WHEN THE MONSIGNOR and Mrs Flannery had finished with them, it was natural that Darragh should hungrily read the newspaper reports of the death of Kate Heggarty, in the remaining mad expectation that at the end of one of the columns the journalists or Inspector Kearney would come clean and say, ‘By the way, this is just a sample of what we can do to create realities where there were none and, far from being strangled, Mrs Heggarty, on her next day off work, will be found escorting her son, Anthony, up Homebush Road to St Margaret’s primary school.’ Neither Telegraph nor Herald, a Masonic rag according to the monsignor but necessary to buy on large occasions for its war maps and so that a fellow could be annoyed by its acidulous editorials, nor the vacuous afternoon Sun made this admission so desired by Frank Darragh, who was forced to put the print away from him so that his tears did not ruin the page.
But at least the newspapers pleased the monsignor by not mentioning Darragh, and by failing to cast any shadow over the monsignor’s financial and sacramental polity of St Margaret’s.
Apart from that, it was a pitiable story, and the newspapers were sympathetic to Mrs Heggarty, though they did not thoroughly excuse her. There was an editorial in the Telegraph which reminded soldiers’ wives that as generous as they might be socially, they must be careful about the people they admitted to their houses in their husbands’ absence. Neighbours had seen a man in a brown suit visit Mrs Heggarty one time in the early evening, and another man in a blue suit arrived from a large car parked around the corner about noon on a recent Saturday. He carried a suitcase like a commercial traveller.
Mrs Heggarty was well liked by neighbours, the papers said, though they said she did not go round attending tea parties. Her son could say nothing about the male visitor, except that he was strong—‘He tossed me for fun,’ said Anthony. ‘He was named Johnny, and brought chocolate with him’. It seemed that sometimes when the visitor was there, Mrs Stevens minded Anthony.
Darragh’s head, for spasms of perhaps twenty seconds at a time, and recurrently through the coming days, was possessed by the image of her face descending, the crown of her honest head exposed to God and to Darragh’s gaze, to embrace with her lips the thin rim of a china cup. And somewhere, in Africa or Europe, Private Heggarty woke in his prison camp thinking himself still a man with a wife.
Darragh went to the school to see Anthony, but he was not there. The nuns said he was having some days off with Mrs Stevens.
The day after her death had been suitably one of neutral weather, and even early, when Darragh went to put on his vestments and say Mass, offering up the bread and the wine that Christ, who knew agony, might extend His mercy to Kate Heggarty, clouds had already cancelled sun, and sun the clouds. The seasons were seized in place, he believed. After Mass and a poor breakfast, he felt in his shirtsleeves the need of a black cardigan, and when he put it on, the need to be bare-armed. He said his office in one session that morning, and the words evaded his attention, so that sometimes he would look back over the ‘Veni Creator’ and ask, ‘Did I recite that?’
The monsignor was not about at lunch time, and Darragh could not think of a single task for himself. If Kate Heggarty, disciple of Rerum Novarum, could not be helped, it was worth asking who might be.
The afternoon paper said that the observed wearer of the brown suit, an Italian door-to-door salesman of household products, was helping police with their enquiries. Darragh exclaimed at the newsprint. This could not be the man bearing gifts. Kate Heggarty would not admit a salesman and make him the crux of whether she remained a Catholic or not.
In the afternoon of that suspended day, Mrs Flannery found him in his room and told him there was a telephone call from the cathedral. It proved to be the vicar-general of the archdiocese, Monsignor Joe McCarthy. Standing in the hallway, phone to ear, Darragh felt chill break out on his underarms as if he would be unable ever again to accommodate himself to any climate.
‘Frank, Joe McCarthy here. Sounds to us here as if you’ve had a hectic time. Shot at one week, and now this parishioner of yours. And the strangler.’
At the utterance of that word—strangler—Darragh felt, like an intimate revelation, the genuine existence of such a person. Until now the fellow had been a black vacancy, brown or blue-suited perhaps, carrying his bag of indefinite kindness, a force with the consistency of smoke. Not a defined man, with hands as rough and hurried as those of a rescuer. Nor did it seem to Darragh, for once, that Inspector Kearney had the right level of urgency to match the concreteness of this clever, strong fellow, this murderer. With this idea of a definite, ten-fingered, two-handed man, Darragh was overtaken by a boiling rage, utterly unsuitable to bring to a telephone call from a vicar-general of an archdiocese. He scrambled in this tempest to hold to one small white area of reason, at the apex of his brain, with all the rest blood-red again, and suffocating.
‘I feel very sorry for that woman,’ were the tepid words he managed to emit from this cauldron.
‘The world has gone utterly mad,’ Monsignor McCarthy asserted. ‘It is a time for God’s special mercy. I hope we all get it, Frank.’
Darragh somehow managed to agree.
‘His Grace the archbishop thinks that in these disturbing times you should go on retreat … you know, spend a bit of time in meditation and reflection. There is a Franciscan retreat house on the South Coast, or more exactly, Kangaroo Valley …’
Darragh knew, as any priest would, that to be told that the archbishop thought was not to hear an idle opinion but a command.
‘It’s very kind of His Grace,’ said Darragh, trying to accept it all as a matter of the new, Australian-born archbishop’s paternal concern. But he lacked the means of contemplation. He possessed only the means of rage. ‘I keep myself very busy, Monsignor, and I doubt if Monsignor Carolan could easily get through all he has to do without my help. I mean, in the chief areas in which I am able to assist—ceremonies, confession, parish visitations …’
‘Yes, you visited the poor woman, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
The vicar-general made a creaking noise over the phone, as if he were struggling to find arguments Darragh knew very well he already possessed, and had well calibrated from use on earlier problem priests.
‘A–a–ah,’ said McCarthy. ‘It is precisely when a priest considers himself indispensable that he should take a retreat. I feel indispensable to His Grace, but if I were run over by a truck, he’d find a perfectly good new vicar-general in a moment.’
‘For how long did His Grace want me to stay in retreat?’
‘Well, that is flexible. For as long as we and Monsignor Carolan between us think it might benefit you, I suppose. Beginning next Monday. You could take the train to a bit beyond Wollongong, you see, and the Franciscan friars will pick you up and take you out to Kangaroo Valley. You’ll miss your Monday off, I’m sorry, but the journey’s very pleasant in its own right.’
‘Next Monday,’ Darragh repeated woodenly.
Not early enough to prevent him undertaking his full weekend workload, but soon enough after the event should the salacious Sunday press mention him. He was dolefully aware he would not escape making this retreat. Retreats were the Church’s universal early response to all questionable incidents involving the clergy.
‘We wouldn’t want you to rush back, I don’t think, Frank. Count on at least ten to twelve days.’
‘I don’t believe there’s any need,’ he still pleaded. It was no good being like an obedient monk. Not with all this fever in his soul, and the idea of the strangler born of woman and bearing a name. ‘Look, it just seems to me … the country’s about to be invaded, Monsignor, and whether by war or murder, children are becoming orphans. I don’t think I can go away and meditate at such a time.’
‘Frank,’ the vicar-general told him with greater severity than had marked the discussion so far, ‘your superiors think you have to. It’s precisely at a time like this that you need to reflect. You’ve been through a great deal, a storm of the emotions. These events deprive a man of his compass. A retreat will get you back to your true north. Now, Frank, no more arguments. I’d be embarrassed to have to get the archbishop himself to talk to you.’
There was no arguing. ‘May her soul, and all the souls of the faithful departed, rest in peace …’ he muttered at the phone when the vicar-general hung up. ‘May her soul …’ He needed to act. In God’s name he had been forbidden to act. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.
The monsignor was in, and so the dinner was uneasy at the presbytery table, Darragh sensing that as angry as the monsignor might be with him, he was, this sober, tea-drinking night, angry with himself as well, for his heated, whiskified feelings at the conference with Kearney yesterday. Perhaps, too, he harboured an edgy suspicion that there might have been a better way to do things, a more loyal way to Darragh, if only a man had not been so angry, and so shocked by anointing the strangled girl.
‘Did you hear from the cathedral?’ the monsignor asked with basso neutrality.
‘They want me to go on a retreat,’ said Frank. ‘It seems you’ll decide with them how long I should be there.’
‘I think you need it, Frank,’ said the monsignor.
‘Why don’t I go tomorrow then?’
‘Tomorrow you have to take young Heggarty up to the orphanage at Killcare. I’ve got Mr Connors lined up to drive you and the little bloke.’
‘Then why don’t I go on retreat the next day?’
The monsignor’s face was pained. ‘Because you’re needed over the weekend.’
‘That’s exactly right, Monsignor. I’m needed over next weekend, and next Monday to Friday as well. Who’ll do all your extra work for you?’
‘Frank, is this the attitude?’
‘Yes. It seems I’m getting worldly. Having been grilled by you and Kearney in tandem, I’m not nearly as innocent as I was.’
‘Look, Frank, I made the best decision I could. I was too damned upset, Frank, even to pray over it. Perhaps you thought I threw you to him, but … As for false innocence, I can only hope you’ve turned that corner. You know what they say? In the world, but not of it. To be effective, a fellow has to know something of how the world works.’
‘I won’t learn much about the world in a Franciscan monastery in Kangaroo Valley.’
‘I think you’ve acquired a bit of knowledge in the last few months, Frank, and now it’s time to reflect on it.’
‘With you the gaoler, Monsignor, to tell me when I can emerge?’
Darragh was delighted to see that his baiting had brought angry colour back to the monsignor’s cheeks and scalp.
‘His Grace will certainly discuss it with me.’
‘And who will be your donkey when I’m not here the weekend after next?’
‘Frank, I don’t like that tone.’
‘Do you think it’s time some of your beloved finance committee went on retreat? They’re in the world and totally of it.’
‘Frank, watch what you’re saying. This isn’t you, I know. You’ve always been such a cooperative young bloke!’
‘That was because I was a fool. Now I know a thing or two.’
‘Well, one thing you ought to know is you don’t talk to your parish priest like that. You ought to know that much if you’re suddenly such a knowledgeable cleric.’
‘Do you mind if I leave the table, Monsignor? I don’t feel like any dinner.’ In fact, mutton was setting in its own fat on his plate, and the peas too were being claimed by the unspecific, tepid gelatinous mixture which was Mrs Flannery’s version of gravy.
‘You can certainly go, Frank. You’ve just demonstrated why you need to go on retreat.’
Frank stood up and went to the foot of the stairs, where he savoured the small astringency of his vented anger.
‘Don’t forget you have to do the early Mass tomorrow,’ called the monsignor.
The phone began to ring then. It was Captain O’Rourke, oblivious of murder, proposing, without any particular enthusiasm, a shared visit to Private Aspillon.