An Angel In Australia

by Tom Keneally

  On an arranged morning in Lent, Mr Conover, who looked like the all-wise Lionel Barrymore from an Andy Hardy picture, came to collect Father Darragh from the presbytery for air-raid practice. They walked together to the school, where Felicitas and the nuns had assembled all the children on the tarred playground. Some of these latter were babes—five-year-olds, even an occasional bright under-five. No amount of assumed brashness on the faces of the third graders could wipe out a pervasive quality of wide-eyed uncertainty in the mass of children. One of the younger nuns, parading the senior ranks with a hand-clapper device which warned children to behave, seemed herself restive and fearful. The jaws of the clapper, audible to Darragh, seemed determined to eat away all bravado, to summon an appropriate fear to the place.

  Sister Felicitas beckoned the distinguished air-raid warden and Darragh forward, introduced them again to her charges, and invited Mr Conover to address the children.

  ‘Children,’ said Mr Conover, like a kindly bishop, ‘have you ever heard the air-raid siren sounding from outside the council chambers, just up there, a block and a half away?’

  The children, used to pacing their chanted responses to adult authorities, cried, ‘Yes, Mis–ter Con–ov–er!’

  ‘Today we will practise what will happen if the air-raid siren sounds to announce a real air raid. Now, there were enemy bombers which bombed Darwin, and children there went safely to shelters when the siren went, and came out safely afterwards. Do you understand?’

  They told him in their school plainchant that they did. Mr Conover turned to Darragh, ‘Father, if you could go into the shelter first, so the children who come in can see you as they enter …’ Darragh agreed. He hoped that on the day, in the instant before some terrible impact of war, he would be able to console these innocents, cast over them the mantle of the sacraments. What he did not want to think of, what he knew would be easy to think of in a vulnerable shelter, was their being lifted by the hand of detonation, and pounded to dust.

  ‘Father Darragh will be in the shelter first, so there will be nothing to worry about. God and Father Darragh will mind you.’

  All eyes turned to Darragh, and they believed. On Conover’s glib tongue, he had become the parent of parents. Now that they had invested their faith in him, the young nun’s wooden clapper could afford to turn silent.

  ‘So let us imagine that Japanese bombers have appeared over Sydney. The siren at the council chambers has sounded, and you come out here, obeying the nuns. No pushing, children, for the siren will sound in good time to allow everybody to get to the safe place. Now, Sister Felicitas, which children go first?’

  Felicitas knew. Third graders, girls first, were already moving in orderly pairs. The little girls of St Margaret’s affected a solemnity which only a few of the larger, freckled boys, muttering, tried to bear away.

  ‘Father,’ said Mr Conover. Thumb in vest pocket, he gestured to Darragh with his free hand to take the lead of the marching children. As he reached his place at the column’s head, Darragh could hear the girls’ voices behind him, whispering and clicking away, a knitting-needles sound as they sewed together their mysterious discourse. ‘Father …’ he could overhear them say now and then. They were not fully at ease but had been told to be brave for the sake of the youngsters. ‘Father …’ Their reliance on him gave him back a purpose. He reached a low green door in the church wall, a door of tongue-and-groove planking. Apparently Mr Conover considered it up to strength in the event of dive-bombers. Darragh wriggled at its painted latch and opened it. ‘Very well, children,’ he said over his shoulder, and stooped and entered a dark place which exuded the smell of clay and abiding moisture. He lit the torch with which Conover had provided him and guided the children to benches which lay all around the edges of this extensive cavern. The girls hurriedly sat, anxious to find a place beside best friends and face the unimaginable peril hand in hand. Encouraged by the entry of the older children, the five and six-year-olds followed, many of them surprisingly composed, like people performing a practised rite. It was then that he saw, among the dimly lit infant faces, that of Anthony Heggarty, the son of Hitler’s prisoner.

  The light of unwitting victimhood which shone on so many young faces seemed to Darragh to mark out the young Anthony Heggarty’s features in particular. The child had taken up his place on one of the benches yards from Darragh. Suddenly all the children, more than a hundred and twenty of them, had found seats under the instruction of those excellent marshals, the Dominican nuns.

  Mr Conover himself entered, stooping in his suit, and closed and latched the green door from the inside. A new order of murk prevailed and the earthen smell dragged at young nostrils. There was an unconscious bout of anxious sniffing, until the children became accustomed to the air of the place. The light of the nuns’ and Darragh’s torches was rendered intense but narrow.

  ‘Now,’ said Mr Conover. ‘You all have your linen bags. Say the bombing becomes heavy. Take out your little halves of tennis ball and put them over your ears.’

  There was a rustling of linen and fingers, and soon all the children had a demi-globe of tennis ball attached to either ear.

  ‘Now your ears are protected,’ said Conover, ‘but you can still hear Sister, can’t you? And you can still hear Father Darragh.’

  Although he wondered how either Felicitas or himself could be heard during a bombing raid, Darragh was delighted for the children’s sake to play along, and do a voice test, as did Felicitas, and all the children as a mass, including the fourth class tough guys by the door, chanted in unison that indeed both could be heard. The noise of their answer surprised them a bit, for it zipped around the steel columns and returned quickly to them from the buttressed under-floor of the altar.

  Sister Felicitas took over. ‘So Mr Conover would like you to keep those halves of tennis ball on your ears for five minutes now, for bombing can last that long or even longer. If the noise is so loud that you might be tempted to bite your tongue, you’ll be told to take out the plugs you have in your linen bags and bite them with your teeth—isn’t that so, Mr Conover?’

  ‘That’s exactly right, Sister Felicitas,’ Mr Conover agreed, maintaining the myth of leisurely bombardment, of explosions which left space for leisurely decisions.

  So the children were told to remove one tennis-ball half, get the plug from their bags, bite it, and then replace the temporarily removed earguard. A nation of tennis players, going to war with hemispheres of rubber to protect their eardrums.

  The children bit away at their mouthguards for a minute, some too avidly and with exaggerated tooth-display. ‘Firmly but gently,’ Sister Felicitas told them. An older boy dropped his in the dirt and others spat out theirs to laugh at him. ‘Take those boys’ names, Sister,’ cried Felicitas, and the one with the clapper hastened to do so.

  The same nun, having taken the names of the miscreants, wielded her clapper at a nod from Felicitas, and the children were asked to return their mouthplugs but not their earguards to their pouches.

  ‘So,’ said Felicitas, ‘we shall ask Father Darragh to lead us in the singing of “Hail, Queen of Heaven”, keeping the tennis ball halves over your ears while you sing.’

  Darragh counted to three and then swung his hand, and the children burst forth, their voices sharpened, exalted by where they were.

  Hail, Queen of Heaven, the ocean star,

  Guide of the wanderer here below,

  Thrown on life’s surge we claim thy care,

  Save us from peril and from woe …

  Young Heggarty, eyes fixed, sang the words off distractedly into a void. Darragh liked the hymn, and belted it forth with an automatic joy, the enthusiasm which had been his entire life until recently. He had always presumed himself as close to the Virgin Mary as to his earthly mother in Rose Bay. He could not envisage the features, though. The standard statues of the Madonna, the lady in blue and white, with her foot upon the serpent’s head, had derived in considerable part from the visions of St
Bernadette of Lourdes eighty or so years past. A biblical-scholar priest at Manly, however, had once remarked that every racial group made statues of its divinities and saints in their own likeness, and that although statuary provided a fair spiritual focus between the faithful and their saintly intercessors, the features were not meant to be taken literally but, like an illustration in a book, as an aid to imagination. The professor then surprised Darragh by suggesting that Christ and His Mother, as Aramaic-speakers and inhabitants of Galilee, must have been Bedouin-brown. The Virgin Mary was unlikely to have exceeded five feet three inches in height, the scholar said, and Christ Himself unlikely to be more than five feet seven.

  The Heggarty boy was dreaming, the familiar words slipping half-formed from his lips. Another hymn, ‘Faith of Our Fathers’, was proposed by Sister Felicitas, and Darragh again acted as choirmaster. The small, well-schooled voices sawed their way up and down the complicated verse:

  Our fathers chained in prisons dark,

  Were still in heart and conscience free.

  How sweet their children’s fate would be–ee,

  If they like them could die for Thee–ee …

  Five minutes of protected eardrum practice passed. Via his sighting of Anthony Heggarty, the worrying images of Mrs Heggarty and the stranger, generous for a purpose, replaced the idea of Japanese bombardment and of the dimensions and appearance of the Holy Family in Darragh’s mind. The urgency had re-arisen in him to write to Mrs Heggarty, to send a note home with Anthony. After this air-raid practice he would examine his conscience perhaps, and if there were to be a letter, it would be based on an honest exercise of piety, not on the basis of pride, or of any other desire his instincts told him it was better not to name.

  Sister Felicitas called on him, now that the tennis ball halves were back in the linen bags and the children had had as much practice as their years could stand, to bless the entire group. ‘Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus…’ The littlest ones were allowed into the open air first, and crouching under the low roof still, Darragh heard how the sunlight outside gave them back their voices and called out all the laughter which, in the bomb shelter, had lain buried.

  Back in his room and at his prie-dieu, its kneeler buffed by the knees of a number of former St Margaret’s curates, Darragh attempted his examination of conscience. He began with formal prayers—the ‘Our Father’ the ‘Ave’, the ‘Confiteor’. Then he tried in their residual light to organise his motives, to place them in line with absolute principles rather than with thoughts about how eminently, touchingly, beautifully ripe for salvation Mrs Heggarty was. Her honesty, for one thing. It seemed to give her a special strength of claim. He put in a quarter of an hour, recited some more prayers in conclusion, rose with the matter unresolved, and went straight to his desk and wrote the note to her, as he had really known from the start he would. He had been concerned, he said, by their conference. If she would like to speak again, she must feel free …

  He waited in the playground, intercepted Anthony Heggarty, placed the letter in his satchel and told him to be sure to give it to his mother. He did not care, nor should he have, if Sister Felicitas saw this transaction from her dominant place on the school steps.

  IT WAS THE kind of late summer day in which, if possible, people stayed indoors. The air blazed beyond the windows, and was rendered dense with smoke from a bushfire in the Blue Mountains. Saying his office in the corner of the living room, Darragh was interrupted by Mrs Flannery, tentative because she knew the importance of the hours. There was an American soldier at the door.

  ‘Oh,’ Darragh commented. ‘I didn’t hear the bell.’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Flannery. ‘He sort of appeared. He looks very impressive.’

  Mrs Flannery might have made an Australian soldier wait until Darragh had finished the office. But the Americans had the authority of their strangeness and their air of confidence.

  The soldier in the hall, Darragh noticed in the small time before the conversation began, was a large, well-made man, but did not stand with the typical jauntiness Sydneysiders associated with his type of particularly well-cut uniform. He held his cap at his side, and his smoothly combed brown hair did not seem much brilliantined. The stripes on his sleeve were worn, as Americans wore them, the reverse way to Australian chevrons—pointing to the shoulder, ascendant. Beneath this man’s three stripes were further semi-rondels. The man stood peering up at a painting of St Jerome, translator of the Bible into vulgate Latin, who knelt in umber oils amidst the scrolls of his own and others’ scholarship, bare-breasted, a stone nearby for penitential beating of his breast. He withdrew his gaze from it dazedly as Darragh appeared before him, and blinked. He had extraordinary almond eyes, as fascinating, Darragh thought at once, as those of a knight or courtier or angel in a Renaissance altar piece.

  ‘Father,’ the soldier said, ‘am I disturbing you?’ He was perhaps a year older than Darragh, and his particular mixture of forwardness and courtesy was refreshing on a dull morning in Lent. Darragh said not at all, and marked his place in Vespers with one of the coloured in-sewn tassels of his breviary.

  ‘My aunt’s died back home,’ said the soldier, fixing him with the almond eyes.

  ‘Ant?’ asked Darragh, thinking this an insect joke.

  ‘No,’ said the soldier, shaking his head, self-reproving. ‘I forgot you guys pronounce it different. My A–U–N–T. She’s a widow. And not so old. I was wondering if you could say a Mass for her.’ He pulled from his trouser pocket a folded envelope. He knew the protocol for offering a priest a stipend for saying a Mass for the dead.

  ‘My father’s sister-in-law, see. Louisa Fratelli. More or less raised me, with my parents being so busy with the market garden. I’ve written her name on the envelope.’

  Darragh accepted the envelope and considered it. He looked inside. There was, as the last time an American had asked him to say Mass, a full pound note. But this was to be a Mass for the dead. To be asked to say Mass for a person who had died so far-off—that was a new experience.

  Darragh said, ‘I should tell you … the normal stipend for a Mass is as little as five shillings and never more than ten.’

  ‘Please, Father. Take it. Put the rest in the poor box.’

  Darragh said, ‘Thank you. I will. We have a very active St Vincent de Paul branch here, and soldiers’ families to look after, Sergeant …’

  ‘Sorry. I’m Master Sergeant Gene Fratelli. G–E–N–E, as in Gene Kelly. Eugenio, I was baptised. I’m an MP, but I take my armband off in places like this.’

  Darragh introduced himself and asked, ‘Where did your aunt die?’

  ‘Next door my parents. Place called Stratford. In California. The Central Valley. Lots of Italians. Some Portuguese. You know. The Portuguese and Mexicans do the picking.’

  ‘Why did you come to St Margaret’s, Sergeant?’ Darragh wanted to know. ‘Not that you aren’t entirely welcome.’

  ‘I’ve been to Mass here once or twice.’ Darragh was surprised. He would surely have noticed such a striking face from the pulpit.

  Darragh suggested, ‘There’s a dance club at Flemington—a lot of American soldiers go there.’

  ‘I don’t hang round those places, Father. I like quieter people. Someone to take a poor GI in and give him dinner.’

  So, someone in the area had kindly fed Sergeant Fratelli, Darragh concluded. He could not quite defeat in himself the idea that there was something odd about a man wanting a Mass said in Australia for a woman who had died in California. But there was no reason why such an arrangement was not entirely proper. The Communion of Saints transcended all borders and traversed an ocean with ease.

  ‘I’ll announce your aunt’s name at the Masses on Sunday,’ said Darragh.

  ‘Louisa Fratelli,’ insisted Darragh, for verification.

  ‘You know, that would have tickled her,’ Sergeant Fratelli told him with a sudden smile which reached up and nicely kindled the almond eyes. ‘I’ll try to be here for it, u
nless I’m on duty of course. I’m running Suspects Squad at the moment.’ Darragh did not know what that meant, and did not ask.

  ‘Who’s this guy again?’ asked Fratelli, nodding towards the painting.

  ‘St Jerome. Fourth or fifth century. I don’t know the exact dates, Sergeant. He came from North Africa and translated the Bible into Latin. He’s the patron saint of librarians, and he was secretary to a Pope, but he often lived in desert caves.’

  ‘He was an Arab?’

  ‘Egyptian, I believe.’ Darragh was not utterly sure.

  ‘And the stone in his hand, Father?’

  ‘He was penitential. He beat his breast with desert rocks.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Fratelli. ‘That’s what I like. I like saints’ stories. Because I’m not one myself.’

  He smiled, his lips folding gently. ‘Are you and the head priest fixed for groceries, Father?’

  ‘Yes, thanks, we’re well off.’

  ‘You’d say that,’ Fratelli asserted, as if he knew Darragh well. ‘I can get stuff easy. The PX at the Showgrounds.’

  ‘Please, don’t go to the trouble …’

  ‘Okay. But you guys have rationing and all …’

  ‘You’re a generous man. But we’re well looked after, thank you.’

  The man saluted casually, without that British snappiness the Australians were taught to affect but rarely managed. With a last look at St Jerome, he let himself out of the door. He had fascinated Darragh with his casual courtesies, which were stylistically different from those of young Australian men. Darragh had noticed that in addition to his stripes, he wore three white service bars on his lower sleeve, which meant he had served in the army for some years, probably since he was eighteen, and thus—as Kearney had in Sydney—had beheld mayhem. That reality made it harder for Darragh to define the man Fratelli was. But that was merely one small mystery cast up by the new order of the world, when to defeat the risk of terrible Japanese strangeness, one needed to invite some relative strangeness within the walls.