Office of Innocence (12 page)

The passive effort involved in having the sheets pulled up to her chest again by Darragh seemed to exhaust her. Darragh ate the second host himself, and stood in prayer a moment.

“I'll try to find Bert,” he said.

This time Bert was in the kitchen, unpacking a brown bag. “I ducked round to Moran and Cato's for some biscuits,” he said in his voice of flat melancholy, yet it was touching to find that he considered Darragh's being there an event, a significant passage, worthy of the good cups and a few Arnott's shortbreads.

“Mrs. Flood is finished,” said Darragh. “I mean, she's been anointed, and the rest.”

“Righto,” said Bert. “She'll be happy. And Ross will be sweet. His bark's worse than his bite. He feels he has to be rude to you. Union rules.”

The
Daily Mirror
was on the table with its predictable stories of Allied progress in Africa and Allied devastation in Asia. All the military success was in the wrong place for Bert and Darragh, and came at the cost of Lance Bombardier Heggarty's capture and Mrs. Heggarty's endangered soul.

Darragh said, “Mrs. Flood will be safe now from all this.” He waved his hand at the headlines. As soon as he said it, he thought he might have uttered the wrong sentiment.

“She'll be missed,” said Bert. “She was a lovely girl. She was an usherette at the State when we came down to Sydney, believe it or not. Don't know what she was doing with an ugly bugger like me. Pardon the French, Father.”

“French?”

“My swear words. Pardon them.”

“Of course.”

A half-grin came to Bert's face. “Not that I'm likely to give them up, you know. I hope Ross didn't say anything too nasty to you last time you were here?”

“No,” Darragh lied.

“See, he can be an angry mad bugger. Make a good soldier if he hadn't had the crook lungs himself. An orphan, you know—at least his mother died young and he was on his own. Most orphans are angry buggers because they feel they didn't get a fair shake. Toys at Christmas and all that stuff. Had a hard life, of course. But no sooner does the party say we need you somewhere than he's there. Works like a Trojan, that feller.”

Darragh wondered what a priest could say when the wronged husband clicked his tongue over the well-known and affectionately recorded traits of the lover.

Tea finished, Bert led him up the hallway and paused at the bedroom door to allow Darragh to say goodbye to Mrs. Flood. But the woman was noisily yet delicately sleeping. Raised and redeemed on her pillows, she wore the same gracefully amused smile she had before he had laid the oil upon her extremities.

“Call on me again, Bert. Whenever Mrs. Flood wishes.”

He was no longer frightened of Trumble. Knowing him to be himself a frightened, fatherless child helped reduce his Marxist ardor to size.

X

Over the past few days, the smoke had been dissipated by rain and cold southerlies, and Darragh had begun to wonder if Anthony Heggarty had remembered to pass the letter to his mother. It seemed to him to justify the monsignor's low estimation of him that he had entrusted such an important document to a first-grade child.

Darragh consoled himself during downfalls with a book of Monsignor Knox's witty essays,
The Mass in Slow Motion
, in the parlor. Now that the first breath of winter had struck, it provided a congenial corner. Looking through the parlor's side window, he saw the child, Anthony, standing at the door, gathering himself to ring, water in his hair. Darragh moved quickly, to get to the door before the bell alerted Mrs. Flannery.

Seeing him, Anthony extended his hand, an envelope in it, spotted with warm rain. “Thank you, Anthony,” said Darragh. “Are you well?”

“The Nazis have my father,” said the boy. This seemed to be obviously a quotation from Kate Heggarty. “But it means he'll come home safe.”

“Yes,” said Darragh. “And I pray that it's soon.” And he did. He wanted Mrs. Heggarty's soul. He wanted her submission as he'd wanted Mrs. Flood's.

The boy seemed happy and went away across the wet gravel towards the school. Darragh took the plain white envelope inside. The writing on it was in parish convent copperplate.
Thou shalt know them by their hand
. . . . Under her address in the Crescent she had carefully written the date, and the letter was rather touchingly set out in a manner not unlike a school essay. “Go home, girls,” you could virtually hear a nun in Kate Heggarty's girlhood say, “and for your homework write the sort of letter you would write to a priest if you wanted spiritual advice.”

Dear Father Darragh,

It is very kind of you to take an interest in our welfare. We would be honored to have the blessing of your visit on our house at this troubled time. Except that I do not want to argue the matter with you again. I feel we argued the matter enough last time.

I am now working every day until three o'clock, so that it would be better if you were to visit Anthony and me. It would need to be in the later afternoon about four.

Yours sincerely
Kate Heggarty (Mrs.)

She said no arguments, but she wanted to see a priest, and that was the first step, Darragh believed. A more critical voice within asked who she thought she was to put limits on a priest. She had no right to expect an easy visitation, not after her forthrightness in the presbytery parlor. Besides, she might simply relish playing with him, flexing her power over him by making him desire her salvation. So, for his own part, he intended to consider and not to rush.

By next morning he had convinced himself that some speed was advisable. He believed that an instinct or a revelation—one or the other—told him that he lived on a temporal plane, and that human souls are redeemed in time.

The Heggarty house when he arrived at it at four o'clock that afternoon was the kind that people called a duplex, a word which seemed to offer more than the narrow-fronted dimensions which now faced him. Mrs. Heggarty lived in one of two adjoining dark brick little dwellings, both of them with the random air of being rented out rather than owned. But the Heggartys' place had its front gate and its little garden, and a side gate with a narrow laneway which led to the backyard, where Kate Heggarty could hang the washing and Anthony romp.

Darragh's ringing at the door was answered by Kate Heggarty herself, who seemed flustered and out of breath, her hair done up in the sort of scarf factory workers wore, as if she had arrived home a few seconds before. She had the busy appearance of a woman who had a pot on the stove in one room and ironing to do in another. But at the sight of Darragh she gave in to events and composed herself.

“Father,” she said. She seemed very solemn and a little confused. His earlier suspicion, that she wanted him here as a sop to her vanity, evaporated. She asked him please to come in.

She still had an air of bewilderment as she closed the door behind him, and in the dark hallway talked for reassurance. “Gosh, my mother would be pretty upset with me for having a priest in the house when it's so messy.” But as they passed two shut bedroom doors and came into the lounge room, mess did not seem to prevail. Darragh was somehow delighted that she had here all the standard treasures of womanhood, including the china cabinet with a good tea set. A small statue of the Virgin Mary sat beside the mantel clock, to show that she had not definitely decided against that part of her being. On a lacquered rattan table stood the picture of her husband, Heggarty, in his dark serge, hopeful beneath a jaunty hat, and herself in a calf-length wedding dress. The marriage day. The picture established an authority in the room. The sight of the soldier's definite features brought to Darragh a sense of the filament of marriage pulled wire-thin by the distance between Heggarty and his wife, but still honored here on a rattan table. In the Crescent.

“Please sit there, Father, and I'll go and get tea.”

Darragh smiled. “I don't think I want to sit here in style alone. The kitchen's good by me.”

“Oh,” she murmured, gravely considering the issue. “Gee. I suppose that's okay.”

She spoke like a woman trying to hide blemishes when there were no blemishes to hide. Nor did she place any stipulation, as she had by letter, on what might be said. Only that he would forgive the housekeeping. Yet the kitchen he entered with her was swept clean, the yellow linoleum polished to a well-worn sheen. The colored glass in the windows of her deal dresser shone. Who am I, he wondered, to expect a perfect kitchen, and to accept it as a token of grace in its owner? Yet he had already done so.

“Please,” she said, “sit down.” She pulled out a chair by her small, varnished kitchen table. These were, Darragh knew, the founding pieces of furniture of a hard-up marriage. And then it occurred to him that that was what embarrassed her—that she expended her life on the obscure maintenance of these few things bought on installment payments from Mark Foy's or Grace Brothers. She would have liked to have the luxury of treating them negligently, but she could not afford it. Because of her poverty, she must maintain these sticks and laths as if they were museum pieces, and part of her resented the fact and longed to be able, for once, to be a bit negligent.

“Please sit,” she repeated with a breathless desire that things should go well. “I'll boil the kettle.”

Darragh said, “This house does you honor, Kate.”

She paused in lighting gas under her full kettle. She was as taken by surprise as he was that he had used her first name. “Yes, but I just wish the maid hadn't taken the day off.”

All her movements fascinated him. It was a great temptation to dream oneself the possessor of this house, particularly this humble kitchen which so frustrated her pride. “I don't want to break the terms of your letter,” he said. “Not that I necessarily accept them, but we'll let that side of the argument rest. But I
have
remembered you. In the Mass and the office . . .”

She coughed. “Yes,” she said. “I'm pleased . . . no, that's silly, Father. I'm grateful.”

“And no news of your husband?”

“Except that I called the Department of Defence. They think his group has been moved to Tunisia, and that in time they'll be sent to Germany or somewhere else in Europe. They said they'd write when they know more. Poor fellow, he'll be bored stiff.”

If she considered boredom the extent of his sufferings, Darragh thought, then it was a good thing.

The tea was ready. She went to the ice chest and took out a lump of fruit cake.

“You can't make it properly, under rationing,” she told him. “You have to skimp on the eggs and butter.”

“I can't,” said Darragh. “Lenten fast.”

“What if I cut just a small cube? You could have that.”

He consented. “A very small cube.” And sipping his tea he tasted the mouthful of cake she had cut for him and declared it superb. Perhaps, despite her disclaimer about the cake, the kind man's eggs and butter were in this recipe. And with the sweetness in his mouth, he began to ask himself what he was doing here. Shorn of all power except the power of his eunuch example. Did she like the idea, after all and despite herself, of a tongue-tied priest dancing attendance on her?

He was distracted by Anthony running in flushed from the backyard, followed by neighbors' kids all demanding their slice of cake. Anthony with an only child's resolve swamped by clamant, rough-elbowed children. To those children, Darragh was barely a presence, while Anthony was made to stand still and greet him. Then, with the fruit, flour, and sugar in their blood, they raged out again without spoken intent, in a tight formation like migrating birds. They
knew
what they were about.

“Thalia Stevens's kids are a bit rowdy,” Mrs. Heggarty explained with a faint smile. “She's got too many of them to polish them. But she's the best neighbor I have. No pretensions.”

But was Thalia Stevens the source of some of her ideas, Darragh wondered.

There was now another rattle at the back screen door. Darragh thought it must be a late-arriving child. From his place at the table, however, he saw the stooped blond figure of Ross Trumble, leaning there, peering in. His face was weirdly bloated—he had either been in a fight or got a skinful of beer somewhere. He carried a heavily wrapped packet in his hands.

“Ross,” called Mrs. Heggarty. “What in heaven's name are you doing here?”

“I,” said Trumble. For a time, he considered the proposed shape of his intended sentence. “I have had the afternoon off from the sickroom,” he said. “Been to town. The Journalists' Club. I have a friend . . .”

“The bar's open there, obviously.”

Heartburn made Trumble's mouth form into a rictus. When the spasm had passed, he said, “You could say that, Katie. But I've got some chops for you too. From another friend. At the abattoirs.”

“Another Red, I suppose?”

“Well, Katie, you don't need to take them.”

“I don't want them if they're stolen goods.”

“No, they're part of his meat quota, for Christ's sake.”

“No blasphemy, Ross. Come in then. Have some tea.”

Trumble opened the screen door and stepped in. As he put down the bundle of meat on the sink, his eyes took in the room, with Darragh at the table.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Father Death himself.”

“Father Darragh,” said Kate. “And you be polite! Sit down here.” She organized a chair for him, back on to the sink, and picked up the parcel and transferred it deftly into her ice chest. She seemed to Darragh to be habituated to this movement—Trumble called in regularly, and brought gifts of meat. Surely she was not risking damnation for the sake of such prosaic parcels?

Today, however, Trumble found the business of sitting occupied all his mental and physical powers. Watching him, Darragh's own mental powers were centered on whether to stay or go. Why was it his kind of priest, and not the monsignor's kind, who sat at a tea party with a would-be apostate and a Communist?

“How is Mrs. Flood?” Darragh asked Trumble.

“How's Mrs. Flood?” Trumble repeated, but—it seemed—with not too much viciousness. “Not too bloody flash is the answer. I ought to be there, but I needed to have a break. I don't know. The sickroom gets me down. I spent long enough sick myself. . . .”

“You devote a great deal of time to her, Ross,” Kate Heggarty reminded him. The proposition that hung in the air was that he was a fine and considerate adulterer. The scales of virtue were shifting in this kitchen, and the standard weights no longer applied. Even Darragh felt the shift. The idea that there could be virtue at the heart of sin seemed not as outrageous an argument as it should. And this was the problem with Kate Heggarty, he saw. She was a Catholic, but within a world of Stevenses and Floods and Trumbles, whose codes of conduct had not been laid down in any Thomistic code, and whose ethics were not mediated by the Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

Trumble drank his tea hungrily. It brought sweat out on his forehead. When he was finished, he looked up at Darragh. “You know, I'm trying to be polite. But I don't like you breathing around Kate.”