Homebush Boy (20 page)

Gentle Mrs Frawley said to me on one of those afternoons, ‘Did the girls tell you Mother Concordia is dying?'

I must have frowned, because Mrs Frawley remarked that the old nun had had a good life. Concordia was the woman who had intimidated with a white chalk line all us six-year-old piddlers at St Martha's Convent. Death seemed in one sense a likely proposition – Concordia had seemed old ten years ago, when she urged us not to cause the Virgin Mary to blush.

‘We're in the nuns' chapel hours on end praying for her,' said Rose, as if she did not see herself as a nun yet, the nuns being still
them
.

I thought of Curran, lean and olive, reciting the Sorrowful Mysteries in the wood-panelled chapel at Santa Sabina.

The mention of so austere a figure as Concordia of course by indirect paths reminded me that I was close to the time limit of pretending to be a potential priest. All the funkholes out of that destiny seemed to be guarded by arguments and ideas sharp as razors already unsheathed, and put in place by everyone from Father Byrne to the Cardinal.

For example: ‘I've decided to go to university first.'

‘
Yes, but many a vocation is lost that way
.'

‘I've decided I don't have a vocation.'

‘
Yes, but how can you tell until you've tested it?
'

Could I manage to say, ‘But I like girls too much. One in particular'?

Or equally impossible, ‘I had a revelation during Sunday Mass. God
revealed
that he had other plans for me.'

I was painted into the piety corner as certainly as Mother Concordia was herself cornered by nature and piety on the tall bier of her bed in the Dominican Convent. But I wasn't going. I couldn't go. It would have to be said.

The next morning I practised breaking the news to Matt.

‘I've just about decided against going into the priesthood,' I told him.

He put his head on the side in his intelligent, tolerant manner, in a way which sometimes made me believe that he saw through all the posturing.

‘There's always time afterwards,' he said with the hopeful, upward intonations which were his nature. This was a time of year when Dinny McGahan was letting the two of us sit outdoors on the verandah to go through our Pass subjects. We studied long hours, so that there was always time for a little desultory conversation. Even as Matt and I walked home we were still quizzing each other on Modern History or Shakespeare's soliloquies.

Coming back to Mattie's little bungalow on one of those first afternoons of knowing about Mother Concordia and her impending death, I saw Curran and her well-dressed mother walking together down Shortland Avenue. Past the little suburban gardens they walked like two equals, intently discussing something. Bernadette Curran even wore her maroon Dominican Convent gloves, and Mrs Curran's gloves were white. They were two women dressed not so much to represent motherhood or daughterhood, but an impenetrable sisterhood. What they talked of was unguessable but, you couldn't doubt, marvellous. It occurred to me that whatever was going on there, my mother had been deprived of it in her two-boy, all-male family.

I told Matt, ‘There goes Mrs Curran and Bernadette. They're dolled-up exquisitely!'

Matt gave a half chuckle. ‘That must be pretty exciting for you, Tom,' he murmured.

I gave him a small nudge on the upper arm. But what they spoke of, the Curran women, transcended our chirping and banter. It had crux, it had weight.

Calling in at the Frawleys yet again, a household in which because of Mrs Frawley's kindness, Mr Frawley's serious purposes and the Frawley girls' genial mockery I felt appreciated, I found out what the Curran women had been discussing.

It was to do with Concordia, the matriarch of the Order. Like Mother Margaret, she had not borne earthly children. Yet this fact made all of them – the Frawleys, the Currans and all the rest – her children. In batteries, her daughters, class by class, girls small and large, in their impeccable maroon, had entered the Dominican chapel to pray for her deliverance or happy death. The Leaving Certificate girls were asked to come and go to the chapel only at their leisure, but come and go they did. A hush hung over their futures. Some may have even felt a pulse of an ambition to achieve in the end a death as notable, as reverberating as that of Concordia. Such a departure from the normal suburban or bush deaths of grandfathers and grandmothers!

The prefects of Santa Sabina were, I heard, admitted in a bunch into the large convent parlour, where Concordia's deathbed had been moved to allow for room for visitors. They saw the brave, rugged, sculpted face of Concordia, still cowled in the Order's regulation clothing for the sickbed at this supremest moment. They saw her lowered lids, and the effort of the discourse she pursued with God on earth's furthest up-jut, on land's end.

This was a death from an ancient and baroque tradition. Had there been what the Frawleys called ‘some mad girl', some girl, that is, who was a temperamental echo of the mad boy I was, she might have been overly influenced, morbidly fascinated, inflamed by divine ambitions. But Curran was sensible, had no time – as I knew – for exorbitant responses. She should have come out safe from the visit to Concordia.

The full and potent magic of the death of the great Irish matriarch had not yet, however, been unleashed.

Imagine a room where the Honours English and History girls are at their desks, preparing for the coming public examination, when a messenger enters, a younger nun, and whispers to Curran. Mother Concordia wants to see Curran on her own. Walking out of the study, does Curran – who looks so settled in all life's circumstances – feel unsettled to be chosen to share some of Concordia's last seconds? She must not be totally at ease with such an excessive act of graciousness.

Here at last drama has found a way to penetrate Curran's matter-of-fact, no-nonsense,
Aussie
advance towards the greatness everyone agrees will mark her later life.

She approaches the sickroom where only the last watchers remain, the most senior nuns who have shared table and cloister with Concordia for years and who are now easing her on her way. Monsignor Loane is long gone from the bedside, with the canisters of holy oil with which he has anointed Concordia in the sacrament called Extreme Unction. Two nuns rise from their knees and take Curran by the elbow, bringing her forward to the deathbed. One of them touches Mother Concordia's shoulder. The old nun half opens her eyes. She tears her gaze away from Yahweh's long enough to say, ‘Bernadette, I call upon you to become a Dominican nun and take my name,
Concordia
. I will pray for you and support you in the Presence of God.'

I still wonder if as Bernadette left the deathbed (and indeed the old nun would die overnight, eased of the question of the inheritance of her name) any nun said to her, ‘Think closely about this. A command from Concordia is not necessarily a command from God!'

It had been after Concordia had made her severe bequest to Curran that I saw the Curran women speaking so earnestly on their way home and mentioned it to Matt.

It is wrong to surmise the decision was made for her by Concordia's deathbed edict. Sensible and democratic Curran was not so readily deprived of will as all that. But it must have had an effect in some scales of decision, and it seems she made the decision pretty quickly afterwards. She did not trumpet it though – I heard about it not from her lips. I had gone home with Matt to his house in Shortland Avenue, and his mother offered us tea and told us.

‘Wow,' said Matt. ‘What'll you do now, Mick?' Did he mean, how to top that? Or how to deal with it? I sat in a vacuum, my hands prickling. As soon as I could I left. It was as if this were a war, but all the maidens, not all the young men, were about to vanish. I walked bemused to the Frawley house in Broughton Road, and everyone was home except Mr Frawley the wiry grouper. Rose Frawley had answered the door with a half-smile.

‘Have you heard the news?' all three women were asking. ‘What will you do?' asked Rose. ‘Join the Foreign Legion?'

She of course was delighted that she would have a sister, a Strathfield girl, a Santa Sabina girl, her own head prefect and ‘brain', with her in the novitiate.

We discussed it. I felt a constraint over my heart, sharp edges against my ribs. The Oxford University Press Edition of GMH. I knew I did not need that discomfort any more. I took it out of my breast pocket and absent-mindedly slid it into my schoolbag.

The younger, gentler Frawley girl, Denise, cried, ‘Did you see what Mick just did?'

Rose said, ‘Sick of strung rhythm, are we?'

‘Sprung rhythm,' I told her without any passion.

I got home and my mother did not notice merely the phantom shape of GMH in the grey serge coat she looked after so arduously. She had met Mrs Frawley outside Cutcliffe's Pharmacy in Rochester Street and had been told.

‘This shouldn't have any influence on what you decide,' she told me.

When my father came home from his store in Granville, he said the same thing. ‘Just because everyone else is volunteering it doesn't bloody mean you have to.'

He knew whereof he spoke. He had been a volunteer in his day, and had not been fully happy in the service.

What was worst for me was that I could tell that whatever Curran was renouncing in the name of the Deity and Concordia it was not me. No messages or hints had been sent. There was no chance of a last hand-hold.

Nonetheless, amongst the quicksilver shifts of sentiment occurring to me, there now grew a desire to be associated with such a brave drama. Curran's sincere choice put the question to me in a lasting way the Cardinal had not been able to. On the one hand the sublime path. On the other hand, the chance of a normal university degree and a little double-fronted brick cottage in a suburban street. GMH had been a priest in his cell and had sung like an angel in his chains.

There were references of pure and sublime love as well: Eloise and Abelard, St Francis and St Clare. And then there was the other, Australian example – Father Tenison-Woods and Mother Mary MacKillop. MacKillop the seraphically handsome woman, and Julian Tenison-Woods a priest like GMH, but a famed geologist rather than a poet. Mother Mary MacKillop had founded the Sisters of St Joseph, who lived in poverty and taught poor children in the Australian colonies. She spread her Order right through the world, so that she constituted an early Australian success story. I had seen Tenison-Woods' works in the library of the Brothers' house –
History of the Discovery and Exploration of Australia
, Volumes I and II,
Fish and Fisheries of New South Wales
and
Geological Observations in South Australia
. He quarrelled with Mother MacKillop, yet enthused her to found an Order and at the same time had an heroic sense of Australia's ancient geology. They – Tenison-Woods, elegant Brit, former
Times
journalist, and MacKillop, colonial girl – had once been photographed side by side, and made a remarkable pair. Mother MacKillop's piercing, enormous eyes. No fainting mystic. A good, practical woman. Like Curran in that. Could there be some possible similar and future alliance between Curran and myself?

The following Sunday the Currans had us all up to their little brick house at Strathfield for an afternoon tea. It was a kind of celebration and farewell. I did not take my GMH, what was the point? As we drank the tea and ate the
Women's Weekly
's best sponge cake – it was still an era where women felt ashamed to serve cake from a cake shop – Curran did not make much of her decision, although Rose Frawley kept talking about it excitedly. She still remarked continuously on the fact she and Bernadette Curran would be Dominican novices together. I began to see that this blustery, open-faced girl-woman had been genuinely and pathetically scared of the tests in front of her, amongst novices she had never seen before. Now she would be able to look across the choir stalls to a known face.

Either Matt or Larkin the agnostic said, ‘Which one of you will be Mother Superior first?' and we saw Mr Curran hide his face and turn his shoulder, which began to shudder. A shamed silence fell over everyone, and Mrs Curran went and laid a hand on his arm.

In that second I knew that I was going too. The sense of seeing the rituals from the
inside
, the way GMH had, overtook me again, but now it did not fill me with terror. It was in part a matter of crazily knowing that grief could not be avoided, and this grief displayed by the Curran parents was purposeful and noble. In the Currans' house at tea the richly-coloured skeins of motivation – a yearning for GMH's God, a desire to serve, a desire to instruct, a taste for drama, a preference for fleshless love, an exaltation in the Latin rites. I would never be bored by them, I knew. I would never listen surreptitiously in the confessional, between penitents, to the Saturday races.

So I walked home with Matt and Mangan knowing I would go. How the decision chastened, calmed and yet exhilarated me. I said nothing though, no longer a braggard. For a time I would imitate the style of the Currans and keep my decision secret. It struck me delightfully that I would have no bad news to announce to the Cardinal or Father Byrne, but I wondered how my father would take it.

At last on an ordinary Tuesday morning at school, I told Matt. He turned to me with his face on its normal questing angle. A morning in October, the month I would turn seventeen. The wattle was out in vivid bloom and air was beginning to take on what the Romantic poets would have called a Lethean weight in preparation for the usual hot and humid Australian Christmas. We were reading Pass History on the verandah outside Fifth Year Blue, in pleasant shade.

‘Secular or monastic?' asked Matt. What sort of priest would I be. Parish or in the cloister like Mangan.

‘I'm going into Springwood,' I told him.

‘Good,' he said. ‘So we'll see you every Christmas.'