by Tom Keneally
Monsignor Carolan came in, lifted the teapot off the table and shook it. Reassured that there was tea inside, he poured a cup.
‘How is it going there, Frank?’
‘It’s going well,’ lied Frank, now that the monsignor could not quite be trusted.
‘I was hoping, since there’s a finance committee get-together at Mr Gaffney’s on Thursday night, you might be able to take Benediction for me that night too.’
‘All right,’ said Frank, but not before an instant of consideration.
‘I don’t want to work you to death, old son,’ said the monsignor, beaming with his characteristic Australian bonhomie. He might have been a successful farmer from the bush, a suburban real estate agent. The filament between him and his brethren working in earthly occupations seemed thin at such moments. The weight of his priesthood could seem to rest lightly on him. Yet he was the monsignor. He kept God’s bank passbooks too. All the elite of the archdiocese of Sydney were such men. The alternative, when it came to parish priests, seemed to be isolated, cranky, semi-hermitic and misanthropic old coots in faded, scurfy soutanes and run-down presbyteries.
‘You just tell me if you need a break,’ said the monsignor. ‘You could go up and stay a few days with Father Roberts at Katoomba.’
‘I don’t think I need a holiday yet, Monsignor.’
‘Okay.’ The monsignor ingested his tea in one long draught. ‘Did you hear the Japanese bombed Derby?’ Derby was an improbably remote place in Western Australia. But they were citizens of the Commonwealth there!
Darragh asked, ‘What will happen to finance committee meetings at Mr Gaffney’s when the Japanese come sailing up the Parramatta River?’
The monsignor frowned. ‘That’s a pretty strange question, Frank. I suppose the answer is, we’ll do what we can.’
At this opening, Darragh trembled on the edge of losing his temper, and knew he could not win the argument in his present state. He looked full in the monsignor’s eyes, daring him to see the change in his curate. The monsignor looked away, and shrugged, and left the room. ‘Look after yourself, Frank,’ he called over his shoulder. That was the problem—how to answer the monsignor in a way which did not concede the point?
Now Darragh walked Homebush Road on his way to Mrs Flood’s address as it appeared in the parish records. Christ had amazed a woman He met by the road in Palestine, a region to which the British and Australians now grimly clung. ‘I am not married,’ the woman had told Christ. And He said to her that indeed she wasn’t, that the man with whom she lived was not her husband. Her imagination had been at once captivated, her morality revived. Darragh said a hopeless prayer to the effect that he might have a similarly kindly impact.
Thin beneath his black serge suit and clerical stock and collar, he did not sweat much, which was welcome, since on days of high heat, sweaty priests glistened within their stoles, their encrusted chasubles. Women like the Clancy sisters and others of their age were always asking him did Mrs Flannery feed him enough, as if they wanted him to turn into a fat, companionable, sweaty parish priest of the kind he precisely did not seek to be.
Today he was bound north towards the railway line, and the road called The Crescent, which wasn’t a crescent at all but a straight street, where Mrs Flood awaited the conclusion of her tuberculosis in the company of her two men. He would have felt himself a ghost, and possibly would have liked that, had not he encountered mothers walking their children to St Margaret’s. They exuded huge smiles in his direction, and he bleakly prayed that none of the boys would meet a pernicious brother. If Mr Regan was correct in his idea that the Japanese were God’s mechanism to erase a godless generation, the only trouble was that the inviolate children had to suffer the correction as well.
A military transport train ran along the embankment above The Crescent, and soldiers whistled from its windows at two girls emerging from Pedderick the chemist’s. Boys whistling their way through every suburb and township between Sydney and some camp in the bush. The war did not seem to suppress them. Maybe they found the imminent prospect of the enemy as hard to believe in at this moment as did Darragh himself.
Beyond a garden of lank grass, the front windows of Mrs Flood’s low-slung house were open. Thus Darragh surmised she must be in. The doorbell, the kind you cranked, was answered by a tall man. He wore grey pants, grey vest, white collarless shirt—very much like the abused husband in his dream except that he was fuller in the body. The man’s stoutness saved Darragh from perceiving the dream which had motivated him to come here as too prophetic. As well, the fellow showed a normal secular shock at seeing him.
‘Aw yes,’ he said, as if he knew this awkward day would arrive; and here it was.
Darragh said he was the curate from St Margaret’s. ‘Is Mrs Flood in?’ he asked. ‘I believe she’s been fairly sick.’
‘Yeah,’ said the man, rubbing his overnight beard. ‘Yeah, she’s been a bit up and down lately. It’s her condition.’
‘Is she at home?’
The man stood back, reluctantly permitting Darragh to enter. The hallway had an odour of dust spiked with the bitter scent of invalid tonics and tinctures. ‘We’re out in the kitchen,’ said the man in the vest, directing him up the hallway. Darragh turned. ‘You’re Mr Flood?’
‘That’s right. Bert.’
‘Father Frank Darragh,’ said Frank, offering his hand. But the mutual clench was full of doubt. After all, how could you achieve the normal electricity of mateship between hand and hand if you introduced yourself as ‘Father Frank Darragh’? What other description could Frank give himself though? They would suspect him more if he did not introduce himself in those terms, which nonetheless created an instant space about the priest, across which the sacramental mercies might or might not operate. Mr Flood retrieved his unwilling hand, and led Darragh up the hallway.
In the sunny kitchen, at the head of a scrubbed table with the well-intended remnants of sandsoap embedded in its grain, Mrs Flood, in light from the window behind her, sat in a wicker chair buttressed by pillows. She made a splendid invalid, possessed of a strange beauty. Seated beside her on a plain kitchen chair was a lean but muscular young man, fair-headed, drinking tea and holding in one hand, folded for reading, a newspaper entitled The Worker. Seeing Bert Flood and Darragh arrive, he creased it exactly to the size of a legal deed and laid it on the table like an opening bid. His left hand was heavily bandaged.
‘Rosie,’ said Mr Flood, gesturing with embarrassment towards Darragh, ‘this is the priest from up the road.’ There was a clear, pleading message: you deal with him. You send him on his way with a flea in his ear. There was no doubt Mrs Flood had the presence for such a task. She and the young man studied him in committee. Mrs Flood’s red hair had sinuous curls, apparently of its own volition, without the intervention of beauty parlours. Her eyes glittered. She wore a generous trace of smile that gave Darragh hope of a welcome.
He heard himself repeat his name and tell her he’d heard she wasn’t well. Breathing harshly, and her eyes glimmering in some kind of appreciation, Mrs Flood rubbed her lips with an immaculate handkerchief. She said, ‘Sit down, Father Frank.’ Generally only the close friends of priests had the liberty of calling them by their first names. She was, of course, aware of this, and was possibly sending him a signal—he would not be getting conventional reverence in this kitchen, but then he would not get typical denial either. And perhaps, in her voice crimped by her disease, with the second syllable of ‘Father’ reduced to a wheeze, she was presuming on the authority of her illness to help her through this meeting.
‘It’s years since we’ve had a priest here,’ she told him from her chair.
‘But you’re on the parish roll,’ said Frank.
‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I used to go up there sometimes for Mass. But that monsignor of yours, he’s money-crazy.’
‘Not for his own sake,’ said Frank.
‘Oh, Father Frank, he used to drive a pretty nice car. You met B
ert, did you? And this is our friend, Ross Trumble. Ross crushed a finger at the brickworks. He’s off on compo.’ Darragh exchanged nods with blue-eyed Mr Trumble.
‘Get us some tea, eh, Bert?’ suggested Mrs Flood. Bert went to the stove willingly to check on the state of the kettle, which was close to boiling.
‘Sit down, Father Frank. Take that chair, that’s right. I bet those old biddies the Clancys told you to come and try to improve me. Did you drive down yourself?’
‘Walked,’ said Frank.
‘Good for you, young feller,’ said Mrs Flood. She called to her husband, ‘See, Bert, not all of them have cars.’ It sounded as if they had once had a bet on the matter.
Ross Trumble still considered him, and the man’s cheeks had become flushed from mounting discomfort or hostility. It was clear from these signs he had not met many priests, had preconceptions about them, and waited in uneasy certainty for Darragh to manifest himself.
As Bert came to the table with the replenished teapot, and a fresh cup and saucer for Darragh, Mrs Flood asked, ‘What can we do for you, Father?’
‘Well,’ said Frank, ‘since you’re ill, and no doubt you find it hard to get to Mass, I thought you might welcome the chance for me to hear your confession and bring you communion occasionally.’ The young man was looking utterly away now, not willing to share his gaze with Darragh. He knew it wasn’t his place to say yes or no, however.
Mrs Flood was overtaken by an authentic tubercular coughing fit. It was not opportunistic, a disguised answer to Darragh’s offer. Mrs Flood did not need to disguise anything. The young man, Trumble, rose, turned his back to the company, and went to a bench and poured a brown liquid into a glass. He brought it back and put it down in front of Mrs Flood who, gasping and signalling with eyes and small gestures of her hands that she would soon be well, reached for it and swallowed it at a gulp, right on top of her still active, gasping cough.
‘Thanks, Rossy,’ she said in a choked voice, as serenity re-entered her eyes.
She smiled, and Trumble gave the briefest grin of gratification.
‘Kind of you, young Father Frank,’ she said at last. ‘But I don’t think it’s come to that yet. I’ve got a fair way to go, I hope. Rossy and Bert look after me well.’ She reached out and gently patted the young man’s bound hand. ‘Sinner I am, but I’m not ready for the big last confession.’
There was an implicit wink in the way she spoke. She was not vicious, yet Darragh would not have been surprised to see her flutter her eyelids in attentive Ross Trumble’s direction. She managed with ease this company of three men, two of them rendered uneasy by the presence of the third.
With her polite refusal, what could Darragh do, having chosen the subtle rather than the didactic line? He said gamely, ‘I wasn’t trying to imply that you needed the last rites, Mrs Flood. But every Catholic is supposed to make his Easter duty, to go to confession and take communion before Easter. Would you like me to visit you before Easter?
He looked at Bert. Bert must understand that an Easter confession could restore his marriage. You would expect a husband to hang on the wife’s reply to such an idea, but Bert did not seem to hang on anything or see significance in much. He remained a mildly friendly presence, and distractedly smoked his thin cigarette. His mind was not so much elsewhere, but had long moved away from here, from the triangle around the table and the priest who could amend it.
Mrs Flood seemed to pity him in his bemusement. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you’re a nice young fellow, Father Frank. But neither of these boys here are Tykes. And I think I’m going to have to wait for them to get more used to the idea of you calling in like this. How about if I get them to give you a call if I need anything? Anything along the lines of communion, or eternal salvation. What do you say, eh?’
She beamed, offering her small concession, having thoroughly won this encounter.
Darragh could merely utter the official line. As much as he believed it he sounded like a cop reducing some complicated statute to plainest English. ‘I do urge you to think about doing your Easter duty, Mrs Flood. It’s a requisite placed by the Pope on all Catholics.’
‘I’ll certainly think about it, Father Frank,’ she told him, but with a sudden sisterly frown which warned him not to try his luck further; not if he wanted to be welcome.
Darragh finished his tea. To try to elicit something from the men—he was not sure what—but to try to engage them, he began to talk of the war.
Mrs Flood explained, with a heightened colour in her cheeks for which Darragh hoped she might not have to pay later, ‘Rossy here’s a bit of a Red, you see, Father Frank. He thinks the most important thing is the battle in Russia, because if Hitler wins, that’s the end of the revolution. But God, I have to say I’d hate it if the Nips came. I’d have to call on you then for sure, Frank.’
Frank?
‘Well, perhaps we could meet a little earlier than that,’ said Darragh.
He saw Bert rolling a further, conclusive cigarette, and maintaining the composure of those who survive by being beneath notice. A verandah-dweller to a T. Bert and Trumble and Mrs Flood knew it was time for him to go. Supporting his bound hand a little, Ross Trumble stood up. ‘I’ll see him out,’ he insisted.
‘May I give you a blessing before I go?’ asked Frank of Mrs Flood.
‘Don’t see what harm it can do.’
Trumble averted his eyes during the small rite.
‘Benedicat vos …’ He used the plural, so that even torpid Bert and hostile Ross, without their knowledge, were encompassed in the rite. ‘Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus.’
‘Feel better already,’ said Mrs Flood, opening the bright eyes she had kept closed for this prayer, her marvellous smile in place. ‘Thank you, Father Frank.’ With the generosity of that smile she had beguiled first Bert, and then lean Ross Trumble. She who had the power to leave them with nowhere else to go, exactly as she had left Darragh with nothing else to do except depart.
He told all of them it had been a pleasure to meet them, that he would remember Mrs Flood at Mass, and then Ross Trumble was solemnly leading him back up the hall. The tall, fair-haired brick worker opened the door with his undamaged hand and then blocked the exit.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I can’t call you “Father”, so don’t expect it.’ He waited a while as if he half-hoped for a strong chastisement from Darragh.
‘I can’t make you do anything, Mr Trumble.’
‘Okay, Frank, listen. You’re just another feller to me, you see. You seem a fair enough bloke which makes it all the more bloody outrageous that you should come here with your “I’m Father Darragh” and your “Let me give you a blessing”, and all the rest of the bag of tricks.’
‘It’s what I was put on earth to do,’ Frank asserted. He still hoped it was true.
‘Yeah, and you might be sincere about it. But I bet you live pretty well. Better than us.’
Darragh could do nothing but fall back on his common malehood and shrug. ‘I get paid barely thirty shillings a week.’
‘Yeah. But all’s found for you by the believers, isn’t it? And you whack on about God and redemption, but really you’re put here on earth to keep the workers in their place. To offer them heaven instead of justice.’
‘I’ve heard all those arguments, Mr Trumble.’
‘I think they’re pretty good arguments, Frankie boy.’ He was breathless with anger, Darragh noticed. ‘I mean, God doesn’t need marriage, but the banks certainly do. One little two-person mortgage after another. Do not fornicate outside the marriage because you’ll buy the second woman a dress or a jewel, and that’ll get in the way of bank repayments!’
Frank said with an ironic smile which invited Trumble into the joke as well, ‘I never knew that. That I was a bank employee.’
Trumble wouldn’t concede. ‘You’re as much a bank’s man as any copper. Look, I know what you’re here for. You’ve heard the gossip and you’re chasing u
s up. You think if you hear her confession you can make her split up with me. All of us out in the kitchen knew what this was about. So to me you’re just a bloke who tries to stand between a man and his woman. And according to tradition, that’s a bloody dangerous place to stand.’
Darragh, edgy with anger, nonetheless decided to resort to equivalent frankness. ‘Come on, Ross. The way you’re living isn’t natural.’
‘It’s natural as hell to me. I’m warning you, you’ve got no special protection just because you happen to wear a dog collar. You ought to wake up to yourself!’
Darragh had always surmised that one day there would be threats of this nature. He had imagined that they would be easier to brush off than this one was. His arms and legs, ready to fight if needed, felt heavy with alarmed blood. His mouth was dry, and he felt foolish and negligible.
‘Are you going to let me out of the door?’ he asked Trumble. ‘I’ve got other duties today.’
‘You poor young bastard,’ said Trumble, and stepped aside at last.
Darragh walked out, down the steps, across the garden, and took exact care closing the wire gate, as if that might earn him some credibility from Trumble.
BACK IN THE presbytery, Frank Darragh ate his lunch with a wooden but profound appetite. In the face of Mrs Flood’s charming refusals, of Trumble’s hostility, he urged himself to greater firmness and self-respect. It was not as if this fallow season of the soul was unexpected, and its feelings of leadenness and futility. Every authority spoke of the onset of the disease called accidie, a sort of religious version of profound boredom, a sense of the withdrawal of grace when no notable sin has been committed to explain it. Mystics—St John of the Cross, St Teresa of Avila, as well as Thomas à Kempis in The Imitation of Christ—all wrote of this sudden absence. It could last for years, and the traveller had numbly to seek his way, in the certainty that illumination lay at the end of the track. He had had it easy until now, yet who was he to expect it would be joyous all along, when even St John of the Cross had walked the path of ashes? Still, with this deadness in them, it was not to be wondered that some priests preferred playing golf to hearing confession, or that they consoled themselves with food or drink or gambling. And with oblivious sleep. Manoeuvring other, younger priests into doing the early Masses.
