Shame and the Captives (23 page)

•  •  •

Colonel Abercare declared to his wife at dinner on the night of her arrival, “I thought we might introduce ourselves to Father Delaney, the parish priest here. I hear he's rather a scholar. Trained in Rome, too dreamy to be a bishop. But apparently—so one of the officers told me—he wrote three volumes of theology, all in Latin. Actually, they call him Dr. Delaney. As in, doctor of divinity.”

Emily was half-amused that his efforts to win her back had extended to researching the condition of Catholicism in Gawell. “I thought I might just turn up on Sunday,” she said. “I mean, it's kind of you. But we don't have to give him notice beforehand, do we? He sounds more interesting than the Irishman down at Tathra, though.”

“Mrs. Cullen says he lacks the common touch. But the ‘touch' out here is very common indeed. What if I call him? I'll tell him he'll be meeting just one Catholic, and that I'm godless.”

Emily declared, with what seemed like artlessness, “None of us is godless. If He's not there in our acts then He's there in our punishment.”

Ewan Abercare was of course both made uncomfortable and impressed by this aphorism. But—to be honest—it was delivered the way Emily had delivered her theological reflections before the disaster, easily and without trying to hammer it to his forehead. He said nothing for a while, suppressing the tendency to mar the exchange with yet another of his useless apologies. At last he said, “I'll concede that. Although if it's not God who punishes us, we certainly know how to punish ourselves.”

“Handsomely said yourself,” Emily smiled. “You're a clever man, Ewan.” There was a genuine smile of admiration for him in her eyes. She actually thought he was a professional success, and that compliment elevated him.

He smiled at her. “I could have gone far,” he said.

The next morning, from his office at the prison camp, Colonel Abercare called Dr. Delaney's presbytery and managed to persuade his ferocious Irish housekeeper to fetch the priest, who was disrobing
after weekday morning Mass. He introduced himself to the priest and said that he had been born a Protestant, but his wife was from an old English Catholic family and he would be honored to introduce her to him. Indeed, he invited Delaney to morning tea in the house on the corner of Parkes Street.

Emily got in Mrs. Cullen, her coreligionist, to help with the morning tea. Dr. Delaney proved thin and wild haired, and had a melancholy, though willing, face. Despite Gawell's climate, he looked far more like the pale English-born priests Emily had known in her childhood than someone from this part of the world. He shook hands with the colonel and bowed to Emily. A professional man's bow. He would in the end come to know, Abercare presumed, by way of the confessional, much of her inner soul—though not, he hoped, her history, since she seemed to have at last recovered from it.

After the three of them had sat down and Mrs. Cullen had served the tea, Delaney said, “I go up to the camp sometimes myself, to say Solemn High Mass with Padre Frumelli for the Italians who aren't out on the farms. As for the Italians who come to my ten o'clock on Sundays, most of them use it purely as a get-together. But in any case, that's a sung Mass. We have an excellent choir.”

Abercare was strangely proud of the four-hundred-year-old resistance to the established system that Emily's family had accomplished. He knew Protestantism had ultimately encouraged diversity of opinion and had given men a lot of time to invent the steam engine, and so forth. They weren't distracted by holy days and novenas and too many saints. But he boasted now to Delaney that Emily's family had been Catholics through the age of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, through the Gunpowder Plot and Act of Settlement. Politics had always been closed to them. But they had crept into the army.

“I've read about families like that,” said Delaney when Abercare had finished. “They hid priests in cavities in the wall. That's the case, isn't it?”

“There are stories of that kind,” Emily conceded. “We've only had
a few generals in the family, of course. If you're Catholic, you need superlative military skills to become a brigadier.”

“What is the explanation for my humble rank, then?” asked Ewan Abercare, comfortable for once with his place in all hierarchies.

“But we had other consolations,” Emily said. “The thing I have never understood about other Christian religions is how they get by without a mother in them. Just God—who is always a male or shown in those terms. Since I was a little girl I've needed the Virgin Mother, and would feel orphaned without her.”

Dr. Delaney said, “Yes. But of course we need to be careful of Mariolatry.”

Ewan Abercare let the unfamiliar term flow over him and pursued his normal private puzzlement about how a Virgin could be described as a “mother” and in what sense. But he did not know how to comment and he let this great Catholic contradiction slide by him.

Delaney told Emily, “You'll discover our congregation a pretty hardhanded lot of people. Generous. And very observant. There's not a lot of mysticism there or much
visible
spirituality, you know. Their spirituality is deep, though. It's like Australian rivers that run pretty far down in the earth—to avoid evaporation. I certainly don't get too many of them discussing my book on the mysteries of faith. But they have a strength I don't. It's the strength to lead a normal life. You'll hear plenty of laughing and raucous talk outside the church door.”

“You have to take whatever congregation is offered if you're a Catholic,” said Emily. “I'm not great shakes as a mystic myself.”

The priest nodded and said, “You're a member of a very big club. Colonel, I wanted to say that you are very welcome, too, but that's not an attempt to proselytize you. I'm no good at converting people. It happens if it's going to happen.” Abercare could tell that Emily was delighted with this man, and his willingness to descend from his three-volume work to see his congregation as more gifted and virtuous than he was. In inviting him to morning tea, almost by instinct Abercare had done something to reconcile her to this house and to him.

On the strength of the blessings this theologian had given him, Abercare approached her in his bed that evening. His hands reached over her back and took hold not of the breast, but of the ribs below, a lesser claim, he thought, and tolerable. She understood what his ultimate objective was. She allowed him to cup her breast and then she turned and addressed herself to fulfilling the reunion.

Beyond the house was silence—the silence of an achingly quiet room in an achingly still house girt by streets that slumbered as soon as the night came down on Gawell. And no one knew what remarkable shifts of trust and penitence and longing were being acquitted on the corner of Parkes Street.

•  •  •

The colonel came home one evening when Mrs. Cullen was leaving. She had insisted on staying back to cook an evening stew for the Abercares, so the colonel offered her a lift, which she refused. When he insisted, she acquiesced, but, embarrassed by the attention, she told him he could drop her three miles southwest of town. It was a distance which, in these exorbitant reaches of earth, town to town, was minute to drive and considered appropriately walkable. When he offered to drive her to her house, and saw the corrugated iron shack in which she lived, he knew that this was what she was trying to hide. This was but one of many houses on a property owned by a family called the Doyles, and Mr. Cullen was a rouseabout there and elsewhere, and when the shearing came on every spring, a shearer.

This first time Abercare dropped her through the gate and up to the shack in its nest of granite boulders, he did not see the husband. He saw a boy of about sixteen appear in a doorway wearing the uniform of Gawell High School. He had sharp, intelligent features and eyes like his mother's.

“That's my son, Martin,” she said. “He's in fourth year high school.”

Mrs. Cullen said “fourth year” with a faint emphasis. Most Gawellians had left school by the end of the third year at the latest,
and perhaps more than half of them much earlier than that. Fourth year meant a Leaving Certificate and then God knows what! A job in a bank. Or there was a subtler ambition he sensed in Mrs. Cullen, which put a university not beyond her objectives for the boy.

Colonel Abercare said, “Thank God the war is going well. It'll be much better if it ends and your boy is allowed to be a scholar.”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Cullen. “But we all have to pull our weight.”

Pulling our weight to save this corrugated iron shed for the commonwealth of Australia, Abercare thought.

“But I prefer he wasn't put in danger too,” she admitted.

The colonel could bet that Martin Cullen was the only fourth year Gawell student who came from corrugated iron.

T
here was an occasion when Giancarlo asked if it was possible for him to go to Mass. It wasn't that he believed much, he told Duncan and Alice, but he wanted to meet up with other men from around the farms of the district. A great deal was happening in Italy, and even if the things other men were saying were half wrong, he said, it meant they were also half-truths. He said he could walk—“She only five kilometers, Mr. 'Erman.” But perhaps to relieve his guilt about the extra petrol ration he'd been given and used for other purposes, Duncan suggested that they could take Giancarlo to the Catholic Church, and then he and Alice could go to the Methodist service—it wouldn't kill them, said Duncan, to go to Sunday service. Alice wondered if the straight and dimly perceived God of Methodism could somehow cure what was, within her, a glory and a disease that seemed to belong to another jurisdiction altogether.

She waited by the truck in a dress, straw hat with veil, and brown, heeled shoes, and when the men appeared—Giancarlo in his prison clothes as required—she climbed into the front beside Duncan while Giancarlo vaulted onto the back. And so they set out to their diverse worship.

“You won't tell the priest?” she had asked him, privately, and nearly
as a joke. They had been together in his room twice that week and had not yet fully repented. And she had heard the priests of the Catholics were hypnotic in their influence, and sometimes she had a fear that they might glean the truth from Giancarlo, who said he did not believe but who surely must retain some of what he'd learned of these things in his childhood.

“I don't tell the priest,” he had assured her with his wryest smile. “I say to God on his own—where this girl of dreams comes from?”

She and Duncan dropped Giancarlo outside the large church, where POWs milled beneath a tall gum tree waiting for the people with names such as Doyle and Hogan and Murphy to enter the church first in their suits and best dresses and hats; and for the young girls dressed in blue and white, the Legion of Mary, to march into the church in a phalanx. Duncan called as Giancarlo walked towards the others, “Keep out of trouble, Johnny.” He thought the admonition very funny, and after his chuckle died, he turned the truck and drove to the humbler Methodist church on the eastern edge of Gawell.

Alice had always enjoyed the Methodist hymns. She fancied herself as a passable soprano, and had felt in the days of her vanity and innocence that the Wesleyan anthem “All People That on Earth Do Dwell” was well suited to her gifts. This Sabbath it meant nothing when put beside her incapacity to direct her mind to anything but the thought of Giancarlo, lost for an hour or more in the unimaginable environs of his idol-worshiping childhood faith.

The Reverend Temple's sermon was very different from John Wesley's hymns—a most unmusical rant about the evils of American films and the false glamour with which they imbued improper clothing, smoking, and alcohol. He named Bette Davis and Cary Grant as embodying the flippancy Hollywood brought to issues of courtship and marriage, though he was willing to admit there were worse cases whose names had been reported to him by his congregation.

The service was familiar from her childhood and allowed room for the forefront of her mind to wander. Thought swung, of course,
compass-like, to Giancarlo and for the first time, the nearness of Duncan and his redolence of tobacco and shaving cream and soap placed the two men, Duncan and his prisoner, into the one frame and in a new way. Her skin prickled from the idea this evoked. Was Duncan, who she'd assumed was almost perniciously unaware, in fact utterly aware, and putting up tolerantly with the Giancarlo affair until it reached what she now knew must be its conclusion, Alice returned to her chaste vigil, her temporary widowhood? She heard herself swallowing, trying to absorb or choke the idea down. She covered her eyes with her hands as if in an onset of a phase of devotion.

What would be his motive? she then asked herself. Could this simple being really be so immoral as to tolerate Giancarlo and herself? And why would he? Did he do it in a kind of tired wisdom, letting her find out by exhausting herself on the body of another, different kind of prisoner? Or did he let it happen for pure malign enjoyment and one morning soon would call the Control Center and demand they take the Italian back? Was she kneeling beside gullible virtue or worldly viciousness?

The minister spoke relatively briefly and the service ended by ten o'clock. Somehow, Alice stumbled from the church.

Outside again, hauling himself into the truck, Duncan called to Alice, as if he were the target of the Reverend Temple's condemnations, “Haven't been to the pictures since nineteen thirty-seven. Not since Mrs. Herman got ill. She was always more keen on it than I was.”

And so Duncan reckoned himself safe from the baleful influence of the flicks.

There was something so completely convincing about this, she decided with a spasm of delicious reprieve. She was convinced again that he had decided at some time, out of fear of the world, not to look beyond himself. And now, from lack of use, he'd lost the ability to do it. A minister spoke of the sins of moving pictures, and Duncan thought at once only of himself and the flickers. So he had—it was
obvious again—resigned from all wisdom except the wisdom of running a farm.