to bring up their children away from all the madness in the pagan parts of the country. And I’m happy to say there are even a few good Catholics in Hollywood itself.
‘I was reading the other day in a Catholic magazine about the film star Maureen O’Sullivan. You’ve probably watched her if you go to the pictures occasionally. Well, in the midst of all the temptations of Hollywood, that woman is still an outstanding Catholic mother. She’s been married all her life to a good Catholic man and they’ve brought up six or seven fine young children. So it can be done. And don’t forget Bing Crosby either—a decent Catholic father who’s never had his head turned by Hollywood. But how rare these people are.
‘Boys, whenever I think about Hollywood and what it’s doing to the world I’m glad I’m an old man. I honestly don’t know how I’d save my soul if I had to grow up with all the temptations facing you young fellows today. In my time we had nothing like the films and books and even the newspapers that you fellows have to fight against. Today I suppose there’s not one of you who doesn’t go to the pictures now and then and give the paganism of Hollywood a chance to infect you.
‘“Ah, but I only watch harmless films for general exhibition,” you’re saying to yourselves. Well, I sometimes wonder if there’s any such thing as a harmless film. Did you ever stop to think what sort of lives these actors and actresses lead outside their films? Did you know for instance that nearly every young woman film star has to surrender her body to the director or the producer or whoever he is before she gets the part of the leading lady? And these are the sort of people that the young men and women of today are supposed to have for their heroes and heroines.’
While the chaplain went on to talk about Our Lady again, Adrian thought hard about the film stars he met on his American journeys. If Father Lacey was right about Hollywood, some of these women might have been through unspeakable agonies when they were younger. For all Adrian knew, Jayne with her innocent smile or Marilyn with her serene gaze might have spent her younger days with her eyes shut tight and her mouth clamped to stop herself from screaming while some pot-bellied Cecil B. DeMille ran his sweaty hands over her naked skin.
The women had never mentioned those things to Adrian for fear of spoiling the fun of their outings together. They were generous courageous creatures. He should have spent more time getting to know their life stories instead of treating them as beautiful playthings. In future he would encourage them to share their old painful secrets with him. They would soon realise that nothing they could tell him about Hollywood would shock him.
Adrian’s teachers often said that the name ‘Dark Ages’ was misleading and unjust. Protestant historians used the name to imply that the centuries when the church was at the height of its influence were a time of ignorance and misery. In fact, as all fair-minded historians agreed, Europe in the so-called Dark Ages was more peaceful and contented than it had ever been since. And the countryside was dotted with monasteries that were centres of learning. Catholics should get into the habit of using the term ‘Middle Ages’ to cover the whole period from the end of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt (or Reformation, as it was sometimes called).
Adrian was certain he would never have become a slave to sins of impurity if he had lived in the Middle Ages. A boy in those days grew up in a simple two-roomed cottage and slept in the same room as his parents and brothers and sisters. He fell asleep hearing the calm breathing of his family round him and the comfortable noises of the cows and horses in the byre through the wall. If his parents wanted to have another baby they waited until their children were all sound asleep before they did anything about it. In a home like this there was no opportunity for a boy to sin in his bed without being discovered.
The luckiest boys went off to monasteries as soon as they reached puberty. In a monastery a boy had so many beautiful things to inspire him that he soon forgot about women. Every day as he walked in procession along the cloisters, he glimpsed through the narrow gothic windows the rolling hillsides covered with fruitful vines or grazing cattle. Every morning he saw the ordained monks each bent over his private altar in the shadowy nooks behind the high altar of the monastery chapel. When the sunlight flashed from the bulky silver of the chalices, and the folds of the elaborate vestments hissed against each other, he knew he would never wish for a greater pleasure than to say mass alone like that each day.
If a boy stayed at home he still had fewer temptations than a modern boy, because he was hardly ever alone. The whole villa
ge worked together all day in the fields. And the itinerant Franciscan and Dominican friars wandering up and down the roads of Europe kept a sharp lookout for young fellows mooning around in copses or thickets.
For centuries, Europe was hardly troubled by sex. Her most imaginative young men devoted all their energy to making gold and silver ornaments or stained-glass windows or religious paintings or illuminated parchments.
Historians were right when they said the Modern Age began with the Renaissance. Nude paintings and statues began to appear, even in the most fervently Catholic countries. And many of the female nudes were almost as attractive as twentieth-century film stars.
A young man of the Renaissance would have had many of the sexual problems that bothered Adrian Sherd. Even in those days, artists and sculptors had discovered the tricks that were used by photographers for Health and Sunshine magazine. The female statues had smooth marble between their legs and the women in the paintings stood in tantalising poses that did not quite reveal all.
The generation that grew up during the sexual excitement of the Renaissance became more and more resentful of the church’s strict attitude to impurity. These were the people responsible for the Protestant Revolt.
The most important changes made by the Protestants were to remove two institutions which had been a nuisance to the sexually lax. They abolished the celibacy of the clergy and the sacrament of confession.
Martin Luther himself was a priest. Why was he so anxious to do away with the vow of celibacy? Because he himself wanted to marry. And why was he in such a hurry to get married? Adrian had heard many times from priests and brothers that Luther was an unhappy tormented man who should never have become a priest in the first place. It was common knowledge that he was a glutton and used foul language. It wasn’t hard to imagine such a man having terrible battles against impure temptations. The woman he eventually married was an ex-nun. What if he had known her, or at least caught sight of her, while he was still a Catholic priest? Was it possible that all his troubles with the church first started when he realised he couldn’t stop thinking about a certain pretty woman?
Adrian had arrived at an explanation for the Protestant Revolt. He believed it was quite likely that the whole thing had been started by a priest who was tempted beyond his endurance to commit a sin of impurity by himself. Adrian found it almost too shocking to think about. He would never have repeated it to anyone, not even a Protestant, because it reflected on the sacred office of the priesthood.
It was a fateful day in the history of impurity when the Protestant leaders decided that it was no longer necessary to go to confession to have your sins forgiven. In drab cities all over northern Germany young men suddenly realised that what they thought about in bed at night need never be revealed to another living soul. They could do what they liked all week and still stand up on Sunday and sing hymns at the tops of their voices and look the minister in the eye.
The doctrine of predestination was all that a young man could wish for. Once he knew he was one of the elect, he could sin every night of his life and still be saved. If Adrian Sherd could have been born in Geneva in the great days of Calvinism he would have found religion a pleasure instead of the worry it was to him in twentieth-century Australia.
In the Protestant half of Europe, the Middle Ages were swept away forever. In Italy, Spain, Poland and the other Catholic countries, things were much the same as before except that many a young man must have wanted to migrate to a Protestant land.
When the Catholics and Protestants reached the New World, it was easy to see which religion was easier to live under.
At the beginning of the Modern Age, a young Spaniard no older than Adrian stood beside the Rio Grande and looked north-east across unexplored territory. The plains before him stretched away through Texas and Kansas and on to Nebraska and far Iowa. It should have been a stirring sight, but the young Spaniard was deeply troubled. He foresaw all the afternoons when he would stand alone by clear streams among miles of waving grasses and remember girls and women he had seen in old Castile and feel the overpowering urge to commit a sin of impurity. By the time he had explored the American prairies he might have had a hundred sins on his soul. When he got back to a Spanish city he would have to go to confession. It was a terrifying prospect.
At the same time, a young English gentleman looked westwards from a hilltop in Virginia. He was eager to explore all he could of the great continent before him. He would be a long time alone in the forests and prairies, but he knew a trick to cheer himself up at night. While he did it he would remember the pretty young ladies he used to admire each Sunday in his little parish church in Devon. Or he could look forward to the day when he arrived back in England and shook hands with the minister and sat down in his old family pew and looked round to choose one of the young ladies for his wife.
Late one Sunday afternoon Adrian was lying on his bed in his room at the back of the house. The sky outside his window was full of high grey clouds. A strong wind thumped the outside of the house and rattled a piece of timber somewhere in the wall. Adrian’s mother and his youngest brother were away visiting one of his aunts. His father was dragging a plank backwards and forwards across the backyard trying to level the sandy soil before he sowed it with lawn seed. Adrian’s younger brother was on the path at the side of the house, bouncing a tennis ball against the chimney.
Next door, Andy Horvath and his wife and two or three other couples were having some kind of party in the bungalow behind the Horvaths’ half-built house. At about three o’clock they had started singing foreign songs and they were still going strong. There was one song they kept coming back to. Adrian had heard it three or four times already. The way they sang the chorus made the hair prickle on the back of his neck. It was sad and savage and hopeless.
Adrian thought of all the quiet backyards stretching away for miles in every direction. Then he thought of America.
He went outside to the shed and sent his passenger train around the track. It stopped in the Catskill Mountains. He went back inside to his bed and pulled a rug over himself and thought about the green mountains of New York state.
Sherd grabbed Gene and Ann and Kim firmly by their wrists and bundled them into his car. He told them they were going to the Catskills just for the hell of it. Soon they were among steep hillsides where shady forests alternated with lush green meadows. Sherd stopped the car beside a lofty waterfall that hung like a veil of silver over a secluded glade.
He didn’t waste time with idle chatter or a picnic lunch. As soon as they reached the little glade he told the women to get undressed. For some reason Gene and Ann and Kim wanted to tease him. They ran a little way into the trees and stood laughing at him.
But Sherd had come to the Catskills to save himself from being bored to death. He was in no mood to be trifled with. He ran after them. As they ran and stumbled ahead of him he had glimpses of their pink thighs and white undies that made him crazy with desire.
He caught the three of them in a meadow where the grass was waist-high and thick with wildflowers. He behaved like the strong silent type. He stripped all three of them. Then he flung himself on the woman of his choice and took his pleasure roughly and without a word of thanks. Afterwards he lay where he was and watched the meadows in the Catskills turning slowly from green to grey.
Mr Sherd came in from the backyard and said he’d call it a day because the sand was blowing all over him. Then Adrian’s brother came inside and asked Adrian to play miniature cricket on the path and guess which way his spinners would turn. Adrian agreed to play for ten minutes and no more.
He stood at one end of the path while his brother bowled underarm spinners with a tennis ball. When his ten minutes of cricket were over he sat down and listened.
The Hungarians were still singing in their bungalow. They were starting again on their favourite song. Adrian guessed it was about far-off mountains and forests. He tried to memorise the tune. They started off shouting it, but somethin
g stopped them when they reached the chorus. Adrian ran over and pressed his ear against a hole in the fence. He could hear the separate voices of each man and woman trying to pick up the song again. They were making noises like sobs, as though they couldn’t sing for crying.
At school next morning O’Mullane could hardly wait to tell his friends about his adventure on the Sunday afternoon. He said, ‘I was watching the tennis on the courts near the racecourse and having dog fights on my bike with Laurie D’Arcy when I saw one of the strappers from Neville Byrne’s stables—the one they call Macka—standing behind the pine trees smoushing this tart. She had red hair. I kept my eye on them and I saw Macka trying to get her into one of those old sheds behind the six-furlongs barrier. Well, he got her there at last and I said to D’Arcy we’d better be in this.
‘So we sneaked up and peeped into the shed. Macka had her in a corner leaning back over a rail. He was still smoushing her and getting a handful at the same time under her jumper.’ Adrian said, ‘Was she putting up a fight against him?’ O’Mullane said, ‘Search me. Old Macka put a half nelson on her. He’s a tough little bastard. She could have stopped him easily enough if she’d really tried, I suppose. She kept saying, “Not here, Bernie! Not here, Bernie!” Anyway, she got away from him in the end and ran down a little hill into that long grass near the big iron fence. But Macka caught up with her and pushed her over or she dragged him down or they both fell over but anyway they ended up on top of each other and the last thing we saw was old Macka going for all he was worth.’
Adrian said, ‘You mean he was doing her? Out there in the grass beside the racecourse?’
O’Mullane said, ‘What do you reckon? But listen to the end of the story. I was sure I’d seen the tart somewhere before and Laurie D’Arcy said the same. After tea that night D’Arcy came round to my place and said he could show her to me right then. So he took me over to the Yarram Road shops and there she was serving in the milk bar with an apron on over the same clothes she was wearing with Macka. She said, “Yes, boys. What’ll you have?” I said half out loud, “The same as Macka got,” and I reckon she almost heard me.’
A Season on Earth Page 7