Crimes of the Father

by Thomas Keneally

  “No. Your husband didn’t beat up your kids. And your brother left them alone. At least I hope so.”

  “My brother? I don’t understand.”

  “Your three are flourishing, aren’t they?”

  “They are. Only one of them still goes to Mass, but I’ve come to consider that a minor loss.”

  “Strange,” said Liz Cosgrove, with tragic and manic emphasis. “Our families once lived or died by that. Keeping the faith. What crap! Because no one was measuring the bloody measurers, were they?”

  She picked up a letter from a table nearby. “This is what Stephen left us. It’s a photocopy—the police have the original. Not that there’ll be action, of course. The Knights of the Southern Cross in the police force! They’ll keep it close. But they had to give it to the coroner, and they gave me a copy so I could digest it. A document like this takes years to digest. You . . . you above all . . . you should see it.”

  “Only if . . .” Maureen had no time to protest. Liz had slapped it into her lap. Maureen sat stupefied. Her fear was something she could not define. She did not want to read it, as if the page held the infection of self-destruction and she might carry it to her middle-class children and grandchildren.

  Paul came in just then with the coffee and a plate of biscuits, as if there were any appetite left in this room. The distraction was welcome to Maureen, though, for he questioned her about her preferences for milk and sugar. She almost said she wanted both to buy herself a few seconds. Paul passed her a cup of black coffee while looking to his mother. “Has Mrs. B read it yet?” he asked.

  “Just about to,” said Liz.

  Maureen took a sip of the coffee and, with no options left to her, put down the cup and lifted the suicide letter.

  To all of you. If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t write anything, but I know I owe you an explanation, and this is it.

  I’m sorry that in wrecking my life I wrecked yours. I’m sorry for my rage. I was angry all the time, like the old man in his heyday. But the one person I go to Hell cursing is not who you expect. Monsignor Shannon. My rage was for him. And for myself as well. I take my hate for him to Hell, matched by my own self-hate. He began when I was in Year 6—I didn’t even know what he was talking about at the time, but I soon found out. Before I hit fourteen he went on to another boy. I thought of going to the Church, but it’s useless—he’s such a heavy figure with them. I know one thing—he’ll never kill himself. Too pleased with himself. And I’m too weary to take action. I don’t have the energy to keep going. The other kid, my successor, was Brian Wood. If you ever meet him, tell him to go after Shannon if he wants. He’s done okay for himself, I think. He can probably afford a lawyer. Good on him.

  Again, sorry, sorry. I can’t face many more breaths though. Now I’m gone, you can both get on with life. The only two people I give a shit about! Don’t worry, I didn’t suffer. I’ve got a big raw dose ready.

  It was signed simply “S.”

  Maureen looked up, stricken. She understood now. She was, by blood connection, on the side of culpability.

  “Don’t say a bloody thing,” shouted Liz. “You may not be to blame, but if you say something I’ll rip your throat out. Now go! And tell your fucking brother. Tell him. There’ve got to be other boys. There always are with his sort. Get out!”

  Liz lowered her face, done with Maureen. Maureen knew she had no choice but to rise. As she left the house, Paul escorting her up the hall and opening the door for her, nausea overwhelmed her. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Breslin,” he whispered. “By the way, the coroner will pass on the letter to the director of public prosecutions. He has to if a third party is mentioned in that way. But the police said prosecution’s unlikely . . .”

  And he shut the door.

  On the pavement close to their gates, Maureen vomited. She should clean it up, she knew, but she didn’t have the physical or spiritual means. As she moved her hand to her mouth, she realized it still held the letter.

  It was as if Liz had intended that.

  10

  * * *

  Maureen Breslin Reflects on Her Brother

  July 1996

  I WAS AWARE that my brother, Leo, whom everyone liked, though he was considered a man’s man, was entirely at home within the Church. He had worked in a string of parishes, having a gift for accommodating himself to whatever the Church decided. He adapted to the new post-Latin liturgy, though he enjoyed nothing as much as the Missa Solemnis, with a choir singing plainchant and the priest singing the offertory, which Leo could do in a pleasing baritone that had been exploited, when he was just a schoolboy, for St. Patrick’s Day ceremonies such as the Rose of Tralee and songs like “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”

  The Church in which he flourished was no longer such an Irish thing. Surplus priests from Irish seminaries, and nuns and brothers from monasteries and convents, who’d once been sent to North America and the Antipodes, were very old by the time Leo began his studies. Nowadays the Australian-born nuns and priests of all backgrounds who replaced them are growing past middle age, as is Leo himself, and there are sermons about how there’s no one in the present, supposedly selfish generations to, in turn, take their place.

  At various stages of our childhoods, I would guess that perhaps 40 percent of a class of girls would contemplate entering the convent, especially if they felt encouraged by nuns they admired or had a crush on. The same was the case for boys in the Catholic system who thought about becoming a priest, though the numbers reduced when these boys began to develop heroic pimples and sexual aspirations.

  Leo first decided to enter the priesthood when he was nearly sixteen. The option of becoming a priest, he said, had been floating around for some time but had only just come into focus. (In the 1950s he was praised for that nifty photographic usage “into focus.”)

  While he was studying in the neo-Gothic seminary on the hill above the beach at Manly, he was seen as one of the young men from the archdiocese of Sydney who would be sent to the Collegio di Propaganda Fide in Rome. There, he would finish his studies with students from other prodigiously remote countries such as Uruguay and Nigeria. He would learn the Italian he’d need were he ever to become a cardinal. Each diocese in Australia sent two candidates, so if you were half-clever and came from one of the geographically huge but population-sparse dioceses in the bush—the vast Wilcannia-Forbes, for example—the competition for places in Rome was not so daunting. To be a city boy and be sent was a much steeper competition.

  I think Leo’s academic achievements were solid and were—and I say this with the greatest love and forgiveness I can marshal—unmarked by individuality or an attempt at initiative. The Church was not built for new directions. It believed its directions had been laid down, and Leo happily believed that, too, and was good at conveying the message.

  Despite my mother’s prayers, he was not chosen for the Collegio, which meant that he might have a harder time becoming a bishop. He did honest work in the parishes to which he was posted; he had a gift for administration, and was soon a financial consultant to the archdiocese’s education office.

  Ultimately he became an important adviser to the cardinal himself, and lived at St. Mary’s Cathedral, from where he conducted the sort of active social life at which he had always been so competent. He developed an expertise with insurance through his work on the archdiocesan finances, and was a founding director of the Catholic Church’s own insurance company, for which Damian called him God’s broker. Thus he made many contacts in law firms and insurance companies, and would be invited to industry dinners. I had studied law before my marriage and by then had taken up an editorial post on the small staff of the Australian Law Review. So I sometimes met my own brother at the shindigs laid on by the larger law firms and insurance groups. But my table was, as it should have been, and as I was comfortable for it to be, one of lower status than Leo’s. He would sit in a
tailor-made clerical suit, study the wine labels, and set out to prove what he liked proving to the ungodly—that he was an ordinary bloke underneath it all, and as much of a success in his business as they were in theirs. Many people liked him for his mix of administrative sleekness and easy charm. The charm would have been considered oily if it had not been based on a sincere liking for other beings, a gift of giving his full attention to the person who was consulting him.

  When a sister writes such a qualified opinion—“Many people liked him”—she is giving the suggestion that she herself might not have liked him. Well, I can certainly say, as do many sisters and brothers, “We were temperamentally different.” But I love him. And I was strangely proud of his capacity to be a smooth operator—that was something I seemed to have missed altogether from the family’s genetic assortment. But by the mid-1970s I frequently wondered: wouldn’t he have been better suited to the world of law and finance than to the business of God’s truth? Was he ever attracted by the handsome women of the brokerages?

  His demeanor, as far as I could read it, seemed to say that he managed such questions with the same clerical smoothness as he managed his life.

  11

  * * *

  Docherty Meets Sarah Fagan

  July 1996

  THE NEXT morning Docherty chose his clothes carefully: he didn’t want to dress in full clerical garb or look exactly like a civilian when he was meeting an attractive woman. So he put on a collared shirt and wore a stock with a clerical collar beneath it. Thus he was declaring what he was without making a meal of it.

  Docherty took a bus to Chinatown then walked up to the Powerhouse Museum. Past its forecourt he began scanning for Charlie’s Café, and on the other side of Harris Street he saw it. As he crossed the road, he felt the old Sydney appetite for coffee dragging at the roots of his tongue. In the snows of Canada and on balmy Ontario summer evenings, he would praise his city’s coffee to fellow monks, academics, or graduate students. Starbucks, having spread from Seattle into Canada, would, he knew, never catch on in Sydney, since the coffee nearly everywhere in the city was already so good. A massive Italian postwar immigration had brought with it the Gaggia, and since the 1950s Sydney had gone from a tea-drinking city to an espresso-drinking one at an exponential rate.

  He was not worried about being denied a coffee that morning, either. He felt that the cabdriver wanted this meeting and would be unlikely to negate it by the screams or exorbitant gestures to which she was entitled. He believed this as a professional, though behind his professional ethics and compassion for her there was in him an old-fashioned reticence about scenes.

  He could see her through the front window as he approached the café. She was already seated, in jeans and the blue shirt of her taxi company, her hair severely tied behind her. She had a coffee in front of her. When he came in and nodded at her, she got up, frowning. He knew that part of her, the part stuck in its familiar misery, must have hoped he would not turn up.

  She nodded him to a chair. “In normal circumstances,” she said in quite a moderate voice, after the waitress had taken Docherty’s order, “I’d thank you for turning up. All I’ve done is harangue you. So, why did you?”

  “I thought I had a clue as to what might be causing you so much distress.”

  “So much distress,” she scoffed, making a fist and hitting his forearm with it. “Not distress. Rage, mate! Call it what it bloody well is. Rage!”

  “Yes. I think I could make some guesses about the rage. Without being too patronizing.”

  She took a sip of cappuccino and for a moment it left froth on her lips.

  “Do you think I’m a good-looking woman?” she challenged him.

  “I do, of course. But that isn’t the issue. So why do you ask?”

  “I shouldn’t have any difficulty in finding a husband or lover, then, should I?”

  Docherty could see no sense in buying further into this argument. The question seemed a tease, or at least a test he did not need to take. “I think we should talk about your true problems, which aren’t about how you look. Shall I begin by saying what I think about your anger?”

  She was surprised, perhaps by how quickly he had reached that point. She shrugged and nodded curtly but said nothing. He knew that if he did this badly, it would be painful for both of them. And there would be a scene.

  “Okay,” he began in a lowered voice. “I could be absolutely wrong and too swayed by my clinical experience, but I would guess that your rage comes from a violation you suffered at the hands of the clergy when you were young. Of a priest, I mean. It happens that a lot of my research and practice is in this area. You might not have felt much for years, but then the fury arrived and overcame you.”

  “Well, go on then,” she invited him. Her large brown eyes, weighing him, were less mocking.

  “I think that if you were abused as a child you would find it hard to have what are called ‘normal’ relationships—although I suspect that most people in ‘normal’ relationships only produce certain approximations. Like myself. I’m only approximately a priest. I’m a celibate monk, sure, because that’s the job I took on. But I know how we all hang by a thread. However, whatever that term ‘relationship’ means, you don’t find that possible. What happened to you then makes it impossible now. The anger, the panic—if I’m right, you know it all better than me. So you pick up a priest who’s flown in from Canada and you off-load on him. And fair enough, too. It’s time you told someone in the business.

  “So . . . am I anywhere close?”

  “Well,” she said, looking out of the window then returning her eyes to him. “So far you’re right. You don’t have all of it. But you’re right in a generic sort of way.”

  “Of course I’d have to be wide of the exact mark. As much as these crimes are similar, they’re also different from each other. I don’t know you. I can’t go beyond the generic.”

  “Guess what age I was?” she challenged him after drinking more coffee.

  “I don’t think we ought to turn it into a game.”

  “We’ll turn it into a game if I say so. If it’s a game, I bloody well own it.”

  “Very well.” He shook his head. He felt the solemnity and grief. “You mean when it happened?”

  “Yes. What else? When it happened.”

  “Somewhere between thirteen and sixteen years. But, God knows, I’m no prophet.”

  “No, but you’re close. More than two years—fourteen onwards. Then he got a girl to replace me. And God knows where she is. Poor bitch. I think of her and I don’t want her to be totally happy. Explain that.”

  “I think it’s easy to explain. It’s human. Me saying that will probably only make you madder, but it’s the truth. I might be a priest, I might be a psychologist, I might be a male brute, but I’m a human, too. I’m appalled as a human that all that happened to you.”

  She scanned him and decided to believe him for now.

  “So now what? I was a ruined child. And grew up to be a ruined nun.”

  “Oh Jesus,” said Docherty. “That is a rarer combination. But not unknown. And, I hope, not irreparable.”

  She was partially appeased.

  “Okay, smart-arse,” she challenged him. “What happened then?”

  “Would you enjoy me getting it wrong?” he asked.

  She made a small acquiescent squeak of the lips.

  “Of course I’ll get it wrong,” he said. “I can only use abstract nouns like shame, rage, anxiety. You were too young and he . . . whoever he was . . . drove your psychosexual development into morbid grooves. It was as if he dammed up your development. What lies behind the wall grows stagnant. It isn’t your fault at all, but sometimes you think it is, and that does nothing to lessen the rage.”

  He must have been accurate in part, for she grew solemn. “Were you got at when you were young?” she asked.


  “No. My being here is entirely my own work. I’m here because I wasn’t got at.”

  “Then there’s at least a chance,” she conceded, “according to what I’ve heard, that you won’t become an abuser.”

  “Most aren’t, you know. Most of us are just confused heterosexuals. But homosexuals make good priests, too. There’s an irony in that, as you know. It’s the Church’s secret no one dares utter.”

  “You don’t have to be Einstein to know that,” she told him.

  “You don’t even have to be Christ,” he assured her.

  “Do you understand how fake a sentiment like that sounds to the modern ear? On the streets? It might be good for the retreat house. It’s utter shit to real people.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Well, I’m old-fashioned. I actually talk like that.”

  “Why don’t you stand up for yourself? Just because some other priest wrecked me, doesn’t mean you can’t push back at me.”

  “If you were my patient, I would. As it is, we’re just talking. Human to human.”

  “I suppose you think I’m sexually inactive,” she challenged him. This was the part, he thought, where the patient tries to shock you.

  “Okay,” he said. “I won’t presume anything.”

  “I fuck men randomly. And I like it. I give signals, if I want, to someone in the cab. Other cabdrivers, too. Younger than me. Pakistani graduate students. I’m the one who makes the move, and it’s quick and off he goes, never to be seen again. Never to have his face redefined for me, never to have it impose itself. I’m in charge. In your much-praised permanent relationship, is the woman ever in charge? My mother wasn’t in charge for a day.”

  “There are some men who aren’t like that, though. Power sharing is what works in most marriages. I mean, just from my observation. What would I know? But it seems people often get to that workable arrangement by argument. That’s the messy human process.”