The moment came one evening when we had been discussing the dismissal of one of the lecturers for sexual harassment. The case was particularly heinous because the lecturer in question—Berrigan noted in passing the homophonic appropriateness of the title—had used academic bribery and blackmail to ensure silence and get his way. I speculated aloud whether that difficult adjective ‘evil’ was appropriate in this context.
‘Oh, no,’ said Berrigan with unexpected firmness. ‘He was weak and vain and dishonest—as much with himself, as with anyone else. But evil? Oh, no, that’s a different kettle of fish.’
‘But surely the effect of what he did . . . ?’
‘Effects are not relevant. We don’t call a drunken coach driver wickeder than a mass murderer because he kills more people in a traffic accident. Effects anyway are ultimately incalculable. Evil, like beauty, is a thing of itself, without cause or justification. It is an entity, independent of those it acts on and through. When you see it, you know it.’ Berrigan was leaning forward and I saw that there was a tremor in the hand that held his whiskey. ‘Hannah Arendt was wrong when she talked about the banality of evil. Sin is banal. Human weakness is banal. But evil lies beyond human weakness. It preys on human weakness, and it is not banal.’
‘There’s something you’ve been wanting to tell me,’ I said.
Berrigan leaned back with a sigh. He was grateful for the opportunity, but I detected a residue of reluctance in him. At the time I thought that as a Catholic priest, he may have felt it beneath his dignity to open up to a mere Anglican. I now believe I was mistaken: Berrigan was beyond such trivial sectarian concerns. When a man has stared into the pit as he had, he very properly hesitates to communicate the horror he has experienced.
He made several false starts to his story, and often, during the course of his narration, went into long digressions, fascinating in themselves, but not relevant to the events he described. I will therefore give a précis of what he told me and only set down his exact words when I can remember them and they are of importance.
I must also, for the sake of completeness, make one other observation. The time of year was October, and it had been raining. My house is a modern one, its rooms are small and centrally heated. The radiators were on and the room when he began to tell his story was pleasantly warm, but as he got into his narrative I began to experience something like cold. That is the only way to describe it, because I am sure that, had I looked at a thermometer it would have shown that the temperature had not dropped. It was similar to having a fever when you know that you are perfectly warm but you still shiver, and cold sweat courses over your skin. But the symptoms were not shivering or cold sweat, but the kind of stiffness and paralysis, both mental and physical that you experience if you have to spend a long time in a cold, damp room.
**
Soon after his ordination Father Berrigan was sent to a parish in the North of England. The work was hard; the poverty he witnessed was distressing, but the sense of fulfilment was great. The period we are talking about was shortly after the Second World War when there was at least almost full employment, and communities had not yet begun to disintegrate. He had been working in this parish for about a year when he was summoned by his bishop to a meeting. I gathered from hints dropped by Berrigan that relations with the bishop were strained for reasons he did not make clear.
At the meeting he was asked, in addition to his parochial duties, to take over as confessor and spiritual director to a convent. An elderly priest who lived in semi-retirement nearby was able to say Mass for them, but he was not considered to be fit enough for more exacting spiritual duties. Berrigan was deliberately vague to me about the location of this convent, but I gathered that it was in a fairly remote part of rural Lancashire and some distance from his own parish. Berrigan wondered why he had been chosen for the task, but the Bishop merely said that it was because Father Berrigan had a car, a rare commodity among Catholic priests in the 1950s.
His predecessor in the role had been a Father Coughlin who had withdrawn, apparently because of ill health. (Coughlin incidentally was not the man’s real name; Father Berrigan told me he could not reveal it.) Berrigan asked the bishop if he might speak or write to Father Coughlin, but the bishop forbade any communication and refused to reveal Coughlin’s whereabouts. There was something about the bishop’s more than usually abrupt manner which made Berrigan feel that information was being withheld from him.
The following day Berrigan drove over to the convent which was called The House of the Sacred Heart. It stood in its own grounds on the edge of a large village which Berrigan called Crampton. It had high walls and was approached by a long gravel drive via a spiked wrought-iron gate which needed to be unlocked by one of the sisters. The house itself had been purpose built at the turn of the century of red brick in a plain, soulless style. The order of nuns which it served was contemplative though not utterly silent or enclosed. They conducted retreats, and they had attached to them what was known as a Magdalene House where unmarried girls who had become pregnant could be brought to have their children delivered and then taken away to be adopted. There, under the supervision of the nuns, the girls worked a laundry—the convent’s chief source of income—until they were deemed fit to be released again into the community.
‘We are talking about the 1950s,’ said Berrigan, ‘when attitudes were not as enlightened as they are now.’ I nodded, acknowledging my friend’s almost obsessive desire to give as accurate and fair an account as he possibly could.
His first impressions of The House of the Sacred Heart were contradictory. ‘I felt I ought to have been more uplifted than I was. It was a fine day, bright with high clouds and a bit of a breeze, a good walking day. The place was spotlessly clean and neat; and the nuns I met showed cheerful faces. I was given what I could have described as a warm welcome; except that it left me cold. Perhaps the fault was mine. There was something too about the light in the convent which I did not care for. It is hard to describe except to say that the place was very cool and white, somehow unnaturally so. It reminded me of the light you get in a room when it has been snowing and the sun reflected off the snow throws a while glare on the walls and ceiling. I was shown into Mother Superior’s office. I remember the one picture, a crudely coloured photograph of Pius XII, staring intensely at me out of that bespectacled skull of a face. Behind a desk Mother Superior smiled at me. She had regular features, and the typical nun’s look of scrubbed agelessness, shorn of everyday human charm or ugliness.’
Berrigan found Mother Superior an admirable woman but not especially sympathetic. ‘She was utterly devoted, efficient, unimaginative, a born organiser. Perfectly nice, but. . . . You find them in all denominations. In your church they’ll be supervising bring and buy sales and flower rosters. . . .’
Berrigan hesitated a moment and I knew his thoughts. He was wondering if I felt that he was implying that my wife was like that.
‘Margery was hopeless at flower rosters,’ I said. ‘Bring and buy sales left her cold.’
Berrigan smiled sheepishly, then went on: ‘If that type has a fault it is a certain reluctance to face reality if a problem turns up which is beyond their capacity to deal with. Pretend it isn’t there and it will go away was her philosophy. An inadequate one, as I discovered. But she was very friendly, and she knew how to treat me, without that creepy, servile respect that nuns often show towards a priest.’
After the interview with Mother Superior Father Berrigan took tea with the other sisters in their parlour. There were sixteen of them and Berrigan was introduced to every one individually. ‘One small thing nagged at me. I can’t say I was disturbed by it, but it did seem faintly mysterious. I had the odd impression that there was one nun in that parlour to whom I had not been introduced, and yet, when I counted them off, and memorised their names, I found that I had met them all. I put it down to nerves and unfamiliarity.
‘When the tea party was over I asked if I might visit the girls in the Magda
lene House. Mother Superior seemed a little surprised and disturbed by my perfectly reasonable request. I had been deputised to see to their spiritual needs as well as those of the sisters. Mother Superior took me through into their quarters.’
‘The girls’, as they were called, though some of them were in their late twenties, were housed in an annex, built slightly later than the main convent building. The ceilings were not so high, but the place had the same atmosphere of high polish and cleanliness, and Berrigan observed the identical quality of light that was in the convent. There were about a dozen girls who slept two to a room. The conditions under which they lived were not exactly harsh. They were clean, of course, and a degree of modest comfort was allowed them. They had a common-room which contained some easy chairs, a shelf full of improving books and a piano, but no radio or gramophone. Mother Superior explained that most of their time was taken up with work in the laundry or in cleaning and polishing the Convent. Berrigan gathered that the average stay in Magdalene House was six months.
‘We find that they come to their senses very rapidly,’ said Mother Superior. Berrigan had looked at her face to see if he could detect any signs of compassion, or even irony in her expression, but there was nothing. The girls seemed calm and well behaved, but there was something in their look that worried him. ‘It was an expression common to nearly all of them,’ said Berrigan, ‘a sort of miserable resignation. All the fight had gone out of their faces. But underneath that there was something else; something I couldn’t put my finger on immediately. Afterwards I realised that it was fear.’
Berrigan drove home in a heavy mood. The following Saturday, he was due there in the afternoon to hear the confessions of the community, and on the day in question, he felt a reluctance to set out on his journey which went well beyond the reasonable misgivings he felt about his new appointment. ‘It was almost a physical force,’ he said, ‘as if someone were pressing down on my shoulders jamming me into the ground so that I couldn’t move. I felt a terrible lassitude, of the kind I rarely felt in those days. Still, I went.’
Unlike the previous Saturday, when he had first seen The House of the Sacred Heart, the weather was overcast. Long lines of grey cloud, in Berrigan’s phrase ‘like dirty bolsters’, lay over the landscape. It struck Berrigan as odd, uncanny even, that, though there were few electric lights on in the building the quality of the light, that blank and leprous white, was precisely the same as it had been the previous Saturday, even though the weather was quite different. He went to the convent chapel and made ready to hear the confession of the sisters.
At this point in the narration Father Berrigan allowed himself one of his charming, transforming smiles. ‘Monsignor Knox once said that hearing the confession of nuns is like being nibbled to death by geese,’ he said. ‘Well, without claiming to be the expert on geese that poor Knox was, I would say that was about right. All the petty failings of humanity are there, but writ smaller. All the little nastinesses of the caged convent world came out.
‘Well, all that I had expected. I was old enough in my profession to know that convents are not havens of serene sanctity. I had heard the confessions of the sixteen sisters and the Mother Superior and was preparing to leave the confessional when another slipped in to the box. I could see enough through the grill to know that it was a nun. But who was it? Was there another nun in the convent that I had not been told about; or was it one of the nuns I had heard slipping in again to tell me something she had omitted from her first confession? She said the “Bless Me, Father, for I have sinned” in a strange breathy voice, almost a whisper, that I did not recognise. The accent was Irish, but not, I thought, a genuine one. It sounded to me like stage Irish, self-conscious and mocking.
‘Obviously, Bill, I can’t tell you the substance of the confession. Even if I were released from the seal of the confessional I wouldn’t, but that confession was a horror. Oh, I don’t mean murders or anything dramatic like that, just an endless litany of cruelties inflicted on the inmates of the convent, mostly verbal, sometimes insidiously physical. Animals had been tortured too apparently. But the worst things had been done to those poor defenceless girls in Magdalene House. The recital was interspersed with the most terrible blasphemies. More than once I tried to stop her but she went on and on in this teasing mock Irish so that I began to feel that I was only the latest of her long line of victims. That was the worst of it. The creature on the other side of the grill had not only enjoyed committing her crimes, she was now taking pleasure in reciting them to me. When she had finished I began laboriously to admonish her before giving her the penance that was suitable to her. What it would have been I cannot think, because in the middle of my stumbling homily she left the confessional. I heard tripping feet running lightly over the stone of the chapel floor, then the chapel door clanged shut with a deafening reverberant echo.’
There was a long pause. Father Berrigan leaned back in his chair exhausted by his reliving of the ordeal. ‘May I come back tomorrow night and tell you the rest?’ he said.
**
The following night we had dinner together at a restaurant. He seemed more cheerful. As we walked back to my house he took up the story again. ‘There was one thing I didn’t tell you about which I should have done,’ he said. ‘There was something about my interview with the person I shall call the Seventeenth Sister that I had found exciting. Arousing even. The horror predominated, but I cannot deny the undercurrent of another feeling. It was what made my mind return to it time and again.’
Father Berrigan had made enquiries with the Mother Superior about the Seventeenth Sister, but she said that there were only sixteen sisters under her and that was that. He did not think that Reverend Mother was lying, but her dismissal of his story was abrupt to the point of rudeness. ‘There is all the difference in the world between not knowing and not wanting to know,’ was Berrigan’s comment.
The only solution that Berrigan could think of to the problem of the Seventeenth Sister was that one of the girls in Magdalene House had been playing a trick on him. But then he heard their confessions and decided that this was out of the question. None of them had the spirit for it. The faults they confessed were even smaller and drearier than those of the nuns. Had a nun come twice to confession? And if so, why?
Berrigan was still pondering these questions as he walked to his car in the drive. ‘As I was about to get into it,’ he said. ‘I was approached, rather furtively I thought, by Sister Joseph, one of the younger sisters. She was a small, almost dwarfish creature with prominent and badly arranged teeth. I sensed urgency in her manner, and fear. She told me that she had happened to overhear my conversation about the Seventeenth Sister with Mother Superior. She told me that not so long ago there had been another member of their community, Sister Assumpta, but that she had died. I tell you, I had no idea what to make of this, and I asked her what on earth she meant. She merely said: “Ask Father Coughlin. He’s in St Francis Xavier’s.” Then she looked round sharply. I turned my eyes in the same direction and we saw Mother Superior standing on the steps of the convent. She had on a face, as they say, like thunder.’
By this time my walk with Father Berrigan had taken us back to my house. I invited him in for a drink. ‘Is this all right?’ he asked with a tentativeness which was quite uncharacteristic.
‘Of course,’ I said, opening the door. ‘Tell me about St Francis Xavier’s.’
Berrigan untensed and chuckled. ‘So you’ve not heard of St Francis Xavier’s? Well, there’s no reason why you should, you being an apostate. We in Mother Church call it “the Priests’ Nuthouse”. Officially, it’s a rest home for Catholic Clergy. It’s where you go to convalesce, or if you have a breakdown, or sometimes if you are in disgrace and need some time and space to “consider your position”, as they say.’
We sat down in the sitting room and he took a glass of whiskey from me.
‘I wanted to know what was happening and I suspected that only Father Coughlin would or could gi
ve me an answer, so on Monday, my day off, I drove the two hundred or so miles to St Francis Xavier’s in Hampshire.’
His journey was in vain: Father Coughlin had died two days previously. Berrigan found everybody very unwilling to discuss Coughlin. ‘I gathered that he had had what we call “a bad death”. You know what I mean. Personally, I think people pay far too much attention to how a man dies. It’s how he lives that matters. Well, Coughlin had died in a way that everyone was reluctant to talk about, and I found myself under a strange cloud of suspicion for even asking about him.’
But his enquiries had not been entirely in vain because, a few days later, he received a package containing a child’s school exercise book and a letter. The letter was from someone signing himself Brother Michael and Berrigan never knew whether he was one of the staff or an inmate of St Francis Xavier’s. The letter informed him that Father Coughlin had been the victim of a ‘succubus’. The term was familiar to me, but only as a relic of medieval superstition: a succubus being in legend an evil spirit which sleeps with its male victim in female form. Berrigan was as sceptical as I would have been about this information. ‘As to the exercise book,’ said Berrigan, ‘I could make little or nothing of its contents. The letter told me that Coughlin had been writing in it during the last weeks of his life. The pencil script was partly indecipherable scrawl. Much of what could be read seemed to belong to an unknown language. The words “Alona Shaga” occurred often. At the time I had no idea what that meant.’
The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories Page 26
