by Tom Keneally
By next morning he had convinced himself that some speed was advisable. He believed that an instinct or a revelation—one or the other—told him that he lived on a temporal plane, and that human souls are redeemed in time.
The Heggarty house when he arrived at it at four o’clock that afternoon was the kind that people called a duplex, a word which seemed to offer more than the narrow-fronted dimensions which now faced him. Mrs Heggarty lived in one of two adjoining dark brick little dwellings, both of them with the random air of being rented out rather than owned. But the Heggartys’ place had its front gate and its little garden, and a side gate with a narrow laneway which led to the backyard where Kate Heggarty could hang the washing and Anthony romp.
Darragh’s ringing at the door was answered by Kate Heggarty herself, who seemed flustered and out of breath, her hair done up in the sort of scarf factory workers wore, as if she had arrived home a few seconds before. She had the busy appearance of a woman who had a pot on the stove in one room, and ironing to do in another. But at the sight of Darragh she gave in to events and composed herself.
‘Father,’ she said. She seemed very solemn and a little confused. His earlier suspicion, that she wanted him here as a sop to her vanity, evaporated. She asked him please to come in.
She still had an air of bewilderment as she closed the door behind him, and in the dark hallway talked for reassurance, ‘Gosh, my mother would be pretty upset with me for having a priest in the house when it’s so messy.’ But as they passed two shut bedroom doors and came into the lounge room, mess did not seem to prevail. Darragh was somehow delighted that she had here all the standard treasures of womanhood, including the china cabinet with a good tea set. A small statue of the Virgin Mary sat beside the mantel clock, to show that she had not definitely decided against that part of her being. On a lacquered rattan table stood the picture of her husband, Heggarty, in his dark serge, hopeful beneath a jaunty hat, and herself in a calf-length wedding dress. The marriage day. The picture established an authority in the room. The sight of the soldier’s definite features brought to Darragh a sense of the filament of marriage pulled wire-thin by the distance between Heggarty and his wife, but still honoured here on a rattan table. In The Crescent.
‘Please sit there, Father, and I’ll go and get tea.’
Darragh smiled. ‘I don’t think I want to sit here in style alone. The kitchen’s good by me.’
‘Oh,’ she murmured, gravely considering the issue. ‘Gee. I suppose that’s okay.’
She spoke like a woman trying to hide blemishes when there were no blemishes to hide. Nor did she place any stipulation, as she had by letter, on what might be said. Only that he would forgive the housekeeping. Yet the kitchen he entered with her was swept clean, the yellow linoleum polished to a well-worn sheen. The coloured glass in the windows of her deal dresser shone. Who am I, he wondered, to expect a perfect kitchen, and to accept it as a token of grace in its owner? Yet he had already done so.
‘Please,’ she said, ‘sit down.’ She pulled out a chair by her small, varnished kitchen table. These were, Darragh knew, the founding pieces of furniture of a hard-up marriage. And then it occurred to him that that was what embarrassed her—that she expended her life on the obscure maintenance of these few things bought on instalment payments from Mark Foy’s or Grace Brothers. She would have liked to have the luxury of treating them negligently, but she could not afford it. Because of her poverty, she must maintain these sticks and laths as if they were museum pieces, and part of her resented the fact and longed to be able, for once, to be a bit negligent.
‘Please sit,’ she repeated with a breathless desire that things should go well. ‘I’ll boil the kettle.’
Darragh said, ‘This house does you honour, Kate.’
She paused in lighting gas under her full kettle. She was as taken by surprise, as he was, that he had used her first name. ‘Yes, but I just wish the maid hadn’t taken the day off.’
All her movements fascinated him. It was a great temptation to dream oneself the possessor of this house, particularly this humble kitchen which so frustrated her pride. ‘I don’t want to break the terms of your letter,’ he said. ‘Not that I necessarily accept them, but we’ll let that side of the argument rest. But I have remembered you. In the Mass and the office …’
She coughed. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m pleased … No, that’s silly, Father. I’m grateful.’
‘And no news of your husband?’
‘Except that I called the Department of Defence. They think his group has been moved to Tunisia, and that in time they’ll be sent to Germany or somewhere else in Europe. They said they’d write when they know more. Poor fellow, he’ll be bored stiff.’
If she considered boredom the extent of his sufferings, Darragh thought, then it was a good thing.
The tea was ready. She went to the ice chest and took out a lump of fruit cake.
‘You can’t make it properly, under rationing,’ she told him. ‘You have to skimp on the eggs and butter.’
‘I can’t,’ said Darragh. ‘Lenten fast.’
‘What if I cut just a small cube? You could have that.’
He consented. ‘A very small cube.’ And sipping his tea he tasted the mouthful of cake she had cut for him and declared it superb. Perhaps, despite her disclaimer about the cake, the kind man’s eggs and butter were in this recipe. And with the sweetness in his mouth, he began to ask himself what he was doing there. Shorn of all power except the power of his eunuch example. Did she like the idea, after all and despite herself, of a tongue-tied priest dancing attendance on her?
He was distracted by Anthony running in flushed from the backyard, followed by a neighbours’ kids all demanding their slice of cake. Anthony with an only child’s resolve swamped by the clamant, rough-elbowed children of her neighbour. To those children, Darragh was barely a presence, while Anthony was made to stand still and greet him. Then, with the fruit, flour and sugar in their blood, they raged out again without spoken intent, in a tight formation like migrating birds. They knew what they were about.
‘Thalia Stevens’s kids are a bit rowdy,’ Mrs Heggarty explained with a faint smile. ‘She’s got too many of them to polish them. But she’s the best neighbour I have. No pretensions.’
But was Thalia Stevens the source of some of her ideas, Darragh wondered.
There was now another rattle at the back screen door. Darragh thought it must be a late-arriving child. From his place at the table, however, he saw the stooped blond figure of Ross Trumble, leaning there, peering in. His face was weirdly bloated—he had either been in a fight or got a skinful of beer somewhere. He carried a heavily wrapped packet in his hands.
‘Ross,’ called Mrs Heggarty. ‘What in heaven’s name are you doing here?’
‘I,’ said Trumble. For a time, he considered the proposed shape of his intended sentence. ‘I have had the afternoon off from the sick room,’ he said. ‘Been to town. The Journalists’ Club. I have a friend …’
‘The bar’s open there, obviously.’
Heartburn made Trumble’s mouth form into a rictus. When the spasm had passed, he said, ‘You could say that, Katie. But I’ve got some chops for you too. From another friend. At the abattoirs.’
‘Another Commo, I suppose?’
‘Well, Katie, you don’t need to take them.’
‘I don’t want them if they’re stolen goods.’
‘No, they’re part of his meat quota, for Christ’s sake.’
‘No blasphemy, Ross. Come in then. Have some tea.’
Trumble opened the screen door and stepped in. As he put down the bundle of meat on the sink, his eyes took in the room, with Darragh at the table.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said. ‘Father Death himself.’
‘Father Darragh,’ said Kate. ‘And you be polite! Sit down here.’ She organised a chair for him, back on to the sink, and picked up the parcel and transferred it deftly to her ice chest. She seemed to Darragh to be
habituated to this movement—Trumble called in regularly, and brought gifts of meat. Surely she was not risking damnation for the sake of such prosaic parcels?
Today, however, Trumble found the business of sitting occupied all his mental and physical powers. Watching him, Darragh’s own mental powers were centred on whether to stay or go. Why was it his kind of priest, and not the monsignor’s kind, who sat at a tea party with a would-be apostate and a Communist?
‘How is Mrs Flood?’ Darragh asked Trumble.
‘How’s Mrs Flood?’ Trumble repeated, but—it seemed—with not too much viciousness. ‘Not too bloody flash is the answer. I ought to be there but I needed to have a break. I don’t know. The sick room gets me down. I spent long enough sick myself …’
‘You devote a great deal of time to her, Ross,’ Kate Heggarty reminded him. The proposition that hung in the air was that he was a fine and considerate adulterer. The scales of virtue were shifting in this kitchen, and the standard weights no longer applied. Even Darragh felt the shift. The idea that there could be virtue at the heart of sin seemed not as outrageous an argument as it should. And this was the problem with Kate Heggarty, he saw. She was a Catholic, but within a world of Stevenses and Floods and Trumbles, whose codes of conduct had not been laid down in any Thomistic code, and whose ethics were not mediated by the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Trumble drank his tea hungrily. It brought sweat out on his forehead. When he was finished, he looked up at Darragh. ‘You know, I’m trying to be polite. But I don’t like you breathing around Kate.’
‘Shut up, Rossy,’ said Kate Heggarty, a sudden and easy severity in her eye which showed she knew how to manage rough trade.
‘You like sick women, don’t you?’ Trumble asked Darragh. ‘You’ve got ’em where you want them. They can’t do anything except say sorry. But Kate’s not sick, is she?’
‘Drink up,’ Kate ordered Trumble. ‘You’re out of here, son!’
He looked up leadenly. ‘It’s the truth,’ he said.
‘You know I’m a Catholic. Don’t even begin it, Ross! Drink up and get out.’
‘Oh jeez!’ said Trumble, but he drank and—to Darragh’s amazement—rose, belched, said a polite general good afternoon, and vanished by the back door.
‘Thanks for the chops,’ she called after him. And then to Darragh, ‘I’m sorry.’
Darragh smiled, but wondered whether he should question her about Trumble. For reasons he could not define, he didn’t want to. He did not want to find out she had stooped to Trumble. He might turn into an automatic priest again and say something to drive her away. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Darragh. ‘I’ve been told off by Mr Trumble in the past.’
But he was delighted the man had gone. Now a conversation between a parishioner and a curate could develop. But Mrs Heggarty did not want it to, or had other matters more important to her.
‘See, Ross never knew his mother,’ said Kate Heggarty, anxious to explain Trumble’s behaviour. Bert had been the same way. There was something about Trumble which made people enumerate the reasons for his blunt rhetoric and hostility. ‘Rosie Flood was like his mother and his girlfriend all in one. And Rosie’s dying, so he comes sniffing round other kitchens, looking for a future home.’ And she smiled broadly at this; the predictable brashness of it had endeared Trumble to her. ‘He doesn’t mean any of that stuff he says,’ she continued. ‘It’s just he gets scared if he doesn’t fill the air with it, he’ll have to explain himself. He thinks everyone has to be told about the whole caboodle—history, society, religion, the world. He’s easier with all that than he is saying hello like a normal person.’
Darragh could tell from the fading light beyond the screen door that soon he must go. He could not sit on in this quiet hour, drinking tea to no purpose.
‘Look,’ he said, feeling more her brother than her priest, ‘I know you can’t be harangued, Kate. And I don’t want to …’ He began again. ‘To be honest, I can’t see much benefit here, in these walls, from that fellow, whoever he is. I can’t see anything notable enough to risk a marriage over. That’s what puzzles me.’
Her face flushed, but only mildly. ‘I think, living in the presbytery, it’s hard for you to tell, Father.’
‘Is there nothing to be said then?’ he asked her. He knew traditional priests would scorn the asking of such a question. They would have walked out the door, warning her emphatically of hell. But that would not have been of any service to her.
‘You know what I’ll say,’ she said, suddenly straining for breath. ‘I know what you’ll say. Have more tea though. Don’t give me up for another five mintues.’
So he drank more tea and there was minor conversation but little to say. He rose at last, and thanked her and left fairly briskly, not to string out the futility. He was aware too that there was no basis for future meetings, unless like Mrs Flood she should unexpectedly summon him to bring the sacraments or other comfort. Walking home in a light shower, he felt depressed that the contact had ended. Was Catholicism and its orthodoxy sometimes better designed for the timid, for twitching souls who came too often to confession, for the scrupulous so hungry for absolution at every hour? That was a mystery. A mystery so great that, although not short of breath, he found himself pausing, like an asthmatic gathering strength for the next stride. Like the old monsignor creeping up the seminary driveway.
AS DARRAGH ATE toast with nothing but a thin film of butter one Lenten morning, the monsignor, wearing his usual indoors clothing of white shirt and black trousers, came into the dining room, a long, knowing smile on his face. It was of a nature to make Darragh suspect that the man indulgently knew of his letter and visit to Mrs Heggarty, and would want to argue about it and offer a tolerant rebuke of the kind Darragh found harder to answer than screaming outrage. But it was some other mystery of human behaviour and divine will he wished to bring to Darragh’s attention.
‘A fine Catholic, that Inspector Kearney,’ said the monsignor. ‘Here is a man who must run the investigation of every notable crime in New South Wales. Yet he still has time for the faith of his childhood. He’s tracked down your young man, Howley, the missing brother. This Howley’s been working on a transport ship, taking supplies to Queensland. Good way to vanish from a community, eh? At least for a time.’
‘Is he well?’ asked Darragh.
The monsignor pulled the lower part of his face sideways and assessed his whiskers with the back of his palm. ‘Brother Keogh went to see him at some seamen’s canteen in town. The young bloke fobbed him off. By now he’s no doubt been around the fleshpots of Townsville, which they say is full of Yanks.’
As for Mr Regan, Darragh’s mother’s neighbour, so for the monsignor: the Yanks and fleshpots went hand in hand.
‘I suggested to Keogh you might want to go along next time, to confess the boy. And advise him.’
Darragh could not say anything of that. ‘If Brother Keogh wants me to. Yes.’ But what an awkward meeting it would be, over mugs of tea in some sailor-frequented place.
‘The bugger’s situation needs to be made regular,’ declared the monsignor.
Darragh hoped that Brother Howley would both remain on coastal steamers and seek dispensation from his vows. Yet Darragh thought his case too complex for his talents. It was not normal in the way Mrs Heggarty’s case was normal.
In the gravel walk between the presbytery and church Darragh paced and recited the office, the crunch of his boots pleasantly syncopating the utterance of the Latin psalms and hymns. This was near the place where he had spoken earlier to the formidable Inspector Kearney, who put murdered spirits to rest and thus needed his beer. As Darragh recited, he frequently had to repress the dangerous images of Mrs Heggarty’s honest and lovely fury as she ordered Trumble from her kitchen. And even more fatuously, the silly daydream that he would look up to see her standing by the gateway into the street, tired now of apostasy, a sister in Christ. Her lack of so doing had him restive, and the Latin he recited h
ad a strange feel of being tedious not so much to himself as to God. The Cantate Domino passed from his lips more as sigh than urgent whisper of exultation. ‘Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes rivos aquarum—As the hart yearns for the water of the brooks, so does my soul desire Thee,’ felt like an utterance of pale hope rather than accomplished reality. How could it be the established truth of his soul when his eyes kept being drawn towards the street gate?
The gate to the street did creak in answer to his fantasy, and he looked up to see Master Sergeant Fratelli wearing a shining helmet, as if posing for St Gabriel in Raphael’s The Annunciation. The letters MP on his sleeve showed he was on duty, or close to it. A large camouflaged car stood parked behind him as if, in the best police tradition, sealing an exit. Another soldier was at the wheel.
‘Hello, Father,’ called Fratelli. ‘I said I’d be round. I got something you might need. Just a moment.’
He walked to the car, opened its back door and extracted a cardboard box. As he approached again through the gate, Darragh could see the box was laden with groceries, lustrously packaged. Even as America hung on for survival, it had the thoroughness to send its glittering products everywhere with its troops. Perhaps the images on the tins of Spam and peanut butter gave the American warrior a vivid sense of the preciousness of what he fought for. ‘I thought that with rationing and all,’ said Fratelli, ‘you and the monsignor might need a little of something extra.’
‘You mustn’t put yourself out,’ Darragh protested. ‘After all, it’s still Lent.’
‘No, I can get this stuff easy, Father. Anyone of my rank can. It’s nothing.’
Indeed, Darragh felt an automatic gratitude rise in him. This package would have great potency with Mrs Flannery, who was always talking abut the difficulties of shopping, and the niggardliness of certain Masonic shopkeepers who knew that she worked for the priests.
