Office of Innocence (19 page)

The monsignor looked up with alarmed eyes and the hair on his skull in disorder. “Mine's a Buick,” said the monsignor, covering his mouth with his fist as the acid of what he had been drinking seemed to recur. “Thank God, Frank doesn't have a car.”

“But does your mother have a car, Frank?”

“A Morris,” said Darragh. “It belonged to my father. My mother doesn't drive it much.” He yearned for the father who had nursed the Morris so proudly along, swinging its bony steering wheel, or, in braces and a tie and vest, treating the leather upholstery with a soft cloth. So much is lost before you're thirty, and now it seemed Kate Heggarty was amongst the careful lost who cleaned their leather and linoleum and baked their fruitcake.

“Apparently it was all pretty secretive,” the inspector said. “The coming and going of your kindly fellow, Father Frank. She was even secretive with Thalia Stevens, who really liked her. Mrs. Stevens told me they were like sisters. Her old man is away too, but safe for the moment, in Western Australia. But far off enough for her to sympathize with Mrs. Heggarty. She approved of her friend being pretty secretive, because people these days jump to conclusions. She knew this Heggarty girl had her pride. You'd picked her as a proud woman, Father Frank?”

The monsignor muttered, “Strangling doesn't happen to proud women, but to fallen ones.”

“Well, that's not always true, Monsignor,” said Kearney moderately. “Sometimes it happens to those who are too innocent.”

“I can't imagine that,” the monsignor remarked, locked into his own version of the death. His stubbornness about it made the story he had told about Mrs. Heggarty, the absolution of her body, more and more credible to Darragh. He felt the shudder as truth entered his blood. No more spiritual advising for Kate, he thought for the first, freshly bewildered time.

“The truth is,” Kearney went on, yawning slyly as his argument turned a new corner, “it's often a woman who is caught between two men. It's often jealousy or fear of losing her on the part of one of them, or of both. That can bring on a fatal result.”

“But there weren't two men,” Frank protested. “Her husband is a prisoner.”

“But say there were people who didn't know you, Father Frank,” suggested Kearney. “Think for a moment as they would. This fellow who wants the girl in one sense, and a priest who wants the woman in another sense, and sends her letters by way of her son, and visits her even though she says she has nothing more to say. I know you don't see it as a triangle, and I don't. But vulgar people, or people who didn't know your pure motives, might, you see. Sit down, Father Frank. Let's all sit.”

Darragh, taking the third seat, wanted to say, “Call me Frank or Father. Not Father Frank.” But he was pleased to suppress the demand, since it might make him seem restively guilty in the face of this outflanking line of argument. He felt restively guilty in any case.

Kearney resettled himself and sighed. “This is what I wanted to tell you, Father Frank. I've done a lot of work with priests in the past, and I know as well as anyone that they're human. If you'll excuse me for saying it, they're like the rest of us, all too damn human. Now Kate Heggarty was a very beautiful young woman, a genuine good sort. And not all young priests are very worldly. They go into the seminary straight from the brothers' schools. They might have been to a Catholic Youth Organization dance. That's the extent of their knowledge of society between men and women. You went to the seminary straight from school, didn't you, Frank?”

Darragh admitted it. “But you're going in the wrong direction,” he said.

“I'm sure I am, but just tolerate me a little while. It would be possible for a young fellow who was a priest, and who didn't have a lot of worldly experience, to get infatuated and to have all the human longings . . . and these could be in what you'd call a very spiritual way. But still, human longings underneath.”

“Like St. Francis and St. Clare,” the monsignor annotated, for once not disgusted, but still fearful.

“I am not saying for a moment that this happened,” Kearney assured Darragh yet again. “But imagine a young priest had built a woman up in his mind as a model of what a woman should be—good-looking, straight, virtuous. A fair dinkum Australian woman of the best kind. And as I say, he doesn't have a romantic attachment to her in any clear way, but he wants her maybe to go on being this model of Catholic womanhood. He wants her to be a fine daughter of the Blessed Mother, he wants her to be a Child of Mary. And then he discovers that it's not so. Like other women under stress, their husbands POWs in Singapore or Germany, or just serving in the army, she falls. You see, good women can fall. If they didn't fall they wouldn't need confession. And so one way or another this young priest finds she's let herself down, and let down all the effort he's put into her soul.
And
, he finds out, she betrayed herself with some character who has bought his way into her affections, say with gifts of stockings or chocolate or gin, or something else as silly. A young priest might feel really outraged then. A young priest might feel a sort of fury . . . and he might find a lot of strength.”

Behind his instant rage, Darragh felt also an instant self-recognition. He managed though to glare at the two policemen, the one called the monsignor, and the other who was a servant of the Crown in New South Wales.

Kearney said, “You're a slim, fit young fellow, Father Frank, a bit scrawny but long-armed and strong.”

As Kearney hypothesized, casting him as the potential strangler, the level of outrage Darragh felt was in fact not as extreme as he would have expected. Though his revulsion was profound, it was tempered by the suspicion that Kearney, as he had when he asked for a Lenten indulgence, was playing at a mental exercise at which he was skilled. He liked to have people flustered. He had succeeded with Monsignor Carolan, and turned him into an inquisitor to harry Darragh.

“You're not telling me that I'd hurt her?” asked Darragh, at a loss for convincing words, reduced to the plainest, most ordinary denial. “Out of some sense of moral outrage?”

“Or out of a kind of justice,” Kearney said.

Darragh covered his face with his hands.

“It's ridiculous,” said Darragh. “She has a little boy.”

The monsignor was weary now, his mouth aching open in a whisky yawn behind which he still managed to counsel Darragh. “Frank, I adjure you, son. If there were anything at all to it, you're better off telling the inspector. Rather than becoming the suspect of some bigot who'd love to send you to jail.”

Inspector Kearney nodded at that. “Better to speak now, while you're amongst friends.” He reached for the near-empty whisky bottle. “Have another drink, Father Frank. Ease it out. What is there you can tell?”

With both hands, Darragh dismissed the idea of a drink. His voice was taken over by some fury of contempt. “Apart from the confessional, I met Mrs. Heggarty five times, I believe. Once by accident on a train. Then in the playground, and in the parlor there. Then at her house with her child there, or at least running in and out, excited, with Mrs. Stevens's children, and with Trumble calling in.” The memory took his breath a moment. “Then at Mrs. Flood's funeral. That's all. I won't waste time taking offense.”

The monsignor cast his eyes up. It was clear to Darragh that his parish priest did not accept a parity of insult and outrage had been achieved between them, and he was not yet finished with the just punishment of his curate. Kearney, however, remained as level and calm as ever. And began to question Darragh about how, apart from Mass, he had spent Sunday. Darragh explained that he had gone to his mother's for lunch. Aunt Madge drove him in the Morris down to Watsons Bay for a walk, and she had filled him in on the plots of pictures she had seen since Easter. Then tea, and Madge drove him to Central Station. Then back to the presbytery. “I read a bit,” said Darragh. “Finished my office.”

“You weren't tempted to call in on Mrs. Heggarty on your way from the station?”

Of course not, Darragh told him.

“And . . .” said Kearney, “no night walks?”

Refusing to answer, Darragh cast his eyes to the far corner of the room. Kearney quietly dispensed with the lees of his whisky glass. He stood. “Well, it looks like I can't help you any further then, Vince,” he told the monsignor. Darragh was aware in some amazement that both the monsignor and the policeman didn't fully believe him. Kearney fetched his hat, the clipped and multicolored feather in its brim.

“Father Frank,” he said, “you look after yourself. I don't want you to suffer from guilt by association.”

For diplomacy's sake, Darragh stood and shook Kearney's hand, the hand he at least knew, which led by the ganglia of a big police arm to the brain which had made a cunning assessment of his preoccupation with Mrs. Heggarty, though misreading his intentions.

After shaking the monsignor's hand, Kearney was gone.

Darragh said, “Excuse me, Monsignor.”

“No,” ordered the monsignor, kneading his face. “Sit down, Frank.”

Darragh took the seat recently occupied by the inspector. “So, she is really dead?” he could not help asking.

“Oh, you're so bloody gormless,” said the monsignor. The corners of his broad head began to shine yet again with red disapproval. “My friend gives you a chance to confide in us, and all you can do is come up with a kind of prim outrage.”

“I'll attend the funeral,” said Frank.

“That's what I bloody well mean. That's a fence that's not even close, Frank. The body won't be released for burial for at least a week, ten days, Kearney told me. And imagine the newspapers there, round the grave. Thank God there's nothing
too bad
in her letter. As for yours, well, who could say?”

Until this moment, Darragh had not quite believed in the monsignor's warnings about a press scandal. He believed it had been a conjured-up stick to beat him with. But now he imagined the impact of such a thing in the
Sunday Truth
, his mother's surprise, Mr. Regan's. Not exactly
Truth
readers, the Regans and the Darraghs, but they would have it gleefully pointed out to them by neighbors. It seemed both a small and a massive thing to care about when put beside the idea of Mrs. Heggarty being finished with breath and all systems of hope.

“So
I
shall do the funeral,” continued the monsignor, pausing again to try to swallow his heartburn. “You can take the child to Killcare, Frank, since he knows you. I'll get one of the parishioners to drive you up. A day in the bush. That's if you're here. I've spoken to the vicar-general and it's very likely the cathedral might want you to go on retreat, Frank. Seven days of contemplation. Or a month of it.” He shook his head in long sweeps, and his horror at having a priest ordered off on a compulsory retreat because his actions had been indiscreet obviously weighed on the monsignor.

“I'm sorry,” said Frank. Though he wondered if he could tolerate the silences of a retreat, he would argue that point if it became necessary.

“Oh, Frank, you're encouraging me to become a tyrant, and supervise all your bloody stupid acts. I think I've said that once already, though.” And, having caught himself out in repetition, the monsignor sounded all at once as if he had become more lenient. With a further muttered apology, Darragh was let go to his room, but did not reach it before, on the first landing, the great loss of Mrs. Heggarty and the cruelty she had somehow attracted to herself reduced him to crippling tears.

XV

When the monsignor and Mrs. Flannery had finished with them, it was natural that Darragh should hungrily read the newspaper reports of the death of Kate Heggarty, in the remaining mad expectation that at the end of one of the columns the journalists or Inspector Kearney would come clean and say, “By the way, this is just a sample of what we can do to create realities where there were none, and, far from being strangled, Mrs. Heggarty, on her next day off work, will be found escorting her son, Anthony, up Homebush Road to St. Margaret's Primary School.” Neither
Telegraph
nor
Herald
, a Masonic rag according to the monsignor but necessary to buy on large occasions for its war maps and so that a fellow could be annoyed by its acidulous editorials, nor the vacuous afternoon
Sun
made this admission so desired by Frank Darragh, who was forced to put the print away from him so that his tears did not ruin the page.

But at least the newspapers pleased the monsignor by not mentioning Darragh, and by failing to cast any shadow over the monsignor's financial and sacramental polity of St. Margaret's.

Apart from that, it was a pitiable story, and the newspapers were sympathetic to Mrs. Heggarty, though they did not thoroughly excuse her. There was an editorial in the
Telegraph
which reminded soldiers' wives that as generous as they might be socially, they must be careful about the people they admitted to their houses in their husbands' absence. Neighbors had seen a man in a brown suit visit Mrs. Heggarty one time in the early evening, and another man in a blue suit arrived from a large car parked around the corner about noon on a recent Saturday. He carried a suitcase like a commercial traveler.

Mrs. Heggarty was well liked by neighbors, the papers said, though they said she did not go round attending tea parties. Her son could say nothing about the male visitor, except that he was strong—“He tossed me for fun,” said Anthony. “He was named Johnny, and brought chocolate with him.” It seemed that sometimes when the visitor was there, Mrs. Stevens minded Anthony.

Darragh's head, for spasms of perhaps twenty seconds at a time, and recurrently through the coming days, was possessed by the image of her face descending, the crown of her honest head exposed to God and to Darragh's gaze, to embrace with her lips the thin rim of a china cup. And somewhere, in Africa or Europe, Private Heggarty woke in his prison camp thinking himself still a man with a wife.

Darragh went to the school to see Anthony, but he was not there. The nuns said he was having some days off with Mrs. Stevens.

The day after her death had been suitably one of neutral weather, and even early, when Darragh went to put on his vestments and say Mass, offering up the bread and the wine that Christ, who knew agony, might extend His mercy to Kate Heggarty, clouds had already canceled sun, and sun the clouds. The seasons were seized in place, he believed. After Mass and a poor breakfast, he felt in his shirtsleeves the need of a black cardigan, and when he put it on, the need to be bare-armed.

He said his office in one session that morning, and the words evaded his attention, so that sometimes he would look back over the Veni Creator and ask, “Did I recite that?”

The monsignor was not about at lunchtime, and Darragh could not think of a single task for himself. If Kate Heggarty, disciple of “Rerum Novarum,” could not be helped, it was worth asking who might be?

The afternoon paper said that the observed wearer of the brown suit, an Italian door-to-door salesman of household products, was helping police with their inquiries. Darragh exclaimed at the newsprint. This could not be the man bearing gifts. Kate Heggarty would not admit a salesman and make him the crux of whether she remained a Catholic or not.

In the afternoon of that suspended day, Mrs. Flannery found him in his room and told him there was a telephone call from the cathedral. It proved to be the vicar-general of the archdiocese, Monsignor Joe McCarthy. Standing in the hallway, phone to ear, Darragh felt chill break out on his underarms as if he would be unable ever again to accommodate himself to any climate.

“Frank, Joe McCarthy here. Sounds to us here as if you've had a hectic time. Shot at one week, and now this parishioner of yours. And the strangler.”

At the utterance of that word—“strangler”—Darragh felt, like an intimate revelation, the genuine existence of such a person. Until now the fellow had been a black vacancy, brown- or blue-suited perhaps, carrying his bag of indefinite kindness, a force with the consistency of smoke. Not a defined man, with hands as rough and hurried as those of a rescuer. Nor did it seem to Darragh, for once, that Inspector Kearney had the right level of urgency to match the concreteness of this clever, strong fellow, this murderer. With this idea of a definite, ten-fingered, two-handed man, Darragh was overtaken by a boiling rage, utterly unsuitable to bring to a telephone call from a vicar-general of an archdiocese. He scrambled in this tempest to hold to one small white area of reason, at the apex of his brain, with all the rest blood-red again, and suffocating.

“I feel very sorry for that woman” were the tepid words he managed to emit from this cauldron.

“The world has gone utterly mad,” Monsignor McCarthy asserted. “It is a time for God's special mercy. I hope we all get it, Frank.”

Darragh somehow managed to agree.

“His Grace the archbishop thinks that in these disturbing times you should go on retreat . . . you know, spend a bit of time in meditation and reflection. There is a Franciscan retreat house on the South Coast, or more exactly, Kangaroo Valley . . .”

Darragh knew, as any priest would, that to be told that the archbishop
thought
was not to hear an idle opinion but a command.

“It's very kind of His Grace,” said Darragh, trying to accept it all as a matter of the new, Australian-born archbishop's paternal concern. But he lacked the means of contemplation. He possessed only the means of rage. “I keep myself very busy, Monsignor, and I doubt if Monsignor Carolan could easily get through all he has to do without my help. I mean, in the chief areas in which I
am
able to assist—ceremonies, confession, parish visitations . . .”

“Yes, you visited the poor woman, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

The vicar-general made a creaking noise over the phone, as if he were struggling to find arguments Darragh knew very well he already possessed, and had well calibrated from use on earlier problem priests.

“A-a-ah,” said McCarthy. “It is precisely when a priest considers himself indispensable that he should take a retreat. I feel indispensable to His Grace, but if I were run over by a truck, he'd find a perfectly good new vicar-general in a moment.”

“For how long did His Grace want me to stay in retreat?”

“Well, that is flexible. For as long as we and Monsignor Carolan between us think it might benefit you, I suppose. Beginning next Monday. You could take the train to a bit beyond Wollongong, you see, and the Franciscan friars will pick you up and take you out to Kangaroo Valley. You'll miss your Monday off, I'm sorry, but the journey's very pleasant in its own right.”

“Next Monday,” Darragh repeated woodenly.

Not early enough to prevent him undertaking his full weekend workload, but soon enough after the event should the salacious Sunday press mention him. He was dolefully aware he would not escape making this retreat. Retreats were the Church's universal early response to all questionable incidents involving the clergy.

“We wouldn't want you to rush back, I don't think, Frank. Count on at least ten to twelve days.”

“I don't believe there's any need,” he still pleaded. It was no good being like an obedient monk. Not with all this fever in his soul, and the idea of the strangler born of woman and bearing a name. “Look, it just seems to me . . . the country's about to be invaded, Monsignor, and whether by war or murder, children are becoming orphans. I don't think I can go away and meditate at such a time.”

“Frank,” the vicar-general told him with greater severity than had marked the discussion so far, “your superiors think you have to. It's precisely at a time like this that you need to reflect. You've been through a great deal, a storm of the emotions. These events deprive a man of his compass. A retreat will get you back to your true north. Now, Frank, no more arguments. I'd be embarrassed to have to get the archbishop himself to talk to you.”

There was no arguing.
“May her soul, and all the souls of the faithful departed, rest in peace,”
he muttered at the phone when the vicar-general hung up.
“May her soul
. . .
”
He needed to act. In God's Name he had been forbidden to act. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.

The monsignor was in, and so the dinner was uneasy at the presbytery table, Darragh sensing that as angry as the monsignor might be with him, he was, this sober, tea-drinking night, angry with himself as well, for his heated, whiskified feelings at the conference with Kearney yesterday. Perhaps, too, he harbored an edgy suspicion that there might have been a better way to do things, a more loyal way to Darragh, if only a man had not been so angry, and so shocked by anointing the strangled girl.

“Did you hear from the cathedral?” the monsignor asked with basso neutrality.

“They want me to go on a retreat,” said Frank. “It seems you'll decide with them how long I should be there.”

“I think you need it, Frank,” said the monsignor.

“Why don't I go tomorrow then?”

“Tomorrow you have to take young Heggarty up to the orphanage at Killcare. I've got Mr. Connors lined up to drive you and the little bloke.”

“Then why don't I go on retreat the next day?”

The monsignor's face was pained. “Because you're needed over the weekend.”

“That's exactly right, Monsignor. I'm needed over next weekend, and next Monday to Friday as well. Who'll do all your extra work for you?”

“Frank, is this the attitude?”

“Yes. It seems I'm getting worldly. Having been grilled by you and Kearney in tandem, I'm not nearly as innocent as I was.”

“Look, Frank, I made the best decision I could. I was too damned upset, Frank, even to pray over it. Perhaps you thought I threw you to him, but . . . As for false innocence, I can only hope you've turned that corner. You know what they say? ‘In the world, but not of it.' To be effective, a fellow has to know something of how the world works.”

“I won't learn much about the world in a Franciscan monastery in Kangaroo Valley.”

“I think you've acquired a bit of knowledge in the last few months, Frank, and now it's time to reflect on it.”

“With you the jailer, Monsignor, to tell me when I can emerge?”

Darragh was delighted to see that his baiting had brought angry color back to the monsignor's cheeks and scalp.

“His Grace will certainly discuss it with me.”

“And who will be your donkey when I'm not here the weekend after next?”

“Frank, I don't like that tone.”

“Do you think it's time some of your beloved finance committee went on retreat? They're in the world and totally of it.”

“Frank, watch what you're saying. This isn't you, I know. You've always been such a cooperative young bloke!”

“That was because I was a fool. Now I know a thing or two.”

“Well, one thing you ought to know is you don't talk to your parish priest like that. You ought to know that much if you're suddenly such a knowledgeable cleric.”

“Do you mind if I leave the table, Monsignor? I don't feel like any dinner.” In fact, mutton was sitting in its own fat on his plate, and the peas too were being claimed by the unspecific, tepid gelatinous mixture which was Mrs. Flannery's version of gravy.

“You can certainly go, Frank. You've just demonstrated why you need to go on retreat.”

Frank stood up and went to the foot of the stairs, where he savored the small astringency of his vented anger.

“Don't forget you have to do the early Mass tomorrow,” called the monsignor.

The phone began to ring then. It was Captain O'Rourke, oblivious of murder, proposing, without any particular enthusiasm, a shared visit to Private Aspillon.