An Angel In Australia

by Tom Keneally

  He looked up with eyes in which shame and confusion were too naked. ‘Sometimes,’ Mr Regan continued, ‘I think Christ put the Church into the hands of the wrong people. The Europeans, the Americans. Us. What’s happening is a judgement of our easy ways. The races at Randwick while men die. Our general lack of fibre. I felt that I must confess it to you too, even though I knew you as a little kid. Just to show you there are old fools as well as young.’ He refilled his own glass, and Darragh’s. ‘I got a good rent, needless to say.’

  The man hung his head, his informal confession concluded. The self-imposed test of telling it to a young priest who knew him as a pillar had been passed, but seemed to have exhausted the man. Darragh felt bound to attempt to comfort him. ‘You have to do your job, Mr Regan,’ he said. ‘It’s not your job to force a confession from this colonel. The woman might have been his daughter.’

  Mr Regan shook his head.

  ‘If anything,’ Darragh persisted, ‘it’s the colonel who is the sinner. You have no certain knowledge that he wanted the flat for a bad purpose.’ He was arguing like a Jesuit.

  Mr Regan said, like a theologian, ‘The worst sins are the most excusable. They’re the ones that get us damned.’

  Frank saw that the man was burdened with something he’d done, probably a long time ago, for which he’d never forgiven himself. ‘I wouldn’t say that, Mr Regan. You seem to be pretty hard on yourself.’ He forced a smile. ‘On all of us.’

  Mr Regan shook his head and seemed suddenly, but too late, interested in his seniority. ‘You may not understand what I’m getting at, Father Frank. You’re young. What concerns me is this. Will I in a year’s time happily be renting flats to the Japanese? For the same reason I did to the American? For that’s what my office door says I do, and it’s what I do by habit. Will their strangeness make me say, “All right, cripes, I might as well.”’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll behave like an Australian patriot, Mr Regan.’

  ‘I’ve been a real estate agent thirty-seven years.’

  Eyes averted from this neighbour tormented by scruples, Frank began to advise him that one of the great human errors was to decide beforehand how we would behave in a given situation. We could not predict what divine grace, appropriate to the moment, would flow our way. This seemed to give Mr Regan little comfort, and Frank Darragh was happy in the end to be told he ought to go and see his mother and aunt again. Mr Regan himself stayed on in his bomb shelter to finish his bottle of beer, and Frank passed through the household of lithe, Cootamundra-bound Regan women, so that he could go on his way to say goodbye to his mother and Aunt Madge.

  LATER, DARRAGH WOULD see Mr Regan’s over-frank and unsacramental confession as the beginning of a phase of exceptional confessions cast up—so Mr Regan would have it, and so Darragh himself saw it—by the corrupting and perilous times. The following Saturday afternoon, for example, Darragh heard the confession of a young soldier—there was a dim glint of khaki shirt through the confessional screen, and Darragh thought he knew the penitent beyond, identifying him from voice and outline as a rather sensitive young militia sergeant whose parents lived in the parish, a man who had been involved in theatrical companies in the area, and whose angular, fine-cut features made him somehow an unlikely member of the sun-blasted, hard-handed Australian army.

  The sin as confessed was this: the soldier had been invited to a smart party on the North Shore but was embarrassed to have found no girl to take. A neighbour of the soldier, a few years younger, who had gone to the same school as he and with whom he had a special friendship, offered to take part in a startling stratagem. This boy, seventeen and of delicate frame, had offered to dress as a woman, just as happened in Shakespeare and comedies, and accompany the soldier to the party, for the purposes of farce. This was innocence itself, for Darragh seemed to remember something along these lines in Twelfth Night, which he studied in boyhood. And the volunteering boy was used to doing this, apparently. It was somewhere between a frequent joke and a common performance. He had attended acting classes, said the sergeant, and knew all about theatrical make-up too.

  On the day of the party the young soldier had sat with the boy as he made himself up at length, and by the time they went to the party together, the disguised young man looked more handsome to the militiaman than many a girl. The soldier had danced all night with the made-up boy, and then they had left and performed what the tormented soldier called ‘an indecent act’. Now he found it very hard to stay away from his friend. He had realised that women did not count for him.

  Darragh, of course, had heard of the existence of such sins, but to meet the proposition in the flesh raised something edgy in him not only in terms of moral outrage but because he felt inadequate to the task of counselling the militiaman. Yet he began, since it was his task to begin. The militiaman must realise, he said, that he had greatly imperilled himself—he had not merely outraged God but was tending in a direction which would make him an outcast. To Darragh, eternal priest and—he would himself admit—sheltered boy, there seemed to be a wilfulness in that. He wanted to be angry, but under the exorcist’s burden of being a merciful confessor, he felt, too, that without the army and the heightened time, without the threat of dying too young in some horrifying tropic place, without all borders blurring or being borne away, this young man would not have behaved in this perverted manner. History had knocked the soldier out of his orbit, had confused the directions he should take. ‘You must avoid this association,’ said Frank firmly and with utter conviction, but fearing, as with Mr Regan, he might be out of his depth. For to the Frank Darragh who occupied the confessional that day, with the power to bind and loose humanity from its shame and moral wilfulness, woman constituted the ultimate temptation. The dream of closeness with a woman, of being party with her to the revelation of some unutterable mystery. The girl on the train was both noble soul and alluring creature. But not so a boy dressed as a pseudo-woman. Woman was so much the pole star that he could not imagine why this militiaman-navigator beyond the grille should be swayed by such false magnetism.

  ‘I tell myself I’ll avoid him, but I don’t know how to,’ the soldier admitted. ‘I see him everywhere.’

  ‘Everywhere. You mean, you run into him all the time.’

  ‘Not all the time. But I see his face everywhere.’

  ‘No,’ said Darragh, deciding that severity would not serve and adopting a gentler tone. ‘No, that’s an indulgence. You shouldn’t talk or think that way. You’ll find that you will meet some girl—indeed, you should try to do that. That will put you back on your proper track. It is possible for a good person, and I know you are a good person, to be thrown sideways by some kink. But that’s all this is. A kink.’

  Darragh hoped his own revulsion had not emerged.

  ‘Then I’ll try,’ said the soldier, more insistently. Darragh could not doubt the sincerity of that, and yet it seemed to him that a whiff of hopeless self-knowledge drifted through the screen. Darragh himself was infected by it, and struggled in its coils.

  Darragh came clean. It was, an instinct told him, most fruitful. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m only a young man, like you. As man, I know no more than you know. Possibly less. As priest I know the sacramental power of absolution, and I know too the power and mercy of the Virgin Mary, the ultimate woman, the Tower of Ivory, the Star of the Sea. She will not let you be lost. I promise you. She will not let you.’

  The soldier said nothing.

  ‘Do you understand?’ asked Darragh, more in hope than in authority.

  When the soldier said he did, Darragh absolved him. But strangeness had entered Father Darragh’s moral atlas.

  His Tuesdays were devoted to visitations. He had divided the streets of Homebush and Strathfield and, with the help of the parish rolls, set forth systematically to visit the faithful on foot. When he took his black felt hat off at their doors, his straight brown hair, assiduously parted, itched with sweat. He was careful not to enter households where youn
g women were on their own, chatting to them instead at their doorways, touching, with the implied beneficence of his office, the heads of their children who gazed up snuffling at him. Sometimes a parishioner’s son or husband was home on leave, and Darragh was brought inside to drink tea from the best cups and had fruit cake forced upon him.

  The near sixty-year-old Clancy sisters lived together in Beresford Road, and in particular fed him. Occasionally he visited them out of pure hunger. He knew them to be penitents of his, that they confessed their non-sins to him once a month at least. ‘I was snippy with my sister.’ They were stoutish, forthright women who at some stage had sold up their late father’s pub in Narromine and moved to the city to live comfortably ever after on the proceeds. They wore support hose under their big tents of floral dresses, and their thickening ankles put stress upon the leather bulwarks of their plain shoes. But he had no doubt that they were among the beloved of Christ. They lived virtuously but without fuss, they were frank to a fault, and they gave amply to the monsignor’s building fund. The elder Clancy told him once, ‘I’m pleased to have escaped all the fuss of marriage. Children would be nice—our brother has the two. But marriage is a torment, Father, for many women.’ And she would draw herself up in all the certainty of her lucky escape. Who was he, a celibate, to disagree with her?

  He was drinking tea with them on the Tuesday following the soldier’s confession. It was nearly noon, and he had at least six and a half cups in him from various households, and his bladder ached. They were the sort of people, the Clancy sisters, one could ask for the use of their lavatory. They had no illusions that priests lacked bladders. Their bathroom was always set up in taste, with a special towel laid by for his use, and a fresh bar of Cashmere Bouquet. They always presumed, too, he was there for a donation. They did not resent it, but offered him money to take back to the parish—generally, as now, £10 in a white envelope.

  ‘But I didn’t come for that,’ he said.

  ‘Well, if you’re to be a parish priest you must get used to asking for money.’

  The Clancy sisters were also astounding informants. They did not seem to be shocked at all by scandalous behaviour in the Strathfield–Homebush area. Nor did they adopt any pharisee airs—they were honestly enthralled by gossip, a generally minor sin they might, for all Darragh remembered, have mentioned in the confessional. They knew which absent soldiers’ wives were behaving badly. They had, perhaps from their pub-owning papa, such a normal air of knowing all about the debased nature of the human heart, even of their own hearts, that it was hard to see them as narrow carping gossipers, as whitened sepulchres while within everything was rotten.

  ‘Mrs Flood,’ said the elder Miss Clancy, while the other shuttled about their kitchen, ‘her mother was such a good Catholic. Her father was rough as anything, they said he was a Communist at the saleyards. She rents a room to a young fellow from the brickworks. Strapping young bloke, but they tell us 4F, unfit to serve.’ Miss Clancy tossed her head in the baldest disbelief. ‘He seems to serve the Flood household all right.’

  The other Miss Clancy came from the kitchen with fresh hot water.

  ‘Mrs Flood,’ she sharply informed Darragh, ‘now shares bed and board with the young fellow, and the husband resides on the back verandah!’

  They both shook their heads, though they did not seem as shaken as Darragh by this degree of lasciviousness in a prosaic suburb.

  ‘You should go and see her, Father,’ said the bossier of the Clancys. The command made him uneasy. Another dictum of his old spiritual director: ‘People don’t come around by being harangued. They respond to example.’ He would need to think about what example he could set Mrs Flood.

  ‘Thing is,’ said the older sister, ‘she has this very bad consumption. Coughing all the time. Bloody handkerchiefs. She’s been in a sanatorium …’

  ‘Boddington,’ said the younger Miss Clancy. ‘In the Blue Mountains.’

  ‘You’d wonder where she’d get the energy. And for the young fellow … well, you’d wonder what the attraction is.’

  ‘Red hair,’ said the younger sister, offering Darragh more Scotch Fingers. ‘Some men are crazy for it.’

  Darragh supposed he should visit Mrs Flood sometime in the near future in view of her medical condition alone. It would be a difficult business if the brickworker and the husband were both at home at the time. What could be said? Perhaps the Clancy sisters were wrong about the boarder. But they had an aura of great certainty.

  When Darragh asked them, before leaving, if they had an air-raid shelter to go to, they told him of course they did, only two doors up. As for their ever fleeing, ‘No Jap would dare put a foot in our front door,’ said the eldest. Darragh hoped she would not be disabused of that proposition.

  He returned from the Clancy sisters with that unaccustomed sense of oppression recurring. He felt he needed what he rarely needed: not a mere afternoon nap, but a few profound hours of sleep. It was as if to the scales of sin the Clancy sisters had added that one backbreaking straw—the sexual villainy of mortally ill Mrs Flood. This tattle about the red-headed adulterer seemed connected in its high colour with the confession of the soldier about the boy seductress. He knew his father must have seen fantastical things in Paris and London, where soldiers sought in viciousness a model of the horror they were on leave from. But the younger Darragh’s boyhood had been sheltered from the concrete evidence of human desire which many of his fellow seminarians brought from their childhood farms and raw inner suburbs to their studies. He was prepared for the sins which occupied the major headings in Noldin’s Summa Theologiae Moralis; he had not expected to face in Strathfield the danse macabre of Noldin’s more fanciful footnotes. Surely, the footnotes of extreme perversion belonged to Europe, to France, say, with its world-weariness and its ancient record of sin, which God had punished in 1940 by letting the French army collapse.

  The reliable springs of divine wisdom on which he drew confidently in the confessional and in daily life to deal with normal sin now seemed more remote from him. There was as well a stupefying sense that further shocks awaited before the Japanese Empire finally lapped up against the Clancy sisters’ doorstep.

  In an attempt to ward off the itch for oblivion, to achieve a sense of the normal, a sense of being held in position by wisdom incarnate, Darragh read what was left of his office—Vespers and Compline. Psalm 139, now that he looked at it, was full of warnings about the fallibility and ill will of humanity. ‘Acuunt linguas suas ut serpens; venonum aspidum sub labias eorum. Their tongues are as sharp as those of serpents; the venom of asps lies under their lips.’ So far from redemption, this creeping, serpentine species of which he was a member.

  Mrs Flannery cooked an entire dreary lunchtime meal for him that day. The monsignor was not in, and so Darragh was able to read the Herald as, in his sudden spiritual weariness, he devoured Mrs Flannery’s floury cooking, aware that on this poisonous earth he was fortunate to be fed, but incapable, for once, of a sense of gracious thanksgiving.

  The Herald (‘Protestant rag that it is,’ said the monsignor as he thoroughly read it) had predictable tidings. A surrounded Australian battalion had successfully fought its way back to the British lines in Malaya, but the mark of the Japanese advance was further down the Malay Peninsula than it had been the last time the Herald published its dispiriting map. The government was already discussing plans for the evacuation of children from Brisbane and Sydney should the Japanese capture fields which put those targets in range. Children had already been moved from the tropical port of Darwin. But framing the news of military catastrophe and the coming bewilderment of children were the graphic advertisements in which Pepsodent toothpaste promised the young success in their social life at their local tennis club—‘Shirley’s teeth are so much whiter!’ In Capstan and Turf and 33 advertisements, the faces of confident smokers too, hemmed in the columns of bad news. Salvital promised the threatened populace of the Commonwealth of Australia, no matter what, a se
ttled digestion, and Solvol assured them they would meet every emergency with immaculate hands.

  A chastening statement from the prime minister, Mr Curtin: ‘The Spearhead reaches South—Always South’. Mr Curtin suggested that the whole future of ‘our race’ was at stake. At Leichhardt Stadium, Billy Britt had fought an American soldier named the Alabama Kid. Britt, a Catholic Youth Organisation boxer of some renown, had been flattened in the eighth round by said Kid.

  Darragh took his plate to the kitchen to thank Mrs Flannery. She had tapioca pudding for him, but he suggested that as much as he liked tapioca, he might have it that night. He heard his own voice and feared it sounded sullen. He hated to sound that way. It had been part of his self-respect as a youth to overcome the natural surliness of boyhood. But here it was, asserting itself at his age, in the presbytery kitchen.

  By the time he reached his room, which blessedly pointed towards the quiet, tree-lined street rather than towards the convent school, he was staggering with exhaustion, and broke the rule of neatness by lying on the bed in his black trousers. His chances of surreptitiously ironing them later, without Mrs Flannery’s knowledge, were non-existent, since in domestic affairs she was all-knowing. But he would deal with that question later. He was instantly asleep, with the sort of tiredness which induces vivid dreams.

  He saw very clearly in the brassy afternoon light that came from his window and penetrated his sleep the striped awnings which Australians used to transform back verandahs into bedrooms. Millions of Australians, adolescents or inconvenient uncles, lived verandah lives and dreamed verandah dreams, sheltered by such awnings. Hundreds of thousands, anyhow. The canvas always patterned in yellow and browny-orange—very nearly the same colour as the flags which were put up on beaches to mark safe swimming spots. By the awning of Darragh’s dream sat a grey-faced, thin man, wearing a satin-backed vest, a collarless shirt, undistinguished pants, smoking a thin, self-made cigarette. He seemed the loneliest man in that plain void enclosed by orange and yellow sun-blasted awning. Occupying in his own household the space reserved for the visitor, the child, the over-staying, under-paying guest. Darragh approached him and asked, ‘What have you done?’ For though the man’s demeanour was humble, there was no doubt that he had achieved something worthy of a mad emperor. The man was philosophically inhaling the smoke from his little glowing cigarette and had his eye on the middle distance. ‘What have you done?’