“Father Darragh,” she said, arriving. “We met on the train once. Anthony, you go and play.” She released her son's hand, and the little boy went hopping across the playground, relishing its sudden, uncommon vacancy.
“I didn't introduce myself then. I'm Mrs. Heggarty. Mrs. Kate Heggarty.” As if the name itself were a burden, tears rose in her vast eyes. Apart from her son, she did not look like a Mrs. She was too young, and had an unsullied air.
“Oh yes,” said Darragh. “And your boy goes here to St. Margaret's. Anthony.”
“That's it,” she said.
“Your husband will be home soon. Isn't the prime minister going to bring all the troops back here? To face the Japanese?”
“My husband has been taken prisoner. Not dead. Captured.” She put the slightest, frantic stress on the word, and the weight of her green eyes upon him.
There was a time before, and recently, when he believed the world simple and had confidence in the automatic comfort of soul which he represented simply by being a priest. He could say something blithe and plain, and people in grief nonetheless would consider it an utterly original set to words particular to their sorrow, and dedicated specifically to relieving it. “He led a decent Catholic life,” for example, or “She was well prepared for death.” Now though, the oft-uttered and reliable clichés evaded him. He could only repeat some parboiled idea picked up from newspapers. “I believe the Germans treat prisoners better than the Japanese do.” Since this gave Mrs. Heggarty nothing, and far from easing the tension in her face caused her brow to knot, he struggled, a mere secular fool, graceless and floundering. “Of course, despite Hitler, they come from the Christian tradition,” he said.
He wondered did the government go on paying her husband's wages during his captivity. Lord knew how long that would be. The war in the northern hemisphere seemed endless, fought at one end on unimaginable reaches of the Sahara, and at the other on the equally immense steppes of Russia. Only in the southern world, increasingly Japanese, were the fronts fluid and altering daily.
Mrs. Heggarty blinked and shook her head free of his inanities. She murmured, “You know, it's cold, he said in all his letters. My husband. He said I wouldn't believe how cold the desert could get. I hope the Germans give him a blanket.”
“Of course they will,” said Darragh, but he was blindly hoping too, and she could tell that. He had the purest impulse to take her by the shoulder, to place some reassuring pressure there. A fraternal thing. That sort of innocent vernacular gesture was forbidden to him, though. He saw with a particular resentment he had never until now experienced that he must operate on a bloodless and austere level. Ah, he remembered—there had been a piece in the Herald about a Rommel offensive. Towards Benghazi in North Africa. “I shall remember you and your husband in my Masses,” he assured her.
He could see that this had at least some meaning for her, she did not consider it nothing; she considered it part of what she had come for.
“You must do that,” she told him. “We need it. Things weigh heavily. . . .”
He had feared that Mrs. Flood had so diminished him with her twinkling irony that all his offices might seem negligible to the daughters of Eve, to every single one of them. But it was delightful that it weighed with her, his intention to pray. She was clearly from a tradition of observance. On little evidence he surmised her parents: a working man but nobody's fool. An Aunt Madge–like, Lang-voting mother. Faith and social justice! For Mrs. Heggarty was no supine soul. She had an air of independent thought—or so he believed on the slim evidence of their two brief meetings. She was the sort of person about whom he was willing to make fairly early and positive judgments. The forthrightness with which she'd spoken to him on the train—that was his guide. So he stood constructing a history and a soul for her, out of the few scraps of what he actually knew.
“This is his last letter,” she said, extending a small, square, stiff letter. The army photographed the letters of soldiers and sent them off to families in this form, a card, the writing sharp but reduced. “His job was towing an antitank gun around the desert,” she said, surrendering the letter now with a small shrug, as if to say, He only drove a truck . . . why did the Germans bother taking him?
Darragh looked at the letter. “Dearest Sweetheart and Tiger,” it was addressed. Mrs. Heggarty pointed to a passage which read, “You wouldn't believe how cold it is at night. Even in Alexandria—what we call Alex—it can get colder and foggier than you'd think was likely. I thought this was supposed to be Africa, eh? Not like at the pictures though. Not like Tarzan.”
Having proved the assertion that her husband found the desert cold, she emitted a sound like creaking. A tear or two appeared on her cheek. But Darragh felt that she had then sternly cut off the subtle machinery which produced them.
Sister Felicitas and her small group of nuns had emerged from the school building and moved away, carrying their satchels to where Mr. Dyer's car waited for them beyond the gate, ready to return them to the bosom of their community. There was a small flavor of starch in the way Felicitas called, “Good afternoon, Father Darragh. Good afternoon, Mrs. Heggarty.” It was as if she was in her way jealous of this close discourse, the chance of tears and anguish which hung over it.
When the nuns vanished up the laneway, there were only lolloping Anthony and this married girl and Darragh in all the reaches of tar.
“Could I come and talk to you at the presbytery, Father?” Mrs. Kate Heggarty asked.
“Certainly,” said Darragh.
The presbytery's severe parlor was indeed designed for meetings with the laity. They took place beneath the tranquillity of the Virgin's gaze from a statue placed on a plinth above the table, beneath the authority of the picture of Pius XII on the wall, and the glow of Christ's suffering heart above a credenza. And under the strict but oblique observance of Mrs. Flannery, too, who suspected that any layman or woman not connected to fund-raising or prospective marriage was somehow engaged in trickery and special pleading when they came to an appointment in the parlor. Indeed, she felt that the monsignor and Darragh had better things to do than look after the obscure wants of the laity. That's what confession was for!
Darragh was so aware, however, of the pressure of desperation in Mrs. Heggarty that he would have been willing to hold such a meeting this afternoon, while her son, Anthony, zoomed unheeded around the playground. Indeed, on a selfish level, he sought to continue this dialogue, for it was a solace to him as well. Her offer of the letter was a solace. She had thought him to have potential influence over her husband's plain words sent such an exorbitant distance. Poor Private—or was it Trooper or Gunner?—Heggarty's capture and its impact on Mrs. Heggarty had brought him a purpose in the midst of a vacant day. The still-receding backs of St. Margaret's four brown-and-white-habited nuns, making for the street and Mr. Dyer's big old car, inhibited him, though. He was reminded that he should perhaps be less impetuous.
“I could see you tomorrow,” he said. “At four o'clock. Could someone mind Anthony for you?”
“Yes. I'll arrange it.”
She had regained her composure, her cheeks were drying. This admirable soul.
“But are you sure,” he asked, taking the part of the monsignor and Mrs. Flannery, “that your problems could not be better dealt with in the confessional?”
She thought and then shook her head. Again, poor Private Heggarty. To be separated from such a tower by the chances of battle.
He said, “Look, your husband will return, with a smile on his face. One of these days soon. The war seems endless. But I'm sure it will end.”
What a silly utterance, he chided himself. For it was, of course, the intervening days which weighed on Kate Heggarty's spirit.
When Darragh came to breakfast after early Mass the next day, he found Monsignor Carolan eating boiled eggs in the presbytery dining room. From his face, Darragh could tell the world had changed further, even since yesterday's bombing. “Well, it's happened, Fra
nk. That ee-jit General Percival has surrendered Singapore.” Monsignor Carolan, influenced by the Irish nuns who had taught him in his childhood forty years past, called anyone he didn't like an ee-jit. And General Percival, British commander in Singapore, was an ee-jit he'd inveighed against regularly.
“Our Australian boys were more than willing to fight on,” said the monsignor, the livid white of egg showing momentarily on his tongue. “But Percival's shown that as good as he is at burning people's houses, he's no good at dealing with true warriors.”
Monsignor Carolan's father had come to Sydney from County Cork, and as every Cork man knew, General Percival, as a young officer, had burned down the family house of Michael Collins, Irish Free State hero. Free Staters had been waiting ever since for God and history to punish Percival.
“All those poor boys,” said the monsignor, reaching for the toast rack. “Prisoners now because of that fool, that gormless coward. It's just like the last business—lions led by donkeys. Fine intellects left in a hole by ee-jits. And we'll know about it, Frank. There'll be desperate women around now. Their husbands prisoners of war.”
“I've met one already,” Frank said. “But her husband was captured in Libya. By the Germans.”
The monsignor shook his head. “You're young, Frank. You should watch out for women who have nothing to lose. They're not quite responsible for themselves at a time like this. Don't be too open to them.”
In a pitiful try at proving his worldliness, Darragh said, “The woman I spoke to yesterday has asked to see me in the parlor. I suggested the confessional, but she insisted on seeing me for counsel.”
The monsignor turned ruminative. “Fair enough, Frank. I leave it to you. Though I'd suggest it's always good to keep the parlor door open during talks like that. It helps moderate behavior.” Even in the seminary Darragh had heard speeches like this—advice about managing women, who were of their nature a volatile and perilous quantity.
The monsignor finished his toast.
There did seem to Darragh to be an altered air, even in quiet Homebush Road. The world had changed. It had been axiomatic that Singapore could not fall. The Japanese, makers of laughable prewar junk products—inferior toys, unreliable clocks—had altered the universe by taking the untakable port. His father had sometimes, influenced by Irish forebears, mocked the concept of the British Empire, for which of course he had been a Great War warrior. But there had been a profound comfort in its being there, to be lauded or sneered at. Now the exclamation mark of that empire, the long shaft of Malaya, the plump point of Singapore, was borne away, all in a little more than three months.
He owed it to the Eternal Church and the Communion of Saints to spend the morning visiting the elderly sick of the parish. When Darragh called into Pedderick the chemist's to buy shaving cream and razor blades, three women were already there, one talking to Mr. Pedderick and two others discussing Singapore by the door. Words such as “disaster” and “poor Mrs. Thorpe” filled the shop. His entry caused the conversation to mute itself, except that Mr. Pedderick said, like an accusation, though Darragh could not be totally sure, “Fifteen thousand Australian prisoners!” Darragh felt an urge to say that all things being equal he was willing to place himself in the way of the Japanese tide. But that would have brought conversation at Pedderick's to a total halt.
It was good to enter homes where his motives were not judged. To stand before people weak from the pressure of the earth's calamities, but now immune from them too, since they were about to broach eternity. The Japanese would not arrive in time to enslave them. For their journey, they lay in beds beneath pictures of the Sacred Heart. Brown scapulars devoted to St. Anthony were twisted around the bedposts, and missals brimmed with holy cards at the side of the bed; and the odor of devout candles on the sideboard contested the thinner smell of pre-decomposition, the traces of urine and excreta which announced the decline of the human system. It was possible to believe but impossible to imagine, when he thought about it, that Mrs. Heggarty could reach this stage. She would exhale her soul, he was sure, in mid-splendor.
Before and after a light lunch he said his office with an energy and freshness which had been lacking on other days, and then realized that it was his coming pastoral meeting with Mrs. Heggarty, who had in her extreme hour revived his zeal. From his room, he remotely heard the quarter-past-three bell rung by the freckled child on Sister Felicitas's steps. He read that morning's paper, which Mrs. Flannery had brought him, and all was reverses: Singapore gone, along with Hong Kong, whose British garrison was swamped so quickly and whose defenders with their wives and families lay now in the hands of the newcomers, the punishers. The Dutch in the East Indies overwhelmed—Sumatra reeling, Java quaking. Photographs of American flight crews with unconscionable smiles spiced the newsprint with hope. It seemed essential that he occupy himself thus, with somber issues, until Mrs. Heggarty arrived downstairs, and Mrs. Flannery answered the door, admitted her, summoned him. Until then, he tried with some success to suppress daydreams, especially those involving fraught and beautiful women.
To fill in the time further he began reading a detective novel about one Lord Peter Wimsey, who lived in a world unidentifiable to those who inhabited Australian suburbs, to those who ministered to the sins of such as the pernicious brother of the Strathfield community, or Mrs. Flood. Even the suspicious characters did not speak to Lord Peter with the particular working-class directness of Mrs. Flood's lodger and lover, Ross Trumble.
Remotely, he heard the large knocker at the front door sound. He rose and put on his black serge coat. He picked up his breviary, as if it was the natural armor to take him to such a confrontation as that about to occur. He paused to take in a breath, but did not look at himself in the mirror behind his door for fear that he would spot the hollow man he had been for the past week. Mrs. Flannery could be heard making her brisk way to his door, and then knocking. “Father? Mrs. Heggarty is waiting for you in the parlor.”
“Tell her I'll be just a moment,” called Darragh in the voice of preoccupation. He gauged the passage of a minute. He'd always hoped he would never spend a minute in this way, for vanity's sake, letting fallow, godless seconds evaporate. Then, full of a kind of terror and indefinable hope, he opened the door and heard his own steps like those of another person in the corridor and on the staircase. The door to the parlor was open, and pushing it farther aside, he saw her seated in a chair at the far end, with the window behind her. She had dressed as if for Mass in a fawn suit, and a little slanting domed hat with a feather at the brim. Her hands were joined nervously at the table, but now she stood up, as she had stood up all her life for the entry of priests. Introibo altare dei. The emergence of the vestmented priest from the sacristy onto the altar steps, of the school-visiting priest arriving in a classroom, had been bringing her to her feet since babyhood. You could tell these things by instinct.
“Hello, Mrs. Heggarty,” he heard himself say, like a kindly grocer.
Frowning most frankly, she told him good afternoon.
“Take a seat,” he said, sitting under the picture of Pius XII, the former Father Pacelli. His Vatican lay deep in the fascist state of Italy, whose German brethren had captured Mr. Heggarty. Yet the Vatican's eternal magisterium rose above such temporary political facts.
“Have you heard anything at all about your husband?” he asked.
“I spoke to another woman,” said Mrs. Heggarty, not quite engaging him with her green eyes. “Her husband was captured last year. She said it took at least six months for the Red Cross to find him and for her to get a letter.” The pressure of such a wait brought the possibility of tears to her face again, but they were suppressed. “The Department of Defence said they'll send me his wages direct. But he was only a lance bombardier.”
So Lance Bombardier Heggarty.
“Soldier's pay,” murmured Darragh. He had heard her say that, in the playground.
“That's right, Father,” Mrs. Heggarty asserted. “Nothing to
write home about.”
“Does Anthony know what's happening?”
This was progressing well, he believed, for Mrs. Heggarty seemed to be aided by his questions, not that they showed any superior skill.
“I'm still trying to choose the moment.”
Darragh nodded.
“We don't know when the war will end, do we?” she said, lifting her eyes, like a woman closing with the chief point of debate. “We don't know whether it will end at all. And if it'll end our way. Do we?” The tears gamely repressed behind her features gave her questions an enhanced authority. He knew at once she had lived in a harder world than he had.
“Surely Western Christianity will succeed in the end,” said Darragh, “even though it's hard to believe from the papers.”
“But the Nazis are Christians, as you told me. And they're doing pretty well, aren't they?” asked Mrs. Heggarty with a touch of aggression. “Every time we set out into Libya, they drive us back. Don't they? These Christians. And a lot of them are Catholics.”
Darragh blinked. He did not want to think too much about the Nazi Catholics. He had enough conundrums already. “Let me say this, Mrs. Heggarty. Sometimes I think there will be suffering before there's deliverance. You're part of the suffering now, and I sympathize with you.”
“I know you do,” she said. “But I'm the one who has to go through it.” Was there a further hint of aggression in her voice?
“Perhaps I could speak to the gentlemen in the St. Vincent de Paul's?” he suggested. “In case there's anything you need . . .”