Crimes of the Father

by Tom Keneally

  ‘In that regard, however,’ Docherty pressed on, ‘I have an advocate. I would be grateful if Your Eminence took the time to hear him. It’s my brother, Declan Docherty, who is a —’

  ‘I know of him,’ said the cardinal. ‘He’s an industrial relations lawyer in Melbourne.’

  ‘That’s him, Your Eminence.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was related … So you think all this is a matter of industrial relations?’

  ‘That didn’t occur to me as an aspect of the issue. But he has commissioned a legal opinion you might wish to pass on to your lawyers. If you consent to hear him … He happens to be in the office outside, because we met for a farewell breakfast. My plane leaves tonight, you see.’

  Docherty observed the cardinal hesitate. But he proceeded to phone through to his secretary to tell him that Mr Docherty should be let in.

  Declan entered in his good suit, looking uncowed. Docherty noticed that the demeanour of the cardinal changed a little. His Eminence was used to clear and unquestioned authority over priests. Industrial relations lawyers who had, however, caused problems in Catholic diocesan schools in matters of alleged unfair dismissal were a far more dangerous quantity, and it was as though the cardinal felt there was a balance of honour, of respective successes and losses, between him and Declan. That seemed to make him wary and to think he would give a weight to this encounter that he had not brought to his earlier discussions with Docherty.

  The cardinal extended a hand. Declan did not kiss it in the loyal Catholic manner but shook it, and the cardinal did not seem outraged. Declan held the file with the legal opinion under his free arm.

  ‘Your brother mentioned unfair dismissal,’ said the cardinal, with an air of near-amusement at the concept.

  ‘And denial of natural justice,’ supplied Declan. ‘Frank told you about our mother’s health?’

  ‘Yes. He did.’

  ‘It would be merely justice if you reversed the ruling of your predecessor and took Frank back into your diocese. What’s the danger in that? He might give an unconventional sermon or two …’

  ‘I believe that can be guaranteed,’ said the cardinal almost affectionately. Good old Frank. Again, though, he was not closing doors on Declan as energetically as he’d closed them on Docherty.

  ‘Basically,’ Declan explained, ‘the unfair dismissal laws of this state lay down three principles. One is whether there is an incapacity to do the work; the second is whether there has been improper conduct on the employee’s part; and the third is the case of redundancy. None of those principles existed in Frank Docherty’s case.’

  ‘Ah, but we aren’t a trucking company or a retail store,’ the cardinal said with alacrity. ‘The Church is a voluntary association, and judges have shown little appetite to say other wise, whether in our case or in that of the Anglicans or of the Uniting Church, or in Judaism, or whosoever.’

  ‘Well,’ said Declan, ‘for that very reason, the issue hasn’t been fully tested in our courts. An English court has found the claim of an Anglican vicar to be justiciable, but the vicar died before he could bring his case. My opinion is that the courts could find Frank’s case well worth a run. In fact, if my brother were not allowed to return to this diocese to carry on normal pastoral work to the extent he chose and was capable of, my partners and I would be willing, on the basis of this opinion, which you are welcome to keep, to test the matter for him in the courts. But I ask you to look at him. He is not a litigant by nature, and, in any case, you’ve had to close the major seminary, haven’t you? The young are no longer becoming priests in the old numbers.’

  ‘There are just as many called,’ the cardinal asserted. ‘But the world is so loud now, and the young cannot hear.’

  ‘Well, however you like to interpret it, Your Eminence, you have a shortage of personnel. You’re bringing in priests from the Third World, where the priesthood is still a going concern. And that’s a fine thing. But here is a man willing to work on modest terms, a man of unstained repute and considerable intellect, willing to visit parishes and keep them alive. He would, of course, live in his community, his Order’s house, where he is staying now, and he might have some lecturing duties of the kind that would give great lustre to the Church.’

  Cardinal Condon turned to Frank. ‘You’d be ready to stand by while your brother’s law firm attacks the archdiocese?’

  ‘I am not utterly comfortable about it,’ Docherty admitted. ‘But I do believe I was denied natural justice. Then there is the matter of my mother, and there I have a primary loyalty.’

  ‘But you’ve got a sweet posting in Canada … With tenured status at a university.’

  ‘I believe,’ said Declan, ‘we could find expert witnesses who would testify that my brother could have found a similar post here until the late cardinal, your predecessor, left him with only two choices − either to be laicised, or to go to some other area where his Order had a house. Yet he stayed a priest, and that, I think, was pretty admirable. Don’t you?’

  The cardinal weighed this and made an ambiguous mouth. ‘We’ve all stayed priests, Mr Docherty. But what I don’t like is your giving me an ultimatum: restore him to the archdiocese, or else!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Declan. ‘But I don’t want to reach a point of coercion, and neither do you. It strikes me that the defence in the Devitt case must be costing you a great deal more than a settlement would. And the same would certainly be true in this case. Frank is not seeking any settlement other than the right to be a priest here. As well, he would be required to get certification from the superior of his Order in Canada, and from his bishop, that he has performed well there. I somehow think he’ll get those without difficulty. I spoke to a parish priest in Ontario, an older man Frank helps. He said he wouldn’t be able to keep the place going without my brother. For one thing, Frank offers the parishioners free counselling two nights a week. But he does the more traditional duties as well.

  ‘As for his fellow priests in the Order of the Divine Charity, they have nothing but good to say of him − even though some of them have theological arguments with him. But theological arguments are permissible in the modern Church, aren’t they, Your Eminence?’

  The cardinal shook his head but said nothing.

  ‘So,’ Declan pressed on, ‘dare I say, if I were you, I’d show your lawyers this opinion I’ve given you. Needless to say, if you took my brother back, we would be prodigiously grateful. And my mother would call down blessings upon your head.’

  Now Declan put the opinion on the cardinal’s desk, reached for the man’s hand, took it and kissed it earnestly. ‘I think that just about covers it for now, Your Eminence,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you for seeing my brother,’ Docherty told the cardinal.

  ‘I’ve known starting price bookmakers who aren’t as slick as you two,’ His Eminence muttered, but his tone had some concession and certainly did not blot out future possibilities. He even told Docherty, on parting, to have a safe journey back to Canada.

  Walking out of the grounds of the cathedral, Declan turned to his brother. ‘Now you know why lawyers drink too much – we are always slithering around other slitherers.’

  Docherty said, ‘I don’t know how you do it. He was beating me to a pulp, and you came in and played him like a flute.’

  ‘Please,’ said Declan Docherty. ‘Not like a flute. Not anything involving lips.’ He gave a small shudder. ‘Let’s make it a cello.’

  ‘Yes,’ Docherty agreed. ‘But it’s a tremendous skill, and I don’t have it.’

  ‘People wouldn’t love you if you did.’

  ‘Your family seems to love you.’

  ‘At least they forgive me.’

  ‘You’re talking like Uncle Tim used to.’

  ‘Uncle Tim was no fool.’

  Back outside the hotel, with the air from the harbour rushing up Macquarie Street from the direction of the Opera House, the brothers embraced. This men-embracing-other-men trick was something that had not
existed when Docherty was young, when men considered affection a weakness. He had tried to learn its protocols, the unambiguous fraternal embrace – even some of his fellow priests and members of the Congregation of Divine Charity were aficionados of the hug.

  ‘What if I pay your way up to business class tonight?’ his brother asked.

  ‘I don’t think that would go well with who I am.’

  ‘Maybe not. I’ll tell you who you are, Frank. You’re unconventional, but you’re the real bloody deal.’

  37

  Docherty Leaves Sydney

  July 1996

  After he had said goodbye to his new friend Gunter Eismann, Docherty was taken to the airport by Sarah Fagan – it seemed now to both of them a sacrosanct arrangement.

  ‘At the risk of giving you a big head,’ she told him as she drove, ‘it was … fortuitous I met you.’

  ‘I feel fortunate to have met you, Sarah,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have missed all your free character assessments!’

  ‘For God’s sake, accept a compliment. How can you be fortunate to meet me? I’m only partly on the way to becoming a human being.’

  ‘I could name plenty of people who haven’t even begun.’

  ‘Brian Wood. I don’t quite know what will happen with him. It could be everything or nothing.’

  ‘That’s the normal human arrangement, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Sarah said. ‘Most people are nothing or a bit of everything. Very few are absolutely everything or absolutely nothing, so that you can’t tell what to expect. He’ll either reverberate or disappear. But it cheers me up that he’s much more ruthless than me.’

  ‘And, as he said, he can afford lawyers,’ Docherty murmured.

  As dusk came on, she dropped him outside the international terminal in the midst of the contest for car and cab spaces, the chaos of harried, distracted drivers and passengers making it no venue for earnest goodbyes. Sarah proudly found him a luggage trolley he didn’t have to pay for, and their farewells were terse. She touched his arm and he found himself leaning to kiss her cheek.

  He was at the long queue for Air Canada economy before he had fully said goodbye. And Sarah Fagan, prospective high school teacher, cab driver for now, had disappeared to rejoin the banal melee of the city.

  Docherty was pleased he had an aisle seat. He was beside a retired couple going to Canada, because, the husband said, he’d seen a picture of Lake Louise in a Saturday Evening Post when he was a child in the bush, and it had seemed the most improbable and desirable place on earth, imbued with a glamour intensified by the dourness of Australian life in the 1950s.

  Docherty read a newspaper report of what had happened the day before at the Devitt trial. The senior counsel for the Church had argued that the trust and trustees could not be sued. There was an opinion piece in the Herald by a lawyer with whom Docherty had been to school, who was well known as a media commentator. It urged the Church to abandon the trust defence and, at any cost, to have the trial heard on its merits. Docherty agreed, and was reminded by the weight of these fretful matters that transcendental meditation was very handy both when faced with the gravity of human absurdity and with an overnight economy class flight.

  Between sleep and conversation the flight was pleasant, with an esprit generated amongst the people in his area of the plane based on sharing the limits of cheap economy seats for a preposterous number of hours. Somewhere north of Fiji, they crossed that filament known as the date line and the day slipped back by one from Sydney’s.

  As the sun rose over the North Pacific Docherty was oblivious to the scandal that had broken out in Sydney and was still blazing away at mid-morning, taking up the nation’s oxygen.

  Brian Wood had bought a full page in a Murdoch tabloid, an imperfect tool, but sufficient to publish Stephen Cosgrove’s suicide letter. Above the letter a heavy typescript read:

  In June this year, a school friend of mine, Stephen Cosgrove, suicided by drug overdose. He wrote a farewell letter in which he mentioned me while accusing a priest of abusing both him and me. I can verify Stephen’s claim, and thus I indemnify this newspaper of any action that might proceed from their publishing Stephen’s pitiful document.

  I take no delight in appearing before the world as a victim of this priest. But I am aware that by acknowledging the truth so publicly, by sharing it so widely with others, I can prevent further wrongs, and achieve a sense that the burden I have carried too long has been taken from my shoulders. I ask those who have loved me unconditionally to this point of my life to continue to do so. I invite those who have favoured my company, Wood and Associates, with contracts, to continue to do so. Wood and Associates is unchanged.

  He had placed his address, according to the requirements of law, at the base of the advertisement. And below this was a line to say that he would not be taking up any requests for elucidation.

  By afternoon, as Docherty waited for his connecting flight in Vancouver, the Church had agreed to settle with Dr Devitt, whose terms proved modest but certainly exceeded the Church’s original offer.

  And the monsignor had been made available by the cardinal of the archdiocese to answer questions from the police.

  38

  Morning Mass

  July 1996

  Docherty’s flight to Toronto descended in a lavender dawn. He had that long-haul sense that his brain and major organs had somehow been sundered from his body.

  He still had a bus ride to reach the Order’s house in Waterloo, and on finally arriving there he found to his delight two of his fellow priests, including Tubby, waiting for him. So this is homecoming … Perhaps I do belong here, he thought.

  Later, he ate with them in the monastery dining room, exchanged the news of the summer and talked about Jean Chrétien and his opposition to Quebec separatism.

  ‘Did you cause trouble down in Sydney?’ asked Tubby Enright.

  ‘I’m still not popular with the boss down there. I’ll fill you in when I’ve got more energy.’ Then they all drank a beer and eased their way off to their beds.

  In the corner of Docherty’s room sat his personal computer like a comrade. It was shrouded with a cover – its last night of rest before his invigorating work recommenced. Seeing it he remembered with exhilaration his graduate seminar in behavioural psychology in two days’ time, the fact it would sweep him up and energise him. Tomorrow was not too early to do further drafting of his work for Bishop Egan, a chance to redeem the stigma he bore in the eyes of Cardinal Condon of Sydney.

  From a profound, exhausted sleep, he woke early the next morning. Although he did not quite know what time it was in Sydney, his body was falsely declaring itself alert to begin the day and he still felt the terrible dislocation associated with a trans-global migration.

  He had not only his own PC but a fax line in his room for university communications with students and staff. And he had not been long awake when it began to stutter forth new pages to join some weeks of unanswered messages, in urgent and emphatic black, in the tray. There seemed to be a wearying number of them. And this for the quiet time of year!

  The first page that emerged was handwritten and had Sarah Fagan’s name on it. He read the message. It had been sent the morning after she’d seen him off.

  Dear Frank,

  I still feel bad I had my young friend crunch you. As you know, I have travelled a long way in a little time and I hope you didn’t mind travelling the short drop to the footpath. I decided to play it as hard as them, so you’ll have to forgive me. Remember the card you dropped on the cab seat the first time I met you? It had this fax number I’m trying, so I hope I’ve reached you with the news. Wood’s gone public with Shannon’s name. It’s astounding. Justice in one hit! Nowhere for the man to hide! I found it easy to come out once Wood had set up a way of doing it for us. See attached. And thanks.

  He watched other pages edging for Wood, pages with text and images. He was impatient for them all to download in a way he could not rem
ember having ever felt in the old days when communications took so long, so many days and weeks.

  On the first of the pages was a photograph of Sarah Fagan herself, rather photogenic, looking at the camera unflinchingly, comfortable with her accusations, her support of the evidence of Stephen Cosgrove and Wood. There was a picture of a harried Monsignor Leo Shannon. For, according to the article Sarah had sent, the cardinal’s office said it was only in recent days that accusations against the monsignor had reached them, and, it went on, that archdiocesan authorities had considered withdrawing Monsignor Shannon from the Devitt case. It seemed that Leo Shannon would, for the first time in his career, find himself reduced and written off, even before any charges arose. He too would have an education in archdiocesan expediency.

  Independently of the investigation, the Church had announced it intended to abandon the challenge to Dr Devitt’s plea for the suspension of the Limitation Act and would enter into negotiation with his lawyers. And on the next page he saw the text of Stephen Cosgrove’s letter in the tabloid.

  Docherty shaved distractedly, too many developments to absorb. Maureen would be shattered, he knew. Should he call? What would he say? What time was it in Sydney? Nine in the evening. Not too late, given the circumstances.

  He dialled her number. The only answer was the redolent Australian dial tone, then Damian’s recorded voice inviting him to leave a message.

  ‘I don’t know what you two must be feeling,’ Docherty told the cold telephonic vacancy. ‘Maureen … you don’t deserve … you deserve to be free of your brother’s shame. I’m sorry. I send my love.’

  He was guiltily relieved that he had not needed to speak to them. Why were they out? Had kind Damian taken her away for a road trip? Was she sedated?