DARRAGH SPENT A drugged Monday in St Vincent’s Hospital, attended by whispering nuns who had much to celebrate in God’s benevolence. The Chicago had not been sunk, the young priest had been rescued, the killer detained! Though there were rumours that the mother submarines from which the swarm of midget subs had been released had shelled the innocent streets of Bondi or Bronte, the bodies of the Japanese submariners lay as deeply dead as that of Kate Heggarty, and the nameless citizens of the city walked abroad with tales to tell of the night of their survival.
Dear old Trumble, who had refused to leave his charge, was entitled to dream of his revolution at war’s end—that was Darragh’s view. He who loved the idea of the Madrid Republicans who massacred priests to save the populace from their influence was praised by the press for having saved the life of a priest. On the human plane, nothing was simple. And Darragh, who was co-hero of Fratelli’s capture, did not feel a sense of triumph. Fratelli held him still by the throat. He was in purgatory with a barely saved and howling Kate. Fratelli seemed to have crushed the hope from his blood.
At one time he woke to find his mother and Aunt Madge sturdily present, and realised that contact with Fratelli had given him a disease, a membrane of dimness over his eyes. He began to shed tears when they spoke to him. Shame, which had been lifted from him yesterday morning, had returned at Fratelli’s hands the night before.
He woke at three o’clock on Tuesday morning, recited the office from his breviary, which someone had taken the care to bring him from St Margaret’s, and strained for the same level of gratitude as the Sisters of Charity. He was in feverish dread of the morning paper, and when the nuns did not bring him one, he went to the end of the corridor and found a Herald. After the passage of two nights, he was barely mentioned except as the victim of an assault. The oldest paper of the city, the most respectable, the paper of the ruling classes of Australia, had let him off lightly and with some generosity of soul.
For a time there was a hollow elation, but within half an hour it had evaporated, leaving an underlying landscape of ruin exposed. He felt a ridiculous tendency to tears when the monsignor visited him, spotting his grief in his eyes. ‘Frank, please don’t be upset. They have the killer safe contained.’ The killer could not be contained though. He stained everything he touched; he spread darkness with his lunging penis. ‘This is what comes of taking things too seriously, son,’ said baffled Monsignor Carolan.
‘I want to go back home,’ Darragh told him. ‘I want to work.’
The monsignor sighed. ‘The hospital’s ringed by journalists and their cockatoos, just waiting to get a picture of you leaving. Stay a while yet.’
Darragh continued inconsolable about Gervaise, dead sailors and the wife of Lance Bombardier Heggarty, whose face was more intimately clear to him than that of visitors. ‘This is just a crack-up you’re having, Frank,’ the monsignor advised him on a second visit. ‘You’ll come out of this the wiser.’ He reached out and took Frank’s wrist. ‘Be a good fellow there.’ Then he laughed, trying to cheer Darragh up with ruefulness. ‘Quite a trick even for you to be out at the one time with a strangler and a Communist!’ Darragh was indeed consoled that the improbable comedy of it had reached the monsignor. ‘Where do you get ’em from, Frank? You’re a wonder in your way.’
Darragh did not want to look at newspapers again after that first time. It was as if he learned through the pores of his skin what others, even the nuns, knew from the newspapers of their patients. Fratelli had been questioned by the Americans and the CID. A fellow MP had by some accident, or led by a sense of something awry in the master sergeant, searched Fratelli’s locker on Sunday evening before the emergency broke out, and found a journal. The idea of a journal seemed all too credible to Darragh, given Fratelli’s confessional fervour, the fullness of his account, the evasions, the qualifications he put on his own guilt. All that took words. It took ink. There was not merely a journal, as the CID, summoned by the corps, found in searching his locker. There was as well a memento, a blouse. It was white, and of embroidered linen, no obviously risqué item. Fratelli would have prided himself on taking a worthy garment—no vulgar brassiere, no satin lingerie.
By the afternoon following the submarine attack, a resident of The Crescent, with the authority of the accumulated evidence against the man, had identified Fratelli, and the earnest blue suit in which he made his journeys to Mrs Heggarty’s plain door. Darragh could well imagine how Kearney would have skilfully evoked information from the honest citizens of The Crescent, including Mrs Thalia Stevens.
Mrs Darragh came again, and Aunt Madge, and he found himself turned to stone or at least to silence by their tolerance of him, their cheery determination. That too brought tears to his eyes, which threatened to choke him if he let them free. They sat in light, looking in at him in his pit. His mother said that, darling, she was proud of him. He was earnest, she said, that was all. Earnestness could be cured, apparently, at St Vincent’s. He had so shamed them, he wanted to confess, but the pills they began giving him on the second day bloated and dried his tongue. It lay in his mouth like a toadfish in a drying pool. Had the pills given him this tendency to be giddy and go liquid at the eyes? He asked a nun that, and she was evasive.
Vicar-general Monsignor McCarthy visited in his purple stock, and told Darragh that he was being prayed for. When he went outside, he could be heard holding half an hour’s conversation with a specialist beyond the door. Darragh believed, though he could not swear to anything he heard or saw, that the specialist said, in a slightly raised voice, ‘But he can’t go on retreat. He needs a holiday.’ The vicar-general re-entered the room, frowning about the purple of his stock. ‘There’s no rush for anyone to make up their minds on what should be done yet, Frank,’ he said. ‘Just rest for now.’
Darragh was appalled with himself for being challenged by a tendency to weep in the face of this official purple. ‘I want to begin saying Mass again,’ he declared. ‘Hearing confessions. Anointing the sick.’
‘In a day or so, Frank.’ The vicar-general pointed to the breviary on the bedside table. ‘And you don’t need to worry about the office. You’re dispensed from that for now. You’re far too ill.’
‘Dispensed,’ said Frank. He hated the verb acutely.
Because the pills let the days slide away beneath his feet, it was Saturday before Inspector Kearney came with another senior detective. Kearney seemed tentative, and tender in a brotherly sort of way. ‘Father Frank, we’re not going to pursue the bugger for grievous bodily assault. It’s the murder or nothing.’
‘Of course it’s the murder,’ said Darragh, and again his eyes filled and threatened to unman him.
‘The Yank authorities are right on our side. But the bastard’s pleading insanity.’
Darragh felt laughter in him, as hectic as the monsignor’s laughter had been earlier in the week. ‘He zigs and he zags,’ said Darragh, as if it were an endearing trait of Fratelli.
‘He certainly does. Look, when things are better for you, I have to talk to you. Don’t be alarmed. Our American friends don’t want this to be a circus. They’ll try him by closed court martial at Victoria Barracks. They’re going to ask a New South Wales Supreme Court judge to sit with all the colonels. This won’t be like a public court. No bigotry, no cross-examination. A court martial will give you a fair go. You should be out of the chair within an hour.’
‘I can’t break the seal,’ Darragh explained. ‘The archdiocese wouldn’t know what to do with me then. They don’t know what to do with me now. See, I feel I went down with all the sailaors.’
‘No. No, Frank,’ said the detective in an authoritative way. ‘You’re here, you see. You’re here.’
Darragh frowned. Yes, he must be here, he decided, but he did not always feel as if he was.
Kearney smiled in a rough attempt at reassurance, and to signify Fratelli was a joke. ‘See, he says you drove him to it, because he loved her and you put her in two minds. With your spiritual advice and all! He says you made him mad.’
Darragh laughed outright and without apology.
‘That’s zigging, all right,’ he told Kearney. ‘That’s zagging.’
‘Perhaps. But it’s so easily disproved. I know one of the MP officers thinks Fratelli’s actually courting death, but without so much as saying I am guilty. Because the madness thing … it won’t stand up. The judges will give you an easy time, believe me. You deserve some consideration after what he did to you.’
‘Oh he had me, all right,’ Darragh assented. ‘He had me, the old Fratelli.’
‘He had a horn on him when we took him, Father.’ Darragh did not want to hear that. He was burdened with shame not least because something in him had called out the beast in Fratelli. It seemed, therefore, like malice for Kearney to say it. ‘He kept that awful erection of his for ten minutes after, it seemed. Built like a bloody draughthorse. Remember what he did on Kate Heggarty’s body.’
Darragh instantly vomited over the bedsheets. Nuns came from every region of the hospital, and correctly looked reprovingly at Inspector Kearney, who to them was just an importunate layman.
Darragh lost many days now. He believed he remembered an elderly nun telling him, ‘But you can’t say Mass yet, Father. You’d upset the chalice. Then … Our Divine Lord’s blood all over the place.’
That closed the matter. Yet suddenly, as if he had got immune to the sting of his pills, or as if the doctor had reduced them, he was able to go into a courtyard and sit in the sun. His grief came less frequently, more dully. Tears he shed chiefly in the secrecy of his room, since he knew by now that they seemed to throw everyone into disarray. One afternoon, he and Aunt Madge sat together at a table in this enclosed yard. He caught Aunt Madge watching younger nuns, novices, of an age unlikely to be permitted to nurse Darragh, spying on him for a second from this or that window.
‘Women!’ she told him, as if nuns in some ways participated more heavily than others in whatever frailty she was remarking on. She looked at him as if she knew that the abiding question in his mind was, How do I get from this courtyard into the effectual world? ‘You think you’re such a sinner, don’t you, Frank?’
‘I don’t know whether I’m a sinner or a fool. It’s the same thing.’ There was the thing of feeling unclean too, but he did not burden Aunt Madge with that.
‘Yes, you’re such a wild man, aren’t you? In your own head. That’s exactly what’s wrong with you. I’ll tell you, most of us have buckets more shame than you. The archbishop has more shame; I wouldn’t mind betting that at all—I knew him when he was a curate. The monsignor—that walking ledger. It’s better to be like you than like him! So I want you to cut out these tears, do you hear me? Or if you want to let them flow, do so, but forget shame. You have no shame to bear.’
He shook his head. Aunt Madge lowered her voice. ‘So there’s this assumption around, isn’t there, hinted at in the papers, that you and the girl … that you had an infatuation for her. Well, say it was the truth. So what? What does it matter? Priests have been sillier by far than that. Believe me. Women get to men, and priests are men. Therefore, women get to priests.’
He couldn’t explain how much he was ashamed that his fascination for Mrs Heggarty was public property. And he couldn’t argue with Aunt Madge. She was so robust in debate, of so strong a mind. She dropped her voice further and reached for his wrist, holding it emphatically. ‘I’ll tell you this just to wake you up. Just to make sure you know you’ve let no one down. Mr Regan and I—do you believe this, your beloved, upright Mr Regan?—we had a love affair. Twelve years ago. Yes. Lasted three months. Looked at purely from the point of view of being a lover, he was splendid. He put all his guilt and all his sense of damnation into it, big dear old Regan. Now this was all a terrible thing, Frank, on my part and his. His girls were young. His wife was loyal. But the terrible thing about the sixth commandment, Frank, is that when you’re violating it, when you’re wrapped up in the other person, the other person stands for the entire universe. You forget everything else. And the sinister thing is, you feel somehow that God’s on your side. Or this or that god, anyhow. Venus, say! Well, mea culpa. I didn’t go near the Regan family for eight years afterwards. I used to sneak into your place when you were young, so Mrs Regan wouldn’t see me. Sneaked out. I’m sure your mother knew all about what had happened, but she never said. Anyhow, in the end I just went to Mrs Regan one day and pleaded for her pardon, and she’d already given it. Maybe—and this isn’t an excuse—but maybe she knew that one fling would be more than enough to bind dear old Regan to her for life.’
If Aunt Madge’s object had been to make him fascinated in an old-fashioned way, then he was fascinated and appalled in a general sense, but surprisingly not in any personal way at Aunt Madge, who had always seemed to carry with her the possibility of great passion.
‘And believe me,’ said Aunt Madge, not pausing to get his pardon, ‘there would be bucketloads of parish priests and bishops who could make the same or similar confession. Sex is a grand and terrible thing, Frank. It makes everyone mad sooner or later. Now you read all these prayers every day that talk about what a sinful generation we are, how fallible, how we can’t clean our own backsides without God’s help. And it’s all the truth, Frank, it’s all the bloody truth. But the trouble is you believe it only applies to you. You don’t look at all these other fellows and say, they’re just as silly as I am. You only look at yourself, and condemn yourself. As if you are one of a kind.’
‘The monsignor thinks I’m one of a kind,’ Darragh asserted.
‘And so is he. And so—bloodywell—is he. A pretty ordinary kind, too. Frank, your mother sheltered you too much when you were a kid. Your father had been round the traps, but she made sure you got none of his balance, none of his wisdom. You thought every monsignor had the authority of a god, of God himself. You were an angelic kid. But Australia’s the wrong place for that. In any case, it’s only because you’ve been in the newspapers by accident that the archdiocese is running round like headless chickens. And by the way, don’t you think that’s a bit infantile of them?’
‘They don’t want to have to deal with a scandal,’ said Frank, to fight off Aunt Madge’s superior wisdom. ‘You can’t say that they haven’t been generous. All this …’ He pointed about him. He meant the hospital, the medical treatment. Tears pricked his eyes at the idea of it.
‘Why not? You’re entitled to it, Frank. Don’t let them make you feel guilty about that as well. You can’t help being a bit knocked about, you know. As for newspapers and scandals, they’re the stuff of a day. I’d say the chances of your being pointed to in your old age as someone notorious are pretty small.’
Darragh yielded to an unexpected laugh. He thought, as it came up his throat, this is a natural laugh. Perhaps this is not the laugh of a total fool and a scandal.
He said, ‘They talk about people having a Dutch uncle. You’re my Dutch aunt.’
‘Someone’s got to be,’ said Aunt Madge. ‘Are you shocked? Do you forgive me?’
‘That’s already been settled,’ he said blithely, far from shocked, after Fratelli, at such normal sins as those of Regan and Madge. ‘Ancient history.’
‘Anyhow, I depend on your discretion, Frank, even if you’re not feeling like yourself for the moment.’
‘That’s it,’ said Frank. ‘You’ve got it in one, Aunt Madge. Mad as a cut snake. At least, so I’m told.’
But he was, in his way, recovering. When the day came to attend Fratelli’s court martial, Darragh was driven to the barracks by the archbishop’s secretary and accompanied by a nurse. Darragh remembered the secretary from the seminary, a man a few years older than himself, extremely competent and clever. They chatted about former classmates all the way to Victoria Barracks, Darragh sitting in the front seat like a fully restored member of the archdiocese. Occasionally, something the other priest said would evoke in him a vast dread of the encounter about to take place. ‘Thank God they’ve only let one news agency in to observe this court martial.’ It was a sentiment he had heard before, but now it had immediate meaning. Monsignor Carolan, for whatever reason, had passed on to Darragh a bit of gossip—there had been a debate at the cathedral about whether Frank should give his evidence, as he had always intended to, in full clerical suit, or wearing a white shirt and tie, like a seminarian. The monsignor did not realise that since his conversation with Aunt Madge, Darragh had begun to see such fretful debate as inane.
On arrival at the barracks, the archbishop’s secretary seemed somewhat abashed to be asked to sit outside the courtroom, whose door was guarded by the sort of splendidly turned-out and revolver-equipped American military police of whom Darragh felt he had already seen too many. The secretary muttered to an army officer at the courtroom door, obviously explaining that Darragh had not been himself and might need support within the chamber of the court martial. But his argument was politely rebuffed.
Darragh let himself sink into a daze, surrendered to the numb web of his blood, and so rose and was escorted through the door by a guard. The court-martial chamber was ballroom vast, with its windows taped for air raids and draped to exclude light. Eleven splendid officers of varying age sat at a high table decorated with a succession of American flags. Among the military judges was a bald, plump man in a dark suit, the observing judge from the New South Wales Supreme Court. In front of the president of the court, a stern, square-faced soldier, stood a microphone, and behind him the Stars and Stripes and various army banners crossed over each other to make an impressive pattern against the wall.
By contrast with this heavily populated upper table the court chamber itself seemed under-populated. At the table for the defence sat a captain of perhaps thirty years of age, and Fratelli waited beside him. Darragh found himself staring at Fratelli and was, for reasons he could not define, hungry for signs. Fratelli merely looked in his direction and nodded once, curtly. A man who had tried to throttle him seemed to owe him more, Darragh thought. But then, there was hatred, wasn’t there? He remembered that. Inspector Kearney had told him. Darragh formed words in his head and tried to transmit them to Fratelli. I no longer dread you. Imprisonment and accusation had crushed all that force, that look and air of grandeur, out of Fratelli.
The prosecutor, an older officer, asked Darragh about his meetings with Master Sergeant Fratelli: the day when Fratelli had asked him to say Mass for his aunt, and then the capture of Private Aspillon. The man spoke about that incident in a way which implied it was well known and investigated, and so, in a way which seemed to promise Gervaise a continuing existence. Next, the prosecutor wanted to know what the Australian corporal had said about Fratelli’s being the cause of the storm of fire in Lidcombe. In other matters, Darragh pleaded the seal of the confessional, and was able to say only that Fratelli had said to meet him, for the sake of spiritual guidance, outside the confessional. Then there was the issue of what Fratelli had said while trying to strangle him. No seal extended to that.
All that he was able quickly to recite, anxious to be let go again, back to the anonymity Aunt Madge had promised him was imminent.
Throughout, Fratelli seemed to be as abstracted from what was happening as Darragh was, and gazed fair ahead with a fixity alien to all his previous behaviour as the young officer appointed to defend him began to ask Darragh questions with an edge to them. Did Father Darragh think a sane man would have tried to open fire on the shed in Lidcombe where Aspillon and Darragh huddled together? Without violating what he heard in the confessional, had Darragh done his best to turn Mrs Heggarty away from Fratelli? Then, an irrational question as far as Darragh understood it: To what extent did his own feelings for Mrs Heggarty make him resent the idea that she would go with another man? This was a question the journalists at their table liked.
It was therefore very welcome to the numbed Darragh when the president of the court called for a suspension of that line of examination, put his hand over the microphone, and held an earnest discussion with the bald man in the suit. Fratelli seemed to have drifted to sleep, or perhaps it was an act. At last the president unclasped his hand from the microphone. ‘I’m not going to let you pursue the direction you’re heading in,’ he told Fratelli’s defender. The defending officer could, said the president, call as many specialist witnesses as he chose on the matter of Fratelli’s sanity. He could call the men with whom Fratelli lived. There was no profit in expecting a decent gentleman of the cloth to make judgements on how Fratelli might have felt about this or that.
With the polite thanks of the court, Darragh was told he could go. He rose with his eyes still on Fratelli, who did not look back. But it did not matter. They had sent him behind the wire. They had made him say the rosary on his fingers and live without shoelaces. Darragh could see that within the walls, as a prisoner, he was the mere mirror of the courtier and warrior, the ghost of the fellow who commanded angelic white helmets. Near the door, one of Darragh’s knees gave way and he fell into an involuntary demi-genuflection. Feeling foolish, he struggled upright. He heard the president call to his accompanying military escort, ‘Give the father a hand there, Private.’
And then he was outside, welcomed back by the secretary-priest and the nurse. As they descended the stairs and entered the large black car from the cathedral, the secretary murmured, as if it did not matter, ‘Did anything painful come out, Frank?’
‘Nothing painful,’ said Darragh. ‘He didn’t look at me.’
After his hospital stay, they sent him to live at home, urging him not to forget to take his pills. The vicar-general had told him to go to the pictures, and for good long walks. ‘Your mother’s area of Sydney is full of them,’ he said. When he had been home three days, the vicar-general visited him again, this time in his mother’s living room. Mrs Darragh made tea, set out the finest cups, and then withdrew.
‘Frank,’ Monsignor McCarthy told him when they were alone, ‘the archbishop has been very busy considering what is best for you. What you should do when you get your medical clearance. We think it might be best if you were laicised for a time, until you’re completely fit to work again.’
A fury rose in Darragh. ‘Laicised?’ he said. He shielded his eyes from the idea. ‘That’s a punishment, isn’t it? In melodramas, it’s called being defrocked.’
‘It’s not meant to be a punishment, not in this case. It’s to show great confidence in you. Many men who have crack-ups are given a few months off. To holiday. Even to do a bit of secular work. You see, we could get you work as a proofreader at the Catholic Weekly. And, of course, you could wear lay clothes for the time being.’
‘So that everyone could tell I’m under some sort of probation,’ Darragh said.
‘That’s not what it’s meant to imply. It’s meant to imply you’re getting your health back. And there are many pleasant and untaxing jobs you could do ultimately, although you’re not well enough now.’
‘I don’t have any suitable lay clothes.’
The vicar-general sighed. ‘You were wearing them the night you went out with Fratelli.’
‘It was like fancy dress. I looked ridiculous. Fratelli and Trumble both said so.’
‘Frank, don’t resist us on all this. The archbishop is doing his best by you. You’ll be exempt from saying your office and administering the sacraments. You’ll have nothing to burden you. We’ll keep in constant contact, and when you’re ready to return … As for celibacy, you’re a seasoned hand at that, Frank, and that will stand, of course. You don’t have to be told that.’
‘I don’t,’ said Frank. ‘I’ll still have all the disadvantages of the priesthood.’
‘You’re sounding bitter, Frank. You’ll see it’s best. The archbishop wanted me to give you some … I suppose you could call it set-up money. To buy a suit, and all the rest. I expect you’ll be back at your duties at St Margaret’s or somewhere else by Advent. Or the New Year at the latest …’
The vicar-general took a sheet of paper from a satchel. ‘This is a decree of laicisation. And a letter from the archbishop. You may use them in case there’s any confusion over who you are, and to show you really are a cleric and a priest.’
‘Especially to myself,’ said Darragh, with a tight smile.
‘Come on, Frank. Rally, son! Take this as it’s intended.’
Eventually Darragh’s mother was asked to join them, and the vicar-general told her with a brittle joviality that Frank was to have four or five months rest from work. That he ought to go on holidays—perhaps the Blue Mountains. ‘I have a cousin who’s on a farm at Gilgandra,’ said Mrs Darragh. ‘Maybe Frank would like to go out there and stay, help them with things.’
The vicar-general said that would be a superb idea, and soon it was time for the man to go. Mrs Darragh showed him off the premises, Darragh remaining behind so that he would not have to shake his hand.
Mrs Darragh returned to him with a fretful hope in her face. ‘I think that’s a good thing, don’t you, Frank—a break? In mufti. You can go to race meetings in civvies. I wonder can I call Gilgandra? I wonder will the post office let me?’
For the sake of mercy to his mother, he announced with a demented emphasis, ‘I think it’s a very good idea. I’m going to put on a suit coat right now and take Aunt Madge to the pictures.’
Almost at once, Darragh had a polite call from Mrs Flannery. Another curate was coming to St Margaret’s and Darragh would need to return to the presbytery to clear out his room, to take away his books and clothes. ‘Is the monsignor there?’ he asked, and Mrs Flannery, with a remarkable biddability, went to fetch him.
‘When were you thinking of coming, Frank?’ the monsignor asked him. The following afternoon, said Darragh. ‘Oh,’ said the monsignor, ‘sadly I’ll be out. But best of luck to you. Get well.’
‘You could be there,’ said Darragh. ‘After all the confessions I’ve heard. After all the Benedictions and Masses. You could be there if you wanted.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You choose not to be there.’
‘I don’t think you’re considering your words, Frank, but I know you’re not well.’
‘You could be there to say, “Goodbye Frank. You’ve been a bloody awful curate. Best wishes.” I don’t bite, you know.’
‘I’ve already given you my best wishes, Frank. And, I might say, a good quotient of patience.’
‘Oh well,’ said Frank, ‘I’ve got all I deserve, in that case.’
‘God bless you, Frank, and goodbye,’ said the monsignor with finality.
Aunt Madge organised through a friend of hers, a man named Henry, the one who claimed to have been at Marist Brothers, Parramatta, with Errol Flynn, to drive Darragh all the way from Rose Bay to Strathfield, so that Darragh would not need to catch train and bus while hauling suitcases. Henry was a bachelor, an active man in his parish, and nervously chatty with this young man who was part priest, part layman, part scandal.
Darragh asked him was it possible to drop by The Crescent, and Mr Henry was accommodating, allowing the car to idle outside number 23.
‘This is where it happened?’ he asked tentatively, looking for signs of distress in Darragh.
‘This is the place.’
‘Doesn’t seem possible, does it? I mean, it looks so ordinary.’
About a hundred yards away, a woman and some children turned the corner from Rochester Street. It was Mrs Thalia Stevens, around whom her five children cavorted like hectic minor planets to her sun. She held two-handed a large, unfashionable black handbag and a bulging string bag hung from her elbow. She was not like her late friend, Kate Heggarty, a gracious dresser—her green dress, her black coat and her lacquered black straw hat hung crookedly on her. Her ankles bulged like a promise of old age over her scuffed shoes. She paused at her gate to draw breath, while one of her sons somersaulted up the pathway to her door. Darragh told Henry to move further up the street. ‘Just here,’ said Darragh. ‘I won’t be a second.’
He knocked on Bert Flood’s door. No answer came, but an instinct told Darragh the house was inhabited. At last the door opened.
‘Oh,’ said Bert, taking in Darragh’s sports shirt, suspenders and blue trousers. ‘You, eh? How are you, Frank?’
Darragh exchanged the pleasantries. Bert watched him closely, but in a new way, the way you might watch someone who had been marked by unlikely plague or preposterous chance. Darragh said, ‘I came to thank Ross.’
‘Oh,’ said Bert. ‘Want a cup of tea?’
The inexpressive generosity of Bert would until recently have brought on stupid tears. ‘I’m sorry, Bert,’ said Darragh. ‘I’ve got to get on. I just wondered if Ross …’
‘Well, look,’ Bert said, his gaze wandering in a philosophic way, as if the answer were in a corner of the garden, a quadrant of the sky above the Western Line. ‘It’s lonely here. The old Rossy’s gone off to Cobar. Working in the copper mine out there.’
‘No,’ said Darragh. ‘Isn’t that terrible for his lungs?’
‘Oh, he got a job as tally clerk. I think the party wants him to ginger up the union out there. You know.’
‘Do you have his address?’
‘He’s going to write when he’s settled.’
‘When you do, I’ll write to him,’ Darragh guaranteed.
‘Okay. You know, he’s pretty upset about everything. It was all a shock for him, too.’
Darragh grasped Bert’s hand, and shook it.
After Henry delivered him to the presbytery, Darragh had the exciting feeling of being a trespasser in the familiar yet forever changed hallway, and on the stairwell. Everything looked, in fact, resonantly different. The parlour, the dining room he had shared with the monsignor, his room with its desk. He set to work packing his clothes and his small library, his devotional pictures off the wall. He cleaned out the drawers of his desk. Here, he was surprised to find, lay three pages of blank parish stationery which ages before, or more accurately, after Easter, the monsignor had signed in case there were problems at the bank about the rollover of a money bill, and the finance committee needed them. Darragh gathered these and took them downstairs. ‘I wonder could I use the monsignor’s typewriter just before I go?’ he asked Mrs Flannery, and after a moment’s consideration, she consented.
The letter he typed over the monsignor’s signature was headed To whom it may concern, and declared that Mrs Thalia Stevens of 33 The Crescent, Homebush, was a practical Catholic in good odour with the parish. He took one of the parish envelopes, addressed it to Mrs Stevens, and pocketed it for posting on the way home. Then he carried the accumulated rags and pages of his priesthood out to the boot of Mr Henry’s car.
After Fratelli was found guilty, Darragh could not sleep for dread. He returned to the doctor. His dosages were increased, so that his tongue swelled once more in his dry mouth and impeded his speech. It seemed horrifying now to Darragh that Fratelli would suffer the sorrowful mystery of asphyxiation, the gross bemusement of a cracked spine. Relieved of saying the office, Darragh spent hours in his boyhood bedroom saying rosaries for Fratelli, the Joyful, the Sorrowful, the Glorious Mysteries, all fifteen decades of ten ‘Hail Marys’, an ‘Our Father’, a ‘Glory Be’, no sooner ended than he began again and fell asleep at last, lolling forward on his swollen tongue, his head on the coverlet. His mother wanted to take him to Katoomba as the vicar-general had suggested, to a guesthouse above the great pit of eucalypts which was the Jamison Valley. But he fought her off and delayed her. On the eve of Fratelli’s execution, a set of militia conscription papers came addressed to Francis Patrick Darragh.
‘This is a total mistake,’ said Mrs Darragh. ‘I’ll speak to the vicar-general.’
But Darragh was relieved to be distracted from Fratelli’s execution, and went down to Old South Head Road, caught a tram to the city and enlisted in the army that very afternoon. A priest was automatically laicised, he knew, by joining any of the armed forces, except of course with episcopal permission, to become a chaplain. But if the archbishop could laicise him at a mere word, at least Darragh could laicise himself by signing his name to enlistment. So the equation of justice in Darragh’s head ran.
‘You won’t have to worry about the conscription papers now,’ the recruiting sergeant told him. Darragh was to report to the Sydney Showground the next morning. ‘Bring a suitcase to put your normal clothes in,’ the recruiter told him.
On the morning Fratelli died, Darragh filled his seminary suitcase with his banal clothes, and was at the Showground even before the hour of execution.