Office of Innocence (21 page)

“I'll write to General MacArthur if I need to,” Darragh promised.

“His provost-general would say, ‘That nigger's telling the priest this just to get him upset.' And I do string people along, all right. I like to talk, and have a gift.”

“You do, Gervaise,” Darragh assented. “You have a gift.”

Every other suggestion Darragh made for Gervaise Aspillon's rescue from unjust MPs was gently rebuffed. The black man gave the impression of being used to powerlessness, and reconciled to it after his AWOL adventure.

“Can I see you again?”

“Well,” said Gervaise, “I'm permitted a monthly visit. But I might be somewhere else by then.”

“I'll keep track. I'll watch.”

“You know, Father, an old man I know says, ‘Don't start them dogs a-barkin' unless they's already at it.' It's not bad advice.”

Two guards had reentered the hut. Aspillon lowered his head while Darragh blessed him. The guards dragged Aspillon upright. Darragh was tempted to tell them, “I'll be here to see Private Aspillon again as soon as I can get permission.” But he did not wish to start dogs barking, and so he watched as they jostled the black man out of the hut.

By the Buick beyond the wooden postern of the gate, the captain and his driver were fraternally smoking Lucky Strikes. As Darragh was let through the gate, O'Rourke approached him in a not unfriendly way.

“How did it go, Frank?”

“I'm concerned,” said Frank. He lowered his voice. “He seems convinced that sooner or later he'll be found dead.”

The captain looked away. There were a few seconds of monsignor-like annoyance there. Darragh was bemused to find that he consistently annoyed his fellow priests these days. Something to reflect on in retreat. “Look,” O'Rourke assured him, “prisoners say these things, Frank. If they can get an outsider in, they
always
say these things. They're starved for attention, and they're self-dramatizers.”

“In my experience,” said Darragh, “he's a reliable fellow.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” said Captain O'Rourke. “The man nearly got you killed, Frank.”

“The only question's whether there's any truth to what he says.”

“The compound's full of exaggerators, Frank. Do me a favor and let it go. Look, this is a specialist area of work—I'm sure you'll agree with that. And I'm qualified to do it both by rank and priesthood. Visitors only muddy the water, all due respect.”

“I feel a fraternal duty to him. And a pastoral one.”

“Look, get in the car, Frank,” muttered the chaplain, coloring, “and I'll take you to the station.”

In the privacy of the backseat, Captain O'Rourke seemed to have achieved an even temper. He looked out the window at the proliferation of tents. At last he said, “You're a scrupulous guy, Frank. We have 'em too. If they're not careful, they grow up to be oddballs. Old men with twitches.”

“Because I'm worried about Gervaise?”

But the captain was sure he knew of what he spoke. “It isn't that you lack virtue. It's that you have too much of it for the world to work with. I hope you don't mind me talking out like this.”

“It isn't pleasant,” Darragh admitted. “But I don't mind.”

“You're not responsible for that boy Aspillon. He's in the care of the Chaplains Corps. If we can't save him, he can't be saved. Now, come out here in a month if you like, but you won't find Aspillon. All the black troops will be gone. Don't say I told you. It's a military secret, but everyone around here seems to know it. And Aspillon stands for the reason why it's happening. Your government, and our army,
both
—they don't want black troops in your city, creating civil discord, attracting white women and the anger of white men. Within a week or two, every black soldier will be in farthest North Queensland. It looks like the government and the army are going to save you from yourself, Frank. And just in case you're wondering, we chaplains too believe in the Incarnation, the Communion of Saints, Transubstantiation, and all the other Mysteries of Faith. We too have the charity of Christ urging us. Don't think you've got that on your own, Frank. Okay?”

This gentle but resonating rebuke depressed Darragh and made him suspect he might be ineffectual and silly. Even so, he was not rendered utterly repentant by it. “Still,” he said, “if you don't mind, I'll talk to you in a few weeks. To find out where I can write to Gervaise.” The Reverend Captain O'Rourke looked ahead towards Liverpool station, sighed, and said okay.

XVII

At odd hours it would penetrate and transfix Darragh's imagination: she was lying in the Glebe morgue. Did they treat well her body, which she had bathed for visitors and dressed in floral cloth? Who were these morgue-keepers, who were unordained for their job, who might as easily have worked in a cardboard-box factory? Her dignity had fallen into their hands, and society seemed calm about it, and waited without urgency for a coroner to have his court on her mute flesh.

A small amount of morning print was given to explaining that police had discharged the brown-suited man, the Italian salesman, since he was unable to assist them further.

Meantime, Kate's son had to be made an orphan pending his father's return. Darragh dreaded the arrival of Mr. Connors, the member of the finance committee Darragh had recently slandered, the friend-of-the-parish appointed to conduct Anthony and Darragh to Killcare. Not that Darragh intended to use Mr. Connors as a sounding board, but he was the sort of man who wouldn't hear a word against “the Mons,” as all the finance committee called their parish priest. Yet when Connors came to the presbytery door to fetch him, Darragh found the man's demeanor calming. Despite the times, and two sons in the armed forces, one serving overseas, Connors was one of those people who possessed even in his eye such an unfeigned sense of the moment-by-moment mercies of life that he would suddenly sigh, not for loss of the moment but for its fullness. He was dressed like a very fortress of fatherhood, in a hound's-tooth suit and vest, and a slightly old-fashioned upright collar of the kind Mr. Regan favored, as had Darragh's own late father.

The leather of his car, a 1938 Dodge, squeaked with the enviable tidiness of a man whose life was an abundant tree—one son a doctor, or more accurately an army medical officer, another a lawyer, another a young pilot. Handsome grandchildren filled out the map of his life. Only the cosmic uncertainty of future Japanese intentions interposed any sort of cloud over the happy crown of righteousness which was the Connors family.

“Good morning, Father. A fine early autumn day for a drive up the coast! I hope the recent Lenten devotions don't leave you too weak to enjoy the scenery. You young fellows sometimes take all that too seriously!”

Settling into the front seat, Frank asked him how he had got enough petrol for the journey. Oh, said Mr. Connors, he had an old school friend who was a garage owner in Burwood, a fellow member of the Knights of the Southern Cross. He didn't use the car much anyhow.

“It's not a time to be far from home for too long.”

In opinion, Mr. Connors was a facsimile of Mr. Regan, and to an extent of the monsignor. No question, said Mr. Connors, that Mr. Curtin, the Labor prime minister, had been placed in care of Australia by our Divine Lord. The Portuguese, first European discoverers of the continent, had called it Land of the Holy Spirit, and a country so named was surely not designed by God to fall to barbarians. Curtin certainly knew that and was fighting to save this holy land. He'd defied Churchill and had the Australian troops gradually coming home from the Middle East. (Not in time to save Lance Bombardier Heggarty, Darragh immediately and privately acknowledged.) And though Curtin had in his socialist youth abandoned the tenets of his faith, he was, by all that Mr. Connors heard, very open, very attuned, for an ultimate return. A lonely spiritual sort of man, with the old Irish Catholic fallibility for the drink, which he seemed to have overcome recently. In the meantime, his lapse from Catholicism made him more attractive to the general population, including—even—members of the Masonic lodges. His brave plan to cooperate with the Americans—“because Mr. Churchill isn't interested in our welfare, he thinks we're
bad stock
”—was something earlier prime ministers might not have been brave enough to do for fear of someone like Churchill. “There are people who call themselves Australian,” said Mr. Connors, “who would rather save the Empire than save Australia! Honestly, Father!” Then Mr. Connors wondered if he'd gone too far and offended Darragh's sense of charity. “At least that's how it seems to me,” he said with less certainty.

Mr. Connors turned then to the subject of his son who was learning to fly bombers in Canada. “I hope he comes back here to fight our war, and doesn't stay over there in Churchill's,” he said. It developed that Churchill was one of Mr. Connors's
bêtes noires
—it was an uneasy alliance in arms between the great British statesman and the Connors family of Homebush, New South Wales, Australia. Churchill, said Mr. Connors, had been responsible, when First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, for sending the Australians to Gallipoli. “Look how that worked out!” Mr. Connors suggested.

They were nearing the railway again, the region associated in Darragh's mind with Mrs. Flood and Mrs. Heggarty, his lost parishioners. Here in the Crescent, Mr. Connors braked in front of a low, dank-looking house of plum-colored brick some ten doors from Mrs. Heggarty's place. Up its side laneway and through a gate came five children delighted to encounter Mr. Connors's vehicle. Two jumped on the running board and looked in at him, one on the running board by Darragh's window, and one each on the rear and front bumper bars. It was as if they had planned this capture, so assured did they seem of their jolly, freckled possession.

“Hello, Curly,” said Mr. Connors to one of the two children by his window.

A plump, sweet-faced woman of perhaps thirty years came out of the front door, carrying a suitcase and leading Anthony Heggarty by the hand. Thalia Stevens, whom Kate Heggarty had so respected. Mr. Connors and Darragh ordered her children off the running board and emerged to greet her.

She looked with a concerned smile deep into the eyes first of one, then of the other man. “He's a bit W-I-N-D-Y, poor little feller. He knows what happened, insofar as a kid does. I've tried to build him up.” She turned then to Anthony. “What a beautiful car!” she told him. “You know I didn't ride in a car until I was fifteen? You're a lucky little bloke. Say good morning to Father here.”

Anthony did it. Darragh said, “You can sit in the front if you like, and have the window. Or have the backseat all to yourself.”

For a time Anthony was too reticent to say, but at last he decided he'd like to be in the front too. So he got aboard, as did Mr. Connors. As Darragh thanked Thalia Stevens and went to join them, she said, “Just a word or two, Father.”

He paused, and saw her sad, earnest eyes, already webbed so early in life with incipient lines. “Father, I'm going to miss the little fellow. I wanted to ask you, if I promised to raise him a Holy Roman, and I
would
promise, could you reconsider letting me have him?”

“I don't quite understand, Mrs. Stevens,” said Darragh.

“Well, the nuns wouldn't have a bar of me, seeing I'm not of the faith like. But I would go to Mass with him, or send my eldest, if you'd let me. Look, I know it would be all jake with Kate. She always trusted me with Anthony.”

“Are you telling me you would keep him?”

“And raise him a good little Tyke, Father. I mean, R.C.”

“Do they know this up in Killcare?”

“I don't know. They came, two nuns, and inspected me over.” She smiled with the apologetic air of a person who has failed an exam. “Made my brats sit up, I'll tell you!”

Darragh said, “But I didn't know you were willing . . .”

“Well, I mean,” said Mrs. Stevens, “it isn't the Australia Hotel here or anything, and the kids are always messing up the kitchen . . .”

By now four of her children had ascended to the bonnet of the car and were making Anthony laugh beyond the windscreen.

“I don't think Monsignor Carolan knows this,” said Darragh. “Is there a telephone?”

“There,” said Mrs. Stevens, pointing urgently towards the Rochester Street corner, where at some stage one of Kate Heggarty's visitors had parked. “Do you have any coppers, Father?”

Darragh hunted in his pockets and found only one George V penny. “I can get you another,” said Mrs. Stevens, rushing indoors. Darragh told Mr. Connors and Anthony to wait awhile—he had to call Monsignor Carolan. When Mrs. Stevens was back with another penny, he jogged to the corner, delighted with the possibilities of the hour. He could do Kate Heggarty the intimate honor of saving her boy from Killcare and the automatic stigma of orphanhood.

In his excitement, his index finger seized in vain air before engaging and hauling round the number slot. He began to use his middle finger. Mrs. Flannery answered and said that the monsignor was in his study. Oh the promise of all this—car, boy, cave mother, wizard! Himself the Merlin who gave the boy-king the means of heroic life. So easy, so easy . . .

“Monsignor Carolan,” said Monsignor Carolan.

Darragh told him there might have been a mistake on the nuns' part, that Mrs. Stevens had made it clear to him she would offer a home to the boy, and would raise him as a Catholic. It seemed there was no need for Killcare.

“Frank, Frank,” said the monsignor. “She says that.”

“No, she's an honest woman, and I would make visitations and keep an eye on Anthony.”

“Stop it, Frank,” the monsignor roared. “Stop it! You're hysterical!”

They shared a silence for a while. The monsignor broke it. “The nuns who came to look at Mrs. Stevens's are experts, Frank. Forgive me, I know you're an expert on everything, from women to black troops to God knows what. A bloody encyclopedia, you are!” Darragh could hear the monsignor panting. “You'll—bloody—kill—me—yet, Frank,” he yelled, a word at a time. “The woman is poor, her husband's not there, she's already got five children, and she's not a Catholic. She wants him for the money the Commonwealth pays for foster care, Frank.”

“Monsignor, it doesn't seem to me—”

“Frank, I'm telling you. The people who know a thing or two have decided this. He's lucky to be taken in at Killcare. When his father comes back he can return home. But even if you were delivering the kid to the very pit of hell, on behalf of the archdiocese I'm ordering you to do it. Do you understand, Frank? This is the end. I'm
ordering
you.”

Darragh covered his eyes with his non-phone-holding hand. The idea that he make a profound submission of soul and consign the child had its blind appeal. But, he thought, this isn't the end. He believed there must be ways to liberate the child.

“Are you going to Killcare, Frank?” the monsignor asked, a still, tired voice on the end of the line. “Or would you prefer me to throw you to the archbishop?”

“I have no choice,” said Darragh. “Do I?”

“The sooner we get you on retreat, son, the bloody better.”

Back at the house dispirited, he told Mrs. Stevens that it was all arranged for Anthony at Killcare and couldn't be helped for now. Maybe later. . . . He said this, “Maybe later,” not to fob her off, but like a fellow conspirator. At a level of his brain he was aware he was plotting with a plump, ordinary woman of non-Catholic background against a monsignor and nameless expert nuns. And he was willing to do it. That was a tendency he might expunge during his long and tedious retreat. Or perhaps not.

In any case, depression and anger possessed him as he got into the car, the middle of the front seat, allowing the window seat to Anthony. He patted the seat beside him for Anthony's sake, as if to say, “Feel this luxury!” At the wheel, Mr. Connors, jovially emitting such nicknames as “Tiger,” “Skeeter,” and “Popsy,” persuaded the frowning Mrs. Stevens's brood to get down from various parts of his car and leave it free to move. They clapped when he managed to start the engine. As the Dodge began to draw away down the Crescent, in a street which seemed to refuse to carry in its blank bricks any of the weight of Mrs. Heggarty's murder, the kids ran after it, shouting encouragement, and Anthony seemed cheered.

Driving down Parramatta Road towards town, Mr. Connors told Anthony how well the nuns would look after him. “Only you didn't have any brothers or sisters, did you? Well, now you'll have lots of brothers and sisters.”

“I only wanted a couple,” Anthony declared.

“Well, you'll have a couple of special mates, that's for certain. And the nuns will give you a big boy to yourself, to look after you. I've been up there. I've visited it with St. Vincent de Paul.”