An Angel In Australia

by Tom Keneally

  The prosecutor, an older officer, asked Darragh about his meetings with Master Sergeant Fratelli: the day when Fratelli had asked him to say Mass for his aunt, and then the capture of Private Aspillon. The man spoke about that incident in a way which implied it was well known and investigated, and so, in a way which seemed to promise Gervaise a continuing existence. Next, the prosecutor wanted to know what the Australian corporal had said about Fratelli’s being the cause of the storm of fire in Lidcombe. In other matters, Darragh pleaded the seal of the confessional, and was able to say only that Fratelli had said to meet him, for the sake of spiritual guidance, outside the confessional. Then there was the issue of what Fratelli had said while trying to strangle him. No seal extended to that.

  All that he was able quickly to recite, anxious to be let go again, back to the anonymity Aunt Madge had promised him was imminent.

  Throughout, Fratelli seemed to be as abstracted from what was happening as Darragh was, and gazed fair ahead with a fixity alien to all his previous behaviour as the young officer appointed to defend him began to ask Darragh questions with an edge to them. Did Father Darragh think a sane man would have tried to open fire on the shed in Lidcombe where Aspillon and Darragh huddled together? Without violating what he heard in the confessional, had Darragh done his best to turn Mrs Heggarty away from Fratelli? Then, an irrational question as far as Darragh understood it: To what extent did his own feelings for Mrs Heggarty make him resent the idea that she would go with another man? This was a question the journalists at their table liked.

  It was therefore very welcome to the numbed Darragh when the president of the court called for a suspension of that line of examination, put his hand over the microphone, and held an earnest discussion with the bald man in the suit. Fratelli seemed to have drifted to sleep, or perhaps it was an act. At last the president unclasped his hand from the microphone. ‘I’m not going to let you pursue the direction you’re heading in,’ he told Fratelli’s defender. The defending officer could, said the president, call as many specialist witnesses as he chose on the matter of Fratelli’s sanity. He could call the men with whom Fratelli lived. There was no profit in expecting a decent gentleman of the cloth to make judgements on how Fratelli might have felt about this or that.

  With the polite thanks of the court, Darragh was told he could go. He rose with his eyes still on Fratelli, who did not look back. But it did not matter. They had sent him behind the wire. They had made him say the rosary on his fingers and live without shoelaces. Darragh could see that within the walls, as a prisoner, he was the mere mirror of the courtier and warrior, the ghost of the fellow who commanded angelic white helmets. Near the door, one of Darragh’s knees gave way and he fell into an involuntary demi-genuflection. Feeling foolish, he struggled upright. He heard the president call to his accompanying military escort, ‘Give the father a hand there, Private.’

  And then he was outside, welcomed back by the secretary-priest and the nurse. As they descended the stairs and entered the large black car from the cathedral, the secretary murmured, as if it did not matter, ‘Did anything painful come out, Frank?’

  ‘Nothing painful,’ said Darragh. ‘He didn’t look at me.’

  After his hospital stay, they sent him to live at home, urging him not to forget to take his pills. The vicar-general had told him to go to the pictures, and for good long walks. ‘Your mother’s area of Sydney is full of them,’ he said. When he had been home three days, the vicar-general visited him again, this time in his mother’s living room. Mrs Darragh made tea, set out the finest cups, and then withdrew.

  ‘Frank,’ Monsignor McCarthy told him when they were alone, ‘the archbishop has been very busy considering what is best for you. What you should do when you get your medical clearance. We think it might be best if you were laicised for a time, until you’re completely fit to work again.’

  A fury rose in Darragh. ‘Laicised?’ he said. He shielded his eyes from the idea. ‘That’s a punishment, isn’t it? In melodramas, it’s called being defrocked.’

  ‘It’s not meant to be a punishment, not in this case. It’s to show great confidence in you. Many men who have crack-ups are given a few months off. To holiday. Even to do a bit of secular work. You see, we could get you work as a proofreader at the Catholic Weekly. And, of course, you could wear lay clothes for the time being.’

  ‘So that everyone could tell I’m under some sort of probation,’ Darragh said.

  ‘That’s not what it’s meant to imply. It’s meant to imply you’re getting your health back. And there are many pleasant and untaxing jobs you could do ultimately, although you’re not well enough now.’

  ‘I don’t have any suitable lay clothes.’

  The vicar-general sighed. ‘You were wearing them the night you went out with Fratelli.’

  ‘It was like fancy dress. I looked ridiculous. Fratelli and Trumble both said so.’

  ‘Frank, don’t resist us on all this. The archbishop is doing his best by you. You’ll be exempt from saying your office and administering the sacraments. You’ll have nothing to burden you. We’ll keep in constant contact, and when you’re ready to return … As for celibacy, you’re a seasoned hand at that, Frank, and that will stand, of course. You don’t have to be told that.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Frank. ‘I’ll still have all the disadvantages of the priesthood.’

  ‘You’re sounding bitter, Frank. You’ll see it’s best. The archbishop wanted me to give you some … I suppose you could call it set-up money. To buy a suit, and all the rest. I expect you’ll be back at your duties at St Margaret’s or somewhere else by Advent. Or the New Year at the latest …’

  The vicar-general took a sheet of paper from a satchel. ‘This is a decree of laicisation. And a letter from the archbishop. You may use them in case there’s any confusion over who you are, and to show you really are a cleric and a priest.’

  ‘Especially to myself,’ said Darragh, with a tight smile.

  ‘Come on, Frank. Rally, son! Take this as it’s intended.’

  Eventually Darragh’s mother was asked to join them, and the vicar-general told her with a brittle joviality that Frank was to have four or five months rest from work. That he ought to go on holidays—perhaps the Blue Mountains. ‘I have a cousin who’s on a farm at Gilgandra,’ said Mrs Darragh. ‘Maybe Frank would like to go out there and stay, help them with things.’

  The vicar-general said that would be a superb idea, and soon it was time for the man to go. Mrs Darragh showed him off the premises, Darragh remaining behind so that he would not have to shake his hand.

  Mrs Darragh returned to him with a fretful hope in her face. ‘I think that’s a good thing, don’t you, Frank—a break? In mufti. You can go to race meetings in civvies. I wonder can I call Gilgandra? I wonder will the post office let me?’

  For the sake of mercy to his mother, he announced with a demented emphasis, ‘I think it’s a very good idea. I’m going to put on a suit coat right now and take Aunt Madge to the pictures.’

  Almost at once, Darragh had a polite call from Mrs Flannery. Another curate was coming to St Margaret’s and Darragh would need to return to the presbytery to clear out his room, to take away his books and clothes. ‘Is the monsignor there?’ he asked, and Mrs Flannery, with a remarkable biddability, went to fetch him.

  ‘When were you thinking of coming, Frank?’ the monsignor asked him. The following afternoon, said Darragh. ‘Oh,’ said the monsignor, ‘sadly I’ll be out. But best of luck to you. Get well.’

  ‘You could be there,’ said Darragh. ‘After all the confessions I’ve heard. After all the Benedictions and Masses. You could be there if you wanted.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You choose not to be there.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re considering your words, Frank, but I know you’re not well.’

  ‘You could be there to say, “Goodbye Frank. You’ve been a bloody awful curate. Best wishes.” I don’t bite
, you know.’

  ‘I’ve already given you my best wishes, Frank. And, I might say, a good quotient of patience.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Frank, ‘I’ve got all I deserve, in that case.’

  ‘God bless you, Frank, and goodbye,’ said the monsignor with finality.

  Aunt Madge organised through a friend of hers, a man named Henry, the one who claimed to have been at Marist Brothers, Parramatta, with Errol Flynn, to drive Darragh all the way from Rose Bay to Strathfield, so that Darragh would not need to catch train and bus while hauling suitcases. Henry was a bachelor, an active man in his parish, and nervously chatty with this young man who was part priest, part layman, part scandal.

  Darragh asked him was it possible to drop by The Crescent, and Mr Henry was accommodating, allowing the car to idle outside number 23.

  ‘This is where it happened?’ he asked tentatively, looking for signs of distress in Darragh.

  ‘This is the place.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem possible, does it? I mean, it looks so ordinary.’

  About a hundred yards away, a woman and some children turned the corner from Rochester Street. It was Mrs Thalia Stevens, around whom her five children cavorted like hectic minor planets to her sun. She held two-handed a large, unfashionable black handbag and a bulging string bag hung from her elbow. She was not like her late friend, Kate Heggarty, a gracious dresser—her green dress, her black coat and her lacquered black straw hat hung crookedly on her. Her ankles bulged like a promise of old age over her scuffed shoes. She paused at her gate to draw breath, while one of her sons somersaulted up the pathway to her door. Darragh told Henry to move further up the street. ‘Just here,’ said Darragh. ‘I won’t be a second.’

  He knocked on Bert Flood’s door. No answer came, but an instinct told Darragh the house was inhabited. At last the door opened.

  ‘Oh,’ said Bert, taking in Darragh’s sports shirt, suspenders and blue trousers. ‘You, eh? How are you, Frank?’

  Darragh exchanged the pleasantries. Bert watched him closely, but in a new way, the way you might watch someone who had been marked by unlikely plague or preposterous chance. Darragh said, ‘I came to thank Ross.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bert. ‘Want a cup of tea?’

  The inexpressive generosity of Bert would until recently have brought on stupid tears. ‘I’m sorry, Bert,’ said Darragh. ‘I’ve got to get on. I just wondered if Ross …’

  ‘Well, look,’ Bert said, his gaze wandering in a philosophic way, as if the answer were in a corner of the garden, a quadrant of the sky above the Western Line. ‘It’s lonely here. The old Rossy’s gone off to Cobar. Working in the copper mine out there.’

  ‘No,’ said Darragh. ‘Isn’t that terrible for his lungs?’

  ‘Oh, he got a job as tally clerk. I think the party wants him to ginger up the union out there. You know.’

  ‘Do you have his address?’

  ‘He’s going to write when he’s settled.’

  ‘When you do, I’ll write to him,’ Darragh guaranteed.

  ‘Okay. You know, he’s pretty upset about everything. It was all a shock for him, too.’

  Darragh grasped Bert’s hand, and shook it.

  After Henry delivered him to the presbytery, Darragh had the exciting feeling of being a trespasser in the familiar yet forever changed hallway, and on the stairwell. Everything looked, in fact, resonantly different. The parlour, the dining room he had shared with the monsignor, his room with its desk. He set to work packing his clothes and his small library, his devotional pictures off the wall. He cleaned out the drawers of his desk. Here, he was surprised to find, lay three pages of blank parish stationery which ages before, or more accurately, after Easter, the monsignor had signed in case there were problems at the bank about the rollover of a money bill, and the finance committee needed them. Darragh gathered these and took them downstairs. ‘I wonder could I use the monsignor’s typewriter just before I go?’ he asked Mrs Flannery, and after a moment’s consideration, she consented.

  The letter he typed over the monsignor’s signature was headed To whom it may concern, and declared that Mrs Thalia Stevens of 33 The Crescent, Homebush, was a practical Catholic in good odour with the parish. He took one of the parish envelopes, addressed it to Mrs Stevens, and pocketed it for posting on the way home. Then he carried the accumulated rags and pages of his priesthood out to the boot of Mr Henry’s car.

  After Fratelli was found guilty, Darragh could not sleep for dread. He returned to the doctor. His dosages were increased, so that his tongue swelled once more in his dry mouth and impeded his speech. It seemed horrifying now to Darragh that Fratelli would suffer the sorrowful mystery of asphyxiation, the gross bemusement of a cracked spine. Relieved of saying the office, Darragh spent hours in his boyhood bedroom saying rosaries for Fratelli, the Joyful, the Sorrowful, the Glorious Mysteries, all fifteen decades of ten ‘Hail Marys’, an ‘Our Father’, a ‘Glory Be’, no sooner ended than he began again and fell asleep at last, lolling forward on his swollen tongue, his head on the coverlet. His mother wanted to take him to Katoomba as the vicar-general had suggested, to a guesthouse above the great pit of eucalypts which was the Jamison Valley. But he fought her off and delayed her. On the eve of Fratelli’s execution, a set of militia conscription papers came addressed to Francis Patrick Darragh.

  ‘This is a total mistake,’ said Mrs Darragh. ‘I’ll speak to the vicar-general.’

  But Darragh was relieved to be distracted from Fratelli’s execution, and went down to Old South Head Road, caught a tram to the city and enlisted in the army that very afternoon. A priest was automatically laicised, he knew, by joining any of the armed forces, except of course with episcopal permission, to become a chaplain. But if the archbishop could laicise him at a mere word, at least Darragh could laicise himself by signing his name to enlistment. So the equation of justice in Darragh’s head ran.

  ‘You won’t have to worry about the conscription papers now,’ the recruiting sergeant told him. Darragh was to report to the Sydney Showground the next morning. ‘Bring a suitcase to put your normal clothes in,’ the recruiter told him.

  On the morning Fratelli died, Darragh filled his seminary suitcase with his banal clothes, and was at the Showground even before the hour of execution.

  IN AUGUST 1943, when it was known that Australia, still very much in mid-struggle, had nonetheless been definitely rescued by the valour of its citizens and the strength and gallantry of their great ally, Darragh was stationed as a corporal medical orderly at a hospital in Popondetta in New Guinea. It was a beautiful place on the northern side of Papua New Guinea’s central spine of mountains. It possessed a foothills charm. The Australians had driven the Japanese from the southern shore of New Guinea back over these mountains and into the northern lowlands. Americans had landed on the Solomon Sea shore to take the Japanese from behind. The latter seemed no longer miraculously ordained by God as victors and punishers, but were still strongly dug in on the kunai grass plains which characterised the north coast of New Guinea. North of Popondetta, dreadful, intimate conflicts occurred along the roads driven among the giant grass of pre-war plantations. Men stumbled back from these encounters with bullets through their shins, or lumps of shrapnel in their bandaged heads, or raving with killing infections—dengue fever or cerebral malaria. New Guinean natives often guided them along, as they winced or raved, to the hospital of the 2/14th Field Ambulance. Gangrene and effulgent tropical ulcers, concussion, shell shock, and dizzying fever temperatures had taken their minds from them. In that condition they were often terrified, expecting attack at any second. The Japanese and they had inflicted dreadful, rampant fear on each other.

  By the time they reached the hospital to which Darragh was almost inevitably attached—since he had been honest about his background, and since being a medical orderly seemed to be the best thing for a priest on sabbatical—many of the soldiers no longer knew where or who they were.

  The climate was so much
more pleasant here that sometimes Darragh, off-duty, would climb the hill above the tented hospital, where—for reasons known only to engineers—the deep latrines had been dug. Recuperating men, waiting to go back to the viciousness in the long grass, called it Shit Hill, and its minder was a sullen orderly who sat on oil drums reading American comics and, when he considered the disease peril from the pits had reached a certain point, throwing in gasoline and setting fire to it. Men swore that he had done it when they were occupying the seats, and burned the hair off their arses—but that was merely a story, for the fellow lacked the capacity to make a myth of himself.

  Darragh sometimes went up there to look at the vaporous mountains behind, and the hazed vistas stretching away across the plain to the Solomon Sea. At some moments, far from the wards and the airstrip, Shit Hill was a tropic idyll, and could even, in the evening’s advancing blue light, seem a backwater. But now and then he drove down with other orderlies to collect medical supplies from the airstrips at Buna and Gona, where terrible battles had been fought earlier in the year, and Darragh would inspect the faces of the black soldiers who unloaded the planes and looked after the aircrew messes there. His letters to Camp Kenney had never been answered, nor his letters to the Corps of Military Police. An Australian corporal did not merit such replies.

  From Shit Hill one afternoon, Darragh saw yet another damaged soldier being walked up the trail by a New Guinean in a loincloth, for delivery to the 2/14th. The soldier, it became apparent as he got closer, was not so much walking as being directed and carried, as was the normal procedure anyhow. His faced seemed blackened with ash and sweat. Darragh descended the hill to go on duty.

  The medical officer diagnosed the soldier, a second lieutenant, as suffering from well-developed cerebral malaria, and put him on a drip of saline and sulfa drugs. Darragh was to take his temperature at three-hourly intervals. The man’s body was washed by Darragh and another orderly and as he was settled by flickering generator light on his hospital cot, his features became distinguishable to Darragh. He was at once recognisable as the brother—Howley, or some name of that nature—who in the days before the fall of Singapore had fled his superior and his confessor. Since he became disturbed when Darragh tried to place a thermometer in his armpit, Darragh took his temperature anally, and it was 105 degrees. There was already peril that if he should live, his brain might not return to him.