IT WAS THE kind of late summer day in which, if possible, people stayed indoors. The air blazed beyond the windows, and was rendered dense with smoke from a bushfire in the Blue Mountains. Saying his office in the corner of the living room, Darragh was interrupted by Mrs Flannery, tentative because she knew the importance of the hours. There was an American soldier at the door.
‘Oh,’ Darragh commented. ‘I didn’t hear the bell.’
‘No,’ said Mrs Flannery. ‘He sort of appeared. He looks very impressive.’
Mrs Flannery might have made an Australian soldier wait until Darragh had finished the office. But the Americans had the authority of their strangeness and their air of confidence.
The soldier in the hall, Darragh noticed in the small time before the conversation began, was a large, well-made man, but did not stand with the typical jauntiness Sydneysiders associated with his type of particularly well-cut uniform. He held his cap at his side, and his smoothly combed brown hair did not seem much brilliantined. The stripes on his sleeve were worn, as Americans wore them, the reverse way to Australian chevrons—pointing to the shoulder, ascendant. Beneath this man’s three stripes were further semi-rondels. The man stood peering up at a painting of St Jerome, translator of the Bible into vulgate Latin, who knelt in umber oils amidst the scrolls of his own and others’ scholarship, bare-breasted, a stone nearby for penitential beating of his breast. He withdrew his gaze from it dazedly as Darragh appeared before him, and blinked. He had extraordinary almond eyes, as fascinating, Darragh thought at once, as those of a knight or courtier or angel in a Renaissance altar piece.
‘Father,’ the soldier said, ‘am I disturbing you?’ He was perhaps a year older than Darragh, and his particular mixture of forwardness and courtesy was refreshing on a dull morning in Lent. Darragh said not at all, and marked his place in Vespers with one of the coloured in-sewn tassels of his breviary.
‘My aunt’s died back home,’ said the soldier, fixing him with the almond eyes.
‘Ant?’ asked Darragh, thinking this an insect joke.
‘No,’ said the soldier, shaking his head, self-reproving. ‘I forgot you guys pronounce it different. My A–U–N–T. She’s a widow. And not so old. I was wondering if you could say a Mass for her.’ He pulled from his trouser pocket a folded envelope. He knew the protocol for offering a priest a stipend for saying a Mass for the dead.
‘My father’s sister-in-law, see. Louisa Fratelli. More or less raised me, with my parents being so busy with the market garden. I’ve written her name on the envelope.’
Darragh accepted the envelope and considered it. He looked inside. There was, as the last time an American had asked him to say Mass, a full pound note. But this was to be a Mass for the dead. To be asked to say Mass for a person who had died so far-off—that was a new experience.
Darragh said, ‘I should tell you … the normal stipend for a Mass is as little as five shillings and never more than ten.’
‘Please, Father. Take it. Put the rest in the poor box.’
Darragh said, ‘Thank you. I will. We have a very active St Vincent de Paul branch here, and soldiers’ families to look after, Sergeant …’
‘Sorry. I’m Master Sergeant Gene Fratelli. G–E–N–E, as in Gene Kelly. Eugenio, I was baptised. I’m an MP, but I take my armband off in places like this.’
Darragh introduced himself and asked, ‘Where did your aunt die?’
‘Next door my parents. Place called Stratford. In California. The Central Valley. Lots of Italians. Some Portuguese. You know. The Portuguese and Mexicans do the picking.’
‘Why did you come to St Margaret’s, Sergeant?’ Darragh wanted to know. ‘Not that you aren’t entirely welcome.’
‘I’ve been to Mass here once or twice.’ Darragh was surprised. He would surely have noticed such a striking face from the pulpit.
Darragh suggested, ‘There’s a dance club at Flemington—a lot of American soldiers go there.’
‘I don’t hang round those places, Father. I like quieter people. Someone to take a poor GI in and give him dinner.’
So, someone in the area had kindly fed Sergeant Fratelli, Darragh concluded. He could not quite defeat in himself the idea that there was something odd about a man wanting a Mass said in Australia for a woman who had died in California. But there was no reason why such an arrangement was not entirely proper. The Communion of Saints transcended all borders and traversed an ocean with ease.
‘I’ll announce your aunt’s name at the Masses on Sunday,’ said Darragh.
‘Louisa Fratelli,’ insisted Darragh, for verification.
‘You know, that would have tickled her,’ Sergeant Fratelli told him with a sudden smile which reached up and nicely kindled the almond eyes. ‘I’ll try to be here for it, unless I’m on duty of course. I’m running Suspects Squad at the moment.’ Darragh did not know what that meant, and did not ask.
‘Who’s this guy again?’ asked Fratelli, nodding towards the painting.
‘St Jerome. Fourth or fifth century. I don’t know the exact dates, Sergeant. He came from North Africa and translated the Bible into Latin. He’s the patron saint of librarians, and he was secretary to a Pope, but he often lived in desert caves.’
‘He was an Arab?’
‘Egyptian, I believe.’ Darragh was not utterly sure.
‘And the stone in his hand, Father?’
‘He was penitential. He beat his breast with desert rocks.’
‘Wow,’ said Fratelli. ‘That’s what I like. I like saints’ stories. Because I’m not one myself.’
He smiled, his lips folding gently. ‘Are you and the head priest fixed for groceries, Father?’
‘Yes, thanks, we’re well off.’
‘You’d say that,’ Fratelli asserted, as if he knew Darragh well. ‘I can get stuff easy. The PX at the Showgrounds.’
‘Please, don’t go to the trouble …’
‘Okay. But you guys have rationing and all …’
‘You’re a generous man. But we’re well looked after, thank you.’
The man saluted casually, without that British snappiness the Australians were taught to affect but rarely managed. With a last look at St Jerome, he let himself out of the door. He had fascinated Darragh with his casual courtesies, which were stylistically different from those of young Australian men. Darragh had noticed that in addition to his stripes, he wore three white service bars on his lower sleeve, which meant he had served in the army for some years, probably since he was eighteen, and thus—as Kearney had in Sydney—had beheld mayhem. That reality made it harder for Darragh to define the man Fratelli was. But that was merely one small mystery cast up by the new order of the world, when to defeat the risk of terrible Japanese strangeness, one needed to invite some relative strangeness within the walls.