Crimes of the Father

by Thomas Keneally

  “I’m thinking about it,” she conceded.

  “You see, you may think differently after treatment. You may decide to take stronger action.”

  “You’re such a patronizing sod.”

  “I don’t mean to be,” he insisted.

  “You’re a mealymouthed sod, too.”

  “Yes, you’ve pointed that out regularly. It’s a professional tendency.”

  “Have you any flesh to you?” Sarah blurted out. “Or has it been sublimated? As it was with me, all that time. My chastity when I was a nun was a symptom of damage, not a choice. What’s your excuse?”

  “I’m more or less a normal man, I’d like to think.”

  “Who do you fancy, then? Who makes your balls ache?”

  I was in love with Maureen Breslin, he was absurdly tempted to tell her.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ve told you everything. Now you come clean with me.”

  “Sundry young women of the parish when I was young, and occasional middle-aged ones now I’m older.”

  “Do you masturbate over them?”

  “You know what they say. A healthy male who says he doesn’t masturbate is a liar.”

  “And you do that instead of having a meaningful relationship?”

  An odd question from her, but he did not point it out.

  “Look, the problem with me is this,” he told her instead. “I don’t think I can have a relationship with people except through the priesthood. I was conditioned to that idea as a young man. It’s my self-­definition. I’m also scared that in a real love affair, the sort of thing that lasts a lifetime, the kind I’m interested in, I couldn’t be sure I’d stand the tests—without failing through gaucheries and clumsiness. In any case, by the time I realized the scale of the chastity problem, I was too old to alter my course, and I’m certainly too old now, as I think you observed earlier.”

  “Don’t let me define you, for God’s sake.”

  “All right. But while we’re at it, you’re a handsome woman. And a good one. You have a future.”

  “Jesus, I couldn’t have sex with you!” Sarah rushed to say, in a sort of panic, misinterpreting his intent. “You’d take it all too solemnly. If it happened twice you’d ask the Vatican to laicize you and want to marry me. And all that’s impossible with me. I couldn’t tolerate the intensity of it. I’m garbage. I don’t want to be cherished. And you’re a cherisher.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting that,” Docherty assured her. “Besides, you know I wasn’t. Life panics you, doesn’t it?”

  There was a silence. Then she said, “You’ve always got a question. I’ve got to give it to you, some of them are fancy. And I don’t know if I believe them. Do you always have all the questions and answers?”

  “A small, select bagful,” he admitted. “Beyond that . . . Nothing!”

  “Anyhow,” Sarah said, “I wish you’d done me the service of damning me to the Devil and telling me not to malign a good man. I happen to pick out of the blue a priest who is a psychologist and who believes me.”

  “Yes,” Docherty admitted. “Sorry. Bad luck! Look, if I were an affluent parish priest of the old kind, I’d pay for the treatment. But I can’t. I get a good salary at the university but that goes to my order. I’m allowed to have spending money, that’s about it. Quite generous spending money by the standards of an individual person.”

  “The vow of poverty. I had one of those, too. Now I’ve taken another poverty vow. Driving a cab. Small returns guaranteed.”

  “And I’ve got to go to the airport in ten days. If I call you, will you drive me?”

  “You’ll have to pay me. I can’t afford any favors.”

  “I’ll pay you,” said Docherty. “I’ll give you . . .” But he was distracted by a sudden inspiration. “Perhaps you should meet with the mother.”

  “The mother?”

  “The mother of the boy who killed himself.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I can give you her number. And she has another son. His name is Paul. Why don’t you talk with them? My sense is that it would be therapeutic for her. . . . She doesn’t know how to confront her bereavement. It might be very good for you, too. Between you, you might be able to work out what to do. Everything, something, nothing. I’m not suggesting this as a psychologist. Just as a human being.”

  After a while, she said, “Give me the number, then. And we’ll see.”

  29

  * * *

  Docherty Meets the Monsignor

  July 1996

  DOCHERTY REMEMBERED his last clinical case before leaving Canada: a youngish priest who had been sent to him for treatment. The Mounties had tracked images to this man’s computer, and they were images of children. Rightly or wrongly the man had been given a suspended sentence of three months and a duty to report to the police daily for the length of that sentence, as well as for a further three months. With that done, the court record was suppressed. For now, therefore, the man’s family did not know of his crime. But his bishop certainly did, and he found an administrative and chaplaincy role for the priest in aged care, far from contact with children.

  Pedophiles and abusers of underage children were often stoic deniers, but the young priest had discovered his abnormal appetites with the access the Internet gave him to child pornography sites. He’d become obsessed with the material. “Part of the time I was in front of the console,” he had told Docherty, “I was disgusted with myself, yet I was stuck there; by the hour becoming less human—I could tell it.” His appetites were, for his disorder, utterly characteristic—girls of ten or eleven years.

  He said he had never succumbed to his appetite, that it was possible for him when engaged in speaking to a living and complex child to forget these tendencies. Remembrance and fantasy came later, but he could not sufficiently turn the individual child of the school yard into an object of lust. In other words, he was in his way a human being. He knew what sin and crime were, and he hated them. And yet . . . the addiction to images.

  The police had been apologetic when they’d turned up at the presbytery, astounding and aggrieving his parish priest, who’d tried to order them out. The priest was abashed, he could see utter ruination. If they had left him the means, he said, he would have ended it in the cell and gone into the screaming pit to which his kind were consigned, Hell’s innermost circle.

  “I envied those who were tempted by encounters with grown men and women,” he said. “I wouldn’t have chosen the hell of this attraction. A cop said to me, sympathetically, that he thought I was waiting for them to catch me and shock it out of my system. I didn’t contradict him—I wasn’t in a position to set anyone straight.”

  Some of the priests Docherty treated were strangely mixed, asserting their innocence despite the evidence, telling him they did not intend to cooperate with him, or retreating into the full-blown pathologies of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, NAMBLA, or a variation on this perverse philosophy that the boy-child was honored and educated by the sexual attentions of the older man. Some priests Docherty had met had rendered themselves this deluded: the child had been chosen for them by God to sustain their ministry by making possible the sexual release God knew they needed.

  In his therapy, the mental exercises he set patients such as the young priest, the ones who confessed—though some might subsequently contradict themselves by playing this excuse—Docherty realized that certain people had got the idea that impulses involving children were ungovernable. Yet not every lonely heterosexual male found it an irresistible impulse to sexually importune handsome girls. Indeed, by law, he was required not to.

  So that’s where Docherty always began. He told them they need not touch children, even if the impulse was there. They were capable, as were most people, of abstention.

  * * *

  “DOCTOR,” SAID the monsignor w
hen he finally returned Docherty’s call. “Are you a physician these days, Father Docherty?”

  “No, I’m a research psychologist. And an old friend of your sister and brother-in-law.”

  “I thought,” Shannon said, as if sensing a margin of peril, “you must be that Docherty.”

  “Yes. As I’m sure you’ll also recall, I used to belong to this archdiocese—I was also a member of the Congregation of the Divine Charity. Your sister belonged to a pacifist action group I was involved with.”

  “Yes, I remember. As I recall, my sister lamented your departure,” said Shannon. Then: “You left a message. Something about my evidence in the court case. Some factors relating to In Compassion’s Name?”

  “Not a direct bearing, perhaps, but an indirect one. In a very strong way. Look, could I come to see you? I need only a quarter of an hour. Or would you like to meet somewhere else?”

  “Mmm,” said the monsignor, as if acutely pressed for time, which he might well have been. He might also have been gauging whether it was politic to receive the notorious expellee at the cathedral.

  Docherty rushed to say, “I don’t think this is something we should discuss in a coffee shop or a restaurant. It’s . . . Well, I think you’d call it delicate.”

  “Very well, then,” the monsignor said, yielding with a sigh. “You can come and see me at my office in the cathedral. I am free at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “Thank you,” said Docherty.

  “Mmm,” said the monsignor again, this time as if he had no curiosity, behind that casual noise, about the unstated information this questionable priest would give him.

  * * *

  SYDNEY’S HYDE Park had always been the most pleasant park to cross, to observe the old convict barracks, and the cathedral through the prism of the plumes of water spurting from the exuberant Archibald Fountain. But today the transit there from Elizabeth Street was strangely unsettling. Docherty admitted to himself that he felt afraid. He knew he was not afraid of the monsignor or the cardinal. Yet the pervasive disquiet and tension could not be argued away. His fear was that his motives would be dismissed in a facile way—that with his scraps of evidence he would be thrown back into the street. That the archdiocese—if still stuck in the mindset of the early 1970s—would vengefully deal with him: he knew that he ran the risk of never having his appeal to return to Sydney considered.

  So, in approaching the neo-Gothic, Puginesque bulk of the cathedral, built rather in the style of St. Patrick’s in New York, and representing in sandstone here the same aspirations of the despised Irish immigrants, he did so without the usual nostalgia. There was a questioning going on in him as to whether he was sacrificing his mother’s desires for the sake of the vanity of conscience. He had to admit that out of self-interest, as well, he wanted to be readmitted to the archdiocese, to die in Australia. He had never quite managed to feel Canadian, not that he thought it was in any way something inferior to feel.

  He entered the cathedral dimness, roseate and blue with the robust light from the rose window. Chartres and Salisbury cathedrals might have better glass, but the light beyond the window here was altogether more strenuous than your average northern European day. Docherty took to a pew and prayed for wisdom and for a good reception, an addressing of the issue. The place belonged to him, too, he asserted before the court of his own mind, as much as to the people to whom he was bringing his accusations. On this high altar, after all, he had been ordained a priest by Cardinal Scanlon.

  At the chancery behind the cathedral, a middle-aged woman greeted Docherty neutrally and admitted him to the monsignor’s office. There was a slight redolence of cigar smoke there, as if the monsignor was an occasional indulger. Docherty was standing and the woman was not quite gone when an inner door opened and Leo Shannon entered, a gloss of certitude on his broad cheeks. His hair was smooth though he was going bald, and he had the characteristic plausible face of a fixer, and of a man who belonged at the center of a church.

  “Hello, Father Docherty,” said the monsignor. “My sister’s favorite preacher. I’m sorry things didn’t go so well for you back then.”

  “Well,” said Docherty, “it wasn’t all bad. I still have my order, you see. And my teaching.”

  “Oh yes. Where is that?”

  “It’s at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.”

  For all that this registered with the monsignor, as he now sat down and set himself to sort a document here, a document there, it might as well have been the University of Ulan Bator.

  “Take a seat,” said the monsignor. “Call me Leo.”

  “Thank you, Leo. I’m Frank, of course.”

  “I’ll be just a second,” the monsignor said, skimming three pages from his printer, and signing the third. It was an automatic little ceremony of power, imposed on the petitioner by men who were sure of their influence.

  “You spoke of the court case,” he said, looking up then. “In what regard?”

  “Well, I did say indirectly, Leo. Indirectly, it could come to influence you.”

  “Well, it’s time we got past the mystery, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I think you should look at this.” Docherty handed the monsignor an A4 envelope in which was a copy of Stephen’s note. Brian Wood’s name had been blacked out.

  Monsignor Shannon opened the envelope and peered with uptilted face at the document.

  Docherty said, “I’m sorry, but a copy has been sent to the cardinal. It is the suicide note of a young man you knew. I wanted to give you a chance to read it, and to know that I’m the one who sent it to His Eminence. Unlike those who reported on me to Cardinal Scanlon, I’m letting you know that I’m the messenger. Of course, I’m not assuming anything about it. But there is another alleged victim mentioned in there, though the family’s blotted out his name—I’m sure you would have done the same thing in the same circumstances.”

  The monsignor looked piercingly at Docherty, as if he wouldn’t have bothered with his reading-and-signing ritual had he known this was coming. Then he set to read the letter. His head did not move as his eyes ran over it.

  He coughed once when he was finished. “This is a bloody scurrilous document, and a libel,” he said then, almost blithely.

  “This letter has gone from the police to the coroner, and it may be sent to the public prosecutor. Without the other name inked out, of course.”

  The monsignor’s face reddened. “They’ll laugh at it. If a man were condemned on the basis of ravings like this . . . It would be insane!”

  “The document,” Docherty said, avoiding too precise an explanation of its provenance, “came to me by way of the boy’s family. The mother did not want to advertise it. But I thought it was crucial for you and the Church to be made aware of it.

  “As well as that, and utterly by coincidence, I have been approached by another party, who alleges against you a third series of assaults.”

  “Oh well,” said Leo with more bravado than conviction, and shaking his head. “Bring them all in, every neurotic you can find. This is your fabled discretion at work, I take it. And His Eminence . . . You’ve sent it to him, for God’s sake?”

  “Yes, you’ll have to talk it out with him. I beg you—”

  “You beg me? To hell with you, Docherty! Beg somewhere else! And not at my expense.”

  “The boy killed himself with an overdose after writing that letter. That gives a terrible weight to it.”

  “To hell with that!” said Shannon. “Look, I remember the kid all right, amongst all the other kids of unhappy households.”

  He remembered the child? Out of all the children he would have innocently met, he remembered this one? “They hang round a priest they like and make themselves absolute pests.” He bit a thumbnail. “The cardinal won’t for a moment believe any of this about me.”

  Docherty inhaled. He did no
t like scenes of confrontation, but this one was worse than most. If Shannon mentioned his sister . . . Docherty’s earlier association with her, Docherty’s willingness to hurt the family of which she was a member . . . It would get very complex and perilously testing. He said, “If I was the subject of a letter like this, I think I’d want to be investigated as soon as possible.”

  “What a pompous bastard you are! Didn’t you get into trouble over children yourself?”

  “No. As I think you know, I was thrown out for my politics. It was Vietnam. It was Humanae Vitae.”

  “And I know where you stood on that!”

  “Would you have liked the letter to have been delivered to you by someone else? The mother is so angry . . . but crippled with grief, too. I’ve taken what I hope is a more benign path for everyone.”

  “And what about the Devitt case? How is it affected? By the accusation of a youth deranged enough to accuse me and then kill himself?”

  As Docherty well knew, but Shannon did not, it was usual for the perpetrator—if in this case Leo was one—to point to the damage they had wrought in the victim as if it were proof that their accuser were deranged.

  “Well, as I say, it’s up to you and the cardinal to look at this. But you might decide it’s better for you not to be involved any further in Devitt’s case.”

  Leo’s face had grown florid, his head was thrust forward. “That would be against the cardinal’s wishes. He trusts me. The lawyers get on well with me. You haven’t grown so rabid that you intend to send this poisonous note to the plaintiff’s lawyers, have you?”

  “No.” Docherty was getting angry at the man and yielded to an impulse to turn the knife. “But I think the entire matter could be a risk to your validity as a witness, and that’s why I said it had an impact on the trial.”

  “You talk as if you intend to make it public.”

  “Of course not. Only to the authorities. I haven’t inquired what my duties under civil law might be.”

  “Don’t bother. Nothing will happen. And the cardinal didn’t need to see the letter either.”