A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  “Thank you, thank you,” said Stanton.

  “I hope the devil eats your liver,” murmured Sima. And as Delaney knew, the devil had.

  Stanton drove back to the station and passed out there. Much later he entertained Delaney with tales of his time in the hospital and his full-blooded attempt to blame the knifing on a gang of teenagers visiting from another suburb and looking for prestige. Knifing a policeman, Stanton told his superintendent, was as much prestige as most of those yobbos would ever get. But the story did not stand scrutiny. In the end the superintendent knew everything, and Stanton begged him not to prosecute the Serb. It would destroy my marriage, Stanton said. Old Monty Walsh told Stanton he would save the marriage—they’d get the Serb another way. But there were things you could get away with in the New South Wales police force, and things you couldn’t. To be stabbed on your lover’s premises was one of the ones you couldn’t get away with. There had to be an internal investigation—the commissioner demanded that. It could be in camera; Denise would learn nothing. But even if he survived the medical examination he couldn’t expect any sort of career. Not shooting the Serb was the only sensible thing he had done, but it also demonstrated a lack of presence of mind. The superintendent therefore let Brian Stanton know that at the end of his recuperation his letter of resignation would be accepted.

  4

  “You should speak about this to Gina,” Father Doig told Delaney.

  “Couldn’t do that, Andrew,” Delaney murmured. “No way.” A bloody parson, not a priest, so Delaney’s father spoke of Doig. Father Doig’s black hair was styled at the same unisex salon favored by the Penrith first-grade back line the week before televised games. There seemed to be something contrary to faith and morals in that, a priest attending what Delaney senior called poofter-and-dunce barbers. He found it easier still to specify how Doig’s behavior, as distinct from his hairdo, violated doctrine. Doig had given up hearing confessions in the old-style confessional boxes. Only genial old Father Rushton still sat in his dim little cubicle on Saturday afternoons and wondered about the football score and the trifecta and listened to the eternal temporizing of trespassers. On the most breathless summer’s evening he wore his cassock, as judges in Israel should. He did not offer counsel, like some social worker on call-in radio shows, as Delaney’s father was proud to say. He delivered judgment and brought down absolution in the old style.

  Doig however sat at a table by the side altar. He told those who came to him that he was their brother in weakness and commission of sin and that they should call him Andrew if first-name terms would help them speak more freely. He assured them he had had training in counseling. That’s it, said Delaney senior. It doesn’t matter a bugger that he’s a priest. He’s had training in counseling! I’d like to know where that leaves poor bloody old Rushton?

  “You know, your mother won’t go to him,” Delaney senior told his son during a Sunday visit. “Doesn’t feel like she’s been to confession at all.” And Delaney wondered, as sons often have, what his mother would have to confess. Mrs. Delaney sported a smile which typified what Delaney thought of as meekness—not a failure to address the world but a sort of quietly gleeful acceptance of it. She wore her hair close-cropped like a helmet, and you would walk into a room and discover her smiling to herself, as if sharing her own joke. He had never had to ask himself was his mother happy. She was not however happy with Father Andrew Doig.

  “Have you noticed,” she asked one Sunday, “all the statues disappearing from the church? The one of the Infant of Prague, Saint Therese of Lisieux, Saint Anthony—”

  “You know what he says?” Greg Delany inquired. “He says the Infant of Prague is Czechoslovak or something, and that Saint Therese was only patron saint of Aussie while the place was a missionary country, and that’s not on any more. And Saint Anthony of Padua—that’s the best of all—he says poor old Anthony is used by the superstitious—”

  “There wasn’t any time something was lost in our house,” said Mrs. Delaney, “that it wasn’t found by Saint Anthony.”

  “I used to use him for betting on the football,” said Delaney’s father, without joking. “Two dollars in the poor box for him every time Saint George loses a game or Penrith wins one.”

  “Why didn’t you use him on the stock exchange,” Delaney asked, winking at Gina across the tea table and the opened and exhausted bottles of Resch’s Pilsener, “and make a bloody fortune?”

  “Come off it,” said Delaney senior, who seemed to have no doubt that a modest payoff was the right one for him.

  Mrs. Delaney tossed her helmet hair and said, “I’m sure Gina’s parents would be shocked to hear you talk like that.”

  “My father went and buried a statue of Saint Francis under his first tomato crop,” said Gina smiling, and charming Delaney by covering her wide mouth with a hand as if her parents were there to chastise her.

  “Wog saints are best for tomatoes,” said Delaney, and Gina and his mother laughed and punched his upper arms, as if forestalling the vengeance of heaven. Delaney’s father would certainly have laughed except that it might somehow weaken his accusations of heresy against Father Doig.

  “Did you see he asked the Wades up on the altar the other day for their fortieth wedding anniversary. He’s not a priest, he’s a bloody master of ceremonies.”

  “I’ve asked him to book a jazz band for your twenty-fifth,” Delaney told his father.

  “Not on your bloody life,” said Mr. Delaney. “A marriage is bloody private and so is a confession.”

  Yet here was Father Doig not only hearing Delaney’s confession at a table in plain sight, but saying, “Don’t tell me, tell your wife. I’m not the wronged party.” An approach which made sense but was at variance with the Delaney family’s traditional system of acquitting their sins.

  “It should be the new direction,” Doig whispered. “Ask the person you’ve wronged. In some cases absolution’s the easy way out.”

  “There’s no way I could tell Gina,” said Delaney, though he feared others would.

  “Tell me if this is none of my business,” said Doig.

  Indeed he was nothing like the old-style priests who thundered, “How many times? Was she married or single?” and whose right to know was absolute. Some people thought they got their cheap thrills that way, but in fact the poor old buggers must have been bored stupid, a lifetime listening to people’s sexual small change fall on the confessional floor. Knowing, since they weren’t fools, that none of the big operators ever came near a confessional. But never saying to any transgressor, “Tell me if this is none of my business.”

  Doig continued. “I imagine this was a casual encounter. I mean, almost accidental?”

  “It was the team holiday. Hawaii.”

  Doig smiled. “I see. I’ve been there. Even the priests up there smoke pot. You know, according to some writers it’s our serious love we get damned for. Occasional follies are too mean to count for much. But you know that; you’re an intelligent fellow. I wonder why you felt you had to mention it. I could still have given you the traditional absolution.” That was another thing Delaney’s parents disliked—Doig used terms like “traditional absolution” as if there were no real absolution, even though in the past people had thought there was.

  “So that’s not the issue. What’s really worrying you about all this, Delaney?”

  Delaney managed to say it; in fact a childhood in which his mother had forced him to the confessional had prepared him to say it. “It was practically public, and I can’t stand that. I really can’t stand it. It was what I was smoking. I mean, doing it in front of other people.…”

  “You’d hate Gina to know that.”

  “God, I couldn’t take it. I let the others see me letting her down. You know.”

  “Beasts of the farmyard,” murmured Father Doig.

  “Yes,” said Delaney. “That’s about right, Andrew.”

  “It’s common now, Terry. The video revolution. Group
rutting.” It was as well the saints weren’t still in their niches to hear such things. “Look, Terry, this was a risk you took, wasn’t it? And one Gina took. Your going away to a fleshpot like Hawaii with the boys of Penrith’s third grade. And you were a casualty of that risk. But you learned something, eh? That you aren’t quite as cat private as you thought you were. So that in the future you’ll go forth armed. There’s the security problem, I understand that. If ever anyone is vicious enough to tell Gina, please feel you can both come to me for counseling.”

  Delaney nodded. He did not quite feel the lightness that followed old-style confession, but Doig wasn’t a bad fellow and was compassionate, even if something of a smart alec. He understood the real world at least, the world in which with very little warning alien women unzipped your fly.

  “Would you like,” Father Doig asked, “the traditional absolution?”

  5

  The moonlit picnic table was at Easter piled with hubcaps stacked like pie dishes, and a young man, tall and blond, sat at the table with Kabbel.

  “Look, my friends,” Kabbel called as Stanton and Delaney emerged from the lane. “This is the security business for you!” His boys had found the personnel of a new operation from Parramatta stealing hubcabs from the Audi-Subaru agency down the road. There were rumors they were doing it all up and down the highway. “This crowd goes in to the manager in the morning with the hubcaps and says, ‘We were passing and saw hoodlums levering off your hubcaps. It wouldn’t have happened if we’d been on the job.’ Hungry for business, you see, even at this late stage of civilization, eh? And the fundamental question which arises for us is whether to put the hubcaps back ourselves, which one is not recommended to do with quality vehicles, or to take them to the management in the morning and hope they believe our account of the incident, that we are not pulling the same trick as the Parramatta crowd. What would you advise?”

  “Take them to him in the morning,” Stanton told Kabbel and the blond youth, “and if he won’t believe you tell him to get stuffed.”

  “Or,” said Delaney, “take them to him in the morning with a copy of a letter you’ve written to the Association complaining about the Parramatta mob.”

  “Who don’t belong to the Association,” said the fair-haired young man sitting opposite Kabbel.

  “Yes. But it gives your story an extra seriousness, eh? An extra punch.”

  Kabbel scratched his poll of blond-gray hair. “Australia’s full of private armies,” he said, “masquerading as security companies. Their purpose is not politics, as would be the case in many other countries, but robust greed. This, gentlemen, is my son Warwick.”

  Everyone shook hands. Stanton clearly approved of Warwick, his size, his accent. “You’re living proof, mate, that wogs have Aussie offspring.”

  But Delaney thought there was still a foreign distance in Warwick. It was as if the boy didn’t understand Stanton’s fraternal insult, was neither amused nor affronted.

  “My father’s a genius,” Warwick said with a faint smile. “That’s good enough for me.”

  “Oh yeah!” said a relentless Stanton. “If your old man’s such a bloody wonder, where does this character Uncle come in?”

  “Uncle is my true adviser,” Kabbel said. “In dangers you would not believe or conceive of, he has been my true voice, my only security. I still commune with him any time I like in a coffee shop in Parramatta. He lives upstairs, an ancient now, a man of indeterminate age.” He smiled. “He is the genius behind the genius. If my children don’t believe in my superior vision, they don’t get a job from me.” And he burst into a broad laughter which seemed to Delaney to be itself accented.

  “Well, I’m not going to start believing you’re anything to write home about,” Stanton persisted. “So where in the hell does that leave me?”

  “No, no, relax,” said Kabbel. “Of outsiders I require only that they consider me an honest man.”

  “Even that’s a bloody tall order,” said Stanton, reaching for the remaining segment of a Kabbel sandwich.

  Kabbel’s son Warwick began to gather up the imported hubcaps. “I’ve got to go back and see Scott.”

  Kabbel watched him go, his eyes creased with parental fondness. “There are grand things ahead for that boy,” he murmured to Delaney.

  Delaney was sure neither of his parents had ever said that of him. They had not seen his modest pass in the Higher School Certificate as the basis of his career. His football was to be his career. It would lead him to jobs in public relations or writing for the tabloids. His career in security had been a temporary sinecure to allow him time for daylight training. Sydney however teemed with brilliant five-eighths, and if they didn’t have enough they bought them from Queensland or New Zealand or even imported them from England. (It was axiomatic that any harshly reared Yorkshire boy would sacrifice his gritty origins for the chance to play and live in Sydney.) Delaney’s career had not yet flourished as Brother Aubin, his childhood coach, and Greg Delaney, who loved the Rugby League code as if it were an extension of the True Faith, had foretold it would. What had been employment of convenience had had to become a career equal to playing five-eighth. Without one or the other, the payments of the house could not be maintained, the Spanish living-room and dining-room suite would not adorn the place, there would be no dishwasher. (And Delaney knew by instinct that possession of a dishwasher was the visible sign which separated the spacious from the embattled.)

  Neither Delaney nor Stanton thought that Castle much treasured their special talents. Old Kearney the supervisor had once mentioned to Delaney the idea that he might move up to an administrative job. But the company had stood still. That incarnation of the cheese-paring Scots farmer, Malcolm Fraser, had had his thick-knuckled hand on the throat of the economy and was abetted from afar by Maggie Thatcher, Cowboy Reagan, New Zealand’s Piggy Muldoon and sundry other exponents of the doctrine of economic constipation. When the era of mild recovery arrived, the company seemed to have developed problems of its own, as if there was a secret which management was trying to keep from the men in the field. It was an ill-guarded secret however and was uttered by Rudi Kabbel in that same week in which Delaney and Stanton saw the hubcaps and met Warwick.

  “Have you boys heard there is trouble with Castle? Please, I do not wish to alarm you. But Castle has been forced to consider a bid from Vanguard, and if Vanguard comes they will bring their own people.” Kabbel lowered his voice in the vacant park. “Let me know if anything goes wrong for you. I have a new and rather fascinating contract. Working for me you would join a family.”

  “Would we have to wear your bloody baggy uniform?” Stanton asked. But it was a sort of automatic or reflex irony. Delaney knew his friend was hollowed out by Kabbel’s whisper, that it challenged the chancy equity he held in life.

  “You could have your wife take in the waist,” said Kabbel, laughing, “if you want to resemble a hot Steve Mc-Queen.

  “Winter is on its way,” said Stanton.

  Delaney’s car was at the repair shop. Driving him home, squinting into a diffused but vast rising sun, Stanton at last began to speak. (In the few hours since they had met Kabbel, he had been mostly silent.) “You know how much you’re worth by what you hear and who you hear it from. If you hear from the bloody chairman you’re being retrenched, it’s a different matter from hearing it from a bloody Bisonrussian in the middle of the fucking night.”

  It was Stanton’s whimsy to call Kabbel a Bisonrussian. Delaney said the obvious thing: that it might not be true.

  “I don’t want to be in that bugger’s family. I’d rather be a cog at Castle than a member of his family.” Stanton braked in front of Delaney’s white house. The recently planted lemon-scented gums stood still and, he like to think, vigilant in the first mild yellow light. He was guilty at the elation he felt. The end of Castle forced him to take new chances, the chances he knew he should take while he still could. He kept his lips firmly clamped down on this excitement. He knew Gi
na was asleep inside. She slept seriously, thoroughly. It was his daily task sweetly to rouse her.

  For Brian Stanton, wearing the scars of an earlier foundered career, Castle was all the breath and bread he and his womenfolk could expect.

  Delaney got out but leaned in through the window. Stanton let off the brake and put the car into gear. The activity seemed to cause him pain. “Sometimes you feel like you’re just a whisker away from being nothing, sweet bugger-all. Kiss your ethnic sheila for me.”

  When he drove away, Stanton emitted not so much exhaust as a dangerous musk of disappointment. It seemed to Delaney that it was a stench which might attract a predatory destiny.

  On the next payday the pink slip turned up in Delaney’s pay packet. There was one in Stanton’s too. Even to Delaney it came like the announcement of an expected death and was just as stupefying. “Two weeks severance, a month’s accumulated leave,” said Stanton. “I’m not going on the dole. I’m not going to trot down to the Advisory Financial Service in the bloody park and work out how to organize my bloody poverty. That’s a particular bullshit sonata I’m not going to play. I’ll rob bloody banks first.”

  There was in Stanton a dark capability for holdups. The management of the company’s firearms had been cavalier, and Stanton hoped he would be able to take his .38 with him when he left. He would then have it in his drawer at home: an option. Delaney was relieved when the new supervisor proved finicky and wanted all weapons and ammunition accounted for.

  Delaney began to apply for the jobs he’d always desired. “Somewhere in the bullshit industry,” Stanton described Delaney’s projected ideal employment. “You need to be Mel Gibson with an arts-law degree,” Delaney confided to Gina, on the verge of tears in her arms after a week of talking to personnel managers.

  Stanton shopped himself around less high-flown establishments than the sports institutes and PR outfits where Delaney had been trying for a foothold. Men without jobs, said Stanton, were savages. He was a bloody savage. He would have killed for such tear-arse piecework as unloading crates off trucks at the rear of supermarkets, or free-lancing on a per-delivery basis for a furniture removalist. “They should have saved the building of the bloody pyramids till the 1980s,” Stanton said. “I would have signed on.”