Three Cheers for the Paraclete

by Thomas Keneally

  Costello demanded coolly, ‘Then how did this preoccupation with castration arise?’

  ‘I was reading about the Indian wars in the Rockies,’ explained Hurst. ‘It was not a pulp work. It was researched, a bona fide history. I read what the Indians did with the corpses of American soldiers.’

  ‘Let us into the secret,’ begged the robust Costello.

  Hurst grimaced. ‘They mutilated them and forced the results into their mouths.’

  ‘Of course they did. What else would any genial savage do in war?’

  The young man shook his head.

  ‘Now listen, Hurst, you are a man of faith. You have the barbarian beaten. These are his death throes at which you’re so alarmed. Hurst, I tell you as your confessor, summoning all the special graces of the sacrament to my aid, that these are its death throes and that the very presence of these compulsions may be a sign of how far you have advanced towards perfection. Not that there is ever reason for pride …’

  Hurst, his face no more than quiescent, showed, in fact, no glimmer of conceit. He explained, ‘It’s just that if I ever made that simple movement of picking up the bread-knife, I would not be stopped until I’d done what I had in mind. I know that.’

  ‘You’d have to catch your victim first.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ He took a supreme risk and said, ‘I always have myself at hand.’

  ‘What rubbish!’

  Outside, somewhere on the umbrageous stone façade, pigeons, as if stung by the priest’s electric anger, began to troll.

  Costello said, ‘It’s cowardice to think that way. It is pride to think that you should be exempt from our native insanity, and cowardice to take the compulsion seriously.’

  And anger, being so therapeutic, did the trick. Hurst began to show signs of assent and reason. Costello rose and found a phial of white pills on the table, among the galley-proofs. With his confessional-stole on, and as if it were all part of the sacrament, he extracted two and gave them to Hurst. Then he sat down to absolve.

  2

  GRETE AND BRENDAN were present in the side chapel where Maitland said Mass, both young people seeming appallingly certain of what the rite meant: His actual and offered flesh, His actual and offered blood. Seeing his two kinsmen, Maitland was assailed by a nostalgia for lost certitude.

  He remembered a young priest with whom he had shared a meal in France.

  ‘Of course,’ the priest had told him, ‘I don’t believe that the substance of bread becomes the body of Christ and the substance of the wine becomes … well, you know. I mean, that was a suitable way of expressing the Mass in the Middle Ages. But the words of truth change from century to century. Old formulas of belief go out the window the same way old chemical formulas do. Or rather, they should. You know that; you’re a historian.’

  ‘I know that,’ Maitland admitted. ‘Well, what do you think this rite we perform means?’

  ‘I’m working on it.’

  But Maitland, studying for his thesis, had never had the time to work on it. Now he could only close his eyes and pray on into the thick of the mystery.

  After unvesting, he went back to the infirmary, looking for his breviary. It lay in the nest of tangled blankets where he had spent the night. The ruins of his bed and of Hurst’s were bad testimony to the peace promised him in his youth as emphatically as trainee teachers are promised a superannuation scheme.

  Hurst entered then, limping because of boils. His bedevilled eyes blinked good morning at Maitland, and he raised the infirmary window on the unbedevilled morning. Maitland could see, beyond and below the boy, the beach empty except for someone middle-aged walking dogs. On the balcony of a de luxe flat behind the promenade a man in Bermuda shorts watched the sea and enjoyed his corruptible lot a sight better than Hurst seemed to enjoy his incorruptible one.

  Then, his blankets put away, Maitland searched for matins in his breviary. He wondered what to begin to say to this young man and stranger. During his uncertainty, the student who tended the infirmary came in with Hurst’s breakfast. He frowned, seeing Maitland.

  ‘Pardon my using your sick-room,’ Maitland called to him. ‘I had visitors using my quarters.’

  ‘You’re very welcome, doctor,’ the student said with warmth and some irony. Enough for the priest to see that probably no other teacher or doctor of some sacred science had ever given up his suite (to an itinerant poet or an itinerant anyone) to doss down informally with the sick. Never in all the years the house had stood making priests and providing bishops from its staff and breeding demons in men of Hurst’s kidney. And it was not necessarily a virtue to introduce, into a house that wasn’t his, a late streak of softness for the destitute. His three-year casual occupation of Belgium had taught him a nomadic insouciance which was also not necessarily a virtue. Finally, he thought, inspecting his drenched soles, I must buy new shoes.

  ‘Steak this morning,’ the student told Hurst.

  Maitland left, reciting matins soundlessly with his lips. He heard Hurst claim with some urgency, ‘No, I just don’t need a steak-knife.’

  In Maitland’s bedroom, Grete and Brendan browsed timidly among his books. The bed had been made; he suspected that Grete had even tidied his desk and found a broom and besom and garnished the place. He couldn’t be sure: he had a bad memory for the disorder he made there each day.

  They put the books down quickly. Both of them looked well scrubbed and were dressed ready to go. Just inside the door stood Grete’s large hand travelling-bag, to be gathered up in passing.

  Brendan said, ‘We’ll be going, father. Our sincerest thanks.’

  ‘Fodder, you saved us from a terrible night,’ Grete told him softly.

  ‘I hope we haven’t put you in a bad light, father. We met a colleague of yours in the corridor –’

  ‘You haven’t had breakfast yet,’ Maitland said. ‘And where will you stay tonight?’

  ‘We have so many friends. We’ll ask them straight out, too. Tramps’ pride.’

  Somebody knocked on the outside door. Conspiratorial or timid. Since Maitland was not on terms of conspiracy with anyone in the house, he went through to forestall whoever it was that was timid.

  It was a nun with folded linen in her hands.

  ‘Doctor, I believe you needed new linen.’

  She was middle-aged, too old to be running Dr Nolan’s funny errands.

  ‘No, sister. There must have been a mistake.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. She regretted, therefore, the stairs she’d just climbed. ‘Monsignor Nolan sent a note to the laundry.’

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve had the trouble, sister. Look, leave the linen here and I’ll take it to the laundry when I go down to breakfast.’

  ‘No, doctor. Every man to his trade. Good morning.’

  He called to the two inside and told them he had to see the monsignor for a second. But he did not rush. He waited in the corridor under a picture, so evocative of the awe-struck religion of his childhood, of Ignatius Loyola taking God by storm at Manresa. When he had decided what to say, he went downstairs to the refectory. But, of course, Monsignor Nolan and the students were at breakfast, still stirring tea and listening to the reading. If anything, their massed serenity fed his anger, and he turned into the kitchen and feverishly gathered boiled eggs and sausages for his guests’ breakfast. Once he had juggled their ill-assorted trays up the narrow stairs, he found that they were gone. They had left a few atoms of face-powder on the cover of a book on Hapsburg policy in Bohemia. Also, more deliberately, they had written an apologetic note.

  His loneliness exposed by the presence of the two breakfasts, he sat down. He thought, ‘I must see more people and find some of my old friends. Because they love no one, they imagine that they love …’ But he found it too hard to imagine what he did love.

  Later in the morning, when Maitland entered Monsignor Nolan’s room, he found him singing, ‘Good morning, James!’ as if the house’s supposed taint were forgotten. The president was i
n fact ready, in piped soutane and purple sash, for the Solemn Mass held every Sunday morning in the chapel.

  Maitland said, ‘Monsignor, if you ever again interfere in my moral or physical health, I’ll consider it a serious insult.’

  In the interests of sweet reason, the monsignor began to spread his hands in peace, as pontiffs do for photographers from Life.

  ‘I recognize,’ Maitland continued, ‘my unforgivable bad manners in bringing them here. However, once they were here, you should have realized I wouldn’t let them be insulted.’

  ‘Insulted? That’s hardly fair.’

  ‘I want to assure you that I will be able to use the furniture in my room without catching from it either hydatids or damnation.’

  ‘Oh,’ Nolan murmured, extending towards Maitland the meritorious black sleeves honoured with purple buttons. ‘James, you neglect yourself. I’m sure you never fed yourself properly in Belgium. Perhaps a tonic, James …’

  ‘Perhaps. But on the point of injury, we both owe each other an apology. I’ve given mine.’

  ‘And it’s heartily accepted, James. By the way, you are rostered to preach in the cathedral on this day fortnight. If you could have the text of your sermon with me by Wednesday week.’

  ‘Do you mean to say you censor all cathedral sermons?’

  ‘It’s customary,’ the monsignor said genially.

  ‘Dr Costello’s?’

  Nolan’s hands ran like mice into one of the half-opened drawers. He tugged at a fat manila folder which contained the credentials of his life-span. He tossed a chancery document, twenty years old, to Maitland.

  ‘I am deputed censor for all cathedral sermons, among many other things.’

  ‘But do you ask to see the sermons of other members of the staff?’

  ‘You are in no position …’ said Nolan.

  And this was the truth. He had let his anger over bedsheets spill into the question of a cathedral sermon.

  ‘Very well. I mustn’t keep you from your Missa Solemnis, monsignor.’

  ‘Our Missa Solemnis, James,’ said Nolan mandatorily. ‘I always like very much to see my staff there.’

  Maitland, who did not own a biretta and had hoped to get some work done, strewed the corridor with French obscenities and prepared to have a shave.

  3

  THERE WERE FIVE of them in the sedan, returning from a death and happy as larks. It had been the quiet and ideal death of an old scholar called Monsignor Cairns, and Dr Costello had given well-timed and sonorous last rites. Now he drove, perhaps adventurously, the conversation holding its breath at crossroads. This was after all not a lasting city whose corners, blind with pubs and glossy chemists’ and surgeons’ high fences, he managed, scarcely braking. Yet he loved it and knew that he might be one day its archbishop. Therefore he enjoyed his nascent affinity with all those people who burst from between parked cars to chance a foot towards the flow of traffic. He wished ecstasy on the long-legged girls. On the dark ladies, carrying Balkan delicacies under their arms and frowning towards their six-o’clock stoves seven rivers of traffic away, he wished serenity; and such unlikely fates as love and mysticism were what he wished on the successful men in crisp suits and briefcases fat with devious commerce.

  Monsignor Nolan sat beside him. In the back Dr Maitland, warmly pressed by Nolan to attend the death, sat tight between the profuse hips of Monsignor Nolan’s two widowed sisters, Mrs Clark and Mrs Lamotte. Both ladies were secret claustrophobes and liked to have a door each and the air on their faces. Maitland suspected that they both intended to leap out if a collision seemed likely. Their eyes constantly assessed the traffic and the side-streets, and Mrs Lamotte sighed quietly in moments of risk. Even though Maitland sat forward, both their gusseted flanks rasped slightly against him.

  Costello drove downhill through an avenue of camphor-laurels. Between blocks of flats, the bay showed to Maitland raw-blue and sub-tropic, alien to the priesthood he shared with the two men in the front seat. He had missed an afternoon’s work by going with Nolan, and the loss made him angry. His backside itched on Costello’s synthetic upholstery.

  What had already been said on the journey vouched for what he had assumed two months before, that he was numbered among Nolan’s staff not because of any merit there might be in what he had learnt in Europe but for purposes of safe-keeping – fatherly safe-keeping, the Nolan brand. So that he could hardly see why he shouldn’t scratch like a tom and end without equivocation his career as a priest-teacher-of-priests.

  Mrs Clark had said, some minutes before, ‘They tell me that you’re a great favourite in the confessional, Dr Maitland.’

  Maitland would have liked to believe that the topic had been instigated by Nolan. Yet he knew that the male ethos of the priesthood mattered too much to the president for him to give his sisters a part in chastising any priest.

  ‘It’s all the one absolution, Mrs Clark,’ he said with an orthodox smile. Besides, in the suburban confessional where he spent four hours each Saturday, he had not been aware of any milling of penitents.

  ‘No. You’re very popular with the young people. We knew a few who travel some miles to confess to you.’

  ‘Helen Simmons,’ Mrs Lamotte reminded Mrs Clark. ‘Four Caesareans and the doctor wouldn’t take responsibility for the fifth …’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Mrs Clark pursued. ‘Well, you put her mind at rest. The right thing, too. The commonsense solution. No claptrap.’

  To the experts in the front seat, no claptrap meant permission to use regulating drugs. Mrs Clark was a vigorous girl to have come from the same loins as the pallid theologian, her brother.

  ‘I see,’ Maitland said. He tried to sound like a rough-shod confessor. ‘But one can’t give the happy answer every time, you know.’

  Nolan remarked idly, ‘There’s so much discussion drummed up these days on questions such as that.’ Meaning by that, his sisters’ friend who had had the four Caesareans. ‘Telling people that they are still bound by the same laws as ever is a marvellous reassurance to them.’

  It had to be noted, in justice, that the monsignor seemed to want that to be the final word. If Maitland was a moderate, that is, a heretic, on some questions, the issue was too delicate to be argued between seats in a fashionable sedan.

  ‘You polyglot idiot!’ Costello yelled at a fruiterer’s truck, and the danger to Maitland seemed past.

  ‘The same laws as ever,’ Mrs Clark harked back. ‘Since all the doubt began –’

  Nolan gave a small litigious giggle. ‘No doubt has begun. The Church’s stand on these issues is identical with its stand in the first century A.D.’

  ‘Oh, go on!’ said Mrs Clark, whom Maitland was beginning to like. ‘The Pope’s waiting to make up his mind. How can anyone have a stand in the first century on drugs that weren’t discovered till the twentieth? I ask you.’

  ‘The Pope is not waiting to make up his mind as if he weren’t sure where the truth lay. His Holiness is making an attempt to reconcile extremists. Whether the attempt is wise or not, history will decide. For my money, I’d rather Popes didn’t make apologies for their authority but simply imposed it.’

  Nolan had become so humourless that it was clear how often he and Mrs Clark must argue about dogma and morals, the lady debating without regard for her brother’s status as a specialist. Yet the monsignor was not necessarily a humourless man. He taught a rigid moral theology, based on immutable first principles, within whose framework he was a man of wit. Accept my first principles, he virtually said, and their application, and I shall laugh with you. I shall laugh with you if you accept, for example, that direct killing is always wrong but that indirect killing can be right. See therefore that even in its most harsh applications – the garotting of a criminal for the good of the whole, the death of a mother because a therapeutic abortion cannot be allowed – it remains immutable, and we are brothers.

  Students of a particular cast of mind suffered considerably in his lectures.


  ‘Anyhow,’ Mrs Clark was saying, ‘a lot of priests are confused these days.’ She appealed across Maitland’s lap to her sister. ‘Remember what that priest told young Cath Doran.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Lamotte, interested enough to stop looking up side-streets for death.

  ‘What?’ Costello asked. He was a friend of the family with the right to be blunt.

  ‘A woman’s matter,’ Mrs Clark said chastely.

  Costello laughed, the back of his neck creased into three olive bolsters of flesh.

  ‘Anybody who doesn’t enforce the traditional morality in the confessional would want to watch out,’ the monsignor announced. ‘There’s no future in chaos. I am sure His Grace is about to step heavily on the so-called moderates in this matter.’ He turned to the back seat. ‘This is confidential, of course.’

  Maitland said, ‘I never repeat anything unless it comes from an official source.’

  ‘A good rule,’ Costello called over his shoulder.

  ‘He’ll have a fair bit of heavy stepping to do,’ Mrs Clark decided, meaning the archbishop.

  ‘Don’t you think His Grace’s word should be final with all his priests?’ Costello asked her light-heartedly.

  ‘I suppose it would have to be final,’ admitted Mrs Clark.

  ‘The archbishop is the archbishop,’ said weighty Mrs Lamotte.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Yet Maitland regretted that such robust polemics as Mrs Clark’s were to be so meanly squashed. He said, ‘That would simply mean that a given woman would be refused a permission in one diocese that she could probably receive with ease in the territory of some other bishop. That would make –’ he was forced to old-fashioned words – ‘would make salvation and damnation a matter of diocesan boundaries. I think we must find a better solution than that.’

  The front seat held silence.

  ‘There’s an argument,’ Mrs Clark was confident.

  But Nolan laughed spaciously then. ‘I hardly see that you, Patsy, whose specialty is sponge-cakes, nor you, Dr Maitland, whose specialty is history …’