Now and Then, Amen

by Jon Cleary

He landed in Sydney on Wednesday, October 30, 1929. In America it was still Tuesday, October 29, and investors and bankers were airborne, like wingless hang-gliders, as they leapt from high windows, the thump of their landings adding to the tumult of the Big Crash. The Sydney newspapers featured the Panic on Wall Street, but the thumps were heard only faintly down in the Antipodes; America’s troubles, said the locals, were not ours. Fingal, recognizing fools when they stood in a crowd in the street, got off the ship and instantly started buying property.

  His first purchase was a hotel, a pub, in Paddington, a working-class inner suburb. It had taken him only a week to see that Australians, like the Irish, were natural-born drinkers; unlike the Irish, who could blame their drunkenness and misery on the English, the natives had no excuse. In summer they did blame the heat, but in winter they drank twice as much. Fingal saw the market and moved into it. It was noticeable that three out of five hotel owners had Irish names, proving that some smart Irishmen had got out of the Ould Country.

  Five months after Fingal’s arrival he was startled to read that there was to be a referendum in the neighbouring State of Victoria on the introduction of Prohibition; if the notion spread, his hotels, for he now had two, would soon be out of business. Liquor was not to be sold except for medicinal and sacramental purposes, which presumably meant doctors and priests would constantly have temptation on hand. Fingal at once sent a large donation to the Prohibitionists, assuring them, under an assumed name, of his fervent support. If Prohibition was introduced into Victoria he would move down there and become the bootleg king of Melbourne. Unfortunately for his dreams, the Prohibitionists lost overwhelmingly. The winning margin equalled the number of drunks who voted, though all the pubs were supposedly closed on that Saturday. It was suggested they had had access to the medicinal and sacramental supplies. Fingal did not mind the loss of his donation. He always backed both sides in any contest.

  The Depression at last began to settle on Australia; though, since there was a height restriction of 150 feet on local buildings, no one was jumping out of windows. There was no point in attempting suicide if it might mean no more than one’s being crippled. Violence broke out between striking workers and scabs; the police, caught in between, flailed in all directions with their truncheons, often knocking out each other. The Labour Government of the day brought in what it proudly claimed was a tough Budget, increasing company tax to 6 per cent; blood boiled in the Union Club and other hotbeds of business conservatism and some saw the end of the world looming up. There was talk of marching on the madhouse that was Canberra, the national capital, but since all the banner-makers were flat out supplying the striking and unemployed workers, that idea was abandoned. Newspapers advised readers how to live on £1 a week, ignoring the fact that on £1 a week no citizen, if he had the strength to crawl to the newsagent’s, could afford to buy a newspaper. A cold miserable wind blew through the voters, even in summer, though no one suffered as much as the poorer elements of the northern hemisphere. Starvation, somehow, tastes better in the sunshine: or so the well-fed, volunteer charity workers tried to tell the hungry.

  Fingal Hourigan didn’t suffer at all. Besides his hotels he now had a widening starting-price betting network; SP bookies had been at work since the first convict had tried to out-run the pursuing soldiers, but Fingal was the first man to organize them into a chain. He also bought up closed-down factories and shops, using his profits from the bookmaking; he bought three more hotels, all of them in good situations. In the course of buying the Windjammer Hotel near the Woolloomooloo docks he met Sheila Regan.

  She was behind the bar when he walked into the pub, an ethereal-looking girl who looked as if she should be pulling holy water instead of beer. She was pale-skinned, had blonde hair and dark-blue eyes that said she believed all that the world told her. She was a saint, up to her knees in her father’s foaming ale and lager, an unwelcome steadying influence on the hard drinkers from the wharves across the road. Paddy Regan kept her out of the bar as much as possible, but this day he was short-staffed and she had volunteered to be a stand-in barmaid. She stood at the end of the long bar and the drinkers, afraid of conversion, crowded together at the other end.

  Fingal walked in, took one look at her and fell in love. He had never been a romantic, never had a girl who walked soft-footed through his dreams. He had had girl-friends, but he had always thought of them as the Drainage Board, there to get the dirty water off his chest. Marriage was a fate that, like cancer or an honest living, never crossed his mind. He had never contemplated the possibility of loneliness: money and possessions would always be the best company. Then he met Sheila.

  “I am looking for Mr. Regan,” he said and was surprised that he sounded breathless.

  “He is my father.” She had a voice that should have been in a choir, singing the softer, more seductive notes. “What are you selling?”

  “I’m not selling, I’m buying.” Somehow he managed to sound unaggressive; he couldn’t bring himself to bruise this vision. “Your father is expecting me. I’m Fingal Hourigan. At your service,” he added, getting his breath back and deciding to be a little flourishing in speech and gesture, something she never got from the dockers.

  She smiled: was he wrong or was it a knowing smile? But the eyes were still as innocent as those of a convent novice. “I’d love to visit Ireland, Mr. Hourigan.”

  He blinked: had he missed something? “Pardon?”

  “You offered your services, Mr. Hourigan. Oh, here’s Dad. Be careful of him. He’s a hard man for a bargain.”

  She gave him another smile and floated away, making way for Paddy Regan. He was a thin, red-faced man with thick wavy hair and sharp bitter eyes, the very opposite of his daughter’s. Sheila’s looks had come from her mother, a dark-haired beauty who had run away with a sailor from the S.S. Mariposa when it had docked across the road. She was now in Long Beach, California, living with yet another sailor, though, to be fair to her, he too was from the Matson Line. She was not promiscuous, she wrote her daughter.

  “I’ve thought about your offer, Mr. Hourigan,” said Regan in a voice laced with the best of his hotel’s stock. His breath was an advertisement for what he sold, if you were a drinker who bought through your nose. “It’s not enough, not by a long chalk.”

  “Mr. Regan,” said Fingal, one eye watching Sheila pulling beer for the cautiously suspicious drinkers at the other end of the bar. “I know your financial position down to every penny owed. I will pay you cash, notes in your hand, no cheques, and we’ll alter the bill of sale any way you want to fool your creditors.”

  “Cash, eh?” Regan pulled them each a beer, peered into the amber looking for a green light of advice. “I owe something to the brewery, you know.”

  “Indeed I do know. You owe quite a lot. Leave that to me.”

  “I’m attached to the place.” Regan looked around him. He was attached to it because, wifeless, he was now afraid of the outside world. Out there were too many sober villains who would take him down. It didn’t seem to occur to him that he was standing across the bar from one of them. “Would you want me to stay on and manage it for you?”

  Fingal looked along the bar at Sheila, who now stood watching him. She was silhouetted against a window on which a brewery advertisement was painted: a Walter Jardine rugby league forward looked ready to leap out of the glass and rape her. He said, “I’d like to consult your daughter on that.”

  Regan did not look surprised; he was a weak man who acknowleged that women, or anyway his women, always had their own way. “Be careful, Hourigan. She’s a hard girl for a bargain.”

  Fingal smiled; how could such an ethereal beauty drive a bargain? “I once made love to the queen of an African tribe. She sold me the tribe in the morning.”

  “Don’t waste your mullarkey on me, Hourigan. I’m Irish, too. Are you planning to make love to my daughter?”

  “Not yet,” said Fingal. “Only when it is honourable to do so.”

  S
heila advised him to buy the hotel and to engage her father as manager, but not to let him keep the books. He asked her would she go out with him.

  “I was wondering when you’d get around to asking me,” she said.

  He had been talking to her for less than five minutes. He put her forwardness down to her innocence. “Where would you like to go?”

  “To the fights.”

  He blinked again: she was full of surprises. But he took her to the fights that night, sat at the ringside in the old Stadium and watched Jack Carroll chop an American import to pieces and, out of the corner of his eye, watched the angel beside him leaning forward with all the blood-lust of a half-starved lioness. When he took her home he tried a chaste good-night kiss and was instantly devoured by lips, teeth and tongue that burnt him: even her teeth seemed hot.

  A month later Fingal proposed to her and she accepted him. “On condition that you will take me to Ireland for our honeymoon.”

  “I’ll take you to the moon itself, if you wish,” said Fingal, both feet off the ground as he made love to her, not honourably.

  “Ireland will do,” she said. “Now roll over, it’s my turn on top. I’ve just finished reading The Perfumed Garden.”

  “Does your father know?”

  “No, he thought I was reading the Annals of Mary.”

  “You look so angelic. How can you be so wanton?”

  “It’s my mother in me. Don’t worry, I go to confession every Saturday—I can see the priest’s hair standing on end through the grille. Don’t expect me to be wanton on Saturday nights.”

  “Sunday to Fridays all right?”

  “Every night, three times a night. Oh, I do love you, Fingal!”

  Which she did; and he her. They were married on the January day in 1933 when, on the other side of the world, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Both events appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, though the Hourigan announcement was only a paid advertisement in the “classifieds” column. The general public paid little more attention to Hitler than they did to Hourigan; they were about to declare war on England, whose fast bowlers were hurling cricket balls at the heads of Australian batsmen. The Empire looked ready to fall apart and local weddings and foreign politics were minor events.

  Fingal, as promised, took Sheila to Ireland for their honeymoon. She fell in love with the misty, gentle countryside, but said she wouldn’t like to live there. He then took her to Italy and in St. Peter’s she fell on her knees with a force that he thought would crack them and prayed for half an hour without lifting her head; then they went back to the Hotel Hassler and made wanton love for the rest of the day. He took her to Germany and she fell in love with the countryside of that country. But he was not a pastoral lad and the Irish fields and the German forests made no impression on him. But he went to a Nazi rally and watched, fascinated, while Hitler mesmerized his audience. Capone had had power, but never like this. He dreamed for a moment of capturing an audience back home like this, of 50,000 voters standing up at the Sydney Cricket Ground and shouting, “Heil Fingal!” But he knew it would never work, that if ever he was to have power in Australia it would not be through rhetoric. The natives back there were too laconic, they would always suspect the orator.

  Sheila wanted them to go home through America; she might be a hard woman with a bargain, as her father had said, but she knew how to spend her husband’s money. Fingal, however, said they had to hurry home: he had to go back to making money. The truth was that he was afraid to go anywhere near the United States. Al Capone, in and out of jail now, hounded by the US Treasury, was still a force and, as Fingal well knew, he was not a man to forget a treachery. America, and particularly Chicago, was to be avoided like the rock of Scylla, a Greek dame he had read about in the Chicago Public Library.

  Eighteen months later, back in Sydney and having watered The Perfumed Garden till it was overgrown and had become weedy, as had Fingal, Sheila decided she wanted a child and took out her diaphragm. Nine months later, to the day, she gave birth to Kerry Seamus. She said that was enough children for the time being, as if she had given birth to a litter; she wanted to learn to be a mother, something her own mother had never been. Three years later she decided it was time for another child and she became pregnant with Brigid Maureen. When it came time for delivery it was a difficult birth and Fingal, who still loved her dearly, almost went out of his mind with the fear that he would lose her. She survived and so did the baby, a bawling, brawling infant who entered the world fighting everyone in sight; it was rumoured that when the doctor slapped her to bring her to life, she slapped him back. Her four-year-old brother hated her and she, from some primeval instinct, even before she had her eyes open, hated him.

  And then, slowly but steadily, Sheila came to hate Fingal. It began in ways that, at first, he didn’t quite catch. There would be a barbed remark about his preoccupation with money; women, he had once told her, knew nothing about the making of money. Then she began to complain about the way he made his money; he turned his back on that argument, because he would never discuss with anyone how he did that. That was how it had been in Chicago with Capone and the other gang-leaders, including the Irish: money matters were no concern of the women.

  Then she began to have what she called “a marital headache;” it always seemed to coincide with an ache in his groin. At last he discovered the reason for her turning away from him, figuratively and in bed. She had given up reading The Perfumed Garden and turned to the writings of St. Teresa of Avila.

  “She’s atoning for the sins of her mother,” said Regan.

  He was still managing the Windjammer Hotel, living above the premises and staring each morning across the road to the wharf where his errant wife had waved goodbye as she had fled with the American sailor. He never visited the Hourigans in their home in Bellevue Hill and he was slowly drinking himself to death, though at Fingal’s expense.

  “How are the babies?”

  Fingal brought the children down once a month in the big Buick he now owned; but Sheila never came. “Always on their knees. She’s teaching them to pray, even the baby.”

  “There’s something wrong with us Irish, Fingal. We put too much money on prayer. What does she want to do with the boy? Make him Pope?”

  Fingal nodded seriously. “She actually said that yesterday. I think she’s going out of her mind, Paddy.”

  “The same thing happened to her ma when she ran away with the Yank.”

  In the spring of 1939, two days before Hitler marched into Poland and the world fell into the second war to end all wars, Sheila went completely out of her mind. Fingal was never able to explain to himself or, later, to his children why she did so. She was put away in a home and Fingal engaged a succession of housekeepers and nannies to look after the children; none of them could stand the pious little brats, let alone love them, and none of them lasted longer than six months. The home became no more than a house: love, like world peace, had gone out the window. Fingal turned to making more money, which could be loved without fear of rejection.

  The war was kind to Fingal Hourigan. He made money on the black market, in war industries, in property. When the Japanese shelled a harbourside section of Sydney in 1942 he bought up half of Vaucluse from residents fleeing to the Blue Mountains west of the city. He made substantial donations to war comforts funds and in return was rewarded by ladies on the fund committees who couldn’t give fleshly comforts to their absent husbands. He made no committed alliances, however. He was still in love with Sheila: not the pathetic deranged woman in the private mental home but the ethereal-looking girl who had smiled at him in a hotel bar long ago.

  The war ended and there was no bigger victor than Fingal Hourigan. He had sold out his starting-price business and now he was on his way to being respectable: if being in business where no criminal charges could be made meant being respectable. He indulged in insider trading, though the term was not yet invented; in tax evasion, a legitimate if not honourable pursuit; i
n mortgage foreclosures, only disreputable if pursued against elderly widows; and cheating any Government Department, a national sport. He had raised skulduggery (or skulbuggery, as a later acquaintance would call it) to an art.

  II

  In 1948 Kerry, who was then fourteen, came to him and asked for a man-to-man talk. They had never been close, more like uncle and nephew, and there was a certain constraint between them that had always obstructed any confidences.

  “Is it about sex? Don’t the Jesuits teach you about that?” Kerry, for the past three years, had been attending St. Ignatius’ College as a boarder. It was an expensive school and it had been chosen for him by Sheila before she had gone round the bend from sex to religion.

  “No, I know all about that. I found one of your old books when I was home for the holidays.”

  “What book?”

  “The Perfumed Garden.”

  Fingal didn’t disclaim ownership. “It’s a book on acrobatics. Go on.”

  “I want to be a priest.”

  “The Perfumed Garden brought that on?”

  Kerry laughed, something he rarely did in the company of his father. Fingal looked at him, liking the sound; Kerry was a big boy for his age, already as tall as his father, and the laugh came up from his belly. Fingal grinned, sat back in his chair and relaxed.

  “Actually, I want to be a cardinal.”

  “I think fourteen-year-old cardinals went out of fashion when the Popes stopped having bastard sons. Who gave you the idea of being a priest?”

  “Mother.”

  Once a month Kerry and his ten-year-old sister were taken by the current housekeeper to see their mother. Sheila had occasional lucid stretches—“some women do,” said her now totally alcoholic father, locked away in his room above the Windjammer bar and no longer managing the hotel—and she spent those moments giving advice to the children on how to avoid the wicked ways of the world she had left. Fingal, carefully guarding the memory of the girl he had once loved, never went near her. He paid the bills and sent her expensive presents and flowers every Friday, but that was the extent of his concern for her.