Because he saw no sense in thundering at them, the adolescents of the parish, boys from the Christian Brothers' school a mile away, who might in a short time be fighting the Japanese, milled to his confessional.
Back in the presbytery on Saturday evenings, between confessional sessions, over the housekeeper Mrs. Flannery's chops, peas, potatoes, and carrots, Monsignor Carolan always sooner or later advised him, “Don't wear yourself out, Frank. I've seen fellows like you—great confessors, but it wears them out. Men who take the world's sins on them.” Unless the rite was performed in a brisk, functional way, the monsignor saw the confessional as a possible danger to all concerned, particularly to the vain or the excessively pious. His talents were directed to building the physical kingdom of God—brick by brick. In the month before the war began, he had completed the little school next door to St. Margaret's. Classrooms, playgrounds, toilet blocks were Monsignor Carolan's chief visible sacrament. Frank Darragh suspected he lacked the fund-raising gifts of a Carolan, and thus had little chance of becoming one of those wise, competent managers of parishes so admired in the archdiocese.
At seven o'clock each Saturday night, he was back behind the door of his confessional box, seated in his chair, facing the dim beaded glass of the door which had closed with a smooth ball-bearing click as discreet as God's mercy. Either side of him lay the sliding shutters which gave onto the space occupied by the penitent on the left and the one on the right.
On the other side of the church, in his confessional, Monsignor Carolan tried to serve the needs of his penitents in good time to hear The Sid Stone Variety Show on the Macquarie Broadcasting System at eight o'clock. The monsignor's favorite variety turns were yodeling and birdcalls—he enjoyed a full-throated kookaburra, the most difficult birdcall in the world to achieve with utter authenticity. He had an aged uncle who had done kookaburras and currawongs on The Amateur Hour years before, and been praised by the compère. The joy of Christ shone appealingly in Monsignor Carolan's eye when Stan Jones teased husband-and-wife yodeling teams.
II
On Sundays the merciful confessor Frank Darragh normally said the early Masses, the six-thirty and the eight-o'clock. The monsignor, with the debt on the school to repay, said the more populous and strategic nine- and ten-o'clock Masses. For these he attracted the bulk of the parish with the briskness of his recitation and of his sermon, which never failed to refer to the reality that the parish was burdened with the primary school debt and the maintenance of St. Margaret's.
St. Margaret's was indeed a splendid, almost basilica-like church built in the most modern style during the prosperous 1920s by an Irish parish priest named McHugh, and improved and paid for in his memory by the younger Australian cleric, Monsignor Carolan. It put the modest Methodist chapel and even the Anglican Church of St. Anne's in the shade, which had been the intention of the late Father McHugh and the inheritance of Monsignor Carolan. Behind its main altar, which stood high above marble steps, a fresco of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin into Heaven had been painted by a team of Italian artisans who had traveled the length and breadth of the Australian continent filling churches with iconography in the style of Raphael. These artisans, and the families they had acquired in Australia, had recently been interned, but the papal nuncio in Sydney had been working to have them released so that they could continue their benign craft even in wartime.
There were in St. Margaret's as well two handsome side altars, one to Our Lady of Perpetual Succor, the other to St. Anthony of Padua, everyone's favorite miracle worker and finder of lost objects. None of this had come cheaply, nor had the slate roof and the rafterless cement-and-steel-reinforced upper reaches of St. Margaret's. St. Margaret's had a grandeur then which outshone many Sydney parish churches, including the one at Frank Darragh's first posting, in Stanmore. The next-door parish to Strathfield, Flemington, within reach of the dust from the livestock saleyards, possessed an extremely humble and dowdy church by comparison, barely more than a cement-rendered hall, undistinguished architecturally, with murky varnished cedar buttresses and rafters, and bare gestures towards ornamentation and statuary. It was not that Darragh would be unwilling to serve in such a place, but that he was pleased exceedingly to find himself the unwitting beneficiary of the energy of Father McHugh, native of Ireland, and Monsignor Carolan, native of Tamarama.
Darragh took a little longer than the monsignor over his Mass, since he considered it a work of serious articulation. In the seminary he had acted Mark Antony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and had been an admirer of the iambic pentameter. Since he needed to give the Latin of the Mass at least the same weight and rhythmic enunciation as he had Shakespeare's meters, he found it hard to finish the eight-o'clock Mass and fit in a sermon in fifty-one or -two minutes. But the monsignor had made it clear that that was what he required—Frank was to be back in the sacristy and out of his heavy Mass vestments by about seven minutes to ten. The monsignor wanted peace in which to recite privately the pre-Mass prayers while parched summertime altar boys took turns drinking water from the washbasin which sat in the sacristy's corner.
Within the limits the monsignor placed on him, Frank Darragh was a happy young man, dazed and delighted with his sacramental duties. Dried out from the weight of his vestments that summer, he ate little more than toast at the end of his Masses, despite the insistence of Mrs. Flannery that he needed more. He drank plenty of tea, and left the substantial breaking of his Saturday-night, Sunday-morning fast until he reached his boyhood home in Rose Bay, to which he returned on most Sundays.
This Sunday was in humid February. He had no car, but traveling by public transport gave him a sense of fraternity which he knew he would lose when and if he acquired the skills appropriate to a car, and a vehicle to go with it. Hard-bitten fathers of families raised their hats to him at Strathfield Station, implying, “We are one with you in the Faith.” He made in return a half-embarrassed gesture of raising his black felt hat to them. They were the ones who had fought the fight, had raised their children in a harsh decade. But a fraternity of respect was established, even as people shuffled together towards the doors of the red electric trains.
In the crowded Sunday-morning carriage, young leading aircraftmen tilted their forage caps, and he nodded. The Communion of Saints on the Western Line thundered towards Central Station amidst showers of sparks from the electric lines above. Of course, from much of the population of the trains, those not party to the mysteries of faith, there were surreptitious stares and blankness. Mystification. A mute hostility to which he was utterly accustomed.
A beautiful young woman in a floral dress drew her six- or seven-year-old son off the seat opposite her to allow Frank Darragh to sit. She held the child between her knees and told the boy in a lowered voice, “Say hello to Father.” The boy had a small scatter of freckles on the same fine-grained skin his mother had.
Darragh said, “Thank you for the seat.” The mother had that air of grace, and a particular light in the eye. She was not frightened of him. It was good not to be feared.
“My daddy's in the Middle North,” said the boy.
“The Middle East,” his mother corrected him, and kissed the rim of his ear. Darragh tried to remember if such easy exchanges had operated between himself and his mother. He decided briefly and with some unease that his mother might not have been so casual in the presence of a priest.
“Your father is a brave man,” Darragh told the boy.
Darragh saw that the woman nearly shrugged, as if Darragh's compliment did not serve her and her son much.
“We're going to Clovelly,” said the boy, resting easily against his mother's thigh. As the train rolled, this young woman evoked in Darragh the usual sharp and not too frequent pain of celibacy. His spiritual adviser, an elderly, gentle soul named Dr. Cahill—for every seminarian had to choose a spiritual adviser from the staff of the seminary—had once said, “The institution of celibacy is not a mere sacrifice of pleasure. It asks of a man that he wil
l consent to be the end of the line. That he will not pass on his embodied nature.”
Darragh considered this apparently perfect, archetypal young woman who faced him. Besides what he read as an air of confident innocence, she had the character of having suffered without being given a choice. History, without asking her, had claimed her husband and put him at a fabulous distance from her.
On a rowdy stretch of line near Erskineville, she leaned forward by just a margin and told Darragh, under her breath, that she and her son lived closer to Flemington parish, but belonged to St. Margaret's and preferred to go to Mass there. So she had recognized him as the curate of St. Margaret's. Was she one of the young soldiers' wives who had confessed loneliness or temptation to him? Had he, unconscious of her loveliness, absolved her and imposed a penance: “Say one decade of the Joyous Mysteries”? Darragh nodded, and the woman settled back and resumed a secret whispered conversation with her son.
Central Station that dangerous February was a melee of Sunday people, children in loose summer hats, beach-bound with their parents. Skylarking soldiers bearing kitbags made their way towards the steam trains which would take them—who knew?—to some banal camp in the bush, or to immolation in the Pacific. These warriors amongst whom he could not be counted! On the broad concourse at Eddy Avenue, a larger army of sailors, airmen, and soldiers posed for the pavement photographer on the arms of their mothers, wives, or girlfriends. The papers talked about Australia being stripped of troops, but there seemed enough to raise substantial regiments waiting with their womenfolk for the Bronte and Bondi trams.
And, some distance away, among the crowd by the tramline, stood the mother and son. She had the air of a woman who was used to waiting, of not resenting queues and crowds. Probably a country girl, he thought, building a history in his mind, whose husband had brought her out of the bush to the city, looking for some work in the Depression. Darragh saw her lift her son onto the running board of the Bronte tram. A militiaman who looked perhaps sixteen stood, doffing his slouch hat, and offered her a seat. She took it with a frank smile, and with a steely howl the tram bore her and her tribe of fellow travelers away to Elizabeth Street. When his Rose Bay tram came along five minutes later, he boarded it, and a boy in a school blazer stood up to offer him his seat. Some instinct that he should now separate himself from the memory of the lovely mother, and that this was better achieved in the discomfort of standing, caused Darragh to smile and say, “No, I'm perfectly fine, thank you. You sit.”
To the edification of any Catholics who might be on the tram, and the mystification of others, he pulled from the pocket of his black jacket his Breviarium Romanum. The volume he had was marked Hiemalis—Winter—since it was winter in Europe, winter in the Vatican surrounded by Italian fascists, winter in Russia where Hitler's men correctly suffered at the hands of Soviet troops, winter over the bomb sites of England, and of course over the neutrally undisturbed and poverty-stricken farms of Ireland, from which his own ancestors came. This word Hiemalis in dull-gold lettering on the spine of the beautifully printed little book, when taken in conjunction with the humid summer day, told you that Australia was in a remote and inverted relation to the wellsprings of the European faith, to the locales of monasticism and mysteries of faith, and of strategic importance. That was the basic question which Smith's Weekly and the Telegraph kept asking: Could Mr. Churchill be made to take an interest in the destiny of a place so distant? So far off that a priest, reading the Hiemalis volume of his daily breviary, felt no shiver of northern wind but sweated instead into his black serge, in the close air of a tram beneath a ruthless February sun?
Each day, diocesan priests like Frank Darragh were required to recite their breviary—the office, as it was called. In the tradition of those monks who sang in plainchant the sundry so-called hours of the office—named Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline—busier souls like Frank and the monsignor were allowed merely to recite the psalms, hymns, lessons, versicles, and collects making up the text which, according to one of Darragh's seminary professors, sprang from ancient Jewish tradition and had been formally recited from the second or third century in Christian monasteries. The office thus possessed a worldwide breadth and a historic depth, but that did not prevent comparative speeds for its completion being discussed by young priests on tennis Mondays, the way athletic times for the half-mile might be discussed by runners. A jovial former seminary buffoon named Tim Murphy boasted that he could manage the whole thing in thirty-four minutes. If so, it showed a remarkable facility Frank Darragh couldn't match—the Latin seemed to him to demand a slower enuciation. Verses such as Undique circumvenerunt me sicut apes; adusserunt sicut ignis spinas: in nomine Domini contrivi eos did not rattle off the tongue. Neither did they roll off the mind, in their significance. They surrounded me like bees; they engulfed me like tongues of fire. . . . He had got to say Matins and Lauds the evening before, as was recommended, and Prime and Terce and Sext between his two Masses, and now on the tram he recited None from his breviary, his lips moving, as required by canon law, to pronounce the Latin hymns and psalms and versicles.
The purpose of requiring priests to recite the office the world over, from Nazi-occupied Belgium, where his breviary had been published by the Benziger Brothers, to the southernmost priest in New Zealand or Argentina, was to remind the individual cleric that whatever business the rest of mankind might be engaged in—invention, invasion, impregnation—his job and caution, his only possible joy, was in pursuing the divine order. It was there in the vulgate Latin version of the psalm he read with a slight, unobtrusive flutter of his lips, as he hung from a strap, expelling the words in minor whisper which the tram-clang drowned. And I shall walk on a spacious road because I follow all your precepts. . . . I am reminded by light of your name, O Lord, and I guard your law. . . . I shall take delight in your mandates, which I guard.
He was towards the end of None, of the versicle and response, Darragh doing both, unlike the monks with one side of the chapel uttering the versicle, and those on the other side singing the plainchant reply. He had got as far as the words Averte oculos meos, ne videant vanitatem, Avert my eyes that they should not see vanity, when he felt in an instant cleft in two by the sharpest agony of loss. It arose from nothing, from a slight jolt of the tramlines, and carried not only the face of the young mother, but also the face of the boy generated from her, leaning confidently against her knees. Had he ever known such a woman? Had he leaned against his mother's knees with such casual confidence? He blinked and looked up. The eyes of a proportion of the eyes of the tram travelers, reverent and hostile, were on him. He felt certain they could see his extreme condition, the sudden ax which had divided him, shoulder to loins. How will I eat dinner with my mother? he wondered for a second, though he hoped the extremity of feeling would depart by then. The rest of the office remained to be said: Vespers, Compline. How could it be completed before midnight if he felt as distracted as this? His legs ached too, for no good reason, and he wished he had taken the schoolboy's offered seat.
As the tram began the climb to Edgecliff, however, the pain retracted to become a dull, habitual depression, and he began reciting the Vespers hymn. Extinguish the flames of passion, draw off the heat of poison, grant the salvation of bodies and the true peace of hearts. He feared, however, that for him an age of automatic grace had passed.
The bungalow of Darragh's childhood, approached with the new feeling of having somehow aged during a mere tram ride, and of being tested, stood on New South Head Road in Rose Bay. It was built of plum-colored brick, and its street-facing windows had little segments of stained glass to relieve them of their banal transparency. His mother, a vigorous, lean woman in her early fifties, tended the rosebushes which marked the way to the verandah and the front door. His parents had bought the house in 1923 from an old Scot who had placed by the front door a framed glass sign in which the word “Arbroath” was marked out in gold tinsel. They had left it there. The child Darrag
h had not realized it was the name of a Scottish town, rather than a formula for the hearth. In his present mood of, at best, wistfulness, on this still Sunday suffused with the smell of legs of lamb roasting in a thousand kitchens, it failed to evoke much in him.
One of the roasting legs of lamb which, despite meat rationing, were still offered up as a matter of course to Australian Sabbath appetites was inside Arbroath, and Darragh paused at the closed front door and let its savor lead him back to a more grateful sense of who and where he was, and what was his destiny. An only child. A father always pleased for his son's academic success. Before his sudden death eight years past, Mr. Darragh told Frank that though Mrs. Darragh was shy and not a woman to make a display, she boasted about Frank to all the neighbors. If she showed wariness in her affection, it did not mean she was not as generous as the young mother he'd met on the train. “Your mother is a brick, a true rock,” his father had told him approvingly. “You know where you stand with her.” Young Frank was as willing as his father to find her reticence endearing, and not to mistake it for coolness. At the Christian Brothers' college at Rose Bay, he had given his teachers similar cause for celebration. He suffered from no learning problems or laziness, and so did not need to be punished in the muscular way of the brothers' community, with leather straps and fleas in the ear. He was competent alike at such contrasting puzzles as cricket and algebra. Nothing befell him, not even in adolescence, to drive him to rebellion, or make him seek a world other than the one he knew—unless it was the idea he had of his father's participation in the ill-defined mysteries of war, that massive and risky secular sacrament. He had been exactly the sort of unsullied, unworldly, yet not stupid young man the seminary sought.