An Angel In Australia

by Tom Keneally

  The purpose of requiring priests to recite the office the world over, from Nazi-occupied Belgium, where his breviary had been published by the Benziger Brothers, to the southernmost priest in New Zealand or Argentina, was to remind the individual cleric that whatever business the rest of mankind might be engaged in—invention, invasion, impregnation—his job and caution, his only possible joy, was in pursuing the divine order. It was there in the vulgate Latin version of the psalm he read with a slight, unobtrusive flutter of his lips, as he hung from a strap, expelling the words in minor whisper which the tram-clang drowned. ‘And I shall walk on a spacious road because I follow all your precepts … I am reminded by light of your name, oh Lord, and I guard your law … I shall take delight in your mandates, which I guard.’

  He was towards the end of None, of the versicle and response, Darragh doing both, unlike the monks with one side of the chapel uttering the versicle, and those on the other side singing the plainchant reply. He had got as far as the words ‘Averte oculos meos, ne videant vanitatem—Avert my eyes, that they should not see vanity,’ when he felt in an instant cleft in two by the sharpest agony of loss. It arose from nothing, from a slight jolt of the tramlines, and carried not only the face of the young mother, but also the face of the boy generated from her, leaning confidently against her knees. Had he ever known such a woman? Had he leaned against his mother’s knees with such casual confidence? He blinked and looked up. The eyes of a proportion of the tram-travellers, reverent and hostile, were on him. He felt certain they could see his extreme condition, the sudden axe which had divided him, shoulder to loins. How will I eat dinner with my mother? he wondered for a second, though he hoped the extremity of feeling would depart by then. The rest of the office remained to be said: Vespers, Compline. How could it be completed before midnight if he felt as distracted as this? His legs ached too, for no good reason, and he wished he had taken the schoolboy’s offered seat.

  As the tram began the climb to Edgecliff, however, the pain retracted to become a dull, habitual depression, and he began reciting the hymn of Vespers. ‘Extinguish the flames of passion, draw off the heat of poison, grant the salvation of bodies and the true peace of hearts.’ He feared, however, that for him an age of automatic grace had passed.

  The bungalow of Darragh’s childhood, approached with the new feeling of having somehow aged during a mere tram ride, and of being tested, stood on New South Head Road in Rose Bay. It was built of plum-coloured brick, and its street-facing windows had little segments of stained glass to relieve them of their banal transparency. His mother, a vigorous, lean woman in her early fifties, tended the rosebushes which marked the way to the verandah and the front door. His parents had bought the house in 1923 from an old Scot who had placed by the front door a framed glass sign in which the word Arbroath was marked out in gold tinsel. They had left it there. The child Darragh had not realised it was the name of a Scottish town, rather than a formula for the hearth. In his present mood of, at best, wistfulness, on this still Sunday suffused with the smell of legs of lamb baking in a thousand kitchens, it failed to evoke much in him.

  One of the baking legs of lamb which, despite meat rationing, were still offered up as a matter of course to Australian Sabbath appetites was inside Arbroath, and Darragh paused at the closed front door and let its savour lead him back to a more grateful sense of who and where he was, and what was his destiny. An only child. A father always pleased for his son’s academic success. Before his sudden death eight years past, Mr Darragh told Frank that though Mrs Darragh was shy and not a woman to make a display, she boasted about Frank to all the neighbours. If she showed wariness in her affection, it did not mean she was not as generous as the young mother he’d met on the train. ‘Your mother is a brick, a true rock,’ his father had told him approvingly. ‘You know where you stand with her.’ Young Frank was as willing as his father to find her reticence endearing, and not to mistake it for coolness. At the Christian Brothers’ college at Rose Bay, he had given his teachers similar cause for celebration. He suffered from no learning problems or laziness, and so did not need to be punished in the muscular way of the Brothers’ community, with leather straps and fleas in the ear. He was competent alike at such contrasting puzzles as cricket and algebra. Nothing befell him, not even in adolescence, to drive him to rebellion, or make him seek a world other than the one he knew—unless it was the idea he had of his father’s participation in the ill-defined mysteries of war, that massive and risky secular sacrament. He had been exactly the sort of unsullied, unworldly yet not stupid young man the seminary sought.

  At the door of Arbroath, he rang the bell and his aproned mother opened the door. ‘Frank,’ she said with a careful smile. Darragh had learned from childhood to read her small signs, as now, when with her eyes modestly gleaming she led him through to the dining room and his Aunt Madge. Madge, his maiden aunt, came through the curtain from the kitchen where she had obviously been assisting his mother with the bake. His late father’s sister was a fuller and less restrained woman with a plump, pleasant face and brown hair. She believed in rouge, and her cheeks gleamed with that and with the sherry she always drank before Sunday dinner. While he admired his mother for taking quiet delight in things, Aunt Madge was rowdier. Her story, however, like her parents’, had been shaped by the Great War. The family story was that her boyfriend from the Illawarra had been killed in France on some muddy, indiscriminate patrol—he had been a mere eighteen years old.

  Madge had spent her adult life as buyer for the millinery department of a store in the city—the highly trusted Miss Darragh who would have made a wonderful wife. For a time about 1934 when Mr Darragh lost his job at Hawley and Ledger, the importing company at which he had worked for thirteen years, Aunt Madge had moved in with her brother and sister-in-law as a minister of mercy to help them pay the mortgage. But most of the time she liked to live alone, in a flat at Dover Heights.

  When she loudly kissed him now, Darragh could smell the pleasant blush of sweet wine on her breath. Past her, he saw the table set with white linen on which cruets sparkled, and was fully absorbed and consoled by the intense and encompassing smells of roast potato and moist lamb.

  ‘We’ll sit down in five minutes,’ said his mother. ‘I have beer if you would like it.’

  After the long tram journey, he chose to have a glass. ‘An aperitif,’ said Aunty Madge, for the sake of elegance or of what his father called ‘bush flashness’. While his mother went to get it, Darragh took off his jacket and went to the room he had occupied as a boy to hang it up. He also undid the press-stud at the back of his neck, and released the Roman collar and stock he had worn all the way from Strathfield. The underside of the stock was sodden with his sweat. So now he became an ordinary fellow in black pants and white shirt, about to eat spud and carrot, baked onion and lamb, with mint jelly taken from a cutglass bowl.

  With the heaped plates before the three of them, Mrs Darragh asked her son to intone grace. He did so, and after a perfunctory sign of the cross as habitual as a kiss between spouses, Aunty Madge looked at her plate and said with an augustness of elocution which was her style, ‘Who would believe there was rationing?’

  ‘I would,’ said Mrs Darragh, and risked a smile at her son.

  Aunt Madge had extracted a price for helping out the family during Mr Darragh’s unemployment, which had barely ended six months before he died. She had a habit of inviting herself to all occasional meals—Sunday, Easter, Christmas—and even many evening meals at Arbroath. Her company was welcome to Mrs Darragh, and Aunt Madge disliked the fuss of shopping and dealing with books of ration coupons. She devoted a great deal of her free time to film-going, and could always tell Darragh which film to see on Monday nights after tennis. ‘That Night in Rio is a commonplace little thing, but if you happen to like Carmen Miranda … Dive Bomber’s not a bad war drama, a little unrealistic if that’s what you’re after. Errol Flynn, what a looker! They say he’s an Australian. I met a fellow after
Mass the other day who claimed to have shared a desk with him at Marist Brothers, Parramatta. I said to him, “Mr Henry,”—that’s his name—“Mr Henry, I wouldn’t believe you except I know a fellow like you wouldn’t lie on the doorstep of the church.” I’m not sure the beggar wouldn’t though. Blossoms in the Dust … very touching. Handkerchief-soaker. Greer Garson looks like a saint but from what I’ve read may not be one. Love on the Dole … now that’s a real film about real people.’

  ‘I’m surprised,’ said Mrs Darragh, with a half-smile which invited Frank into the cautious joke. ‘A woman of your age going to see Love on the Dole.’ It was said to be a notorious film. Priests and ministers who had not seen it had widely preached against it.

  ‘Well, it’s the way people live,’ said Aunt Madge, her voice sweeping in its authority. ‘If you treat people unjustly, they don’t just offer it all up for the souls in Purgatory, you know. They try to find an outlet. Anyhow, where were all those priests who run it down when the working men and women were hard up during the Depression? They weren’t to be seen then. But they’re quick to blame the poor for living close to the bone.’

  Frank Darragh was used to Aunty Madge being an anti-clerical but devout Catholic.

  ‘The actors in Love on the Dole,’ Mrs Darragh surprised Frank by saying, ‘were never your poor working men and women, Madge. That Deborah Kerr. In real life she’s got a plum in her mouth like the queen of England.’

  ‘That’s not what I read,’ said Aunt Madge. ‘In fact, I read that she had quite a hard upbringing as a shopkeeper’s daughter. Anyhow, you’d approve of the newsreels.’ Fork in one hand, Madge raised her other to trace phantom headlines in the air. ‘Rommel’s army on the run in Libya, and our dear boys having Christmas in Egypt. Poor things. They look so young. Will they last the year?’

  ‘Will any of us?’ asked Mrs Darragh, chewing her lamb resolutely.

  Darragh felt a familiar spurt of concern and wondered whether she was really afraid, in the way the people in the confessional were afraid. She had never shown him any fear except when he was ill with whooping cough and pneumonia as a child. She looked levelly at her son.

  ‘You should go and speak to Mr Regan.’ Regan was the next-door neighbour, a thoughtful man, father of three daughters. Darragh had never seen him, even at the most casual moment, dressed in anything less than a shirt with detachable collar, a vest and watch chain, and well-pressed, well-tailored pants. ‘Mr Regan has room for me, and for Madge if she chooses, in his air-raid shelter.’

  Aunt Madge declared, ‘I might come over here, but it is a mile. Whereas there’s a shelter in the park right next door to me. I have a choice between being killed with the sight of Mr Regan’s long, droopy face, or among strangers at the park.’ She laughed, tickled, ‘But, God’s will be done …’

  Mrs Darragh murmured, ‘Nice talk for a socialist. And for a friend of Deborah Kerr.’

  ‘If you’d read Rerum Novarum,’ said Aunt Madge, referring to a famous social justice encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, ‘you’d see that there is no conflict between social democracy and faith.’ Aunt Madge had been a great supporter of the Labor premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang, and had given out ‘How to Vote’ cards in Rose Bay among what she called the ‘silvertail’ voters. She was able to quote from the encyclical, as she did now, for it was the holy text of progressive, political Catholics. ‘“Hence by degrees it has come to pass the working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition …” No one with eyes in his head would argue with that one.’

  It was hard at that moment for Darragh to believe that all the particularity of Aunt Madge and his mother could be wiped out by a stray Japanese bomb. And Mrs Darragh had already told him on previous visits that in the event of the invasion itself, she and Madge had been invited to join the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in their convent-fastness at Rose Bay. The nuns were confident that even the Japanese would not violate such an obviously august cloister. Indeed, Frank Darragh could not think of a better place for his mother to shelter should those terrible hosts that had sacked Nanking improbably arrive in the suburbs of Sydney. He feared he himself would be engaged with his congregation in Homebush and Strathfield. What place, apart perhaps from the abattoirs and the brickworks, Homebush and Strathfield could play in the grand plan of a Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was difficult to imagine, but that might add to the peril of the event. Somehow he could imagine the soldiers of the emperor becoming so enraged by the irrelevance of the suburb that they might be provoked to obliterate its people.

  At his mother’s urging, Frank Darragh went next door to see Mr Regan. Sweet-faced and slightly dazed, Mrs Regan sought to feed him another meal, and the Regan daughters, who had known him in his adolescence, quivered with excitement to have Frank Darragh, translated into priesthood, present in their home. The fact he was wearing shirtsleeves seemed to amuse them.

  ‘I must talk to you, Father Frank,’ said Mr Regan under his breath, and collected from his ice chest a bottle of Dinner Ale and led him out of the cooing and fluttering and teasing of the Regan girls into the back garden and down plank steps into the bomb shelter he had so industriously dug among his backyard shrubs. Frank felt already heavy with his meal, and hoped that Mr Regan, a man in his late fifties, was not about to embark on a moral and military weighing of this languid, humid hour in the world’s plummet towards a resolution. In the centre of the damp-smelling air-raid shelter, amidst harsh-timbered bunks, stood a coarse-grained wooden table, and Mr Regan sat at it, inviting Frank to take a chair on the far side. The air was dimmest umber. Mr Regan uncapped the Dinner Ale and poured two glasses. Apparently, in his experience, few priests had ever rejected the offer of a drink.

  ‘Well, Frank,’ Mr Regan reflectively stated, ‘everyone knows that if they land it will be in the Eastern Suburbs here.’ Darragh had not known that that had been established as military reality. ‘I’m sending the women to my brother-in-law’s place in Cootamundra. At least there’s room to hide out there.’ He sighed. The chance of bloody chaos threatened the fine-sewn seams of his vest, the salt-and-pepper cloth of his pressed Sunday trousers. But he would not flee. The worst he could face was murder. What women faced was unspeakable. Besides, he was a real estate agent. As a member of St Vincent de Paul, he had frequently slotted poorer families in Christ’s name into houses and flats which awaited occupation. The Japanese might spare him for his expertise in finding them billets.

  Mr Regan took out a packet of Capstans from his vest and lit one sombrely and with a flourish, as if it would be the only cigarette he would smoke that day. ‘Did you happen to read the Telegraph today, Father Frank? The front page is all cricket and racing. People dancing on the edge of the abyss. The Australia Hotel and the Trocadero crowded with revelry. The divorce courts full to the brim. I read a piece this morning about an air force officer who went to his wife and said that he was not made for marriage. Just like that. Without any apology. And as if he hadn’t already married her. The judge ordered him to return to her within twenty-six days.’ Mr Regan shook his head. He considered the judge ultimately impotent in these matters. ‘This is the problem as I see it. That we’re a race that deserves punishment.’ He lowered his voice to a confessional hush, and the words caused him pain. ‘Myself as much as anyone. I do not exclude myself.’

  Darragh said, ‘I doubt anyone really deserves bombing, Mr Regan.’ He was embarrassed to see this man who had been one of his elders when he was a boy reduced by the times, and by Darragh’s own dignity as a priest, to adopting a confessional tone. Mr Regan admitting guilt, regret and fear of unarguable doom. This man who had always been so certain and so venerable in the eyes of the fourteen, fifteen and sixteen-year-old Frank Darragh.

  ‘Our god is a racehorse,’ said Mr Regan, in explanation. ‘Our god is a glass of beer. Our god is a dance or worse with a pretty girl. How can we complain if the true God shows us Hi
s harsher face? How can we argue if He chooses another power as His agent?’

  Frank sipped his beer, which made him yawn. He changed the subject. ‘It’s very kind of you to have Mum and Aunt Madge in here.’

  Mr Regan gave a concessive brief smile. ‘Oh yes. But they should go to Cootamundra or some such place themselves, you know. Somewhere that’s negligible, you know. But your mother and Madge are very stubborn.’

  ‘They intend to shelter with you. And then with the nuns, if it comes to that.’

  ‘Well, the nuns feel bound to protect the mother of a priest. And Madge.’ Mr Regan laughed. Everyone seemed to have a wry affection for Madge. ‘Madge comes along in her wake.’

  Mr Regan himself took a mouthful of beer and peered into the mid-distance. ‘I wanted to ask you … Pray for me, Frank.’ Indeed the man had taken on what was to Darragh the now-familiar breathlessness of the penitent. ‘I doubt my courage,’ he said. Frank felt abashed—there was no wire screen between him and Mr Regan the patriarch, no curtain, no grille or sliding wooden shutter.

  ‘If the Philippines fall to the Japanese,’ murmured Mr Regan, ‘and there seems nothing to prevent it, Sydney will be even fuller of Americans than ever. And, you know, they are a corrupting influence.’

  ‘Perhaps we corrupt them just as much,’ said Darragh, thinking of the young soldier who had insisted on offering too much for a Mass.

  ‘No,’ Mr Regan maintained. ‘In my case it’s the other way around. Look, I had an American colonel come to my office the other day. He had with him a young woman, an American—she was in uniform. What they call their Army Air Force. The man had a smooth look. Very different from us; they’re not as dowdy. The colonel wanted me to show him a flat. I could tell it was for the young woman, yet they seemed just about as normal and confident as a married couple. And I was embarrassed, but I did it. I knew, you see, he was setting up a love nest. I’ve always discouraged that sort of thing—I know how to put off a fellow Australian. But there was just something about the easy attitude of this chap I went along with. Just glided along. Like a weakling.’