My Lovely Frankie Read online

  Etta.

  But I don’t want to think of Etta now. Even out here on my own veranda, rocking in Miri’s lovely glider, a blackness swarms up when I remember him. I glance at my watch, my father’s watch, which he gave me long ago when I was ordained, and I see it’s seven-thirty.

  Seven-thirty at St Finbar’s was the time for rosary. Then we would study in the library till nine-fifteen, after that a brief fast walk around the courtyard—our boots clattering on the paving stones, our breath noisy as a herd of young horses—then prayer and meditation for half an hour. Lights out at ten, when the Great Silence would descend. Every hour, every minute of our days was accounted for—except for those we stole.

  Here in Currawong, seven-thirty is the time for my evening walk round to Frankie’s old place in Lisson Street. There’s no house there now, of course, it was knocked down years before I came here. ‘And just as well,’ said Miri, ‘otherwise you’d have bought it.’ Yes, I would have, but by the time I retired all that was left was a stretch of rough grass turning to paddock and a single gnarled rosebush where the front steps used to be. As I walk past this place my lips start moving, forming silent words. Anyone seeing me would think poor old Father Rowland was mumbling some kind of prayer. They’d be quite wrong—it’s a poem I’m saying, my father’s favourite, the one he used to get me to read to him when he was dying.

  Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,

  Then another thousand, then a second hundred,

  Then yet another thousand, then a hundred...

  And so on till the end, and then I head towards home. My place isn’t all that far from Frankie’s if you go down the back lanes—though I never do. I take the long way, the one Frankie took on that dusky evening when he met Manda Sutton: along the old highway for a bit, across a paddock and down Jellicoe Lane—the long way down Jellicoe Lane—until I reach the place beside the cherry trees. The trees are old now, the branches gnarled and dry; they don’t bear fruit anymore. You get a little wispy blossom in the spring, nothing like it was in Frankie’s time when he told me those trees looked like a row of brides.

  ‘You’re a sad old frump, Thomas Rowland,’ Miri would say if she saw me standing here, but you know, somehow I don’t think I am. A tiny breeze stirs the leaves and a faint delicious perfume trembles in the air. Somewhere water chuckles over pebbles and there are evenings when I’m almost sure I hear a low breathy voice, Manda Sutton’s voice, calling from some lost veranda, Is that you, Frankie Maguire?

  2.

  Manda Sutton was the reason Frankie came to St Finbar’s. We all had our reasons—he told me about her the very first night we spoke together through the flimsy wall between our rooms. ‘It was this thing that happened,’ he said simply. ‘And then I came here.’

  He’d been late getting out of school that afternoon; Sister Josephine had given him a detention for mucking round in class, she’d left him alone to write out his lines and hurried off to the convent next door. ‘I’ll be back,’ she’d warned him. ‘Don’t you think I won’t be, Frankie Maguire! And I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes if I find you gone!’ When she did come back, long after he’d finished her task, the room was full of shadows and he was gazing out the window at a long caravan of skinny pink clouds and thinking how the weather might turn, not tonight but tomorrow; early in the morning and he’d wake up to that wonderful smell of rain on dusty earth. As she came through the door she was wiping her mouth with a big white hanky and he guessed she’d been having tea with the other sisters and forgotten all about him. ‘You may go,’ she’d said, folding the hanky back into her pocket. There was a small scattering of crumbs on her bodice and Frankie simply couldn’t help himself—‘I knew she’d get mad but I had to do it,’ he said. He’d pointed to the crumbs. ‘You’ve missed a couple there, Sister.’ The look she’d given him was so poisonous it would have dropped the crows dead from the trees and he’d sidled past her quickly and fled. Down at the oval he’d run into Bri Mcphee and Mick Slater kicking a ball round and he’d stopped and had a go with them. And when they’d got sick of it and Bri said, ‘Better get on home,’ he’d looked round and seen that dusk was falling. ‘What’s the time?’ he’d asked, and Mick had peered at his watch and said, ‘Nearly seven.’

  Seven. At home they had tea at six. Right on the dot. Always. By now his mum and Dymphna would be washing the dishes in the kitchen. His dad would be sitting in his chair and though it would look like he was reading the paper, Frankie knew better. ‘He’d be sitting there waiting for me,’ he said. ‘I could see him—in the good shirt and trousers that he wore to work. He always kept his good clothes on till we’d all gone to bed. You’d never see Dad in his singlet, not like other dads.’

  There was a silence then and I thought—it was so long—he’d gone to sleep. ‘Frankie?’ I wanted to hear the rest of the story.

  He wasn’t asleep. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What happened then? When you found out it was so late?

  What happened when you got home?’

  ‘I didn’t go home, not right away. It was funny—I knew I was late and he’d be on the warpath and the later I was the worse I’d get. I knew Martha—she’s the biggest of the little kids—would be saying, ‘Frankie’s late again—’

  ‘Telling.’

  ‘Oh no,’ he was quick to defend her. ‘It wasn’t like that. I mean, Martha does tell on people, but it’s not because she wants to get them into trouble, not really. It’s because she’s in the middle, see, between me and Dymphna and the little kids, and no one notices her much. All she wants is—she wants someone to pick her up, that’s all. Only she’s too big for that.’ He went silent again, as though he was thinking about Martha and the rest of the story wasn’t important to him anymore. By now it was important to me. ‘So what did you do, if you didn’t go home?’

  ‘Oh, I did go home, only not just then. I was putting it off, I think. I took the long way down Jellicoe Lane.’

  The long way down Jellicoe Lane. There was something musical, almost magical in the way he said those words. They sounded like the title of a song.

  In those days there were hardly any houses in Jellicoe Lane, only the Parr’s place on the corner and the Sutton’s half a mile down, bush in between, and then the stand of cherry trees. It was spring and they were covered in blossom and he stopped in front of them. ‘They looked like brides,’ he said. He stood there for a long while, gazing at them and then up at the sky which had rosy streaks across it and those soft little greenish stars.

  ‘I started singing,’ he told me. ‘I couldn’t help it. “All Things Bright and Beautiful” it was, like little kids sing.’

  That must have been when Manda Sutton heard him. The old Sutton place isn’t far behind those cherry trees—half a small paddock, a bit of rough garden, and you’re there. It was a warm night, Manda would have been lounging out on the veranda and suddenly there’d be this boy’s voice singing through the dusk and it would have sounded like some amazing invitation; she’d have come down the steps and across the yard and over the paddock towards the cherry trees.

  ‘It was such a beautiful night,’ said Frankie. ‘You could smell the summer coming, you could feel it in the air. I took off my shirt, I wanted to feel that air on my skin—and then I heard this girl’s voice coming from behind the cherry trees. “Is that you, Frankie Maguire?’’ She knew my name! It was Manda Sutton. She came walking out and stood there, right in front of me.’

  He knew her, of course, in the way you know most people in a small place like Currawong, unless they keep very much to themselves. She was a few years older than him, long out of school because her mother had died and she had to help her dad at home. He knew the older boys said she’d go with you, go with anyone. For nothing. The way she stood there right in front of him, staring at his bare chest made his face go red. ‘I went to pick up my shirt, only she grabbed it, she got it first, she chucked it away and for a moment we were both standing there watching it sailing awa
y, like a big white bird into the trees. She was laughing; she said I didn’t need it anyway because it was so warm. She got up so close to me I could feel her breath on my skin, and she kept on talking about how warm it was, and I couldn’t get any words out, you know, to answer her. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say, I was just standing staring like a kid. She was wearing this really short little dress made of shiny stuff. I think it might have been a petticoat.’

  A petticoat. The word sounded strange in my austere little room at St Finbar’s. Alien, yet beautiful too, and I felt a strange sharp pang, like wanting something for which you had no name.

  ‘Then she touched me,’ said Frankie, and when he said this I felt a little jolt. ‘She put out her hand and ran a finger down my chest and it made me shiver all over, and then she laughed and she said it again.’

  ‘Said what?’

  ‘Is that you, Frankie Maguire?’

  He’d answered this time. ‘Yes, it’s me,’ he’d said, and she’d taken his hand and the next moment he was walking beside her, his hand closed in her warm fingers, and then they were in a kind of grassy hollow behind the cherry trees and Manda was taking off the shiny dress which might have been a petticoat. He’d never seen a naked girl before. At home he’d never seen any of them, except for the baby, without their clothes. They had to be careful always, his father told them, to hide the body’s sin. ‘What sin?’ Frankie had asked once. ‘What sin?’ ‘He didn’t answer me. He said not a word.’

  And when Manda was standing in front of him and the little petticoat was gone, he felt a kind of amazement: he’d never have guessed how beautiful she was without it, he’d never have guessed at those sweet white breasts that made his heart hammer and the breath catch in his throat. Or those rounded, gleaming thighs. ‘Never,’ he said, ferociously, almost. ‘Never.’

  ‘Frankie,’ she’d said again. ‘Frankie Maguire.’ And he said the way she spoke his name, so carefully, as if he was someone solid, important even, made him feel strong and unafraid of anyone and he’d fumbled with the button of his grey school trousers, trying not to think of his mum sewing it on for him, sitting at the table in the kitchen, her eyes screwed up to see. His mum said girls like Manda Sutton were bad but it seemed to him she was good, that she was part of everything, the dusk and the cherry trees, the dark smell of earth and the little green stars the colour of new apple leaves. The sweet curves of her body were good in a way those things were good, and she made him feel part of everything too.

  Only afterwards, when they were lying together, he felt her body suddenly grow tense. ‘There’s someone in the lane,’ she’d whispered, pushing him off her and sitting up, reaching briskly for her clothes. ‘Listen! Hear that?’

  Twigs were snapping. Feet crunching roughly through the grass like they didn’t care what they flattened.

  Manda was up in a flash, pulling the shiny petticoat over her head.

  Frankie didn’t have time for anything. A thin dark shape, familiar, burst through the cherry trees. Manda was gone already. A furious voice was shouting.

  ‘It was Dad,’ said Frankie. ‘He’d got sick of waiting and come out looking for me. I don’t know how he found us. We must have been making a lot of noise.’

  *

  It wouldn’t be much of a problem today. It wouldn’t even have been a great problem back then, unless Manda Sutton had got pregnant, and she didn’t. But Frankie’s father was the kind of person my own father used to call a holy savage: someone who enjoyed power in his family because he had little of it elsewhere, who liked to control and punish and believe he was doing it in the name of God. Frankie was beaten three days running and kept inside the house. Manda Sutton was ignored; though if news of a pregnancy had come, he would have been forced to marry her. His father told him he’d offended Heaven. Frankie would wake in the middle of the night and find him standing beside his bed, shouting how Frankie had made the Blessed Virgin weep and plunged a sword into Christ’s side and God’s face had turned away from him.

  Frankie believed him. ‘I could feel it,’ he said. He could feel Heaven itself turning; when he went out into the garden at night and looked up at the sky the stars were dimmed and far away. A thick muddy slime seemed to set hard in his veins. He felt cold all the time. He went to confession and Father Nolan absolved his sin but the coldness was still there. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the statues in the church, to Mary and St Joseph and St Francis and St Patrick, and Jesus hanging above the altar—none of it did any good. He thought he might never get warm again. In the kitchen at home he heard his mum whisper to his dad, ‘I’m ashamed to say my prayers.’ A mottled flush had spread over her cheeks.

  ‘There!’ said his dad triumphantly. ‘See what you’ve done!’ Dymphna wouldn’t talk to him and Martha and the little ones looked at him with big frightened eyes and pressed themselves against the walls when he walked past. ‘When I tried to talk to them they ran away!’

  He heard his footsteps sounding hollow on the floors. ‘It was the opposite of Manda,’ he said. ‘She made me feel strong, even if it was only for a bit. They, my family, made me feel I wasn’t really there. Like I was no one.’

  He went to the church again and knelt in the small side chapel. Jesus on the cross was looking down at him, and Frankie fixed his eyes on the narrow white feet, which were nothing like the broad cracked ones you saw round Currawong. Even without the painted wounds he thought Christ’s feet looked piteous and hurt. ‘I’m sorry, sorry, sorry,’ he whispered, and added in a rush, ‘I’d do anything for you. Anything.’ He lifted his head and the marble eyes were waiting.

  ‘I’ll give my life to you,’ he promised, and thought he heard a long, soft sigh.

  ‘So that’s how I came here,’ he said.

  *

  Sometimes I think everything that happened came from that spring evening when Frankie was late and took the long way home. If Sister Josephine hadn’t kept him in, if his mates hadn’t been out there on the oval, if the evening hadn’t been so beautiful that he’d suddenly started singing, if Manda Sutton hadn’t been out on the veranda and heard—

  Then his dad wouldn’t have caught him, he wouldn’t have come to St Finbar’s, I would never have met him. Etta would never have seen him, he would never—Etta’s face rises up before me, those pallid cheeks and deep-set eyes, the strange domed shape of his skull—But no, I still don’t want to think about Etta. Not yet.

  3.

  The first time I saw St Finbar’s I was seven years old, a long time before I met Frankie. My father was a doctor with a busy practice in a poor suburb of the city. He hadn’t much time for holidays, but that year he took a whole week off and the three of us went to the small seaside town of Myall. We stayed in a fibro bungalow at the end of Ocean Street, a mere strip of bright green buffalo grass between us and the beach and sea.

  It was lovely. The loveliness rushed over me the minute I woke up: the sea outside our windows and no school, Dad with us all day long, no one to ring or come knocking for him at the door. Every morning after breakfast we’d walk along the beach and over the rocks to the swimming baths. The days were hot and brilliant, the sea a calm sheet of blue on which floated patches of a darker, deeper blue. That colour thrilled me, the way it was so dark and yet full of light. Simply to look at it made me feel rich; it was something to think of at night, before you went to sleep. It made me happy. From the concrete steps above the baths we could see the next little town across the bay, its streets and houses, a long row of Norfolk pines, and above it, high on the headland, something grand: great walls of sandstone, long arched windows, turrets and a tower.

  ‘Is that a castle?’

  They looked where I pointed, my dear long-gone parents.

  They were young then, their faces were flushed with the sun, drops of salt water sparkled in their hair—

  ‘A castle?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There!’

  ‘Oh, he means St Finbar’s.’

  T
hey looked at each other, and then they laughed. It was a special kind of laugh, for them only, I thought.

  ‘What’s St Finbar’s?’

  ‘It’s—it’s a school for boys who want to become priests.’

  ‘Like Father Boyle at home?’

  ‘Well, yes.’ They smiled at each other.

  I stared up at the great building. It must have been a feast day because there was a flag flying bravely from the tower. I’d never seen anything like it outside a picture book. How could it be a school? It was a palace; I couldn’t believe old Father Boyle had ever been inside it, he was far too ordinary. I thought kings and queens and knights in armour must live up there behind those thick stone walls. As we walked back across the rocks I kept turning to stare at it, tugging at my mother’s hand.

  *

  Eight years later I decided I wanted to be a priest. My parents thought I’d got the idea from school—I hadn’t, it was all my own. I loved my parents, I was happy at home and school, yet this ordinary happiness didn’t seem enough for me. I was greedy, I suppose, I wanted more. I wanted to be special, I wanted wonders, glory. I wanted, not to be rich, but richness, the kind of richness I’d sensed in the colour of those floating patches on the sea at Myall, the colour whose name I now knew from our art lessons: indigo. ‘Indigo’, I would say to myself at night, ‘indigo, indigo.’ Then, walking home from school one day I suddenly remembered the castle I’d seen on the headland above that sea: the great walls and battlements and the flag flying against the summer sky—and it seemed to me that it might be a place where you could find richness. ‘Indigo,’ I whispered.