Now and Then, Amen

by Jon Cleary

  Though he had never met or even seen photographs of them, Tewsday now recognized the young girl and the priest. These were the Hourigan heirs, never spoken of by the chairman, never discussed by his executives; but always there in the background, the sometime future bosses. “I’m Jonathan Tewsday, one of your father’s junior executives. Are you at university?”

  “No, I’m an art student.”

  “What do you paint?” He knew nothing about art and had no interest in it. Endorsement and sponsorship of the arts had not yet become fashionable in the commercial and industrial world; money was still being spent only to make money. Art, and artists, should be self-supporting.

  “Naked men, mostly. I’m going to specialize in portraits of penises.” She was learning the youthful pleasure of being outrageous; later she would recognize that outrageousness was the last resort of the untalented. So far she was not certain how much talent she had.

  He clenched his scalp, holding on to his already thinning hair. “Will there be a living in it?” As if, in her circumstances, that mattered.

  “Do you think I need to care?” she said, reading his mind. She had already dismissed him as the sort of young man in whom she would never show any interest. Plump and sleek as a young seal, one for whom appearances would be an abiding preoccupation, the urge for riches oozing out of him, he was everything she currently despised. Her father’s riches allowed her to be comfortably and snobbishly idealistic, something else she would grow out of. “Oh, this is my brother Kerry. This is Mr. Tewsday, a junior executive.”

  She moved off on that insult and Kerry smiled uncomfortably. “Don’t take any notice of her, Mr. Tewsday. Underneath, she’s really a very nice kid.”

  “Are you being charitable because you’re her brother or because you’re a priest?”

  “Oh, I’m not a priest yet, just a trainee. Like you as an executive.” Kerry, too, could toss an insult: he and Brigid were not their father’s children for nothing.

  Tewsday wanted to ask him why any young man in today’s world, so full of opportunity, would want to be a priest; but such a question, he guessed, would be another insult. He knew as much about religion as he did about art.

  “Do they let you out much? I mean to parties like this?”

  “Oh, they don’t make us live a monastic life, if that’s what you mean. They like to expose us to temptation occasionally, just so’s we’ll recognize it.”

  “There’s plenty here,” said Tewsday, looking around. “Wine and women.”

  “I’m not tempted,” said Kerry, smiling.

  “Where will you finish up?”

  “When I’m ordained or later on? The Church is just like working for my father. You don’t shoot to the top in a rush. I’m patient.”

  Tewsday all at once recognized another man with ambition; it surprised him, because he thought all clerics were supposed to be humble. “You’d like to be a bishop or something?”

  “A cardinal, actually,” said Kerry, smiled and walked away.

  Tewsday looked after him, then looked across at Brigid, holding court to several of her father’s more senior executives. Even so young, she was the best of all flirts, an arrogant one: men like to be trampled on before, as they think, they conquer. The senior executives, Don Juans in their own imagination, middle-aged fools in the eyes of their watching wives, jostled each other to catch her attention. Tewsday turned and saw Fingal Hourigan watching the group. The look in the old man’s eyes told him that each of the senior executives had been put on probation. He looked for pride in the old man’s face, but there was none, at least not in his daughter. That only showed when he looked across the room at his son. God damn! thought Tewsday: by the time I get to the top in this corporation, I’ll have a cardinal as a chairman.

  Fingal had taken the monsignor in charge of the seminary to dinner at the Union club. He had joined that conservative establishment last year as part of the consolidation of his respectability; there had been one or two demurs from some of the elderly, stuffier members, but no one had black-balled him. The committee would have preferred a new member whose family could be traced back, preferably on the land or one of the more respected ways of making money; they would not have wanted the tracing to go back too far, for fear that a convict ancestor might have been unearthed; the rattle of chains in a family closet had not yet become a patriotic jingle. At least a man with no family line had no skeletons visible. And he did have money, lots of it, something that was now beginning to have a respectability of its own.

  The monsignor was not out of place in the club, even though a Catholic; he came of an old moneyed family and it showed. “A nice Burgundy, Mr. Hourigan. We’re producing some fine wines in Australia these days.”

  “Do you use them on the altar?”

  “Of course.” The monsignor was a cheerful man, only occasionally depressed by the classes he taught. A radical student would have brightened his life, but the seminaries, like the universities of the day, seemed full of conservative youth. He wondered what the coming decades would bring. He had read the new English play, Look Back in Anger, and he wondered if, when the play came to Sydney, he should take his classes to see it. “Why did you want to see me? Are you going to make a gift to the seminary or is it just about Kerry?”

  “You’re a smart man, Cliff. Okay you’ll get your gift. Now what about Kerry? How’s he making out?”

  “The smartest one I’ve had in years. We are taught—and teach—not to be fulsome. But I have to say your son is brilliant. He is very sound in theology, history, all that, but he is positively brilliant at administration. He is bishop material, if ever I’ve seen it.” The Burgundy had made him fulsome.

  “Nothing more than a bishop?”

  “Ah, that is in God’s hands,” said the monsignor and smiled, because he knew it wasn’t.

  “How do we influence God then?”

  “Pray, Fingal, pray. Are you good at that?”

  “I’m good at anything I put my mind to.” But he wouldn’t know how to start praying.

  In the closed room of his mind he had begun to have megalomaniacal dreams. If Kerry had been American-born he would have made him President. Something like that was happening now in the United States; word had reached him of Joseph Kennedy’s campaign to have his eldest surviving son nominated as the next Democrat presidential candidate. But, since Kerry was Australian-born and Australia amounted to nothing in the world politically, he had begun to dream of other empires. And so had come, as an extension of Kerry’s own ambition, which he recognized now was genuine and strong, to the idea of an Australian-born Pope. So far he had not mentioned the idea to Kerry. He looked across the table and wondered if, half-jokingly, he should mention it to this worldly cleric. But no: the monsignor would treat it as a joke. So would the rest of the Church. The Italians, who ran the Church and thought they had a God-given right to the Papacy, would laugh, then scratch their heads, wondering where Australia was. No Pope had yet found it.

  “Can you save him from the backblocks when he’s ordained?”

  “It’ll be out of my hands, Fingal. But I’ll do my best to recommend him to some admin, office. I don’t think he’s cut out for weddings and christenings. I’m not myself, especially christenings. Many’s the time I’ve wanted to hold the squaw-ling brat under the water, instead of splashing him with it.”

  Kerry was ordained in 1962. Brigid, rebelling against her father, wheedling money out of her trust account by sleeping with one of the trustees, one of her father’s lawyers, had left for Paris in late 1958. She had kissed her father goodbye, the first time she had kissed him in six years.

  “Don’t be angry, Dad. You have Kerry to fuss over.”

  “I don’t fuss over anyone.”

  “No, that’s not true.” Certainly not over her. She had been only fourteen when she had recognized the tribal sign: the son was the one who counted. “But some day you may be proud of me. I’m a good artist and I’m going to be much better.”r />
  “I’ll never understand you,” Fingal had said.

  “I don’t think you understand women. You’ve never talked about her, but did you ever understand Mother? What made her mental? You?”

  “Never!” he said fiercely. He would never have done that to the golden-haired girl who still occasionally slept with him in his dreams. “It was in her genes. I didn’t know when we married, but her grandmother went mad when she was only twenty-five.”

  “Then I might go mad, too?”

  “I doubt it.” He looked at her, sane, confident and seemingly invulnerable. He loved her, but he couldn’t show it. The Irish do share a few characteristics with the English; sometimes he wondered if he were Anglo-Irish instead of pure Irish. He had the piratical inclinations of the English. “You’re a Hourigan through and through.”

  “No insanity there?”

  None that he knew of; but perhaps his ambition for his son was a form of insanity. Brigid went off to Paris, wrote home twice a year and told her father and her brother nothing. Then she came home for Kerry’s ordination.

  Fingal threw a reception afterwards in the castle on the waterfront at Vaucluse, where he had been living for the past five years. As if having a new priest for a son were some sort of protection, he invited the half a dozen women he had been sleeping with for the past ten years. They were youngish widows, divorcees and one career woman, a TV chat show hostess. None of them had known of the others, but, with that instinct that is more highly developed in mistresses than in wives, risk always heightening the senses, they recognized the up-till-then unknown competition as soon as they saw it. Fingal greeted each with a peck on the cheek and nothing more, stood safe between his son and daughter, the Church and Art.

  “My son, Father Hourigan. And my daughter Brigid, home from Paris and living with Picasso.”

  “Unfortunately not,” said Brigid, wondering which one of the women was her father’s regular bed-mate.

  It was an early summer day and the reception was being held in the garden of the big house. It was an Italian-style garden, all stone balustrades and clipped hedges and pebble paths, a proper setting for a young priest destined eventually for the Vatican; but none of the guests, not even the seminary’s monsignor, caught the significance. Only the guest of honour’s sister saw it.

  “Has Dad booked you into the Vatican yet?” she said when she and Kerry were alone.

  “Aren’t you pleased I’m a priest?”

  She bit her lip and for a moment looked as if she might weep. He was shocked; he had never seen her cry, not even as a child. He knew nothing of the childhood tears in the lonely bedroom.

  “Of course I am. It’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Ever since I got the vocation for it.”

  She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “You really do have a vocation?”

  “I really do,” he said, and out on the harbour there was a sudden flash of sunlight, as if God had fired a warning shot.

  She looked down at the garden from the terrace where they stood. “There should be a maze.”

  “Do they have mazes in Italian gardens?”

  “Didn’t Machiavelli invent the maze?” She had no idea if Machiavelli had, indeed, ever been in a garden of any sort; but she had just spent almost four years in Paris and learned the French trick of answering questions with a question. Then below her she saw a face she recognized, though the scalp above it had widened. “Why, it’s—I’ve forgotten your name. Friday, Saturday? The junior executive.”

  Tewsday, thirty now and almost bald, came up on to the terrace as Kerry left his sister and went into the house. “Not any more—a junior executive, that is. Jonathan Tewsday.”

  “Of course! Is there a Mrs. Tewsday and lots of little days of the week?”

  She hadn’t changed in her attitude towards businessmen. An independent income is the best support for an artist’s standards; idealism flowers beautifully when watered by a trust fund. She would never need the likes of Jonathan Tewsday.

  She was still beautiful, but had become a flamboyant dresser; if her brother ever became a cardinal, it would be a race between them to see who caught the eye. She was dressed in black-and-white chequered knickerbockers, white silk shirt and black-and-white chequered cap, with a red silk scarf tied to the handle of her black handbag. It was her Jules et Jim look, but Jules and Jim and Pierre and Yves and Roger and Daniel had all been left back in Paris where, like Fingal’s mistresses, they did not know of each other.

  Tewsday thought she looked terrific, but wouldn’t have walked down the street with her. He knew nothing about women’s fashion, he was too intent on his own wardrobe. “I’ve learned about Art since we last met. Let’s go out to dinner and talk about it.”

  “All right,” she said on the whim that was part of her mother’s bequest, “let’s go now.”

  “Do you want to change?”

  “Why? Don’t you like this?”

  “Love it,” he said and hoped they wouldn’t be seen by anyone he knew. “Do we have to ask your father’s permission to go?”

  “Never do that,” she said. “He delights in saying no.”

  Fingal, who could see in a dozen directions at once, saw them go. He had come to appreciate the worth of Tewsday, but never gave him any verbal encouragement, just promotion and a salary increase; which was all Tewsday craved, since praise wasn’t bankable. He had distinguished himself the previous year when there had been a massive credit squeeze throughout the country. Ballyduff had been awash with liquidity and Tewsday had gained an audience with the chairman. He had brought a list of companies that, unknown to the general market, were on the verge of bankruptcy and ready for takeover. Fingal, though he had said nothing, had been impressed by his junior’s inside knowledge. He had also had inside knowledge of the extent of the newly discovered iron ore deposits in north-west Australia, the biggest ever found, and he suggested early investment there. Fingal, after having them checked, had given him the go-ahead on all the suggestions. Tewsday was on his way, a young man to be watched, as business circles said, and no one watched him more closely than his executive chairman. He was not to be encouraged too much, especially by the chairman’s daughter.

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” said Kerry, coming to stand beside his father. “Brigid can look after herself.”

  “It’s him I’m worried about,” said Fingal, but that wasn’t true. He wanted no one in the corporation admitted to the family. An outsider, once admitted, might want to know the secrets of the family.

  Brigid stayed in Sydney a month on that visit. She went out with Jonathan Tewsday three or four times and went to bed with him once; not out of any attraction to him or liking for him but out of her own sexual hunger. She was at a loose end, something she confessed to no one, hardly even to herself. Her development as a painter seemed to be standing still and, almost as bad, her one sustained love affair, with Jules, who was married, was petering out. The future, which for the young is tomorrow, had begun to look like a washed-out fresco.

  She went back to Paris, determined not to confess failure to her father, and Kerry, certain of success, taking the long view, went into a desk job with the Catholic Education Office. Tewsday went back to making money for Ballyduff and Fingal sat in his chairman’s chair and waited patiently for the future, in which he was certain he would have a controlling interest.

  III

  Brigid took up again with her married Frenchman, a lawyer who specialized in divorce and large settlements. But he was only a cinq à sept lover; he would not leave his wife, who was as rich as Brigid and, when she put her mind to it, a far better cook. In February 1963 Brigid discovered she was pregnant. Trying to force her Frenchman to leave his wife and at least live with her, if not marry her, she refused to have an abortion. Jules the lawyer declined the invitation, all at once honourable towards his wife, an occasional French habit. Brigid went to London and had her baby on the National Health, a choice that was a sub
conscious thumbing of her nose at the bourgeoisie, her lover and her father, neither of whom would ever understand her rebellious nature. Teresa was born on November 22, 1963, a terrible day in history. Brigid wept for her, hoping it was not an omen.

  She did not see her father and brother again till Teresa was two years old. Fingal came to London occasionally in that period, but Brigid contrived to be somewhere on the Continent when he was there. She did it out of perversity, another of her mother’s bequests; but she also did not want Fingal assuming a proprietary interest in Teresa, though it was difficult to see him as a grandparent, especially a doting one. She had not told him directly of the child’s birth, but had mentioned (confessed?) it in a letter to Kerry, who had written back and told her how delighted he was for her sake, if that was what she wanted.

  Then the two Hourigan men came to Europe together, Fingal to do business in Germany, Kerry to attend a short course in Rome. They met in Zurich, Brigid coming there from Lerici, in Lyguria, where she now lived.

  “You didn’t bring the child?” said Fingal.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d want to see her.”

  He wasn’t sure himself, but, “She’s my granddaughter.”

  “And my niece,” said Kerry, trying to sound avuncular or anyway espiscopal, which is much the same thing.

  “What would you have done with her if I’d brought her? Played kitchy-koo with her? Neither of you are child-lovers—you make W. C. Fields look like Santa Claus. You’ll meet her eventually, but I wasn’t going to bring her here and display her like some toy doll. She’s not my toy, she’s my child.”

  They were having lunch in Fingal’s suite in the Baur au Lac, looking out on the lake. She had noticed that Kerry took the luxury for granted; though a priest, he was still his father’s son. Luxury, so far, had not concerned her. Her trust allowance allowed her to live very comfortably and she had that reassuring backstop that the children of the rich always have, family money that would pay for any emergency. So far she had not had to call on her father for help and she hoped she would never have to.