A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  The McAloon boys were watching him. They probably thought he was teaching himself to meditate like a priest. The thought of meditation gave him his answer. For centuries, priests and monks had gone off to meditate in lonely places. They knew they were close to God in caves and secluded valleys. The agitation that troubled Adrian in scenic spots was only his awareness that God was near.

  At the far end of the beach the two girls, his cousins, were going behind the rock. They had scrawny arms and legs, and freckles all over their faces, but he had noticed the shapes of breasts in the older girl’s bathers. In the warm sunny corner, beside a limpid rock pool, the girl was peeling the damp cloth down from her shoulders. There were goosepimples on her white, freckled skin. She stretched her legs apart and rubbed with the towel to get the sand from the insides of her thighs.

  Adrian threw himself into the water. The splash startled the McAloon boys. He wondered had they heard of the holy hermit who used to roll naked in snowdrifts and thorn bushes to drive away temptations of the flesh.

  When he returned home to Melbourne Adrian found a letter with the Charleroi insignia on the envelope. It told him he had been accepted as a candidate in the junior seminary of the Congregation of Christ the King. He was expected to present himself in the first week of February.

  Adrian showed the letter to his parents and asked his mother to book his ticket on the Spirit of Progress and to make sure the train stopped at Blenheim. Then he visited his Aunt Kathleen to say goodbye and thank her for all she had done for him.

  He had never seen his aunt so excited. She said she had a thousand things to tell him before he left. First of all he must always wear the brown scapular of Our Lady. Aunt Kath gave him a new one in case his old one was worn or grubby. (He hadn’t worn a scapular since his first one had fallen to pieces in primary school.)

  She told him the story of a young Australian soldier in New Guinea during the war. The soldier’s mother had asked him before he went away never to be without his scapular. One day he was on patrol in the jungle near the Japanese lines. He was about to walk into a clearing when he felt something holding him back. He kept trying to move forward but this thing kept stopping him. Suddenly there was a noise of firing in the clearing. A Japanese sniper was shooting at the Australian patrol. If the young soldier had gone ahead he probably would have been killed. Then he found out what had held him back. His scapular had caught on a branch. Our Lady’s brown scapular had saved his life.

  Aunt Kathleen urged Adrian to take as his chief patron St Gabriel of the Sorrowing Virgin, who had been proclaimed by one of the popes as a model for young people in the modern world. St Joseph of Cupertino would help him to pass his exams. St Joseph had desperately wanted to be a Franciscan priest, but he just couldn’t learn his Latin. When the time came for his final exams, the only Latin he knew was a certain paragraph he had learned by heart. He prayed all the night before, and sure enough the Bishop examining him asked him to repeat that very paragraph. So he became a priest and worked many remarkable miracles.

  St Anthony of Padua would always find lost objects for anyone who prayed to him. St John Chrysostom would help Adrian become a great preacher. (Chrysostom was Greek for Golden-Tongued.) And the Curé of Ars, St John Vianney, would make him a successful confessor. People used to travel from all over Europe just to go to confession to St John Vianney. One day a man finished his confession and the saint said, ‘But you’ve left out your worst sin.’ And it was true. The man had been too frightened to confess it, but St John Vianney could see into people’s hearts in the confessional.

  Above all, Adrian’s aunt urged him to have a special devotion to Our Lady. He should choose one of her many titles (Aunt Kath’s favourite was Our Lady of the Seven Dolours) and consecrate his whole life to her. Adrian said he had holy cards of Our Lady under some of her titles, but he would love to go through his aunt’s book, The World’s Great Madonnas, and take his time over the great works of art in it.

  His aunt got the book from her shelf and said it could be a going-away present for him. He was so grateful that he told her it would always be with him in his cell—on a little shelf among his spiritual reading.

  When he was leaving she reminded him of all the sodalities and confraternities and societies she had enrolled him in since he was a small boy. Adrian thought of the lamp in the convent in Wollongong that had been burning night and day for his intentions, and wished the nuns could know that their prayers had worked after all, and he was going to be a priest.

  On a table in the hallway his aunt kept a Jacky Mite Box—a little moneybox of red and yellow cardboard with pictures of Chinese boys in coolie hats and wide sleeves. Visitors were supposed to feed Jacky Mite Box with pennies for the Missions in the Far East. Just before he said goodbye, Adrian fed Jacky a two-shilling piece to make up for all the times he had let him go hungry in the years when he was neglecting his religion and disappointing his aunt.

  That night Adrian organised a sacred beauty contest. He tried not to think of it as a beauty contest—he knew that Catholics were advised not to take part in such things. And he had never forgotten that a bishop in America once excommunicated a young woman for appearing in the Miss Nude Universe Contest.

  Adrian’s competition was not judged according to physical beauty, although the winner would have to be graceful and pretty. He intended to find among all his pictures of Our Lady the one that would most arouse his devotion. After he had decided on the winning picture, he would take it to Blenheim and paste it inside the door of his room. Each time he left the room he would glance up at the picture and carry away the beautiful image of Our Lady in his mind. She would inspire him in his work and study just as the image of Denise McNamara had inspired him in the old days at St Carthage’s. And each night when he lay waiting for sleep, the face of the purest woman who ever lived would watch over him.

  Adrian spread out all his holy cards of Our Lady. He wanted to choose two finalists from the cards and two from The World’s Great Madonnas, and then wait a few days before the Grand Final.

  Since his first years in primary school, Adrian had heard Our Lady praised as gentle, loving, kind, pure, modest, meek, patient and spotlessly chaste. He had always been sure that such a woman would have a perfect face and body to match her virtues. But he had never heard any priest or brother or nun mention her physical beauty.

  Sometimes he did hear bits of information that agreed with his own ideas about her beauty. A priest would say, ‘When God was looking for a human being to be the mother of His own beloved Son, he had to choose the most perfect human nature that the world has ever seen.’

  Once, a brother had told Adrian’s class, ‘The great theologians think that God would never have asked Our Lady to endure the sufferings and discomforts of giving birth as we know it. When the time came for Our Lord to be born, it seems almost certain that the Divine Child simply appeared miraculously in her arms.’

  And then there was the doctrine of the Assumption and the story of how the Apostles found Our Lady’s body gone from its grave and a mass of white lilies growing where it had rested. Our Lady had been assumed body and soul into heaven because it was not fitting that the flesh from which Our Lord’s body had been formed should be corrupted in the grave. Her body, still youthful and perfect, was somewhere in heaven even in the twentieth century while Adrian was looking for a worthy picture of it.

  As he judged the pictures, Adrian looked only at the faces. Some of the holy cards showed full-length views of Our Lady but she always wore long loose robes that reached to her wrists and ankles. He had once seen in a book of old masterpieces a Madonna with the Child on her knees and two naked breasts poking out of her dress. If that picture had been entered in his contest he would have disqualified it—it was not a genuine portrait of Our Lady. The idea of her breastfeeding the Child Jesus in public was preposterous. If some sort of feeding bottle had been invented in those days she would surely have used it. Or God could even have nourished the C
hild miraculously, just as He had caused him to be born in a supernatural way.

  Some of the contestants were quickly eliminated. Our Lady of Perpetual Succour had sharp, foreign-looking features and a stern expression. Her lips were pale and thin like a nun’s. She was not nearly feminine enough.

  Others were ruled out because their faces were spoilt by grief. They had dark circles under their eyes or tears rolling down their faces. Our Lady of the Seven Dolours had a fiery glow where her chest should have been, and her heart was exposed to view with seven little swords stuck into it.

  The two finalists from the holy cards were Our Lady of Fatima and a young modern Italian Madonna.

  Our Lady of Fatima wore a long cream-coloured robe braided with tiny gold stars and falling away to reveal a pure-white ankle-length tunic underneath. Our Lady was barefooted, and the skin of her feet was the same flawless golden pink as her facial complexion. Her hair was hidden beneath her mantle, but her colouring suggested she was an ash-blonde.

  The Italian Madonna wore the traditional blue with a mantle of white. The mantle was draped a little carelessly over her head, exposing a few tresses of a bright auburn shade. Her complexion was breathtaking—Adrian had only seen its equal on two or three film stars. But of course the film stars would have used layers of expensive cosmetics, whereas the Madonna’s skin had the radiance of natural good health.

  Her delicate eyelids drooped as she clasped the infant Jesus in her arms. The mother and child were in a glade of roses, and the subtle tints of the blooms echoed the glory of the Madonna’s face. Behind them a pastel-hued dawn was breaking over the roof of a noble building of white marble. They were in some corner of the classical world that had never been defiled by the sensual Romans.

  There were nearly a hundred entrants from the pages of The World’s Great Madonnas. The first to be eliminated were all the Asian and African and Red Indian and Eskimo Virgins, grotesque and impossible to venerate. Adrian would have described them as ugly if it hadn’t seemed vaguely disrespectful to the Mother of God.

  The two finalists from the book were Mater Purissima from England, painted by Frederick Goodall RA, and the Mother from The Holy Family by C. Bosseron Chambers, one of America’s greatest contemporary artists.

  Mater Purissima was a queenly figure with two turtledoves pressed to her breast. Her eyes were downcast and her expression was as innocent as any that Adrian had seen beneath the convent hat of a Catholic schoolgirl. The American Mother was a little older than the other three finalists—a beauty matured by her experience of the world.

  One of the four finalists was to be Adrian’s Patroness for life. He would serve her as a knight in the olden days served his lady. Adrian got scissors and paste and mounted the four Madonnas on strong card. Out of fairness to the contestants he made the four pictures exactly equal in size. He had to mutilate the two pages of The World’s Great Madonnas, but it was in a worthy cause.

  A few days later he sat in the stalls of a city theatre waiting to see Anna, starring Silvano Mangano. He had overheard Cornthwaite talking about this film during the last term at St Carthage’s. Adrian knew it was pretty hot, but not bad enough to be condemned by the church. He would not commit a mortal sin by watching it, but it might put a few mild temptations in his way.

  Before going into the theatre he had calculated how long the film would last and divided this time into four equal parts. As the film started, he took out of his pocket the first of the four finalists in his contest. He held the picture in his cupped hands to hide it from the people around him while he stared at it for a minute or so. Then he put it safely back in his pocket.

  During the first quarter of the film there were several scenes (shots of deep necklines, close-ups of women with lips ajar and nostrils quivering, long passionate kisses) that started the alarm bells ringing in his conscience. Each time this happened, Adrian closed his eyes and called on Our Lady of Fatima to protect him. He took careful note of everything that happened in his mind during the few seconds that followed. Usually it was like a scene from a film all his own. The pale dignified figure of Our Lady of Fatima floated slowly into centre screen. The scantily clad, sultry Italian woman who had tempted him took one look at the cream-gowned Lady hovering above her and fled from the screen, with one hand covering her face for shame and the other trying to rearrange her scandalous neckline.

  During each quarter of the film Adrian used a different one of his four finalists to guard his purity. On the train home to Accrington he compared the results and prepared to announce the winner of the contest.

  He had been rather alarmed to find that none of the contestants was totally effective on every occasion when he had called on her. There had been two or three nasty moments when a nearly naked film star had planted her hands firmly on her hips and stared at the Patroness of Purity and tried to brazen it out. Once, the temptress had looked meaningfully at Adrian and edged towards him as if to say that she had first claim on his loyalty because he had loved film stars long before he loved Our Lady.

  However, all four finalists had managed one way or another to keep him from the brink of mortal sin. As the train neared Accrington he began the speech leading up to the announcement of the winner.

  Our Lady of Fatima, he was sorry to say, was just a little too dim and ethereal under her pale voluminous mantle. He meant no offence, but she was after all an apparition designed to appeal to Portuguese peasant children forty years before. In the turmoil of modern life in the 1950s she did not seem quite corporeal enough to be the Patroness of a young man who had once been excessively hot-blooded.

  (Before dismissing each of the unsuccessful finalists Adrian promised he would pray to her from time to time with minor requests that she would easily be able to grant him.)

  Mater Purissima was very beautiful indeed. Her only fault was that in the stress and panic of temptation he had tended to confuse her with memories he had of senior Catholic schoolgirls sitting with downcast eyes in Melbourne trams and trains. He had never been able to imagine himself talking familiarly with those virtuous aloof creatures. And unfortunately for Mater Purissima he found her, too, just a little beyond his reach.

  The Mother from Chambers’ Holy Family was a real flesh-and-blood woman. He could readily see himself falling at her feet in time of trouble—even flinging his arms around her gowned ankles as he cried out to her to save him. But even she, he regretted to say, would have to forgo first prize. He hesitated to put his reservation into words for fear it might convey a hint of sacrilege. But he assured her he was only describing what had actually happened when he had thrown himself on her mercy.

  In the most perilous moment of his worst temptation in the theatre, when he had stared intently at her face, there had been a horrible instant when she seemed to be not the Mother of God who would freeze with one glance the raging fires of his passions, but an ordinary human being—a smiling young married woman who thought he was looking to her for human affection. No doubt this was his fault and not hers, but the mere fact that it happened made it impossible for Chambers’ Mother to be his Patroness.

  It was clear by now that the winner of the grand final was the young Italian Madonna who had entered the contest without even a title. Before enthroning her as his Patroness and consecrating his life to her, Adrian wanted to confer a distinctive title on her.

  He recalled the moments during the film when he had fled to her from the snares of women who were actually, he was sorry to say, her fellow Italians. She had saved him not by confronting the temptresses as the other Madonnas had done. She had not even deigned to look at the giddy misguided film stars. Instead she had signed to him to follow her through the dense rosebushes burdened with gold and vermilion blooms. Moments later, with her as his guide, he stood in a landscape where no temptation from the modern world could reach him. He breathed an air that no city had ever contaminated and looked up at a sky of other days. She had taken him back to the Great Age of Our Lady.

  He w
ould address her ever afterwards by the name of her lost kingdom. He tried to remember Golden Ages of the past. Into his mind came a name, a harmonious name that recalled a civilisation where she and he would have been at home among soft sea mists and monasteries full of illuminated parchments and the distant sound of hymns in Latin and Gaelic. He knelt before her and addressed her as Our Lady of Dalriada. He swore that from that day on, whenever danger threatened, he would spurn the allurements of the modern world and flee with her to the sanctuary of dim Dalriada.

  In the last fortnight before he left for the junior seminary, Adrian Sherd thought about the duties and privileges of the priesthood.

  A priest had to love the mass. Adrian would not find this difficult. He was looking forward already to the privilege of holding the chalice, which no lay person was allowed to touch. As a priest, he would know the feel of the gold-plated lining that actually came into contact with Our Lord’s Precious Blood. He would lean forward over the altar so that the congregation saw only his hunched back, and hear from only a few inches away the awesome crackling noise as his anointed fingers gently fractured the Host.

  His aunt had once told him a story that showed how deeply a priest ought to love his mass.

  During the war an Australian priest was imprisoned by the Japs in a POW camp. The Japs knew he was a priest, and because they hated the Catholic religion they had threatened him with death if he tried to say mass. They had confiscated all his vestments and sacred vessels, and they searched his cell every day and even shone torches on him at night to make sure he was not trying to celebrate mass in secret.

  Day after day the priest prayed to God for the means to offer just one mass. At last he thought of a desperate plan. He took a teaspoon and the back of a silver watchcase and blessed them and hid them in his mattress. He squeezed a few drops of juice from a grape into the teaspoon and left it for a few days until it fermented. Then he got a tiny morsel of bread and hid it with the other things.