Crimes of the Father

by Thomas Keneally

  “It’s a risk I’m not equipped to take,” she said, “and you bloody know it! Thanks to my glamorous seducer, I’m done for, and I don’t want to go through the rigmarole of it. You know, he was younger than I am now when it happened. But that’s where we come to the second reason for my rage, Father Docherty. What happens when the abuser is now the one who decides the fate of the abused?”

  “Decides your fate?”

  “Not mine, but all those who come to the Church in the hope of mercy. Mercy! They’ve got a committee.”

  “Yes, that’s become standard practice.”

  “And they’ve got a fancy name for it, but all the fancy name means is Cover Our Arses. Even so, do the poor sods who come to inform the Church and to seek its reparation deserve to have him there? Right at the heart of the process? The man who messed me up?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “How do I mean? This is where you’ll begin washing your hands. This is when you’ll scurry to your monastery and take the plane back to Canada. The monster, the man whose name turns my stomach . . . He’s giving evidence right now in a court case some poor fellow’s taken against the Church as a matter of principle. Reckless boy! Because I know the Church will fight to its last lawyer.”

  “That’s true,” agreed Docherty ruefully, and it did not infuriate her that he did so.

  “Monsignor Leo Shannon. Know him? The Devitt case—you must have heard about it? This man, Devitt, refused the terms of Cover Our Arses. The matter’s in court.”

  Docherty flinched. What he’d known with a clinical distance had in one terrible moment become personal. He did know this man! Above all, this man was Maureen’s brother. His mind surged. Maureen couldn’t know about any of this, surely. No, she could not possibly know about it.

  He whispered, “Surely you’re not saying that Monsignor Shannon took sexual advantage of you when you were fourteen?”

  “I certainly am. So, this is where you get up and leave.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “The closing of the ranks,” she declared, so loudly that another coffee drinker noticed. She lowered her voice. “You’re a bit shaken by this, aren’t you?”

  He thought of Maureen. A woman of probity. His professional instincts told him the cabdriver was telling a version of the truth, yet he hoped it was premature to be alarmed.

  “I have to admit I am. And I can’t close ranks. I’m not in the ranks. I’m a sort of outrider. I’ve learned not to discount any such tale as yours. You certainly don’t seem to have a condition of pathological fantasizing, so it looks as if you’re very likely telling the truth. I’m appalled for you.”

  “Go to hell!” But she conceded a half smile.

  He thought of bland Leo Shannon, his presence in the Devitt case, no doubt dealing smoothly with barristers in the courtroom.

  “I think you should see a counselor who specializes in this area,” he told her after a silence. “I can give you a few names.”

  “For a hundred and fifty dollars an hour? On a cabdriver’s pay?”

  “I’ve known one of them to take on cases for the medical rebate. I’ll speak to him. He’s a friend I studied with.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  “I can see why you don’t wish to approach the committee here. ‘In Compassion’s Name,’ as they call it, rightly or wrongly.”

  She murmured, “You’re the first one I’ve mentioned his name to, and it’s so easy. I thought beforehand saying it might kill me. Do you know him?”

  Docherty’s face must have given her the answer.

  “My God, you do know him!”

  “He’s not a friend,” Docherty told her, abandoning professional distance. He saw his hand on the table was trembling a little. “What would you like to do? Approach the Church? Sue it—as this other man has?”

  “I want to strip him naked. Before the eyes of the world. I want to humiliate him and have him publicly ask my pardon. Then he can suicide.”

  “That won’t heal you. But other things can. I hope he’s capable of asking anyone’s pardon. I don’t ask that to prejudge him, but I have a little experience of abusers. They don’t like to be caught, and at a profound level they can’t see that what they have done is wrong and imposes hell on their victims. Some of them even think it’s educative.”

  She was shaking her head. He realized this analysis was not of much use to her. She had adequately vented her feelings, at least as they related to Docherty, to his membership of the clergy. He said, “Do you want to take your case to the archdiocese? Sadly, they won’t let you be represented by a lawyer before the board of In Compassion’s Name. They, of course, have lawyers. You should name Monsignor Shannon. Then he will not be present at the meeting. They’ll protect him, of course—at least at first. It’s part of the culture. But there will also be a shock for them in finding that someone they work with and respect might be guilty of such things. Your situation is far too important for me to bullshit you. You’ll find that they’re quite polite—at least in my experience—and they’re sensible enough to know that to dismiss you out of hand isn’t wise.”

  “That’s the problem. I would lose it if they doubted me.”

  “It’s a risk, so I wouldn’t suggest approaching them until you’ve had professional help. You’d have to see a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist as preparation. To make it possible for you to live with limited results, because I’m afraid the results are sometimes limited. But when you’re feeling up to it, the reason you must go to them is that you are not the only victim—you talked about another girl?”

  He thought of the Breslins; that there was a risk they might be angry with him if Maureen’s brother were accused. But that had to be a secondary consideration, even that—the impact of shame on Maureen if her brother’s crimes were proven.

  “I wish you could get exactly the result you need. It’s immensely important this man be stopped. You’re absolutely certain in your identification? Monsignor Leo Shannon?”

  That made her angry. “Do you think I could make a mistake about it? Once or twice a week for two years or more, and you think I could make a mistake; misplace a name and face? Fuck you!”

  “I’m sorry,” Docherty said. “And I’m sorry that what I say is such cold comfort. But think of it in these terms—every voice raised, even in their supposedly confidential confines—is another voice that will bring about the day when they will have to confront these cases with the compassion the Church boasts of. If not, it will be the secular state that in the end tells them to live up to what they claim to be.”

  She laughed. “My God, you’re beginning to sound as angry as me.”

  “I’d be very pleased if I could take some of your anger onto my shoulders,” he said.

  “You’re not such a bad poor bastard,” she said. “Earnest, anyhow. Notice I talk like a taxi driver now, and you’ll just have to put up with it. But you must have had a decent mother at some stage.”

  “I did,” said Docherty. “When I was a young priest, I was preaching at a parish in Sydney before they sent me to India. I gave a sermon on marriage and thought it very well constructed, first-class oratory. But when I got to my mother’s place for lunch that Sunday, she took me aside and said that if I ever gave such a stupid sermon again, or pretended to know the first thing about what she and my father, or any other couple, had been through in their marriage, she would disown me. If every mother of every priest gave such good advice, the world would be a better place.”

  She shook her head, beyond words now.

  “So, will you talk to a professional?” he asked her. “You can see already the effect of talking to me. Even if you have to see this out on your own, an ally is an ally, and you shouldn’t pass up the chance of making one, no matter how professionally dispassionate. The right person might help you to direct and dissipa
te your fury. You can live a life. Believe me! Please! That’s the only doctrine I’m going to press on you today. I’m no catechist, but I’m a fairly good psychologist.”

  “So,” said the cabdriver, “you argue I should open up about it, come forward, that I should let the Church know about him. But he is the Church. Monsignor! The very word means ‘My Lord’!”

  He wrote out and gave her the name of the clinical psychologist he had studied with at Sydney University. She took the piece of paper. “How much longer are you here?” she asked Docherty.

  “A little over three weeks. Summer break—the academic year’s ended in North America. I’ve got some of my family to visit.” He paused. “Look, I’m not being prudish, but you use these men in a style that’s part of your victimhood. That doesn’t seem much good for you or them.”

  She weighed this.

  “I’d better get back now,” he told her. He began to rise.

  She frowned and after a time said, “My name is Sarah. You don’t need my surname.”

  12

  * * *

  Docherty’s Bengal Crisis

  1961

  AFTER HIS ordination in 1960, Frank Docherty was sent by the Order to teach in its school in Calcutta, Bengal.

  The India he entered did not seem to be the India of Gandhi. Leaving the airport, he passed slums which, in their crowded and chaotic variegations of material, were almost too much for the eye and the conscience to take account of. These masses would not, however, be the subject of Father Docherty’s educative endeavors. The school he was to join sat in ordered grounds; stuccoed classrooms suggested the Spanish Jesuit St. Francis Xavier’s ambition to bring Indians to Christ in the sixteenth century. Nearby was the dusty vista of the Maidan, and in the hazy distance the wedding-cake exuberance of the Queen Victoria Memorial glimmered like a fevered dream of Empire.

  The children who attended the Divine Charity campus were the well-scrubbed and handsomely fed offspring of wealthy Hindus, Muslims, and urbane Zoroastrians, descendants of Persians, as well as some Goan Catholics of Portuguese-Indian origins. The parents of these boys wanted their sons to straddle cultures and religions with composure and worldliness, and exposing them to Catholic priests helped with that. The priests argued that they were imbuing humane principles into India’s future leaders, which would be itself an expansion of Western Christendom in one way or another.

  Docherty was given the task of teaching English and history to the boys in the junior years of the high school. He would need to get older before he found himself teaching the senior forms. He felt a fraud, and had none of the customary confidence that his ordination had empowered him to instruct children wisely. As well, he soon began to feel that these privileged Hindu and Muslim boys were the ones in India who needed him least. He thought of the inhabitants of the shantytowns as the true Indians, the true target for an order like his, and felt these places were where Christ would have located himself.

  He tried to resist the inherent pride of such suppositions, and of the idea that he had some spectacular, noninstitutional role to play as a sort of theological guerrilla. But he had read of priests who worked in squalid factories in Belgium, laboring beside people in their own grim environment, bearing witness to their industrial degradation when no one else did. And he had read of that extraordinary French legionnaire who became a Benedictine—Charles de Foucauld. As a monk, de Foucauld had traveled with the Tuaregs of Algeria on the same principle as the priests of Belgium had toiled. There was something in Docherty that was attracted to such absolutes and humilities, that was embarrassed by the comfort of his life. Was it the hidden, proud zealot in him, or was it a true impulse?

  Earnest young Father Docherty studied Hindu culture, made a pilgrimage to the house of Rabindranath Tagore, and found that his own romanticism, as well as his hopes for humanity, were drawn to Gandhi.

  “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high / Where knowledge is free,” wrote Tagore, “. . . Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”

  As for Gandhi, even Indian priests in the Calcutta school would make ironic comments about his overstatements and the contradictions of his life. The line “It took a lot of money to keep Gandhi living in poverty” was often quoted. They did not understand that Gandhi was a prophet, and thus like Christ he spoke with prophetic hyperbole. But Gandhi, and a disciple of the fabled Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—whose transcendental meditation center Docherty came eventually to attend weekly—were helpful not only in suggesting to him methods of protest without violence, but also in allowing him to maintain peace with his own sexuality. For many in the West transcendental meditation was a fad. For Docherty, it had the coloration of a deeper necessity.

  The Hindu government of West Bengal was kind enough to consider Christmas the basis for a school break, so in December the school emptied and the Indian priests of the Order went back to their home cities. The corridors resonated in the unpeopled school in a way that made you wonder if they would ever take on life again.

  This period coincided with a rare state of mind and soul for ­Docherty—the dark night of which he had been warned about but barely experienced before. He felt an aridity, a sense of being blighted, and with it there set in the most severe spate of primal sexual temptation he had ever suffered. Wrestling with serpents in his own desert, he was too distracted to avail himself of an invitation to a Catholic boys’ home on Christmas Day. He could barely sit through the radio news with the priests who were left in the house.

  This paroxysm of want was so intense that it seemed to Docherty it could only be solved by death or sex itself—he felt he had no intermediate stratagems. On what was, by the standards of Calcutta, a windy night, he took a bus from Park Street through the center of town to the north of the city. He had chosen to wear a hooded jacket, khaki pants, and casual shoes. He left the bus near the Marble Palace and went walking.

  Soon, such a ridiculously small way from his college and order’s house that he could have walked there, except for his fear of perhaps being identified while prowling, he reached the streets of Sonagachi, where women displayed themselves in almost continuous ranks along the facade of dwellings, brothels, and small shops. Some of them were unbearably beautiful and could be had for a price in rupees that even he could afford many times over. But he was so deeply ashamed to be even thinking of trading for flesh in the street, it was as if he lacked the language or valor to negotiate the exchange—one for which he had never been trained or even contemplated making.

  A young Indian man in a cricket sweater and smelling of cloves came up beside him, a healthy face half-glimpsed, hair sleeked but not flashy. The man spoke to him tenderly, in good English. “I can see,” said the silken voice, “that sir has a natural delicacy. Perhaps the gentleman would permit me to find him what he requires.”

  “I don’t need help,” said Docherty, his face raging with heat. He felt nearly cured of his concupiscence.

  “Sir, forgive me if I seem to intrude. But I own an establishment. I have no desire to grasp any supplementary stipend from the sahib. Nor would you be prevented in leaving should you not be suited.”

  To get away from him, Docherty turned a corner, passing a blur of young Indian womanhood, girls from the country—some, it was said, sold to brothel-keepers by their parents. In this sea of prostitutes he felt revulsion and need in equal and towering proportions. He found he had not escaped the young man, and what was shameful was that he did want this man to present him with what his blood considered requisite, and to extract a price before or after the improbable transaction.

  The man indicated a door. “If you please, sir,” and he turned to face Docherty, looking in his Oxbridge sweater and scarf for all the world like an Indian provincial cricketer. I can follow him, Docherty thought. He has sufficient subtlety.

  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 unforgivable. 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.