An Angel In Australia

by Tom Keneally

  What galled was that he had no weight with the woman, no gravity to alter her path, to stop her in her purposeful flight. She had chosen to speak to him because she could say what she could not to more austere men. The interview had left her without a burden. She could tell herself she had been honest with the priests, and no hypocrite, and she had won her argument, strongly made her point. She did not leave stinging with shame at her apostasy, as the powerful of the Church would have made her do. She left saying a pleasant good afternoon.

  So it was as Monsignor Carolan had said to Monsignor Plunkett—he was an easy target—and his anger at the monsignor was unjustified. No doubt his visit to Mrs Flood produced in The Crescent, after he left, tinkling, wheezing hilarity from the lady herself and the darkest, most dismissive curses from the men at the kitchen table. So his role was to be God’s fool, and he must be happy to be if necessary. Except, with all of that, his connection to the God of his joy seemed to have been cut. At Mass that morning the Latin had fled undervalued from his lips.

  There was a worm in his mind, too, an obsessive little creature which tried to convince him that the Communion of Saints, the body of the faithful, was stripped of a large part of its meaning should Mrs Heggarty defect from it. In the state he was in, he hungered for the salvation above all of that one soul. It was as if all other souls could go to ashy oblivion. His own, his mother’s, Aunt Madge’s, Mr Regan’s. This little job with the palms seemed appropriate to his present state: reducing last year’s green life to ashes. But it was a toxic vanity, he knew, to think in that way, that the ashes in the metal pan answered to the ashes within the soul. Vanity to think, too, that Carolan always permitted or persuaded him to do these jobs, the jobs of a sacristan, and he had done them for two years now with dog-like eagerness. While the monsignor and his beloved finance committee occupied a higher level, above such banal, pietistic tasks.

  Tomorrow morning, for Ash Wednesday Mass, said in black vestments, the church would be packed. Those whom piety did not bring there, the anxiety of the times would. The captured cities of Asia would add their embers to the event. Darragh and the monsignor would both need to be on the altar, and as the faithful knelt, would each proceed along the altar rail from different directions, planting the mark of these very ashes on the foreheads of the faithful. Darragh, dipping his right thumb in the brass pot carried for him by an altar boy, would make a small smudged cross on each brow. He would intone, ‘Memento homo quia cines es, et ad cinerem reverteris—Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.’ Or as the seminary wits had it, ‘Remember, squirt, that thou art dirt, and unto dirt thou shalt revert.’

  A large black car had stopped by the gate in line with St Margaret’s long wall. Atop this car, in a wooden bracket, lay the great black bladder which, by technological means Darragh did not understand, fuelled cars now, supplementing petrol with coal gas and saving fuel for the machines of war. A pear-shaped man in a well-cut grey suit and vest, his face shaded by the brim of a felt hat, came walking into the church grounds. Another, similarly dressed man remained in the vehicle. As the man got closer, Darragh took in his broad jaws, the way the breadth of his face diminished as it got closer to the brim of the hat. He wasn’t a handsome fellow, but he was strongly built beneath his inherited body shape. And there was an amusing glitter in his eye.

  ‘Good morning, Father Darragh,’ he said, with the confidence Darragh associated with regular Mass-goers.

  Darragh brushed his hands and said hello.

  The man introduced himself. He was an inspector from the CIB. Darragh was not absolutely sure what these initials stood for, but thought the C might stand for Criminal. The man’s name was Kearney, a name which somehow sat well with his earthy Irish face. It was a name Darragh had often seen in newspapers, and heard invoked by priests as that of a no-nonsense, skilled policeman and utterly faithful Catholic. Despite the influence of the Masons in the New South Wales police force, he had got to the rank of inspector. He might, they said, become the first Catholic commissioner.

  ‘I’m in Concord parish,’ said the policeman, ‘so we’ve never met.’ It still seemed that it was on the strength of that parish affiliation, rather than as a policeman, that the inspector now extended his hand for shaking. ‘I went to school at the Brothers’ up the road,’ he said. ‘Brother Keogh called me. He’s frantic, poor fellow. One of his men has just walked out. A young bloke, Brother Howley. Like that. Packed a bag and fled.’

  The brothers liked to call each other ‘the men’. With some justice, as Darragh was the first to admit. They expected each other to be men, and told the boys they expected them to be too. Their hard disciplines were not designed for what Darragh’s father used to call ‘lily-farts’. To be a man meant possessing something like sturdiness of soul, and an ability to play rugged football. And Darragh knew exactly the ‘man’ who had walked out. Rather than stay and sin again. Or rather than face his superiors, or an older, more severe confessor. Or another potential motive willing to risk damnation as his punishment.

  ‘The fellow didn’t talk to Keogh or to anyone,’ said Inspector Kearney. ‘Didn’t apply for a dispensation of his vows, which in his case is quite possible, since they’re simple vows and a dispensation would come through in a few months. But no. Just caught a bus, the day before yesterday, and hasn’t been seen. You hear confessions over there, I believe. Now I know you can’t break the confessional seal, Father, and I wouldn’t want you to. But Brother Keogh thought—you being the same age as the young bloke—you might have had some informal chats with him. Something to give you sort of an inkling.’

  ‘I’m sorry, he didn’t talk to me, more than a good morning here and there. I got no impression he would leave like this,’ said Darragh. He was, at the same time, amazed at himself that he was not more shocked. The inspector’s knowing eyes weighed him—to the nearest ounce of reticence. Or of frankness.

  ‘I wouldn’t be doing this, Father, except poor old Keogh’s so distressed. We’re up to our eyeballs with all the Yanks in town, and there’s a lot of wartime nonsense between men and women.’ He shook his head in a women-will-never-cease-to-surprise way. ‘But I felt I’d better take the time to make Brother Keogh happy. It’s a serious business to him, this vanishing act. The young bloke had his eye on the army. Did you hear anything about that?’

  ‘No, I didn’t have any clue that this was going to happen,’ said Frank, deliberately choosing a demi-slang, motion picture-derived word like ‘clue’ instead of something more elevated— ‘perception’, for example. Perception was the sort of word used by innocents.

  ‘One of his mates up there, Brother August … he said the fellow was talking about joining the army. He thought Howley was just speculating. Just daydream stuff.’

  ‘In the army,’ said Frank, regretting it as soon as it was out of his mouth, ‘on the battlefield, chaplains are empowered to give a general absolution. Without confession.’

  The policeman’s eyes blazed with an appetite for connections. He was, Darragh saw, no flatfoot, no mere New South Wales walloper. ‘So you’re saying that maybe this youngster ran away and joined the army. Just so he didn’t have to confess some sin?’

  ‘I … I’m sorry to say I had little contact with the young brother separately from the sacraments. If he had spoken casually to me …’

  The inspector nodded, but knowledge did not leave his eyes. ‘Well, we’ve asked at every recruiting station in Sydney. Shown his picture. Navy, army, Royal Australian Air Force. Militia. He never mentioned relatives to you, did he? During chats, I mean. I just thought he might have had doubts and he’d talked to you outside the confessional. When young men leave the Brothers, they often go to relatives.’

  ‘What could you do if you found him?’ Darragh asked.

  ‘Well,’ said Inspector Kearney, ‘I couldn’t arrest him, could I? But I could ask him to come back to Keogh, for a bit of wise counsel, you know. A bit of spiritual guidance. The young fellow
may have something he’s made into a big problem, but it’s not. In any case, if he wants to go, if he still wants to join the forces, it looks like there’ll be enough war left for him to get his fill. I had a bit of time in the last one, and let me tell you, it doesn’t take much of it before you start wishing you weren’t there.’

  The newspapers said that the Japanese in Singapore had left some British officials in place, to run the water and electricity, and even to do policing. Kearney had the flexibility, the worldliness, to be left in place after an invasion and fall. In a way, Darragh admired this great gift, this easy aura of capacity, of usefulness.

  ‘I’m only doing this as an old boy of the place,’ Kearney reasserted.

  ‘Yes,’ Darragh acknowledged, ‘it’s very good of you.’ He could see the inspector thinking: This fellow’s not my kind of priest. Not a man’s man.

  There was not much more Darragh could say, since when a man achieved the power to bind and loose sins in the confessional, he lost the power to be an actor on any matter revealed therein. Darragh would willingly have travelled with Inspector Kearney to recruiting stations, but by the highest possible ordinance was not permitted.

  ‘By the way, Father,’ Kearney said, that bargaining irony in his eye. ‘I haven’t been able to see my parish priest. I can promise you I’m working very hard hours. I wondered if you could give me a Lenten indulgence?’

  A release from having to fast in Lent—that’s what he was asking. The inspector’s sturdiness was wrapped in a degree of flab, but public officials working long hours could be absolved from a literal observance of the fast. People like Mrs Darragh and Mr Regan went meatless on many days of Lent, but the burden on them might not be as great as it was on a member of the CIB, pursuing human viciousness beyond imagining.

  ‘You can certainly be exempt from the fast,’ said Darragh. ‘But there may be something you could sacrifice. Perhaps you could go off beer.’

  For the inspector had the look of yeasty appetite some beer-drinkers acquire.

  ‘Well, you see. Beer’s my only ease from work.’

  The man was trying to settle a contract, via Darragh, with the Unutterable, who could not be bargained with.

  ‘That’s something you must decide about then,’ Darragh told him, and the trace of a triumphant smile appeared on Kearney’s face.

  ‘I don’t want to make a special case for myself, Father,’ said Kearney, making, for the sake of it, a special case. ‘But I do have to deal with hard things. I was on the Shark Arm case, for instance.’ Darragh remembered it: a shark caught in the harbour had disgorged a human arm. Everyone in Sydney knew how, due to the shark’s disgusting retch, a murderer had been caught. Darragh had been haunted in his youth by an image of the white putrid limb lying on the slick boards of the aquarium at Coogee. ‘I worked on that Pyjama Girl case, too,’ said the inspector. Again a famous case—how could it not be?—the mouldering body of a girl in pyjamas. The inspector stepped close to him. ‘You can be sure by the end of this week if not this day, I’ll be standing over some bloody mess. The violently dead give a fellow a thirst and an appetite, you know, Father. This case of the young brother, it’s the cleanest thing I’ve had to do in years.’

  For the sake of not letting Kearney get clean away, Darragh said, ‘Then as I say—perhaps something else. Tobacco, sweets. A gesture. But as for the general indulgence from fasting, you have it.’

  ‘He might have enlisted in the army under another name,’ said the non-fasting Kearney suddenly. ‘In which case …’ He opened his hands, palm up to the sky. It indicated even Brother Howley, fled and perhaps under an alias, justified his exemption.

  The inspector and Darragh shook hands, and the inspector went back to his car, where the other policeman waited.

  Darragh himself went to the sacristy and brought out the two cineria, the long-handled urns. As he shovelled ashes into them with a little green garden spade, it struck him that he was not bound by any confessional discretion in Mrs Heggarty’s case. She had come to the parlour and given him thereby the power to discuss her situation with her at further reasonable times. He had an impulse—which he hoped he would have felt for any threatened soul—to write to her and arrange another meeting. He could send a note home with her boy, Anthony, from the school. All advice was contrary to such a practice. All the axioms of wisdom. The priest who follows a woman into the pit is in the pit with the woman!

  There was a famous case to prove the point, too, a case recited at every seminary in the Pacific region. Every priest in Australia and New Zealand and in the islands of Oceania, including Frank Darragh, had been raised on this cautionary tale of how perilous it was to become close friends with a handsome woman penitent. Fifty years past, in days when most priests were Irish-born, the Irishman Dean O’Haran of St Mary’s Cathedral had been such a popular preacher and confessor that photographs of him were sold at church fêtes, and in his human vanity he had given copies to those who sought his spiritual advice. One of these had been the pretty wife of a famous Australian test cricketer, Conyngham, who sued the dean as co-respondent in a divorce, claiming that O’Haran and his wife had committed adultery in the confessional and crypt of the cathedral. It had become the supreme scandal; the bigots and the prurient of the day were delighted, and though the court proclaimed Dean O’Haran’s innocence, it was claimed that some heavy-handed Irish, men like Kearney perhaps, had intimidated witnesses.

  Appropriately, in his desire not to become the dazzling and bedazzled O’Haran, it could now be his interminable and barely endurable Lenten sacrifice not to contact Mrs Heggarty. But that was narrow piety. Kate Heggarty’s state might alter perilously during the penitential season. To keep aloof might be misguided and another form of that most pervasive of sins, vanity.

  LENT BEGAN. DARRAGH had nearly done Lauds for the next day in his pacing place between sacristy and presbytery when Mrs Flannery emerged from the presbytery door waving the evening Sun. For her to be flapping at the air with it like a frantic newsboy was exceptional. The Sun was the monsignor’s afternoon paper, the better of Sydney’s two poor evening rags. When it was delivered to the presbytery, Mrs Flannery read it first, turning the pages with such care the paper looked utterly pristine, and a few times she had offered it to Darragh, but on the proviso that he treat it with the same archival care, for the monsignor himself would be reading it later that evening.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it, Father,’ said Mrs Flannery with a kind of ferocious satisfaction. ‘Those little yellow beasts have bombed Darwin. There are dead Australians everywhere.’ Her eye showed an enraged Irish glint. Like the Clancy sisters, she had a grim confidence that the Japanese would get what-for from her, if ever they dared turn up on Homebush Road.

  The front page showed a radio-photograph of a destroyed post office, and half-naked gun crews firing at the sky. This had all been forecast, but there was an awe to it now that it had happened, a peculiar feeling of belief being expanded to accommodate the new flavour of this damage.

  She did not let him hold the paper, and having imparted the news, returned the Sun to the presbytery. This gravest of tidings had to be reserved for Monsignor Carolan’s gaze.

  He did what a priest should. He prayed for the dead.

  Mr Conover, the air-warden parishioner, along with his colleagues, had been busy through Strathfield and Homebush. The schoolchildren at St Margaret’s and at the state school near Mrs Flood’s home now carried with them as they transited Homebush Road, north or south, a little linen bag. In it lay the basic equipment needed for enduring air raids: two tennis-ball halves to place over the ears, a wooden wedge to put between the teeth, a whistle to blow beneath the rubble, a tin container of burn salve and a safety-pinned roll of lint bandage. Adults were advised also to travel with a first-aid kit on their persons, and Mr Conover dropped three such small tin boxes into the presbytery. Though Darragh tried for a few days, when going out, to force his kit into his side pocket, Monsignor Carolan seemed t
o think it would push summer-weight black fabric out of shape, and put the kit in his vehicle, unwilling to sacrifice his tailored alpaca neatness until the moment some sort of bombardment actually occurred.

  Mr Conover also gave Monsignor Carolan a personal tour of local air-raid arrangements, so that once again the monsignor would be saved from the inconvenience of air-raid practices until the dreadful day arrived, and Sydney suffered the destiny of Antwerp, Rotterdam and Singapore.

  The chief air-raid shelter for St Margaret’s, both the church and the school, was the dark place beneath the altar, a sort of crypt in which no one had been entombed and which served more as a place where old trestle tables were stacked, and even an ancient, blunt-bladed parish lawnmower had found its retirement. There was barely room for an adult to stand upright in there, but given that the architect’s plans showed that St Margaret’s altar was supported by a reinforced floor and by steel columns, some of whose dark uprights could be seen iron-black within the crypt-cellar, it was an appropriate shelter for the brunt of modern aerial bombardments.

  A note to that effect was sent to all the parents of St Margaret’s children. The infants would be safe beneath the steel-braced, sacred vault of the high altar. Sister Felicitas told Darragh one afternoon that she knew God would not let the high altar be destroyed, but Darragh thought God’s will was more mysterious. Catholic beachheads of stone and steeple, of marble and tabernacle, had been consumed in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore. The sword of Shinto rage had been permitted to bear them away.

  His late father had frequently shown him the pictures, in Bean’s Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18, of the destroyed church in Albert, with its steeple full of holes, its sanctuary in ruins, and the Madonna at its apogee tilting towards Germany. From within that Virgin’s shadow, the Australian Corps had repulsed Ludendorff’s men, but the church, and anyone depending upon its structural strength, had been desolated. Darragh, since his misery and doubt had begun, had started to consider whether sometimes God showed His presence in the midst of horror by pretending not to be there.