ON SUNDAYS THE merciful confessor Frank Darragh normally said the early Masses, the six-thirty and the eight o’clock. The monsignor, with the debt on the school to repay, said the more populous and strategic nine and ten o’clock Masses. For these he attracted the bulk of the parish with the briskness of his recitation and of his sermon, which never failed to refer to the reality that the parish was burdened with the primary school debt and the maintenance of St Margaret’s.
St Margaret’s was indeed a splendid, almost basilica-like church built in the most modern style during the prosperous 1920s by an Irish parish priest named McHugh, and improved and paid for in his memory by the younger Australian cleric, Monsignor Carolan. It put the modest Methodist chapel and even the Anglican church of St Anne’s in the shade, which had been the intention of the late Father McHugh and the inheritance of Monsignor Carolan. Behind its main altar, which stood high above marble steps, a fresco of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin into Heaven had been painted by a team of Italian artisans who had travelled the length and breadth of the Australian continent filling churches with iconography in the style of Raphael. These artisans, and the families they had acquired in Australia, had recently been interned, but the Papal Nuncio in Sydney had been working to have them released so that they could continue their benign craft even in wartime.
There were in St Margaret’s as well two handsome side altars, one to Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, the other to St Anthony of Padua, everyone’s favourite miracle worker and finder of lost objects. None of this had come cheaply, nor had the slate roof and the rafterless cement-and-steel-reinforced upper reaches of St Margaret’s. St Margaret’s had a grandeur then which outshone many Sydney parish churches, including the one at Frank Darragh’s first posting, in Stanmore. The next-door parish to Strathfield, Flemington, within reach of the dust from the livestock saleyards, possessed an extremely humble and dowdy church by comparison, barely more than a cement-rendered hall, undistinguished architecturally, with murky varnished cedar buttresses and rafters, and bare gestures towards ornamentation and statuary. It was not that Darragh would be unwilling to serve in such a place, but that he was pleased exceedingly to find himself the unwitting beneficiary of the energy of Father McHugh, native of Tipperary, and Monsignor Carolan, native of Tamarama.
Darragh took a little longer than the monsignor over his Mass, since he considered it a work of serious articulation. In the seminary he had acted Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and had been an admirer of the iambic pentameter. Since he needed to give the Latin of the Mass at least the same weight and rhythmic enunciation as he had Shakespeare’s metres, he found it hard to finish the eight o’clock Mass and fit in a sermon in fifty-one or two minutes. But the monsignor had made it clear that that was what he required—Frank was to be back in the sacristy and out of his heavy Mass vestments by about seven minutes to ten. The monsignor wanted peace in which to recite privately the pre-Mass prayers while parched summertime altar boys took turns drinking water from the washbasin which sat in the sacristy’s corner.
Within the limits the monsignor placed on him, Frank Darragh was a happy young man, dazed and delighted with his sacramental duties. Dried out from the weight of his vestments that summer, he ate little more than toast at the end of his Masses, despite the insistence of Mrs Flannery that he needed more. He drank plenty of tea, and left the substantial breaking of his Saturday-night, Sunday-morning fast until he reached his boyhood home in Rose Bay, to which he returned on most Sundays.
This Sunday was in humid February. He had no car, but travelling by public transport gave him a sense of fraternity which he knew he would lose when and if he acquired the skills appropriate to a car, and a vehicle to go with it. Hard-bitten fathers of families raised their hats to him on Strathfield Station, implying, ‘We are one with you in the Faith.’ He made in return a half-embarrassed gesture of raising his black felt hat to them. They were the ones who had fought the fight, had raised their children in a harsh decade. But a fraternity of respect was established, even as people shuffled together towards the doors of the red electric trains.
In the crowded Sunday-morning carriage, young leading aircraftmen tilted their forage caps, and he nodded. The Communion of Saints on the Western Line thundered towards Central Station amidst showers of sparks from the electric lines above. Of course, from much of the population of the trains, those not party to the mysteries of faith, there were surreptitious stares and blankness. Mystification. A mute hostility to which he was utterly accustomed.
A beautiful young woman in a floral dress drew her six-or seven-year-old son off the seat opposite her to allow Frank Darragh to sit. She held the child between her knees and told the boy in a lowered voice, ‘Say hello to Father.’ The boy had a small scatter of freckles on the same fine-grained skin his mother had.
Darragh said, ‘Thank you for the seat.’ The mother had that air of grace, and a particular light in the eye. She was not frightened of him. It was good not to be feared.
‘My daddy’s in the Middle North,’ said the boy.
‘The Middle East,’ his mother corrected him, and kissed the rim of his ear. Darragh tried to remember if such easy exchanges had operated between himself and his mother. He decided briefly and with some unease that his mother might not have been so casual in the presence of a priest. ‘Your father is a brave man,’ Darragh told the boy.
Darragh saw that the woman nearly shrugged, as if Darragh’s compliment did not serve her and her son much.
‘We’re going to Clovelly,’ said the boy, resting easily against his mother’s thigh. As the train rolled, this young woman evoked in Darragh the usual sharp and not too frequent pain of celibacy. His spiritual adviser, an elderly, gentle soul named Dr Cahill—for every seminarian had to choose a spiritual adviser from the staff of the seminary—had once said, ‘The institution of celibacy is not a mere sacrifice of pleasure. It asks of a man that he will consent to be the end of the line. That he will not pass on his embodied nature.’
Darragh considered this apparently perfect, archetypal young woman who faced him. Besides what he read as an air of confident innocence, she had the character of having suffered without being given a choice. History, without asking her, had claimed her husband and put him at a fabulous distance from her.
On a rowdy stretch of the line near Macdonaldtown, she leaned forward by just a margin and told Darragh, under her breath, that she and her son lived closer to Flemington parish, but belonged to St Margaret’s and preferred to go to Mass there. So she had recognised him as the curate of St Margaret’s. Was she one of the young soldiers’ wives who had confessed loneliness or temptation to him? Had he, unconscious of her loveliness, absolved her and imposed a penance: ‘Say one decade of the Joyous Mysteries.’ Darragh nodded, and the woman settled back and resumed a secret whispered conversation with her son.
Central Station that dangerous February was a melee of Sunday people, children in light summer hats, beach-bound with their parents. Skylarking soldiers bearing kitbags made their way towards the steam trains which would take them—who knew?—to some banal camp in the bush, or to immolation in the Pacific. These warriors among whom he could not be counted! On the broad concourse at Eddy Avenue, a larger amy of sailors, airmen and soldiers posed for the pavement photographer on the arms of their mothers, wives or girlfriends. The papers talked about Australia being stripped of troops, but there seemed enough to raise substantial regiments waiting with their womenfolk for the Bronte and Bondi trams.
And, some distance away, among the crowd by the tramline stood the mother and son. She had the air of a woman who was used to waiting, of not resenting queues and crowds. Probably a country girl, he thought, building a history in his mind, whose husband had brought her out of the bush to the city, looking for some work in the Depression. Darragh saw her lift her son onto the running board of the Clovelly tram. A militiaman who looked perhaps sixteen stood, doffing his slouch hat, and offered her a seat. She took it with a frank smile, and with a steely howl the tram bore her and her tribe of fellow travellers away to Elizabeth Street. When his Rose Bay tram came along five minutes later, he boarded it, and a boy in a school blazer stood up to offer him his seat. Some instinct that he should now separate himself from the memory of the lovely mother, and that this was better achieved in the discomfort of standing, caused Darragh to smile and say, ‘No, I’m perfectly fine, thank you. You sit.’
To the edification of any Catholics who might be on the tram, and the mystification of others, he pulled from the pocket of his black jacket his Breviarium Romanum. The volume he had was marked Hiemalis—Winter—since it was winter in Europe, winter in the Vatican surrounded by Italian Fascists, winter in Russia where Hitler’s men correctly suffered at the hands of Soviet troops, winter over the bomb sites of England, and of course over the neutrally undisturbed and poverty-stricken farms of Ireland, from which his own ancestors came. This word ‘Hiemalis’ in dull-gold lettering on the spine of the beautifully printed little book, when taken in conjunction with the humid summer day, told you that Australia was in a remote and inverted relation to the well-springs of the European faith, to the locales of monasticism and mysteries of faith, and of strategic importance. That was the basic question which Smith’s Weekly and the Telegraph kept asking: Could Mr Churchill be made to take an interest in the destiny of a place so distant? So far off that a priest, reading the Hiemalis volume of his daily breviary, felt no shiver of northern wind but sweated instead into his black serge, in the close air of a tram beneath a ruthless February sun?
Each day, diocesan priests like Frank Darragh were required to recite their breviary—the office, as it was called. In the tradition of those monks who sang in plainchant the sundry so-called hours of the office—named Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline—busier souls like Frank and the monsignor were allowed merely to recite the psalms, hymns, lessons, versicles and collects making up the text which, according to one of Darragh’s seminary professors, sprang from ancient Jewish tradition and had been formally recited from the second or third century in Christian monasteries. The office thus possessed a worldwide breadth and a historic depth, but that did not prevent comparative speeds for its completion being discussed by young priests on tennis Mondays, the way athletic times for the half-mile might be discussed by runners. A jovial former seminary buffoon named Tim Murphy boasted that he could manage the whole thing in thirty-four minutes. If so, it showed a remarkable facility Frank Darragh couldn’t match—the Latin seemed to him to demand a slower enunciation. Verses such as ‘Undique circumvenerunt me sicut apes; adusserunt sicut ignis spinas: in nomine Domini contrivi eos’ did not rattle off the tongue. Neither did they roll off the mind, in their significance. ‘They surround me like bees; they engulf me like tongues of fire …’ He had got to say Matins and Lauds the evening before, as was customary, and Prime and Terce and Sext between his two Masses, and now on the tram he recited None from his breviary, his lips moving, as required by canon law, to pronounce the Latin hymns and psalms and versicles.
The purpose of requiring priests to recite the office the world over, from Nazi-occupied Belgium, where his breviary had been published by the Benziger Brothers, to the southernmost priest in New Zealand or Argentina, was to remind the individual cleric that whatever business the rest of mankind might be engaged in—invention, invasion, impregnation—his job and caution, his only possible joy, was in pursuing the divine order. It was there in the vulgate Latin version of the psalm he read with a slight, unobtrusive flutter of his lips, as he hung from a strap, expelling the words in minor whisper which the tram-clang drowned. ‘And I shall walk on a spacious road because I follow all your precepts … I am reminded by light of your name, oh Lord, and I guard your law … I shall take delight in your mandates, which I guard.’
He was towards the end of None, of the versicle and response, Darragh doing both, unlike the monks with one side of the chapel uttering the versicle, and those on the other side singing the plainchant reply. He had got as far as the words ‘Averte oculos meos, ne videant vanitatem—Avert my eyes, that they should not see vanity,’ when he felt in an instant cleft in two by the sharpest agony of loss. It arose from nothing, from a slight jolt of the tramlines, and carried not only the face of the young mother, but also the face of the boy generated from her, leaning confidently against her knees. Had he ever known such a woman? Had he leaned against his mother’s knees with such casual confidence? He blinked and looked up. The eyes of a proportion of the tram-travellers, reverent and hostile, were on him. He felt certain they could see his extreme condition, the sudden axe which had divided him, shoulder to loins. How will I eat dinner with my mother? he wondered for a second, though he hoped the extremity of feeling would depart by then. The rest of the office remained to be said: Vespers, Compline. How could it be completed before midnight if he felt as distracted as this? His legs ached too, for no good reason, and he wished he had taken the schoolboy’s offered seat.
As the tram began the climb to Edgecliff, however, the pain retracted to become a dull, habitual depression, and he began reciting the hymn of Vespers. ‘Extinguish the flames of passion, draw off the heat of poison, grant the salvation of bodies and the true peace of hearts.’ He feared, however, that for him an age of automatic grace had passed.
The bungalow of Darragh’s childhood, approached with the new feeling of having somehow aged during a mere tram ride, and of being tested, stood on New South Head Road in Rose Bay. It was built of plum-coloured brick, and its street-facing windows had little segments of stained glass to relieve them of their banal transparency. His mother, a vigorous, lean woman in her early fifties, tended the rosebushes which marked the way to the verandah and the front door. His parents had bought the house in 1923 from an old Scot who had placed by the front door a framed glass sign in which the word Arbroath was marked out in gold tinsel. They had left it there. The child Darragh had not realised it was the name of a Scottish town, rather than a formula for the hearth. In his present mood of, at best, wistfulness, on this still Sunday suffused with the smell of legs of lamb baking in a thousand kitchens, it failed to evoke much in him.
One of the baking legs of lamb which, despite meat rationing, were still offered up as a matter of course to Australian Sabbath appetites was inside Arbroath, and Darragh paused at the closed front door and let its savour lead him back to a more grateful sense of who and where he was, and what was his destiny. An only child. A father always pleased for his son’s academic success. Before his sudden death eight years past, Mr Darragh told Frank that though Mrs Darragh was shy and not a woman to make a display, she boasted about Frank to all the neighbours. If she showed wariness in her affection, it did not mean she was not as generous as the young mother he’d met on the train. ‘Your mother is a brick, a true rock,’ his father had told him approvingly. ‘You know where you stand with her.’ Young Frank was as willing as his father to find her reticence endearing, and not to mistake it for coolness. At the Christian Brothers’ college at Rose Bay, he had given his teachers similar cause for celebration. He suffered from no learning problems or laziness, and so did not need to be punished in the muscular way of the Brothers’ community, with leather straps and fleas in the ear. He was competent alike at such contrasting puzzles as cricket and algebra. Nothing befell him, not even in adolescence, to drive him to rebellion, or make him seek a world other than the one he knew—unless it was the idea he had of his father’s participation in the ill-defined mysteries of war, that massive and risky secular sacrament. He had been exactly the sort of unsullied, unworldly yet not stupid young man the seminary sought.
At the door of Arbroath, he rang the bell and his aproned mother opened the door. ‘Frank,’ she said with a careful smile. Darragh had learned from childhood to read her small signs, as now, when with her eyes modestly gleaming she led him through to the dining room and his Aunt Madge. Madge, his maiden aunt, came through the curtain from the kitchen where she had obviously been assisting his mother with the bake. His late father’s sister was a fuller and less restrained woman with a plump, pleasant face and brown hair. She believed in rouge, and her cheeks gleamed with that and with the sherry she always drank before Sunday dinner. While he admired his mother for taking quiet delight in things, Aunt Madge was rowdier. Her story, however, like her parents’, had been shaped by the Great War. The family story was that her boyfriend from the Illawarra had been killed in France on some muddy, indiscriminate patrol—he had been a mere eighteen years old.
Madge had spent her adult life as buyer for the millinery department of a store in the city—the highly trusted Miss Darragh who would have made a wonderful wife. For a time about 1934 when Mr Darragh lost his job at Hawley and Ledger, the importing company at which he had worked for thirteen years, Aunt Madge had moved in with her brother and sister-in-law as a minister of mercy to help them pay the mortgage. But most of the time she liked to live alone, in a flat at Dover Heights.
When she loudly kissed him now, Darragh could smell the pleasant blush of sweet wine on her breath. Past her, he saw the table set with white linen on which cruets sparkled, and was fully absorbed and consoled by the intense and encompassing smells of roast potato and moist lamb.
‘We’ll sit down in five minutes,’ said his mother. ‘I have beer if you would like it.’
After the long tram journey, he chose to have a glass. ‘An aperitif,’ said Aunty Madge, for the sake of elegance or of what his father called ‘bush flashness’. While his mother went to get it, Darragh took off his jacket and went to the room he had occupied as a boy to hang it up. He also undid the press-stud at the back of his neck, and released the Roman collar and stock he had worn all the way from Strathfield. The underside of the stock was sodden with his sweat. So now he became an ordinary fellow in black pants and white shirt, about to eat spud and carrot, baked onion and lamb, with mint jelly taken from a cutglass bowl.
With the heaped plates before the three of them, Mrs Darragh asked her son to intone grace. He did so, and after a perfunctory sign of the cross as habitual as a kiss between spouses, Aunty Madge looked at her plate and said with an augustness of elocution which was her style, ‘Who would believe there was rationing?’
‘I would,’ said Mrs Darragh, and risked a smile at her son.
Aunt Madge had extracted a price for helping out the family during Mr Darragh’s unemployment, which had barely ended six months before he died. She had a habit of inviting herself to all occasional meals—Sunday, Easter, Christmas—and even many evening meals at Arbroath. Her company was welcome to Mrs Darragh, and Aunt Madge disliked the fuss of shopping and dealing with books of ration coupons. She devoted a great deal of her free time to film-going, and could always tell Darragh which film to see on Monday nights after tennis. ‘That Night in Rio is a commonplace little thing, but if you happen to like Carmen Miranda … Dive Bomber’s not a bad war drama, a little unrealistic if that’s what you’re after. Errol Flynn, what a looker! They say he’s an Australian. I met a fellow after Mass the other day who claimed to have shared a desk with him at Marist Brothers, Parramatta. I said to him, “Mr Henry,”—that’s his name—“Mr Henry, I wouldn’t believe you except I know a fellow like you wouldn’t lie on the doorstep of the church.” I’m not sure the beggar wouldn’t though. Blossoms in the Dust … very touching. Handkerchief-soaker. Greer Garson looks like a saint but from what I’ve read may not be one. Love on the Dole … now that’s a real film about real people.’
‘I’m surprised,’ said Mrs Darragh, with a half-smile which invited Frank into the cautious joke. ‘A woman of your age going to see Love on the Dole.’ It was said to be a notorious film. Priests and ministers who had not seen it had widely preached against it.
‘Well, it’s the way people live,’ said Aunt Madge, her voice sweeping in its authority. ‘If you treat people unjustly, they don’t just offer it all up for the souls in Purgatory, you know. They try to find an outlet. Anyhow, where were all those priests who run it down when the working men and women were hard up during the Depression? They weren’t to be seen then. But they’re quick to blame the poor for living close to the bone.’
Frank Darragh was used to Aunty Madge being an anti-clerical but devout Catholic.
‘The actors in Love on the Dole,’ Mrs Darragh surprised Frank by saying, ‘were never your poor working men and women, Madge. That Deborah Kerr. In real life she’s got a plum in her mouth like the queen of England.’
‘That’s not what I read,’ said Aunt Madge. ‘In fact, I read that she had quite a hard upbringing as a shopkeeper’s daughter. Anyhow, you’d approve of the newsreels.’ Fork in one hand, Madge raised her other to trace phantom headlines in the air. ‘Rommel’s army on the run in Libya, and our dear boys having Christmas in Egypt. Poor things. They look so young. Will they last the year?’
‘Will any of us?’ asked Mrs Darragh, chewing her lamb resolutely.
Darragh felt a familiar spurt of concern and wondered whether she was really afraid, in the way the people in the confessional were afraid. She had never shown him any fear except when he was ill with whooping cough and pneumonia as a child. She looked levelly at her son.
‘You should go and speak to Mr Regan.’ Regan was the next-door neighbour, a thoughtful man, father of three daughters. Darragh had never seen him, even at the most casual moment, dressed in anything less than a shirt with detachable collar, a vest and watch chain, and well-pressed, well-tailored pants. ‘Mr Regan has room for me, and for Madge if she chooses, in his air-raid shelter.’
Aunt Madge declared, ‘I might come over here, but it is a mile. Whereas there’s a shelter in the park right next door to me. I have a choice between being killed with the sight of Mr Regan’s long, droopy face, or among strangers at the park.’ She laughed, tickled, ‘But, God’s will be done …’
Mrs Darragh murmured, ‘Nice talk for a socialist. And for a friend of Deborah Kerr.’
‘If you’d read Rerum Novarum,’ said Aunt Madge, referring to a famous social justice encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, ‘you’d see that there is no conflict between social democracy and faith.’ Aunt Madge had been a great supporter of the Labor premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang, and had given out ‘How to Vote’ cards in Rose Bay among what she called the ‘silvertail’ voters. She was able to quote from the encyclical, as she did now, for it was the holy text of progressive, political Catholics. ‘“Hence by degrees it has come to pass the working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition …” No one with eyes in his head would argue with that one.’
It was hard at that moment for Darragh to believe that all the particularity of Aunt Madge and his mother could be wiped out by a stray Japanese bomb. And Mrs Darragh had already told him on previous visits that in the event of the invasion itself, she and Madge had been invited to join the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in their convent-fastness at Rose Bay. The nuns were confident that even the Japanese would not violate such an obviously august cloister. Indeed, Frank Darragh could not think of a better place for his mother to shelter should those terrible hosts that had sacked Nanking improbably arrive in the suburbs of Sydney. He feared he himself would be engaged with his congregation in Homebush and Strathfield. What place, apart perhaps from the abattoirs and the brickworks, Homebush and Strathfield could play in the grand plan of a Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was difficult to imagine, but that might add to the peril of the event. Somehow he could imagine the soldiers of the emperor becoming so enraged by the irrelevance of the suburb that they might be provoked to obliterate its people.
At his mother’s urging, Frank Darragh went next door to see Mr Regan. Sweet-faced and slightly dazed, Mrs Regan sought to feed him another meal, and the Regan daughters, who had known him in his adolescence, quivered with excitement to have Frank Darragh, translated into priesthood, present in their home. The fact he was wearing shirtsleeves seemed to amuse them.
‘I must talk to you, Father Frank,’ said Mr Regan under his breath, and collected from his ice chest a bottle of Dinner Ale and led him out of the cooing and fluttering and teasing of the Regan girls into the back garden and down plank steps into the bomb shelter he had so industriously dug among his backyard shrubs. Frank felt already heavy with his meal, and hoped that Mr Regan, a man in his late fifties, was not about to embark on a moral and military weighing of this languid, humid hour in the world’s plummet towards a resolution. In the centre of the damp-smelling air-raid shelter, amidst harsh-timbered bunks, stood a coarse-grained wooden table, and Mr Regan sat at it, inviting Frank to take a chair on the far side. The air was dimmest umber. Mr Regan uncapped the Dinner Ale and poured two glasses. Apparently, in his experience, few priests had ever rejected the offer of a drink.
‘Well, Frank,’ Mr Regan reflectively stated, ‘everyone knows that if they land it will be in the Eastern Suburbs here.’ Darragh had not known that that had been established as military reality. ‘I’m sending the women to my brother-in-law’s place in Cootamundra. At least there’s room to hide out there.’ He sighed. The chance of bloody chaos threatened the fine-sewn seams of his vest, the salt-and-pepper cloth of his pressed Sunday trousers. But he would not flee. The worst he could face was murder. What women faced was unspeakable. Besides, he was a real estate agent. As a member of St Vincent de Paul, he had frequently slotted poorer families in Christ’s name into houses and flats which awaited occupation. The Japanese might spare him for his expertise in finding them billets.
Mr Regan took out a packet of Capstans from his vest and lit one sombrely and with a flourish, as if it would be the only cigarette he would smoke that day. ‘Did 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 judgement of our easy ways. The races at Randwick while men die. Our general lack of fibre. 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 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 have 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 neighbour 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.