by Tom Keneally
By now four of her children had ascended to the bonnet of the car and were making Anthony laugh beyond the windscreen.
‘I don’t think Monsignor Carolan knows this,’ said Darragh. ‘Is there a telephone?’
‘There,’ said Mrs Stevens, pointing urgently towards the Rochester Street corner, where at some stage one of Kate Heggarty’s visitors had parked. ‘Do you have any coppers, Father?’
Darragh hunted in his pockets and found only one George V penny. ‘I can get you another,’ said Mrs Stevens, rushing indoors. Darragh told Mr Connors and Anthony to wait awhile—he had to call Monsignor Carolan. When Mrs Stevens was back with another penny, he jogged to the corner, delighted with the possibilities of the hour. He could do Kate Heggarty the intimate honour of saving her boy from Killcare and the automatic stigma of orphanhood.
In his excitement, his index finger seized in vain air before engaging and hauling round the number slot. He began to use his middle finger. Mrs Flannery answered and said the monsignor was in his study. Oh the promise of all this—car, boy, cave mother, wizard! Himself the Merlin who gave the boy-king the means of heroic life. So easy, so easy …
‘Monsignor Carolan,’ said Monsignor Carolan.
Darragh told him there might have been a mistake on the nuns’ part, that Mrs Stevens had made it clear to him she would offer a home to the boy, and would raise him as a Catholic. It seemed there was no need for Killcare.
‘Frank, Frank,’ said the monsignor. ‘She says that.’
‘No, she’s an honest woman, and I would make visitations and keep an eye on Anthony.’
‘Stop it, Frank,’ the monsignor roared. ‘Stop it! You’re hysterical!’
They shared a silence for a while. The monsignor broke it. ‘The nuns who came to look at Mrs Stevens’s are experts, Frank. Forgive me, I know you’re an expert on everything, from women to black troops to God knows what. A bloody encyclopaedia, you are!’ Darragh could hear the monsignor panting. ‘You’ll–bloody–kill–me–yet, Frank,’ he yelled, a word at a time. ‘The woman is poor, her husband’s not there, she’s already got five children, and she’s not a Catholic. She wants him for the money the Commonwealth pays for foster care, Frank.’
‘Monsignor, it doesn’t seem to me …’
‘Frank, I’m telling you. The people who know a thing or two have decided this. He’s lucky to be taken in at Killcare. When his father comes back he can return home. But even if you were delivering the kid to the very pit of hell, on behalf of the archdiocese I’m ordering you to do it. Do you understand, Frank? This is the end. I’m ordering you.’
Darragh covered his eyes with his non-phone-holding hands. The idea that he make a profound submission of soul and consign the child had its blind appeal. But, he thought, this isn’t the end. He believed there must be ways to liberate the child.
‘Are you going to Killcare, Frank?’ the monsignor asked, a still, tired voice on the end of the line. ‘Of would you prefer me to throw you to the archbishop?’
‘I have no choice,’ said Darragh. ‘Do I?’
‘The sooner we get you on retreat, son, the bloody better.’
Back at the house dispirited, he told Mrs Stevens that it was all arranged for Anthony at Killcare and couldn’t be helped for now. Maybe later … He said this, ‘Maybe later …’ not to fob her off, but like a fellow-conspirator. At a level of his brain he was aware he was plotting with a plump, ordinary woman of non-Catholic background against a monsignor and nameless expert nuns. And he was willing to do it. That was a tendency he might expunge during his long and tedious retreat. Or perhaps not.
In any case, depression and anger possessed him as he got into the car, the middle of the front seat, allowing the window seat to Anthony. He patted the seat beside him for Anthony’s sake, as if to say, ‘Feel this luxury!’ At the wheel, Mr Connors, jovially emitting such nicknames as ‘Tiger,’ ‘Skeeter,’ ‘Popsy,’ persuaded the frowning Mrs Stevens’s brood to get down from various parts of his car and leave it free to move. They clapped when he managed to start the engine. As the Dodge began to draw away down The Crescent, in a street which seemed to refuse to carry in its blank bricks any of the weight of Mrs Heggarty’s murder, the kids ran after it, shouting encouragement, and Anthony seemed cheered.
Driving down Parramatta Road towards town, Mr Connors told Anthony how well the nuns would look after him. ‘Only you didn’t have any brothers or sisters, did you? Well, now you’ll have lots of brothers and sisters.’
‘I only wanted a couple,’ Anthony declared.
‘Well, you’ll have a couple of special mates, that’s for certain. And the nuns will give you a big boy to yourself, to look after you. I’ve been up there. I’ve visited it with St Vincent de Paul.’
Anthony occasionally looked out, Darragh saw, at passing women toting or towing children along the shopfronts of the road. Current motherhood was a phenomenon all the way from Concord to Burwood to Petersham to Leichhardt. Darragh feared Anthony was thinking something along the lines of, ‘If it’s so plentiful and normal along here, how have I managed to lose it, this quantity. A mother.’ The junior engineer in Anthony was awakened by their passage across Pyrmont Bridge, and the climax of the Harbour Bridge, its great steel arching like the flight of a sweet arrow towards the sun over North Sydney. Mr Connors knew how many bolts there were in it, and how only the other day a Yank in a Kittyhawk had flown beneath the bridge roadway. It was a great dare with the Yankee pilots!
Ultimately, through woodier and woodier northern suburbs, they were in the country. Beyond Hornsby, farmers kept their children on the edge of the road selling fresh eggs and oranges. ‘They’ve escaped the rationing mania,’ said Mr Connors with approval. Many dun hills gave way to the complex inland waters of the Hawkesbury River, and a long bridge, with a railway bridge and a train running parallel to it—another sign in Mr Connors’s and even Anthony’s eyes that the world was going to some trouble to accumulate its treasures before him. But then, more hillsides and their olive-green foliage, fascinating no doubt to a botanist but less so to an orphan and a priest.
At last a small post office store arrived, and visible beyond it the gothic sandstone of the orphanage. It was, thought Darragh, far too austere for an orphan from Homebush. Its architecture seemed designed more to affright than to mother.
‘It’s big,’ he reassured Anthony, ‘but that’s only because it’s a home for so many boys and girls.’ Anthony began weeping, softly, so as not to appear ungrateful, as soon as they entered the polished-wood hallway. A statue of the Virgin by the door, delicate hands spread, seemed to offer young Heggarty the comfort of that which he could never again know on earth. A young nun showed them to the parlour with deep leather-covered armchairs in monastic black, and a desk. The boy’s soft crying continued.
‘Come on then,’ said fatherly Mr Connors, helping Anthony to a chair. ‘A lot of the kids in here have no mother and no father at all. Whereas your father will come back in a year or two and take you home.’
When this sensible idea did nothing to reach the small boy’s grief, honest Mr Connors winced and exchanged a glance with Darragh.
At last a large, authoritative nun dressed all in black entered, papers in hand, and before she had reached the desk, said, ‘Mother Augustine, gentlemen. Hello, Father. Come now, Anthony. That won’t do!’
This command from a solemn presence did the trick, and Anthony Heggarty, lost in a big black chair, achieved an awed composure. As for the nun herself, Mother Augustine, she was not awed at all by young priests or senior laymen, though she observed the forms of introduction and made note of their names as soon as she had sat down at the desk.
‘You have the birth and baptismal certificates?’ she asked Mr Connors, and Connors produced an envelope from his pocket.
‘These are, of course, copies,’ he said. ‘The police … they didn’t want Mrs Stevens or the nuns searching Mrs Heggarty’s house for them.’
‘Copies are excellent,’ said Mot
her Augustine, reaching for them. She turned to the boy. ‘You’ll make your first communion here, Anthony,’ she said. More than a promise, it sounded like a jovial command. ‘Best to be brisk,’ she murmured in Mr Connors’s and Frank’s direction. ‘Causes fewer tears in the end.’ She picked up a brass bell from her desk and rang it. Three children, two boys and a girl, aged ten or eleven years, entered the office.
‘Paddy, Jim and Shirley will look after you, Anthony. Stand up. And your bag. Paddy, help him with his bag. If you wish to know anything, Anthony, ask these children. Oh dear heavens!’
For Anthony Heggarty, surrounded by his mentors under the pressure of the intentions of Mother Augustine and these unknown children, had urinated on the polished floor. His stricken eyes dared direct themselves at nobody other than Darragh. There was an extremity of desire in them, as if he believed that saving him was easy, and since Darragh was the Good Priest of the Playground, it was within his means. This terror, too, the strangler had made.
The drive back to Sydney could be engaged only at the cost of admitting to his soul an urgency to punish the violator and strangler. What sort of man, presented with the bounty and honesty of Mrs Heggarty, with that thirst for equity beneath green eyes, would find the solution to her conundrum to be this: to constrict her air, violently shut it off, to interdict the river of her blood as well, to close her arteries? He wondered was it because of habits of discipline, of tempering his taste for romanticism, of obeying superiors even when their edicts did not pass the test of reason, that he felt connected now by a tautened rope to the malefactor, and felt that the quickest way to hauling him in might be, after all, to go to the retreat house in Kangaroo Valley, since revelations could arise from passive submission as well as from active rebellion. There must be some ultimate activity of course—quietism was a temptation and a heresy. But revelation was always unexpected—that was a long-established rule. ‘Arise, and go into the city,’ God said to Paul, the persecutor of Christians, when Paul was knocked from his horse by lightning or a flood of light—the text of The Acts of the Apostles was a little obscure in demotic Greek. But what was not obscure was that Paul had had his enlightenment on a road, between Jerusalem and Damascus, locked merely in the contemplation of his horse’s hoof-beats.
And Darragh began to grasp, as Mr Connors, making too much conversation, drove him back to Sydney through forests full of a brazen, questioning light, why he, like Paul, the former Jewish flayer of Christians, had become a stranger to God. He had not asked the correct questions, the questions a pilgrim should ask. God, source of all I am and home to what I might be, what would You have me know, and what have me do? And at once he knew what he would do. That night, the eve of his departure for retreat, he must visit Mrs Heggarty’s house, with no object in mind than to bear home to the dead mother the message of the son’s anguish. This was something beyond the reasonable net of what the monsignor would have him know, have him do. But he couldn’t help that. It was something commanded by divinely implanted instinct. It was the same as to sneeze, to blink, to breathe: something above and something simultaneously below the poles of sin and virtue, will and submission.
AND SO HE SET out, unforbidden, after a solitary dinner, the monsignor absent, salving his soul at the table of one of the laymen. The Crescent, running die-straight east–west by the railway line, its embankments, its electric train stanchions, was, at half past seven at night, a contest between the homely smell of fried, rationed chops escaping the pore of the houses on the left, and the sintered, coaly metallic-electric aroma of rail lines to the right. But there was none of the warmth of raucous kitchens, of stew or vegetables or sago or bread pudding, about Mrs Heggarty’s house, one of the twins separated by a fence of wood and wire, the shallow verandah full of the shadow of death. Three narrow strips of glass made up the front window where the bedroom always was in these houses, in this house as in Mrs Flood’s. He hadn’t paid particular note on his first visit, but now he knew that in there it had happened. Like a girl in a cautionary tale about sin, she had given herself up to, of all the world’s men, the exactly wrong fellow. Not the cynical fellow; not the normally main-chancing fellow. The lethal fellow. She had been struck by the thunderbolt of God’s obscure will. It had avoided Mrs Flood, who had sinned lustily, and struck Kate Heggarty in her first lapse. And she had known as she fought the man that all her talk of dignity had been so much blather, that she could not have made a more extreme mistake. This thought gave him no joy at all, but deepened the poignancy of her loss.
Darragh opened the little wire gate to the side of the house and walked there in narrowed darkness, learning something, he believed, though he could not say what. The southern winter, barely begun, pricked at raw shave marks on his neck, and seemed to have pooled like a malign spirit around the sagging house where Kate Heggarty had brewed her last tea and smiled her last smile. How could Lance Bombardier Heggarty return here and remain sane?
Now into the backyard. The clothes lines ran slantwise across the night, one of them stretched tight with a timber prop. Down the yard, an iron shed slouched but with an exaggerated determination which almost promised it would still stand when Heggarty was at last released. Like a blessing from a well-meaning but immune heart, the sound of The Amateur Hour—to which the monsignor was probably at this moment listening at his parishioner’s dinner table—surged across the dark from somebody else’s kitchen, in momentary and doomed jolliness.
He nudged a laundry door and looked in at the cold washing coppers, and smelled the same smell he had got since childhood from his mother’s laundry—Solvol, Reckitt’s Blue, Sunlight Soap. Here she had attended to the pride of appearance, and achieved that cleanliness which is next to dignity, that quality which ensured that no child’s mother said, ‘Keep away from Anthony Heggarty—his clothes aren’t properly laundered.’ But there was only a ghost of warmth here, only a phantasm of Kate Heggarty retained in the fading scent of blue-bags and cornmeal starch. Not enough, and no declarations, no presence strong enough to explain itself and give instructions.
In deeper shadow of the narrow back verandah sat Lance Bombardier Heggarty’s boyhood cricket bat—you could tell that by its age, and the sticking plaster around the handle, and the crack at the base. An inheritance for Anthony Heggarty. A bucket of clothes pegs kept it company. Relics of a marriage. Laundress and batsman, the notable incarnations of mulier and homo Australis. Over this little conjunction of objects in the near dark, Darragh wept. He raised a hand to the green-painted back door and pushed, but it was locked, and all further indications of the crime were locked within it. He walked down the yard towards the peach tree in its middle, hoping for some enlightenment beneath the cold wires of the clothes line. He still believed that she had infused all her familiar places with clues. This little backyard geography offered something, but he could not sight it, it lay just around the angle of seen reality.
‘Please God,’ he said. ‘Please God.’
In a retreat, in six or ten or twenty days of silence, the only word uttered being the recited office and the words of the liturgy of the Mass, something from this ordinary place might reveal itself.
She had left no trace for him in the air. He wiped his eyes with his right hand and stood still to assess whether this little rite gave him any clearer vision. When it failed to do so, he left by the side laneway, and out the wire gate to the browned-out street. Given that all window shades were drawn by order of the air-raid wardens, the most palpable reality was still the cooling odour of communal dinners, turning rancidly cold in the air. Darragh had given up that homeliness. The squalor of cheek-by-jowl domesticity. He was separated from his own human squalor by the thick walls of St Margaret’s presbytery. Until the invaders came, he had no need to scrape congealed remnants in a sink. This is what it meant, he saw, to be a eunuch for the sake of Christ. And reflecting thus in The Crescent, he moved under the unlit streetlights, feeling his way by the pencils of light which evaded the best intention
s of curtained rooms and which, later tonight, wardens under the management of Mr Conover would see it as their duty, moving about the streets, to eliminate.
On the pavement, a large hand descended on his shoulder, very nearly as a blow. He turned, and it was Ross Trumble. ‘I saw you slinking along there, father of the people,’ said Trumble. ‘In a fucking cardigan tonight. Dressing humbly, eh?’
Trumble’s fairish face and his breath as well were again heated by beer, hastily drunk somewhere else.
‘Hello, Mr Trumble,’ said Darragh. But he blushed too, caught in a strange endeavour some might think perverse, and others guilty.
‘Hello, Mr Trumble,’ Trumble repeated, and appealed to the dark railway embankment across the street. ‘And everywhere this death bird goes creeping in his black cardigan, a woman dies. That poor little tart Heggarty. Do you think she’s a poor little tart, or are you glad she got punished?’
Darragh burned with this insult, since Trumble didn’t know that he, Darragh, was a flawed man, not a skilled robot of the Church, flawlessly uncompassionate.
‘I think you ought to back off me, Trumble,’ he said. ‘I feel terrible enough about her and about Anthony.’
Trumble was a little surprised, but he rallied. ‘The best girls are gone, and the people’s chief hope is under fascist attack, but you have nothing better to do …’
His argument became leaden and died for a second, as he swallowed and moistened his dry mouth. Then he cast about him for something to say—one of his argumenta ad hominem. It was as if, while making up his mind what his next real decision would be, he must fill the space with the occasional music of his polemics.
‘They told me,’ said Trumble, ‘that you had it in for me. You told the bastards about the chops. You really are a bastard. Visiting dead women in a cardigan. I know you blokes preach death-worship. Just look at your chief bloody image. Nailed-up pain. What a model to hold up to kids, eh? You got Rosie Flood. Did you manage to mess up that poor Heggarty sort, before her boyfriend strangled her?’