Three Cheers for the Paraclete

by Thomas Keneally

  The girl sighed and handed Maitland a folded galley proof.

  ‘I wonder could you hurry, father? We have no more than forty minutes to get your reply into copy.’

  Maitland read that Allied Projects were seeking legal advice over accusations recently made against the company ‘from a pulpit in this city’. It was believed that the managing director of the company had been referring to Dr James Maitland, a Catholic priest, who had recently made a withering attack on land-developers. No one more thoroughly respected the clergy than the managing director, but …

  ‘And here’s something volunteered by your cousin.’ The girl offered another proof.

  Joe had said that he was amazed by his cousin’s attack on Allied Projects. Joe had merely outlined the details of his contract to his cousin and found that his cousin had become very angry and threatened to preach against land-developers. There had been a misunderstanding; Joe himself was satisfied with the deal he had made with Allied Projects.

  ‘None of this would be of any value,’ the girl explained, ‘if so many people hadn’t taken an interest in Monday’s feature on yourself. Do you think we could have another photograph? We may not use it, but it’s editorial policy. They like to be able to put, “Today’s picture of So-and-so”. As if it made any difference.’

  ‘It does make a difference. People will study it by the thousands to see if they can find lines of fanaticism in it. Just the same, no, I’d rather you didn’t take another.’

  ‘I applaud that decision,’ Nolan muttered.

  ‘Please,’ the girl said, ‘it would make things so much easier for me.’

  ‘If you have to,’ sighed Maitland, and composed himself. The camera sparkled once in the dusk of the porch.

  ‘Could you stand against that bit of stained glass, father.’

  Maitland obeyed and smiled radiantly, a regular Bing Crosby of a priest. In fact Allied Projects’ legal advice, the hint of law suits, Joe’s denial, all stimulated him to a mild gaiety. The photograph was taken and, as he moved back to the debate, another unexpected one. After which the photographer seemed to be having trouble with one of his camera’s attachments.

  ‘You see, I’ve put a curse on that thing.’

  ‘Instead of acting the fool,’ the president hissed at his back, ‘why don’t you say you didn’t mean any particular company? Why don’t you draw attention away from yourself by saying you didn’t mean this crowd … whatever their name is?’

  ‘Did you want your cousin’s money back for any particular purpose?’ the girl said.

  ‘Did he imply I wanted it as a votive offering?’

  ‘He implied you might have wanted him to give some of it to a church fund.’

  ‘See,’ Maitland told Nolan, ‘I’m not a complete write-off yet.’ He said to the girl, ‘Something like a new refrigerator for the good nuns at the orphanage, who haven’t even got anything to keep their beer cold?’

  The girl sighed.

  ‘I began interfering in this matter at Joe’s request,’ Maitland claimed, ‘But you mustn’t say so.’

  Nolan said, ‘That’s just what you should say. You interfered at your cousin’s request, but you didn’t mean to offend any particular –’

  ‘Why would your cousin take the trouble to come forward and say this?’ She tapped the appropriate galley.

  ‘He must have been induced. He’s married, you see. And if I were as married as he is, I’d be easily induced too. But of course you mustn’t say that, either.’

  ‘What are we to say?’

  ‘That I stand by my sermon, I suppose. That’s about all I can say.’

  ‘You could say that you didn’t mean …’ Nolan suggested a third time.

  ‘But they’re obviously contemplating a libel suit,’ the girl told Maitland.

  ‘That’s all there is to say.’

  ‘I see.’ The girl closed her notebook and smoothed the front of her long hair with one hand. Even to Maitland’s celibate eye, it looked an unmistakably fish-wifely gesture and would one day signify the last chance of at least one good man.

  Maitland said, ‘Joe is lying. I congratulate whoever it is made him lie. I wish him well of any spoils and advise him strongly against shame, which is the curse of his breed …’

  ‘That sort of stuff is useless,’ the photographer ventured – reasonably, lest one of Maitland’s deep Latin malisons extend the curse to his exposure-meter.

  ‘I suppose so. Perhaps I should give your readers a tip for the three-thirty.’

  The president knuckled Maitland in the back. ‘You have a responsibility to this house.’

  ‘Well, come on, Glenda,’ the photographer said.

  Already their special car stood idling beneath the stairs; all that proud metal and cylinder-capacity waiting their grumbling, at great expense to the company, simply so that today’s unsatisfactory statement by Dr Maitland could be got into the hands of the four-thirty masses.

  Glenda gave them a steely good-day. Egan closed the door tenderly. The afternoon light shelved through the shut door and the windows peopled with Irish saints, and Nolan’s flannel shirt was spotted with the gay eczema of stained glass.

  ‘You could have faced the accusations far more firmly,’ said Nolan, unaware that his old working-class shirt had been glorified. ‘You didn’t even try to maintain a responsible attitude.’

  ‘I sulked,’ said Maitland still touched by unseasonable glee.

  ‘Don’t joke, James. Sulk is almost exactly what you did do.’

  Egan had an opinion. Not one to take sides, he stared at the middle distance and looked disturbingly like that rare creature, the informed observer.

  ‘I think Dr Maitland demonstrated that he would not play the game on their ground. I think that was the correct thing to do. As if that piece with the blonde hair has a right to extend or withhold her mercy …’

  ‘That’s very well by individual standards,’ Nolan spat at them. ‘But the priest isn’t an individual. He’s a corporate being with duties to the rest of us. I don’t believe you have fulfilled these duties, James, as seriously as you might have. “Perhaps your readers would like a tip for the three-thirty.” Is that the proper way to face dangerous possibilities?’

  ‘It is my dangerous possibility, monsignor. I believe I sufficiently own it to do what I will with it.’

  The president said, presidentially woeful, ‘I shall telephone the archbishop.’

  ‘Not before I do.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You aren’t to telephone before I do. It’s my place …’

  Nolan gestured widely through the stone walls at the vanished reporters. ‘When they were here, you didn’t seem to know what your place was.’

  ‘Just the same, I’m not so corporate that I need other people to make my telephone calls.’

  The president pretended an interest in his left, perhaps arthritic, priestly hand. There were blotches of blue on it the size of coins.

  ‘By all means, contact His Grace first if you want to. Perhaps there is still time for you to emerge with credit – though I can’t see it. Let me know when the line is free.’

  The old man left. Keeping to the walls of the stairwell, he stopped halfway up to huff beneath a glacial window where St Brendan eyed the Atlantic and a boat full of his deathless sailor-monks. The president bowed his head for a second here, and Egan and Maitland, watching from below, saw the two captains, who each knew what it was to have one unruly tar in the crew, seem to commune.

  On the other hand, His Grace was merely sad; with a sadness that implied a fault, no more, but a definite boyish fault in Maitland. Maitland, not seeing any reason why he should apologize, yet did apologize at length.

  It proved, later in the day, that the blonde had been moderate with him. She got into print that he stood firmly behind his sermon; and this in a paper that did not run much to adverbs.

  14

  EGAN BEGAN AGAIN to insist that he should confess to Mai
tland. It was as if he wanted to add sacramental dimensions to the bare human fact that they shared a secret.

  ‘Bless me, father, for I have sinned,’ Egan muttered. ‘It is five days since my last confession.’

  Maitland, sitting stoled at the prie-dieu where Egan knelt, blushed at the formalities. But to Egan a confession was a confession, that is, a sacrament and a tribunal. He would take no liberties with the judge, whatever the judge intended.

  ‘Why I came tonight, father – James – is that now Nora is going, I see that my motives for continuing to meet her over the past months, and in a variety of places, were not always for the best, for her sanity or mine.’

  Maitland, keeping his head averted, said, ‘Come off it, Maurice! Do you really see yourself as guilty? Or do you simply want to talk things out?’

  ‘I see myself as guilty,’ Maurice insisted.

  ‘Very well. I’ll absolve you. That’s simple. I wish that idiot would quieten down.’

  Once more the sound of the broadcasting van that had plagued the suburb downhill for the past half-hour, penetrated the ill-fitting windows; the sound of gear-changing, and of spoken but indistinct things to do with some fête or festival or fair. The loudspeaker pulsed with the excitement of hoop-las and merry-go-rounds, though the individual banalities could not be heard. All the more reason for them to assume that it was summer and a season of promise at the bottom of the hill and to wonder at how even their innocence had gone hollow.

  Egan said, ‘I very nearly went to see Nora tonight. I could easily persuade her not to leave. Now, there’s no ignoring the fact that it’s an exciting business for any man to have that sort of power. A heady thing, James. Quite genuinely, I need the grace of the sacrament.’

  The broadcast voice receded with its undisclosed wonders.

  ‘How long before she goes?’

  ‘Thursday morning. Three days. If I saw her again, it would be impossible to hide, even from myself, that I’d be doing critical harm to both of us.’

  The sober skull nodded inarticulately, in a way that left Maitland convinced that Egan was not merely playing at guilt.

  ‘Perhaps it mightn’t be as deadly as all that,’ Maitland said. He went on lamely and compulsively, as one speaks to the bereaved. ‘Just the same, if you’ve decided, both of you, that it’s best for her to go to Europe, you’re probably wise not to visit.’

  ‘I know,’ Maurice contended. ‘If I visited her, it would be the end.’ By ‘the end’ he meant something unspeakable, uncanonical. ‘I’ve already done unlimited damage at numerous times over the past year. Mainly by convincing myself, or letting myself be convinced, that I mustn’t give her up to this Celia, that I was performing a necessary charity. Now I see it was probably never necessary. It’s certainly done her no benefit.’

  Mentally he surveyed this hard decision, and then reasserted it. ‘Yes, not the least benefit that I can count. I don’t know how guilty I have been, James, but there’s always guilt in a case like mine.’

  Maitland readjusted the stole about his neck, as if it chafed. ‘You’ve no right to decide that. I’m the judge and I haven’t got the right either.’

  ‘You are the judge, James. Just the same, I’m a man who has always lived by principle until now, and I have always expected others to live by principle. On the basis of principle, I haven’t shrunk from telling women that they can’t use contraceptives no matter how much trouble their husbands make. I have advised lovers to abandon their beloved rather than marry against the prescriptions of the Church, and ordered policemen not to take subtly disguised bribes. All on principle. On principle, I’ve commanded ordinary people, who have no stake in the divine, to do exceptionally brave things. On principle, and in the name of a higher mercy. But when I met Nora I forgot principle and the higher mercy. I decided what was better and best for the poor girl. Events proved me wrong. But once you act against principle, you’re at the mercy of sentiment. Principle is what I’ve always preached and enforced – except in my own case.’

  Maitland said, ‘Come on now, I’m the referee. Self-abuse is out. And I don’t mean onanism.’

  The unlikely and true lover chuckled dutifully. ‘Isn’t humanity a sad, sad case? I’m the type of priest people joke about. The type Christ was angry with. But I must assure you, for Nora’s sake and your own, that our relationship was – at least in the conventional sense – blameless.’

  ‘For God’s sake, I know that.’

  ‘You don’t know anything of the sort,’ Egan almost barked. ‘You think that just because I’m your friend, I couldn’t have committed what is for us practically the ultimate.’

  ‘It’s not that, only …’

  But Egan could not be dissuaded from presuming Maitland’s callow pride. ‘Well, let me tell you, James, something you are likely to find out for yourself one day. That the distance between innocence and guilt, in these matters, is a hair’s breadth.’

  ‘I know. It’s simply that you don’t seem a hair’s-breadth sort of character to me.’

  Egan snorted so heavily that he might well have learnt it from Costello. ‘I have to confess something that would make any priest ashamed. If there was nothing blameless, I believe it was due, under God, to Nora.’

  ‘I see.’

  Egan kept silence for fifteen seconds, a long time for a judge as uncomfortable as Maitland, not knowing what came next. The defensor, who knelt on the edge of Maitland’s vision, had grown reticent, and there was a hint in the reticence. The hint was that Egan wanted to tell the history of Nora and himself, but did not feel self-lenient enough to begin.

  ‘Tell me, Maurice,’ Maitland supplied, ‘how did you meet her?’

  It took a few more seconds for Egan to gather his notes. ‘We were the court of appeal from Nora’s first trial. The defensor vinculi in W——— appealed against the decision of the court of his diocese, which had declared the marriage unconsummated and therefore capable of being nullified. Remember, I told you that Nora managed the Imperial Hotel in W———. She had been married about six years before she began to take steps to have the marriage nullified. It seems that the time went quickly. She had a great deal to do. They had a dozen permanent guests and constantly put up businessmen and graziers and people of that kidney. She supervised the public bar and the lounge.’ Again Maitland looked on the sober, nodding intensity of the little teetotalling priest, reciting by heart the duties of his capable country girl in those years before she had recourse to canon law, ‘She kept a dining-room,’ he announced as her ultimate distinction, ‘of twenty-four tables. It was no small feat for a girl of, say, twenty-seven years.’

  Maitland confessed, ‘I’m sure I couldn’t do it.’

  ‘Neither could I. No one is as capable, James, as a capable woman.’

  Perhaps Egan’s most luxurious daydream was of himself serving on any front – the lounge, the dining-room, the reception office; taking brute loads off the chatelaine’s shoulders.

  ‘Anyhow,’ he said, after an abstracted while, ‘the husband was a problem. Their marriage did not prosper. He drank.’

  ‘And was impotent, you say.’

  ‘Yes.’ The penitent closed his eyes. It seemed that the thought of that grotesque discovery, that stale joke of impotency whose butt was Nora, provided his sight with a problem of focus. ‘And he drank a great deal and molested the guests, so that he ended by giving what was virtually his own hotel a bad name. Celia, whom you would expect to know her canon law and anything else to her advantage, told Nora that she was sure the marriage could be annulled in the Church courts. Nora wouldn’t consent – she had a terror of doctors. It was only when he cornered Nora and three guests with a fire-axe in the lounge after closing-time one night, that she decided to approach the bishop and see what could be done. She says it was for his sanity as well as her own. I believe her. You see, he used to accuse her of liaisons with perfectly respectable guests.’

  ‘Poor fellow,’ said Maitland.

  ‘Ye
s,’ Egan said, ‘poor fellow. The man himself changed his mind a number of times about whether he was impotent or not. He changed his mind both in the W——— trial and in the one held in this archdiocese. By the time I met him he seemed clearly a case for psychiatric care. It was quite a game to follow the turns his mind took. His depositions were often given in the most obscene way imaginable, so that we had a terrible time cleaning them up for use in court. When I say we, I mean the promotor justitiae also, Doctor Costello, who was very kind to Nora. I was, of course, the villain. It was my duty to do all I could to preserve this impossible marriage.’

  ‘Would you like to sit up, Maurice?’

  ‘No. Oh no! I’d never tell anyone else, James, but my knees are like bark from prayer, especially these last months. At least I spend a long time on my knees, and priests who do that are not supposed to behave as foolishly as I have. Good heavens, I even get infections in the cracked knee-pads.’ He lifted a knee and rubbed it, one bursitic knee-cap ruined by love and piety. He uttered in despair his clerkly small cough. In the circumstances, it smacked of hysteria.

  ‘Perhaps if you did sit up for a second –’ insisted Maitland.

  But Egan would not again enter into the subject of knees. He said, ‘I don’t know if you have ever had any contact with the Church courts, James. But in marriage cases most of the evidence is taken outside the court, privately as it were. After I had interviewed Nora at the cathedral nearly two years ago – privately, though there was another priest present, of course, acting as notary – she came back after the notary had left and begged me not to make her face our periti.’

  ‘Periti?’

  ‘I forget that there are even priests who do not understand these terms, whereas they’re my bread and butter. Periti are the Catholic doctors who perform medical examinations for us. There were reasons – all to do with her husband’s producing so-called new evidence – why an examination had to take place. It was a matter of law. I told her so. She began to shudder so much that I began to wish the notary hadn’t gone. She cried in fits and starts, and every time she stopped she put her wet handkerchief away. I remember that I didn’t feel particularly patient and wanted to tell her to keep the thing handy until she had wept herself dry. I told her that the periti were chosen for their uprightness and that there would be an honesta matrona, an honest matron, present. I actually thought, James, that that should satisfy her.’