by Tom Keneally
To fill in the time further he began reading a detective novel about one Lord Peter Wimsey, who lived in a world unidentifiable to those who inhabited Australian suburbs, to those who ministered to the sins of such as the pernicious brother of the Strathfield community, or Mrs Flood. Even the suspicious characters did not speak to Lord Peter with the particular working-class directness of Mrs Flood’s lodger and lover, Ross Trumble.
Remotely, he heard the large knocker at the front door sound. He rose and put on his black serge coat. He picked up his breviary, as if it was the natural armour to take him to such a confrontation as that about to occur. He paused to take in a breath, but did not look at himself in the mirror behind his door for fear that he would spot the hollow man he had been for the past week. Mrs Flannery could be heard making her brisk way to his door, and then knocking. ‘Father? Mrs Heggarty is waiting for you in the parlour.’
‘Tell her I’ll be just a moment,’ called Darragh in the voice of preoccupation. He gauged the passage of a minute. He’d always hoped he would never spend a minute in this way, for vanity’s sake, letting fallow, godless seconds evaporate. Then, full of a kind of terror and indefinable hope, he opened the door and heard his own steps like those of another person in the corridor and on the staircase. The door to the parlour was open, and pushing it further aside, he saw her seated in a chair at the far end, with the window behind her. She had dressed as if for Mass in a fawn suit, and a little slanting domed hat with a feather at the brim. Her hands were joined nervously at the table, but now she stood up, as she had stood up all her life for the entry of priests. Introibo altare dei. The emergence of the vestmented priest from the sacristy onto the altar steps, of the school-visiting priest in a classroom, had been bringing her to her feet since babyhood. You could tell these things by instinct.
‘Hello, Mrs Heggarty,’ he heard himself say, like a kindly grocer.
Frowning most frankly, she told him good afternoon.
‘Take a seat,’ he said, sitting under the picture of Pius XII, the former Father Pacelli. His Vatican lay deep in the fascist state of Italy, whose German brethren had captured Mr Heggarty. Yet the Vatican’s eternal magisterium rose above such temporary political facts.
‘Have you heard anything at all about your husband?’ he asked.
‘I spoke to another woman,’ said Mrs Heggarty, not quite engaging him with her green eyes. ‘Her husband was captured last year. She said it took at least six months for the Red Cross to find him and for her to get a letter.’ The pressure of such a wait brought the possibility of tears to her face again, but they were suppressed. ‘The Department of Defence said they’ll send me his wages direct. But he was only a lance bombardier.’
So … Lance Bombardier Heggarty.
‘Soldier’s pay,’ murmured Darragh. He had heard her say that, in the playground.
‘That’s right, Father,’ Mrs Heggarty asserted. ‘Nothing to write home about.’
‘Does Anthony know what’s happening?’
This was progressing well, he believed, for Mrs Heggarty seemed to be aided by his questions, not that they showed any superior skill.
‘I’m still trying to choose the moment.’
Darragh nodded.
‘We don’t know when the war will end, do we?’ she said, lifting her eyes, like a woman closing with the chief point of debate. ‘We don’t know whether it will end at all. And if it’ll end our way. Do we?’ The tears gamely repressed behind her features gave her questions an enhanced authority. He knew at once she had lived in a harder world than he had.
‘Surely Western Christianity will succeed in the end,’ said Darragh, ‘even though it’s hard to believe from the papers.’
‘But the Nazis are Christians, as you told me. And they’re doing pretty well, aren’t they?’ asked Mrs Heggarty with a touch of aggression. ‘Every time we set out into Libya, they drive us back. Don’t they? These Christians. And a lot of them are Catholics.’
Darragh blinked. He did not want to think too much about the Nazi Catholics. He had enough conundrums already. ‘Let me say this, Mrs Heggarty. Sometimes I think there will be suffering before there’s deliverance. You’re part of the suffering now, and I sympathise with you.’
‘I know you do,’ she said. ‘But I’m the one who has to go through it.’ Was there a further hint of aggression in her voice?
‘Perhaps I could speak to the gentlemen in the St Vincent de Paul’s?’ he suggested. ‘In case there’s anything you need …’
‘I wouldn’t want charity,’ she said, a leaden working-class pride at once apparent in her. ‘We’ve lived our lives avoiding anyone’s charity.’
‘Well, there’s a place in the city—CUSA—it helps out soldiers’ wives.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Charity.’
Darragh said, ‘I know you’re a proud woman. But sometimes we all need——’ She cut him off again, more briskly.
‘We all need …’ she said with a nod.
He could not make up his mind now how things were going. One thing he knew: he could not imagine the monsignor accepting so many interruptions.
She settled herself in her chair. ‘Sorry, it’s not your fault. I get this anger, and sometimes it doesn’t fit inside a room, even a big one like this.’
‘You can’t help feeling some anger,’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘Do you know my chief reason for coming here? I don’t want to be one of those Catholics who creeps away from the confessional and never speaks to a priest again.’ She talked like someone contemplating apostasy. ‘That’s why I’m speaking to you face-to-face, like an honourable person. There is a man … that’s all I’ll say. No more and no less. A visitor. Nothing else.’
Remembering Mr Regan’s moral outrage, Darragh nearly asked without thinking, ‘An American?’ But that was the height of irrelevance. The question of nationalities had no place in the moral counsels of the Universal Church. He was aware of some ridiculous serpent of vanity in him. It was almost as if he felt entitled as her priest to approve her connections with other people, and she had neglected to let him.
‘This man isn’t like other men,’ she said. ‘He’s patient and courteous. He demands nothing, and I do not choose to offer anything but tea and conversation.’ She had grown flushed, as if she had surprised herself with her own forthrightness. ‘But he’s there, of course, at least now and then. He’s careful how he comes in, so that I’m not embarrassed with the neighbours. But he’s willing to provide my son and myself with a few things which make life decent. A pound or two more of meat, a half-pound of butter, an orange. Chocolate …’
She shrugged, and brought her hands together. She had been opening them as she spoke, to indicate spaciousness. You could tell she was disappointed in herself for mentioning chocolate by name.
She said, ‘There’s no glory in rickets, Father. God doesn’t want scrawny ribs.’
Darragh could feel himself flushing too. ‘I understand exactly what you’re saying. But I doubt this fellow does it all from the pure kindness of his heart. Are you telling me that he wants nothing?’
Darragh was voicing the concern not of his own worldly wisdom, but of the sexual scepticism Noldin and other moral theologians passed on to all their students. Even innocents.
‘There is pure goodness of heart,’ she told him directly. ‘Surely a priest would take that for granted. But there are also mixed motives, and we live with them all the time. Especially if they favour us.’
‘Do you realise …’ he asked her in a voice he did not want Mrs Flannery—should she be ensconced somewhere supervising their dialogue—to hear, ‘do you realise this is a proximate occasion of sin?’
She leaned her head to one side and spread her hands again. ‘It hasn’t proven to be,’ she said, like a challenge.
Darragh could say only, ‘Well …’
Mrs Heggarty relented. ‘It has not proven to be. But I don’t want you to think I came down in the last shower eithe
r.’
Darragh still kept his voice low and fraternal, but something had shifted in him, something unpredicted. Noldin and all the parish priests of history had put their words unbidden in his mouth. ‘So this is what you’ll do?’ he murmured. ‘Sell your soul for items of groceries?’
He wished the words unsaid. Indeed, she seemed disappointed. ‘Father,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘you said you understood exactly what I meant. I’d sacrifice my soul for dignity, because people without dignity have no soul to save anyhow. For the dignity of my boy. So that he doesn’t grow up as a bony, miserable little working-class brat.’
Even in his self-disappointment, Darragh was still wary of eavesdroppers. ‘You’re talking like a Marxist,’ he murmured. ‘What about the dignity of suffering?’
‘Well,’ she said in her level way, as if being gentle with him, ‘you’ll have to forgive me, Father, but I don’t see too much dignity of suffering here at the presbytery.’
‘How can you consider what you’re telling me, though? And how can you talk this way when your husband has just been captured?’
She still refused to be easily cowed—her assertions, which she’d obviously kept secret till today, ran confidently in the parlour. She had all the pride and skill of a confident heretic.
‘I talk this way because my husband has been captured. The fellow I speak of, the visitor, is a decent fellow, but he is a fellow after all. I was intending … well, let me say, not to give him any encouragement. I am a married woman. But I need to take the risk of those occasions of sin you speak of, for my sake and Anthony’s.’ She shrugged and composed her breathing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, almost with a fondness. ‘None of this is your fault, Father Darragh.’
Through an over-striving of which he could not cure himself, he was failing this hard, bright, pragmatic soul. Are the best damned? he wondered for a second.
‘Why do you come to me, then?’ Darragh challenged her. ‘I don’t want to offer you counsel when everything I say is rebuffed.’
‘But,’ she said, ‘I feel I owe it to the Church to explain myself.’ She lowered her voice further still. ‘And if I’d gone to some old monsignor, he wouldn’t have let me do it. He would have roared at me and told me to be gone and say the rosary.’
‘Oh yes, but I’m soft enough to listen to all your ranting. You are married! That is the reality. And your husband is a hero.’
‘An ordinary man, but a hero. I hope they are kind, those Germans.’
‘And what will he say when he comes back, and all the gossip rises up around him?’
‘I must hope he’ll be understanding. Of the fix his capture put me and Anthony in. Look, I do intend to remain innocent——’
‘And create scandal,’ said Darragh.
‘Let the old scandalmongers have their field day. If they’re so keen on virtue, let those old biddies live off lance bombardier’s pay.’
So, another argument dispensed with, he scrabbled for what was left in the arsenal of his moral theology. Later, he would realise that he should have been calm, rather than try to win the argument, but he could not see that at the moment.
‘One day you will be a grandmother,’ he now argued, fumbling away, a losing debater, ‘and your son … Anthony … he will understand the truth.’
‘He’ll understand by then what poverty does to people,’ she told him, her face wan, this confrontation costing her, Darragh was happy to see, all the resources of her spirit. ‘I’ll raise him to understand. You speak of the sin against the Holy Spirit. Poverty is the sin against the Holy Spirit. It debases people to a state where they have no virtues because they’re at an animal level. If they’re put there by capital, then capital goes to Mass and communion, and the poor go to hell.’
‘How can you believe this and still be a good Catholic woman?’ asked Darragh unwisely, letting his confusion turn him into automaton priest.
‘I think I might believe it because I am a good Catholic woman. Have you read Rerum Novarum by His Holiness Pope Leo XIII? My father said it was the Church’s answer to Karl Marx.’
Ah! thought Darragh. An Aunt Madge woman after all. She came from a political household.
‘Rerum Novarum never told you to put yourself in the power of men.’
She performed a particularly authoritative and ironic shake of the head. ‘I think … in telling you all this … I’m putting myself under the power of a man now.’
Darragh was intoxicated at once with horror and hope.
‘But I’m a priest.’
‘Like Christ,’ she suggested, shocked with the energy of her own argument. ‘Christ was a man, too. That was the whole point.’
He could imagine her family more particularly now. Lang Labor voters, for sure. The mother a believer in earthly justice from the Prince of Peace instead of Lenin and Stalin. The father a book-reader. Passing on the daily bread of such ideas as the one she’d uttered: poverty debases people to a state where they have no virtues, because they have no soul.
Darragh urged, ‘Tell me what I can do for you, Mrs Heggarty. I can speak discreet words to people who could help you. Please, let me do that much. Our charity may be kinder than that of this visitor.’
She frowned. ‘You’ve got good intentions,’ she told him. ‘I hope you don’t get spoiled in some way.’
‘How could I be spoiled?’ he asked. ‘You’re the one about to go into danger.’
‘Well, it strikes me the Church isn’t always kind to its angelic brethren.’
‘Angelic brethren?’
‘Yes. You’re sort of unspoiled. You don’t get cranky with me, you don’t rouse. You don’t get outraged at my cheek. You tolerate everything and offer answers. You haven’t got any of the normal airs. Except … your answers. Really, they’re the usual little answers. They’re simple answers. They’d be all right if the world was run by fellows like you, but …’
He didn’t like his less than influential nature and future announced to him like this. It made him vengeful for a moment. ‘You may take this man’s help and it could avail you nothing—the Japanese might come …’
‘And bayonet all fallen women, I suppose. Or worse. You’re right. People like my son and me … we have to survive for the week. We have to have our dignity in the hour and the day.’
‘Who talked to you about this ridiculous dignity business?’ he asked, nearly enraged. ‘Is it one of the lines your kind man tries out on you?’
She waved her hand to dismiss this. ‘I have my own ideas,’ she assured him.
‘The idea of redemption as an economic matter—it’s one dear to the Marxists. It’s the only redemption they have.’
‘Would redemption on this earth be such a terrible thing?’
Ross Trumble lived in The Crescent that wasn’t a crescent. So did Mrs Heggarty, as the parish records showed. Had they talked? Surely Ross Trumble wasn’t the so-called kind man? For a moment, though, before he decided not to, it seemed nearly a reasonable thing to ask her did she know Mrs Flood’s lodger.
Instead he told her, ‘Until Hitler invaded Russia, the communists wanted no part of your husand’s war. They went on strike to keep food and uniforms and weapons away from your husband.’
She was mildly unimpressed, and he reduced her to combativeness rather than thought. ‘Do you think that’s why we’re losing the war? Look, I just wanted to be an honest woman with you, Father Darragh, and that’s all. I’m determined on my way.’
Darragh, struggling, tried out the idea that he and she were not Protestants. ‘In the end, we submit our consciences humbly to authority.’
But Mrs Heggarty said, almost with apology, that she was guided by authority but was not its mindless slave.
So he was forced at last to sit awhile in silence, having used every available argument he had at his conscious disposal. Her ideas might be heterodox, but he felt he could not match her strength. He had thought that this could never happen—he had gone forth to Strathfield, New South Wal
es, believing that he was fully equipped for every earthly argument and half of heaven’s. And now, her ideas seemed even to him to shine with a certain sad and plausible wisdom.
Having come here to tell him in her genial but egregious pride that she would not creep away, and having now imparted that, she began to stand up and then to advance past the polished table to the door. The reproduction of Raphael’s Virgin smiled down on her, the Sacred Heart blazed. Darragh rose as she approached the half-open door. He stepped forward and touched her elbow. ‘Please wait.’ But he saw then that Mrs Flannery was arranging some flowers on a hallstand by the beaded-glass front door, and had turned her full gaze towards him and Mrs Heggarty.
‘Thank you for all your advice, Father,’ said Mrs Heggarty, and nodded and left.
AS IF TO CHASTEN people and put them in a mood for the penitential season, Singapore had fallen the weekend before Ash Wednesday. Frank Darragh celebrated Shrove Tuesday on the steps in front of the sacristy by stacking the leftover palms of 1941’s Palm Sunday into an open tin tray, in which he had already lit some charcoal. The palms from April 1941 had dried out—the last terrible year had desiccated them and they burned quite easily, the little bit of charcoal barely adding to their dusty mass.
He had spent a dreadful night, because his sense of loss, of having been given Mrs Heggarty for rescue and having failed in the task, could not be absorbed into the allocated hours of rest. He felt grainy with sleeplessness. He believed that a sort of grit had entered the soul, lay on the face of all leaves, and dimmed every bloom. How could he live to be a priest as long as Carolan had, when he could not convince a young wife, this young wife in particular, towards wisdom? When she uttered her reasons for what she did with such philosophic flagrancy! The Japanese might save him the trouble of a long priestly career, of course, but he did not want them to.