Homebush Boy

by Thomas Keneally

  It was a good night for him though. His snow-white face went pink with the success of the dancing. He was better than me, except for the injustice that I could see myself being clumsy.

  The evening turned out to be a late one by the standards of Strathfield, all of ten-thirty before we found ourselves on the street again. On the way home, I told myself I would hold Bernadette Curran’s hand to her satisfaction and mine. I would evaporate at the touch, dissolving into some great metaphorical ether.

  But in Albert Road, as we strolled along, our splendours barely used up, Mangan having not danced a single time and now lagging behind and humming Mahler to himself, Curran’s corsage still fresh, I tried to slip my hand into hers and was rebuffed.

  I asked why. She said, ‘Why out of all the hands do you have to hold mine? Hold Denise’s.’ The quieter Frawley sister.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she asked loudly at one stage, when I made a second stealthy attempt. I felt foolish but still savoured the long walk to Curran’s place, the furthest of all our houses from the Town Hall. Yet this stroll beneath the box trees, past the oval where I had been in the rare position of athletically embarrassing the twin brother of the dark-haired girl, came to a close inconclusively. We drank tea at the Currans’ and answered Mr and Mrs Curran’s questions about who danced with whom, and I had not vaporized yet but was still on earth and indeed needed to use the urinal. Oh ever wakeful, ever abashing flesh! But I could not attend to the need at the Currans’. To enter their bathroom would be to declare too frankly my humanity and to discover unwanted news about theirs.

  I would wait until I dropped Matt off at his house in Shortland Road. Both his parents were waiting up.

  ‘How did he go?’ genial Mr Tierney asked me.

  ‘You know Matt,’ I said so that he could hear. ‘He’s a tiger. He couldn’t knock them off with sticks. Everyone fell for him. He’s ruthless with women. He tells them such lies, etc., etc., etc.’

  We all laughed like drains with and at Matt the ladykiller. Yet the Tierney parents knew well enough. There were dark-haired girls, or red-haired, or auburn or fair who would not dance with him. There always would be.

  I was able to sneak into their toilet. They were used to the idea that even Mangan and I had bladders.

  Then the final leg of the delivery – taking the Frawley girls to their place. Mangan too went off languidly yawning. For geographic reasons, I always walked the longest. In one sense I took the greatest pains with my friends, in another I took the longest comfort from them. There was an end-of-the-evening flatness to the conversation with Rose and Denise.

  ‘Did you see Freddie? What a bloody brute!’

  ‘Mick, why won’t you and Mangan learn to dance?’ asked innocent Denise.

  ‘I don’t intend to need it,’ I told her.

  ‘Well,’ said Denise, ‘Rose may not need it either, but she’s learned.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t Rose need it?’

  Rose got a smooth smile on her face. It was a form of pride I had seen once or twice before. I had seen it in Dahdah the year before.

  ‘You’re not trying to say you’re going to join the Dominicans?’ I asked. It was an astonishing guess. For Rose was the earthy one. She picked her ears for wax. She said bloody and drongo. She lacked any nun-like gravity.

  ‘She might very well be,’ said Denise.

  ‘There aren’t enough good-looking blokes around,’ said Rose, and laughed at me as was her custom.

  I would hear from a number of sources versions of what had happened, of how the signs, the command, the vocation had dipped down and brushed Rose Frawley with its wing. Up at Saint Lucy’s School for the Blind, from which Matt and an accomplice had once tried to escape, there was a somewhat plump old nun called Mother Margaret. One day earlier in the year when a dramatic Sydney storm, all thunderhead, lightning and raindrops as big as thumbs, descended on Strathfield, she had gone to the nuns’ bathroom to close the window. She had stood on the bath to do so, had slipped, fallen into the bath and broken her leg. Her cries brought some of the other nuns in. When they tried to lift her out of the enamel tub, she screamed with pain. It looked to the younger nuns as if her hip of leg were broken. They wanted to call Dr Buckley of Homebush, the doctor who looked like Bing Crosby and tended to the nuns on a Love-of-God basis. Mother Margaret forbade them to telephone him. ‘I don’t want any man to see me with my legs in the air,’ she told the other nuns. (This was reported to me by Mrs Frawley.)

  The nuns disobeyed her only when the poor thing lost consciousness. It was a broken leg and not long thereafter she developed pneumonia. One afternoon in her ultimate convalescence, she told Mrs Frawley, who visited St Lucy’s regularly to do odd jobs for the nuns, that she wanted to see Rose. The Frawley girls were frequently up at Saint Lucy’s anyhow running errands for the nuns through an arrangement made between the convent and Mr Frawley.

  So Rose went up to see Mother Margaret.

  Margaret told her that while she thought through God’s mercy and the kindness of His Blessed Mother she might survive this illness, the accident was her memento mori, a reminder that her time on earth would be henceforth quite short. Had Rose ever thought of becoming a Dominican nun? And if she had, would she now consider carrying on Margaret’s name by taking it as her religious name when she uttered her Solemn Vows?

  ‘You see,’ my mother told my father one night, ‘they don’t have children, so it’s important for them to think of their religious name going on.’

  Maternity would out.

  Naturally, I now looked at Rose as a girl-woman transformed and elevated. The spirit listeth where it will, but I had never expected it to listeth towards Rose.

  Some time soon after the news of Rose got out, I met Mr Crespi, the Italian door-to-door Watson’s salesman, the Red, one morning in Meredith Street.

  ‘My young friend,’ he said. He looked grey and irritable and smelled of tobacco. ‘I hear of them putting the hard word on that poor girl. This is a criminal act, young man. Why do you all stand around in such slavery? Why are parents so ready to sacrifice their young?’

  ‘The Frawleys see it in a different light,’ I told him, a little angered. The Frawleys didn’t seem like dupes to me, though they were temperamental volunteers, both Rose and Mr Frawley.

  ‘What different light?’ he asked me. ‘This is a new country. It is therefore meant to be a country of fresh ideas, of revolutionary energy. I see none of that. I see only bowing of the head to Mr Church and Mr Bank and Mr Labor Party. That’s why there will never be a true socialist government in this country.’

  I knew from my father that Mrs Talbot’s Left faction had been voted out of the Strathfield branch of the Labor Party by a mass of industrial groupers.

  I enquired how Mrs Talbot was these days. ‘Consumption is no holiday,’ he told me as if I wilfully thought it was easier than revolution. ‘They’re saying she must go into Bodington.’

  This was a famous sanatarium in the Blue Mountains.

  ‘The doctors overcharge,’ he told me. ‘This does not happen in genuine democracy.’

  I had said I would write to her, since she had often talked to me when I passed the boarding house as a child. And I did remember to write a note that night, a letter in which I quoted GMH’s poem Now Time’s Andromeda. I wonder what she made of it.

  Now Crespi went on his way with his bag of unguents and disinfectants.

  ‘Do something for that girl,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Introduce her to life.’

  But I had already. I’d read her snatches of Eliot and GMH.

  I could have told him too that the calling of Rose was the most dramatic thing to have happened to the Frawleys since the Potato Famine. It was the stuff of novels. Young flesh which would never be touched with anything but spirit – it was more dramatic than flesh that was going to take the conventional way. Primp itself up, go out in cars, end up disgruntled in hair curlers.

  We paid for the vanities of t
he Strathfield Town Hall dance. As we all took for granted, Brother Dinny McGahan was a good fellow. But we also understood that in his world and ours, there were two enemies. The lesser was secularism and the greater was sex.

  In the matter of secularism, the Brothers warned us that at Sydney University there was a famous humanist professor, a Logical Positivist called Anderson. Seductive as Satan, riddled with secularism, contemptuous of the philosophy and theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the whole great edifice called Thomism.

  Former students of St Pat’s had told Dinny and Buster of Anderson. Now someone, a parent perhaps, a Santa Sabina nun informed by a Santa Sabina prefect, told them of the other and closer peril. Sex. Especially sex and Freddie Ford.

  Ford was stood up in class on account of his crazed dancing with the high jumper and admonished by Dinny in terms which he would probably remember all his life. ‘You are too vain, sir … ah … and impurity lies beyond vanity, waiting to spring. You took a girl by the waist purely for impure gratification. Did you think of her mother? Ah … did you think of the Virgin Mary looking down on you? Did you think of your own mother and the peril to your immortal soul?’

  There’s no doubting the anguish Brother McGahan demonstrated that day. We were his charges and he had permitted us to be led into the garden of temptation, the lushness at Strathfield Town Hall.

  Catholicism’s huge fear of sexuality, its morbid panic, its detestation of most sins of the flesh (including masturbation, of which I was uninformed at that time), was at play in him. He was both the victim and promoter of that awful phobia.

  Freddie went out weeping, a rare phenomenon amongst sixteen-year-olds. He was suspended from school pending his possible expulsion. The rest of us were set to write a confession of what we had done and what we observed others to have done during the dance. Dinny bade us write the truth under pain of conscience.

  The unknowing might think that he meant to take these accounts off and get some perverse pleasure from them. Brother McGahan was in this matter though not perverse but tormented. He was concerned to find how far the rot had gone. He was concerned to lay God’s preventive axe to the root of the tree.

  Only Matt was not required to set to work on this. His Braille typewriter would have punched out confessions that no one other than he could read. As we wrote, a red pall of shame hung in the room. I’m sure there were some brave, democratic, even Godless souls who were not intimidated by it. I confess I wasn’t one of them.

  The truth is, all of us, the ethos of the place and time, were what would be called Jansenist, though we were ignorant of the term.

  As I would learn later, Jansen was a Bishop of Ypres, the town in Flanders for which Mr Tierney and Digger Crichton had fought. Jansen had argued the utter incapacity of decent people to choose to obey moral law, particularly to overcome their own concupiscence. He must have been faced by phenomena such as Freddie’s lust for the Santa Sabina high jumper. Only Divine Grace could save you from the flesh, according to Bishop Jansen.

  Jansen’s propositions were ultimately condemned by the Vatican since they seemed to undermine the doctrine of free will. He died in 1640, but his doctrine about grace, and his high stress on the essential and continual austerity which must be applied in matters of sexual morality lived on at the Convent of Port Royal in Paris. Here it attracted a number of famous adherents including Blaise Pascal, the prodigy, mathematician and author of the Pensées.

  Not knowing at that stage about Pascal’s Jansenist and therefore heretical connections, I was already dipping into the Pensées, and was particularly attracted of course, as others were, by the aphorism, ‘The heart has its reasons which reason cannot understand.’ This pensée seemed to fit in very well with my feelings at the Santa Sabina dance. Reason could not have gone close to expressing the impulses which led me to grope for the divine Curran’s hand.

  The French and the Vatican found it very hard to suppress Jansenism, and in fact many Irish priests, exiled from their country by the British Penal Laws, ingested Jansenism while studying in France. Every heresy, it stands to reason, adds its stain to the chief, central orthodoxy. The panic that grace would run out and that flesh would conquer, that will and spirit were not enough – that was the Jansenist panic which infected Fifth Year Blue and its popular teacher on the corner of Edgar Street in the antipodes in 1952.

  Perhaps by explaining this theological background, I am trying to explain to the reader how I wrote what I did. ‘I did hear one boy say that it was wonderful to get up against a girl’s breasts.’ (Freddie had in fact said this to Matt and me in passing.) ‘When I was walking home myself, I made a number of stupid attempts to hold a girl’s hand. Although this was a minor matter, I understand how it could have led to something worse …’

  Something worse? Small chance. With me a Celestial, and Curran a sensible and determined refuser of my hand.

  As I wrote, Matt’s Braille typewriter keys did begin to crunch away at the heavy, brown cartridge paper onto which he habitually put everything he knew – the dynasties of Egypt, the Athenian Republic, the Punic Wars, and whatever he felt when he touched the few peculiar, feminine fabrics which encased the Frawleys and Curran, and smelled their scents. What he was writing though was his business.

  I heard from the Frawley girls that there was a similar outrage shown by the Dominican nuns, who had heard reports from some of the girls’ parents about the way their daughters had been clasped, hugged, caressed. Mother Concordia, the oldest surviving Irishwoman from the first group of Dominicans who came to Strathfield, a sort of Matriarch Emeritus of Santa Sabina, took all the fourth and fifth year girls to the chapel, where they said one decade of the Rosary to confirm them in the virtues of Catholic womanhood.

  Hearing the Frawley girls utter the name, I felt a certain awe that Concordia had been put into commission. I had known this nun when I was very young, during the war – when we came down from the bush and I was sent to the little Dominican school of Saint Martha’s. Here we had occasional, august visits from Concordia, and these deepened the dread I already had of the school.

  I was not happy there to start with – not very bright, easily distracted, easily contracting a wheeze. Running around in the playground made my nose stream, but I lost my handkerchief readily, and the wrists of my navy blue blazer became marred by the snail-like silvery traces of mucus.

  The young, impeccable Bernadette Curran had been a member of the same class. She never spilled ink, and her nose never ran. One day on the way down Homebush Road towards the bus, she asked me, ‘Why do you always have drippings on your work?’

  I burned, and said, ‘I don’t see any dripping around here.’

  But she had noticed my terrible weakness. In the subjectivity of childhood misery, every day was a month and every week a year, and both the ink and my nose flowed without spate. To make up for the runniness of my nasal passage, I tried to be a lad with the other lads. When someone started pissing contests up the creosoted walls of Saint Martha’s boys’ toilet I joined in enthusiastically, straining my lower belly to get my stream of urine an inch higher than that of the bloke beside me.

  This was the year in which Singapore had fallen to the Japanese and the occasional Japanese reconnaissance plane went over Sydney, the year in which the entire Australian world scheme – development as a working man’s utopia under the umbrella of Imperial power – had been disrupted by the humiliation of British and Australian arms. Yet it was our urinary crimes which seemed to cry to the heavens, and evoked a visit from Santa Sabina to Saint Martha’s by Mother Concordia. She got all the boys from the Infants and First Grade and took us into the boys’ toilet, aligning us in threes between the urinal stalls.

  She was a big-boned woman, though I didn’t think of her in those terms then. I thought of her as being constructed of one piece through and through, legless as a mountain. Divine thunder was compacted into her eyes and the strip of brow we could see below her celluloid brow-piece. She had a long, immacu
late stick of chalk in her hand. She reached into the urinal stalls and drew a line about two feet three inches off the ground.

  She moved from stall to stall, continuing the line. The stick of chalk did not break in her hand, despite the unevenness of the tarred and creosoted walls. She worked down the left side of the stalls and then passed across the rear of our silent column and worked on the facing right wall. It was awesome to see her mark and measure this infant, male place. When she had finished her work, she was panting slightly, pursing her lips, and she stood in front of us. The chalk was evenly worn down – she had taken lessons long ago in stopping it cracking and wearing to a point.

  She said, ‘I know what you’ve been doing to your shame. Think of what your dear mothers would say. You have disgraced them. More importantly, you have wounded our Saviour and appalled His Blessed Mother. I tell you this: see that mark on the wall. Any boy who piddles above that mark will attract the anger of dear God and cause His Blessed Mother to shed tears of shame.’

  She then took an eighteen inch ruler from a deep, deep pocket in her habit, called forth two of the ringleaders – someone must have talked – and gave them three on each hand. I don’t think it hurt hugely, but its intimation of the Deity’s lightning bolts caused both boys to weep.

  A few weeks later, the Americans and the Australians stopped a large Japanese convoy in the Coral Sea, and then a few months after that – thirty miles from Port Moresby – the Diggers stopped the Japanese advance across New Guinea. All so that we should grow up in freedom, except the freedom to pee above the line.

  Ten years later we had again failed to keep our unregenerative selves in order in the boys’ lavatory at St Martha’s, and Concordia had been forced to come out of ever deeper retirement to lead the girls of Santa Sabina in prayers for our redemption.