Crimes of the Father

  The day before she left she took her eldest brother aside and told him to protect their mother against the old man. The boy solemnly promised. He had been quietening down, had grown earnest, and he shared her abhorrence for their father, the incarnate weakness.

  The entire family came for her entry into the convent—her shuffling father, her brothers, and her mother, who for once had certainty of things going right. In the Order’s chapel they saw their child being invested in the habit, the clothing of the congregation.

  Thus Sarah Fagan became a junior novice, a postulant. After a full year she would become a novice, and at the end of that year take her first vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. And she thought, within her new robes, that her mother could surely no longer remember the night the father placed a hand on his child’s breast. The tapes of the past would be wiped. Father Leo Shannon would become barely a murmur in her memory, a dark entity subject ultimately, she was sure, to obliteration in the depths of her soul.

  21

  * * *

  Docherty and the Cosgroves

  1971

  LIZ COSGROVE had the finest instincts, and considerable hope, yet Docherty could perceive her fragility. Her husband was a lawyer, she told Docherty, and worked for one of the largest city law firms. Barely beyond thirty years and a little old-fashioned in manner, she seemed already to have a shadow on her. One of the elders of the group, discussing many things with Docherty on one of their meeting nights, articulated it: “Liz Cosgrove’s husband. Clever man, university medal. But a ruinous drunk.”

  Liz was passionately engaged with Fatima Deriaya’s cause. She would collect books from deceased estates and sell them to the secondhand bookshop in Crows Nest. She baked cakes and sold them in the main street on Saturdays. She told her children’s teachers that she was raising money to buy Bengali children out of slavery—she thought that some of the nuns need not be troubled by an exact definition of that slavery—and asked them if once a term they could raise funds from parents.

  She wrote to Dr. Deriaya and was invigorated by the letters she got back. Yet there was premature stress in Liz’s face. On one occasion there was a cut to her eye. No one questioned her about it. They didn’t ask because they knew it was no accident, and if she claimed it had been, they wouldn’t have believed her. They kept silent to save her the demeaning lie.

  Docherty did not have a telephone in his room at the monastery, but one night he was called to the communal phone by the secretary. It was Liz Cosgrove. Distressed, she asked Docherty if he could come over to their house, saying simply, beyond artifice, “My husband and I need you.”

  Another priest drove Docherty. He was dropped off and Liz answered the door in her go-to-town clothes. Her face was bruised—by blows and tears miserable and hard to confront.

  “Come in,” she said. When they entered, Docherty could hear a child crying and a glottal male voice calling and consoling. In the living room a man of about Docherty’s age sat on a lounge with a small boy. The man was pale, he wore good but much-scuffed shoes, and he rose and muttered, “Father.”

  “Let me put Stephen to bed,” Liz said neutrally. The man kissed the child inexpertly, a long, somber kiss on his temple. Docherty saw that the bruise beside the child’s eye socket threatened to spread and encircle the eye.

  “I’m Matt,” said the man, rising to greet Docherty. He took a long, acidic swallow. A drinker’s swallow.

  Liz and the child were gone but much of the man’s attention was still on the door.

  “Matt,” said Docherty. “Is it true you both wanted me to come?”

  “Yes,” said Matt. “You see that damage to the boy?” He swallowed a great deal more, and coughed. “I did that. That’s my work . . .”

  “An accident?” asked Docherty.

  “It can seem like an accident to me. But it was deliberate. That’s when we said, ‘Enough!’ Liz screamed it. I said it in despair. And we said, both at the same time, we’ve got to talk to someone and . . . Well, who? Priest? Doctor? And your name came up because Liz thinks you’re genuine. Authentic. In fact, more than that. I don’t know, but I can’t be a chooser, can I?”

  “You must feel rotten,” said Docherty, wondering if bitter repentance after violence and ripe self-accusation weren’t themselves part of the disease.

  Matt shook his head. “I’ve got a ferocious headache and I’m still pissed but I don’t think anyone should give a damn.”

  “I won’t jump in with glib reassurances on that,” said Docherty.

  “You’re trying hard to be a cool priest, aren’t you?”

  “Of course. The reason is I’m really a very awkward and clumsy person. But I know how you feel. I don’t mean the headache. I mean the guilt.”

  Matt, not subjected to the priestly chastisement he had hoped for, put his head in his hands.

  Liz came back. Her husband looked up. “He said, ‘Daddy had an accident,’ that’s all,” she said briskly. “Wanting to console me, you see.”

  Matt raised and shook his head but said nothing.

  “Our other son’s staying with a friend,” said Liz. “So that’s good.”

  Liz asked Docherty if he could pray with them.

  “Yes,” said Matt, almost brightly, as if pleased to have a plan to consume the next few minutes.

  So Docherty settled in to do it, wanting the phenomenon of prayer to have at least a small efficacy rather than the shallow comfort of archaic forms and old pronouns; with a submission to what could not be fought rather than with a solitary connection with the divine. His theory of prayer had arisen from his Indian experience. In the seminary, prayer had been an egocentric and almost neurotic attempt to attract divine attention.

  As he spoke, leaning forward as he gripped his chair, he surprised himself by feeling uncomfortable, in this age when priests were more likely to be asked to act as social workers (a task for which they were woefully underequipped) than as invokers of divine guidance.

  “You know,” he addressed the Ultimate, “that in the phenomenal souls of human beings there are elements that do not yield to the powers of our will; that there are lesions that can be cured only by submission . . .”

  He wondered, meanwhile, whether he’d be able to teach Matt Cosgrove meditation. There was help in that. There was help in AA, too, if Matt could bring himself to submission. You could tell that he was in the phase of the disease in which he saw every disaster as unrelated to the next, disconnected from drink. Docherty could see that Matt still believed that next time he would simply say no to the striding Scotsman, the man in the kilt, the black and white terriers, to the authority of this or that blender whose name was signed on the bottle. Without knowing it, Matt wanted a prayer that spoke not to submission and loss of control, but to his willpower. That is, he wanted a prayer that would let him go on as an alcoholic. Docherty would not give him one. “These children of the Father suffer forces that are larger than their deliberate intentions. . . .”

  Yet to an extent Docherty felt foolish pursuing theories of prayer while this man and woman were drowning. He might just as well use familiar mantras and well-worn incantations to get them settled, adjusted. Next, therefore, he suggested a decade of the rosary. The “Hail Mary,” the “Glory Be” were recited with great hopeful clarity by Liz, with half-abashed mutters from Matt, and with the crispness Docherty felt he owed his public orisons.

  “So,” Liz said when that was done, reaching out for one of Matt’s clenched hands. All of the astounding but bewildered tolerance of good women was in that gesture. “What’s to be done?”

  She looked at both men. The silence stretched.

  At last Matt said, “We’re used to the priest leading the discussion, Frank. That’s how it was when we were kids.”

  “So the person who knows least of what’s happening speaks first?” asked Docherty with a smile, but looking at
Matt to let him know he understood what Matt was doing. That, again, he was reducing this to the normal priestly intervention, comforting at the time it occurs, ultimately ineffectual. This man was racked with guilt at bruising his son and wife, but he did not even know he was hoping for future frenzies of booze that would be purer, that would fuel his true self, his eloquence and good nature, and not his squalors of soul. That would make him tolerable to himself. But Docherty did not want him to forget the intolerable outbursts that inevitably and abundantly followed. Docherty did not want him to believe that after this priestly intervention he could return to the malign rhythm of his life.

  “Well, we still want it that way,” said Matt, not aware that this was a confession.

  “I think Matt should try AA again,” Liz said.

  “It does harm, too,” said her husband.

  “Harm?” Liz asked, in a soft exasperation, raising her eyebrows.

  “Yes,” Matt kept on. “When they find out it can’t help them and they despair, and . . .” He cast his hands up, implying a grim end.

  “For God’s sake,” said Liz, testy at last.

  “I can’t do the twelve steps,” said Matt, perhaps a little too plaintively, but saved from accusations of being dramatic by his obvious shame. “I don’t have a problem with repentance. I’ve been repenting since I was a kid.” He sounded bitter about that fact. “It’s the surrendering to a superior power.”

  “Don’t you believe in one?” asked Docherty.

  “I don’t believe in the Catholic God,” said Matt. “Why should I? When he permits such shit to reign on earth?”

  “Then what do you believe in?” asked Liz. “We asked Frank to pray. Tell me what you love.”

  “My God is a god of vengeance,” said Matt. “And given what I’ve done tonight, it’s just as well.”

  Despite himself, Docherty intervened. “But there’s a transcendence inside you. This is not bullshit, Matt! You know there’s something, deep beyond the you you’re disgusted with. Beyond the next binge you already have in mind.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Docherty ignored the question. “Your God of vengeance is yourself. Your son knows that. But beyond that, there’s the big unknowable. Couldn’t you surrender to it? God almighty, I don’t know what we are! But we are beasts when we believe we can do it all ourselves, and we are saved when we know we can’t.”

  “What if there isn’t any transcendence?” Matt challenged him with sudden bitterness. “What if there’s nothing and I’m just a throat? I think, in fact, I am just a throat.”

  “It’s all right to condemn yourself that way,” said Liz. “It’s not all right to condemn me and the kids. I don’t think you should consider yourself unique. I think you ought to find like-minded reformed drinkers, people who are obviously agnostic. Find out how they do it! Find out how they did it!”

  So Matt was compelled, and it was resolved, and Docherty gave way to the temptation to talk about his passion for meditation as a means of calm submission. In Liz, hope soared. Poignantly. Because if he were honest, Docherty would have admitted he felt tragedy impending.

  * * *

  MATT RETURNED to AA but, feared Docherty, with the air of a man trying a plunge into a forlorn hope before consigning himself to the pit. Three weekly meetings went by. Docherty gave Matt, Liz, and their sons Communion at the altar rails. Then, when he had returned from Sydney University one Wednesday afternoon and was beginning to study, there was a knock at his door.

  “There’s a man asking for you. Not too politely, either. Do you want me to ring the police?”

  “ ‘Here we are, here we are, here we are,’ ” sang Matt when Docherty entered the reception area of the monastic house. “Father Frank, I present you with the inevitable. I’m not going home and belting my kids, though, so I thought I might turn up and belt you, for being such a po-faced bullshitter.”

  “You bastards,” he went on. “You raised us to believe that the sacraments are the cure for human life, that we can solve anything through them. But it’s all bullshit, isn’t it?”

  “I’d like to think not,” said Docherty. “But, yes, there’s been a tendency to credit them with too much effect.”

  There you go, he thought, despairing of himself. A prissy answer when all the man wants is a fight! “You’re trying to harry me into giving you the answer neatly wrapped,” he said. “Or else you want to be condemned by me. I’m sorry, Matt. I can’t insult you because you haven’t wronged me. All you’ve done is set out to prove you can’t help yourself. You knew you weren’t going to succeed, because you’d already decided you wouldn’t.”

  “Damn you,” shouted Matt. “I don’t want a priest who knows nothing and says so. I want the old-fashioned ones who breathe fire and . . . and . . . certainty.”

  The enunciation of “certainty” had been quite a test for Matt and he rested for a while. Then he started up again. “I want to be condemned to Hell. I want you to tell me to confess and be chastised and get some sanctifying bloody grace into me. And with that aboard I can face every peril and beat the world and the Devil and mend my bloody ways. So for Christ’s sake, just tell me I’m a sot. Invite God to strike me down.”

  “Too easy for you,” said Docherty.

  “Listen to me, you prick,” said Matt with the earnestness of the drunk, “I’m not a failure at AA because I think I’m better than other drunks. I’m a failure because I know I’m not as good a man as them. I’m not as good a man.”

  “You’re too intelligent for AA, or you’re too far gone for it. Which is it, Matt?”

  He was bewildered. Docherty pursued him.

  “I saw your ordinary shame the other night. If you were a bad man you wouldn’t have felt it.”

  Matt fell back on his original argument. “The sacraments do the whole bloody job. That’s what I was told as a kid. With the sacraments aboard I need fear nothing. And you’re telling me the sacraments are powerless! I wish you’d all told me that when I was seven.”

  “Listen,” urged Docherty, “the sacraments are like gates. We walk through them. But they can’t help you, because you’ve decided nothing can help you. You can pull yourself from the pit. AA, meditation, the whole arsenal . . . Who cares as long as you save yourself, one way or another.”

  “Jesus!” said Matt in disgust.

  “There is a you that’s an observer, and he’s looking down upon the you who can’t stop drinking. This is the fantasy that’s got you here—that you’re the angel looking down on the pigsty, and as much as your wife hates it, you hate it worse. In fact, the angel in you thinks it’s too superior to be involved in your drunkenness, and it just wants to be quit of you. It’s a proud Satanic angel. Well, listen, Matt, you are not the witness to this. You’re in it. All of you. Don’t take that snide angel with you into AA. Take yourself. Then you’ve got a bloody chance, Matt. Until you do that, nothing happens.”

  Matt drew breath as if he had been the one making the speech. “Christ in heaven!” he roared.

  Docherty worried about the woman in reception, whether she would be so alarmed by the exchange she would call the police.

  “Tone it down, Matt!”

  “What did you say?”

  “You’re not entitled to make a scene!”

  “You’re the one making the scene,” cried Matt. He descended on Docherty and punched him wildly on the jaw. Docherty’s teeth rattled, he bit his tongue, pain and blood filled his mouth. He grimaced, swallowed the blood, and in one furious gesture found his handkerchief to staunch the flow.

  Matt’s lucky punch, Docherty discovered, had dislodged a tooth. An incisor sat glistening in the red on his handkerchief. He offered the damage for Matt’s inspection. At the sight of it, Matt began to vomit. The smell of liquor semirendered by human digestion afflicted Docherty like a parallel pain.

  Th
e receptionist was indeed now at the door, looking from Matt’s retching to Docherty’s bloodied mouth. Docherty had always had a sense that she considered him a monastic oddity, inadequately priestly, and here was the proof, in a parlor violated by vomit and blood.

  Two policemen arrived very fast and seemed anxious to charge Matt. One of them insisted on inspecting the damage to Docherty’s face and yelled at Matt, “Hey mate, you, do you go round beating up priests? That’s a dingo act, you cunt.”

  Docherty explained that Matt was a member of the parish. He’d come for help and there’d been an exchange of words. “It’d be a betrayal of trust to let you charge him,” he told the two policemen.

  One of the two cops, who must have been a Catholic going by his outrage at the idea of punching a priest, whispered, “You don’t have a thing with his wife, do you, Father?”

  “No, nothing like that,” said Docherty, not even embarrassed now that the revolutionary age was here and any man was entitled to talk to any other man so frankly.

  In a private conference with the constables, while Matt sat bedraggled and defeated in a corner, Docherty suggested that he would accompany them to Matt’s home.

  “Do you know he won’t whack his wife?” one of the policemen wanted to know.

  “I don’t believe he’ll do it now,” Docherty said.

  The policemen drove them back to the Cosgrove house, and after issuing a stern warning to Matt, they departed. Docherty stayed on. Matt sat in a corner, unstrung. He fell asleep on the settee. Stephen and Paul came in to inspect their father ambiguously, a fallen hero or a threat, of whom, for the moment, they did not need to be afraid.

  A month later, Liz Cosgrove found her husband in the bath, his wrists slashed. Ambulance men rushed him to North Shore Hospital and he recovered. Docherty visited him but Matt seemed depleted of all conversation.

  He retired from life after that: spent three months in a clinic, received a pension, and most of the time lived, by agreement between himself and Liz, in a hostel near Anzac Parade run by the Sisters of Charity, with other debilitated Catholics and a certain number of alcohol-damaged priests. He died of a stroke in the late 1980s. Maureen wrote to Docherty about it.