At last a small post office store arrived, and visible beyond it the gothic sandstone of the orphanage. It was, thought Darragh, far too austere for an orphan from Homebush. Its architecture seemed designed more to affright than to mother.
“It's big,” he reassured Anthony, “but that's only because it's a home for so many boys and girls.” Anthony began weeping, softly, so as not to appear ungrateful, as soon as they entered the big stone, polished-wood hallway. A statue of the Virgin by the door, delicate hands spread, seemed to offer young Heggarty the comfort of that which he could never again know on earth. A younger nun showed them to the parlor with deep leather-covered armchairs in monastic black, and a desk. The boy's soft crying continued.
“Come on then,” said fatherly Mr. Connors, helping Anthony to a chair. “A lot of the kids in here have no mother and no father at all. Whereas your father will come back in a year or two and take you home.”
When this sensible idea did nothing to reach the small boy's grief, honest Mr. Connors winced and exchanged a glance with Darragh.
At last a large, authoritative nun dressed all in black entered, papers in hand, and before she had reached the desk, said, “Mother Augustine, gentlemen. Hello, Father. Come now, Anthony. That won't do!”
This command from a solemn presence did the trick, and Anthony Heggarty, lost in a big black chair, achieved an awed composure. As for the nun herself, Mother Augustine, she was not awed at all by young priests or senior laymen, though she observed the forms of introduction and made note of their names as soon as she had sat down at the desk.
“You have the birth and baptismal certificates?” she asked Mr. Connors, and Connors produced an envelope from his pocket.
“These are, of course, copies,” he said. “The police . . . they didn't want Mrs. Stevens or the nuns searching Mrs. Heggarty's house for them.”
“Copies are excellent,” said Mother Augustine, reaching for them. She turned to the boy. “You'll make your first communion here, Anthony,” she said. More than a promise, it sounded like a jovial command. “Best to be brisk,” she murmured in Mr. Connors's and Frank's direction. “Causes fewer tears in the end.” She picked up a brass bell from her desk and rang it. Three children, two boys and a girl, aged ten or eleven years, entered the office.
“Paddy, Jim, and Shirley will look after you, Anthony. Stand up. And your bag. Paddy, help him with his bag. If you wish to know anything, Anthony, ask these children. Oh dear heavens!”
For Anthony Heggarty, surrounded by his mentors, under the pressure of the intentions of Mother Augustine and these unknown children, had urinated on the polished floor. His stricken eyes dared direct themselves at nobody other than Darragh. There was an extremity of desire in them, as if he believed that saving him was easy, and since Darragh was the Good Priest of the Playground, it was within his means. This terror, too, the strangler had made.
The drive back to Sydney could be engaged only at the cost of admitting to his soul an urgency to punish the violator and strangler. What sort of man, presented with the bounty and honesty of Mrs. Heggarty, with that thirst for equity beneath green eyes, would find the solution to her conundrum to be this: to constrict her air, violently shut it off, to interdict the river of her blood as well, to close her arteries? Darragh wondered was it because of habits of discipline, of tempering his taste for romanticism, of obeying superiors even when their edicts did not pass the test of reason, that he felt connected now by a tautened rope to the malefactor, and felt that the quickest way to hauling him in might be, after all, to go to the retreat house in Kangaroo Valley, since revelations could arise from passive submission as well as from active rebellion. There must be some ultimate activity, of course—quietism was a temptation and a heresy. But revelation was always unexpected—that was a long-established rule. “Arise, and go into the city,” God said to Paul, the persecutor of Christians, when Paul was knocked from his horse by lightning or a flood of light—the text of the Acts of the Apostles was a little obscure in demotic Greek. But what was not obscure was that Paul had had his enlightenment on a road, between Jerusalem and Damascus, locked merely in the contemplation of his horse's hoofbeats.
And Darragh began to grasp, as Mr. Connors, making too much conversation, drove him back to Sydney through forests full of a brazen, questioning light, why he, like Paul, the former Jewish flayer of Christians, had become a stranger to God. He had not asked the correct questions, the questions a pilgrim should ask. God, source of all I am and home to what I might be, what would You have me know, and what have me do? And at once he knew what he would do. That night, the eve of his departure for retreat, he must visit Mrs. Heggarty's house, with no object in mind than to bear home to the dead mother the message of the son's anguish. This was something beyond the reasonable net of what the monsignor would have him know, have him do. But he couldn't help that. It was something commanded by divinely implanted instinct. It was the same as to sneeze, to blink, to breathe: something above, and something simultaneously below, the poles of sin and virtue, will and submission.
XVIII
And so he set out, unforbidden, after a solitary dinner, the monsignor absent, salving his soul at the table of one of the laymen. The Crescent, running die-straight east-west by the Western Line, its embankments, its electric train stanchions, was, at half past seven at night, a contest between the homely smell of fried, rationed chops escaping the pores of the houses on the left, and the sintered, coaly metallic-electric aroma of the rail lines to the right. But there was none of the warmth of raucous kitchens, of stew or vegetables or sago or bread pudding, about Mrs. Heggarty's house, one of the twins separated by a fence of wood and wire, the shallow verandah full of the shadow of death. Three narrow strips of glass made up the front window—where the bedroom always was in these houses, in this house as in Mrs. Flood's. He hadn't paid particular note on his first visit, but now he knew that in there it had happened. Like a girl in a cautionary tale about sin, she had given herself up to, of all the world's men, the exactly wrong fellow. Not the cynical fellow; not the normally main-chancing fellow. The lethal fellow. She had been struck by the thunderbolt of God's obscure will. It had avoided Mrs. Flood, who had sinned lustily, and struck Kate Heggarty in her first lapse. And she had known as she fought the man that all her talk of dignity had been so much blather; that she could not have made a more extreme mistake. This thought gave him no joy at all, but deepened the poignancy of her loss.
Darragh opened the little wire gate to the side of the house and walked there in narrowed darkness, learning something, he believed, though he could not say what. The southern winter, barely begun, pricked at raw shave marks on his neck, and seemed to have pooled like a malign spirit around the sagging house where Kate Heggarty had brewed her last tea and smiled her last smile. How could Lance Bombardier Heggarty return here and remain sane?
Now into the backyard. The clotheslines ran slantwise across the night, one of them stretched tight with a timber prop. Down the yard, an iron shed slouched but with an exaggerated determination which almost promised it would still stand when Heggarty was at last released. Like a blessing from a well-meaning but immune heart, the sound of The Amateur Hour—to which the monsignor was probably at this moment listening at his parishioner's dinner table—surged across the dark from somebody else's kitchen, in momentary and doomed jolliness.
He nudged the backyard laundry door and looked in at the cold washing coppers, and smelled the same smell he had got since childhood from his mother's laundry—Solvol, Reckitt's Blue, Sunlight Soap. Here she had attended to the pride of appearance, and achieved that cleanliness which is next to dignity, that quality which ensured that no child's mother said, “Keep away from Anthony Heggarty—his clothes aren't properly laundered.” But there was only a ghost of warmth here, only a phantasm of Kate Heggarty retained in the fading scent of cornmeal starch. Not enough, and no declarations, no presence strong enough to explain itself and give instructions.
&n
bsp; In deeper shadow of the narrow back verandah sat Lance Bombardier Heggarty's boyhood cricket bat—you could tell that by its age, and the sticking plaster around the handle, and the crack at the base. An inheritance for Anthony Heggarty. A bucket of clothes pegs kept it company. Relics of a marriage. Laundress and batsman, the notable incarnations of mulier and homo Australis. Over this little conjunction of objects in the near dark, Darragh wept. He raised a hand to the green-painted back door and pushed, but it was locked, and all further indications of the crime were locked within it. He walked down the yard towards the peach tree in its middle, hoping for some enlightenment beneath the cold wires of the clothesline. He still believed that she had infused all her familiar places with clues. This little backyard geography offered something, but he could not sight it, it lay just around the angle of seen reality.
“Please God,” he said. “Please God.”
In a retreat, in six or ten or twenty days of silence, the only word uttered being the recited office and the words of the liturgy of the Mass, something from this ordinary place might reveal itself.
She had left no trace for him in the air. He wiped his eyes with his right hand and stood still to assess whether this little rite gave him any clearer vision. When it failed to do so, he left by the side laneway, and out the wire gate to the browned-out street. Given that all window shades were drawn by order of the air-raid wardens, the most palpable reality was still the cooling odor of communal dinners, turning rancidly cold in the air. Darragh had given up that homeliness. The squalor of cheek-by-jowl domesticity. He was separated from his own human squalor by the thick walls of St. Margaret's presbytery. Until the invaders came, he had no need to scrape congealed remnants in a sink. This is what it meant, he saw, to be a eunuch for the sake of Christ. And reflecting thus in the Crescent, he moved under the unlit streetlights, feeling his way by the pencils of light which evaded the best intentions of curtained rooms and which, later tonight, wardens under the management of Mr. Conover would see it as their duty, moving about the streets, to eliminate.
On the pavement, a large hand descended on his shoulder, very nearly as a blow. He turned, and it was Ross Trumble. “I saw you slinking along there, father of the people,” said Trumble. “In a fucking cardigan tonight. Dressing humbly, eh?”
From what Darragh could tell by darkness, Trumble's fairish face and his breath as well were again heated by beer, hastily drunk somewhere else.
“Hello, Mr. Trumble,” said Darragh. But he blushed too, caught in a strange endeavor some might think perverse, and others guilty.
“‘Hello, Mr. Trumble,' ” Trumble repeated, and appealed to the dark railway embankment across the street. “And everywhere this death bird goes creeping in his black cardigan, a woman dies. That poor little tart Heggarty. Do you think she's a poor little tart, or are you glad she got punished?”
Darragh burned with this insult, since Trumble didn't know that he, Darragh, was a flawed man, not a skilled robot of the Church, flawlessly uncompassionate.
“I think you ought to back off me, Trumble,” he said. “I feel terrible enough about her and about Anthony.”
Trumble was a little surprised, but he rallied. “The best girls are gone, and the people's chief hope is under fascist attack, but you have nothing better to do . . .”
His argument became leaden and died for a second, as he swallowed and moistened his dry mouth. Then he cast about him for something to say—one of his argumenta ad hominem. It was as if, while making up his mind what his next real decision would be, he must fill the space with the occasional music of his polemics.
“They told me,” said Trumble, “that you had it in for me. You told the bastards about the chops. You really are a bastard. Visiting dead women in a cardigan. I know you blokes preach death worship. Just look at your chief bloody image. Nailed-up pain. What a model to hold up to kids, eh. You got Rosie Flood. Did you manage to mess up that poor Heggarty sort, before her boyfriend strangled her?”
Darragh rallied under Trumble's normal hot breath and predictable interrogation.
“Her boyfriend,” asked Frank. “Did you ever see him?”
Trumble seemed genuinely tickled. “His Eminence as Sherlock Holmes! How do you know I'm not the monster? You told bloody Kearney I might be.”
“I didn't tell him that,” said Darragh. And then, as if by inspiration, “Do you still believe everything the police tell you? Maybe you'll end up believing everything I tell you.”
Trumble shook his head. “I know that bastard Kearney. He nearly had me in jail in 1940. Now he comes round and tries to convince me I'm the fancy man. If I hadn't been out all night with a friend who's a journalist at the Telegraph, he would have had me for it, too. That bastard would like to hang me. Have me yelling ‘Bless me, Father' on the gallows. But he's only a straightforward cop, that Kearney.”
“‘Straightforward'?”
“Yeah. You can see through him. You're the sort of bastard no one can see through.”
For a second Darragh had a giddy daydream of having Trumble write down and sign such a statement. It would amaze the monsignor, who found Darragh so transparent. “You give me too much credit, Ross.”
“Don't bloody Ross me! You know, the day's not far off when we'll put you against the wall like we did to the priests in Madrid, and we'll put a hot bullet in your heart.” But Trumble paused and seemed to decide this would not be adequate. “And still the ignorant will come creeping with their little handkerchiefs and mop up your blood and expect it to cure them of goiters.”
Darragh did not know where the impulse to confide in this hostile, half-tipsy Marxist came from. Darragh was God's storm trooper only in Trumble's mind. In the monsignor's, in the vicar-general's, he was an ee-jit and a fable.
“I'm just another man, Ross. Just another confused, battling yokel.”
“Oh yeah. You really loved it when I said that to you last time. Well, let me repeat, Sonny Jim. To me you are just another bloke. And there! You are!” And to emphasize the there he punched Darragh full force on the shoulder. But then he seemed to despair of blows. “There's nothing I can do to you to make up for your bloody creeping influence on Rosie.”
“In the case of Mrs. Flood,” Darragh told him, willing now to stoke the man's confusion of soul, his shoulder smarting, “it wasn't me at work. It was something more than me.”
He was perversely delighted to see Trumble's certain fury return. When you strike again, he thought, I'll damn well strike you!
“Oh, save me from that I-am-but-an-instrument shit,” Trumble declared, showing in his maddened eyes how well Darragh's line had worked. “That makes me really fucking angry. I could beat the fucking certainty out of you.”
Darragh said, “I think you might be more certain than me. We both try to live by great certainty, don't we?”
“Don't bloody say that,” shouted Trumble. “That's utter bullshit! My certainties have a scientific, social, and economic basis. Yours are fucking fairy tales.”
“Maybe that's why I'm having a few problems with them,” Darragh admitted, ringing the changes now between divine messenger and ordinary fellow. Although, he noticed, even in the midst of all this yelling, it was easier to be frank with an enemy than with the guardians of the Faith.
Trumble asked, “If you've got any doubts, why did you need to come hunting down Rosie and Kate?”
Darragh, the darkness of his rage a potent comfort, was enjoying himself. He had Trumble's head spinning, he could see. Darragh's mother had spoken in awe of his gentle father's Gaelic temper emerging in his youth, the power of his rage, his determination that the insulter should not walk away before blows were thrown and blood drawn. That madness was in him now, but he retained throughout his cunning in debate.
“Look, Ross,” he said, “I believe in the flawed nature of humanity. I believe Stalin is as lustful for power as any man. I believe the Pope is subject to sin. You believe people are born perfect, and it's ownership that destroys
them, that having it or not having it is all that makes them bad. You're more innocent than I am. You're touchingly innocent. You'd make a damn good student for the priesthood.”
“I can't bloody believe this,” said Trumble, casting his eyes to the mute-dark sky, and at a loss to take the discussion further, he threw a considerable punch at Darragh. It landed on the side of his neck, an improbable level of force and intent in it. Darragh, very satisfied, could not stop himself bending over, gagging, and thus inviting Trumble into his defenses. It was easy for Trumble now to strike him again on the upper cheek, showing great accuracy for a man who had been drinking. It was as Darragh had read in the novels—the heavens lit up with whirling stars, and a bilious incredible day supplanted night. But he had his balance, at least, and grabbed the solidity of Trumble, driving him back in an imperfect but potent rugby tackle, the kind which the brothers of his boyhood would have considered a poor substitute to real sportsmanship. A short, half-smothered punch against his ear brought further foul comets into Darragh's vision. He began to pummel Trumble's kidney area, and stood up and reeled off one good blow against Trumble's left cheek. Even so concussed, he knew that this was not the Christian martyrs' way, to try to oppose one's own lions to the lions of the tyrant. The true way was to open one's breast to the claws, but Darragh could not manage it. He threw another truncated and worthy punch into the soft and—as he thought of it—beery flesh near Trumble's spine, where a rare area of flabbiness absorbed it and robbed it of some meaning. Then he pulled himself away and brought a short, satisfactory blow on Trumble's ear. But the man's forehead, fair, steely, and dense, descended on Darragh's temple and proclaimed another brief, vicious, sickly day.