Crimes of the Father

by Tom Keneally

  Up a staircase with orange walls a bulb shone on the first landing, and beyond that was a curtain, which the young cricketer parted, letting Docherty into a corridor. The smell was of incense, the sounds utterly normal, nothing exotic, dishes clanging from a kitchen, water running. Their banality did not calm the beast that roiled in his belly.

  The young man gestured Docherty into a claustrophobic room with garish yellow walls and unframed pictures of Tantric copulation between Indian lovers. Immediately he felt chaste again. He could escape when the man was gone, bounce down the stairs, walk past those colonnades of used women, catch the bus at the Marble Palace and locate himself in the busload of humans making boring, unwracked journeys.

  But the man was back, his hand on the shoulder of a slight figure he pushed forward. Docherty avoided looking at her for some time, but he now knew that sex must be done. When he did look, she was not a woman. She was a thin country girl, a flimsy child even by the standards of Bengal or Rajasthan. The circle of vermilion on her forehead was like an admission of powerlessness, a surrender to God. Her eyes were pretty, her jaw thrust forward prognathously. She was perhaps twelve.

  The man had mistakenly read Docherty’s hesitancy as a desire for a child rather than a woman. His stomach heaved.

  ‘My God,’ he managed to say. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Tell the sahib your name!’ said the young man.

  ‘Rahini,’ the child said in a reedy voice.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Docherty and, turning, he was aware as never before of his impotence in the greater world in the face of sex. Here, his priesthood and his lust were hollow boasts against reality. He rushed down the orange stairwell into the street and set out south. The Marble Palace swam towards him. On the pavement outside it he vomited as people looked at him with a level of suspicion that the equivalent illness in an Indian would probably not have evoked in them.

  That night he tore release out of his body. Willing to die in the midst of the spasms, the dark paroxysm, he found it joyless and stupefying. A young girl lived in slavery in Sonagachi. She had no part in his fantasy, but now his fleeing her seemed unforgiveable. Priests could bind and loose, absolve and consecrate, and pontiffs could pontificate, but throughout all such earnestness and posturing Rahini was one of thousands of children alone in Sonagachi.

  He did not say Mass the next day, and sought absolution for his range of vices, lust the least of them, from a Jesuit in the church near Xavier College. In the confessional, the priest said, ‘I have found Hindu meditation a great source of comfort. You should not be ashamed to look at its methods. Meditation is a human thing as well as a divine.’

  He was lenient, as Docherty knew he would be. ‘I don’t think one lapse will bring down divine judgement,’ he said in a faint Lancastrian accent. There were many good men amongst the Jesuit brethren, and many sound jurists of morality. They were no doubt themselves flawed, self-chastened men, who, because of their own temptations, were wiser than their more rigorous, callow brethren. Docherty recalled Father Holland.

  ‘This was not one lapse,’ said Docherty. ‘This was an act of nihilism. It was full of hate and denial. It was a display of the most horrible despair. I’m terrified it will happen again.’

  The Jesuit priest said, ‘Humans are driven to such emptiness.’

  ‘Walking away from the brothel was itself a crime,’ said Docherty. ‘I was offered a girl of, at best, twelve years. What will meditation, or my absolution, do for her?’

  Yet Docherty would always believe afterwards that transcendental meditation had saved him, and had allowed him to become something like a mature priest. The classes he undertook were taught by the middle-aged Guru Surabhi in an upstairs room on Diamond Harbour Road. He began them with his critical faculties in place, but found little to criticise. TM was induced by the use of mantras, phrases expressing basic belief. Docherty found them useful, but not prescriptive. He used the Hebrew ‘I Am Who Am’ (‘Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh’) as frequently as he used the Indian ‘Om Namah Shivaya’, the meditation on and submission to the female principle of the universe. He was sceptical of the so-called Maharishi Effect, the belief that if one per cent of humanity practised meditation, there would be a resultant rise in the contentment of the entire species. That would remain to him a pleasant fable.

  He took to meditating twice a day while sitting in his room in the priests’ house. The exercise gave him not only a sense of healing, but a space in which he felt the emotional sinews of his seminarian boyhood were stretched to mature form. Through meditation he confronted the true scale of desire; and yet, through contemplating some of Surabhi’s remarks, he began also to consider the essential unity of the world. This was no abstract idea to him. It related to how he should accept the push–pull within himself, his inner tides of hungers and recognitions. To dwell on the unity of the world and of the human entity, to experience it, or to consent to feel it as a potent essence within oneself was a liberation for a priest needing to be reconciled to himself, to what he was, the usual stray package of seemingly contradictory impulses.

  For the Christian orthodoxy in which he had been raised claimed that the world did not possess unity, but was driven by dualities. God and the Devil were the poles of the earth-bound creature, and on top lay the poles of the flesh and the spirit. It was axiomatic that the spirit had to overcome the flesh to avoid damnation and chaos. The soul had to dominate the base meat of human existence as Europe had dominated the African darkness. That was a dangerous and destructive division to introduce into the one planet and, above all, into the one human being. It came to him gradually that he could not continue as a priest unless he jettisoned such beliefs, and became a sort of heretic. Unless the spirit somehow welcomed the flesh in as a brother, neither could happily survive. The crucial experience that had sent him to the guru on the recommendation of the solemn old Jesuit priest seemed to prove this to him.

  He remembered reading one of the Desert Fathers, an Egyptian hermit of early Christianity, who had recommended a mental exercise: when attracted to a woman, or by the thought of her, one was to imagine lying with her after death, all her beauty putrefied and stinking. The body wanted her, that was the argument, but the spirit had the power to abstract her and condemn her to death. At the time, these legends had been codified – a debate still flourished about whether women possessed a soul in the same sense as men, and that argument would continue well into the Middle Ages.

  But an instinct, developed through meditation, told Docherty, and reason told him even more pointedly, that he could not ‘conquer the flesh’; that to represent the body as a mere lump of questing flesh reduced those who were desired – women themselves – to mere lumps of yearned-for flesh and challenged the dignity of half the human species. He could not, as St Kevin of Glendalough had, throw women whose presence tempted him off high geographic points, and it was not his duty to imagine them putrefied. He must accept both the conditions of his life, and its coexistence with a world of beautiful and engaging women, many of whom he could have loved.

  Thus meditation was for Docherty the great equaliser of body and spirit, and the great appeaser of elements. As a seminarian he had not been taught how to meditate, but simply told to do it. Now, exercises the downtown guru gave him, and even the incantation of the transcendental mantras, prepared his soul for the great totality – good and bad – and the coexistence of parallel splendours and demons. Sometimes in meditation he simply sat with Christ and the ‘Mother Principle’, Mary. Around these avatars, too, the tensions of desire flickered, for they were also human, appeased and validated and imbued – he simply accepted this – with divine force.

  He did not advertise his interest in Hindu meditation, nor did he conceal it, and the people most amused were the few Indian priests of the Order, who nicknamed him Dox, short for ‘heterodox’, and made well-meaning but sceptical jokes about him as a levitating swami. The English deputy headmaster – the headmaster himself being Irish – came
to refer to him as the Guru.

  His confession with the Jesuit priest brought him not only to meditation but also to the office of Dr Fatima Deriaya. The priest had astonished him that day by saying, ‘There is a woman named Dr Fatima Deriaya. A Muslim. She negotiates with brothel-keepers and buys girls’ freedom. Perhaps you could discuss your concerns with her.’

  ‘I would have to tell her that …’

  ‘Exactly. You’d have to confess the experience of your weakness. As a Christian priest to a Muslim woman. Perhaps that is adequate penance.’

  Dr Fatima Deriaya was a middle-aged, gentle woman with large, lively features and a persuasive, ironic delivery that reminded Docherty a little of his own mother. At their first meeting in her office, he managed to tell her how he had met Rahini. He gave Dr Deriaya the street and building to which the man had taken him, and asked Dr Deriaya whether her NGO could liberate Rahini. He realised, he told Dr Deriaya, that one liberation barely touched that huge bowl of ignominy. He gave her all the money he had accumulated over two years.

  ‘Can you afford that, young man?’ she said, unshocked by his confession, tolerant.

  She bought out Rahini for what she considered an exorbitant price, and the brothel-keeper joyously held the money and declared, ‘For this I can buy two new girls.’

  In a fallen world, it was hard to do unambiguous good.

  After three years, the deputy headmaster and headmaster’s reports on Docherty were so glowing that the Order decided to bring him home to Australia and into full-time university studies, though these would be interspersed with holding parish retreats and filling in for diocesan clergy in local churches.

  He was uneasy to go, to exchange the scale of India for the smaller horizons of suburban Australian life, and had he been a man who had not taken vows to his Order and its superiors to obey their reasonable decisions, he might have chosen to stay. But he was no more free to remain than a soldier with transfer orders. So he went home.

  13

  The Case of Sarah Fagan, 2

  Early 1970s

  One afternoon she heard him say idly that he hoped Mother Alphonsus could supply him with two other girls to help him out. She felt the jolt of this news, and a sickening bewilderment in the pit of her stomach; the extreme sentiments of the rejected. Yet at reason’s futile level, she knew even then that he had never promised her their collaboration would be exclusive.

  Later, in the presbytery office, he said with a naked suddenness, ‘You understand I might need to have these other girls here for appearances?’

  She wanted to know what that meant but could not frame the question. Even though she could have raged like a virago in love, she maintained a calm and respectful demeanour. That was the condition of employment.

  Next, with a deftness she would discern only afterwards, he said, ‘Do you feel there has been a special divine kind of friendship between us? That we are drawn close in a spiritual unity, perhaps like St Francis of Assisi and St Clare. The connection between us has a holiness to it. Do you sense that too, Sarah?’

  There was no air remaining in the room – he had used it all to frame his astonishing proposition. She wondered if she should run out, driven by the scale of what he had said.

  ‘I like to please you with my work,’ she said simply. ‘If that is friendship, then I’m very happy.’

  He held up a hand and became more confiding, wonderfully so, and the fragrance from his hair or skin, or both, seemed very strong. ‘I know what it is, dear Sarah. You don’t find home a place you want to be. Would you let me make friends again between you and your family?’

  ‘How would you do that?’

  ‘I could come and see you. A pastoral visit.’

  ‘A visit?’ It could not be refused, but the idea of Father Leo Shannon encountering her parents was excruciating. Her father would slur and lurch in the living room, switching the television off with bad grace. Even her harried mother was now herself an element in Sarah’s dread of home: she represented to her daughter the shame of having marriage reduce her, taking away her features; and her eyes had seen what could never be mentioned – her husband’s sodden attempts to find a new version of his ruined wife.

  It was apparent all at once to Sarah, under the threat of Father Shannon’s visit, and of what might be shockingly said and revealed then, that her sole option was to become a nun. That was the utter escape from her family. Her mother, by the force of this choice, would come to forget everything she had seen on the night Sarah’s father had visited her. God knew what her brothers thought about nuns, yet she felt that she could reduce her brothers and her father to a grudging and bewildered reverence. And be done with them.

  When Father Shannon turned up at the house on Thursday night, Sarah was in torment at what he would discover and use to discount her. As her mother led the priest down the hallway, breathing was a challenge for Sarah; the world could at any point and in untold ways fracture. Father Shannon carried a box of chocolates and presented them to her mother, saying that his sister had said when she was little, to the amusement of adults, ‘There can never be enough chocolates.’

  ‘And besides,’ he went on, ‘your very efficient daughter has helped me so well to get the parish records in order. I’m going to get more girls from the convent to help me, but your daughter is the paragon.’

  The truth was that her father had been abstemious that day, at her mother’s insistence, and though edgy, perhaps waiting to go out later, treated the inconvenient priest with a sombre deference. Her brothers took their cue from their father. They made no smirks in Father Shannon’s wake. Observing the ease of the priest, Sarah told herself he was clearly not shocked by the house or by the assortment of people within it, and she was infused with a sudden joy. He had cast absolution over her. There were no problems left in her life that could not be overcome by her friendship with him, and by prayer and study. And becoming a nun! She understood that he had mentioned the other girls purely to pretend Sarah was not as special as she actually was to him, or perhaps to allay some indefinable alarm in her parents at the intensity of his favour.

  The survival of the visit, and Father Shannon’s forgiveness of the Fagans for all their domestic flaws, physical and temperamental, exhilarated her.

  Two afternoons later she was attending to the filing in the parish office when he entered as usual. ‘Sit down here beside me,’ he said lightly, and he put himself on the settee beneath the window. When she obeyed him he sighed a peppermint sigh. ‘Companion of my soul,’ he said. ‘You may indeed be unhappy at home.’ And with extraordinary suddenness his arm went around her shoulder, he moved his smooth face towards hers and had kissed her before she realised he was even contemplating it.

  The kiss did not seem to her superficial. It opened her like a wound. It shuddered through her. She wondered if it was meant to be somehow disciplinary, the clerical equivalent of an electric prod. It seemed at the least a tough sacramental test.

  He said, ‘I know that God permits us this in the light of our special love.’

  The line would sound later in her history like inept and fraudulent self-justification. At the time, however, it resonated with overwhelming authority. She thought it the truest thing she had ever heard, and though she was caught between flight and captivity, the challenge of interpreting his actions kept her static.

  At last she was able to raise her eyes to him. His glittered. There seemed a huge theological certainty in them. He bent and whispered in her ear, ‘As much as this is permitted, I will go. Enough for today!’

  He kissed her cheek, stood, bending a little, said that they must pray about this, and left the room.

  The next day at school, after a fevered night, she felt agelessly wise. But she remained in a ferment; indeed had come close to pretending an illness so she could stay in the hated home. The very unexpectedness of what had happened, and the unpredictability of what would happen today, the afternoon the monsignor always visited his older sister in the
Eastern Suburbs, kept her preoccupied. She saw Mother Alphonsus in her maths class, but knew that she could confide nothing to her; nor did she want to. For one thing, Mother Alphonsus was, above all, a practical woman, and this business superseded practicality.

  That afternoon at the presbytery Father Shannon came in during her office duties, sat in a separate seat and assured her it was licit for her to take her blouse off. Licit! She would sneer years later, as if it were a prissy word that compounded his crimes. But, again, at the time it had absurd power. She turned her back to him to remove the garment. He told her to face him since there was nothing hidden and nothing forbidden between choice souls. She thought, if he can accept my breasts, then there’s nothing more for him to absolve. She turned. He said she was beautiful in the eyes of God. Then, curiously, she thought, he asked her to lie on his lap. As he tentatively caressed her breasts she felt in him a divine heat and he, the most measured of men, lost control of his body and shuddered beneath her, gasping. That happened twice. And then with a further caress he told her they were to go from each other in peace and without telling any lesser souls about what had passed between them.

  She told herself she should feel flattered, and this response was interspersed by a surge of sensual feelings that she knew were forbidden. Yet, since they were centred on him, they must be lawful as well. She would ask him about that next time she saw him.

  He reassured her. He visited the Fagan household again. He brought National Geographics for the boys.

  And then, the following Thursday, when it was quiet and children’s cries from the schoolyard were no longer to be heard, he penetrated her with his body. She lay like a martyr (and so she believed she should) ready for the transfixing, since it was the priest’s will. It was her entry, she felt at once, into a true earth and the possibility of paradise. Instinctively, she served his purpose. She had no doubt that the chief pleasure to be concentrated on was his. She knew it was not her time, that her duty in this connection was to give him solace in the agony he seemed to suffer as he withdrew himself and emitted his fluid.