I heard the creak of Frankie’s bed, the scrape of his door across the floor, quick determined steps passing my room and heading towards the stairs, up to that cold dormitory beneath the tower where on the windy nights of feast days they must have been able to hear the flag slapping cleanly way above their heads. I got up and went down the corridor towards the stairs. Frankie was already at the top and I thought he’d go in and start talking to the kids, calm them down; instead he stayed standing in the doorway and I pictured the rows of small faces turned curiously towards him, wondering why he didn’t speak. Then, unexpectedly, he began to sing.
Hushabye, don’t you cry,
Go to sleep, you little baby,
It was a lullabye, very soft and gentle, yet though Frankie’s voice held a great tenderness, there was something hard in it too, hard and young and even angry, and you felt it was anger for everything that made them cry.
When you wake, you shall have cake,
And all the pretty little horses.
Outside the wind had dropped and the lullabye spilled out through the great spaces of the building, flooded down the stairs and along the corridors and passages, found its way into every distant room. I imagined Old Blinky listening, smiling sleepily, Father James and Father Gorman lifting their heads from their books, Father Stuckey scratching his head and wondering, ‘Now, what’s that?’ I saw the Rector starting from some shallow snore-filled sleep, reaching for his dressing gown, his face already congested with rage. And of course there was Etta—he would be at his desk still, bent over the Book of Little Things. He would recognise Frankie’s voice and his lips would move into that thin straight line, which in him might have passed for a smile. In a moment, when he’d completed the sentence he’d been working on, he’d get up from his chair and walk to the door. The Rector would come rushing from his room, and all the other teachers and the prefects in a crowd behind him; in a moment there’d be the sound of doors flying open and running feet … I stood there gripping the banister and I thought how this was it at last: it was all over for Frankie now, in the morning he’d be gone.
Upstairs he was still singing.
I didn’t go back to my room. I stood there and waited for them to come. Only they didn’t. Nothing I’d imagined happened. Even Etta didn’t appear. The small boys were quiet now. Frankie finished his lullabye and came down to his room again. I was standing in the corner of the landing and he walked right past without even seeing me, and after a bit, when I was absolutely sure no one was going to come, I went into my own room and got back into bed. Next door Frankie was quiet, already asleep. There was a strange beautiful hush over the whole great building and I swear there was a kind of warmth in it, I could feel it on my face and in the air. In the morning no one said a word about the incident, except now and then I’d see an awed face turned in Frankie’s direction as he walked by.
He’d got away with it, and I didn’t for a second know how.
*
‘Well, they’d have thought it was nice, you know,’ Miri said to me once when we talked about that night. ‘Your teachers.’
‘Nice? They didn’t think in terms of nice, Miri.’
She laughed. ‘Oh, I bet some of them did. I bet Father Stuckey did.’
‘Yes, I suppose he might have.’ Father Stuckey left the priesthood a few years after I was ordained. He married a nurse and they went to live in Perth, where they had four children, all boys. I imagine him with these boys on long summer evenings, out on an oval like the one across the road from my house, teaching them to bat and bowl. On the first day of a new season they’d have a bright new ball and Mr Stuckey would throw it high up in the air and shout, ‘To the glory of God!’, embarrassing them all. And sometimes, very occasionally, he’d stop what he was doing and stand very still and quiet, his big face turned up towards the sky. ‘Dad?’ the boys would clamour, tugging at his shirt, ‘Dad, what’s up?’ And then in a moment he’d be all right again, and they’d get on with the game.
‘The Rector wouldn’t have thought it was nice,’ I said to Miri. ‘Frankie sang that lullabye in the middle of the Great Silence, remember? They were strict about that at St Finbar’s. There was this story they read us from The Science of Saints—’
‘The Science of Saints! I don’t believe you!’
‘It’s true. It was one of the books we had for the readings at mealtimes. And there was a story where this nun fell down the stairs in the middle of the night and broke her leg, and lay there until the next morning because she didn’t want to call out and break the Great Silence.’
Miri made a snorting sound.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘even I didn’t quite believe that story. All the same, the Rector wouldn’t have thought a song in the middle of the Great Silence was nice at all, even if it was a lullabye. I’d have expected him to come crashing out, roaring.’
‘Didn’t you say it was very cold? And he was all warm and tucked up in bed—’
‘You’re such a cynic, Miri.’
‘And you’re such a romantic, Tom.’
‘The cold wouldn’t have bothered Etta, though. I still can’t understand why he didn’t come.’
‘He’d have noticed the Rector and the teachers weren’t reacting; he’d have guessed then that they were going to let it go. And so he had to let it go too. He must have been furious.’
‘It was hard to tell what he felt. Always.’
The next morning at breakfast I glanced towards the Seniors’ table: whatever Etta felt, he looked just as usual, aloof and sedate. He was buttering a slice of toast and then cutting it neatly into four exact squares.
‘And he was only a kid, after all,’ said Miri with a little sigh.
‘What? WHAT?’
‘He was only a kid, Tom. Remember how you told me he entered St Finbar’s at ten? The course was five years, wasn’t it? Before the Senior Seminary? He was head prefect, but he wouldn’t have been more than fifteen. Think of it, Tom! He was younger than you.’
Her words shook me. I didn’t want to think of it, that Etta was only a child.
‘There was nothing young about him, ever,’ I said.
*
It was true that Etta had seemed ageless to us back then. Perhaps that’s why we were so surprised when his parents came to visit. It was about a week after the lullabye incident, and we saw the big grey car parked in the courtyard as we came out from lunch. Most visiting parents were excluded from the building, even those who’d travelled hundreds of miles, sitting up all night in dusty railway carriages—they were not special, they were not given to God as our teachers were, as we would be some day. They waited humbly in the courtyard while their child was brought to them, and they were allowed to spend a few hours with him down behind the dairy, where a stretch of ground had been asphalted over and furnished with a couple of rough wooden tables and some benches. They brought picnics—pies and cakes and soft drinks they’d bought from the shops down in Shoreham.
Because of their status (Etta’s father was a High Court judge, there were bishops on both sides of the family) Etta’s parents were allowed inside, as mine had been because my father was an old friend of Father James. From the windows of the library later that afternoon we saw a man and woman emerge from the main door with the Rector, Etta walking a few steps behind. The man was tall and grey-haired. He had a priestly look about him, a thin, ascetic face with inward-looking eyes. The mother—‘He’s got a mother!’ exclaimed Frankie—and yes, that was it, you didn’t think of Etta having a mother because it was almost impossible to imagine him small and trusting, holding someone’s hand. Here she was though: pale skin and dim brown hair, those same neat expressionless features and that queer gliding walk that made you think she was moving in another element than the one the rest of us breathed. They shook hands with the Rector, and then Etta accompanied them to the big grey car. Again he walked a few steps behind them, as if his rank was lower. There were no hugs and kisses, only another cool handshake, and when the car s
tarted we didn’t see them wave.
Etta didn’t wave either. Before the car reached the gates he’d turned sharply and walked back inside. There was something almost military about his bearing; you half expected to hear the click of heels.
‘He’s not like us,’ whispered Frankie. I supposed by ‘not like us’ he meant that Etta had no real feelings and wouldn’t care in the least if his parents were cold to him—indeed, he might have thought it right and proper. But what I remember most clearly about that moment is the little rush of joy I felt at Frankie’s use of the word ‘us’—that he was including me with him. Almost, I squeezed his hand.
15.
My mother wrote to tell me that Miri was getting married in September and everyone was hoping I’d be able to come to the wedding.
I’d visited Miri’s home in the Territory several times, and now a rush of memories flooded in: the airy old timber house with verandas all round, the sheds, the horses, the waterhole where you could swing into the water from a rope—I saw it all in a fever of longing. And my family! To see them all again: my mother and father, Aunty Sarah and Uncle Ray, Miri in her wedding dress—for a while I even daydreamed about taking Frankie with me, how he’d love it all! I knew it was impossible, even for me the Rector’s permission was required.
He wouldn’t give it. ‘No, you can’t,’ he said. On the desk in front of him I saw a square envelope with silver wedding bells embossed in one corner and Miri’s embroidery of kisses all round. The envelope was fat so I knew it contained a letter as well as the invitation card. So far she hadn’t written to me at St Finbar’s.
‘I feel so sorry about that,’ she told me later. ‘I was in love, Tom, I was so in love with Chris. Love makes you selfish, and I was crazy about him. It was only when I sent you the invitation that I wrote a letter. And then when I heard you weren’t allowed to come I sent you another one. It was the longest letter—’
‘I didn’t get it. I saw the first one though, the one that came with the invitation.’
There it sat on the Rector’s desk, addressed to me. He didn’t hand it over; instead he gave me a lecture on the love of God. I was here at St Finbar’s to serve God, he told me, to learn to love Him, as He loved me. Families, friends—he paused a little on that last word, and I wondered if he meant Frankie, if he’d seen us together when he was patrolling the grounds and gardens, his small black eyes veering sharply from the pages of his breviary. I wondered too if Etta had made some kind of report. Close friendships were frowned on at St Finbar’s, ‘special friendships’ they were called. Sometimes the friends were separated. I thought of being moved from my room, of Frankie being moved; I didn’t know how I’d manage a whole night without the sound of his soft breathing from next door. It would be him they moved, and because he was always in trouble they might give him a room on the first floor, right next to the prefects’ rooms, where Etta could watch him all the time. Perhaps the wall between their rooms would be as thin as ours was, and then it would be Etta who heard that soft breathing, his every shift and sigh.
‘Are you listening to me, boy?’
‘Yes.’
He glared.
‘I mean, yes, Father.’
The vein in his forehead was throbbing, I could see he was in a bad mood. Perhaps if I’d asked him the next day I’d have got a different answer and been allowed to go to Miri’s wedding. He was known to be changeable, on rare occasions he could even get jolly, though only for a little while.
‘I saw him crying once,’ Joey Gertler would tell me years later when we met at the Rector’s funeral.
‘Crying! When was that?’
‘When I was at St Finbar’s. It was late at night. I’d gone out walking, trying to get my mind off food. Frankie wasn’t the only one who went wandering round, I reckon most of us did at some time or other. Anyway, I was passing the Rector’s study and I looked in, and there he was, sitting in his big chair, bawling his eyes out. Great big fat tears they were, like a little kid’s. But the thing that got me was the shoes—’
‘The shoes?’
‘Great big shiny ones. They looked—it sounds weird, I know, but they looked sort of—blameless. Not that he was, by any means—except they got to me, those shoes. When I came back from my wander his light was out and I thought of him lying in bed, that big head of his flat on the pillow, and I wondered what he thought about. How old was I then? Fifteen? I suppose it was the first time I actually realised adults were human, like we were.’
That afternoon when the Rector refused me permission to go to Miri’s wedding, there was no sign of humanity that I could see. Families and friends were distractions, he repeated, and I seemed to be particularly susceptible, I must learn to do without these affections and concentrate on the love of God.
‘The love of God!’ he thundered, thumping his huge fist on the desk, so that Miri’s letter jumped and our eyes went to it and his fleshy fingers closed over the envelope and he slid it into a drawer. ‘That’s mine,’ I whispered. He didn’t hear. ‘The love of God!’ he roared again. ‘That’s the important thing!’ His cheeks mottled with a strange colour that was more purple than red. He dismissed me.
Dazed, I walked away down the corridor. My thoughts were like a baby’s, simple and insistent: I want to go! I want to go! I want to go! Tears welled in my eyes. My head cleared as I walked out into the courtyard and then I began wondering, what was the love of God? What did it mean? They never told you, not in any way you could understand. And why was it wrong to love your family, anyway? If you weren’t allowed to love people, what kind of person would you be?
The love of God—once I’d thought I knew what this phrase meant. I’d heard it all my life, in school and church; I’d taken it for granted that God loved us. What kind of love was God’s? What was love anyway? I thought of my mother bandaging my father’s hand in the kitchen that night before I went away. I thought of Den and Joseph playing the board game in their living room that rainy night when Dad and I were driving home from the camp. Frankie’s face flickered for a moment behind my eyes.
When I left the Rector’s study it was only halfway through the recreation period. As I came out through the cloisters I could see the kids playing football over in the paddock; Frankie didn’t seem to be amongst them, but I spotted Etta at once. He wasn’t on the field—he had some kind of exemption from sport—he was standing beneath the trees at the end of the pitch and he was staring up the hillside towards the wall. I could see no sign of Frankie up there, no flash of red sweater against the drab grey-greens, yet Etta kept on staring and I guessed he’d seen me coming and wanted me to understand that he knew all about Frankie going up the hill and looking down through the wall at the St Brigid’s girls. He wanted to scare me, I think, and to gloat; though he didn’t actually look at me there was something slightly triumphant about the very way he held that big domed head. And for a long while the two of us stood there silently, Etta’s pale eyes fixed on the wall, my own eyes on Etta. Then I turned away.
I saw Father Stuckey standing in the long grass of the paddock next to the cricket oval. He was all by himself so I went over. He looked up and smiled when he saw me coming; he had a muddy old cricket ball in his hand. ‘Found this in the grass here,’ he explained, holding it up for me to see. His voice held true delight, the ball might have been the kind of gold nugget you only found in museums. Though he was mad about any kind of sport, cricket was his favourite; the older kids said he’d been a hopeful for the state before he came to St Finbar’s. ‘Must’ve been left over from last season,’ he went on, picking at the mud around the ball’s seams and then rubbing it up and down the front of his cassock to get it clean. The cassock was a mess, you could see what he’d had for breakfast on it, and all last week’s meals, and now smears of mud and grass were being added. I thought of him in the Rector’s study, standing hangdog, being yelled at for untidiness and letting down the side.
‘Father,’ I said. ‘What’s the love of God?’
‘Ah.’ He studied the ball closely, picking at a stubborn fleck of mud. ‘God’s love,’ he said, and sighed, his eyes drifting towards the edge of the paddock. ‘God’s love.’ He drew in a breath; it was a deep one and you pictured his big pink lungs taking in the air like a diver high up on the edge of a board. ‘Well, we Christians follow the God revealed in Jesus, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Jesus taught that God was a loving father, didn’t he? Like the father in the story of the prodigal son?’
‘Yes.’ My heart had sunk already.
He smiled at me, encouraging. ‘Like your own father, perhaps.’
I thought of my father in the free surgery he held on Thursday afternoons. It was mostly the women from the army camp who came, and my father would sit beside them on the sofa he kept in the consulting room, his head bowed, listening silently to their stories. Sometimes they’d be crying. When they’d gone he’d stand at the window watching them walk away along the street. If God’s love was some heavenly version of this, we’d all be okay. If God’s love was like that of Frankie’s father, we were done for.
‘God is love,’ Father Stuckey was saying. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.’
The familiar words had no effect; instead a feeling of sternness rose up inside me, as if Father Stuckey was telling lies.
He waved his hand towards the gardens and the playing fields, the boys in their old sweaters pouring down towards the goal. ‘That’s God’s love.’
My Lovely Frankie Page 10
