Crimes of the Father by Thomas Keneally

Author:Thomas Keneally
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

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The Case of Sarah Fagan, 3

Early 1970s

WHEN SARAH remembered the expressions of special friendship between Father Leo Shannon and her, she remembered they often did not involve her body but instead his instructing her how to pleasure him. This form of friendship ran for months, and at no stage did she persuade herself she felt anything but flattered, though the daring of it all took her breath. She remembered a sense of election more than sexual feeling, and the illimitable affection she had when he emitted the white fluid. For in the seconds beforehand he was like a pathetic creature: he had descended from the altar to become a whimperer, in the way Christ had descended to face his redemptive sufferings with tears of blood.

He assured her many times at every encounter that there was nothing wrong with their sessions of friendship and that she need not mention them to any confessor. And yet, by a kind rule applying only to the closeness of soul they felt between them, he authorized her to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist, the Communion host.

She did not seek his Masses. One week the monsignor would do the early ones and Father Shannon the later, and the following week the order was reversed, and she did not take particular notice of this rhythm of priestly duty. But her mother wanted to be at Father Shannon’s Mass, and when Sarah received Communion from his hands, he seemed inadvertent, as if she were simply another communicant, another schoolgirl. She was unspecial at the altar rails, where he was at the summit of his power, but special on the Thursday afternoons in the parish office when he was bound to her. The other girls he had mentioned were sent away to deliver this or that letter and then go home. They were simply tokens.

At school, Mother Alphonsus boasted that girls made up half of the Sydney Law School. A study of the state’s medical schools offered similarly pleasing statistics. She suggested to clever Sarah Fagan that she ought to apply for a scholarship for further study. Yet, for reasons mysterious to outsiders, the convent had presented itself to Sarah as a personal means of escape. There, she would be one of a number of sisters, and she was sure she would never again be called on to be as intimate a friend in spirit and body as she was to Father Shannon.

As soon as Year 11 ended she expressed her ambition to him. One more year of high school education, and then the novitiate!

“Which order?” he asked her.

She said she had not quite decided, and he promised he would look into possibilities for her.

“Our friendship has now been perfected,” he told her after a December session, one of what he called “particular friendship.” “You will become Christ’s now, and you will need your time free in the coming year for study.”

This was true enough, but she felt immediate pain at the idea of being once more simply an ordinary parishioner and student.

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