Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

On the following Saturday at confession a young wife murmured to him that her husband was making excessive and unreasonable demands on her body and offering as his only excuse that he could not resist her charms. Through a narrow gap in the fingers that he held to his brow, Sherd saw that it was Her. Denise was a young matron, still radiantly beautiful, and troubled by the worst possible affliction that could befall a Catholic wife.

The young confessor was in difficulties again. It was his moral duty to support the oppressed wife, to provide her with arguments that would dissuade her husband when he was too ardent. But how could he, Sherd, blame any man for losing his head over Denise — least of all the poor wretch who had to watch her for hours each night moving about the kitchen in her negligee, who saw the cluster of jars and tubes of her intimate toiletries every time he opened the bathroom cupboard, and who passed a few feet from her unmentionables, filled to roundness by the wind, on Monday’s clothes line?

Father Sherd petitioned the Archbishop for a second transfer and was appointed to the Cathedral itself, to an administrative position. There, in a quiet ivy-covered building in the shadow of the great spire of Saint Patrick’s, he was at the spiritual nerve-centre of Melbourne.

In carpeted conference rooms behind locked doors he sat with a select group and saw the Archbishop rapping his cane against wall diagrams showing the financial health of the Archdiocese. (Within the boundaries of each parish a bar graph in vivid red stood for the School Building Fund overdraft. Some graphs in the outer suburbs towered like church spires themselves. Others in older parishes were a more respectable size.) He was present when charts were unrolled showing the comparative strength of the Faith in hundreds of parishes. (The usual indicator was the number of communion breads consecrated each week — expressed as a percentage of the population of the parish.)

Weeks before the end of the football season he knew the likely premiers in the A Grade Young Catholic Worker competition. He saw in writing the actual value (calculated for insurance purposes) of all the chalices and sacred vessels and furnishings and devotional bric-a-brac in the Cathedral. He was among the first to know when a lady in Sandringham claimed to have been favoured with a series of visions of Our Lady, or when two non-Catholic doctors in Essendon testified that they could find no natural explanation for the disappearance of a man’s tumor and the man himself swore he had been cured by the miraculous intervention of a saint.

It was no surprise when Father Sherd was appointed private Chaplain to the Archbishop himself. The Chaplain’s duties included the hearing of His Grace’s weekly confession. But Sherd soon grew used to keeping a straight face no matter what secrets were poured into his ear.

And even on the night when the Archbishop confessed the news of his elevation to the College of Cardinals, Father Sherd’s first words were to warn him that a Cardinal’s hat would not fit onto a swelled head.

In the fullness of time when word reached Melbourne that Pope Pius the Twelfth had gone at last to meet his Maker, Father Sherd went quietly to his room and began to pack his suitcase. Of course the Cardinal-Archbishop of Melbourne would be taking his Chaplain to Rome for the election.

In the Holy City Sherd stayed quietly in the background while the movie cameras whirred and the journalists shouted their absurd questions. But in his apartment in the wings of a Renaissance Palace, on the night before the College of Cardinals was immured, he did not shrink from his task.

His Grace drew up a chair beside him. (They had come to dispense with formalities during confessions.)

‘Father, as my Chaplain you should know that the European and American votes are equally divided between three candidates. Australia and the missionary countries will almost certainly tip the scales. It’s a terrible responsibility.’

Sherd kept all trace of human curiosity from his voice. ‘And who are the favourites, so to speak?’

The Archbishop sounded old and tired. ‘Dell ’Ollio of Ferrara, Ruggieri of Padua and Basile, the local chap. I can’t separate them.’ His voice quavered. ‘Help me, Father.’

Sherd looked pointedly away until the Archbishop had composed himself. Then he asked calmly, ‘What do they have to recommend them?’

So His Grace outlined their careers, their stated policies, their reputations for sanctity, all the while waiting for some hint from his confessor in a matter that would affect the future of Christendom.

Sherd was in no hurry to offer any decision. He closed his eyes and thought of Melbourne far away. It was nearly midnight — Eastern Standard Time. Darkness lay all over the great sprawling suburbs from the idly slapping waves of Port Phillip Bay to the moist leafy hillsides of the Dandenong Ranges. But under the night sky with its fiercely blazing Southern Cross, the city was not at peace.

In thousands of back bedrooms and sleepouts and detached bungalows, young Catholic men lay in the age-old posture of the solitary sinner — resting easily on the left side; the right hand free for its frictional work and the left hand poised with a crumpled handkerchief at the ready. Elsewhere in the same suburbs, their chaste white bodies enclosed in voluminous nightgowns or fleecy pyjamas, were the young Catholic women who could have inspired the passionate young men to reform their wasted lives if only they had met and understood each other.

And Melbourne was not the Masturbation Capital of the World, as Adrian Sherd had once imagined. It was likely that the same problem occurred in every civilised country on earth. The Catholic clergy should have been more aware of it. Not only parish priests but bishops and the most eminent theologians should have been devising a policy for bringing together the wretched self-abusers and the girls who might have saved them. The sheer number of mortal sins committed each day by those desperate young men was sufficient justification for His Holiness himself to issue some instruction in the matter.

And there slumped at Sherd’s side and waiting for his advice, was the Cardinal who might have the casting vote for the election of the new pope. It was within Sherd’s power to ensure that the next supreme pontiff was the man with the best plan for relieving the torment of thousands of Catholic boys all over the world.

But all this was mere dreaming. It was surely absurd to expect a candidate for the papacy, the highest office on earth, to announce to the College of Cardinals that he was seeking election on a policy of abolishing masturbation.

Adrian Sherd knew he had to be realistic about his future. It would be all too easy to dream of the priesthood just as he had once dreamed of a sex life in America or a married life near Hepburn Springs. As a young man with a religious vocation he should have drawn a lesson from his unhappy past. He had spent too much time in unreal conjectures, in devising whole years of a future that would never eventuate. On his visits to America he had wasted the better part of his adult years pursuing carnal pleasure. His projected marriage to Denise had brought him to the threshold of middle age. His dreams had spanned a lifetime. He had spent a lifetime on clouds. Now was the time to think of his real future.

Father Sherd was a humble parish priest. On a typical Saturday night he drew back the screen and shifted wearily to hear the next confession. It was a young man’s voice. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It is one month since my last confession and I accuse myself of committing a sin of impurity by myself nineteen times. This is all I can remember, Father, and I am very sorry for all my sins.’