By an implicit arrangement the two of them never spoke of the Church—Declan and his wife had let their weekly attendance at Mass slide. The fact seemed to make Declan more edgy in his brother’s company than Docherty wanted him to be. Docherty even had a sneaking sympathy for the omission—Declan was far too bright to be browbeaten or soft-soaped by your average deadening, authoritarian sermon, and Docherty knew as well as anyone in the archdiocese of Sydney that there was not a lot of encouragement for original material, for breaking new ground. It was by no means impossible to find somewhere a priest whose sermon was exhilarating, but there was the investment of time for uncertain results. Indeed, Docherty’s semiblasphemous idea was that since the threat of Hell for missing Mass had failed to compel Declan’s generation, it was the duty of the Church to offer something so enriched with meaning and communal solace that people would dislike missing it.
Frank and Declan’s mother, born Helen Quinlan, was a handsome woman, a Queensland country girl and Depression-era survivor. She had been, by accounts of Docherty’s aunts, a lively girl, star of the convent netball team. At a dance at the Catholic Club in the bitterest year of the Depression, she had met a handsome, exuberant young man, James Docherty, who described himself as a pub broker and horse dealer, and was from the same town and parish, Rockhampton on the Barrier Reef.
Jim Docherty was fanciful, eloquent, frolicsome—and a fundamentally unreliable father. Before his death, at every turn of his fortunes Helen had seemed skeptical of him. Certainly she had reason: he was capable now and again of taking the family to the financial edge, due to his dreams of impossible riches based on chancy propositions, which included—in line with his Irish heritage—cheap but chancy country pubs in hamlets beyond Adaminaby or Cobar, and expensive and unreliable racehorses. To pay him credit, however, after he had moved his wife and young sons to Sydney, he had given them stability, for he’d become an adequately affluent man: he and his brother Tim were partners in three pubs in Rozelle, Alexandria, and Leichhardt.
His premature death at barely more than fifty, which would have been an economic catastrophe for half the families of the boys Frank went to school with at the Christian Brothers, left his mother financially secure. She remained a dynamic woman who didn’t resign from vivacity, social life, a certain acerbic flirtatiousness, and all the rest, but she never remarried, something that was a subtle relief to her sons when they were in high school and imbued not only with the first stirrings of sex but with the baleful influence of Irish sexual puritanism.
Helen had been careful with her encouragement of her husband, and—seeing that a repute for cleverness had not helped him much—she applied the same reticence to her boys. Declan told his brother during the Melbourne Test in 1993 that when he was named dux of their school in North Sydney, his mother had kissed him on the forehead and said, “That’s it, then. You’ve done very well!” Unlike more gushy mothers, that was the extent of her adoration. Declan and Frank had enough wit to know that had they possessed the sort of mother who kept referring to their academic supremacy, it would have become tiresome, an embarrassment. And yet they could have tolerated at least one or two more references to it. It was the case in most families—indeed Frank had not encountered one in which it was not the case—that the woman dominated all imagination and concern, and provided a high emotional spur.
* * *
ON THAT bright July afternoon of the day of Docherty’s arrival, at the reception of the complex in which Helen now lived, he asked to be connected to her room. She answered and told him to wait there—she proposed that they walk in the garden. As he waited, he was overcome once more by a pleasant, torpid reflection that it was part of his good fortune he had a mother who did not take him too seriously, who did not exalt his earnestness of soul into a sign of coming magnificence on either the ecclesiastical or the mystical scale. It did not mean that her love or admiration for him was in any way qualified. He knew from his previous visit that she had, amongst the reduced set of icons on her dresser, photographs of Declan’s family, and of Frank in his doctoral gown. What she doubted was not her children’s talent, but the capacity of the world to adapt itself to them, and Docherty knew that had been a wise doubt in his case.
When she appeared, she had a pink bloom in her face. She walked with a cane held casually, even stylishly. He knew from the liveliness of her face that her acerbity was at its best and her spirits robust. She still looked young to be in a retirement home.
“Well, you’re back,” she said, with a trace of imputation that he was forcing himself on her attention.
He laughed. “Yes, Mater.” He had taken in his adolescence to calling her Mater in the manner of the English public schoolboys he’d read about in the British comics that had made their way to the colonies after the Second World War. Docherty kissed her and she hugged him with one arm. Her nature accounted for that.
“I believe you’re in good shape?” he said.
“I’m not repeating stories three times anymore, if that’s what you mean. Did you have a good flight from the Arctic?”
“We were attacked at takeoff by polar bears, but Biggles and Ginger shot them and we got clear just in time.”
“Ha-ha! The smart aleck is back! I know there aren’t polar bears in Ontario. But there’s everything that goes with them. Ice on the roof. Probably ice in the soul, as well. And God knows what it must do to people’s joints.”
“You’ve got to get Declan to bring you over there. I know you’re game enough for the trip. You’ll be surprised how pleasant the summers are.”
“I’m saving up to fly first class,” she told him and gave a wink. “It may take a while.” Like many Australians of her generation, she was a climatic nationalist, no matter how many sun melanomas the patriots had to show for it. “But, I have to say, it’s good that you’re here,” she continued. “You’re my first son, you know. Given birth to in uncertain times, let me tell you.”
“I kind of remembered all that, Mater. Now, I have to speak at this conference tomorrow, and hope to see you in the days after. Perhaps I can take you for a spin in the car.”
“What car?” she asked.
“The monastery clunker. As your first son I owe you everything. Including the best clunkers I can summon up.”
“Yes,” she said, “you do owe me everything.” She gave a dry grin. Such was his mother in a sentimental mood, and her voice evoked multitudes of forgotten banalities and crises and tenderness. It did not evoke, however, meanness or a chastising subtext, as some parental voices did. Helen was a woman of reliable parts, of surfaces that would not shift. But if you wanted someone to gild the lily of affection, she wasn’t the one.
They walked in the garden. He told her he had written a letter to the cardinal archbishop pleading to be allowed to return. And he reminded her that he was speaking at the Sydney Council of the Clergy.
“About kiddy-fiddlers?” she asked. “I’m not certain that’ll win His Eminence over.”
“What do you think will?”
“Tell him your mother’s going to get very angry if he doesn’t have you back. Can you imagine: me as the plaintive old mummy of her priest-son, weeping on the 7.30 Report for a sight of her boy? Rachel weeping for her children. I’ll make him seem a monster.”
“I’ll warn him,” Docherty assured her.
She looked at him sideways with her warm irony—that is, with love—and took him to the dining room for tea. Along the way she introduced him to lively old biddies and blokes, old-fashioned Australians arguing politics, chortling bitterly at satirical cartoons in the Herald. And she continued with her grievance. “When you think of all the drongos and dolts the old cardinal could have thrown out! Well, thank God for the jet plane yet. Remember the letter your old grandfather in Ireland sent your father. ‘I think there may be an eternal decree,’ ” she recited, “ ‘that I shall never again in this world look upon the
faces of my exiled children.’ Breaks your heart, eh? On the other hand, a Cork farmer, able to write like that! Imagine. We’ve got baccalaureates who can’t write their way out of a paper bag these days.”
“The cleverer we become,” said Docherty with a smile, “the less literate.”
She was obviously a hub of organization amongst the people in the home. She arranged the tickets for the Sydney Theatre Company and the occasional opera. It was her love of cricket that had imbued him, and she was the resident authority—she could recall the major statistics of every Test since 1928.
“Do you think Sydney will be congenial to you?” she asked. “In the future, I mean.”
“Well, the fellows at the monastery seem inoffensive, and of course I’ll have an easier time of it when I finish this research project. Going to the cricket—without being caught in a riot, for example, as in Calcutta. And seeing my old mum now and then.”
She warned him—at least it sounded like a warning, “I’m not going to be one of those priest’s mothers who thinks their son should live for them.”
“No,” Docherty conceded. “I don’t want you to be, either. But I do daydream of taking you for rides to the Blue Mountains.”
“And I want you to take me out to dinner so I can complain at length about how economic rationalism is destroying the so-called commonwealth of Australia.” She had always called it that, the commonwealth. “And how the mongrel Murdoch press is cheapening debate by mistaking insults for arguments and editorial for news. And how an auxiliary bishop here refused Communion to a nun who talked about the ordination of women. That sort of thing! Meaty subjects.”
Her extended left arm trembled as she recited her log, a portent of any number of bad possibilities.
“Do you have any shakes?”
“Side effect of my injections of zoledronic acid.”
“Is it really?”
“My prognosis is that I’ll live forever with the old Quinlan heart, tough as a bookmaker’s satchel and about the same size.”
He remembered an argument between his father and mother in which Jim Docherty had accused his wife of being cold. Even back then Frank had thought, in a kind of angry protest, No! Cold was a description he would not countenance. It was that she treasured her emotions too keenly to easily express them. His father was the sentimental man who could reinforce one feeling with another—a success with a racehorse with the general well-being of tipsiness, for example, not that he was in any way a habitual drunkard. But with that emotional glibness of his, every grand sentiment had to be emphasized, placed in bold type, and this was only exacerbated by an accretion of booze.
In the later afternoon Docherty drove his mother up to the great headland of Manly and she talked about the night the Japanese miniature submarines had penetrated the Sydney boom gate to attack the USS Chicago. Looking down the harbor from North Head, they discussed the Australian cricket team and praised Adam Gilchrist and his phenomenal talents. And they were content.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING morning, Docherty served Mass at a side altar of the chapel for an old German priest he had met at dinner the night before. Gunter Eismann had worked for many years in New Guinea. He was, on the authority of his advancing years, ironic about the whole missionary project: he had found in large part, as Docherty himself had years earlier in India, that the target population had marked him more permanently than he had them.
Eismann had great simplicity of soul, and was one of those lucky people who seemed to have become increasingly childlike and untroubled, a type sometimes encountered in monasteries. Yet Docherty thought he appeared fragile, too, as if a pit of serpents threatening this elderly man’s spiritual peace lay beneath a wafer-thin film of composure. He had told Docherty the previous night that during the war he had served as a member of a U-boat crew for two years before he was captured, and that in his POW camp he had been drawn into the orbit of and influenced by a Benedictine monk who had visited.
For a man in Eismann’s situation, to be a member of a religious order was a good arrangement, as abnormal as the outside world might consider it. He was looked after, had brother priests who understood him, and was not overburdened with work. He went out to short-staffed parishes on the weekend, as most of the Order did, and no doubt gave calm, unremarkable, Teutonic-inflected sermons about a God of love.
That morning, while Docherty said his Mass, the first he’d had a chance to celebrate in some days, he fell into contemplation. By now, in the last few weeks of his fifties, Docherty sometimes felt that despite his dependence on conversation and contact with other humans, he wished to take comfort only from the liturgy, from the rite of the Mass, and from sitting by the hour in chapel, or taking a walk in the presence of . . . of what? . . . Of the Crucial, of the essential element, the sexless, person-less Utter, or—as Catholics used to describe it—the Divine Presence.
Nearly everything Docherty had believed when he became a seminarian seemed now to push up against the limits of the absurd. Was the Virgin Mary a virgin? Was Christ God or a prophet of God? And the great circus of the canonization of saints—what was to be made of that? The po-faced searching for three miracles, as if so many suspensions of the natural law were either credible or in fact desirable. He simply knew that all these were at best kindly myths, hinting at transcendence. It was the transcendence he still felt at the rim of the Ultimate, which in his case meant sitting in an empty church in the Divine Presence, waiting, as he saw it, for it to come out and meet him.
He accepted that via the vagaries of empires and emigrations, an Irish inheritance had been reborn in a string of antipodean colonies, and through an accident of fate his life lay with a particular religious tradition—the Catholic one—though it so easily could have lain with another. Born a cricket-mad Bengali, for example, he would have seen the world through the lens of Durga, Krishna, Shiva, while still knowing the difference between a seamer, a yorker, an outswinger, a googly, and a leg-break. Born a cricket-mad Sydneysider of parents who were products of the massive Irish immigration to Queensland, and you saw the world through the imagery of incarnation and resurrection, and knew every delivery in the menu of balls a bowler might serve up to a right- or left-handed batsman, including Shane Warne’s flipper.
Through performing the sacraments—baptisms, weddings, visits to the dying—Docherty was aware that he was reaching towards both an indefinable but, to him, essential realm, as well as celebrating human solidarity: the whole species embroiled in life and death, but further in a celebration of the Beyond, the Unutterable, the I Am Who I Am. Though it was not an I, Docherty thought, because it was not a person. Not a he, she, or it; not a first, second, or third person. It was the Am, and the Am resided in people’s minds. Because of religion’s institutional pomposities, it was in the mind in some cases as the great Not There, the great Absence. But even then, Docherty thought, a Not There-ness in the world was so huge a fact, it was almost itself a There-ness. He didn’t often run these principles of his past people, because they could sound smug if wrongly delivered. But they were not smug as he perceived them.
He was relaxed with the question, therefore, of why he should feel the promise of transcendence when he was an entirely accidental creature, an inhabitant of a random star; the only star on which Christ had died, as far as was known, or rather been killed off—as the scapegoats and the outsiders and the tellers of truth always are, generation by generation. Christ lashed the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the rival political parties, theological camps, liturgical opponents, the Pharisees being corporate hypocrites and the Sadducees toffs. But Docherty knew the spiritual children of both factions were found in the curia in Rome and, in some cases, amongst bishops. For the sake of their power, their comfort, and the avoidance of scandals that should have been spoken about and damned by them, they created new scapegoats, new Christs, new sacrifices.
Apart from this, he let the q
uestion lie as to whether the Utter noticed the human rites, the services of ritual connections between humans, between them and It. “It” could, he chose to believe, be approached, be crudely experienced through ritual and meditation. He could not live without these, let alone see any greater reason for being a priest. He simply knew that this was his version of a religion, a religion that was once coextensive with the worldview but no longer was. Yet it was his, Docherty’s, balm to practice it, a balm in this life whatever befell him in the next—oblivion, or transport, or vision in whatever gradations.
The truth was he had to be modest. He knew the suspicion he attracted from his brethren in the wider priesthood. He was a priest who ponced around academia all week, dealing with unhealthy and distasteful subjects, and helped out at a local parish on the weekend—how graceful of him! But his order was very grateful for the professorial salary he contributed to the finances of the monastery.
4
* * *
Maureen Breslin Remembers the 1960s
I WAS BORN into an Irish-Catholic family from Sydney. I belonged to that generation of Irish-Catholic women of the New World (the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere) who were the first to go to university and acquire a degree almost as a matter of course rather than miraculous exception.
One summer day in 1959 I took a ship with a friend and fellow newly minted graduate, Momo Griffen, and we embarked for the barely foreseen, never previously experienced cold of a London winter, which we were sure would give glamorous relief to us children of torrid Australian summers. Momo and I had booked a passage on the brave understanding that we wanted to escape the constraints of suburban Sydney, and the narrow Australian definition of what a woman was meant to be in the—looking back on it—suburban idyll of the reign of Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies.