But now he must be aware Docherty was at the door, because Frank, when he spoke, was not muted.
“Good evening, Maureen.”
Frank seemed to be announcing unabashedly his arrival for anyone inside the house to hear, as well as assessing and testing me. Was this a continuation of our last exchange? I wondered. Was I still the woman who’d made that stupid, obsessive statement?
He said, “I’ve had a time of it, I’m afraid. I should have called before coming. But I think you’ll understand.”
I wondered, would I understand? I would have welcomed distracting everyone—Damian, myself, Frank—with a fury. Yet I thought of my sleeping children. And he had reached out and patted my upper arm, like a consoler, or else like a man about to wreak havoc and apologizing beforehand. It seemed impossible to be angry, impossible not to invite him in.
“Damian knows,” I told him.
I saw his lips compress as he entered. He was paler than I had ever seen him. I wondered who would initiate the dreaded scene. I could not have said how I wanted things resolved. As I followed him into the living room, I could see Damian’s eyes glittering.
“Father Frank,” said Damian. “Take a seat.”
All three of our kids emerged from their rooms, one by one. With their tentative smiles they sought reassurance the world was still in place, and in return we gave them endearments and blandishments to go back to sleep. I saw them to their beds and wondered what was happening in the living room. When I returned the two men were seated with glasses of wine in their hands. Damian called, “All quiet on the Western Front?” and I said it was.
“I’ve come to say goodbye,” Frank said now, straight off. “I’ve been examined and found wanting. I’m required to leave the archdiocese of Sydney. My order is sending me somewhere else.”
He looked at me. I thought he might be saying, I’ve done this for you. This is love.
Yet immediately I thought it was also abandonment. Abandonment of me. And, I decided at that second, as some kind of antidote, also the abandonment of the group. He had provoked our rebellion, mine and Damian’s. Our new conscientious daring, whatever you called it—the combination of progressive theology and politics in which we were finding a place—was connected to Frank. He had, however, become at the same time the fabric of what still connected us to our forefathers’ and, let me also say, foremothers’ religion.
We sat aghast, awaiting a justification.
“You’ve chosen to go,” I accused him.
He said, “No. But I couldn’t expect to be allowed to remain here forever.” He smiled that smile that seemed to belong, despite his long adult features, to a thirteen-year-old at the Christian Brothers. I wondered, is that the way men become priests? By remaining boys?
“Where are you going?” asked Damian. “Is it too far for us to drive?”
“I fear so,” said Docherty. “I’m going to my order’s house in Ontario. They’ve found a spot for me there. And a job.”
“Ontario? Ontario in Canada?”
“Well, there’s one in California, too,” with his annoying exactness, venerated by me. “But I’m afraid in this case it is Ontario in Canada. There’s a university there, in a town called Waterloo. You know I’ve been working on my master’s in behavioral psychology.”
We had only the dimmest sense that he had been.
“Well, they want me to embark on a doctoral degree there.”
We were still bewildered as to why such a radical geographic relocation was necessary. I, as a putative lover, wondered even more so.
“Do you want to go to Canada?” asked Damian, as if he himself thought it too far a reach to make amends for the crimes I had already admitted, crimes of merely potential desire.
“Look, I don’t have a choice,” Frank said, as if he had not uttered an earlier choice, and for me.
“You don’t have a choice!” I called out, loud enough to bring the children back, though they did not come.
He stared bleakly at me. Damian could see it, that stare.
“I don’t have a choice. I have overreached myself. I am an arrogant man. I’ve done more harm than good.”
“Bugger you!” I said. And an absurd afterthought came straight to my lips. “If we write to your superior general,” I suggested, “do you think we might sway the damned cardinal?”
I was aware that as a member of a religious order he had a superior general who might be pleaded with.
“Not in this case,” he said. “Look, I might as well tell you. You may remember a thin man who sat in the choir loft. Mr. Dryden, straight black hair, and a part that could have been made by an axe.”
We had seen him.
“One of the parishioners tipped me off that the man was taking notes during my sermons. I believe that he did so because someone in authority—in the Church, I mean, or maybe in a political context—told him to. So that’s the story. Cardinal Scanlon has suspended my faculties to say Mass and give the sacraments within the diocese. My superior general is embarrassed by me, but he’s also embarrassed for me. He’s tolerated me as a young turk. But the cardinal has a harder time. I can understand it. He’s a scrupulous man, and he’s been worried by me for some time, fearful I’d harm the Church’s relationship with the government by my opposition to Vietnam. And Mr. Dryden was not on his own—the cardinal had quite a dossier on me from a number of sources. I keep on forgetting about the Democratic Labor Party people and their terror of Communists, and their reports of my Vietnam sermons showed I was one.
“So that’s it. Things are changing, but not that quickly. You mustn’t think badly of anyone involved in this. I’ve had a valuable education in what is possible in the future. I will be far more careful.”
“So you come and wake us up, Frank,” said Damian. “Throw everything into the air, and then you’re blithely off before any of it’s even landed on the ground.”
“I’m sorry. But it’s not my choice.”
“I know. ‘Orders from above’! The SS excuse!”
I sensed his anger was because I was one of the items thrown into the air, and I certainly hadn’t landed.
“Why don’t you just leave the bastards?” he asked. “Give up that hopeless priesthood. We all know it’s full of noble fools and dolts, and the dolts always win. Leave and make yourself an honest man, for God’s sake.”
I frowned away in the shadow of Damian’s outrage. He wanted Frank to become a private man. And then what? I would be part of the debris, and I did not even know, despite an undeniable longing for imperfect Frank, where that would put me.
“But it’s my Church,” said Frank, identifying his fundamental love. “If I let myself be ejected, what does it say about me? And it may be . . . it may be a fortunate thing. Look, none of us get to a plateau of certainty where we’re sure of everything. We’re always in transit and always confused. I’m sorry.”
“Jesus,” said Damian, “show a little anger, will you? You must be so bloody angry. If you’re not angry, you’re not human. Listen, I know it! My wife loves you. Or if not, she is mightily distracted by you.”
Damian saw my gestures of denial. “I know, I know,” he continued. “And, yes, three children. But it doesn’t alter the fact. Old as religion! You’re the prophet, she’s the vestal. Don’t you bloody see that?”
I saw Damian was trying to clear the air of obsession, that he was daring Frank to love, and—as improbably as ever—to love me.
Frank inhaled and lowered his eyes. “Of course I’m angry. But what would be the sense of passing that virus on to you?”
“Oh, I’ve bloody well got the virus, I tell you,” said Damian. “And Maureen has the other one. I hate having been born a Catholic. I daydream of life as an agnostic. That’s the life we should all have! It’s the true religion of the species. And Maureen. Do you love her in the full sense? Come on, show
us the truth. You’re content to move on in a cloud of cheap mystery. Come clean, like we’re supposed to do in your confessional. And if you say you love her like a sister, I’ll bloody well punch you.”
Frank seemed unequipped for this scene, his face blushing as he strove to honor Damian’s right to an answer.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course I love her. As a woman, and a companion. I’m drawn to her. And I can’t have her and shouldn’t have her. And that’s that!”
“No, it isn’t,” Damian insisted. “This is your chance!”
I prepared myself to intervene. My fate was being bartered between the men; I must say something weighty. But on they went.
“A chance for what?” asked Frank, finding his anger. “A three-month affair? Why not? Marriage isn’t ownership. You don’t own her, Damian, though you’ve got first claim on her love. But the three children. They own her. They’d bring her back. And so, by the way, would you.”
“Thanks a million,” Damian said with a hack of a laugh.
“Because you’re a good man.”
Damian’s face had become pitiably suffused now. He had decided that after all he did not want this confrontation. I suffered one of those Graham Greene moments then: what is the boundary between love and pity? Because I pitied Damian and it felt like love. I wished I could go to him and hold him.
“Well, I’m not going to be executed,” Frank told us in the meantime. “A far humbler administrative fate’s come into play. I’m regretful for both your sakes.” He reiterated that. “For both your dear sakes.”
I put my forehead against my hand. Tears were close, but I knew they’d be to no avail.
“So, no affair with Mrs. Breslin?” asked Damian, humiliating us, as he was in part entitled to.
“Damian!” I protested.
“No,” said Frank. “In a parallel universe, I can’t say . . .”
“This universe will do me, Frank. Typical of you to want an alternative one.”
“You could say that,” Frank gently admitted.
“The Church will seem less habitable,” said Damian, then, as if becoming his friend again. “I mean, if you go.”
“It will be just as habitable,” Frank murmured. “It has you two. Lucky to have you.”
Again, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be yielded up so terminally to Damian.
Damian muttered in what was obviously an uncomfortable rush, “You’ll have to forgive me if I said anything offensive.”
Frank went over and reached a hand to his shoulder. Man to man. Once more, I felt, with a flare of annoyance, where am I in this?
I wanted Frank. I didn’t take him. There was a cost in that, and I paid it. Where was the gesture, the hand on my shoulder? It was too like that ritual by which men say, “Your girl’s safe with me, mate!” Did the girl have anything to say on that matter? Maybe not a girl with three kids.
“What about me?” I cried. “What about me as you two make peace with each other?”
“Don’t you see?” asked Damian. “You are the arbiter in this matter. You always were.”
“All I see is you two and your gentleman’s agreement.”
I wanted Frank so painfully. By now I had even forgotten my children sleeping a few meters away.
Frank brought his hands to his face. Easy for you, I thought. “This is my life,” he said. He dropped his hands and shook his head. “Your lives are cut out for you, too.”
He turned to me. “The children are a decree. They can’t be denied. Damian . . . Damian is too good for the two of us. And the truth is that if I want to go on being a priest of my order, I have to go. I can’t stay here. And that’s it. I appreciate your eloquence, Damian. It does your bloodlines credit. You should have been at the Dublin Post Office in 1916.”
“For heaven’s sake,” said Damian, “you don’t even believe in armed resistance.”
“You’re right. But as Yeats said, ‘A terrible beauty is born’!”
“Bullshit,” said Damian. “Men were turned to carcasses.”
* * *
WE ALL went to see him off at the airport. Trans-Pacific, Sydney to Vancouver. All the weekly group and activists exuberant in grief. Except for me. I couldn’t afford exuberance.
“This was meant to happen,” he told me, taking me aside. “For everyone’s sake.”
“For mine?” I asked.
Apart from that I stood back, swallowing again and again, feeling riven and stuck for words. What do you say on the rim of a great loss? I think I can claim after this passage of time, and without too much melodrama, that he was always my shadow love.
24
* * *
The Case of Sarah Fagan, 4
1970s
THE ORDER permitted visits by parents and family once every three months, and Sarah considered these adequate: enough for her fond mother, more than enough for her flawed father.
Her novice mistress was not the dragon some of the older nuns had warned Sarah she would be, but more or less as promised by Father Shannon: a tall, ample woman in the tradition of mother superiors in films who exuded goodwill that was more compelling than strict discipline. She laid out the rule of the Order—meditation, the recital of the Office, study, silence except in recreation and when temporarily revoked, custody of the eyes, examination of conscience, and other appropriate exercises for a novice nun.
In the matter of the examination of conscience, she said, they should not be too particular, in case scruples, the most unimportant peccadillos, began to assume a scale equivalent in the novices’ minds to real crimes such as running a concentration camp or being Jack the Ripper.
There were only five novices—it was the era in which preachers were beginning to bewail the falling-off in numbers of candidates for the priesthood and orders of nuns and brothers, blaming it on television and growing secularism, rock ’n’ roll, and permissive films. One was thirty-five and had been an accountant. She must desperately want to be here, thought Sarah, to abandon a career, to nullify her training and her specialty.
Sarah cherished the test of silence and contributed to a work roster, scrubbing and vacuuming in silence. The drudgery was pleasing because it produced an atmosphere immaculate but for the faint smell of furniture polish.
When the girls took their vows after their two years in the novitiate, they were moved to a house owned by the Order near the University of Sydney, where they maintained a monastic life. They were not always successful in finding a priest to say Mass in the mornings, but they would chant the Liturgy of the Hours and spend twenty minutes in meditation. Then they went to their university classes and studied, and in the evening were allowed to exchange ideas and assertions, political news and even gossip. It was their turn to send up the students who looked at them askance whenever they entered the lecture hall in the robes of their order.
Sarah loved university life and took a form of pride in the looks other female students gave her, as if she violated the assumptions by which they lived. Many of them, she knew, would become victims of men and the marriage tyranny, or suffer a man’s power to close them out and reduce their life at home to misery. She knew that none of them was immune from the peril—as educated and forceful as they might be.
Later, she would remember her own confidence at this time, her belief that she had put herself beyond damage. Meanwhile she had her four friends, and they were pretty much amiable with each other, though occasionally when one of them, Boniface, was alone with Sarah, she was acerbic about the accountant. Sarah did suffer a crush on an ancient history lecturer, but it was a thing of sentiment, not the body. It was as if her appetites had died the day Father Shannon had recruited the new girl and sent her away.
When the young nuns were not studying or going to classes, they worked on administrative duties, and went to schools to observe in classrooms. Sarah, who by now had taken the reli
gious name Constance, was marked out as a high school teacher of English and history. By her third year she was occasionally teaching classes, not in the formal sense but under the supposition that she was telling the girls about her university studies and thus the studies ahead of them. She had a natural rigor that the girls respected but did not fear. She knew, therefore, that she was a born teacher and a potential Alphonsus. Her heart was mute, and she was happy.
There had been a time when nuns were taught to be chary of complimenting each other on their professional gifts. Pride was a sin exceeded in perniciousness only by lust. Pride could lead to disobeying one’s superiors. But the Order was almost by instinct trying to be kindlier and warmer to its young nuns—there were so few it seemed ill-advised to drive them away with accusations of conceit. Hence Sister Constance was much praised for garnering university distinctions year by year.
Not that on visits to the Order’s schools everything progressed with sisterly sympathy and concord. Some of the other teachers were reserved, some waspish in an unhappy way. At morning tea at her old school she could tell which members of the group would welcome her back when she had finished her training, and which wouldn’t. One might say with an unappeased rictus of the mouth, “I hear you got a distinction in modern history. Oh my, you’ll be too grand for us.” If she had been honest she would have said, “I shall devote my time to taking the shine off you.”