Darragh, of course, had become acquainted with the existence of such sins, but to meet the proposition in the flesh raised something edgy in him not only in terms of moral outrage but because he felt inadequate to the task of counseling the militiaman. Yet he began, since it was his task to begin. The militiaman must realize, he said, that he had greatly imperiled himself—he had not merely outraged God but was tending in a direction which would make him an outcast. To Darragh, eternal priest and—he would himself admit—sheltered boy, there seemed to be a willfulness in that. He wanted to be angry, but under the exorcist's burden of being a merciful confessor, he felt, too, that without the army and the heightened time, without the threat of dying too young in some horrifying tropic place, without all borders blurring or being borne away, this young man would not have behaved in this perverted manner. History had knocked the soldier out of his orbit, had confused the directions he should take. “You must avoid this association,” said Frank firmly and with utter conviction, but fearing, as with Mr. Regan, he might be out of his depth. For to the Frank Darragh who occupied the confessional that day, with the power to bind and loose humanity from its shame and moral willfulness, woman constituted the ultimate temptation. The dream of closeness with a woman, of being party with her to the revelation of some unutterable mystery. The girl on the train was both noble soul and alluring creature. But not so a boy dressed as a pseudo-woman. Woman was so much the polestar that he could not imagine why this militiaman-navigator beyond the grille should be swayed by such false magnetism.
“I tell myself I'll avoid him, but I don't know how to,” the soldier admitted. “I see him everywhere.”
“Everywhere. You mean, you run into him all the time.”
“Not all the time. But I see his face everywhere.”
“No,” said Darragh, deciding that severity would not serve and adopting a gentler tone. “No, that's an indulgence. You shouldn't talk or think that way. You'll find that you will meet some girl—indeed, you should try to do that. That will put you back on your proper track. It is possible for a good person, and I know you are a good person, to be thrown sideways by some kink. But that's all this is. A kink.”
Darragh hoped his own revulsion had not emerged.
“Then I'll try,” said the soldier, more insistently. Darragh could not doubt the sincerity of that, and yet it seemed to him that a whiff of hopeless self-knowledge drifted through the screen. Darragh himself was infected by it, and struggled in its coils.
He came clean. It was, an instinct told him, most fruitful. “Look,” he said, “I'm only a young man, like you. As man, I know no more than you know. Possibly less. As priest I know the sacramental power of absolution, and I know too the power and mercy of the Virgin Mary, the ultimate woman, the Tower of Ivory, the Star of the Sea. She will not let you be lost. I promise you. She will not let you.”
The soldier said nothing.
“Do you understand?” asked Darragh, more in hope than in authority.
When the soldier said he did, Darragh absolved him. But strangeness had entered Father Darragh's moral atlas.
His Tuesdays were devoted to visitations. He had divided the streets of Homebush and Strathfield and, with the help of the parish rolls, set forth systematically to visit the faithful on foot. When he took his black felt hat off at their doors, his straight dark-brown hair, assiduously parted, itched with sweat. He was careful not to enter households where young women were on their own, chatting to them instead at their doorways, touching, with the implied beneficence of his office, the heads of their children who gazed up snuffling at him. Sometimes a parishioner's son or husband was home on leave, and Darragh was brought inside to drink tea from the best cups and had fruit cake forced upon him.
The near sixty-year-old Clancy sisters lived together in Beresford Road, and in particular fed him. Occasionally he visited them out of pure hunger. He knew them to be penitents of his, that they confessed their non-sins to him once a month at least. “I was snippy with my sister.” They were stoutish, forthright women who at some stage had sold up their late father's pub in Narromine and moved to the city to live comfortably ever after on the proceeds. They wore support hose under their big tents of floral dresses, and their thickening ankles put stress upon the leather bulwarks of their plain shoes. But he had no doubt that they were amongst the beloved of Christ. They lived virtuously but without fuss, they were frank to a fault, and they gave amply to the monsignor's building fund. The elder Clancy told him once, “I'm pleased to have escaped all the fuss of marriage. Children would be nice—our brother has the two. But marriage is a torment, Father, for many women.” And she would draw herself up in all the certainty of her lucky escape. Who was he, a celibate, to disagree with her?
He was drinking tea with them on the Tuesday following the soldier's confession. It was nearly noon, and he had at least six and a half cups in him from various households, and his bladder ached. They were the sort of people, the Clancy sisters, one could ask for the use of their lavatory. They had no illusions that priests lacked bladders. Their bathroom was always set up in taste, with a special towel laid by for his use, and a fresh bar of Cashmere Bouquet. They always presumed, too, he was there for a donation. They did not resent it, but offered him money to take back to the parish—generally, as now, ten pounds in a white envelope.
“But I didn't come for that,” he said.
“Well, if you're to be a parish priest you must get used to asking for money.”
The Clancy sisters were also astounding informants. They did not seem to be shocked at all by scandalous behavior in the Strathfield-Homebush area. Nor did they adopt any Pharisee airs—they were honestly enthralled by gossip, a generally minor sin they might, for all Darragh remembered, have mentioned in the confessional. They knew which absent soldiers' wives were behaving badly. They had, perhaps from their pub-owning papa, such a normal air of knowing all about the debased nature of the human heart, even of their own hearts, that it was hard to see them as narrow carping gossipers, as whitened sepulchers while within everything was rotten.
“Mrs. Flood,” said the elder Miss Clancy, while the other shuttled about their kitchen. “Her mother was such a good Catholic. Her father was rough as anything, they said he was a Communist at the saleyards. She rents a room to a young fellow from the brickworks. Strapping young bloke, but they tell us 4F, unfit to serve.” Miss Clancy tossed her head in the baldest disbelief. “He seems to serve the Flood household all right.”
The other Miss Clancy came from the kitchen with fresh hot water.
“Mrs. Flood,” she sharply informed Darragh, “now shares bed and board with the young fellow, and the husband resides on the back verandah!”
They both shook their heads, though they did not seem as shaken as Darragh by this degree of lasciviousness in a prosaic suburb.
“You should go and see her, Father,” said the bossier of the Clancys. The command made him uneasy. Another dictum of his old spiritual director. “People don't come around by being harangued. They respond to example.” He would need to think about what example he could set Mrs. Flood.
“Thing is,” said the older sister, “she has this very bad consumption. Coughing all the time. Bloody handkerchiefs. She's been in a sanatorium.”
“Boddington,” said the younger Miss Clancy. “In the Blue Mountains.”
“You'd wonder where she'd get the energy. And for the young fellow . . . well, you'd wonder what the attraction is.”
“Red hair,” said the younger sister, offering Darragh more Scotch Fingers. “Some men are crazy for it.”
Darragh supposed he should visit Mrs. Flood sometime in the near future in view of her medical condition alone. It would be a difficult business if the brickworker and the husband were both at home at the time. What could be said? Perhaps the Clancy sisters were wrong about the boarder. But they had an aura of great certainty.
When Darragh asked them, before leaving, if they had an air-raid shelter
to go to, they told him of course they did, only two doors up. As for their ever fleeing, “No Jap would dare put a foot in our front door,” said the eldest. Darragh hoped she would not be disabused of that proposition.
He returned from the Clancy sisters with that unaccustomed sense of oppression recurring. He felt he needed what he rarely needed: not a mere afternoon nap, but a few profound hours of sleep. It was as if to the scales of sin the Clancy sisters had added that one backbreaking straw—the sexual villainy of mortally ill Mrs. Flood. This tattle about the redheaded adulterer seemed connected in its high color with the confession of the soldier about the boy seductress. He knew his father must have seen fantastical things in Paris and London, where soldiers sought in viciousness a model of the horror from which they were on leave. But the younger Darragh's boyhood had been protected from the concrete evidence of human desire which many of his fellow seminarians brought from their childhood farms and raw inner suburbs to their studies. He was prepared for the sins which occupied the major headings in Noldin's Summa Theologiae Moralis; but he had not expected to face in Strathfield the danse macabre of Noldin's more fanciful footnotes. Surely, the footnotes of extreme perversion belonged to Europe, to France, say, with its world-weariness and its ancient record of sin, which God had punished in 1940 by letting the French army collapse.
The reliable springs of divine wisdom on which he drew confidently in the confessional and in daily life to deal with normal sin now seemed more remote from him. There was as well a stupefying suspicion that further shocks awaited before the Japanese Empire finally lapped up against the Clancy sisters' doorstep.
In an attempt to ward off the itch for oblivion, to achieve a sense of the normal, a sense of being held in position by wisdom incarnate, Darragh read what was left of his office—Compline and Vespers. Psalm 139, now that he looked at it, was full of warnings about the fallibility and ill will of humanity. Acuunt linguas suas ut serpens; venonum aspidum sub labias eorum. Their tongues are as sharp as those of serpents; the venom of asps lies under their lips. So far from redemption, this creeping, serpentine species of which he was a member.
Mrs. Flannery cooked an entire dreary lunchtime meal for him that day. The monsignor was not in, and so Darragh was able to read the Herald as, in his sudden spiritual weariness, he devoured Mrs. Flannery's floury cooking, aware that on this poisonous earth he was fortunate to be fed, but incapable, for once, of a sense of gracious thanksgiving.
The Herald (“Protestant rag that it is,” said the monsignor as he thoroughly read it) had predictable tidings. A surrounded Australian battalion had successfully fought its way back to the British lines in Malaya, but the mark of the Japanese advance was further down the Malay Peninsula than it had been the last time the Herald published its dispiriting map. The government was already discussing plans for the evacuation of children from Brisbane and Sydney should the Japanese capture fields which put those targets in range. Children had already been moved from the tropical port of Darwin. But framing the news of military catastrophe and the coming bewilderment of children were the graphic advertisements in which Pepsodent toothpaste promised the young success in their social life at their local tennis club—“Shirley's teeth are so much whiter!” In Capstan and Turf and 33 advertisements, the faces of confident smokers hemmed in the columns of bad news. Salvital promised the threatened populace of the Commonwealth of Australia, no matter what, a settled digestion, and Solvol assured them they would meet every emergency with immaculate hands.
A chastening statement from the prime minister, Mr. Curtin. “The Spearhead reaches south—always south.” Mr. Curtin suggested that the whole future of “our race” was at stake. At Leichhardt Stadium, Billy Britt had fought an American soldier named the Alabama Kid. Britt, a Catholic Youth Organization boxer of some renown, had been flattened in the eighth round by said Kid.
Darragh took his plate to the kitchen to thank Mrs. Flannery. She had tapioca pudding for him, but he suggested that as much as he liked tapioca, he might have it that night. He heard his own voice and feared it sounded sullen. He hated to sound that way. It had been part of his self-respect as a youth to overcome the natural surliness of boyhood. But here it was, asserting itself at his age, in the presbytery kitchen.
By the time he reached his room, which blessedly pointed towards the quiet, tree-lined street rather than towards the convent school, he was staggering with exhaustion, and broke the rule of neatness by lying on the bed in his black trousers. His chances of surreptitiously ironing them later, without Mrs. Flannery's knowledge, were nonexistent, since in domestic affairs she was all-knowing. But he would deal with that question later. He was instantly asleep, with the sort of tiredness which induces vivid dreams.
He saw very clearly in the brassy afternoon light that came from his window and penetrated his sleep the striped awnings which Australians used to transform back verandahs into bedrooms. Millions of Australians, adolescents or inconvenient uncles, lived verandah lives and dreamed verandah dreams, sheltered by such awnings. Hundreds of thousands, anyhow. The canvas always patterned in yellow and browny-orange—very nearly the same color as the flags which were put up on beaches to mark safe swimming spots. By the awning of Darragh's dream sat a gray-faced, thin man, wearing a satin-backed vest, a collarless shirt, undistinguished pants, smoking a thin, self-made cigarette. He seemed the loneliest man in that plain void enclosed by orange-and-yellow sun-blasted awning. Occupying in his own household the space reserved for the visitor, the child, the overstaying, underpaying guest. Darragh approached him and asked, “What have you done?” For though the man's demeanor was humble, there was no doubt that he had achieved something worthy of a mad emperor. The man was philosophically inhaling the smoke from his little glowing cigarette and had his eye on the middle distance. “What have you done?”
The man rose like a night porter or watchman roused by an unexpected demand or question. The fag end dangling from his thin, creased, yellowed fingers, he moved from his chair to lead Darragh on a tour of the atrocity.
There are some dreams, particularly the dreams of exhausted afternoons, in which your sense of movement seems very close to movement in the waking world. There are corridors to be traversed, and doors to be opened, and the weary pale man, leading him and opening the way, performed those services for Darragh. He opened the bedroom door and entered into a mesh-wired, room-sized meat closet where immaculate sides of lamb hung from hooks. He picked up from the floor some sharp implements which might stand in the way of Frank Darragh's thorough inspection. On a couch by the meat closet's window sat a bloodied handkerchief. Darragh looked at it and rage filled him. The man nudged the floor and inhaled his narrow-gutted cigarette and forced a joyless cloud of smoke, hissing, between his teeth. “We were expecting you earlier,” he said.
If the clean-slaughtered sheep of this dream were calculated to wake Father Darragh, they did not. But they flavored his ongoing sleep with that particularly acrid fear peculiar to dreams. Even his unconscious mind was aware of his limbs fibrillating and turning chill, the sort of coldness of the reins that comes, say, from standing too close to some edge. I come to bring you a clean sacrifice. . . .
He was somehow aware of the afternoon advancing, and was pleased at that, for any new, conscious-stricken requirements of the day would need to be postponed. Sometimes, if he was about at the right hour, he went over to greet the children as they left school. But that hour of promise and innocence and blessing slipped away beneath the umber tide of his sleep. It was five past five when he woke, his body sweaty because of the ill-considered amount of clothing in which he'd fallen asleep. At seven o'clock he was to conduct the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, singing the hymns with the congregation, raising the monstrance with the Divine Host within it to bless the faithful petitioners, all of them with their heads bowed in predictable ways: Dear God, save my boy, stop the Japanese, make my husband kinder, aid me as the other man charms me, give me a happy death, ease my pain,
assuage my doubt!
As he went to the bathroom to rinse his neck and upper body, he could hear Monsignor Carolan's voice raised in conversation in the lounge room downstairs. Tuesday. The monsignor always had lunch with his classmate Monsignor Plunkett on Tuesdays. Monsignor Carolan had once told Darragh, “Plunkett knows every rich Catholic between here and Bourke, and knows how to talk to them, too.” Darragh decided that when he had washed and changed his shirt, he would go—as a polite curate should—and pay his respects to eminent Monsignor Plunkett. So, ten minutes later, in the sort of collarless shirt to which priests attached their stocks by means of a stud, he made his way down the stairs. Halfway down, it became clear to him that the monsignor believed him to be out of the house. He was speaking in that full-blast voice which powerful men develop in their middle age, and he was discussing Darragh.
“He hears bucketloads of confessions,” the monsignor was saying. “That seems to be his chief definition of what a priest does.”
“Sounds morbid,” suggested Plunkett. “I hope it's not, Vince.”
“No. A happy soul. If anything innocent as a lamb. See, an only child, elderly and protective parents. The father's dead. Poor young Frank knows nothing of the world. He also knows nothing about the eleventh commandment, without which nothing gets done. Thou shalt raise plenteous finance. I don't think he'll ever be any good at that one. Parishioners tell me he visits them and asks them not to give him money.”
“Some sort of a zealot then?”
“No. Too earnest, that's all. You see, everything he does flows out of his innocence. What's going to become of him if events shake him up?”
“What sort of events do you mean?” asked Plunkett.