Office of Innocence (10 page)

For the sake of not letting Kearney get clean away, Darragh said, “Then as I say—perhaps something else. Tobacco, sweets. A gesture. But as for the general indulgence from fasting, you have it.”

“He might have enlisted in the army under another name,” said the nonfasting Kearney suddenly. “In which case . . .” He opened his hands, palms up to the sky. It indicated even Brother Howley, fled and perhaps under an alias, justified his exemption.

The inspector and Darragh shook hands, and the inspector went back to his car, where the other policeman waited.

Darragh himself went to the sacristy and brought out the two cineria, the long-handled urns. As he shoveled ashes into them with a little green garden spade, it struck him that he was not bound by any confessional discretion in Mrs. Heggarty's case. She had come to the parlor and given him thereby the power to discuss her situation with her at further reasonable times. He had an impulse—which he hoped he would have felt for any threatened soul—to write to her and arrange another meeting. He could send a note home with her boy, Anthony, from the school. All advice was contrary to such a practice. All the axioms of wisdom. The priest who follows a woman into the pit is in the pit with the woman!

There was a famous case to prove the point, too, a case recited at every seminary in the Pacific region. Every priest in Australia and New Zealand and in the islands of Oceania, including Frank Darragh, had been raised on this cautionary tale of how perilous it was to become close friends with a handsome woman penitent. Fifty years past, in days when most priests were Irish-born, the Irishman Dean O'Haran of St. Mary's Cathedral had been such a popular preacher and confessor that photographs of him were sold at church fêtes, and in his human vanity he had given copies to those who sought his spiritual advice. One of these had been the pretty wife of a famous Australian test cricketer, Conyngham, who sued the dean as corespondent in a divorce, claiming that O'Haran and his wife had committed adultery in the confessional and crypt of the cathedral. It had become the supreme scandal; the bigots and the prurient of the day were delighted, and though the court proclaimed Dean O'Haran's innocence, it was claimed that some heavy-handed Irish, men like Kearney perhaps, had intimidated witnesses.

Appropriately, in his desire not to become the dazzling and bedazzled O'Haran, it could now be his interminable and barely endurable Lenten sacrifice not to contact Mrs. Heggarty. But that was narrow piety. Kate Heggarty's state might alter perilously during the penitential season. To keep aloof might be misguided and another form of that most pervasive of sins, vanity.

VII

Lent began. He had nearly done Lauds for the following day in his pacing place between sacristy and presbytery when Mrs. Flannery emerged from the presbytery door waving the evening
Sun
. For her to be flapping at the air with it like a frantic newsboy was exceptional. The
Sun
was the monsignor's afternoon paper, the better of Sydney's two poor evening rags. When it was delivered to the presbytery, Mrs. Flannery read it first, turning the pages with such care the paper looked utterly pristine, and a few times she had offered it to Darragh, but on the proviso that he treat it with the same archival care, for the monsignor himself would be reading it later that evening.

“You wouldn't believe it, Father,” said Mrs. Flannery with a kind of ferocious satisfaction. “Those little yellow beasts have bombed Darwin. There are dead Australians everywhere.” Her eye showed an enraged Irish glint. Like the Clancy sisters, she had a grim confidence that the Japanese would get what-for from her, if ever they dared turn up on Homebush Road.

The front page showed a radiophotograph of a destroyed post office, and half-naked gun crews firing at the sky. This had all been forecast, but there was an awe to it now that it had happened, a peculiar feeling of belief being expanded to accommodate the new flavor of this damage.

She did not let him hold the paper, and having imparted the news, returned the
Sun
to the presbytery. This gravest of tidings had to be reserved for Monsignor Carolan's gaze.

He did what a priest should. He prayed for the dead. The living, however, seemed acutely close—he could hear a chant of times tables from the school behind the church.

Mr. Conover, the air warden parishioner, along with his colleagues, had been busy through Strathfield and Homebush. The schoolchildren at St. Margaret's and at the state school near Mrs. Flood's home now carried with them as they transited Homebush Road, north or south, a little linen bag. In it lay the basic equipment needed for enduring air raids: two tennis-ball halves to place over the ears, a wooden wedge to put between the teeth, a whistle to blow beneath the rubble, a tin container of burn salve, and a safety-pinned roll of lint bandage. Adults were advised also to travel with a first-aid kit on their persons, and Mr. Conover dropped three such small tin first-aid boxes into the presbytery. Though Darragh tried for a few days, when going out, to force his kit into his side pocket, Monsignor Carolan seemed to think it would push summer-weight black fabric out of shape, and put the kit in his vehicle, unwilling to sacrifice his tailored alpaca neatness until the moment some sort of bombardment actually occurred.

Mr. Conover also gave Monsignor Carolan a personal tour of local air-raid arrangements, so that once again the monsignor would be saved from the inconvenience of air-raid practices until the dreadful day arrived, and Sydney suffered the destiny of Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Singapore.

The chief air-raid shelter for St. Margaret's, both the church and the school, was the dark place beneath the altar, a sort of crypt in which no one had been entombed and which served more as a place where old trestle tables were stacked, and where even an ancient, blunt-bladed parish lawn mower had found its retirement. There was barely room for an adult to stand upright in there, but given that the architect's plans showed that St. Margaret's altar was supported by a reinforced floor and by steel columns, some of whose dark uprights could be seen iron-black within the crypt-cellar, it was an appropriate shelter from the brunt of modern aerial bombardments.

A note to that effect was sent to all the parents of St. Margaret's children. The infants would be safe beneath the steel-braced, sacred vault of the high altar. Sister Felicitas told Darragh one afternoon that she knew God would not let the high altar be destroyed, but Darragh thought God's will was more mysterious. Catholic beachheads of stone and steeple, of marble and tabernacle, had been consumed in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore. The sword of Shinto rage had been permitted to bear them away.

His late father had frequently shown him the pictures, in Bean's
Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918
, of the destroyed church in Albert, with its steeple full of holes, its sanctuary in ruins, and the Madonna at its apogee tilting towards Germany. From within that Virgin's shadow, the Australian Corps had repulsed Ludendorff's men, but the church, and anyone depending upon its structural strength, had been desolated. Darragh, since his misery and doubt had begun, had started to consider whether sometimes God showed His presence in the midst of horror by pretending not to be there.

On an arranged morning in Lent, Mr. Conover, who looked like the all-wise Lionel Barrymore from an Andy Hardy picture, came to collect Father Darragh from the presbytery for air-raid practice. They walked together to the school, where Felicitas and the nuns had assembled all the children on the tarred playground. Some of these latter were babes—five-year-olds, even an occasional bright under-five. No amount of assumed brashness on the faces of the third-graders could wipe out a pervasive quality of wide-eyed uncertainty in the mass of children. One of the younger nuns, parading the senior ranks with a hand-clapper device which warned children to behave, seemed herself restive and fearful. The jaws of the clapper, audible to Darragh, seemed determined to eat away all bravado, to summon an appropriate fear to the place.

Sister Felicitas beckoned the distinguished air-raid warden and Darragh forward, introduced them again to her charges, and invited Mr. Conover to address the children.

“Children,” said Mr. Conover, like a kindly bishop, “have you ever heard the air-raid siren sounding from outside the council chambers, just up there, a block and a half away?”

The children, used to pacing their chanted responses to adult authorities, cried, “Yes, Mis-ter Con-ov-er!”

“Today we will practice what will happen if the air-raid siren sounds to announce a real air raid. Now, there were enemy bombers which bombed Darwin, and children there went safely to shelters when the siren went, and came out safely afterwards. Do you understand?”

They told him in their school plainchant that they did. Mr. Conover turned to Darragh. “Father, if you could go into the shelter first, so the children who come in can see you as they enter . . .” Darragh agreed. He hoped that on the day, in the instant before some terrible impact of war, he would be able to console these innocents, cast over them the mantle of the sacraments. What he did not want to think of, what he knew would be easy to think of in a vulnerable shelter, was their being lifted by the hand of detonation, and pounded to dust.

“Father Darragh will be in the shelter first, so there will be nothing to worry about. God and Father Darragh will mind you.”

All eyes turned to Darragh, and they believed. On Conover's glib tongue, he had become the parent of parents. Now that they had invested their faith in him, the young nun's wooden clapper could afford to turn silent.

“So let us imagine that Japanese bombers have appeared over Sydney. The siren at the council chambers has sounded, and you come out here, obeying the nuns. No pushing, children, for the siren will sound in good time to allow everybody to get to the safe place. Now, Sister Felicitas, which children go first?”

Felicitas knew. Third-graders, girls first, were already moving in orderly pairs. The little girls of St. Margaret's affected a solemnity which only a few of the larger, freckled boys, muttering, tried to bear away.

“Father,” said Mr. Conover. Thumb in vest pocket, he gestured to Darragh with his free hand to take the lead of the marching children. As he reached his place at the column's head, Darragh could hear the girls' voices behind him, whispering and clicking away, a knitting-needles sound as they sewed together their mysterious discourse. “Father . . .” he could overhear them say now and then. They were not fully at ease but had been told to be brave for the sake of the youngsters. “Father . . .” Their reliance on him gave him back a purpose. He reached a low green door in the church wall, a door of tongue-and-groove planking. Apparently Mr. Conover considered it up to strength in the event of dive-bombers. Darragh wriggled at its painted latch and opened it. “Very well, children,” he said over his shoulder, and stooped and entered a dark place which exuded the smell of clay and abiding moisture. He switched on the torch with which Conover had provided him and guided the children to benches which lay all around the edges of this extensive cavern. The girls hurriedly sat, anxious to find a place beside best friends and face the unimaginable peril hand in hand. Encouraged by the entry of the older children, the five- and six-year-olds followed, many of them surprisingly composed, like people performing a practiced rite. It was then that he saw, amongst the dimly lit infant faces, that of Anthony Heggarty, the son of Hitler's prisoner.

The light of unwitting victimhood which shone on so many young faces seemed to Darragh to mark out the young Tony Heggarty's features in particular. The child had taken up his place on one of the benches yards from Darragh. Suddenly all the children, more than 120 of them, had found seats under the instruction of those excellent marshals the Dominican nuns.

Mr. Conover himself entered, stooping in his suit, and closed and latched the green door from the inside. A new order of murk prevailed, and the earthen smell dragged at young nostrils. There was an unconscious bout of anxious sniffing, until the children became accustomed to the air of the place. The light of the nuns' and Darragh's torches was rendered intense but narrow.

“Now,” said Mr. Conover. “You all have your linen bags. Say the bombing becomes heavy. Take out your little halves of tennis ball and put them over your ears.”

There was a rustling of linen and fingers, and soon all the children had a demiglobe of tennis ball attached to either ear.

“Now your ears are protected,” said Conover, “but you can still hear Sister, can't you? And you can still hear Father Darragh.”

Although he wondered how either Felicitas or himself could be heard during a bombing raid, Darragh was delighted for the children's sake to play along, and do a voice test, as did Felicitas, and all the children as a mass, including the fourth-class tough guys by the door, chanted in unison that indeed both could be heard. The noise of their answer surprised them a bit, for it zipped around the steel columns and returned quickly to them from the buttressed underfloor of the altar.

Sister Felicitas took over. “So Mr. Conover would like you to keep those halves of tennis ball on your ears for five minutes now, for bombing can last that long or even longer. If the noise is so loud that you might be tempted to bite your tongue, you'll be told to take out the plugs you have in your linen bags and bite them with your teeth—isn't that so, Mr. Conover?”

“That's exactly right, Sister Felicitas,” Mr. Conover agreed, maintaining the myth of leisurely bombardment, of explosions which left space for leisurely decisions.

So the children were told to remove one tennis-ball half, get the plug from their bags, bite it, and then replace the temporarily removed ear guard. A nation of tennis players, going to war with hemispheres of rubber to protect their eardrums.

The children bit away at their mouth guards for a minute, some too avidly and with exaggerated tooth display. “Firmly but gently,” Sister Felicitas told them. An older boy dropped his in the dirt, and others spat out theirs to laugh at him. “Take those boys' names, Sister,” cried Felicitas, and the one with the clapper hastened to do so.

The same nun, having taken the names of the miscreants, wielded her clapper at a nod from Felicitas, and the children were asked to return their mouth plugs but not their ear guards to their pouches.

“So,” said Felicitas, “we shall ask Father Darragh to lead us in the singing of ‘Hail Queen of Heaven,' keeping the tennis-ball halves over your ears while you sing.”

Darragh counted to three and then swung his hand, and the children burst forth, their voices sharpened, exalted by where they were.