Beyond a garden of lank grass, the front windows of Mrs. Flood's low-slung house were open. Thus Darragh surmised she must be in. The doorbell, the kind you cranked, was answered by a tall man. He wore gray pants, gray vest, white collarless shirt—very much like the abused husband in his dream except that he was fuller in the body. The man's stoutness saved Darragh from perceiving the dream which had motivated him to come here as too prophetic. As well, the fellow showed a normal secular shock at seeing him.
“Aw yes,” he said, as if he knew this awkward day would arrive; and here it was!
Darragh said he was the curate from St. Margaret's. “Is Mrs. Flood in?” he asked. “I believe she's been fairly sick.”
“Yeah,” said the man, rubbing his overnight beard. “Yeah, she's been a bit up and down lately. It's her condition.”
“Is she at home?”
The man stood back, reluctantly permitting Darragh to enter. The hallway had an odor of dust spiked with the bitter scent of invalid tonics and tinctures. “We're out in the kitchen,” said the man in the vest, following him up the hallway. Darragh turned. “You're Mr. Flood?”
“That's right. Bert.”
“Father Frank Darragh,” said Frank, offering his hand. But the mutual clench was full of doubt. After all, how could you achieve the normal electricity of mateship between hand and hand if you introduced yourself as “Father Frank Darragh”? What other description could Frank give himself, though? They would suspect him more if he did not introduce himself in those terms, which nonetheless created an instant space about the priest, across which the sacramental mercies might or might not operate. Mr. Flood retrieved his unwilling hand, and led Darragh up the hallway.
In the sunny kitchen, at the head of a scrubbed table with the well-intended remnants of sand soap embedded in its grain, Mrs. Flood, in light from the window behind her, sat in a wicker chair buttressed by pillows. She made a splendid invalid, possessed of a strange beauty. Seated beside her on a plain kitchen chair was a lean but muscular young man, fair-headed, drinking tea and holding in one hand, folded for reading, a newspaper entitled The Worker. Seeing Bert Flood and Darragh arrive, he creased it exactly to the size of a legal deed and laid it on the table like an opening bid. His left hand was heavily bandaged.
“Rosie,” said Mr. Flood, gesturing with embarrassment towards Darragh, “this is the priest from up the road.” There was a clear, pleading message: You deal with him. You send him on his way with a flea in his ear. There was no doubt Mrs. Flood had the presence for such a task. She and the young man studied him in committee. Mrs. Flood's red hair had sinuous curls, apparently of its own volition, without the intervention of beauty parlors. Her eyes glittered. She wore a generous trace of smile that gave Darragh hope of a welcome.
He heard himself repeat his name and tell her he'd been told she wasn't well. Breathing harshly, and her eyes glimmering in some kind of appreciation, Mrs. Flood rubbed her lips with an immaculate handkerchief. She said, “Sit down, Father Frank.” Generally only the close friends of priests had the liberty of calling them by their first names. She was, of course, aware of this, and was possibly sending him a signal—he would not be getting conventional reverence in this kitchen, but then he would not get typical denial either. And perhaps, in her voice crimped by her disease, with the second syllable of “Father” reduced to a wheeze, she was presuming on the authority of her illness to help her through this meeting.
“It's years since we've had a priest here,” she told him from her chair.
“But you're on the parish roll,” said Frank.
“Yes,” she admitted. “I used to go up there sometimes for Mass. But that monsignor of yours, he's money-crazy.”
“Not for his own sake,” said Frank.
“Oh, Father Frank, he used to drive a pretty nice car. You met Bert, did you? And this is our friend Ross Trumble. Ross crushed a finger at the brickworks. He's off on compo.” Frank exchanged nods with blue-eyed Mr. Trumble.
“Get us some tea, eh, Bert?” suggested Mrs. Flood. Bert went to the stove willingly, to check on the state of the kettle, which was obviously close to boiling.
“Sit down, Father Darragh. Take that chair, that's right. I bet those old biddies the Clancys told you to come and try to improve me. Did you drive down yourself?”
“Walked,” said Frank.
“Good for you, young feller,” said Mrs. Flood. She called to her husband, “See, Bert, not all of them have cars.” It sounded as if they had once had a bet on the matter.
Ross Trumble still considered him, and the man's cheeks had become flushed from mounting discomfort or hostility. It was clear from these signs he had not met many priests, had preconceptions about them, and waited in uneasy certainty for Frank to manifest himself.
As Bert came to the table with the replenished teapot, and a fresh cup and saucer for Darragh, Mrs. Flood asked, “What can we do for you, Father?”
“Well,” said Frank, “since you're ill, and no doubt you find it hard to get to Mass, I thought you might welcome the chance for me to hear your confession and bring you communion occasionally.” The young man was looking utterly away now, not willing to share his gaze with Darragh. He knew it wasn't his place to say yes or no, however.
Mrs. Flood was overtaken by an authentic tubercular coughing fit. It was not opportunistic, a disguised answer to Darragh's offer. Mrs. Flood did not need to disguise anything. The young man, Trumble, rose, turned his back to the company, and went to a bench and poured a brown liquid into a glass. He brought it back and put it down in front of Mrs. Flood, who, gasping and signaling with eyes and small gestures of her hands that she would soon be well, reached for it and swallowed it at a gulp, right on top of her still active, gasping cough.
“Thanks, Rossy,” she said in a choked voice, as serenity reentered her eyes.
She smiled, and Trumble gave the briefest grin of gratification.
“Kind of you, young Father Frank,” she said at last. “But I don't think it's come to that yet. I've got a fair way to go, I hope. Rossy and Bert look after me well.” She reached out and gently patted the young man's bound hand. “Sinner I am, but I'm not ready for the big last confession.”
There was an implicit wink in the way she spoke. She was not vicious, yet Darragh would not have been surprised to see her flutter her eyelids in attentive Ross Trumble's direction. She managed with ease this company of three men, two of them rendered edgy by the presence of the third.
With her polite refusal, what could Darragh do, having chosen the subtle rather than the didactic line? He said gamely, “I wasn't trying to imply that you needed the last rites, Mrs. Flood. But every Catholic is supposed to make his Easter duty, to go to confession and take communion before Easter. Would you like me to visit you before Easter?”
He looked at Bert. Bert must understand that an Easter confession could restore his marriage. You would expect a husband to hang on the wife's reply to such an idea, but Bert did not seem to hang on anything or see significance in much. He remained a mildly friendly presence, and distractedly smoked his thin cigarette. His mind was not so much elsewhere, but had long moved away from here, from the triangle around the table and the priest who could amend it.
Mrs. Flood seemed to pity him in his bemusement. “Look,” she said, “you're a nice young fellow, Father Frank. But neither of these boys here are R.C. And I think I'm going to have to wait for them to get more used to the idea of you calling in like this. How about if I get them to give you a call if I need anything? Anything along the lines of communion, or eternal salvation. What do you say, eh?”
She beamed, offering her small concession, having thoroughly won this encounter.
Frank could merely utter the official line. As much as he believed it he sounded like a cop reducing some complicated statute to plainest English. “I do urge you to think about doing your Easter duty, Mrs. Flood. It's a requisite placed by the Pope on all Catholics.”
“I'll certainly
think about it, Father Frank,” she told him, but with a sudden sisterly frown which warned him not to try his luck further; not if he wanted to be welcome.
Frank finished his tea. To try to elicit something from the men—he was not sure what—but to try to engage them, he began to talk of the war.
Mrs. Flood explained, with a heightened color in her cheeks for which Darragh hoped she might not have to pay later, “Rossy here's a bit of a Red, you see, Father Frank. He thinks the most important thing is the battle in Russia, because if Hitler wins, that's the end of the revolution. But God, I have to say I'd hate it if the Nips came. I'd have to call on you then for sure, Frank.”
Frank?
“Well, perhaps we could meet a little earlier than that,” said Darragh.
He saw Bert rolling a further, conclusive cigarette, and maintaining the composure of those who survive by being beneath notice. A verandah-dweller to a T. Bert and Trumble and Mrs. Flood knew it was time for him to go. Supporting his bound hand a little, Ross Trumble stood up. “I'll see him out,” he insisted.
“May I give you a blessing before I go?” asked Frank of Mrs. Flood.
“Don't see what harm it can do.”
Trumble averted his eyes during the small rite.
“Benedicat vos . . .” He used the plural, so that even torpid Bert and hostile Ross were, without their knowledge, encompassed in the rite. “Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus.”
“Feel better already,” said Mrs. Flood, opening the bright eyes she had kept closed for this prayer, her marvelous smile in place. “Thank you, Father Frank.” With the generosity of that smile she had beguiled first Bert, and then lean Ross Trumble. She who had the power to leave them with nowhere else to go, exactly as she had left Darragh with nothing else to do except depart.
He told all of them it had been a pleasure to meet them, that he would remember Mrs. Flood at Mass, and then Ross Trumble was solemnly leading him up the hall again. The tall, fair-haired brick worker opened the door with his undamaged hand and then blocked the exit.
“Look,” he said, “I can't call you ‘Father,' so don't expect it.” He waited awhile as if he half hoped for a strong chastisement from Frank.
“I can't make you do anything, Mr. Trumble.”
“Okay, Frank, listen. You're just another feller to me, you see. You seem a fair enough bloke, which makes it all the more bloody outrageous that you should come here with your ‘I'm Father Darragh' and your ‘Let me give you a blessing,' and all the rest of the bag of tricks.”
“It's what I was put on earth to do,” Frank asserted. He still hoped it was true.
“Yeah, and you might be sincere about it. But I bet you live pretty well. Better than us.”
Darragh could do nothing but fall back on his common malehood and shrug. “I get paid barely thirty shillings a week.”
“Yeah. But all's found for you by the believers, isn't it? And you whack on about God and redemption, but really you're put here on earth to keep the workers in their place. To offer them heaven instead of justice.”
“I've heard all those arguments, Mr. Trumble.”
“I think they're pretty good arguments, Frankie boy.” He was breathless with anger, Darragh noticed. “I mean, God doesn't need marriage, but the banks certainly do. One little two-person mortgage after another. Do not fornicate outside the marriage because you'll buy the second woman a dress or a jewel, and that'll get in the way of bank repayments!”
Frank said with an ironic smile which invited Trumble into the joke as well, “I never knew that. That I was a bank employee.”
Trumble wouldn't concede. “You're as much a bank's man as any copper. Look, I know what you're here for. You've heard the gossip and you're chasing us up. You think if you hear her confession you can make her split up with me. All of us out in the kitchen knew what this was about. So to me you're just a bloke who tries to stand between a man and his woman. And according to tradition, that's a bloody dangerous place to stand.”
Darragh, edgy with anger, nonetheless decided to resort to equivalent frankness. “Come on, Ross. The way you're living isn't natural.”
“It's natural as hell to me. I'm warning you, you've got no special protection just because you happen to wear a dog collar. You ought to wake up to yourself!”
Darragh had always surmised that one day there would be threats of this nature. He had imagined that they would be easier to brush off than this one was. His arms and legs, ready to fight if needed, felt heavy with alarmed blood. His mouth was dry, and he felt foolish and negligible.
“Are you going to let me out of the door?” he asked Trumble. “I've got other duties today.”
“You poor young bastard,” said Trumble, and stepped aside at last.
Frank walked out, down the steps, across the garden, and took exact care closing the wire gate, as if that might earn him some credibility from Trumble.
V
Back in the presbytery, Frank Darragh ate his lunch with a wooden but profound appetite. In the face of Mrs. Flood's charming refusals, of Trumble's hostility, he urged himself to greater firmness and self-respect. It was not as if this fallow season of the soul was unexpected, and its feelings of leadenness and futility. Every authority spoke of the onset of the disease called accidie, a sort of religious version of profound boredom, a sense of the withdrawal of grace when no notable sin has been committed to explain its withdrawal. Mystics—St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, as well as Thomas à Kempis in The Imitation of Christ—all wrote of this sudden absence. It could last for years, and the traveler had numbly to seek his way, in the certainty that illumination lay at the end of the track. He had had it easy until now, yet who was he to expect it would be joyous all along, when even St. John of the Cross had walked the path of ashes? Still, with this deadness in them, it was not to be wondered that some priests preferred playing golf to hearing confession, or that they consoled themselves with food or drink or gambling. And with oblivious sleep. Maneuvering other, younger priests into doing the early Masses.
The idea he had been so free with when hearing the brothers' confessions, that this was a test, brought him only the dimmest sense of consolation. For the first time he was not intent to finish the residue of his office, of which so far he had recited only Prime. Nonetheless, he walked up and down behind the church, yawning occasionally, beating his way through the hours, muttering, speeding through the Veni Creator.
Then, because it was the sort of thing curates did when he was a kid, he went to his room, put on his collar and coat, and then walked across to the school, where the children were about to emerge from the classrooms to start their walks home, in convoy for fear of the more robust stone-throwing children of the state school, or to board the 413 and 414 buses. In the meantime the real enemy had come closer. A long way off, but closer than that in the geography of dread.
St. Margaret's Primary School was a succession of four sunny red-brick rooms connected by a corridor. On the tarred playground, hopscotch lines had been painted by some enterprising nun or parent. A toilet block of brick and latticework completed the quadrangle, the campus, at the as yet humble but serviceable St. Margaret's Primary. It was staffed by the nuns from the Dominican convent, who were driven each morning from the Boulevarde, where their splendid high school was located, to St. Margaret's by a pious old man named Dyer, and driven back to their convent again after school. As Darragh waited on the edge of the playground, one freckled boy of about ten years emerged on the steps outside the classroom corridor, holding a school bell. The boy was about to clang it to signal the end of a day's education at the hands of the Dominican sisters when he saw Darragh in the yard. He straightened his fairly languid stance, paused, and rang the bell with a severity which such a sighting warranted.
Sister Felicitas, the principal, emerged. Sister Happiness. But she had a splendid hard-headedness like the monsignor's. Her spirituality seemed of a functional, sane, confident na
ture. A youngish woman, she was perhaps ten years older than Darragh, perhaps less, and was clearly being groomed by her order for high office, headmistress-ship and mother superiorhood of one of the posher convents the Dominican Order ran. She was quite a good-looking woman in a sharp-featured way, Darragh abstractly thought.
Now a jostling queue of children built behind Sister Felicitas in the windowed corridor. The rowdy boys, the prim girls, the junior wide-eyed children of both sexes. He could all but hear their whispers, “There's Father. Shut up, there's Father.” The presence of a priest in the schoolyard had always lent a sacramental weight to his own childhood homegoings.
Mothers had begun to mill in the bitumened laneway between church and school, and saw him.
Felicitas called to her students, “Father Darragh is here. You must all say good afternoon to Father Darragh. Silence. Silence there, you ruffian. All say ‘Good afternoon, Father Darragh.' ”
From within the corridor came the tremolo greeting. “Good after-nooon, Faaather Darraaagh.”
“Now don't run,” the nun ordered. The children descended, two by two, the short stairway to the playground. Small girls held hands. Boys seemed about to explode from the pressure of their own seemliness. Around the corner of the school, mothers marshaled children for their convoys down Homebush Road. A few dozen students crowded for a while around Darragh, who wore as innocent a smile as he could for them, and told them they had better get on home. A girl showed him an essay with a little gilt star and a holy picture of Our Lady of Succor attached to it—marks of high academic achievement. When he said it was all very good, she ran off, high-stepping with delight.
As the crowd began to clear, Darragh saw, standing by the school corner, the young woman and the boy he had met on the train a few weeks before, on the way to his mother's. He could also see, absolutely obvious in her, the impulse to speak to him. For a second he felt reinvigorated. A merciful God had sent her up Homebush Road to renew his soul by making some small demand on him. Even so he did not move. He waited confidently for the matter to resolve itself in her. At last she came towards him across the hopscotch lines, her eyes wide and full of doubt behind her auburn fringe, her long lips engaged in her internal dispute about the wisdom of approaching him, her son by the hand.