An Angel In Australia (24 page)

Fratelli could not be dissuaded from further unnecessary explanations. ‘I don't court women like a barbarian. I'm slow. I'm kind. I take care. I say gentle and tender things you would not expect of a rough soldier. I don't parade my uniform, never have. I dress like an ordinary Joe in an ordinary job. I am thoughtful of her children—though I want the woman, I know that this can be a hard thing for the child. For the way the child sees the mother, that's what I mean. I'm as scared as the woman that the child might see us doing something wrong. The woman is frightened of that too, but not as frightened as I am. I'm the one that's got good reason to be frightened. The
woman meets me, and I'm as edgy as she is about what might happen. I'm as careful. Women aren't used to this. They're used to oafs blundering up, wanting them straight off.'

‘All you tell me,' said Darragh, further and further out of his depth, ‘confirms you have a good heart.'

‘You don't know yet where I'm taking you. Anyhow, I don't visit often, I visit at discreet times. And as I said, dressed like a guy who works in a store somewhere. A guy in a cheap suit. Kind of threadbare and respectable. Grey or blue with little pinstripes. No two-tone shoes. Some dead guy's tie, bought in a secondhand shop. The dust of years in it. I'm so sincere, I'm pretty much invisible. I do this not so that people won't remember me, though that's often the case, I look like some Polack factory hand. I do it for her, too. I don't preen. I say, this is all I am, a poor motherless child. So I kind of fall in love the normal way. I think it's the normal way. She's married, but her husband is away, working on a dam somewhere, or drilling for oil, or in the navy.'

With a tremor in his throat, Darragh said, ‘Or serving in New Guinea or Africa …'

‘I'm talking about my old life, in the States. Fort Ord, Camp Bullis, Fort Bragg. I've been ten years in the service.' Fear of what was imminent prevented Darragh from commending the earnestness, the care for avoiding scandal, in Fratelli's courtship methods. At the heart of lust there was meant to be no redeeming courtliness. ‘I tell myself this is genuine love that I feel, and that, like they say, love conquers all. I'm behaving well. I even feel noble. I'm able to imagine what it'll be like when she and I say at last yes, and I get excited like a normal man, and want no other woman on earth. I even want her to leave her husband. I begin to talk to her about it before we've even done a thing.'

He considerately paused, in case Darragh wanted to annotate the issues raised to this stage. But Darragh had nothing to say, for Fratelli evaded all the skills of the confessor.

So the sergeant continued. ‘Some night—or some daytime if the kid's at school—it comes. And this is perfect. This is a perfect union. No unwillingness in the woman—we're both past unwilling. She gives herself up. The one problem is, I can't give myself up. My aunt reaches out from the pickers' quarters, and I smell the smell of the place, and I'm done for. I'm part of a terrible greyness. I've died, I'm gone. This good woman lies there with a corpse, a rotting thing. Me. She knows it, and I can't begin to tolerate that she knows all this about me, that she sees me rotting like this. She's full of fear. She's sacrificed honour. For this? To lie with the dead?'

‘You
must
see a doctor,' Darragh told him. A doctor might be the least of it.

‘I
must
see a doctor,' Fratelli agreed. ‘But at the time I'm not within reach of a doctor. Before I know, I've reached out and crushed her breath out of her. I save myself. I save her as fast and furious as I can. I manage, dear God, to crank off like a schoolboy. I put my suit back on, and I close the door and leave my saved love behind.'

Darragh, who had had rage for the imagined murderer, felt mere exhaustion now. ‘You are in the greatest danger,' he said. Which was absurd.

‘It happened three times in the States. Three angels I made and released from their own disgust. Only three. I don't go round talking to every woman I meet.'

‘And one in Australia,' said Darragh with his dreadful certainty.

‘An angel in Australia,' Fratelli assented.

‘Don't you dare say angel!' Darragh, overtaken now by the appropriate fury, told him. ‘I forbid you.'

‘It's the way I think,' Fratelli murmured.

‘No. You say angel to excuse yourself. You've done nothing but excuse yourself throughout.'

Darragh was aware his voice was growing somewhat heightened for the confessional. But the confessional lightning had struck him. The very woman whose salvation he so actively desired was connected to this wretch whose salvation he needed now to countenance. This case always advanced in Moral Theology classes, in the section
De Sacramentis
. The murderer comes to the confessional grille, to the curtain where God's omniscience begins, and the priest is left with the human knowledge of what has been savagely done. The confessor orders the killer to surrender himself—it is a condition of absolution that he should firmly intend to do so. The killer says he will, and the priest absolves him in the hope that the grace of the sacrament will fortify him for self-surrender to the state. But then the killer does not do so, reneges on the conditions of his absolution. When Dr Cleary, professor of moral theology, raised this issue, for some reason Darragh the student imagined an enclosed European village, sealed in by mountains, with the priest walking among gothic villagers, knowing they were endangered by the killer yet unable to tell them. As Darragh the student had imagined the scene, it had little to do with the suburbs of Sydney.

But it had happened to him and to those with whom he had broken the bread of heaven. It was not some alpine village of the kind he knew only from films set in Europe. It was a matter of
these
plain streets. A priest, whether in Homebush or in a mountain-girt Catholic village, could not break the seal of the confessional to save his life, to protect his good name, to refute a false accusation,
to save the life of others, to aid the course of justice or to avert a public calamity. He was not bound by any oath in court when asked to reveal what was said in the confessional. A confessor who directly violated the seal of confession incurred an automatic excommunication, which only the Vatican could lift. The Fourth Lateran Council seven hundred years past had stated a sentiment Darragh was familiar with: ‘Let the confessor take absolute care not to betray the sinner through word or sign, or in any other way whatsoever …' The Czech saint, St John Nepomucene, confessor to King Wenceslaus IV and to his queen, knew that the king was perverse in his sexual practice, and that the queen was utterly faithful to him. Wenceslaus tortured St John so that he might reveal the queen's sins, and when he would not he was thrown into the river Moldava and drowned, dying to preserve the seal.

The other law which Darragh knew from his student days and now could recount to himself instinctively was that he could not even raise the matter with Fratelli outside the confessional, unless by some miracle, some quirk of his madness or guilt, Fratelli himself raised it.

Darragh heard himself tell Fratelli flatly that he must turn himself over to the authorities, and heard Fratelli answering in a reasonable, doleful voice.

Darragh shook his head. ‘What? What are you telling me?'

‘I said, I am the authorities,' said Fratelli moderately, with the mildest sadness.

‘You are not an authority. You are the authority for nothing.'

‘Just now,' Fratelli said reasonably, ‘you told me the grace of confession will help me not do any of this again. I wish never to do it again. But if I turn myself in, Father, I'll be hanged.'

‘Don't you think that just?'

‘Kind of just,' Fratelli conceded.

‘You'll do this dreadful thing again.'

‘Not if I pray.'

‘This is hopeless,' said Darragh. ‘Will you release me from the seal of the confessional, so that I can talk to you about this, face to face?'

‘You can't tell anybody else?'

‘No, I can talk only to you. In fact, if anyone else overheard us, they'd be bound to secrecy too. But nobody will overhear us.'

‘Father, I have a purpose to amend myself.'

Darragh shook his head. ‘When will we meet then?'

‘Why not outside?' suggested Fratelli. ‘Now.'

For some reason this made Darragh furious. ‘Haven't you got any shame at all?'

‘I have shame. And if you don't speak to me gentle, Father, whoever will?'

‘I don't know if I can do that yet. Speak gently, I mean.'

Fratelli said, ‘Maybe you'll be given the grace to do it. If I can be, you sure can too.'

‘Stop this sophistry, for God's own sake.'

‘I don't understand,' said Fratelli. ‘All I understand is that I'm contrite.'

‘God forgive you,' said Darragh, and then he absolved Fratelli of the crime of destroying Kate Heggarty. He imposed a penance of one whole rosary—the Joyful, Glorious and Sorrowful Mysteries—to be recited within the next twenty-four hours. It was such a fatuous penalty, Darragh thought, for the deaths by omission of Negroes, the deaths by commission of wives. He suspected that, after all, the sacrament of penance was not designed for such sins and Fratelli should have stayed, without approaching the confessional, in the habitation of the damned, some outer dark, awaiting capture.

By the time the stunned Darragh emerged thinking,
Surely he has gone
, it was full night. He looked automatically at his watch—it was only three-quarters of an hour before Saturday night Benediction, which meant a full church of people these anxious days. All attending to their contract with God: I will attend Benediction and Mass if you will let him live … If you make sure I die before him … If you give me a sign that he has gone to heaven … If you will turn the alien hosts away. God made no contracts, however. Except perhaps the long-term contract of redemption, longer running than the term set by the severest bank, the most avid insurance company.

He found Fratelli smoking calmly on the side steps of the church. The light in Mrs Flannery's presbytery kitchen thinly blinked between blackout curtains. Darragh snatched the cigarette from his hand and ground it out against the pavement. He was aware, from this sudden contact, of the meatiness of Fratelli's hand and thus, by implication, of the arm in which it ended. He took a step back in disgust.

‘Father,' said Fratelli without sarcasm, ‘I think you might hang me yourself.' And he held his hands up palm first. ‘We can talk more about it. Tomorrow night. Are you free tomorrow night?'

Darragh tried to perceive some notional calendar of his coming activities. He saw only vacancy. He said, ‘Yes, tomorrow night.'

Here, in the broader night, Fratelli was in command. ‘Okay. I want you to dress like a normal Joe. My style. You got any civvies, Father? There's a pub in the Cross, Greenknowe Street. Open all hours to us and our friends. We'll find a quiet corner. A corner with walls behind us. Will you come, really?'

‘I tell you to surrender yourself tonight. I don't want a drinking session with you.'

‘It takes time and a bit of moral support before a guy can do that, Father. And I'm on duty tonight. So will you come tomorrow?'

‘You're not in a position to order a priest around.'

‘No, but you'll come. We'll settle everything that needs to be settled then.'

Darragh thought himself further into the meeting Fratelli proposed. There was something about those ‘walls behind us,' Fratelli had mentioned that alarmed Darragh, who harboured a primal desire to live longer than Fratelli. No Moldava River for me, he pledged.

‘I'll bring someone with me though,' he said. He could not imagine who it would be. ‘Just someone to keep an eye on me. He can drink in another part of the bar. He won't know what we're saying.'

‘Who will you bring?' asked Fratelli, sniffing the air, suddenly irritable. ‘I don't want another guy. Another guy mightn't know that what I told you is sacred. I don't want eavesdroppers.'

‘I can assure you, this fellow won't eavesdrop.'

‘But he'll know you don't trust me.'

‘I don't.'

‘Says very little for the absolution you just gave. And all that grace you talk about.'

‘I'm a human being, and I'm scared. I'll tell this …' Darragh was going to say
friend
, ‘… parishioner that I'm afraid you're such a sociable man I might get drunk, that he's there to get me home safe. I'll tell him we're talking, privately, about Private Aspillon.'

‘It all comes back to niggers,' said Fratelli. ‘You'll wear civvies …?'

‘Yes. Out of positive shame for the company I'm keeping.'

Fratelli sighed at this. ‘I'll meet you on the corner of Macleay and Greenknowe, eight o'clock. Is that set?'

‘Of course it is,' Darragh assented. He was suddenly delighted that he would see Fratelli again. The more time he spent with the man, he believed, the closer he was to the necessary end, the punishment.

A
S SOON AS HE
entered the presbytery hallway, Darragh could hear the radio—a relayed BBC broadcast about the Afrika Korps and the British and Australian Eighth Army. He found, as he took a breath and went into the dining room, that the monsignor was eating chops with mint sauce and Worcestershire.

‘Frank,' he said, looking up. He wore his usual cardigan and his black pants, was well-shaven and his thinning hair slicked. ‘Sit down here,' he said, as if Darragh's sins had now been expiated. He called to Mrs Flannery, and Frank's meal was brought. It was touching, it was the affectionate gesture he so needed, and yet, seeing the glisten of fat on the meat, Darragh's gorge rose. He fought it, knowing that over-delicate sensibility must be conquered if he was to go drinking with Fratelli.

‘Would you mind turning down the radio before you go, Mrs Flannery?' the monsignor asked, and the housekeeper did it and vanished.

‘Frank,' said the monsignor, who had clearly examined his
conscience about his curate and come up with hopeful resolutions, ‘I'm sorry you went through the mill last Sunday. Thank God you weren't here. You'll have enough ghouls turning up at tomorrow's Mass just to see you. But now you can understand the points I was making beforehand, points I made only for your sake. How were our friends the Franciscans, by the way?'

‘They were very kind,' said Darragh. An instinct told him that he would do better with the monsignor if he gave fuller and more detailed answers, and he struggled to clear his head of Fratelli so that it could be done. ‘My retreat master was a wise old priest. A former digger they told me. The fellow who runs the dairy down there, Father Matthew … Well, he broke the story to me very gently last Sunday.'

The monsignor seemed gratified. He nodded a few times. ‘I rang him too. But you were not there at the time. I couldn't wangle two trunk calls in a day.'

‘That's all right. You buried Mrs Heggarty.'

The monsignor made a pained face. ‘I was harsh on her the day Kearney was here. I was somewhat shocked, Frank. When I buried her, I was aware of her neighbour weeping, and I had a suspicion, for what it was worth, that a woman who could be so mourned might attract the divine mercy.' The monsignor coughed. ‘For what such a suspicion is worth,' he explained quickly.

Darragh was close to tears, of loss and hope both, so said nothing.

‘You know,' said the monsignor, ‘just let me say … be careful at Mass tomorrow. Don't do anything designed to satisfy the curious. Do you promise me? I know you're a good preacher. I hope that this Sunday you'll give a sermon no one will remember. A boring, boring sermon, Frank. God knows there's plenty of them. You could get one out of a book.'

‘I'll do my best,' said Darragh. ‘But I must—for my own honour—mention the thing, without going into details.'

The monsignor sighed. ‘We're all hoping it'll be plain sailing for you from here on, Frank. It'll be a good thing when they catch the fellow, too. Excuse me now, I'm playing whist at the Gardners' tonight. I'll see you before the nine o'clock Mass.' He said a moment's grace after meals, knitting his brows, and stood.

‘Monsignor,' said Darragh.

‘Yes, Frank?'

‘Thank you. A lot of men might have wanted to vet my sermon tomorrow.'

The monsignor laughed. ‘Don't think I didn't consider it myself, Frank. But I think you've got to trust fellows. Even young Turks.'

Darragh ate his chops automatically and without the relish the ration coupon which had gone to buy them seemed to justify. It was considered that sermons should deal with the mysteries of faith in the abstract, and with biblical tales or events from the lives of saints. Many priests thought it best to avoid the individual, the anecdotal, the concrete. It was considered dangerous to talk about local illustrative cases, to use the suburban instance as a parable. The rule was sometimes broken to permit a priest to denounce a particular book, generally one he had not read, or a film—one he had not seen, or had seen and left at the end of the first reel. A politician might be denounced, although that had become more dangerous recently, since the war seemed to have driven people's opinions in various directions and produced in them an electoral wilfulness. But beyond that you stuck for your examples to the citizens of Christ's Aramaic-speaking locale. The prodigal son, the wedding feast at Cana, Christ walking on the water. And, of course, the woman taken in adultery.

When the monsignor was vanished to his whist, Darragh went
to the church for Benediction and to hear evening confessions. Though he encountered anxious souls, souls who thought they were damned for some lie they had told, some theft of a few pounds of steel or timber or food, some lunge driven by lust, he gratefully absolved them all. Their sins were human ones and radiant with absolvability. The last of them had been absolved, indeed, by half past eight. An idea about a protector, a bodyguard, had come to him as well. He went back to the presbytery, changed out of his soutane into his suit, his stock and clerical collar, and set out down Homebush Road towards the railway line. He wondered if observant policemen were already on his track, but could see nothing much happening. Pedestrians were rarely thick on these streets, and the genuinely cold Saturday night air hung slackly over the wide pavements. If, before the encounters of the Coral Sea, there had been a lack of electric fear in the air, now there was a lack of joy at partial salvation. It all felt as it did before—ageless, and unimpressed by events.

In The Crescent he looked for the police car waiting under the railway embankment. He did not see one. Had they given up the watch? He entered the gate of what he thought of, even though she was now gone from it, as Mrs Flood's house. Ross Trumble answered the door, which was what he had hoped. He wore a woolly jumper and, hulking and good-looking, did resemble a revolutionary. It was impossible to believe that he was 4F. He seemed to Darragh acutely muscular. And he was sober tonight.

He was taken aback to see Darragh.

‘You've come to see Bert?' he decided.

‘No, Ross. You.'

‘Me? Jesus, you're a game one. The scandalous priest, eh? Did the police spot you on your way past?'

‘I don't think they're there tonight. I don't know.'

‘Anyhow,' said Ross Trumble, his face cracking into a smile, a feature he had not yet displayed in any of his past meetings with Darragh, ‘this'll confuse the buggers, won't it? Two suspects meeting. And what a two!' The idea tickled him. ‘I mean,' he said, ‘they had to separate us last time.'

He laid his eyes in comradely amusement on Darragh.

‘Come in then. Bert's out at a World War I get-together.' People had now begun to call Darragh's father's Great War that.
World War I
. “I'll make you a cup of tea. Or pour you a beer.'

‘I'd like a beer, in fact,' said Darragh. He thought of it as training for the next night, and as a consolation for the harsh day just past. They went through to the kitchen where Trumble switched off a radio. It had been broadcasting from the Trocadero in town, Andrews Sisters-style performers singing patriotic songs. ‘
It's a brown slouch hat with its side turned up, And it means the world to me
…' Ross Trumble seemed embarrassed to have such trite lyrics emanating from his radio, or Bert's. He switched the instrument off and went to the ice chest, from which he took out a half-drunk bottle of beer. He found a clean glass in a dresser, held it up to the light, considered it adequate and poured.

‘Beer, the working man's religion,' he said. He shrugged. ‘Just a thought. Not trying to rile you.' He laughed again. ‘Given that up as a bad bloody job since the other night. Sit down.'

It seemed that the blows thrown and the attention of police had by some mysterious formula made them friends. Trumble's gibes were comradely now, for which Darragh was grateful. He half-smiled and began to drink the oaty dinner ale, tasting the gracious grain in it, and feeling a normal fellow.

‘Did you get into much trouble with bishops and people like that?' asked Trumble.

‘They sent me on a retreat.'

‘A
retreat
?' He obviously and with some justice thought of the term in a military sense.

‘You go away to a monastery, keep silent, pray and have sessions with a spiritual adviser.'

‘And you were in the middle of that when the story came out in the papers?'

Darragh said yes.

‘So it isn't all beer and skittles, this feeding people the opium of religion.'

‘I don't mind admitting it's been pretty hard lately.'

Trumble himself had sat now. He lifted his own half-drunk glass of beer. ‘I'm supposed to be happy when things go a bit bad for servants of the system. Priests and coppers. But it's different when you get to know somebody.'

Darragh thought that Trumble the revolutionary must, in fact, be a kind of sentimentalist, since he considered having a police-interrupted tussle with another man to be a valid form of getting to know him. There was a sort of innocence in this, and Darragh was surprised but strangely cheered by it.

‘We're just ordinary blokes, you know,' said Darragh. ‘Some of us very ordinary. And we don't see ourselves as you see us.'

‘How
do
you see yourself?'

‘As a servant of the people.'

‘That
is
interesting,' said Trumble. ‘When you bloody think about it.'

‘Why?' asked Darragh.

‘Well, you see, it makes you a poor bloody exploited sod as well.'

‘I don't feel exploited,' said Darragh, though the temptation was there. ‘I became a priest of my own free will. No one put a gun to my head.'

‘No. I bet they just told you you'd go to hell if you didn't.'

‘I had a profound desire for it,' said Darragh.

‘Yeah. But they conditioned you, you see. They raised you to want it.'

‘And did they raise you to want to be what you are?'

‘My father bloody did, though I didn't see so much of him. He was without a job five years. Travelled round region to region by foot, and riding the rattler. They kept them on the road, town to town, but they didn't give them the means to travel. Railway police hunted them out from under the carriages. A great system, eh? Some fathers said, “Become a lawyer or a doctor, boy, because you'll never be hard up.” But my father said when we met up again: “Change the world so that you can be a worker, and don't have to be a doctor or a lawyer to be safe.” That was my education. It made some damn sense.'

‘Everyone's childhood makes sense when you're in it,' Darragh said. ‘That's when the world is simple.'

‘And my world was simply bloody awful,' Trumble told him with a grin, but without the note of accusation which had marked their earlier discourses. ‘If you blokes are the servants of the people, where were you? You were living in your presbyteries, weren't you, and we were lining up at the kitchen door.'

‘I was at high school. My father was out of work too. He told me the Church didn't always act well. Some priests locked themselves in against the poor. But the Sisters of Charity were handing out tea and soup to anyone in the side streets. Just for the pure humanity of it.'

They were getting deeply into Kate Heggarty territory—social justice,
Rerum Novarum
, Marx, dignity. As much as these matters interested Darragh at normal times, they could not be permitted to dominate this kitchen conversation. Darragh took a
long sip of the beer, and felt the first onset of deceptive, effervescent brotherliness in his blood. The thought struck him that men drank to achieve this platform of goodwill. The impulse itself was noble if benighted. His father had had a few episodes with whisky during days of unemployment, hiding it in the cistern of the toilet. It was his attempt to mould the world down to a graspable state. But spirits made Mr Darragh sad and aggressive, and broke down the coherence of his character. He became an unshaven stranger with a gap-toothed slash of a mouth who threw an inaccurate punch at Darragh's mother and told Darragh to fucking grow up, that his mother was making him a lily-fart. Darragh had especially noticed his own liking for liquor on the tennis Mondays. I'll have to be careful, he thought, or I'll become one of those red-nosed priests with the broken facial capillaries of the boozer—or, as they called it, the Tipperary tan. But none of that was as pressing an issue as Fratelli.

‘Look, Ross,' Darragh said, leaning forward, getting down to business. ‘I'm not a soldier because I'm a minister of religion, exempt. I believe you're 4F. I'm not saying this in any jingoistic way—I don't want you to go and get killed or anything like that. But it's just, you seemed so strong the other night, when we were having our … our little scrum … down the street.'

‘I am 4F though, fair and square,' said Trumble. ‘Had tuberculosis. And bad. Part of a lung gone. That's where I met Rosie. Up in the Boddington sanitarium in the Blue Mountains. It's easy to die in a place like that, but I thought: Build yourself up, son! I even chopped wood to the limit of what breath I had. And I wanted to live. Because wars always bring on a revolution, so I knew this one would too, if I could just stick around.' Darragh was tempted to say, ‘Perhaps it'll be a revolution against Stalin,' but he didn't want to get into that argument.

‘So I can hold my own,' Trumble concluded.

‘I think you can too.' Once more a polemic urge surfaced in Darragh to ask, ‘Can you really imagine the whole of Australia Communist?' But that would take the conversation in an unfruitful direction. He said instead, ‘I came because I want you to do me a favour.'

‘Here we go,' said Trumble with a broad smile, but again it had a jolliness to it.