Office of Innocence

  “Is it true you told people they were to blame for that woman?” murmured the monsignor.

  “That is not true,” said Darragh, in a supposedly easy voice, so that the altar boys would have no room for gossip about a falling out between the parish priest and the curate. But it was sickening that the monsignor had informants amongst the congregation.

  “You remember last night I told you not to mention her.”

  “I didn't mention her by name,” said Darragh. “But there had to be some reference to her. If people were scandalized by last week's paper, it was up to me to stanch the scandal this week.”

  The monsignor, a mountain of priesthood in his braided, threaded, looped, and glittering robes, joined his hands and sank his fine-cut nose between them in prayer. Having folded the chasuble, stole, and maniple in its drawer—you could not trust the altar boys with that job—Darragh crossed the room and threw the white alb into a laundry basket, for Mrs. Flannery always gave him a fresh one, heavily starched by lay nuns in Parramatta, to start the week.

  Without looking at him, the monsignor put on his head the black four-cornered, three-peaked cap named the biretta, optional wear for priests, which older men seemed to favor more than younger, and took up his chalice in its altar cloth, one hand beneath the chalice veil, the other laid flat across the embroidered burse, the customary posture of the priest approaching the altar. Anger was still in his face. He said sideways out of his mouth, “Are you going out today, Father?”

  “Not today,” said Darragh. He would visit his mother and Aunt Madge on some other Sabbath. “This evening.”

  “I'm going out to lunch. I'll leave you a note before I go.”

  And he progressed through the door, and Darragh heard that peculiar unified sound of an entire Catholic congregation rising as one, a noise made up in part of sundry fabrics moving, of limbs of all ages straightening, of ankles hitting kneelers, of knees colliding with the pew in front. This was the nine-o'clock Sunday Church militant, ascending in its ranks to greet its monsignor.

  Darragh ate another presbytery breakfast—a boiled egg, toast—and then hunched down at the desk in his room and began to apply himself to reading the small hours for the Sunday within the Octave of the Ascension.

  The psalms for the office of Prime were not particular to that Sunday; that is, they were the same psalms that priests, rattling through Prime, early or late at night, after a day in the sun, trying to make Matins and Lauds before midnight, said every Sunday. Deep in Psalm 17, a familiar verse stopped him in mid-mutter. “Lapis, quem reprobaverunt aedificantes, factus est caput anguli.” The stone which the builders have rejected has been made the keystone of the arch.

  It was not the first time a text penetrated him for good or ill. But by a hand which Darragh could only presume to be divine, the steepling weight of last Sunday's newspaper shame, which he now understood had been crushing him, crowding him nearer and nearer lunacy, was gone. He could not say how long the relief would last, but the sense of being a favored child, or at least a being on a just course, returned like a gracious tide he seemed to experience even in his limbs. He dropped to his knees with an enthusiasm he had not felt for some months and offered thanks to Mary, the Mother of humankind, for her intercession, and to Christ, who had also tasted blood and ashes in the Garden of Gethsemane and written something mysterious in the dust of the Temple forecourt as the Pharisees bayed, for His divine remission of a terrible sentence. Simultaneously, he felt confirmed in his intentions to meet with Fratelli. Efficacy returned to him like the rain, which even as he knelt began to fall outside. He had heard a distant radio report that in the parched interior, from which the weather came, there had been welcome torrents over the remaining areas held until recently by drought. He felt as graced by torrents as the inimitable earth itself.

  He continued with Vespers and Compline: “Ecce nunc tempus acceptabile, ecce nunc dies salutis . . .” Behold now is the proper time, now the day of deliverance . . .

  By the time he came downstairs, he knew, both the monsignor and Mrs. Flannery would be gone from the house. Sunday midday was the one time of the week Mrs. Flannery did not cook, but went to eat a baked dinner at her sister's house in Concord West. The dining room was empty and innocent of cooking odors. In the hall was an envelope addressed to him in Monsignor Carolan's handwriting. “Dear Father Darragh,” it began rather formally. “Don't go out tomorrow until we have discussed your future.” It was signed “Vincent Carolan, PP.” Even that left him calm and armored in new certainty. There was a second letter, and the monsignor added a note of regret to it that he had forgotten to give it to Darragh the day before, when he returned from retreat. It carried a design of a cross and eagles, and was from Captain O'Rourke. Aspillon, said O'Rourke briefly, was in a compound west of Townsville, more than a thousand miles north. “I'm informed he's in good health. If you wish to write to him it is care of the Detention Compound, Camp Kenney, via Townsville. My unit will be on the move soon, so this is likely to be our last communication.”

  Against what he knew from Fratelli, Captain O'Rourke's assurances counted for little. But for today, the amiable Gervaise would have to be committed to the care of God. Darragh had far too much else to attend to.

  XXIII

  “Jesus,” said Trumble, turning to him as Darragh stepped onto the train behind him. At the station, as earlier arranged, they had barely nodded to each other, but this train to Town Hall was nearly empty, and it was obvious they could travel together as a pair. “You look like a dead giveaway, old sport. Let's find a seat.”

  Trumble indicated facing seats by a window beyond which the occasional hooded lights of these suburbs could be seen. With benign amusement, he looked over his new friend's appearance. Darragh wore a pair of clerical black trousers, the seminary darkness of which he had tried to cancel out with his schooldays sports coat, a Fair Isle knit sweater, a white shirt left over from youth, and a broad woven tie of a fashion not much favored in this time of war, dread, and excitement. He had worn his black overcoat over it all while he waited to board the train at Homebush. Now, on the train, he and Trumble sat together companionably but not saying much, having talked so thoroughly the night before. At Town Hall Station, Darragh went to the men's lavatories, spending tuppence—such was the inflation of war—on a toilet cubicle in which he removed his coat and hat, packed them in the little grip he carried, and emerged, he dared hope, like a typical, undistinguished citizen of the world, out with a mate, looking for an after-hours drink.

  “If you'd needed strides,” said Trumble, assessing him as he emerged from the lavatory, “I could have given you a gray pair. You look like a bloody archbishop in mufti.” Darragh was disappointed the effect was not better, and Trumble, seeing this, relented. “Don't worry. We'll pass you off as a . . . well, maybe a student of philosophy or some such. Let me carry the bloody grip for you. No, let me. Come on.”

  Trumble, who in other circumstances was in favor of putting priests against the wall and shooting them, was taking his duty of care of Darragh with a thorough seriousness. As they moved up to street level on the corner opposite the wedding-cake architecture of the Town Hall, Darragh was aware of Trumble's hand extended behind his shoulder, as if to catch him should he suddenly fall back down the stairs.

  Park Street did not seem to know quite what to make of its own blackout-cum-brownout. Department stores retained in their windows a few lights by which dress mannequins could be observed. Light spilled onto the pavement from occasional open cafés and pub doorways. Hoping to be a city hidden from bombers, it yet also hoped to be a city of discreet delights, of wares awaiting the next day's opening hour.

  “Two Japanese reconnaissance planes over Sydney today, and the buggers can't give up their advertising,” said Trumble, sniffing at Grace Brothers' window. It was the first Darragh had heard of Japanese reconnaissance planes, but they were not Trumble's chief point. “They're loyal to their credo, all right,” said Trumble of the shopkeeper
s. “They'd rather do business than live.”

  They passed Hyde Park with its antiaircraft battery, St. Mary's Cathedral, where Darragh had been ordained a priest, looming dark behind. As they passed the Australian Museum, Trumble said jovially, “Better watch out, Father. Between here and the Cross there are tarts on every corner. By the way, in the Soviet Union there's no prostitution. You ought to find that fact interesting.”

  And indeed women in knee-length, low-cut dresses, early-winter cardigans, and flimsy coats, with acrid port and cigarettes on their breath, appeared from doorways to say, “Hello boys!”; “Out on the prowl, fellers?”; and “I always liked Australian blokes better than Yanks.” Though he had lived his boyhood four or five miles from this very point in William Street, Darragh had never before heard this sort of solicitation and found it a shocking yet exhilarating experience, as if he were getting closer to the unacknowledged core of the other reality, the one which did not present itself at the altar rails with shining face. A mysterious Sydney existed of which he had no knowledge, and he climbed with Trumble past car showrooms to the reputed parish of that other Australia, Kings Cross.

  On its hill, and along the ridge of Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross possessed a barely muted commercial energy of a particular kind. Though most doors were closed for the Sabbath, there was a sense of events occurring behind them, of drinks being poured, of jokes and touches exchanged in warm rooms closed to the sight of passersby. Americans in crisp uniforms discussed their options by every corner.

  Crass Darlinghurst Road led into more urbane Macleay Street, where naval and army officers with eagles on their peaked caps and surer social calendars than the enlisted men hurried towards their evening engagements, delighted—it seemed—that accidents of war had offered them such a pleasure port as Sydney.

  “Our saviors,” Trumble told Darragh. “They won't look so posh a week after the Japs arrive. The little yellow men will have 'em digging latrines.”

  This sentiment of Trumble's was uttered just as he and Darragh passed a knot of American soldiers. It was spoken with undue volume, with Trumble staring ahead unblinking, with a kind of neutral certainty, into the eyes of the tallest of the men. It was one of those situations in which the victims of remarks are not sure that they have heard what they have heard, and would rather let ambiguity pass them by.

  “They'll save us,” said Darragh, “if anyone will.”

  But it was apparent that Trumble was as full of a sense of a coming divine purge as was Mr. Regan of Rose Bay. Trumble went on talking, as they moved down Macleay Street, about the fact that fashionable people entertained American officers in their flats, gin and whisky being provided from the horn of plenty which America seemed to be even in its retreat. “And there they all stand,” asserted Trumble, on what authority Darragh was unsure, but with Mr. Regan's intensity, “glass in hand and weak as water. They don't seem to understand this is a world game.”

  At the corner of Greenknowe Avenue, Trumble and Darragh waited where Fratelli had nominated. Darragh's heart seemed to try to find shelter in his throat. Mousy lights shone under the alcove of the post office. A young Australian pilot officer and his woman friend passed Trumble and Darragh, and seemed confused a little by their ill-assorted nature, by the question of what these two men had in common. But as they passed, Frank was relieved to see the couple return quickly to their mutual self-absorption. I shall never know that, he realized. Not that particular fierceness of attention for another. Were my mother and father like that? Did they have that triumphant air of having found together a sublime secret?

  He felt cold. The sky was low and moist and a wind honed itself on the corner where they waited. Trumble showed a hardy indifference. He was underdressed for the night, Darragh thought, and lacked a sweater.

  He sensed the question in Darragh's look. “If I put on too many jumpers I get chills. Better to defy the bloody cold.” He seemed proud of the concept of defiance, and of how it had brought him to terms with his disease.

  Long before the man himself went to the trouble of peering about in the near dark for Darragh, Darragh could see the square and somehow confident body of Fratelli approaching up Macleay Street from the direction of the naval base. He was dressed as he had described himself in the confessional: a normal citizen in a dark blue suit. Darragh decided to advance on him, and Fratelli's attention was jolted. Seeing Trumble waiting on the corner, he paused, lightly balanced, ready to flee.

  “That's not a cop?” he asked.

  “If only you knew, Sergeant,” uttered Darragh with an immediate ferocious laugh. “He's a Red revolutionary. He wants to do away with you and me, all right. But not yet. Not tonight.”

  “He's a big sonofabitch.”

  “He's had TB. F4. He'll sit across the room. He thinks we're talking about Aspillon. But he'll get me home safely. I thought you'd be in uniform.”

  “Sometimes I work out of uniform. Sometimes I've got to. But I'm carrying my MP identity. I can get us into this club.” He reached into his pocket for it. “Thanks for coming.”

  Just short of some sort of primal grimace, Darragh said, “There's only one reason I came.”

  “Father, contempt won't do it for you,” Fratelli remarked with some sadness, his vast eyes encompassing the breadth and depth of all Darragh's compassion and ill will. “Introduce me to your friend.”

  So it was done, with appropriate mutual distrust between Trumble and Fratelli. “Okay then,” said Fratelli, and he led them away from Macleay Street, down amongst browned-out flats, past a warden on the prowl for chinks of light, and into a small, darkened door which stood by steps leading down towards the waters of Elizabeth Bay.

  Fratelli pushed the street door open, inwards, and stood back to let Trumble and Darragh enter a small, crowded alcove. In here, an American sailor—what they called shore patrol—stood smartly accoutered, and an old man in a white coat sat by a table on which a visitors' book waited.

  “My guests,” said Fratelli to the old man in his authoritative, sunny manner, and signed himself in with his serial number and stood back to let Darragh and Trumble sign. Darragh, after considering the matter, signed himself as Father Francis Darragh, spelling “Father” out in full so that there was no ambiguity. If he paid for it later in social odium or the disapproval of monsignors, so be it. It guaranteed he had left trace of himself. Fratelli led them through into a bar area, surprisingly cavernous. There were men and women in here, only perhaps half of them in uniform. An occasional Australian soldier or officer sat with his American hosts. Darragh turned to Trumble, who still carried Darragh's little grip, and said, for Fratelli's sake, “I just have to have a word with the sergeant.”

  Indeed, Fratelli seemed strangely sanguine about the coming interview. “Why don't you sit at the bar, mate?” he said, with a well-meaning attempt at an Australian accent. “Tell the barman to put your beer on my tab. And any scotch too.”

  Lugging the grip, Trumble went happily to the bar, which in the style of Sydney bars had no barstools, and leaned on the counter, observing Fratelli and Darragh make their way to a table against the far wall. As he settled, Fratelli began looking at the girls in sweaters and bright frocks who circulated around the room.

  “These are good girls, not whores, Father,” Fratelli assured Darragh, pointing to the girls. “They volunteer to work here. To sit and talk with us. We're under orders not to ask them for anything more.”

  Darragh shook his head and gazed full at Fratelli, from whose murderous lips these irrelevant assurances came. They were interrupted by a frizzle-haired waitress from whom Fratelli ordered scotch and a beer chaser. Darragh said he'd have a pony, the smallest available measure of beer under New South Wales licensing laws.

  “Come on, Frank,” said Fratelli, discreet about Darragh's priesthood, “join me in the same. We can ease up after that. This is what workingmen drink in America.”

  Darragh was persuaded, thinking that he could make his own pace in the drinking. But
as well as that, as much as he needed to keep clear, he did desire something Lethean, something to blunt the import of the evening, something to encourage him in the silliness of this scene with blithe Fratelli, who must be rendered down to grave decisions.

  Fratelli asserted his authority again now by telling the waitress to send a hit of whisky Trumble's way as well—“That long drink of water at the bar.”

  The woman went.

  “Sorry I was late,” said Fratelli at once, as Darragh himself opened his mouth. “A big Saturday night in Sydney last night—still processing some of the fights. Air-raid warnings this morning. Did you know there were two Jap reconnaissance planes over us, right over here, this morning?”

  “My friend told me.”

  “Yeah. Around about the time you were getting up to say Mass.”

  Darragh contested this glib truth. “I didn't hear any sirens.”

  “No. It was more an alert for us. Look, let's wait till she brings the drinks before we talk.”

  “You mustn't settle yourself,” said Darragh. “We're not here to drink.”

  “Am I beneath talking and drinking with?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So you say,” Fratelli muttered with a small assuring nod, which carried its own ration of slyness. “I do want to do the right thing, in case grace fails me.”

  “In case you fail grace,” Darragh insisted.

  “Easy to say, Father,” Fratelli complained. “But I want to be good.” He held up both hands. “I want to have a serious conversation that looks like normal talk.”

  Darragh closed his eyes and put a hand to his forehead.

  The drinks came quickly, and Fratelli paid for them with a ten-shilling note, telling the woman to keep the change. This, in a nontipping nation, would give her a margin of shillings to take home. But she showed no special gratitude. She gave an appearance of boredom at the egregious generosity of Americans.