Office of Innocence (4 page)

Mr. Regan took out a packet of Capstans from his vest and lit one somberly and with a flourish, as if it would be the only cigarette he would smoke that day. “Do you happen to read the
Telegraph
today, Father Frank? The front page is all cricket and racing. People dancing on the edge of the abyss. The Australia Hotel and the Trocadero crowded with revelry. The divorce courts full to the brim. I read a piece this morning about an air force officer who went to his wife and said that he was not made for marriage. Just like that. Without any apology. And as if he hadn't already married her. The judge ordered him to return to her within twenty-six days.” Mr. Regan shook his head. He considered the judge ultimately impotent in these matters. “This is the problem as I see it. That we're a race that deserves punishment.” He lowered his voice to a confessional hush, and the words caused him pain. “Myself as much as anyone. I do not exclude myself.”

Darragh said, “I doubt anyone really deserves bombing, Mr. Regan.” He was embarrassed to see this man who had been one of his elders when he was a boy reduced by the times, and by Darragh's own dignity as a priest, to adopting a confessional tone. Mr. Regan admitting guilt, regret, and fear of unarguable doom. This man who had always been so certain and so venerable in the eyes of the fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-old Frank Darragh.

“Our god is a racehorse,” said Mr. Regan, in explanation. “Our god is a glass of beer. Our god is a dance or worse with a pretty girl. How can we complain if the true God shows us His harsher face? How can we argue if He chooses another power as His agent?”

Frank sipped his beer, which made him yawn. He changed the subject. “It's very kind of you to have Mum and Aunt Madge in here.”

Mr. Regan gave a concessive brief smile. “Oh yes. But they should go to Cootamundra or some such place themselves, you know. Somewhere that's negligible, you know. But your mother and Madge are very stubborn.”

“They intend to shelter with you. And then with the nuns, if it comes to that.”

“Well, the nuns feel bound to protect the mother of a priest. And Madge.” Mr. Regan laughed. Everyone seemed to have a wry affection for Madge. “Madge comes along in her wake.”

Mr. Regan himself took a mouthful of beer and peered into the mid-distance. “I wanted to ask you . . . Pray for me, Frank.” Indeed the man had taken on what was to Darragh the now familiar breathlessness of the penitent. “I doubt my courage,” he said. Frank felt abashed—there was no wire screen between him and Mr. Regan the patriarch, no curtain, no grille or sliding wooden shutter.

“If the Philippines fall to the Japanese,” murmured Mr. Regan, “and there seems nothing to prevent it, Sydney will be even fuller of Americans than ever. And, you know, they are a corrupting influence.”

“Perhaps we corrupt them just as much,” said Darragh, thinking of the young soldier who had insisted on offering too much for a Mass.

“No,” Mr. Regan maintained. “In my case it's the other way around. Look, I had an American colonel come to my office the other day. He had with him a young woman, an American—she was in uniform. What they call their Army Air Force. The man had a smooth look. Very different from us; they're not as dowdy. The colonel wanted me to show him a flat. I could tell it was for the young woman, yet they seemed just about as normal and confident as a married couple. And I was embarrassed, but I did it. I knew, you see, he was setting up a love nest. I've always discouraged that sort of thing—I know how to put off a fellow Australian. But there was just something about the easy attitude of this chap I went along with. Just glided along. Like a weakling.”

He looked up with eyes in which shame and confusion were too naked. “Sometimes,” Mr. Regan continued, “I think Christ put the Church into the hands of the wrong people. The Europeans, the Americans. Us. What's happening is a judgment of our easy ways. The races at Randwick while men die. Our general lack of fiber. I felt that I must confess it to you too, even though I knew you as a little kid. Just to show you there are old fools as well as young.” He refilled his own glass, and Darragh's. “I got a good rent, needless to say.”

The man hung his head, his informal confession concluded. The self-imposed test of telling it to a young priest who knew him as a pillar had been passed, but it seemed to have exhausted the man. Darragh felt bound to attempt to comfort him. “You have to do your job, Mr. Regan,” he said. “It's not your job to force a confession from this colonel. The woman might have been his daughter.”

Mr. Regan shook his head.

“If anything,” Darragh persisted, “it's the colonel who is the sinner. You had no certain knowledge that he wanted the flat for a bad purpose.” He was arguing like a Jesuit.

Mr. Regan said, like a theologian, “The worst sins are the most excusable. They're the ones that get us damned.”

Frank saw that the man was burdened with something he'd done, probably a long time ago, for which he'd never forgiven himself. “I wouldn't say that, Mr. Regan. You seem to be pretty hard on yourself.” He forced a smile. “On all of us.”

Mr. Regan shook his head and seemed suddenly, but too late, interested in his seniority. “You may not understand what I'm getting at, Father Frank. You're young. What concerns me is this. Will I in a year's time happily be renting flats to the Japanese? For the same reason I did to the American? For that's what my office door says I do, and it's what I do by habit. Will their strangeness make me say, ‘All right, cripes, I might as well'?”

“I'm sure you'll behave like an Australian patriot, Mr. Regan.”

“I've been a real estate agent thirty-seven years.”

Eyes averted from this neighbor tormented by scruples, Frank began to advise him that one of the great human errors was to decide beforehand how we would behave in a given situation. We could not predict what divine grace, appropriate to the moment, would flow our way. This seemed to give Mr. Regan little comfort, and Frank Darragh was happy in the end to be told he ought to go and see his mother and aunt again. Mr. Regan himself stayed on in his bomb shelter to finish his bottle of beer, and Frank passed through the household of lithe, Cootamundra-bound Regan women, so that he could go on his way to say goodbye to his mother and Aunt Madge.

III

Later, Darragh would see Mr. Regan's overfrank and unsacramental confession as the beginning of a phase of exceptional confessions cast up—so Mr. Regan would have it, and so Darragh himself saw it—by the corrupting and perilous times. The following Saturday afternoon, for example, Darragh heard the confession of a young soldier—there was a dim glint of khaki shirt through the confessional screen, and Darragh thought he knew the penitent beyond, identifying him from voice and outline as a rather sensitive young militia sergeant whose parents lived in the parish, a man who had been involved in theatrical companies in the area, and whose angular, fine-cut features made him somehow an unlikely member of the sun-blasted, hard-handed Australian army.

The sin as confessed was this. The soldier had been invited to a smart party on the North Shore but was embarrassed to have found no girl to take. A neighbor of the soldier's, a few years younger, who had gone to the same school as he and with whom he had a special friendship, offered to take part in a startling stratagem. This boy, seventeen and of delicate frame, had offered to dress as a woman, just as happened in Shakespeare and comedies, and accompany the soldier to the party, for the purposes of farce. This was innocence itself, for Darragh seemed to remember something along these lines in
Twelfth Night
, which he studied in boyhood. And the volunteering boy was used to doing this, apparently. It was somewhere between a frequent joke and a common performance. He had attended acting classes, said the sergeant, and knew all about theatrical makeup too.

On the day of the party the young soldier had sat with the boy as he made himself up at length, and by the time they went to the party together, the disguised young man looked more handsome to the militiaman than many a girl. The soldier had danced all night with the made-up boy, and then they had left and performed what the tormented soldier called “an indecent act.” Now he found it very hard to stay away from his friend. He had realized that women did not count for him.

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.