Liz continued her work raising money to free children from the brothels of Calcutta. If she considered herself an available woman, she was by now too severely frightened of violence to trust a male around her boys. And so her life was written. It seemed the Cosgrove family had remained blighted ever after.
22
* * *
The Past Sins of Monsignor Shannon
Early 1970s
HE DID not approve of his past sins, and in the penitent season after his being absolved of them he hoped they would never return to him. But sometimes they did, as he slept or in waking hours, and they induced desire.
As a young man, Leo Shannon felt he fitted the priesthood as a hand fits a glove. Even in the seminary he loved it all—the fraternity, the monastic chapel, the debates on morality, the lectures delivered in Latin, which gave him a sense of secret knowledge. The liturgy of the Mass impassioned him. The words of consecration. He believed absolutely then—though he did not quite dare ask himself later in his career—in transubstantiation: that at the words of consecration uttered by the priest, the very natures of the bread and wine were transformed into the body and the blood of Jesus Christ. Essentially, he liked the ecclesiastical trade and its routines—the evening Masses and confessions on Saturday; the Sunday morning Masses and sermons; the dinner at his parents’ place and—as he got older—at his sister’s on Sunday night. The gossipy golfing Mondays spent with other priests before the sacramental and administrative business of the week.
He found it hard in a parish to occupy himself on a Tuesday. The parishes of the city of Sydney in the 1970s were not like the Irish parishes of which his great-grandparents had spoken, nor their continuation in the sparse settlements of the New South Wales bush. In his grandparents’ day the priest trudged or rode from farm to farm, and there was always a peat fire (or one of eucalyptus boughs) to sit at, and always someone to speak to and to spiritually elevate. But now even the sick weren’t what they’d been when he was a boy—there were not as many of them. It had been a good arrangement in the old days, with the priest too busy to inquire into what he himself really thought.
Despite his facility with theology and Thomistic philosophy, he had not wanted to pursue further research and study. So Shannon found himself an urban priest in a generation in which both parents worked. He walked amongst the children in the playground of the parish school, and the kids cried out to him, and he spoke to them. But he did not want to spend his afternoons talking to classes, offering them the primitive theology appropriate to primary school students. He wished profoundly and earnestly he could imbue them with certainty just by touching their hands, but that was not the way of things. So even a visit to the school was, more frequently than not, simply a tedious outing which, though it might have convinced the schoolkids, did not convince him.
He joined a suburban tennis club, and took a little pride from the fact that the players said to each other, “You’d never know he was a priest.” But they did know he was, and that gave him mystery and potency, two qualities he had an appetite for. They had expected him to sermonize them, but he was of the school, like most priests, that the best sermon was your own normality. Though his lucky backhand smash down the line at the net in a game of doubles was no different an entity than one delivered by an agnostic, he felt it reverberate like a mystery of faith amongst the other doubles players.
Leading by example was not, of course, what it had been on the island of his forebears, a monotheistic society in which the mildest human virtue of a priest was bruited about the Irish consoling themselves for their dependence on the clergy, and the clergy deigning now and then to demonstrate their membership of the human race.
The city parish Leo Shannon worked in had been founded towards the end of the First World War, and it struck him that its records and management were chaotic, despite its priest’s air of being in command of all elements. So this was the task to which he devoted himself: to get the records indexed, to make an archive of bills paid, and to restore order to bills payable, so that the monsignor would see what a splendid job he had done. He enjoyed it. Bringing order to the records was like bringing order to the soul.
He had to give an occasional talk at the nearby girls’ college, a school of considerable reputation. It was an experience—girls in their second year of high school, respectful, faithful, and not yet worldly. Those with a smear of acne on their faces wore it like a deeper uncertainty about the future. They possessed unconscious beauty. That did not mean that some of them did not surmise their future power over men, but they were still uncertain of its dimensions. He had a conversation with the sensible headmistress, Mother Alphonsus, and developed the idea, at that stage without any consciously questionable intent, of recruiting some of the cleverer girls to help him organize the parish office.
The girl who succeeded Sarah Fagan was the one named Angela Galvin. He began to prepare her for the grand proposition, the special friendship involving special liberties. She was a different character from her predecessor, not as solemn, not as intellectual, but at least, perhaps more, emotionally agile. The sort of girl described as effervescent. The trouble with effervescence is that it is talkative. Sometimes it is also knowing. This girl—to use an Americanism—knew the score.
At the end of his seventh afternoon working with Angela, her father came to the presbytery. He was a trade union official—one of the new breed, not created on the shop floor but by way of law and industrial relations degrees. He asked the housekeeper if he could see Father Shannon. Shannon was out at the time, but later he called the man and arranged a meeting, suggesting a local coffee shop. Galvin told him, “I’d rather speak to you at the presbytery, Father, for fear of what might be overheard.”
Leo Shannon felt a certain dread. He had a sense that the man might denounce him and the idea caused sweat to break astringently from the pores of his neck and arms.
Angela’s father turned up at the presbytery the next morning. “Can we speak confidentially somewhere?” he asked Shannon.
Shannon invited him into the parlor, closed the door, and pointed him towards some easy chairs by the window. From the school yard the distant fracas of girls at the convent, boys at the Brothers school, reached them. The man sat—it was an accommodating, enveloping seat, but once in it he became aggressive. “You know, living like this, you jokers should take a good look at yourselves!”
“What exactly do you mean by that?” asked Shannon. He had his aura of justifying dudgeon in place.
“I mean, that you choose to live in this sterile environment, in these cold rooms, with every comfort except the one that counts. Playing it austere. And then you reach out to my daughter to try to give yourself some life. But not my daughter! Not my daughter, Father!”
Father Shannon maintained the bluff. “I don’t quite see what you’re implying. I’m a priest and my pastoral care extends to—”
But Galvin said, “Stop it. Stop it, now. I’m a Catholic. Not due to anything you’ve done. But I’m a Catholic. Let us say it finishes here. My daughter. And it stops with any other girls, too. Be assured, we are watching. I have spoken already to Mother Alphonsus.”
“Whom I’m sure was appalled by your suggestion!” said Shannon, very worried by the strange, chastening worldliness in the man’s eyes. Of course, Shannon thought. Industrial relations. He would have seen champion bluffers before.
He went on making his protestations, declaring that he was above all this. He acted out rather than felt hostility towards Galvin, who then made the calm point that if no more convent schoolgirls were called in to work with Father Shannon, there should be no further problem.
“But, again, you should be clear: we are aware, Father,” said the man. “Let this be a wake-up to you.”
So his breezy, lively, chattering daughter had chattered enough to alarm her parents. Shannon maintained his dignity and his denials. Mother Alphonsus did not
alter her demeanor towards him. But he knew he must be careful now.
* * *
A MONTH later, while he heard confessions, he encountered an eleven- or twelve-year-old boy whom he believed he knew. The boy’s mother was Liz Cosgrove, a friend of his sister. Married a drunk, and he’d given her two fresh-faced, earnest boys, this one the younger.
It was simply part of the routine of the confessional to be concerned about masturbation and the young, and whenever a wholesome boy mentioned temptations of the flesh, Father Shannon asked automatically, “The lower part of your body? Do you ever find yourself tempted to touch it?” It was taken for granted that a boy this age would understand what was meant by that.
Shannon did not challenge the orthodoxy that said the young must be helped to fight off the temptation to practice what his moral theology textbook called manustrupatio—hand-rape. He did not utter the question with any malice. His training had instructed that this was the first of the real sins, and the young must be helped to avoid it. He himself had been helped by prayer and wise counsel to get very nearly through his teenage years before understanding what this sin was, and falling to it almost out of curiosity. These days, after his confrontation with Galvin, Shannon lived in chastened purity, fortified by prayer.
The boy seemed confused by the question. Shannon felt a pulse of sympathy. Then he felt something else: an awareness that he could help this child to get beyond that first sin, that he could comfort and accompany him through it; an awareness he had chanced on a treasure—his ability to guide this child. He paused and waited for his breath to return. His wariness, his repentance—the repentance of a man who decides he has offended God on a technicality, as a breach of theological etiquette, rather than by harming his young fellow sinners—had disappeared, and a fever was taking its place. It was a fever to which he had not known until then he was susceptible. Galvin had slammed the door on one desire. But here was another door.
“I believe that because of your intelligence,” said Father Shannon, “you might encounter special problems. That’s why I would like you to attend the presbytery, where I can advise you and hear your confession in privacy. Do you think you would like to do that, to come to the presbytery for confession?”
The boy said he would like to do that. The authority of the clergy is not quite dead, Father Shannon assured himself.
“I have one last question for you. Do you love your father?”
Shannon himself didn’t know why he wanted an answer to this, but for some reason he did. The kid obviously thought that he was subject to a moral ambush, and hesitated.
“Please, please,” Shannon soothed him, “I merely ask because I know that your father struggles.”
The boy said, “I told my mother once that I hated him. She said, ‘No, you hate the demons in him.’ ”
“So you love your father?”
“I do hate the demons in him. They make him break things. They make him hurt us.”
“I’ll send a note to your headmistress. See you at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon. You’ll be there?”
It was disgraceful that he had an erection as he said this. But my intentions are good, dear Mother, he pleaded with the Virgin Mary. Help me, Mother. Help me help this boy.
The child seemed a near-translucent being to him, an angel with just enough flesh, whose voice had a questioning yet fresh-minted quality to it. He could have identified its especial strand amongst any playground hubbub.
He did exactly that when he visited the parish school that afternoon in his role of chaplain—behind the raucousness of the playground, he watched Stephen Cosgrove speaking sagely on a bench to other less riotous classroom mates.
Shannon hand-delivered a note to the headmistress of the school, a middle-aged nun called Sister Frances.
“It’s all in the note,” he said. “But, as you know, the Cosgroves are a troubled family, and I want to do what I can to prevent that marring the life of young Stephen.”
The next day the boy arrived at the appointed time, three minutes after Shannon had positioned himself by the parlor door to answer the ring before the housekeeper could even leave the kitchen. Stephen stood in his school uniform, adorned with his shining prefect badge—the nattiness-next-to-Godliness with which his mother had sent him from home apparent in him, heartbreaking and demanding desire.
The boy also possessed an old-fashioned awe of church, which Leo Shannon himself would have felt at that age if summoned to the presbytery. It was intoxicating to observe. The boy had no idea that it was Shannon who trembled, who felt he hung giddily by a wire stretched across the sky and might fall from it at any instant.
“Come upstairs,” Shannon said. “We can talk properly there.”
He showed Stephen into the office beside his bedroom. The sofa he had used for the guidance of Sarah and Angela was still in its place. He had enough self-reflection to be amazed that he was about to take part in another act of beneficence.
He had set on a side table a glass of milk with a beaded doily covering it, and shortbread.
“I thought you might be thirsty and a bit hungry,” he suggested. He removed the doily. The boy dutifully drank some of the milk and ate a biscuit. He had not come expecting to be fed, however, and he munched and sipped distractedly. Shannon did not turn his full attention, at least in an obvious sense, to him yet. He looked through papers on the desk, ticked a few, even wrote a check and put it in an envelope. He would address it later, though, for he did not have enough focus left for the task. The boy had put the glass and the shortbread, half-eaten, aside.
“Well,” said Father Shannon. “You and I are under the seal of the confessional now. You don’t tell your parents about what happens in the confessional, do you?”
“No, Father.”
Shannon settled in his chair, turned and looked at the boy on the settee.
“Because you are a special boy,” he told him, “I need to see your private parts. To know that they are normal. It is very important to know that a boy’s parts are normal. Do not be afraid. The cardinal has given me special permission to make such an inspection.”
The boy looked bemused in a particular way, as a fawn-like creature unexpectedly ordered to jump through a ring of fire. Shannon knew the boy was fearful, but his pity was swept up in hunger. Once, in obedience to the Church, the boy had risen and had lowered his trousers—yes, Shannon insisted, his underpants, too—Shannon was aware that he had the casual power he wanted.
At the priest’s command the boy took his own timid penis in his hand—“It is important to know if it functions properly”—and it was clear that he had not done such things very much, for when Shannon demanded that he do so, his massaging of himself was token and timid.
From then on Shannon told every lie. It was required and lawful in God’s eyes that the boy become more strenuous, put in more effort. It was necessary that Shannon should show him how, and important the boy should see his own, Shannon’s, full erection, and enclose it in his hand.
When it was over, a stain of shame began to invade the former exaltation as he told the boy that what they had done was not wrong; that he, Father Shannon, had a special dispensation to deal with these cases. That this was a great secret to which few were admitted.
Shannon cleaned himself and the boy up. Then he drove Stephen home, leaving him at his gate. He was certain from the boy’s demeanor there would be no talking. Stephen remained awed, which did not evoke any guilt in Shannon. But the boy was also bewildered, and that did cause the priest some unease.
Having seen Stephen go inside, Shannon drove two streets and stopped in the shade of box trees as a disabling sorrow swept through him. He laid his head on his hands and wept. When he had recovered somewhat, he drove to Father Guest’s parish, confessed to him, swore sincerely that this had been an aberrant afternoon and that it would not occur again, and received the belo
ved balm of absolution which returned the soul to its proper course. He went on a retreat at a monastery in Kangaroo Valley and after a week of silent prayer believed himself appropriately chaste.
It did not last. He returned for a while to Stephen. In fact, over a decade of fall and penitence and fall, there were three boys with whom he shared a series of these intimate pastoral exchanges. In each case a natural progression led them from the confessional to the presbytery, where Shannon would greet the boys in his own quarters when the monsignor was away. When Shannon told them there was nothing abnormal about them, that he himself was the sufferer, and that they were merely helping him with his special problems as the archbishop had sanctioned, he believed absolutely for that half hour that this was the case.
It was when a boy he did not know approached him in the confessional and mentioned Father Guest, curate of a neighboring parish, and raised the question of what Father Guest had done to him, that Father Leo Shannon saw a remarkable and further confessional possibility.
23
* * *
Maureen Breslin Remembers the Expulsion of Docherty, 1972
ONE NIGHT there was a knock at our door. When I answered it I discovered the least expected of visitors, especially for that time of day. Father Frank Docherty, a little doleful and looking thin. We had not seen each other since the afternoon I’d made that berserk statement to him. To be honest, I don’t know if that was virtue or cowardice, on my part and his. I had half-expected a call from him to adjust, or enlarge on, or renounce what he had said and done at our last meeting. I owed him one myself. But in the absence of us communicating, I had found the means to tell Damian what had happened, a recital no doubt all the more hurtful and annoying because of the idea the love-stricken have that the enchantment they are under is unchosen, an accident. Damian had seemed more acerbic than bitter. He said he had seen it coming but that it was a shock to hear it confirmed by me. I had a feeling he had undue faith that my attachment to him was profound, that what I was undergoing was some form of amatory influenza. He saw the affliction as temporary, a cloud on the face of the waters—in no way the waters themselves. I was not in a position to argue this point with him, to urge him to greater distress and threats and yelling.