Crimes of the Father

by Tom Keneally

  ‘All your instincts seemed to be against that,’ Docherty observed.

  ‘My instincts were. But I was wrong. I fed you a line of bloody nonsense, Frank, and I haven’t been able to concentrate since this morning. I said I could be the great corporate facilitator or a victim. But of course I am both. I wish you hadn’t come near me, but you did. And you challenged my equilibrium.’

  ‘I feel the same way,’ Sarah Fagan told him. ‘I picked him up at the airport in my cab. If it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t be in the place we all are now. Caught between stools.’

  Wood spread his hands in a what-can-a-person-do? way. ‘The thing about you is that you set off quite a chain today. A sequence. I’d just seen you off when two very polite coppers, extremely polite and sensitive, arrived in the office. I think the receptionist thought they were tracking you, Frank. I took them into the same conference room. They told me I had been named in a suicide document as a victim. They wanted to know if I would press civil charges. And you know what I told them. I told them I thought not. Of course, they said, think about it. But I said no.’

  The others were awed and Sarah frowned.

  ‘I said no because that way’s not adequate. That way’s absurd, as this Devitt man is finding. But I have to get the monsignor. I have to see him on his knees. I want to see him grieve as we’ve grieved.’

  Sarah said, ‘That’s been our fantasy. The monsignor on his knees before the world. All of us who could have sued him in a civil court are being choked off by the trust defence the Church is running. We shouldn’t be in a position where we have to hope a wise judgment will emerge from the court. We shouldn’t have to wait for that. Even then, suing Shannon isn’t enough. And we’ve rejected killing him.’

  ‘Stop saying that, Sarah,’ Docherty told her, but she ignored him.

  ‘So there must be a third way.’

  There was silence.

  ‘I was ashamed to declare myself a victim,’ murmured Wood then, a low voice but with its own authority. ‘I was uncertain about the woman I love and intend to marry. I was uncertain about my clients. I thought of the Filipino corporations, and the Hong Kong ones, many of them riddled with orthodox Catholics. I think the Indians would just be confused. And the Japanese …

  ‘But too bad! I must discuss this with my associates. Subsequent to that, without any apology to anyone, I’ll get Shannon. I will make a police investigation inevitable. Stephen’s last letter will appear before the court, backed by me.’

  Wood looked at Liz. ‘Why should we hide it, Mrs Cosgrove? It was Stephen’s word. It is a weapon for the rest of us. Let’s wield it. Please.’

  She frowned, yet to Docherty, and perhaps to the others, she did seem to have become reconciled, having never seen the letter as Wood saw it.

  Wood said, ‘You, Frank, Father Frank, you are not to tell the cardinal of any of this. As far as you know it’s simply talk on my part.’

  ‘What will you do, though?’ asked Sarah Fagan.

  ‘So you were used by him, too?’

  ‘Yes.’ She laughed darkly. ‘They can’t accuse the mongrel of not being bisexual.’

  At this outburst, Liz made a sound that was part lament and part yelp.

  ‘I was his schoolgirl,’ said Sarah. ‘From a buggered-up family. Was your family buggered up in some way?’

  ‘I have to say, not exceptionally,’ said Wood. ‘But the monsignor knew my father, through business, and my father had him at his dinner table as an entertaining cleric. It is a vanity of Catholics in business to be able to exhibit what passes for an urbane cleric at their dinners. Enter the monsignor.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarah, absorbing this history. ‘Yes.’

  ‘We should meet here tomorrow night,’ said Wood.

  ‘I’ll be on the way to Canada,’ Docherty reminded them.

  ‘I can keep you up to date by email, Frank. As a courtesy. Beyond that, it isn’t your business.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Docherty. ‘But I have to see the cardinal tomorrow morning. My mother wants me to come back to Sydney, and the cardinal is looking for reasons to deny me re-entry as a priest of this archdiocese. Am I to behave as if this meeting didn’t happen? Can’t I tell him, as encouragement to him to take a different tack, that the victims intend to take any action they can?’

  Paul said, ‘Our discussions tonight have been confidential, and you have an understanding of confidentiality, I know.’

  Docherty rose. ‘I don’t have the legitimacy to be here. And I do think you have the right to discuss things confidentially.’

  They all looked sombrely back at him.

  ‘I wish you well, and I feel for you, and for Stephen,’ Docherty continued. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Brian, because it will make for many more possibilities than otherwise. I hope to come back and see you all. May you have the blessings of what we used to call an omnipotent God. That’s still a defensible description in some terms. But you may ask, “Why didn’t that omnipotent God intervene when we were at the mercy of the abuser?” I ask it myself. All I can say is, Christ be with you. He also is a sort of victim of the Church.’

  There was silence, then Liz Cosgrove said, ‘Thank you, Frank, for your good intentions.’

  ‘That’s all I’m capable of,’ said Docherty. ‘The final and appropriate humiliation is to find out one’s intentions don’t add up to much. Goodnight. I know the way, Paul. Don’t break up the meeting.’

  He was on the pavement outside the garden gate when there was a noise at the front door and Wood came running out. Docherty prepared himself to be damaged. Wood had been angelically wise and temperamentally calm, but of course he had to snap.

  ‘I just wanted to say, Frank,’ Wood said, ‘leave it to me. I’ll get the bastard. You’ll find out how!’

  36

  Docherty Says Goodbye to His Brother

  July 1996

  Declan was up from Melbourne on legal business that he had made sure coincided with Frank’s departure. He had long since invited Docherty to breakfast at the InterContinental Hotel on this his brother’s last morning in Sydney. Docherty, dressed for his next confrontation with the cardinal, presented himself in proper canonical form − dog collar, the black alpaca that had worked perhaps a little on Wood. He wanted to look as conventional as he could, in the hope that it might earn him points in the cardinal’s weighing and measuring.

  At the breakfast table in the great loggia created by grafting the old colonial Treasury buildings onto a modern block, his brother looked precisely as Docherty would have wished him to – a healthy, tennis-playing paterfamilias, with the gloss that only a good life in a satisfying profession and on a peaceful hearth can give a man. As Docherty arrived his brother rose to meet him, hand out, an Order of Australia golden on his lapel.

  ‘Frank,’ he said, but not with any loud implausible fraternity. Docherty shook his hand and once he was comfortable they arranged between themselves what they’d order. ‘Never face a cardinal on a skimpy stomach,’ Docherty told his brother. He added, ‘I saw Herself.’

  ‘Yes. I’m taking her to the opera tonight. Do you really think you can come back here? She’s pretty keen on it.’

  ‘I’m hopeful,’ Docherty said. ‘At least I think I am. But, for several reasons, His Eminence is suspicious of me.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Declan, producing a folder. ‘This is a gift to you, of a sort. I have not been able to get the Church’s records on you, although I’m sure we could if we really went for them. But this is an opinion, which I got some of our brighter young things to draw up, on the unjust dismissal of priests from their functions by church authorities. Happy Christmas.’

  He pushed it across the table in front of Docherty. ‘It’s only July,’ said Docherty. ‘But thank you very much.’

  ‘The cardinal dismissed you in the early seventies, but the Church can’t do that on moral grounds anymore, simple as that. Whether the cardinal wishes you to be his best mate or not, under various headi
ngs he cannot deny your claim of having been unjustly dismissed, or fail to provide reinstatement and court-ordered or agreed-upon compensation. It used to be that only workers in industries under an award system had a claim. But the latest legislation encompasses enough to include you. At state level, we have a fair work ombudsman who could take up the case. You are not without friends, in court or out. In the Devitt case the Church is using state law to its advantage. You can do the same thing. So I’m doing this for the old girl and for you.’

  ‘And that’s the law?’ asked Docherty.

  ‘That’s the law.’

  Docherty was touched that his brother would set his clever young colleagues on this issue. Coffee arrived and the brothers drank as Docherty leafed through the opinion.

  ‘Now what I want to know,’ asked Declan, ‘is whether I could represent this situation to the cardinal as it really is, and in modern terms. Would you let me join your expedition to see him? He’s hard-headed − he’ll try to reiterate what a loose cannon you are. And what a pleasure it will be to shake him off. I must be there to tell him he can’t, and to let him know you know the game’s changed. If they can use lawyers, so can you.

  ‘I read a piece you wrote for the Toronto Globe in which you said priests are citizens as well. They are required to be and they are entitled to be. This gives them responsibilities under the law and access to the law. If you believe that …’ Declan leaned across the table and lightly tapped the folder, ‘he can’t tell you to get lost when you bring your legal advisor, your brother, into the room. I’m proud to say that he knows I’m trouble.’ Declan winked at him. ‘What do you think?’

  Frank shook his head. ‘I’m tempted to do it for the sake of Herself!’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Declan, sniffing the air combatively. ‘He certainly knows about our company. We’ve been involved in a few cases of unfair dismissal by Church schools. I think he’ll give me a high-handed audience. Which will be fine.’

  ‘I have to see him about some … Well, some other matters first,’ said Docherty. ‘But it’s kind of you to offer to do this.’

  ‘I want to go to more cricket with you,’ said his brother. He grinned. ‘Wouldn’t the old lady approve of us fronting him!’

  ‘I believe she would. You’re brave to call her the old lady. But she thinks you’re a genius.’

  ‘And she thinks you’re a prophet. She wouldn’t want to tell you that in case it encouraged you. But for a polite fellow, you can’t stop yourself getting into trouble, can you?’

  ‘I’m a bit amazed myself at that,’ Docherty admitted.

  His brother looked across the room. ‘I don’t know how you manage at all, Frank, this celibacy thing. Not that I’m looking for answers.’

  ‘And not that I’ve got much to tell you. No sainted illegitimate children, no life partner. You see, I’ve got no evidence I could maintain a lifelong partnership.’

  ‘I think you might manage, Frank.’

  ‘Well, like everyone one, I’ve had my moments. But you wouldn’t wish it, that relationship, on a woman. A priest’s woman. There are noble ones, let me tell you. Easier to manage if you’re diocesan clergy; not so easy if you live in a house of priests. But you really wouldn’t want it to happen to your daughter. Besides, I took the vow.’

  ‘It must sometimes be a relief to say that. I took the vow.’

  ‘Maybe it’s my bolthole,’ Docherty conceded.

  Declan whispered, ‘Should we have some Irish whiskey in our coffee before coming to knuckle with His Eminence?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Docherty. ‘Very kind. But I like to take cardinals straight.’

  As they walked, two men seemingly relaxed, towards the cathedral of sunny sandstone, Declan said, ‘You should spend time with Catherine.’ Catherine was his older daughter. ‘She’s interested in the Church’s culture, the way the structures of the Christian liturgy still prevail in civil life. She’s writing a humanist honours thesis on it. On Church rituals and Masonic ones and ones that are purely societal, like our remembrance of the dead in wars. It’s a pup out of Derrida, and she’d love to publish and get noticed by the major deconstructionists. If she got noticed by Susan Sontag or Harold Bloom or Jacques Derrida she’d feel she’d made it. If you were back in Sydney full-time, she could just call you up. She could come up here, go to Doyle’s for lunch with you and rabbit away, uncle and niece.’

  ‘I can’t imagine anything more delightful,’ said Docherty. And he could not. But the centre of his respiration seemed to be stuck in his throat. The old awe of prelates, grander than God, was upon him.

  In the outer office of the chancery, they were met by the cardinal’s private secretary, and Docherty explained that in the second half of his audience with the cardinal he wanted to ask about his potential return to Sydney, and that he had a friend in making those pleadings − his brother, a Melbourne lawyer whom he believed the cardinal would know of.

  Declan calmly handed over his card. The secretary nodded, and said quite pleasantly that he would give the cardinal that message. ‘Just wait,’ he murmured. ‘The boss is still at breakfast, but he won’t be long.’

  Docherty and Declan sat together, shoulder to shoulder, and five minutes later the young man called Docherty into Cardinal Condon’s office. Entering, Docherty found the cardinal was dressed in a black suit, red stock and collar, no doubt ready to attend some civic event on behalf of the Catholic Church, or to give a lunchtime speech. He extended a hand and Docherty yielded to protocol and bent his knee in a slightly slovenly, embarrassed genuflection, to kiss the cardinal’s ring. The democrat in Docherty protested ‘Kiss no master’s hand,’ but he was in a complex situation this morning. The cardinal would receive more shocks, and it was best not to begin with one.

  As soon as this ritual was concluded His Eminence retreated to his side of the table and sat down. He motioned for Docherty to do the same.

  ‘So, tell me what’s happening,’ he said.

  Docherty cleared his throat. Since they had last spoken, Docherty told him, he had sought legal advice on his responsibilities as a citizen who was in possession of certain information, and thereafter he had made this information available to the ombudsman. He had no protection in law, he said, if he did not do so.

  The cardinal rumbled, ‘If every unfounded accusation was the subject of a statutory declaration to the … to the ombudsman, the new looser and binder of sins … God help us!’

  ‘I’m afraid that I had a file snatched from me in the city. It contained few pages, but amongst them was Stephen Cosgrove’s suicide letter. I think it was a mugging.’ True enough, even in light of Sarah’s confession. ‘On top of that, I’ve become aware that the other victim named in Cosgrove’s confession knows about his letter and might, for all I know, consider action of his own.’

  ‘Action of his own?’

  ‘He’s an eminent citizen,’ Docherty said. ‘He won’t be easily dismissed.’

  ‘More eminent than Devitt?’

  ‘Even more so, yes.’

  There were some marked nasal exhalations from the cardinal. ‘You know what distresses me? Let him be whatever he is. What worries me is that at the centre of all this is you, Father … Dr Docherty. Letting a piece out here, a piece out there. I feel an orchestration going on. Aimed at a dear friend and trusted aide.’

  Docherty felt anger, a heat down his arms and in his face. ‘That is a misconception, Cardinal,’ he said firmly. No Your Eminence now. ‘I wanted none of this news to come my way. Since it did, and since one of the victims is particularly influential, I think you should take steps to prepare for the possibility that the accusations will become public.’

  The cardinal took these assertions of Docherty’s surprisingly well. Perhaps he preferred directness. He said, ‘Have you asked yourself if Dr Devitt’s lawyers are behind all this? Is it an attempt to discredit the monsignor and the Church in the middle of these hearings?’

  ‘I have to say it would be a delus
ion to believe that,’ Docherty asserted. ‘You might wish to warn Monsignor Shannon of what is impending, too. He won’t welcome the news from me.’

  ‘Well,’ said the cardinal, with a pained rictus of his mouth, ‘I can’t say you haven’t been frank with me. But it is the frankness of a fool, Docherty, a man who does not know how the Church works. A man who has learned no lessons …’

  Docherty thought that this was a good point to intervene. ‘I genuinely regret that you hold such a poor opinion of my actions, Your Eminence. I cannot quite see myself how I have in any way wronged you.’

  ‘Scandal-mongering, sir. That’s how. Undertaking the ruin of a good priest’s reputation.’

  ‘Your Eminence, to my mind what I’ve done is to warn you of dangerous possibilities. If the monsignor’s unjustly accused, then that is appalling, of course. But so is the opposite.’

  ‘These sorts of rumours always follow priests,’ His Eminence declared. He means it, Docherty perceived. It was as Passerelli had explained to him. The cardinal could not imagine anyone he respected doing such things. ‘Priests are the victims of infatuation by unstable people. It’s always been the case. These claims have never had substance, or at least not as much as you think they do!’

  ‘How wonderful if it were all lies,’ Docherty conceded. But now, given the cardinal’s suspicion of him was incur able, he thought it was time to attack the question of a return.

  ‘Part of my concern about your assessment of me,’ Docherty pressed on, ‘arises from the fact that my mother is now aged, as I believe I mentioned the last time we met and in my letter earlier this year. Her health is not what it was and she has no daughters – just the two sons. She is hopeful that when I retire from my academic post I will reapply to be incardinated here, in Sydney, so that I can be with her in her advanced years.’

  Cardinal Condon actually whistled for a few seconds. ‘Well, I’m afraid there is little chance of that, Father Docherty. Perhaps my predecessor was hasty in getting rid of you – although it was a time of high political colour, as I remember it. But you have done nothing to convince me that I’d want you working or preaching or giving the sacraments in this archdiocese.’