Office of Innocence (17 page)

Though it was early in April, the heavy, white, braid-encrusted chasuble felt hot, and temporarily removing it while waiting in the sacristy between the half-past-six and eight-o'clock Masses, Darragh saw a somehow familiar soldier appear tentatively at the door.

“Hello there,” Darragh said with some enthusiasm. The Mass, and his own words of hope, had made the world more fraternal.

“It's me, Father. I was with the American MPs.”

Darragh saw the corporal's stripes on the man's arm. He was the Australian soldier who had had the look of having been a Great War digger. He also possessed the enduring, creased face of a fellow who'd known the humiliation and the hunger of the Depression.

“I had the Owen gun the Yanks said went off.”

Darragh unpinned the maniple from his wrist and stepped forward. “Please come in,” he said. The man did so, looking in awe at the vestment benches and the little stained-glass window which featured St. Brigid of Ireland. To Catholics, a sacristy was an august place, occupied chiefly by clerics and acolytes.

“I didn't like that the other day,” said the man. “I didn't like what the Yank sergeant said. But they've had an inquiry and I got shouted down. I know how to use an Owen gun, and I didn't make any mistake. The sergeant started it off. With his bloody pistol, Father. Pardon my language.”

If this was the truth, there was part of him which would not have wanted to know. That the angelic courtier and warrior, Fratelli, could be so crafty. Could he also be vicious in his cunning?

Darragh said, like a military veteran, “Well, I wouldn't hold it against any man if his gun misfired.”

“That's the whole thing, Father. I wouldn't have come here to see you—my parish is Stanmore. If I thought I'd done it, I'd just lie doggo and feel silly, like any other chap would. You know you said in your sermon that not all soldiers are just men. Well that bugger—I mean, that American—he isn't. He's a blame-shifter, that one.”

“He seemed sincere enough to me. What I mean is, he had the welfare of the Negro man at heart.”

“Well, he was more than willing to set his blokes off. And everyone knows the Yanks are trigger-happy. Australian armies, we were raised to be sparing with ammunition. But not
them
. They squander. That's why I think in the end they might do all right. Their soldiers aren't as good as ours. Full of cheek, absolute skites. But, crikey, they've got some gear.”

“So you think he blamed you to save his own embarrassment.”

“That's be right. And we're handy too, for them to blame. They think we're hillbillies. Even
their
hillbillies think we're hillbillies. But I wanted to tell you, anyhow. It wasn't the Owen. The Owen is a gun a bloke can depend on.”

Frank thanked the corporal, wished him well and saw him vanish. The corporal's accusations against Fratelli would have been easier to dismiss had Darragh—in the ten minutes during which he waited to go out to the altar for the next Mass—not been able to review his brief but intense contacts with Fratelli and decide that they had, after all, displayed from the sergeant's side, among the decisiveness and goodwill, and perhaps because of them, the shadow of an indefinite excess. Diverting his convoy just to pick up a priest in Strathfield seemed part of it. And yet, how could the man be condemned? The fine-spirited Gervaise, the theologically accurate Private Aspillon, had been comprehensively saved by Fratelli's decision.

On a busy Sabbath it was easy to attribute what the corporal had told him to the rivalry between Americans and Australians, which, as everyone knew, lay beneath the surface of their brotherly cooperation in the cause of the Christian world.

XIV

That Sunday evening he got a call from the American chaplain. “Captain O'Rourke,” the man announced himself, and Darragh explained that he was concerned for Gervaise Aspillon.

“Yeah, I know the case, Father,” said O'Rourke. He had a voice like James Cagney.

“Gervaise made a sincere confession to me. I'm concerned that he might not be well treated in the . . . the compound.”

“Well, the guy was AWOL three weeks. Sounds like desertion to me. Only stood out where he was hiding because he was a colored.”

“I wondered would you visit him, Captain?” Darragh used the military title because he had a sense Father O'Rourke was flattered by it.

“Sure. I've already been around there. Said a decade of the rosary with him.”

“And was he well?”

He heard a sigh from Father O'Rourke. What business was it of this Australian curate?

“You see,” said Darragh, “I was at the capture with him.”

“Yeah. I can't see why that Fratelli guy didn't ask one of us. Made my feelings known to him, too.”

It seemed Father Tuomey's was not the only territory which had been violated.

“Look,” said the American priest, “you can't pretend they won't be a bit hard on him. Not with all that's going on. He shouldn't have fornicated with a white woman either. That gets us in bad with the Australians. You guys don't like that any more than we do.”

“He has a genuine taste for the sacraments and a strong doctrinal sense.”

“I'll do what I can. I've got the compound, the hospital, the Dental Corps, and the signals personnel to attend to. We're overstretched. I've got nothing against the man, but he doesn't stand for more than the others do. The truth is, the others do their duty better than he has.”

“Would I be able to visit him?” asked Darragh.
Let me know if you've got some extraordinary intention
, the monsignor had told him. Was visiting Gervaise an extraordinary intention?

O'Rourke sighed yet again. “Look, we can do the job with him. Guys like him love to get on the good side of a civilian.”

Darragh weighed this monsignor-like advice, and considered whether he needed to see Gervaise more than Gervaise needed to see him. “He seemed concerned about his safety, though,” said Darragh.

“He'd say that.”

Darragh paused again, to think of more pretexts. “I'd consider it a great favor. And I think he'd feel safer. . . .”

To Darragh's surprise, O'Rourke relented. “I'll have to check it out with the MPs, and then get back to you.”

As Darragh waited for O'Rourke to contact him again, Monsignor Carolan pursued his career as a student of battles. He still conned the battle maps reproduced on the front page of the
Sydney Morning Herald
and matched them against the maps of his
Times Atlas
to give them an added dimension.

In the third week after Easter, the monsignor sat for periods by his cabinet radio, with the
Herald
and the
Atlas
in his hands, studying maps which represented the great island-dotted blankness of the Southwest Pacific. Through this and other overheard news, Darragh became aware that a crucial confrontation was brewing in that theater of lethal blue called the Coral Sea. This wing of the Pacific was hemmed in on three sides by the Solomons, Papua, and Australia's north coast. It was believed that the Japanese Admiral Inouye was on his way across the huge arena of the Coral Sea to capture Port Moresby in New Guinea. And as the monsignor told Frank at breakfast on May 7, if Moresby went, then Australia would in short order be invaded.

Over the next days, the monsignor kept track of the events in the Coral Sea with a military fervor rather than that of a potential martyr of the one true Church. He seemed bravely undisturbed about the possible impact of the battle upon his plans for paying off the church and expanding the school. He was passionately intrigued by the fact that this was the first battle in the history of humankind in which the sailors of both sides did not see each other's ships, but only each other's lethal planes. Japanese carrier planes tried to sink the American and the Australian flotillas in this new and fantastical warfare. The destiny of the Western and Christian world was decided in these bright, equatorial waters, and Darragh was surprised he felt so little urgency, alarmed at his wooden sense of separation from the God of history and of the immanent world. By the time he emerged from the confessional on Saturday evening, the flagship
Australia
had valiantly saved itself from persistent attack. Two more American aircraft carriers had been damaged, but the Japanese flotillas were broken and Japanese aircraft carriers had been sent to the bottom. By the time Darragh met the monsignor in the sacristy, Darragh heard that it was official. The Japanese had been turned back for the moment. They would no doubt try again, but they need not succeed any better than they had this time.

“I intend to declare this a Mass of thanksgiving,” said the monsignor, robing for his nine-o'clock, his face translucent with happiness.

The next day's tennis was in large part a farewell to a classmate of Darragh's who had had experience as a youth in the militia and who had been appointed a chaplain to units in northern New South Wales. There were rumors that these battalions were about to go to New Guinea, so the after-match beer was drunk to jokes about rank—the classmate would begin as a one-pip lieutenant, a “second looie,” as Australian jargon had it—and about the comic likelihood that the young priest might need or be tempted to take up arms, and thus become a warrior priest, like Father Murphy of the Irish 1798 uprising, or the Irish monk who had won the Military Cross for killing Prussians in the Great War. Darragh kept the story of his sharing the siege with Gervaise to himself. He was pleased no rumor of it had reached his friends.

Darragh returned to St. Margaret's about dusk, his mind flickering with daydreams about a martial career. If the Japanese succeeded in the end, how much preferable would it be for a man to be amongst fellow soldiers, to be a military prisoner if necessary rather than part of the great mass of hostages. His nature was not a rancorously envious one, however. The daydream was more pleasant than bitter. Yet it was in its way intense again, as it had been on the day four years earlier when the exorcist had urged him to be a merciful confessor.

As he came in through the front door of the presbytery, he saw Mrs. Flannery seated on the edge of the chair which stood beneath a print of Our Lady of Perpetual Succor. She looked like a woman in a doctor's waiting room, and stood upright as Frank appeared. She had an officious and chastising whisper, and that was what emerged from her lips now. “The monsignor's been waiting for you. He's in his office with that policeman.”

Which policeman? Surely the Lidcombe affair was not a matter for the civil police.

“Go in, Father,” said Mrs. Flannery, gesturing with one hand. “Go in!”

Darragh did so. Monsignor Carolan and Detective Inspector Kearney were drinking whisky together, seated either side of the monsignor's desk.

“The man of the hour,” said Inspector Kearney, putting down his glass. His double-breasted coat was unbuttoned and the monsignor was in his customary autumn cardigan. They had an air of being at easy understanding with each other and with the whisky they shared. But the monsignor seemed embarrassed as he stood up.

“Well,” he said, and shook his head. “Frank . . .”

The detective rose too, and began to button his suit coat. He said, “We presume you don't know, Father Frank. Mrs. Catherine Heggarty is dead.”

Darragh became instantly giddy and was jolted sideways a step. The world had become too fast in its malice. He leaned against the wall and was gratified in some minor key of his senses to assure himself that it, at least, was still solid. Somehow the detective inspector produced a third glass from the table and sloshed some whisky and soda into it. Looking keenly at Darragh, he said, “You should have this, son.”

Rather than believe what had been said, he was willing to accept the monsignor and inspector had devised this chastising lie to save him from folly. But Monsignor Carolan still seemed more tremulous than Darragh might ever have imagined him to be. He said, “Because you had your Monday off, I had to give the poor thing her last rites. Rigor hadn't set in. I hope her soul was still there. Because the circumstances . . . they weren't promising.”

It was good priestly practice to absolve bodies not utterly claimed by death's iciness, in the hope that a repentant soul lingered, awaiting the blessed word.

Breath returned to Darragh. “She can't be . . . she was at Mrs. Flood's burial. Just ten days or so ago.”

“Ten days is a long time, Father Frank.”

“Tell me,” said Darragh. “Was she in an accident?”

His soul at a distance from the room, he observed Inspector Kearney inform the Monday tennis-playing dolt who had wandered into the monsignor's study. “Misadventure,” said Kearney. She had been found strangled early that morning. Did they, Darragh and the monsignor, really know what strangulation was? asked Kearney. It was harder than in the films to strangle any healthy soul; it took either great strength or great accidental bad luck on the part of the victim, and sometimes of the killer. This hadn't been bad luck. This had been strength. And it had not been done by someone who had forced his way in. There were no signs of that. Quite the contrary, Kearney asserted.

Darragh, in misery, returned to his body and heard the inspector's words as a distinct series of bricks, or stones, laid in place. “It takes strength,” Kearney explained in a lowered voice, “to close off the esophagus of someone healthy, to crush the larynx. Then at the same time, this strangler of Mrs. Heggarty's constricted the arteries carrying blood to the brain. That takes double strength. Neighbors haven't told the son yet, he's been staying with them overnight. They got him ready for school and he's over with the nuns now.”

“I must see to him,” said Darragh.

The monsignor shook his head. “There'll be time, and there'll be others to do it too. Stand still, for God's sake, Frank.”

“His father was taken prisoner,” explained Darragh, to justify going over there, extracting Anthony . . . and then what?

“It's probably a case for the sisters at Killcare,” the monsignor said. The Order of St. Joseph ran an orphanage at Killcare, between surf and bush, north of Sydney.

Darragh still thought he could sidestep the evil rumor of strangulation, a phenomenon unknown among women in Homebush and Strathfield, suburbs which, whatever their ordinary and even occasionally perverse sins, protected their citizens with the dome of their own blessed banality. It was a concept, too, which could not be fitted to what he knew of Mrs. Heggarty. So for a time he concentrated his uncertain but awful grief on that orphanage some hours distant. Killcare, he knew by instinct, would be overcrowded because of war, and because of the Depression, which only war had put pause to. It was not a homely institution. Anthony Heggarty, Darragh was sure, would prove an unsuitable orphan. He would prove short of the stoicism his situation asked of him.