Crimes of the Father

by Tom Keneally

  In between these tasks, said Father Shannon, she was welcome to attend to her homework. So, within the presbytery, sitting in its dusted chairs on its polished wood, she did her trigonometry and her French.

  3

  Docherty in Sydney

  July 1996

  After Frank first left Australia in 1972, sent to the Order’s ‘house’, or monastery, in Ontario, it was seven years before he returned.

  International airfares were high in that decade, and the truth was that eventually he found his mix of priestly work and academia in Canada satisfying. Docherty’s graduate studies at Sydney University had been based around psychology and sociology, so when he found himself close to a good provincial university in a regional town in Ontario, at the desire of both the superior of his Order and of the local bishop he proceeded to his doctorate.

  The other monks in the Order’s house were either indifferent or amused by the expulsion Docherty himself found hard to live with. Occasionally one might say, after too much evening beer, ‘Come on, Frank. Come clean with us. Did you fall for some Aussie woman?’

  Some Aussie woman. Maureen Breslin. He did not know whether to grieve for her. To rejoice in being separated from her, he thought, would be sinister indeed, because it treated a living, splendid woman as if she were temptation incarnate. In private, he applied meditation and his Gandhi-ist principles to prove to himself that he had not been hard done by. The world was one of forced migrations. Look at the bloody relocations of 1947 across India and Pakistan. And in no sense could this part of Ontario where the house was located be depicted as a bitter land of exile. He came to miss Australia and his mother and the sight of Maureen only with occasional spasms of grief and not, as he had expected, continuously.

  In the 1980s, as the price of travel fell, he came home twice for visits during the North American summer. On the first of these, he found that his friends the Breslins were of the same mind as him. Willing without embarrassment to make room for the intense attraction he and Maureen Breslin shared, but not wanting to make a meal of analysing it. North Americans had a tendency to want to analyse mysteries, but Australians pragmatically thought not only that mysteries were beyond analysis, but that analysis would break their ineffable clockwork. He was grateful for this new level of friendship. Critics would say it made a eunuch of him. Well, that came with the job.

  His last visit had been three years before, for which his brother, Declan, paid his plane fare so that Docherty could visit their mother, who was by then living in a retirement village run by the Little Sisters of the Poor and had some weeks earlier broken her hip. The resultant shock had provoked a transient ischemic episode, which mimicked the symptoms of a stroke but whose effects then eased. The paralysis of the left side of her face and body ameliorated after two days, and she was already well recovered by the time Docherty arrived. Her nurses said it had been a sad thing to see her when she was demoralised, and that his visit had elated her.

  Declan Docherty was a lawyer in Melbourne who had become an industrial relations specialist. During Frank’s 1993 visit Declan took his brother to the Melbourne Christmas and Sydney New Year Ashes Tests, and some of the Adelaide Test as well. Cricket did not seem a luxury to Frank, raucous though it might sometimes be and as malicious as the aim of pace bowlers might sometimes seem.

  Everywhere they walked during lunch and adjournments and rain breaks at the Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and in the members’ stand of the Sydney Cricket Ground, Declan was stopped by other lawyers, men from the corporates, and union officials, and he took this frequency of greeting with a calm social grace. Declan was known for having friends on both sides of the fence, and bringing about satisfactory results with his well-paid interventions. A former New South Wales Labor minister confided with vinous breath to Docherty that his brother had a large hand in designing industrial relations systems for sundry businesses, which gave industrial peace for years at a time. It was not a matter of surprise to Docherty – he knew his little brother was clever, flexible of thought, amiable, earnest, learned.

  By an implicit arrangement the two of them never spoke of the Church – Declan and his wife had let their weekly attendance at Mass slide. The fact seemed to make Declan more edgy in his brother’s company than Docherty wanted him to be. Docherty even had a sneaking sympathy for the omission – Declan was far too bright to be browbeaten or soft-soaped by your average deadening, authoritarian sermon, and Docherty knew as well as anyone in the archdiocese of Sydney that there was not a lot of encouragement for original material, for breaking new ground. It was by no means impossible to find somewhere a priest whose sermon was exhilarating, but there was the investment of time for uncertain results. Indeed, Docherty’s semi-blasphemous idea was that since the threat of Hell for missing Mass had failed to compel Declan’s generation, it was the duty of the Church to offer something so enriched with meaning and communal solace that people would dislike missing it.

  Frank and Declan’s mother, born Helen Quinlan, was a handsome woman, a Queensland country girl and Depression-era survivor. She had been, by accounts of Docherty’s aunts, a lively girl, star of the convent netball team. At a dance at the Catholic Club in the bitterest year of the Depression, she had met a handsome, exuberant young man, James Docherty, who described himself as a pub broker and horse dealer, and was from the same town and parish, Rockhampton on the Barrier Reef.

  Jim Docherty was fanciful, eloquent, frolicsome – and a fundamentally unreliable father. Before his death, at every turn of his fortunes Helen had seemed sceptical of him. Certainly she had reason: he was capable now and again of taking the family to the financial edge, due to his dreams of impossible riches based on chancy propositions, which included – in line with his Irish heritage – cheap but chancy country pubs in hamlets beyond Adaminaby or Cobar, and expensive and unreliable racehorses. To pay him credit, however, after he had moved his wife and young sons to Sydney, he had given them stability, for he’d become an adequately affluent man: he and his brother Tim were partners in three pubs in Rozelle, Alexandria and Leichhardt.

  His premature death at barely more than fifty, which would have been an economic catastrophe for half the families of the boys Frank went to school with at the Christian Brothers, left his mother financially secure. She remained a dynamic woman who didn’t resign from vivacity, social life, a certain acerbic flirtatiousness, and all the rest, but she never remarried, something that was a subtle relief to her sons when they were in high school and imbued not only with the first stirrings of sex but with the baleful influence of Irish sexual puritanism.

  Helen had been careful with her encouragement of her husband, and – seeing that a repute for cleverness had not helped him much – she applied the same reticence to her boys. Declan told his brother during the Melbourne Test in 1993 that when he was named dux of their school in North Sydney, his mother had kissed him on the forehead and said, ‘That’s it, then. You’ve done very well!’ Unlike more gushy mothers, that was the extent of her adoration. Declan and Frank had enough wit to know that had they possessed the sort of mother who kept referring to their academic supremacy, it would have become tiresome, an embarrassment. And yet they could have tolerated at least one or two more references to it. It was the case in most families – indeed Frank had not encountered one in which it was not the case – that the woman dominated all imagination and concern, and provided a high emotional spur.

  On that bright July afternoon of the day of Docherty’s arrival, at the reception of the complex in which Helen now lived, he asked to be connected to her room. She answered and told him to wait there – she proposed that they walk in the garden. As he waited, he was overcome once more by a pleasant, torpid reflection that it was part of his good fortune he had a mother who did not take him too seriously, who did not exalt his earnestness of soul into a sign of coming magnificence on either the ecclesiastical or the mystical scale. It did not mean that her love or admiration for him was in any way quali
fied. He knew from his previous visit that she had, amongst the reduced set of icons on her dresser, photographs of Declan’s family, and of Frank in his doctoral gown. What she doubted was not her children’s talent, but the capacity of the world to adapt itself to them, and Docherty knew that had been a wise doubt in his case.

  When she appeared, she had a pink bloom in her face. She walked with a cane held casually, even stylishly. He knew from the liveliness of her face that her acerbity was at its best and her spirits robust. She still looked young to be in a retirement home.

  ‘Well, you’re back,’ she said, with a trace of imputation that he was forcing himself on her attention.

  He laughed. ‘Yes, Mater.’ He had taken in his adolescence to calling her Mater in the manner of the English public schoolboys he’d read about in the British comics that had made their way to the colonies after the Second World War. Docherty kissed her and she hugged him with one arm. Her nature accounted for that.

  ‘I believe you’re in good shape?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not repeating stories three times anymore, if that’s what you mean. Did you have a good flight from the Arctic?’

  ‘We were attacked at take-off by polar bears, but Biggles and Ginger shot them and we got clear just in time.’

  ‘Ha-ha! The smart aleck is back! I know there aren’t polar bears in Ontario. But there’s everything that goes with them. Ice on the roof. Probably ice in the soul, as well. And God knows what it must do to people’s joints.’

  ‘You’ve got to get Declan to bring you over there. I know you’re game enough for the trip. You’ll be surprised how pleasant the summers are.’

  ‘I’m saving up to fly first class,’ she told him and gave a wink. ‘It may take a while.’ Like many Australians of her generation, she was a climatic nationalist, no matter how many sun melanomas the patriots had to show for it. ‘But, I have to say, it’s good that you’re here,’ she continued. ‘You’re my first son, you know. Given birth to in uncertain times, let me tell you.’

  ‘I kind of remembered all that, Mater. Now, I have to speak at this conference tomorrow, and hope to see you in the days after. Perhaps I can take you for a spin in the car.’

  ‘What car?’ she asked.

  ‘The monastery clunker. As your first son I owe you everything. Including the best clunkers I can summon up.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you do owe me everything.’ She gave a dry grin. Such was his mother in sentimental mood, and her voice evoked multitudes of forgotten banalities and crises and tenderness. It did not evoke, however, meanness or a chastising subtext, as some parental voices did. Helen was a woman of reliable parts, of surfaces that would not shift. But if you wanted someone to gild the lily of affection, she wasn’t the one.

  They walked in the garden. He told her he had written a letter to the cardinal archbishop pleading to be allowed to return. And he reminded her that he was speaking at the Sydney Council of the Clergy.

  ‘About kiddy-fiddlers?’ she asked. ‘I’m not certain that’ll win His Eminence over.’

  ‘What do you think will?’

  ‘Tell him your mother’s going to get very angry if he doesn’t have you back. Can you imagine: me as the plaintive old mummy of her priest-son, weeping on the 7.30 Report for a sight of her boy? Rachel weeping for her children. I’ll make him seem a monster.’

  ‘I’ll warn him,’ Docherty assured her.

  She looked at him sideways with her warm irony – that is, with love – and took him to the dining room for tea. Along the way she introduced him to lively old biddies and blokes, old-fashioned Australians arguing politics, chortling bitterly at satirical cartoons in the Herald. And she continued with her grievance. ‘When you think of all the drongos and dolts the old cardinal could have thrown out! Well, thank God for the jet plane yet. Remember the letter your old grandfather in Ireland sent your father. “I think there may be an eternal decree,”’ she recited, ‘“that I shall never again in this world look upon the faces of my exiled children.” Breaks your heart, eh? On the other hand, a Cork farmer, able to write like that! Imagine. We’ve got baccalaureates who can’t write their way out of a paper bag these days.’

  ‘The cleverer we become,’ said Docherty with a smile, ‘the less literate.’

  She was obviously a hub of organisation amongst the people in the home. She arranged the tickets for the Sydney Theatre Company and the occasional opera. It was her love of cricket that had imbued him, and she was the resident authority – she could recall the major statistics of every Test since 1928.

  ‘Do you think Sydney will be congenial to you?’ she asked. ‘In the future, I mean.’

  ‘Well, the fellows at the monastery seem inoffensive, and of course I’ll have an easier time of it when I finish this research project. Going to the cricket – without being caught in a riot, for example, as in Calcutta. And seeing my old mum now and then.’

  She warned him – at least it sounded like a warning, ‘I’m not going to be one of those priest’s mothers who thinks their son should live for them.’

  ‘No,’ Docherty conceded. ‘I don’t want you to be, either. But I do daydream of taking you for rides to the Blue Mountains.’

  ‘And I want you to take me out to dinner so I can complain at length about how economic rationalism is destroying the so-called common-wealth of Australia.’ She had always called it that, the common-wealth. ‘And how the mongrel Murdoch press is cheapening debate by mistaking insults for arguments and editorial for news. And how an auxiliary bishop here refused Communion to a nun who talked about the ordination of women. That sort of thing! Meaty subjects.’

  Her extended left arm trembled as she recited her log, a portent of any number of bad possibilities.

  ‘Do you have any shakes?’

  ‘Side effect of my injections of zoledronic acid.’

  ‘Is it really?’

  ‘My prognosis is that I’ll live forever with the old Quinlan heart, tough as a bookmaker’s satchel and about the same size.’

  He remembered an argument between his father and mother in which Jim Docherty had accused his wife of being cold. Even back then Frank had thought, in a kind of angry protest, No! Cold was a description he would not countenance. It was that she treasured her emotions too keenly to easily express them. His father was the sentimental man who could reinforce one feeling with another – a success with a racehorse with the general wellbeing of tipsiness, for example, not that he was in any way a habitual drunkard. But with that emotional glibness of his, every grand sentiment had to be emphasised, placed in bold type, and this was only exacerbated by an accretion of booze.

  In the later afternoon Docherty drove his mother up to the great headland of Manly and she talked about the night the Japanese miniature submarines had penetrated the Sydney boom gate to attack the USS Chicago. Looking down the harbour from North Head, they discussed the Australian cricket team and praised Adam Gilchrist and his phenomenal talents. And they were content.

  The following morning, Docherty served Mass at a side altar of the chapel for an old German priest he had met at dinner the night before. Gunter Eismann had worked for many years in New Guinea. He was, on the authority of his advancing years, ironic about the whole missionary project: he had found in large part, as Docherty himself had years earlier in India, that the target population had marked him more permanently than he had them.

  Eismann had great simplicity of soul, and was one of those lucky people who seemed to have become increasingly childlike and untroubled, a type sometimes encountered in monasteries. Yet Docherty thought he appeared fragile, too, as if a pit of serpents threatening this elderly man’s spiritual peace lay beneath a wafer-thin film of composure. He had told Docherty the previous night that during the war he had served as a member of a U-boat crew for two years before he was captured, and that in his POW camp he had been drawn into the orbit of and influenced by a Benedictine monk who had visited.

  For a man in Eismann’s situat
ion, to be a member of a religious Order was a good arrangement, as abnormal as the outside world might consider it. He was looked after, had brother priests who understood him, and was not over-burdened with work. He went out to short-staffed parishes on the weekend, as most of the Order did, and no doubt gave calm, unremarkable, Teutonic-inflected sermons about a God of love.

  That morning, while Docherty said his Mass, the first he’d had a chance to celebrate in some days, he fell into contemplation. By now, in the last few weeks of his fifties, Docherty sometimes felt that despite his dependence on conversation and contact with other humans, he wished to take comfort only from the liturgy, from the rite of the Mass, and from sitting by the hour in chapel, or taking a walk in the presence of … of what? … Of the Crucial, of the essential element, the sexless, person-less Utter, or – as Catholics used to describe it − the Divine Presence.

  Nearly everything Docherty had believed when he became a seminarian seemed now to push up against the limits of the absurd. Was the Virgin Mary a virgin? Was Christ God or a prophet of God? And the great circus of the canonisation of saints – what was to be made of that? The po-faced searching for three miracles, as if so many suspensions of the natural law were either credible or in fact desirable. He simply knew that all these were at best kindly myths, hinting at transcendence. It was the transcendence he still felt at the rim of the Ultimate, which in his case meant sitting in an empty church in the Divine Presence, waiting, as he saw it, for it to come out and meet him.

  He accepted that via the vagaries of empires and emigrations, an Irish inheritance had been reborn in a string of antipodean colonies, and through an accident of fate his life lay with a particular religious tradition – the Catholic one – though it so easily could have lain with another. Born a cricket-mad Bengali, for example, he would have seen the world through the lens of Durga, Krishna, Shiva, while still knowing the difference between a seamer, a yorker, an outswinger, a googly and a leg-break. Born a cricket-mad Sydneysider of parents who were products of the massive Irish immigration to Queensland, and you saw the world through the imagery of incarnation and resurrection, and knew every delivery in the menu of balls a bowler might serve up to a right or left-handed batsman, including Shane Warne’s flipper.