Office of Innocence (9 page)

She said, “There's no glory in rickets, Father. God doesn't want scrawny ribs.”

Darragh could feel himself flushing too. “I understand exactly what you're saying. But I doubt this fellow does it all from the pure kindness of his heart. Are you telling me that he wants nothing?”

Darragh was voicing the concern not of his own worldly wisdom, but of the sexual skepticism Noldin and other moral theologians passed on to all their students. Even innocents.

“There
is
pure goodness of heart,” she told him directly. “Surely a priest would take that for granted. But there are also mixed motives, and we live with them all the time. Especially if they favor us.”

“Do you realize,” he asked her in a voice he did not want Mrs. Flannery—should she be ensconced somewhere supervising their dialogue—to hear. “Do you realize this is a proximate occasion of sin?”

She leaned her head to the side and spread her hands again. “It hasn't proven to be,” she said, like a challenge.

Darragh could say only, “Well . . .”

Mrs. Heggarty relented. “It has
not
proven to be. But I don't want you to think I came down in the last shower either.”

Darragh still kept his voice low and fraternal, but something had shifted in him, something unpredicted. Noldin and all the parish priests of history had put their words unbidden in his mouth. “So this is what you'll do?” he murmured. “Sell your soul for items of groceries?”

He wished the words unsaid. Indeed, she seemed disappointed. “Father,” she said, shaking her head, “you said you understood exactly what I meant. I'd sacrifice my soul for dignity, because people without dignity have no soul to save anyhow. For the dignity of my boy. So that he doesn't grow up as a bony, miserable little working-class brat.”

Even in his self-disappointment, Darragh was still wary of eavesdroppers. “You're talking like a Marxist,” he murmured. “What about the dignity of suffering?”

“Well,” she said in her level way, as if being gentle with him, “you'll have to forgive me, Father, but I don't see too much dignity of suffering here at the presbytery.”

“How can you consider what you're telling me, though? And how can you talk this way when your husband has just been captured?”

She still refused to be easily cowed—her assertions, which she'd obviously kept secret till today, ran confidently in the parlor. She had all the pride and skill of a confident heretic.

“I talk this way because my husband has been captured. The fellow I speak of, the visitor, is a decent fellow, but he is a fellow after all. I was intending . . . well, let me say, not to give him any encouragement. I
am
a married woman. But I need to take the risk of those ‘occasions of sin' you speak of, for my sake and Anthony's.” She shrugged and composed her breathing. “I'm sorry,” she said, almost with a fondness. “None of this is your fault, Father Darragh.”

Through an overstriving of which he could not cure himself, he was failing this hard, bright, pragmatic soul. Are the best damned? he wondered for a second.

“Why do you come to me, then?” Darragh challenged her. “I don't want to offer you counsel when everything I say is rebuffed.”

“But,” she said, “I feel I owe it to the Church to explain myself.” She lowered her voice further still. “And if I'd gone to some old monsignor, he wouldn't have let me do it. He would have roared at me and told me to be gone and say the rosary.”

“Oh yes, but I'm soft enough to listen to all your ranting. You are married! That is the reality. And your husband is a hero.”

“An ordinary man, but a hero. I hope they are kind, those Germans.”

“And what will he say when he comes back, and all the gossip rises up around him?”

“I must hope he'll be understanding. Of the fix his capture put me and Anthony in. Look, I
do
intend to remain innocent . . .”

“And create scandal,” said Darragh.

“Let the old scandalmongers have their field day. If they're so keen on virtue, let those old biddies live off lance bombardier's pay.”

So, another argument dispensed with, he scrabbled for what was left in the arsenal of his moral theology. Later, he would realize that he should have been calm, rather than try to win the argument, but he could not see that at the moment.

“One day you will be a grandmother,” he now argued, fumbling away, a losing debater, “and your son . . . Anthony . . . he will understand the truth.”

“He'll understand by then what poverty does to people,” she told him, her face wan, this confrontation costing her, Darragh was happy to see, all the resources of her spirit. “I'll raise him to understand. You speak of the sin against the Holy Spirit. Poverty is the sin against the Holy Spirit. It debases people to a state where they have no virtues because they're at an animal level. If they're put there by capital, then capital goes to Mass and communion, and the poor go to hell.”

“How can you believe this and still be a good Catholic woman?” asked Darragh unwisely, letting his confusion turn him into automaton priest.

“I think I might believe it because I am a good Catholic woman. Have you read ‘Rerum Novarum,' His Holiness Pope Leo XIII? My father said it was the Church's answer to Karl Marx.”

Ah! thought Darragh. An Aunt Madge woman after all. She came from a political household.

“‘Rerum Novarum' never told you to put yourself in the power of men.”

She performed a particularly authoritative and ironic shake of the head. “I think . . . in telling you all this . . . I'm putting myself under the power of a man now.”

Darragh was intoxicated at once with horror and hope.

“But I'm a priest.”

“Like Christ,” she suggested, shocked with the energy of her own argument. “Christ was a man, too. That was the whole point.”

He could imagine her family more particularly now. Lang Labor voters, for sure. The mother a believer in earthly justice from the Prince of Peace instead of Lenin and Stalin. The father a book reader. Passing on the daily bread of such ideas as the one she'd uttered: poverty debases people to a state where they have no virtues, because they have no soul.

Darragh urged, “Tell me what I can do for you, Mrs. Heggarty. I can speak discreet words to people who could help you. Please, let me do that much. Our charity may be kinder than that of this visitor.”

She frowned. “You've got good intentions,” she told him. “I hope you don't get spoiled in some way.”

“How could I be spoiled?” he asked. “You're the one about to go into danger.”

“Well, it strikes me the Church isn't always kind to its angelic brethren.”

“Angelic brethren?”

“Yes. You're sort of unspoiled. You don't get cranky with me, you don't rouse. You don't get outraged at my cheek. You tolerate everything and offer answers. You haven't got any of the normal airs. Except . . . your answers. Really, they're the usual little answers. They're simple answers. They'd be all right if the world was run by fellows like you, but . . .”

He didn't like his less than influential nature and future announced to him like this. It made him vengeful for a moment. “You may take this man's help and it could avail you nothing—the Japanese might come . . .”

“And bayonet all fallen women, I suppose. Or worse. You're right. People like my son and me . . . we have to survive for the week. We have to have our dignity in the hour and the day.”

“Who talked to you about this ridiculous dignity business?” he asked, nearly enraged. “Is it one of the lines your ‘kind man' tries out on you?”

She waved her hand to dismiss this. “I have my own ideas,” she assured him.

“The idea of redemption as an economic matter—it's one dear to the Marxists. It's the only redemption they have.”

“Would redemption on this earth be such a terrible thing?”

Ross Trumble lived in the Crescent that wasn't a crescent. So did Mrs. Heggarty, as the parish records showed. Had they talked? Surely Ross Trumble wasn't the so-called kind man? For a moment, though, before he decided not to, it seemed nearly a reasonable thing to ask her did she know Mrs. Flood's lodger.

Instead he told her, “Until Hitler invaded Russia, the Communists wanted no part of your husband's war. They went on strike to keep food and uniforms and weapons away from your husband.”

She was mildly unimpressed, and he reduced her to combativeness rather than thought. “Do you think that's why we're losing the war? Look, I just wanted to be an honest woman with you, Father Darragh, and that's all. I'm determined on my way.”

Darragh, struggling, tried out the idea that he and she were not Protestants. “In the end, we submit our consciences humbly to authority.”

But Mrs. Heggarty said, almost with apology, that she was guided by authority but was not its mindless slave.

So he was forced at last to sit awhile in silence, having used every available argument he had at his conscious disposal. Her ideas might be heterodox, but he felt he could not match her strength. He had thought that this could never happen—he had gone forth to Strathfield, New South Wales, believing that he was fully equipped for every earthly argument and half of heaven's. And now, her ideas seemed even to him to shine with a certain sad and plausible wisdom.

Having come here to tell him in her genial but egregious pride that she would not creep away, and having now imparted that, she began to stand up and then to advance past the polished table to the door. The reproduction of Raphael's Virgin smiled down on her, the Sacred Heart blazed. Darragh rose as she approached the half-open door. He stepped forward and touched her elbow. “Please wait.” But he saw then that Mrs. Flannery was arranging some flowers on a hall stand by the beaded-glass front door, and had turned her full gaze towards him and Mrs. Heggarty.

“Thank you for all your advice, Father,” said Mrs. Heggarty, and nodded and left.

VI

As if to chasten people and put them in a mood for the penitential season, Singapore had fallen the weekend before Ash Wednesday. Frank Darragh celebrated Shrove Tuesday on the steps in front of the sacristy by stacking the leftover palms of 1941's Palm Sunday into an open tin tray, in which he had already lit some charcoal. The palms had dried out—the last terrible year had desiccated them, and history had taken away their sap. They burned quite easily—the little bit of charcoal barely adding to their dusty mass.

He had spent a dreadful night, because his sense of loss, of having been given Mrs. Heggarty for rescue and having failed in the task, could not be absorbed into the allocated hours of rest. He felt grainy with sleeplessness. He believed that a sort of grit had entered the soul, lay on the face of all leaves, and dimmed every bloom. How could he live to be a priest as long as Carolan had, when he could not convince a young wife, this young wife in particular, towards wisdom? When she uttered her reasons for what she did with such philosophic flagrancy! The Japanese might save him the trouble of a long priestly career, of course, but he did not want them to.

What galled was that he had no weight with the woman, no gravity to alter her path, to stop her in her purposeful flight. She had chosen to speak to him because she could say what she could not to more austere men. The interview had left her without a burden. She could tell herself she had been honest with the priests, and no hypocrite, and she had won her argument, strongly made her point. She did not leave stinging with shame at her apostasy, as the powerful of the Church would have made her do. She left saying a pleasant good afternoon.

So it was as Monsignor Carolan had said to Monsignor Plunkett—he was an easy target, and his anger at the monsignor was unjustified. No doubt his visit to Mrs. Flood produced in the Crescent, after he left, tinkling, wheezing hilarity from the lady herself and the darkest, most dismissive curses from the men at the kitchen table. So his role was to be God's fool, and he must be happy to be if necessary. Except, with all of that, his connection to the God of his joy seemed to have been cut. At Mass that morning the Latin had fled undervalued from his lips.

There was a worm in his mind, too, an obsessive little creature which tried to convince him that the Communion of Saints, the body of the faithful, was stripped of a large part of its meaning should Mrs. Heggarty defect from it. In the state he was in, he hungered for the salvation above all of that one soul. It was as if all other souls could go to ashy oblivion. His own, his mother's, Aunt Madge's, Mr. Regan's. This little job with the palms seemed appropriate to his present state: reducing last year's green life to ashes. But it was a toxic vanity, he knew, to think in that way, that the ashes in the metal pan answered to the ashes within the soul. Vanity to think, too, that Carolan always permitted or persuaded him to do these jobs, the jobs of a sacristan, and he had done them for two years now with doglike eagerness. While the monsignor and his beloved finance committee occupied a higher level, above such banal, pietistic jobs.

Tomorrow morning, for Ash Wednesday Mass, said in black vestments, the church would be packed. Those whom piety did not bring there the anxiety of the times would. The captured cities of Asia would add their embers to the event. Darragh and the monsignor would both need to be on the altar, and as the faithful knelt, would each proceed along the altar rail from different directions, planting the mark of these very ashes on the foreheads of the faithful. Darragh, dipping his right thumb in the brass pot carried for him by an altar boy, would make a small smudged cross on each brow. He would intone, “
Memento homo quia cines es, et ad cinerem reverteris.
”
Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return
. Or as the seminary wits had it, “Remember, squirt, that thou art dirt, and unto dirt thou shalt revert.”

A large black car had stopped by the gate in line with St. Margaret's long wall. Atop this car, in a wooden bracket, lay the great black bladder which, by technological means Darragh did not understand, fueled cars now, supplementing petrol with coal gas and saving fuel for the machines of war. A pear-shaped man in a well-cut gray suit and vest, his face shaded by the brim of a felt hat, came walking into the church grounds. Another, similarly dressed man remained in the vehicle. As the man got closer, Darragh took in his broad jaws, the way the breadth of his face diminished as it got closer to the brim of the hat. He wasn't a handsome fellow, but he was strongly built beneath his inherited body shape. And there was an amusing glitter in his eye.

“Good morning, Father Darragh,” he said, with the confidence Darragh associated with regular Mass-goers.

Darragh brushed his hands and said hello.

The man introduced himself. He was an inspector from the CIB. Darragh was not absolutely sure what these initials stood for, but thought the C might stand for Criminal. The man's name was Kearney, a name which somehow sat well with his earthy Irish face. It was a name Darragh had often seen in newspapers, and heard invoked by priests as that of a no-nonsense, skilled policeman and utterly faithful Catholic. Despite the influence of the Masons in the New South Wales police force, he had got to the rank of inspector. He might, they said, become the first Catholic commissioner!

“I'm in Concord parish,” said the policeman, “so we've never met.” It still seemed that it was on the strength of that parish affiliation, rather than as a policeman, that the inspector now extended his hand for shaking. “I went to school at the brothers' up the road,” he said. “Brother Keogh called me. He's frantic, poor fellow. One of his men has just walked out. A young bloke, Brother Howley. Like that. Packed a bag and fled.”

The brothers liked to call each other “the men.” With some justice, as Darragh was the first to admit. They expected each other to be men, and told the boys they expected them to be too. Their hard disciplines were not designed for what Darragh's father used to call “lily-farts.” To be a man meant possessing something like sturdiness of soul, and an ability to play rugged football. And Darragh knew exactly the “man” who had walked out. Rather than stay and sin again. Or rather than face his superiors, or an older, more severe confessor. Or—another potential motive—willing to risk damnation as his punishment.

“The fellow didn't talk to Keogh or to anyone,” said Inspector Kearney. “Didn't apply for a dispensation of his vows, which in his case is quite possible, since they're simple vows and a dispensation would come through in a few months. But no. Just caught a bus after school, the day before yesterday, and hasn't been seen. You hear confessions over there, I believe. Now I know you can't break the confessional seal, Father, and I wouldn't want you to. But Brother Keogh thought—you being the same age as the young bloke—you might have had some informal chats with him. Something to give you sort of an inkling.”

“I'm sorry, he didn't talk to me, more than a good morning here and there. I got no impressions he would leave like this,” said Darragh. He was, at the same time, amazed at himself that he was not more shocked. The inspector's knowing eyes weighed him to the nearest ounce of reticence. Or of frankness.

“I wouldn't be doing this, Father, except poor old Keogh's so distressed. We're up to our eyeballs with all the Yanks in town, and there's a lot of wartime nonsense between men and women.” He shook his head in a women-will-never-cease-to-surprise way. “But I felt I'd better take the time to make Brother Keogh happy. It's a serious business to him, this vanishing act. The young bloke had his eye on the army. Did you hear anything about that?”

“No, I didn't have any clue that this was going to happen,” said Frank, deliberately choosing a demi-slang, motion-picture-derived word like “clue” instead of something more elevated—“perception,” for example. “Perception” was the sort of word used by innocents.

“One of his mates up there, Brother August . . . he said the fellow was talking about joining the army. He thought Howley was just speculating. Just daydream stuff.”

“In the army,” said Frank, regretting it as soon as it was out of his mouth, “on the battlefield, chaplains are empowered to give a general absolution. Without confession.”

The policeman's eyes blazed with an appetite for connections. He was, Darragh saw, no flatfoot, no mere New South Wales walloper. “So you're saying that maybe this youngster ran away and joined the army just so he didn't have to confess some sin?”

“I . . . I'm sorry to say I had little contact with the young brother separately from the sacraments. If he had spoken casually to me . . .”

The inspector nodded, but knowledge did not leave his eyes. “Well, we've asked at every recruiting station in Sydney. Shown his picture. Navy, army, Royal Australian Air Force. Militia. He never mentioned relatives to you, did he? During chats, I mean. I just thought he might have had doubts and he'd talked to you outside the confessional. When young men leave the brothers, they often go to relatives.”

“What could you do if you found him?” Darragh asked.

“Well,” said Inspector Kearney, “I couldn't arrest him, could I? But I could ask him to come back to Keogh, for a bit of wise counsel, you know. A bit of spiritual guidance. The young fellow may have something he's made into a big problem, but it's not. In any case, if he wants to go, if he still wants to join the forces, it looks like there'll be enough war left for him to get his fill. I had a bit of time in the last one, and let me tell you, it doesn't take much of it before you start wishing you weren't there.”

The newspapers said that the Japanese in Singapore had left some British officials in place, to run the water and electricity, and even to do policing. Kearney had the flexibility, the worldliness, to be left in place after an invasion and fall. In a way, Darragh admired this great gift, this easy aura of capacity, of usefulness.

“I'm only doing this as an old boy of the place,” Kearney reasserted.

“Yes,” Darragh acknowledged. “It's very good of you.

He could see the inspector thinking, This fellow's not my kind of priest. Not a man's man.

There was not much more Darragh could say, since when a man achieved the power to bind and loose sins in the confessional, he lost the power to be an actor on any matter revealed therein. Darragh would willingly have traveled with Inspector Kearney to recruiting stations, but by the highest possible ordinance was not permitted.

“By the way, Father,” Kearney said, that bargaining irony in his eye. “I haven't been able to see my parish priest. I can promise you I'm working very hard hours. I wondered if you could give me a Lenten indulgence?”

A release from having to fast in Lent—that's what he was asking. The inspector's sturdiness was wrapped in a degree of flab, but public officials working long hours could be absolved from a literal observance of the fast. People like Mrs. Darragh and Mr. Regan went meatless on many days of Lent, but the burden on them might not be as great as it was on a member of the CIB, pursuing human viciousness beyond imagining.

“You can certainly be exempt from the fast,” said Darragh. “But there may be something you could sacrifice. Perhaps you could go off beer.”

For the inspector had the look of yeasty appetite some beer drinkers acquire.

“Well, you see. Beer's my only ease from work.”

The man was trying to settle a contract, via Darragh, with the Unutterable, who could not be bargained with.

“That's something you must decide about then,” Darragh told him, and the trace of a triumphant smile appeared on Kearney's face.

“I don't want to make a special case for myself, Father,” said Kearney, making, for the sake of it, a special case. “But I do have to deal with hard things. I was on the Shark-Arm case, for instance.” Darragh remembered it: a shark caught in the harbor had disgorged a human arm. Everyone in Sydney knew how, because of the shark's disgusting retch, a murderer had been caught. Darragh had been haunted in his youth by an image of the white putrid limb lying on the slick boards of the aquarium at Coogee. “I worked on that Pajama-Girl case, too,” said the inspector. Again a famous case—how could it not be?—the moldering body of a girl in pajamas. The inspector stepped closer to him. “You can be sure by the end of this week if not this day, I'll be standing over some bloody mess. The violently dead give a fellow a thirst and an appetite, you know, Father. This case of the young brother, it's the cleanest thing I've had to do in years.”