by Tom Keneally
Dear old Trumble, who had refused to leave his charge, was entitled to dream of his revolution at war’s end—that was Darragh’s view. He who loved the idea of the Madrid Republicans who massacred priests to save the populace from their influence was praised by the press for having saved the life of a priest. On the human plane, nothing was simple. And Darragh, who was co-hero of Fratelli’s capture, did not feel a sense of triumph. Fratelli held him still by the throat. He was in purgatory with a barely saved and howling Kate. Fratelli seemed to have crushed the hope from his blood.
At one time he woke to find his mother and Aunt Madge sturdily present, and realised that contact with Fratelli had given him a disease, a membrane of dimness over his eyes. He began to shed tears when they spoke to him. Shame, which had been lifted from him yesterday morning, had returned at Fratelli’s hands the night before.
He woke at three o’clock on Tuesday morning, recited the office from his breviary, which someone had taken the care to bring him from St Margaret’s, and strained for the same level of gratitude as the Sisters of Charity. He was in feverish dread of the morning paper, and when the nuns did not bring him one, he went to the end of the corridor and found a Herald. After the passage of two nights, he was barely mentioned except as the victim of an assault. The oldest paper of the city, the most respectable, the paper of the ruling classes of Australia, had let him off lightly and with some generosity of soul.
For a time there was a hollow elation, but within half an hour it had evaporated, leaving an underlying landscape of ruin exposed. He felt a ridiculous tendency to tears when the monsignor visited him, spotting his grief in his eyes. ‘Frank, please don’t be upset. They have the killer safe contained.’ The killer could not be contained though. He stained everything he touched; he spread darkness with his lunging penis. ‘This is what comes of taking things too seriously, son,’ said baffled Monsignor Carolan.
‘I want to go back home,’ Darragh told him. ‘I want to work.’
The monsignor sighed. ‘The hospital’s ringed by journalists and their cockatoos, just waiting to get a picture of you leaving. Stay a while yet.’
Darragh continued inconsolable about Gervaise, dead sailors and the wife of Lance Bombardier Heggarty, whose face was more intimately clear to him than that of visitors. ‘This is just a crack-up you’re having, Frank,’ the monsignor advised him on a second visit. ‘You’ll come out of this the wiser.’ He reached out and took Frank’s wrist. ‘Be a good fellow there.’ Then he laughed, trying to cheer Darragh up with ruefulness. ‘Quite a trick even for you to be out at the one time with a strangler and a Communist!’ Darragh was indeed consoled that the improbable comedy of it had reached the monsignor. ‘Where do you get ’em from, Frank? You’re a wonder in your way.’
Darragh did not want to look at newspapers again after that first time. It was as if he learned through the pores of his skin what others, even the nuns, knew from the newspapers of their patients. Fratelli had been questioned by the Americans and the CID. A fellow MP had by some accident, or led by a sense of something awry in the master sergeant, searched Fratelli’s locker on Sunday evening before the emergency broke out, and found a journal. The idea of a journal seemed all too credible to Darragh, given Fratelli’s confessional fervour, the fullness of his account, the evasions, the qualifications he put on his own guilt. All that took words. It took ink. There was not merely a journal, as the CID, summoned by the corps, found in searching his locker. There was as well a memento, a blouse. It was white, and of embroidered linen, no obviously risqué item. Fratelli would have prided himself on taking a worthy garment—no vulgar brassiere, no satin lingerie.
By the afternoon following the submarine attack, a resident of The Crescent, with the authority of the accumulated evidence against the man, had identified Fratelli, and the earnest blue suit in which he made his journeys to Mrs Heggarty’s plain door. Darragh could well imagine how Kearney would have skilfully evoked information from the honest citizens of The Crescent, including Mrs Thalia Stevens.
Mrs Darragh came again, and Aunt Madge, and he found himself turned to stone or at least to silence by their tolerance of him, their cheery determination. That too brought tears to his eyes, which threatened to choke him if he let them free. They sat in light, looking in at him in his pit. His mother said that, darling, she was proud of him. He was earnest, she said, that was all. Earnestness could be cured, apparently, at St Vincent’s. He had so shamed them, he wanted to confess, but the pills they began giving him on the second day bloated and dried his tongue. It lay in his mouth like a toadfish in a drying pool. Had the pills given him this tendency to be giddy and go liquid at the eyes? He asked a nun that, and she was evasive.
Vicar-general Monsignor McCarthy visited in his purple stock, and told Darragh that he was being prayed for. When he went outside, he could be heard holding half an hour’s conversation with a specialist beyond the door. Darragh believed, though he could not swear to anything he heard or saw, that the specialist said, in a slightly raised voice, ‘But he can’t go on retreat. He needs a holiday.’ The vicar-general re-entered the room, frowning about the purple of his stock. ‘There’s no rush for anyone to make up their minds on what should be done yet, Frank,’ he said. ‘Just rest for now.’
Darragh was appalled with himself for being challenged by a tendency to weep in the face of this official purple. ‘I want to begin saying Mass again,’ he declared. ‘Hearing confessions. Anointing the sick.’
‘In a day or so, Frank.’ The vicar-general pointed to the breviary on the bedside table. ‘And you don’t need to worry about the office. You’re dispensed from that for now. You’re far too ill.’
‘Dispensed,’ said Frank. He hated the verb acutely.
Because the pills let the days slide away beneath his feet, it was Saturday before Inspector Kearney came with another senior detective. Kearney seemed tentative, and tender in a brotherly sort of way. ‘Father Frank, we’re not going to pursue the bugger for grievous bodily assault. It’s the murder or nothing.’
‘Of course it’s the murder,’ said Darragh, and again his eyes filled and threatened to unman him.
‘The Yank authorities are right on our side. But the bastard’s pleading insanity.’
Darragh felt laughter in him, as hectic as the monsignor’s laughter had been earlier in the week. ‘He zigs and he zags,’ said Darragh, as if it were an endearing trait of Fratelli.
‘He certainly does. Look, when things are better for you, I have to talk to you. Don’t be alarmed. Our American friends don’t want this to be a circus. They’ll try him by closed court martial at Victoria Barracks. They’re going to ask a New South Wales Supreme Court judge to sit with all the colonels. This won’t be like a public court. No bigotry, no cross-examination. A court martial will give you a fair go. You should be out of the chair within an hour.’
‘I can’t break the seal,’ Darragh explained. ‘The archdiocese wouldn’t know what to do with me then. They don’t know what to do with me now. See, I feel I went down with all the sailaors.’
‘No. No, Frank,’ said the detective in an authoritative way. ‘You’re here, you see. You’re here.’
Darragh frowned. Yes, he must be here, he decided, but he did not always feel as if he was.
Kearney smiled in a rough attempt at reassurance, and to signify Fratelli was a joke. ‘See, he says you drove him to it, because he loved her and you put her in two minds. With your spiritual advice and all! He says you made him mad.’
Darragh laughed outright and without apology.
‘That’s zigging, all right,’ he told Kearney. ‘That’s zagging.’
‘Perhaps. But it’s so easily disproved. I know one of the MP officers thinks Fratelli’s actually courting death, but without so much as saying I am guilty. Because the madness thing … it won’t stand up. The judges will give you an easy time, believe me. You deserve some consideration after what he did to you.’
‘Oh he had me,
all right,’ Darragh assented. ‘He had me, the old Fratelli.’
‘He had a horn on him when we took him, Father.’ Darragh did not want to hear that. He was burdened with shame not least because something in him had called out the beast in Fratelli. It seemed, therefore, like malice for Kearney to say it. ‘He kept that awful erection of his for ten minutes after, it seemed. Built like a bloody draughthorse. Remember what he did on Kate Heggarty’s body.’
Darragh instantly vomited over the bedsheets. Nuns came from every region of the hospital, and correctly looked reprovingly at Inspector Kearney, who to them was just an importunate layman.
Darragh lost many days now. He believed he remembered an elderly nun telling him, ‘But you can’t say Mass yet, Father. You’d upset the chalice. Then … Our Divine Lord’s blood all over the place.’
That closed the matter. Yet suddenly, as if he had got immune to the sting of his pills, or as if the doctor had reduced them, he was able to go into a courtyard and sit in the sun. His grief came less frequently, more dully. Tears he shed chiefly in the secrecy of his room, since he knew by now that they seemed to throw everyone into disarray. One afternoon, he and Aunt Madge sat together at a table in this enclosed yard. He caught Aunt Madge watching younger nuns, novices, of an age unlikely to be permitted to nurse Darragh, spying on him for a second from this or that window.
‘Women!’ she told him, as if nuns in some ways participated more heavily than others in whatever frailty she was remarking on. She looked at him as if she knew that the abiding question in his mind was, How do I get from this courtyard into the effectual world? ‘You think you’re such a sinner, don’t you, Frank?’
‘I don’t know whether I’m a sinner or a fool. It’s the same thing.’ There was the thing of feeling unclean too, but he did not burden Aunt Madge with that.
‘Yes, you’re such a wild man, aren’t you? In your own head. That’s exactly what’s wrong with you. I’ll tell you, most of us have buckets more shame than you. The archbishop has more shame; I wouldn’t mind betting that at all—I knew him when he was a curate. The monsignor—that walking ledger. It’s better to be like you than like him! So I want you to cut out these tears, do you hear me? Or if you want to let them flow, do so, but forget shame. You have no shame to bear.’
He shook his head. Aunt Madge lowered her voice. ‘So there’s this assumption around, isn’t there, hinted at in the papers, that you and the girl … that you had an infatuation for her. Well, say it was the truth. So what? What does it matter? Priests have been sillier by far than that. Believe me. Women get to men, and priests are men. Therefore, women get to priests.’
He couldn’t explain how much he was ashamed that his fascination for Mrs Heggarty was public property. And he couldn’t argue with Aunt Madge. She was so robust in debate, of so strong a mind. She dropped her voice further and reached for his wrist, holding it emphatically. ‘I’ll tell you this just to wake you up. Just to make sure you know you’ve let no one down. Mr Regan and I—do you believe this, your beloved, upright Mr Regan?—we had a love affair. Twelve years ago. Yes. Lasted three months. Looked at purely from the point of view of being a lover, he was splendid. He put all his guilt and all his sense of damnation into it, big dear old Regan. Now this was all a terrible thing, Frank, on my part and his. His girls were young. His wife was loyal. But the terrible thing about the sixth commandment, Frank, is that when you’re violating it, when you’re wrapped up in the other person, the other person stands for the entire universe. You forget everything else. And the sinister thing is, you feel somehow that God’s on your side. Or this or that god, anyhow. Venus, say! Well, mea culpa. I didn’t go near the Regan family for eight years afterwards. I used to sneak into your place when you were young, so Mrs Regan wouldn’t see me. Sneaked out. I’m sure your mother knew all about what had happened, but she never said. Anyhow, in the end I just went to Mrs Regan one day and pleaded for her pardon, and she’d already given it. Maybe—and this isn’t an excuse—but maybe she knew that one fling would be more than enough to bind dear old Regan to her for life.’
If Aunt Madge’s object had been to make him fascinated in an old-fashioned way, then he was fascinated and appalled in a general sense, but surprisingly not in any personal way at Aunt Madge, who had always seemed to carry with her the possibility of great passion.
‘And believe me,’ said Aunt Madge, not pausing to get his pardon, ‘there would be bucketloads of parish priests and bishops who could make the same or similar confession. Sex is a grand and terrible thing, Frank. It makes everyone mad sooner or later. Now you read all these prayers every day that talk about what a sinful generation we are, how fallible, how we can’t clean our own backsides without God’s help. And it’s all the truth, Frank, it’s all the bloody truth. But the trouble is you believe it only applies to you. You don’t look at all these other fellows and say, they’re just as silly as I am. You only look at yourself, and condemn yourself. As if you are one of a kind.’
‘The monsignor thinks I’m one of a kind,’ Darragh asserted.
‘And so is he. And so—bloodywell—is he. A pretty ordinary kind, too. Frank, your mother sheltered you too much when you were a kid. Your father had been round the traps, but she made sure you got none of his balance, none of his wisdom. You thought every monsignor had the authority of a god, of God himself. You were an angelic kid. But Australia’s the wrong place for that. In any case, it’s only because you’ve been in the newspapers by accident that the archdiocese is running round like headless chickens. And by the way, don’t you think that’s a bit infantile of them?’
‘They don’t want to have to deal with a scandal,’ said Frank, to fight off Aunt Madge’s superior wisdom. ‘You can’t say that they haven’t been generous. All this …’ He pointed about him. He meant the hospital, the medical treatment. Tears pricked his eyes at the idea of it.
‘Why not? You’re entitled to it, Frank. Don’t let them make you feel guilty about that as well. You can’t help being a bit knocked about, you know. As for newspapers and scandals, they’re the stuff of a day. I’d say the chances of your being pointed to in your old age as someone notorious are pretty small.’
Darragh yielded to an unexpected laugh. He thought, as it came up his throat, this is a natural laugh. Perhaps this is not the laugh of a total fool and a scandal.
He said, ‘They talk about people having a Dutch uncle. You’re my Dutch aunt.’
‘Someone’s got to be,’ said Aunt Madge. ‘Are you shocked? Do you forgive me?’
‘That’s already been settled,’ he said blithely, far from shocked, after Fratelli, at such normal sins as those of Regan and Madge. ‘Ancient history.’
‘Anyhow, I depend on your discretion, Frank, even if you’re not feeling like yourself for the moment.’
‘That’s it,’ said Frank. ‘You’ve got it in one, Aunt Madge. Mad as a cut snake. At least, so I’m told.’
But he was, in his way, recovering. When the day came to attend Fratelli’s court martial, Darragh was driven to the barracks by the archbishop’s secretary and accompanied by a nurse. Darragh remembered the secretary from the seminary, a man a few years older than himself, extremely competent and clever. They chatted about former classmates all the way to Victoria Barracks, Darragh sitting in the front seat like a fully restored member of the archdiocese. Occasionally, something the other priest said would evoke in him a vast dread of the encounter about to take place. ‘Thank God they’ve only let one news agency in to observe this court martial.’ It was a sentiment he had heard before, but now it had immediate meaning. Monsignor Carolan, for whatever reason, had passed on to Darragh a bit of gossip—there had been a debate at the cathedral about whether Frank should give his evidence, as he had always intended to, in full clerical suit, or wearing a white shirt and tie, like a seminarian. The monsignor did not realise that since his conversation with Aunt Madge, Darragh had begun to see such fretful debate as inane.
On arrival
at the barracks, the archbishop’s secretary seemed somewhat abashed to be asked to sit outside the courtroom, whose door was guarded by the sort of splendidly turned-out and revolver-equipped American military police of whom Darragh felt he had already seen too many. The secretary muttered to an army officer at the courtroom door, obviously explaining that Darragh had not been himself and might need support within the chamber of the court martial. But his argument was politely rebuffed.
Darragh let himself sink into a daze, surrendered to the numb web of his blood, and so rose and was escorted through the door by a guard. The court-martial chamber was ballroom vast, with its windows taped for air raids and draped to exclude light. Eleven splendid officers of varying age sat at a high table decorated with a succession of American flags. Among the military judges was a bald, plump man in a dark suit, the observing judge from the New South Wales Supreme Court. In front of the president of the court, a stern, square-faced soldier, stood a microphone, and behind him the Stars and Stripes and various army banners crossed over each other to make an impressive pattern against the wall.
By contrast with this heavily populated upper table the court chamber itself seemed under-populated. At the table for the defence sat a captain of perhaps thirty years of age, and Fratelli waited beside him. Darragh found himself staring at Fratelli and was, for reasons he could not define, hungry for signs. Fratelli merely looked in his direction and nodded once, curtly. A man who had tried to throttle him seemed to owe him more, Darragh thought. But then, there was hatred, wasn’t there? He remembered that. Inspector Kearney had told him. Darragh formed words in his head and tried to transmit them to Fratelli. I no longer dread you. Imprisonment and accusation had crushed all that force, that look and air of grandeur, out of Fratelli.