There were some four or five hours of sunlight left as he took to Homebush Road and its bubbling tar, now carrying his surplice and stole and two candlesticks in a bag somewhat like a workman's, and also within it the small black box containing not only the pyx and hosts and oil, but wads of cotton to apply the unguent to Mrs. Flood's organs of sense. A professional pride helped him deal with the bullying heat and the stained air. Extreme unction. An anointment at the last. A smearing of those human extremities which had walked into, sniffed, eyed, or tasted wrong. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, priests anointed the loins, the region of so much lethal peril, but fortunately that was not the custom with the Roman Church.
Bert Flood, opening the door of the little house with a greater speed than last time, wore what looked like the same vest and pants and collarless shirt as before. “Oh yairs,” he said, as if he had forgotten he had called Darragh. “The missus is in the bedroom.”
He was one of those Australians who confused Darragh. Bert Flood's demeanor bore out the description given by one of the bush poets: “Hadn't any opinions, hadn't any ideas.” He appeared as if he had leached all anger, enthusiasm, and purpose out of his soul, to the extent Darragh wondered how he ever got himself to the intense point of proposing marriage to Mrs. Flood, and what she thought of him when she agreed. But in his way, he had achieved a dramatic point now by opening the door to Darragh.
Bert led him to the first room off the corridor. Darragh noticed first a pleasant smell of menthol and camphor in Mrs. Flood's bedroom. The woman herself lay diminished in the middle of the bed, buttressed with pillows, and there was a hectic redness to her cheeks. Beside her on a wicker table lay various brown bottles, and a glass with the dregs of some fluid still in it. A picture of a sylvan arbor, bearing no resemblance at all to the landscapes in which Mr. and Mrs. Flood had conducted their marriage, sat over the bed, in its way like a prayer for Eden, or for a cleansed earth in which all growth and all manners were orderly. Both partners had failed the idyll.
It seemed to Darragh that in aging by ten years since he had last seen her, Mrs. Flood had managed to become more ageless. Wastage was visible, however, in the way her facial bones made claim upon the rosy filament of flesh laid over them. The death's head was threatening to emerge. The humming rattle of her breath was a permanent sound. There was no tubercular charm to it today. It sounded frankly like the clatter of some failed mechanism.
“She's not too flash at talking for long,” said Bert. But her eyes were alight as they picked up Darragh's arrival. In the context of her decline, her smile seemed more childlike than girlish. But at least she was not one of those of whom Christ said, “I wish you were either hot or cold, but since you are neither, I shall spit you out of my mouth.”
Darragh asked, “Could I put the pyx and the oil on the table here?” Bert nodded, bustled past, and rearranged the bottles of medicine and tonic to make room for Darragh. Then he touched Darragh on the elbow and gave him a solemn half-wink. “I'll leave you to it, Father. I'll get the kettle on.”
“You're welcome to stay, Bert. It's your house.”
The idea seemed to panic Bert.
“No. I'll get the kettle on.”
For that was the great secular sacrament—tea. Before Bert had even left, Mrs. Flood reached out and grasped the hem of Darragh's coat, dragging him closer. “Don't make Ross clear out. We met in the sanitarium. He had this curse too. He's a good fellow. And I'm past it all now. Past every crime, eh? If you come on heavy, it'll only make trouble for poor old Bert. All right?”
It was apparent from the effort this took that she could not make a detailed confession.
“Don't talk,” he said, in command with the dying. “You can nod, Mrs. Flood.”
She nodded to show she could. A new submission had entered her.
He unpacked his bag, placed the two candlesticks from his small black case on the table, lit them, put on his surplice and stole, while Mrs. Flood's eyes glittered with a kind of hunger at all these activities. He instructed her to pray mentally with him while he recited the Act of Contrition.
“Oh my God,” he intoned, “I am heartily sorry and beg pardon for all my sins . . .”
She said arduously, “There's one thing, Father. You know why I married Bert. He didn't make a fuss of me. I was impressed. We worked for this store in Cobar, and Bert was a warehouseman, and I sold frocks. The boss was always grabbing for me. But Bert didn't make a fuss. It turned out he couldn't make a fuss of anything, poor old dear.”
“Don't talk, Mrs. Flood. You don't need to.”
“These . . . what you call, sins of the flesh.”
“It's all right.”
“They're not so bad. They're just silly little things half full of dark. But there's light and heat too. . . .”
“Yes, but you repent of them?”
“Look at what the Japs did in Hong Kong . . . and the Black and Tans in Ireland . . . they were sins!”
“But the people who committed them don't have the benefit of our beliefs,” he said, entering into the debate despite himself. “Leave it all to God and repent.”
“All right,” she gasped. “I do.”
“Please, you don't have to talk. Just nod.”
Indeed she nodded with a poignant urgency. Confession was easy for the sinner of limited breath. Mrs. Flood continued to nod her affirmation of repentance as Darragh recited. Her lips throughout worked dryly on the sentiments she lacked the breath to state. She said ambiguously, “I'm sorry for Bert,” as he absolved her.
Then he took the small white host out of the pyx, and she opened her mouth as taught in childhood, and he placed it on her tongue. “Now, Mrs. Flood, you'll understand I must wash my hands before I open the holy oil. Is that all right?”
“Don't be delicate on my account,” she instructed him, pointing with her right hand in the bathroom's direction.
He went and found it, scrubbing himself at the basin, from which hung an old razor strop, possibly Bert's. Bert had laid out a clean towel. In his way the fellow was astonishing. Darragh went to find him to ask him would he help with the bedclothes, since they would need to be moved back for the anointing. But Bert was not in the kitchen, or on the awninged verandah which was his isolation ward from both marriage and the disease.
Returned to Mrs. Flood's room, Darragh took up the container of oil from its bracket in the black case and, with the appropriate words, absolved with this holy chrism her eyes for all the wrong they had seen, her ears for the burden of what they had heard, her nostrils for having drawn the breath of sin, her hands for their ill-considered caresses, her mouth for its mortal appetites, and finally, the sheets drawn back, her feet, pink and delicate and not like normal suburban feet, for walking in dangerous paths. “Per istam Sanctam unctionem et suam piissimam misericordiam indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid deliquisti.” Through this blessed oil and His loving mercy may the Lord forgive whatever ill you did.
The passive effort involved in having the sheets pulled up to her chest again by Darragh seemed to exhaust her. Darragh ate the second host himself, and stood in prayer a moment.
“I'll try to find Bert,” he said.
This time Bert was in the kitchen, unpacking a brown bag. “I ducked round to Moran and Cato's for some biscuits,” he said in his voice of flat melancholy, yet it was touching to find that he considered Darragh's being there an event, a significant passage, worthy of the good cups and a few Arnott's shortbreads.
“Mrs. Flood is finished,” said Darragh. “I mean, she's been anointed, and the rest.”
“Righto,” said Bert. “She'll be happy. And Ross will be sweet. His bark's worse than his bite. He feels he has to be rude to you. Union rules.”
The Daily Mirror was on the table with its predictable stories of Allied progress in Africa and Allied devastation in Asia. All the military success was in the wrong place for Bert and Darragh, and came at the cost of Lance Bombardier Heggarty's capture and Mrs. Heggarty's endangered s
oul.
Darragh said, “Mrs. Flood will be safe now from all this.” He waved his hand at the headlines. As soon as he said it, he thought he might have uttered the wrong sentiment.
“She'll be missed,” said Bert. “She was a lovely girl. She was an usherette at the State when we came down to Sydney, believe it or not. Don't know what she was doing with an ugly bugger like me. Pardon the French, Father.”
“French?”
“My swear words. Pardon them.”
“Of course.”
A half-grin came to Bert's face. “Not that I'm likely to give them up, you know. I hope Ross didn't say anything too nasty to you last time you were here?”
“No,” Darragh lied.
“See, he can be an angry mad bugger. Make a good soldier if he hadn't had the crook lungs himself. An orphan, you know—at least his mother died young and he was on his own. Most orphans are angry buggers because they feel they didn't get a fair shake. Toys at Christmas and all that stuff. Had a hard life, of course. But no sooner does the party say we need you somewhere than he's there. Works like a Trojan, that feller.”
Darragh wondered what a priest could say when the wronged husband clicked his tongue over the well-known and affectionately recorded traits of the lover.
Tea finished, Bert led him up the hallway and paused at the bedroom door to allow Darragh to say goodbye to Mrs. Flood. But the woman was noisily yet delicately sleeping. Raised and redeemed on her pillows, she wore the same gracefully amused smile she had before he had laid the oil upon her extremities.
“Call on me again, Bert. Whenever Mrs. Flood wishes.”
He was no longer frightened of Trumble. Knowing him to be himself a frightened, fatherless child helped reduce his Marxist ardor to size.
X
Over the past few days, the smoke had been dissipated by rain and cold southerlies, and Darragh had begun to wonder if Anthony Heggarty had remembered to pass the letter to his mother. It seemed to him to justify the monsignor's low estimation of him that he had entrusted such an important document to a first-grade child.
Darragh consoled himself during downfalls with a book of Monsignor Knox's witty essays, The Mass in Slow Motion, in the parlor. Now that the first breath of winter had struck, it provided a congenial corner. Looking through the parlor's side window, he saw the child, Anthony, standing at the door, gathering himself to ring, water in his hair. Darragh moved quickly, to get to the door before the bell alerted Mrs. Flannery.
Seeing him, Anthony extended his hand, an envelope in it, spotted with warm rain. “Thank you, Anthony,” said Darragh. “Are you well?”
“The Nazis have my father,” said the boy. This seemed to be obviously a quotation from Kate Heggarty. “But it means he'll come home safe.”
“Yes,” said Darragh. “And I pray that it's soon.” And he did. He wanted Mrs. Heggarty's soul. He wanted her submission as he'd wanted Mrs. Flood's.
The boy seemed happy and went away across the wet gravel towards the school. Darragh took the plain white envelope inside. The writing on it was in parish convent copperplate. Thou shalt know them by their hand. . . . Under her address in the Crescent she had carefully written the date, and the letter was rather touchingly set out in a manner not unlike a school essay. “Go home, girls,” you could virtually hear a nun in Kate Heggarty's girlhood say, “and for your homework write the sort of letter you would write to a priest if you wanted spiritual advice.”
Dear Father Darragh,
It is very kind of you to take an interest in our welfare. We would be honored to have the blessing of your visit on our house at this troubled time. Except that I do not want to argue the matter with you again. I feel we argued the matter enough last time.
I am now working every day until three o'clock, so that it would be better if you were to visit Anthony and me. It would need to be in the later afternoon about four.
Yours sincerely
Kate Heggarty (Mrs.)
She said no arguments, but she wanted to see a priest, and that was the first step, Darragh believed. A more critical voice within asked who she thought she was to put limits on a priest. She had no right to expect an easy visitation, not after her forthrightness in the presbytery parlor. Besides, she might simply relish playing with him, flexing her power over him by making him desire her salvation. So, for his own part, he intended to consider and not to rush.
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 honored 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 colored 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 installment 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 si
t,” she repeated with a breathless desire that things should go well. “I'll boil the kettle.”
Darragh said, “This house does you honor, 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.”