A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  ‘When I look at your firm young breasts I probably admire them for the part they played in God’s plan for us by catching my eye some nights as you slipped into your nightgown and prompting me to ask you to yield to me in bed. Or else I simply praise them for the wonderful job they did each time you brought another child into the world—swelling to a prodigious size before the great day and then pouring out gallons of nourishing milk through the conspicuous nipples during the weeks when your infant pressed its hungry mouth against them.

  ‘And when I happen to glance at your supple white thighs and my eye quite naturally travels up them and rests for a moment on the intimate place enclosed between them, I suppose all I do is praise God for designing your body so that a part of it could accommodate my seed and afterwards perform its noble task of propelling another new creature into the world.

  ‘And that, I’m afraid, is all that will happen between us in heaven. I still think we’ll be allowed to stroll now and then through pleasant groves that remind us of Tasmania or Hepburn Springs or the Otways. And because those places once meant so much to us, we surely wouldn’t be breaking the laws of heaven if we held hands now and then or even exchanged an innocent friendly kiss.

  ‘If we feel like it we can both dive into a crystal-clear stream and swim around naked. You can even lie floating on your back all afternoon if you like and I won’t be the least bit interested. I won’t even have to be on guard against strangers finding our secluded spot. If a whole tribe of men and women saints suddenly appears beside our stream and stands looking down on us, we’ll just wave to them and go on swimming.

  ‘In fact our little outing will probably end with some handsome young man wading out to you and looking down on you with nothing but friendship in his eyes and telling you the story of how he was martyred fighting the Saracens in the siege of Acre. You and he will stroll off hand in hand, with you looking up into his eyes and telling him how you were married to a chap in the twentieth century and all about your children. I’ll watch you go, knowing I mightn’t run into you again for years, but I won’t be at all concerned.

  ‘Well, that’s what the Gospel teaches us, anyway. I still think it’s hard that couples like us who love each other so passionately must be no more than good friends in heaven. Perhaps the trouble is that my love for you is far greater than God expects of a husband. After all, He only requires people to be attracted to each other so they’ll marry and ensure a constant supply of new souls to do His Will on earth and glorify Him in heaven. If you and I have the largest possible number of children and turn them out good Catholics, that should be a sufficient reward in itself. We’ve got no right to expect that we’ll enjoy for all eternity the emotional and physical pleasures of being in love.

  ‘If you look at the history of the church you won’t find any saints who got to heaven simply because of their love for a wife or husband. The people honoured by the church as saints are those who never yielded to their emotions or passions. And I don’t mean just priests and brothers and nuns. Only today I was looking through my Daily Missal at the notes on some of the saints who were ordinary lay people like you and me.’

  Sherd picked up the missal from beside his bed and read from it.

  St Praxedes consecrated her virginity to God and distributed all her wealth to the poor.

  St Susanne, a holy virgin of high lineage, refused to marry the son of Diocletian and was beheaded after grievous torments.

  St Frances of Rome was the type of a perfect spouse and, after her husband’s death, of a perfect religious in the house of Oblates which she founded.

  St Cecilia, of an illustrious Roman family, converted her husband Valerianus and her brother-in-law Tiburtius, preserved her virginity and was beheaded.

  St Henry, Duke of Bavaria and Emperor of Germany, used his power to extend the kingdom of God. By agreement with his wife he preserved virginity in marriage.

  ‘These are the people we’re supposed to model ourselves on. There’s no record of any man who was canonised because he had an extraordinary love for his wife and gave up every other happiness to serve her as I’ve done for you.

  ‘When the saints I’ve mentioned got to heaven you can be sure they didn’t moon around looking for their lost loved ones. St Henry would have smiled politely whenever he passed his wife on some heavenly avenue. He might not have seen her for months, but he didn’t miss her because he had learned on earth that there are things more important than conjugal love.

  ‘I’ve never mentioned this to you before, and I hope it doesn’t dismay you, but I think I envy the people who haven’t been baptised. At least they have a chance of meeting their wives or husbands again in limbo and continuing their great love affairs. Limbo, as you know, is a place of perfect natural happiness. It seems reasonable to suppose that the greatest natural happiness of all will be permitted there. In fact, when all bodies have been resurrected after the General Judgement, there might be nothing to prevent a man and his wife in limbo from enjoying also some of the purely physical pleasures they once enjoyed in this life.’

  Early in the third term Adrian’s class went on a retreat at the monastery of the Pauline Fathers. For three days and nights the boys lived at the monastery and observed some of its rules. They kept the Great Silence from evening prayers until after mass next morning; they ate their meals in the refectory while a lay brother read aloud the life stories of great saints; and they walked in the garden for a half-hour of meditation after breakfast.

  The monastery was in a garden suburb a few miles from Swindon. Adrian arrived in a bus after dark. Next morning he stood at his upstairs window and looked across the huge lawns to the tall front fence and couldn’t work out the direction of Swindon or Accrington. He knew the name of the street and the suburb where he was. But it was a part of Melbourne he had never visited before. He might have walked for miles from the front gate of the monastery before he came to some tramline or railway station that could give him his bearings.

  All the time Adrian was at the monastery he enjoyed feeling cut off from the world. He was hidden for a few days in one of the best suburbs of Melbourne for the purpose of looking into his soul and making sure he was on the right path.

  Before the retreat, the brother in charge of Adrian’s class had suggested that each boy should take some spiritual reading. He said there would be free periods during the retreat when the best thing a boy could do was to read and chew over the sort of things he didn’t usually have time to read because of the pressure of his studies.

  Adrian arrived at the monastery with three Australian Catholic Truth Society pamphlets and a Reader’s Digest in the bottom of his bag. The pamphlets were called Purity: The Difficult Virtue, Now You’re Engaged and Marriage Is Not Easy. The Reader’s Digest had an article entitled ‘Physical Pleasure—What Should a Wife Expect?’ Whenever the retreat program allowed free time, he went to his room and read.

  On the last evening of the retreat, the priest in charge called the boys into the monastery parlour and invited them to start a discussion on some problem facing a Catholic young man in the modern world. The priest said he would act as chairman and perhaps give a short summing-up at the end.

  The boys seemed embarrassed about talking in front of a strange priest, but at last John Cody stood up and said they ought to discuss the moral problems of boys and girls mixing together. The priest said it was an excellent topic and told Cody to start the ball rolling.

  Adrian was glad he had taken a seat on the very edge of the boys and almost out of sight of the priest. He was angry with the priest for letting the boys choose such a frivolous topic.

  The boys in his class talked for hours at school about girls they met on trams or at dances. They said such and such a girl was adorable or gorgeous or luscious or cute, but no boy ever dared to claim one of them was his girlfriend. Adrian knew that all these fellows dreamed of was to walk some girl home from tennis on Saturday or fetch her a paper cup of lemonade at the learn-to-dance cla
ss and stand beside her while she sipped it.

  Adrian was sure none of his classmates ever lay awake for hours at night planning seriously his whole future with the young woman he loved. They wasted their time on tennis and dances and parties, and yet they were ready to discuss in all seriousness (in a retreat house, too) the moral problems of their childish games.

  Adrian was spared all the petty troubles of teenagers because he had found quite early in life a young woman worthy to be his wife. At the first sign of any temptation against purity with any female he happened to see in the street, he only had to think of Denise McNamara and the danger was over. But his danger was far less than other fellows’ anyway—knowing that Denise returned his affection, he didn’t have to worry about dances and parties and company-keeping and goodnight kisses and all the rigmarole of modern courtship.

  He looked out of the window into the dusk. The fence around the monastery was hidden in shadow. From where he sat he could see no sign of any street or even a neighbouring rooftop. If he could have kept his eyes on the dark shapes of trees and shrubbery and shut out the affected voices of his classmates as they stood up by turns and had their say and sneaked a look at the priest to see if they were saying anything heretical, he could have imagined himself in a forested landscape—the sort of place he preferred when he wanted to talk seriously to Denise.

  A boy was saying, ‘Although we’re all students, and the main duties of our station in life are to obey our teachers and pass our exams, just the same we have to live in the world outside. You know what I mean—we go to dances and mix with the opposite sex. Some of us might even attend parties where the girls’ parents don’t come to collect them afterwards. So we’re expected to walk the girls home to their front doors. Now, the problem I’d like to hear discussed is this business of the goodnight kiss. You take this girl home and get to the front door and she says, “Thanks for everything.” And then what do you do? I mean, do you kiss her or just leave her standing there? I’d like to hear some other fellows’ opinions on this.’

  Adrian was very anxious to be alone with Denise. Only a few hours before, in the recreation period after lunch, he had found information in his pamphlets and his Reader’s Digest that he had to share with her.

  There was no time to fuss over which month or year of their marriage they were meeting in. He led her straight out through the french windows onto the deserted veranda. She sat on the stone parapet and leaned back prettily against the ivy-covered pillar. They both stared into the sombre forest.

  Sherd said, ‘I know the Reader’s Digest is a non-Catholic magazine, but a lot of the things it says are quite useful if you’re careful to see that they’re not about faith or morals and they don’t contradict the church’s teachings.

  ‘Only today I found something in a Digest article that you ought to think about carefully. It seems that one of the causes of so much boredom in marriages these days is the wife always waiting till her husband asks her whether they can be intimate. This might shock you (I was a little surprised myself when I read it) but there’s no reason why the woman shouldn’t ask the husband sometimes whether he feels inclined to perform the act.

  ‘From my own point of view, I wouldn’t think any less of you if you whispered to me in bed now and then that you wouldn’t say no if I asked you.

  ‘And just to prove that all this isn’t just some idea dreamed up by sensual Americans—I’ve read in an ACTS pamphlet that each partner in a marriage founded on Christian charity learns to anticipate the moods and inclinations of the other. Which means for our purposes that you could make an effort sometimes to watch my moods and learn to tell when I’m likely to approach you. Then you can take some of the responsibility off my shoulders by asking me before I have to ask you.’

  This was one of the most difficult conversations that Sherd had ever had with Denise, and he thought it best to leave her alone for a few minutes while the full meaning of it sank in. He turned back to the parlour of the retreat house.

  Barry Kellaway stood up and said, ‘Wait a minute. Doesn’t it make all the difference whether the girl’s a Catholic or not? I mean, if she’s a good Catholic she’ll naturally be very careful what happens when she’s alone with a chap outside her front door.

  ‘If she thinks it’s the time and the place for a quick little goodnight kiss, the chap can do it quickly and she’ll make sure none of them puts themselves in any moral danger. And if she’s not a Catholic, then the chap ought to examine his conscience because he could easily be going into an occasion of sin whenever he takes her home on her own.’

  Kellaway sat down and looked at the priest in the corner.

  The priest said, ‘For argument’s sake we’ll assume we’re talking about Catholic young people. It’s hard enough to make rules for ourselves without trying to sort out non-Catholics’ consciences for them. But I do agree that there’s no reason whatsoever for boys of your age to be hanging around front doorsteps with non-Catholic girls.’

  Adrian went back to Denise and took her hand. He was a little afraid he might have spoken too frankly to her or given her too much new information at once. But her smile told him she was grateful for all the trouble he was taking to explain the whole range of Catholic teaching on marriage and the latest findings from America.

  He said to her, ‘It’s interesting to note that both the ACTS pamphlets and the Reader’s Digest think it’s most important for each partner to make the act of love enjoyable for the other.

  ‘The pamphlets don’t use those words exactly, but they do point out that either partner would commit a mortal sin if he or she executed the sexual act for no other reason than his or her selfish enjoyment.

  ‘I think we both ought to examine our consciences to see if we’re doing all we can for each other in this matter. And perhaps in future you’ll do your best to make the act more enjoyable for me, while I make sure you’re perfectly comfortable with a nice soft pillow under your head and treat you gently and not get carried away with selfish lust.’

  Denise stared into the twilight. All the talk about intimacy had put Sherd in the mood for it, and he hoped Denise would soon notice he was a little more agitated than usual and guess the reason for it.

  Just then Alan McDowell stood up behind him and said, ‘No matter whether the girl’s a Catholic or not, she must have seen some modern films and realised it’s the custom nowadays for young people to have a quick goodnight kiss at the front door after a night together. If you don’t do it you could be making a fool of yourself and next time you see her she won’t be so easy to get on with.’

  McDowell kept his eyes away from the priest, but several boys looked round as though they expected the priest to break in and explain how wrong McDowell was. The priest only pressed his lips tightly together and made notes on a slip of paper.

  McDowell kept talking: ‘I reckon it all depends what sort of kiss you give her and how long it takes.’ (The room was suddenly very quiet.) ‘If it’s just a quick little one where you just brush your faces together it’s probably no worse than a venial sin. But if it’s one of those other sorts you sometimes see in films where they take a long time to finish’—someone blew his nose with a peculiar sound that might have disguised a snigger—‘well, I think they’re probably dangerous and they ought to be forbidden for Catholics.’

  Adrian didn’t bother to listen any more. It digusted him to think of big, lumpish Alan McDowell trying out different sorts of kisses on girls he had no intention of proposing marriage to.

  Sherd put his hand gently on Denise’s knee and said, ‘I found something else very interesting in the Reader’s Digest. You know, for many years people have thought it was only the man who was supposed to get some pleasure from the marriage act. The woman was expected to be a good wife and put up with whatever her husband did to her and get her happiness from the romantic love they shared.

  ‘Well, just lately these scientists and doctors in America have discovered that if a woman tries hard
enough and learns not to be frightened, and the man doesn’t hurry too much, she might be able to get a sort of pleasure almost equal to her husband’s.’

  On the veranda it was almost too dark to see what Denise thought of this. Sherd wondered whether she would say she didn’t need any more pleasure than she already got from seeing him happy and rested after the act, or whether she would smile shyly and say she would try to be more relaxed next time and see if the Reader’s Digest was right.

  But before Denise could speak, Bernard Negri said, ‘It’s all right for Alan to concentrate on what sort of goodnight kiss you’re going to give a girl, but I think the most important thing for a Catholic boy to worry about is where the kiss takes place. I mean, we’ve been taught all our lives not to go into an occasion of sin. I think I heard once that if you deliberately go into an occasion of sin that you know full well will probably cause you to sin, you’ve already committed a mortal sin as serious as the one you thought you were probably going to commit anyway.

  ‘Well, as I was saying, it depends where you are when the kiss takes place. If you’re standing on her front veranda with the front light on and you know her parents are sitting up inside waiting for her, there’s probably no danger in it. But if you’re at one of these parties where the parents go away and leave the young people on their own and somebody turns the lights off, isn’t there a grave danger that you’ll be tempted to do something worse than kissing?’

  Adrian congratulated himself for having avoided all the tangled moral problems of company-keeping. He kissed Denise tenderly on the forehead and said, ‘So much for the pleasures of marriage. To speak of more serious matters—even many good Catholics are not aware of all the graces and spiritual benefits they’re entitled to get from marriage. Luckily for us, I’ve always read everything I could find on the subject. And buried away in an ACTS pamphlet today I found a wonderful bit of news.